Sometimes, you need the safety of a pack

One of the most insane parts of the last six or so years has been the rise of the trans movement — to the point where it’s moved off the pages of various freak show publications, to a place of prominence where, at least if you live in anything resembling a college town, you’re confronted with it with some degree of regularity. Whether it’s lining up your pronouns in your e-mail address, or making sure you tell some ugly, middle-aged individual they are something they’re not, you’d better be on point in the gaslighting game of the decade.

And it’s highly relationally disruptive and devolutionary. Instead of YOU (yourself) assessing the most basic aspect of a person’s make-up — their gender — you’re supposed to believe whatever they say that comes out of their mouth. You’re supposed to suspend belief. And until Donald Trump came along, you could be fired, persecuted, or potentially slapped with penalties for not indulging someone’s often auto-erotic fantasy.

I really think that most people knew all this would end, sometime. But note to my community. It hasn’t, and it’s not going to end anytime soon. The respective cat is out of the bag.

The research on what’s actually happening with trans people’s brains is somewhere between mediocre to awful. Others have covered that, and I wrote a piece on trans demographics here. There are some key things to note. Not all trans people are afflicted in the same way. It is a mental illness, and these things reside on a multi-axis range of factors. But a significant percentage of them have what are called Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.

Axis II/Cluster B disorders are major dynamic change units in societies, and have been, literally since the beginning of time. These are things like psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and some version of schizoid and paranoid personality disorders. Out of the center around Axis II/Cluster B are the lesser known ones that often create massive damage. My own mother had a Cluster C Avoidant personality disorder, and the chaos that this created in both my younger life, as well as my maternal search image in how I’ve dealt with women has created all sorts of forks in the road. But it’s also given me insight, unobtainable by any other means.

And what is the main insight? A key, neglected aspect of personality disorders is that they all fall under the umbrella of relational disruption. There are laundry lists of symptoms/characteristics, generated by various psychological researchers over the years. But I’ve found most of the lists inconclusive (there are obviously better/worse ones) likely dependent on whether the researchers themselves had a personality disorder, and were attempting either to discover truth, or hide their tracks. But you, as an individual, know when you’re dealing with one. It’s very similar to a piece of dark matter passing through your orbit. You can’t see it. But you feel the tug. And that’s EXACTLY why there’s so much pressure from the trans community to take away your agency. It’s not just the make-up they’re trying to hide. It’s the chronic relational disruption.

But back on target. The purpose of this piece is not to dig independently into individual personality disorders. Rather, it’s to understand how they act in the context of human social networks and systems.

A couple of years ago, I put some serious time into thinking about how system boundaries in human systems affect how we perceive cause-and-effect of various actions, and lessons from human activities. I centered this around the famous monkey grape/cucumber experiment run by Frans de Waal. In the experiment, there were two side-by-side monkeys, and a researcher would alternately (dependent on the monkey) give a grape reward for retrieving a rock, or a cucumber reward. The key was the two monkeys were able to see each other. And because of that, it didn’t take long for the monkey only getting a cucumber for a rock to get pissed when he saw the other monkey getting a grape for the same action. Everyone laughs at the video, posted below. But it’s actually much darker than that.

The natural tendency of the human brain is to draw a system boundary around the two cages, and leave it at that. But I started realizing this led to a very defective conclusion. What happened if you drew the system boundary around the researcher as well? Or included the cages or open space the monkeys would be returned to in the back? Would the monkey that got shorted beat the hell out of the other monkey? You can read this here to construct your own thoughts. Short version — lots of stuff we do to animals in labs is positively psychopathic.

A couple of years later (that piece was written in 2016) I turned my thoughts to the larger question — what happens when you have psychopaths in systems of HUMANS? This is a harder question, because now one must ask very carefully what the effects are going to be, and whether to consider both temporal and spatial effects. Further, it’s easy to decide that psychopaths (I’m going to use this as my generic term for Axis II/Cluster B/C individuals) are some defect in brain function — poor attachment, brain injury, sexual abuse, cultural environment, etc. All of which may be true. And maybe, in an organ as complex as the human brain, some error rate is inevitable. But that still does not explain their evolutionary persistence. Psychopaths are characters in literature down through the ages. If they really were a deep liability, or rather, a bug, as opposed to a feature, then societies without them would always prevail. And the ones that had any would collapse.

