On Trump’s Assassination Attempt, Civil War, and Leaky LARPs

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.

Are Men from Mars and Women from Venus?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Cape Kiwanda, Oregon — photo by Charles Conor Pezeshki (my son)

If there’s anything that characterizes intellectual life nowadays, it’s the tragedy of metacognition — the things not talked about in intellectual circles that might actually better or lives, or provide increased understanding into the conflicts and complexes of modern society. When you’re bogged down in spending most of one’s discussing whether men playing dress-up at various stages of their developmental arc, and policy to be written along those lines, you’re losing a lot. It’s a lot like biodiversity loss — most of the animals, or thoughts going extinct are invisible to modern society. We lose ground, and complexity in information in more ways than most people realize.

One of the big ones I’ve reflected back on are the actual differences between men and women (putting aside the noise above — standard definitions here, folks.) I see this because it affects our young people more than anything. By positing there are either a.) no differences between the two, or b.) only perverse differences that can only be defined and discussed by select individuals in the contemporary academy, we are creating the playing field for our own extinction. I look at the level of social intercourse (forget the real kind for a moment) happening between young people nowadays and I honestly wonder how we’re going to survive as a species. It’s more monastic than a Franciscan nunnery.

Human brains are fascinating things, but they produce information based on a knowledge stack. I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on the blog in terms of my work on knowledge structures. But here’s the thing, folks. Just like computers, human brains work on a modified, vastly hyperconnected stack of hardware, firmware and software. Our current intellectual caste has decided that we’re only allowed to (maybe) talk about the last one, while we’re using that selfsame software. And any discussion of the lower levels will get one branded with some “‘ist” term, which then will lead to shunning.

But anyone with experience with higher forms of life knows that this is ridiculous. I’m a dog fanatic, and if there’s any one sentient individual that has convinced me that specific knowledge can permeate all three levels, especially over time and within the context of some version of selective breeding, it’s my friend.

Boo Boo, the borzoi.

Boo Boo the borzoi, as a puppy.

Boo Boo’s quite a bit bigger now (he is a wolfhound) but he was born with instincts. And one of those is to be able to identify, stalk, and predate wolves. I have never trained him to recognize a wolf, nor has he associated with other borzoi that might have placed that knowing in his software. He was born with it. And he demonstrates this very “software-ish” behavior whenever a wolf-hybrid comes to the dog park. Boo Boo will become agitated and alert, and go into a stalk. Which has me reaching for my leash, because I’ve had enough experience with Boo Boo and aggressive dogs to recognize him as a dog of means.

You can read about borzoi on the web if you so desire. But the breed is only 500-600 years old — a cross between some Pyrenees-type dog and greyhounds. Somehow, Boo Boo’s preternatural sense of what a wolf is (my border collie does not have it) is in there. And it’s not just hunting something that moves. Boo Boo loves puppies and all small dogs. Somehow, at some point in time, Boo Boo’s ancestors’ software got turned into hardware. And hence we have a Russian wolfhound.

Boo Boo in a comfortable environment.

There is a constant drumbeat from the scientific community that “somehow” our brains are fundamentally different from other animals. I’ve also discussed this on the blog regarding sentience, and I think it’s B.S. Additionally, as time has gone on, various researchers have also documented that dogs are so emotionally available to us because they think like us — just without the difference in clock speed for certain, more abstract items.

It doesn’t mean that animals don’t think different thoughts. I would, for one, love to talk to a sperm whale, which has a brain like ours, except theirs weighs 20 lbs. They manage to coordinate actions literally across oceans. But the demands of inter-agent coordination are largely the same — to the point that even animals with very different starting hardware (like birds) end up with similar behaviors to humans, because of how their brains adapt, in both hardware and software, to the exigencies of existence.

With that background, I’d like to reintroduce a discussion around the notion that, once one recognizes the knowledge stack, men and women actually do think differently. And that difference might not show up in higher levels of thought — though lower level knowledge structures are omnipresent and nested in higher level knowledge structures. But down at the baseline, men and women have core hardware/firmware differences that really drive inter-agent coordination knowledge at the level (Survival and Tribal) that a shit-ton of culture is generated at.

Why does this matter? Certainly, women and men are both capable of high level abstract thought. Arguing about that is boring to me, though it makes the psychopaths ecstatic. The big ‘Why’, though, is because when one cannot recognize that at least there are some differences, spread across population demographics (of course — no one sex is monolithic here) then you have opened up the door for psychopaths to sow confusion among the masses. You’re handing those people that seek to destroy societal coherence a big fat club. When you can create internal, self-reinforced confusion inside independent agents, you’ve really managed to score a big enchilada in terms of driving societal collapse.