But that’s not the story of human history. I had to face up to the very hard, and disturbing fact that psychopathy is likely a feature of large-scale human systems. Not a bug.

I am a fan of Spiral Dynamics, Clare Grave’s masterwork, and am no believer in cultural relativism. I think the current post-modern anti-colonial rhetoric is actually gaslighting of entire disciplines — sociology, anthropology, as well as psychology. To gainsay the evidence of more or less successful societies is to deny the evidence in front of us. Short version — some people live in upwardly developing prosperity, while others live in squalor and violence. But figuring out exactly why is difficult.

But then I realized. It IS actually possible to draw a system boundary around Tribal societies relatively easily. Once you get above this, it gets more and more complicated. So I looked into Tribal societies.

There is some research on that is good, or at least a little rational. There is also a lot that is total garbage, full of romanticism and nonsense, generated by people who would never last a week in a real one. Some of the backlash is due to guilt over, across the world, our functional genocide of most tribal societies. That is a fact. But in the process of what the civilized world did to these people, we also lost our way in understanding the core of how many of these function. One of the many books I’ve read on how tribal societies function is Guns, Germs and Steel,by Jared Diamond. Diamond has the personality (and probably the research staff) to write long books. Trust me — you have to be neurodivergent to punch out a 1000 page tome. Why that is true will have to wait for another time.

The one thing that Diamond did document, however, is how intrinsically violent tribal life was, and is. People at the tribal stage of development kill each other ALL THE TIME. Murder rates run at 10x-100x of civilized societies. From ChatGPT – but this matches what I remember well.

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“In The World Until Yesterday (2012), Jared Diamond draws on anthropological field data—especially studies by Lawrence Keeley, Napoleon Chagnon, and others—to estimate that traditional tribal societies experienced homicide rates far higher than those of modern state societies.

He summarizes the comparison roughly as follows:

• Tribal / traditional societies: on the order of 500–1,000 homicides per million people per year.
  • This comes from archaeological and ethnographic data for small-scale societies such as New Guinea highlanders, Amazonian Yanomamö, and various pre-state groups.
  • It equates to about 0.05–0.1% of the population killed each year, or over a lifetime the chance of dying by homicide can reach 10–30% in some groups.
• Modern state societies: typically around 1–10 homicides per million per year in peaceful contemporary nations (roughly 0.001% per year).

Diamond uses these figures to argue that, per capita, the murder rate in many tribal societies is roughly 10 to 100 times higher than in modern nation-states.

These numbers are not meant as a precise single statistic—Diamond stresses that rates vary widely between tribes and through time—but his central estimate is that the risk of violent death in pre-state tribal societies was about an order of magnitude (or more) greater than in modern societies.”

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More reading led to another interesting insight. Lots of tribal “coming of age” rituals involved sexual abuse. It’s pretty well established that child abuse is a problem across Native reservations, even in the US. But what was more interesting (pathologically) was this was once again, not a bug, but a feature of the vast majority of tribal societies. And it obviously happened to girls as well as boys. After some ritual deflowering, there was almost always what I would call a “re-integration” ceremony, where the particular gender would be declared a man, or woman in the tribe. I can’t bring myself to read such publications as Margaret Mead, but there’s lots of stuff in her research romanticizing this.

The other thread I managed to weave into this line of psychosocial development is this: “what happens to individuals who are sexually abused, especially en masse?” The only person I found who had done research on this was Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, England. His work showed a probabilistic spread — most kids rebounded. But some did not, and went on to display deeper pathologies.

But getting back to system boundaries. What happens when we draw that system boundary in both time and space? What is the long continuum over the years in human society that we see, at least at the Tribal v-Meme level? Institutionalized sexual abuse creates key actors in those same societies, that go on to assume roles that, like it or not, are part of that tribe’s persistence. Their warrior societies are stacked with crazy-ass psychopaths. The ones that most of the time, sit in the warrior lodge — because the rest of the tribe knows they are some crazy-ass MFs. But at the right time, when the tribe is threatened by another tribe over the hill, or mountain, the warrior lodge doors get opened, and they pour out. If there are not enough of them, then the tribe CEASES TO EXIST.

What role do women serve in tribal societies? Sadly, by our civilizational standards, women, from a genetic perspective, exist to have an affiliation to being traded to other tribes, during some period of potlatch or some occasion. This is just historical record, folks. And what women would have the affiliation to get down to business with whomever they met? Once again, relationally disruptive women. You can look up your own stories about the libertine nature of various tribal ceremonies. But once again — it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Without a particular level of genetic mixing, tribes would falter and CEASE TO EXIST.

Don’t shoot me. I’m only the piano player.

So what happens when you’re dealing with a large cadre of people in the middle of a memetic collapse, as the Democrats most clearly are? You end up with what I call the Great Simplification. There aren’t any new ideas to grab onto. So you hang onto your past winners. The problem, though, is this shifts your organization or group back into the Tribal v-Meme space. Anyone that thinks that tribes have more developed information spaces than modern societies, I can’t help you. And that means you’re also looking at downstream seizing of historical mental models (this is a great piece — short version, takes a complex society to create a nuclear bomb, but only a terrorist with a piece of wire to use it.)

But the models you pick will be the ones that your Neo-Tribe has an affinity for. And those affinities, like it or not, arise from The Matrix.

There’s a top-level thought going around right now in the form of emancipation population theory. What’s happened is that in our society, we’ve basically liberated everyone, and now the only ones left are the criminally insane (DeCarlos Brown murdering Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, NC) or the larger trans movement, which is now starting to produce a statistically significant number of assassins (Tyler Robinson killing Charlie Kirk) all hopped up on hormones and fantasies of self-castration. On the surface, it’s compelling. But both these potential groups hold extreme damage to the public reputation of the Democrats.

And in the age of social media, we get to watch, within the span of six weeks, two actual snuff films. Over and over. You cannot deny either the murder of Iryna nor Charlie Kirk being shot in the throat. For any human without isolating levels of Tribal v-Meme affiliation, simply put — that dog won’t hunt. You would not want to affiliate yourself with a group that advocated for crazy people slitting throats in public, or defend a textbook assassination. No contemporary organization could hold up under those circumstances.

Yet endless pronouncements by a variety of celebrities and D politicians do just that. So something else is going on in the deep subconscious of the Democratic party.

And that thing is a complicated stack. But in the current moment, the question that Ds ask me is this: “Why can’t you drop the trans thing? There just aren’t that many of them.” To which I reply “Why can’t YOU drop the trans thing?”

And the neo-Tribal answer is “we will never betray our psychopathic warrior caste. We’re gonna need them to kill people, whether we’re publicly endorsing this or not. Or we’re going to cease to exist.” Now tag on some modified form that allows for the DeCarlos Browns of the world, whose own MOTHER was pleading for help in dealing with her schizoid/psychopathic son. But the systems set up, profoundly Democratic in essence, refused. Especially in a time of perceived threat, they need those people.

Obviously USAID (which various D actors/operatives have consistently defended) has known about the importance of maintaining a cohort of psychopathic warriors for a while. They’ve funded them in Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. And a bunch of other unstable countries. All masked, of course, as health-related. But when you look at the history of revolution and warfare in these places, you really have to be fooling yourself to see this as benevolent.

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From ChatGPT

Here’s the updated master list of documented trans-rights/LGBTQI+ groups or initiatives supported by USAID, now including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
(It highlights direct grantees or well-documented local partners; many broader USAID health projects also sub-grant to numerous smaller community-based organizations.)