What are the two dyads that exist in men and women that drive core behavior? With all the usual caveats (statistical distribution, etc.) they are:

  1. Men are driven by: Protect and Provide.
  2. Women are driven by: Nurture and Social Control

These two sex-differentiated mandates dominate the lower level of thought (and hence culture) in humans. They are innate, and used by humans as core operating principles as key sorting principles in human societies, almost ubiquitously.

The male part is easy. Modern day feminism (whichever wave you want) has endorsed dissecting the male persona as legitimate discourse, as long as it is portrayed negatively (and usually bound up with race as well.) There is a lot of this out on the web. But I’ll tell you this, folks. If you’re at a party, and some dude grabs your lady’s ass, and you don’t do anything, I guarantee you’re headed for the checkout line. Chris Rock has the best routine on the ‘provide’ part, and I’ve posted it below. He is a true genius of the age.

Next Level.

But if you notice, we don’t discuss women’s core functionality. There are all sorts of DeepOS reasons for that — especially if you believe that men are a giant breeding experiment run by women. This may be true, but is better left for another day.

Considering ‘Protect and Provide’ before we move on, one can see when there is a distortion in either, it leads to antisocial behavior that ripples across societies. ‘Protect’ can turn into physical abuse. ‘Provide’, on either side, leads to excess, or starvation. Easy. And since these are a coupled dyad, lacking in one can lead to overcompensation in the other. That’s a key point, and if you want a fun mental game, you might graph up a teeter-totter with the various outcomes.

Now on to women. Nurture and social control.

In any debate over the superiority of one of the sexes over the other, the first word — Nurture — is either explicitly or implicitly front and center. Humans as a rule like the idea of nurture, and put forward this as the reason women should be the exclusive in governments, and all other sorts of organizations. Women nurture, and collaborate, and remind us of “mommy”. It’s a core function, and it’s the primary psychological weapon brandished in any kind of argument that’s really about power and control. Maggie Thatcher didn’t get her handle as the Iron Lady by baking cookies.

But the problem is that most Western cultures routinely denigrate the role of nurturing as having any importance at all. We put our infant children in revolving caregiver daycare, and trust our entire future on the lowest external status women in our society. We call women who want to stay home with their babies “lazy”. And everyone’s fine with nurture and talking it up until it’s time to make 20 sandwiches for the picnic.

The same posited and projected “women are more empathetic than men” behaviors also must come into play into how young women then view how they want to pursue their own futures. In the last 20 years, I have met only a handful of young women who even want to have a family. The numbers show this, of course, with declining birthrates across the Western world. I read once that teen pregnancy and women’s infertility are two sides of the same coin, and I think it’s true. In our current political milieu, people are ready to fight over the morality of in-vitro fertilization, as well as talking about artificial incubation of the entire pregnancy cycle. These are linked phenomena — by the time a woman becomes self aware enough to resist the toxic behavior, and mirroring it herself in her youth, she becomes infertile. Biologically, the best time to have a baby is 16-25. But even stating this obvious fact is considered full of sexist bias. It’s nuts.

The problem with this truly schizophrenic cultural perspective on nurture is that it is intrinsically coupled to its dyadic partner, Social Control. Women provide social control in societies through establishment of norms, as well as hierarchies inside women’s culture. Social control is important. I think the core of it is that it likely prevents sexual abuse of children. And it manifests in numerous ways — older women are constantly at war with both men and women over the status of what I call ‘uterine real estate’ — who gets access to younger fertile females. Only the highest status elder males are given anything resembling an endorsement to reproduce with young females (look at Robert de Niro, or Leo DiCaprio, for example.) And of course, the abortion wars wage on and on. Feminists are quick to indict men for existing as primary actors in all these fights, a la The Handmaid’s Tale. But by and large, I think this is bullshit. If you look at hyper conservative tribal societies, it is women that run the social norms. Who enforces the Taliban’s edicts? It’s the grandmothers. That doesn’t mean that men play no role. But the day-to-day is almost completely run by elder women in that society.

The problem with all this is that without recognition of the base programming in young women, they are the ones that suffer the most. They are the ones that bear the conflict, and seek retrograde solutions for their own biological exigencies. Modern society not coming up to the bar leads to Christian and progressive fundamentalism and oppressive excesses. And these are all hooked together inexorably in cause-and-effect.