Group / Initiative (lead org)	Country	What USAID funded / supported
Blue Diamond Society (BDS)	Nepal	Partnered with USAID on inclusive disaster-risk and health programs; also received HIV‐program support under PEPFAR and was affected by the 2025 funding freeze.
Parichaya Samaj	Nepal	Community center providing HIV prevention and counselling; supported by USAID-backed HIV programs until the 2025 pause.
LINKAGES (FHI 360) – MSM & transgender community partners	Nepal	USAID/PEPFAR project providing HIV services and community-led monitoring through local trans/ MSM CBOs in 19 districts.
LINKAGES (FHI 360) – trans partners	Kenya	USAID/PEPFAR project supporting trans-competent services and advocacy recommendations for Kenya’s national AIDS strategy.
ACCELERATE / “Mitr Clinics” (Johns Hopkins Univ. & Fenway Institute)	India	USAID-funded network of transgender health clinics (Hyderabad, Kalyan, Pune) providing gender-affirming care, mental-health and HIV/STI services.
Humsafar Trust (collaborations)	India	Long-running partner on HIV services for MSM and transgender communities; noted as affected by the 2025 funding pause.
Africa Queer Network	Uganda	Kampala-based NGO that reported receiving a USAID stop-work order during the 2025 pause; previously funded for HIV programs serving LGBTQ—including trans people.
SUSTAIN program (with local partners)	Uganda	USAID-funded “Strengthening Uganda’s Systems for Treating AIDS Nationally,” which highlighted key populations including transgender people in HIV treatment and testing.
LGBT Global Development Partnership (via Astraea, Victory Institute, etc.)	Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia	USAID partnership that provided small grants and capacity-building to local LGBT groups—including trans-led CBOs—through Astraea’s grant network.
Bandhu Social Welfare Society (Bandhu)	Bangladesh	Implementer of USAID’s SHOMOTA (Equality) Activity (2022–2027) to advance rights and services for gender-diverse people.
Sompriti Samaj	Bangladesh	Co-partner with Bandhu in the SHOMOTA project supporting gender-diverse communities.
Transgender Network Sri Lanka (TNSL)	Sri Lanka	National trans-rights NGO receiving USAID support, including through the LINKAGES HIV program (2017–2019) for trans-inclusive services.

Overall pattern:
USAID’s support for trans rights has typically flowed through health-focused programs (PEPFAR, HIV prevention/treatment) and the LGBT Global Development Partnership, which channel funds to local trans-led or trans-serving community-based organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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You might think this is a play from a new playbook. But it’s not. I remember reading about the late ’90s civil war in Sierra Leone. The rebels set up a variety of checkpoints throughout the country. And who staffed them? 16-year-old boys, with AK-47s, dressed in negligees. Called Kamajors, they believed the dresses gave them spiritual protection. What IS interesting, as I investigated this (I remember the pictures from the Granta book I had) is that ChatGPT was very intent on painting the Kamajors as some kind of noble warrior cult defending innocents, than the berserker cult they were actually. Though, TBF, ChatGPT admitted these people did commit war crimes.

So here we are — stuck with a former major party, in the process of social devolution, captured by its own sexually abused and abusive psychopathic members, with no ideas on how to make a better world. And desperately reaching for its own warrior caste that used to be discreetly backed by the US government itself.

They just can’t quit them. And we as a nation better wake up to the deep roots of this. I live deeply entrenched in a community with a lot of their supporters. They are also old, and I suspect dementia, or some low level Alzheimer’s disease is also a problem. But I’ll tell you — they have absolutely no problem serving up fresh hell on the opposition. Or attacking me. And it is true that where I live is a microcosm. But microcosms are useful for understanding larger dynamics.

Civil societies are great things. They preserve far more human life than tribal societies, and provide lifestyles and benefits unimaginable even 100 years ago. But they are inherently fragile as well. And the path back down to the level where circumstance naturally puts the psychopaths back in the warrior hut is gruesome. I wrote this because I finally decided it mattered enough to get this model out there. The challenge is to get enough people to realize that a lot of what is going on with these people is not conscious — but it is actionable. Centering a societally devolutionary group’s (The Democratic Party) psychopathic warrior caste as those creating the diktats of the future is only going to result in societal chaos and destruction. Don’t fool yourself.

There’s still time.

But not as much as we’d like.

P.S. I wrote this two weeks ago. It explains how the Ds turned tribal.