When basement-level scaffolding is denied or suppressed, pathologies a plenty are generated. This post could be a whole book on how all this works. But at least let’s start the discussion. What does our core programming consist of? What are its key demographics? How can we create a truly inclusive culture that allows our young people to thrive?

It’s crickets and shame out there, folks.

P.S. I had read the book I inherently mentioned at the top of the post some 20+ years ago. I didn’t go back and re-read it before writing this post. But I did read the Wikipedia article on it. Nothing like what I am proposing was really in there.

There’s also a humorous and transactionally based web-based author that will give you both a chuckle and insight I found recently — Hoe_Math. It’s dating down in the lower v-Memes. But most dating is in the lower v-Memes. Enjoy!

AI, Maxwell’s Demons and the Pirate Pugg — Redux

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Family vacation — Grand Teton National Park

One of my favorite pieces of whimsical science fiction is Stanislaw Lem’s story in The Cyberiad about Klapaucius’ and Trurl’s (two robots who are meta-robots — robot constructors) encounter with the Pirate Pugg. I’ve written about this here, in an attempt to understand how the Internet actually resolves truth. I wrote this some years back, and let no one say I am not an optimist. (The piece is pretty good, and I recommend it, which I don’t for all my writing.)

But I am a bit more jaded at this point.

The short synopsis – Klapaucius and Trurl sail across the universe, having various adventures, all with some combination of moral and mathematical point in mind. On their Sixth Sally, they encounter a very unusual pirate, the Pirate Pugg, who kidnaps the pair. Pugg is different from other pirates, in that he has a Ph.D. And instead of wanting the usual things for ransom (gold, silver, etc.) Pugg craves, more than anything, information. So in order for them to escape, they construct a Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind. What this Demon does is sit and stare at a box of dirty air, which theoretically contains all the potential informational patterns in the universe, and sort those into ones that actually might exist from those that are purely random. Upon doing so, the Demon prints this on paper tape (the Cyberiad was written in the ’60s) which then spews out, and ensnares Pugg so our heroes can escape.

“No insults, please!” said Pugg. “For I am not your usual uncouth pirate, but refined and with a Ph.D., and therefore extremely high-strung.” 

Let it not be said that Lem had no insight into the personality of many in the academy.

My thesis in the original piece was that Spiral Dynamics and its information coherence requirements would march us up the epistemological knowledge complexity ladder. And once we got closer to the top, the entire Internet, with its ability to scrutinize information, would eventually get to some broader set of truths. I didn’t write it in that piece, but assumed there would be some sort of time constants in social media, that through discussion, and implicitly reason, viewpoints would emerge that dominate how we as a species process truth. For example, though many may not understand it, we all pretty much agree that gravity pulls down and holds us to the Earth.

But with the advent of more advanced AI models, I can see that I seriously underestimated the ability of computers to fuck things up — the sheer volume of information that AI such as Language Learning Models (LLMs) can process was outside my little thought bubble. We now have the ability not just to integrate a lot of data, we also have the ability to create data, as well as narratives, that are profoundly biased in ways that the inventors of the tech. may not, or worse, may have considered. When Google released its AI product, Gemini, it immediately started producing Woke images of an African-American George Washington, with no discrimination to the reader of the information that this wasn’t reality.

I, myself, typed my name into Google Gemini to see what it might say about me. It replied that such a person impersonates a full professor at Washington State University, but isn’t really one. Google took down Gemini and “reformed” it — now it claims it cannot know who I am, and so has no response. But to release a Woke AI bot, with the current emphasis in our society on Cancel Culture, is a scary thing. Now, in the Noosphere of the Internet, I cease to exist.

But back to the Pirate Pugg. Timescales matter. Why? Pugg is defeated by the Demon of the Second Kind by the churning of the paper tape that entangles him, allowing time for the two robot constructors to escape. But what happens to all of us if that same Demon, instead of just producing knowledge for whatever form of Trivial Pursuit we may be interested in, can spin out lengthy yarns? Or novel, but nonsensical theories, extremely quickly? Moving up the complexity scale for knowledge structures, we’re still stuck pretty low on the hierarchy. The big thing folks get stuck on with AI is that while it may be able to parse the known knowledge universe, it is notoriously bad at metacognition — knowing what it doesn’t know. It can’t — it’s not set up for it (designers are going to intrinsically arrange themselves in testable hypotheses of knowledge — it’s the way THEIR minds are wired) and not likely to evolve this ability any time soon. It’s not even a recognized problem!

But what our Maxwell’s Demon will do is trash up the knowledge space we all require that much more quickly. Pugg’s paper tape printer will work overtime. And the garbage it produces will make any biased thesis supported. Author Erik Hoel (a bright young man) might be the one that coined the term “AI Pollution” and that might be the best descriptor of the phenomenon.

What is missing, of course, is the current inability of any AI to ground itself in a self-determining physical reality. That, of course, will likely change — but maybe not in a way that favors the individual. I read once that a person moving about the U.S. has upward of 200 pictures taken of them per day. With increases in efficiency of image software, it means any right you may believe you have to situational privacy is really just a canard. And with advances in drone technology, it also means that if someone wants to shoot you, it wouldn’t be that hard.

I don’t believe that AI is going to take over the world any time soon. But it would help if we actually started having a discussion on what it actually can do. And at least engage in a little consequential thinking that’s outside the apocalyptic perspective that makes it on the podcast circuit. It’s supposed to help us, no?

P.S. This is a good piece on a v-Meme perspective on current AI limits.

Getting to the Truth — Concept Maps and what exactly do the v-Memes tell you?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Ladle Rapid on the Selway River, from another life

One of the things that is exquisitely irritating to me is when people go on about “the truth”. Why? Because the person talking about it usually isn’t in possession of it anyway, and anyone that knows much about a given subject realizes that, for the most part, it’s a scaling problem, in both time and space. Truth at a small scale is too often an inadequate descriptor with truth at a large scale, and if you don’t have any real sense of epistemology (at least if you’re here on this blog, you might be looking for one) you won’t even get there.

And to make things worse, seems like the primary reason anyone brings up “the truth”, as opposed to making the argument, is to gain power and control over someone else. It’s not like they’re really looking to share.

That doesn’t mean that objective truth doesn’t exist. It’s just powerfully difficult to get to, and really depends on how you bound the problem, as well as possess access to the different change processes extant in any given observation. I wrote a whole piece on “truth in information” if you’re interested. Short version of that piece — “truth” is what you use, from an information perspective, to coordinate with your homies. If you take that concept, and meld it to the latest meme — FAFO (fuck around and find out) — you’ve probably got most of what you need. What FAFO really is for those that read my stuff is FAFO is the same as “grounding validity” — some set of experiences that you either create, or get tossed into and endure — that then shows whether your notion of the truth maps to anything in your larger world.

Scientists have all sorts of fancy schemes for FAFO, with lots of other acronyms, like RCTs (random control trials) which are more reliable ways of determining if you found out. Whole fields won’t even permit you to FA (theorize) because inherently, that’s going to replace some old dude’s theory that a certain group is ferociously fond of. So you can’t even get to the FO part of everything, not because you might be wrong. Rather, because you might be right. My favorite example of this was portrayed in the National Geographic series “Genius”, in the sub-series on Albert Einstein. Philipp Lenard, an experimental physicist in Germany (and famous Hitler supporter) was one of the people who condemned Einstein’s various theories as “Jew Physics” and was in part responsible for Einstein leaving Germany and coming to the U.S. where he persuaded Roosevelt to build a nuclear bomb based on his theories. Talk about FO indeed.

OK — I could go on. But let’s do a simple example to understand this truth thing a little. Hopefully, this will show you how it works a little better.

Let’s say we have three scientists at a conference, standing around, drinking the bad coffee one drinks at conferences. These three scientists study gravity. They are typical scientists in The Matrix— not a single hell-raiser like me in the bunch. They exist in a classical Legalistic v-Meme social hierarchy, and as such, they follow rules with their experiments to come to conclusions. What THAT means is they set up complicated, ever-more-precise experiments to study this phenomenon.

How do they do this? Let’s just assume they are highly sophisticated ball-droppers. They drop a ball in one place, and they measure the acceleration of the ball as it speeds toward the ground. The first scientist says to the other two: “Hey, I’ve been studying this phenomena where when we drop a ball, it speeds toward the ground. We’re very diligent and precise in our measurements, and at that place, it seems that the ball accelerates at about 9.8 m/sec*2!”

The other scientist chimes in “well, we’ve been running similar experiments. We carefully calibrated EVERY part of OUR experiment, even buying a bowling ball polisher, and we’ve dropped our balls, and it turns out when we measure the acceleration it’s 9.81 meters/sec*2!”

The third scientist takes a swig of that nasty conference coffee, and says “I’ll bet that if you two stepped outside of your labs, and measured the acceleration of this so-called ‘gravity’ in the downtowns of your respective cities, you’d find out the acceleration of those dropped balls would also be 9.81 meters/sec*2.”

OK. What do the other two scientists, locked in their Legalistic v-Meme social structures say?

“If you want us to believe that, you’re going to have to run another experiment and prove it!”

Of course, we all know that when it comes to gravity, we’re far past that particular point in how physicists understand all of this. There are a host of reasons why (math being one) that this is a kinda-silly example. But it illustrates how an empiricist/experimentalist might approach this situation.

And here’s the point. The knowledge structures that you have access to come out of the social structure where you operate. Legalistic social structures are title- and process-driven, and such, the relationships inside them are low empathy. You are supposed to follow the rules in dealing with someone inside them – that’s the knowledge structure tool you have access to. And that’s going to be dependent on their position in the hierarchy. They MUST know what they’re talking about if they have the title and position they have, and there is a rule-based order to things. And metacognition? Knowing what they don’t know? And especially guessing? That’s an agency-driven ability. You certainly don’t have that. You’re supposed to color within the lines. It’s all spelled out for you on what their rights and privileges are. (Note — anyone wondering why Ketanji Brown Jackson, our most recent Supreme Court Justice, refused to say what a woman is during her confirmation hearing has their answer in her portrayal of a person lacking agency for even basic information. She was stating loud and clear that she was not a legal constructionist. Sheesh, though.)

If you doubt this, listen to any university president conferring degrees on students during this graduation season. “Rights and privileges, rights and privileges” blah blah blah. It’s how the social system operates. Hand over a big wad of cash, and you never have to think again. Except maybe what kind of donut you get to eat. That’s the limits of YOUR agency outside your rights and privileges.

Now here is the devastating insight. Even THESE systems can, through a process of convergence, get to a global truth. In our case (let’s keep it simple) that gravity across the planet pulls toward the center of mass of the Earth, and it accelerates things at ~ 9.81 m/s2. But absent some guiding/binding principle of mathematical physics (if you go back up and look at the knowledge structure necessary for that, it’s all the way up in the Yellow/Turquoise Global Holistic level) the way you’re going to get there is 2-D area covering. In short, you’re gonna unroll the map of the globe, charter a sailing ship and an ATV to take you to a ton of places all around the globe, where you’re going to run your measurement OVER AND OVER.

If you know about fractals, what you’re attempting to do is in the fractal space, you’re using a one-dimensional covering space (a single point gravity measurement) to map a 2D phenomenon – the surface of the Earth (as you’ve defined it.) And for those that know a little about this, is you are NOT using anything resembling a multi-fractal, with different covering capacities, to make your life easier. You’re not throwing a higher-dimensional blanket over the entire globe. You’re plodding along, point by point, at whatever temporal and spatial scale your community lets you. Or you get denied that bad coffee at the next conference, you pariah!

And THOSE scales are directly tied to the social structure (how big of a circle that your gravity measurement applies) and enforced by the membership. You break the rules and say something like “this is an obviously generalizable phenomenon” and people ain’t gonna like it. And now you can bring in all the other structural forcing functions that exist in your social structure that are used. There might be a large contingent of researchers whose sole job it is to traverse the planet, measuring the gravitational constant. They’ve got mouths to feed. This guiding principle shit you might be proposing is moving their cheese. And on and on.

Maybe someone’s concerned that the constant will change over TIME — it’s not just space that matters. What does that do to the measuring business? Might be great! Folks can keep doing this for their ENTIRE career, in more and more sophisticated modalities, adding significant digits along the way. And once you’re locked into a given social structure, where the real incentives are rising in status in the social hierarchy, as opposed to really figuring out what the gravitational constant is (that’s just a bus you’re riding) then supposed boredom really isn’t the issue.

So if you’re a Guiding Principles guy like me (phone home, ET!) what we now have is a way of viewing exactly how a given truth is found — and if it’s a good mechanism. We can look to see if we can construct a model that will provide “covering” for reality in the space. We could ask the researchers if they would create what we call a Concept Map to describe their research in their field. And then we could examine that Concept Map to determine exactly how their brains are working to cover information in their field, and how they’re building truth.

Here’s an example of a low v-Meme, low sophistication concept map. Just FYI — the example I’m going to use to explain this is gonna be simple, because it takes TIME to make these pictures! Let’s start with an airplane.

Top-Level Concept Map for an Airplane

Let’s say we wanted to ground this particular concept map more to reality — we might use photos of a real plane, serving up an example that the author would choose to illustrate the point. That now also tells you about the author of the concept map’s perspective. If someone, for example, worked in Boeing’s structures division, their concept map of an airplane might likely include a dissected Boeing 737. And on and on.

One can also infer how higher order v-Memes might generate increasingly complex concept maps, and start including multidimensional information inside that space. The 2D map tells you precious little about how a plane flies (obviously, we’re all familiar enough with airplanes to know wings are involved) but increased evolution of perspective, as well as sophistication of the person drawing the map, will cover the n-dimensional aspect of the “truth” of an airplane more than the simplistic block diagram above. Around the wings might be air! Or Bernoulli’s equation – the governing physical principle that creates lift, that allows the wings to work. Someone might need to add how an airplane works in the different seasons of the year — hauling holiday travelers during Christmastime, or business travelers during the week. A spatial representation of the globe might be included. And on and on.

What is interesting is doing this with an unprepared audience and seeing what the implicit functioning of that person’s thought process is. I originally did this with students in my mechatronics class a long time (25 or so years ago!) and had them draw a block diagram of a military jet attempting to launch a missile. As impossible as it may seem to be, students would draw some version of a block diagram, maybe giving a block to wings, and a pilot, and a missile. But then they would draw arbitrary connections between the blocks, with what were obviously erroneous connections between the parts. It was one of the “ah-ha” moments when I started understanding that people have to be evolved to consequentiality and higher level coherent thought. I wish I had saved some of the originals. What was fascinating was that students did remember, almost perfectly, little sing-songy stories (one could call them a mnemonic device) on almost everything we covered. Hello, Tribal v-Meme. Once you see how people actually think, v-Meme-wise, you can’t unsee it.

One can also start seeing the need for all the different knowledge structures — and the people that think in them. A highly sophisticated observer might have the ability to sketch an airplane seen on a runway, as part of a spy operation, and then return with that sketch for analysis of the constituent parts. Someone process-oriented might track larger aircraft patterns, and then assign a given agent to show up at the right time to see the aircraft in question. On and on.

But back to the Truth. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that our brains are going to frame up whatever question we’re asked with the models that are spawned out of the value sets we’re programmed with. That doesn’t mean with the addition of appropriate process, we can’t overcome our perspective. We certainly can. But it behooves us to understand our own minds as we navigate through the world, attempting to find a given truth. It could be hidden in plain sight — but our unlovely minds just might not be able to see it.

Quickie Explainer — Complexity Limits

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
On the Challenge Course

One of the hardest things I’ve seen people struggle with is their cognitive incapacity to realize someone else they’re talking to is NOT understanding what they’re saying, and that the target of the communication likely cannot understand. People, of course, want to map this kind of miscommunication to subject matter. I have a Ph.D., I did my research in chaos theory, so therefore if I talk to someone about chaos theory, they won’t be able to understand what I’m talking about because THEY don’t have a degree in engineering. 

Of course, this does indeed happen. If you write a thesis on chaos theory, you’ve hopefully gotten a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the ins and outs of said theory. Unfamiliar words, like bifurcation, limit cycle, attractor and so on will likely cause confusion for a lay person, not grounded in advanced mathematics. 

But I also ascribe to the viewpoint “if you can’t explain your research to your grandma, you likely don’t understand it very well yourself.” What that really means is very different. It means you ought to be able to take what you’ve done and analogize it so that a non-specialist can generally get the gist of what you’ve spent 3 years sitting in front of a computer doing. 

Sometimes, topics are so convoluted, that’s not even possible. But I’ve found that most subjects are not so weird that if you practice analogizing, you can spin a narrative that grandma can grok. 

All that’s well and good. You SHOULD be able to take whatever it is you do and at least have as a goal that people can modestly understand some complicated, multivariate process that you need to explain. At least with you in the room, and connecting to the people you’re explaining it to. We do this all the time in engineering education. Young people aren’t raised on concepts like entropy and enthalpy, of course (and probably not most readers of this blog!) But when you’re navigating complex issues (like whether COVID was invented in a lab) with multiple twists and turns, that contradict the mental models that people have on how the world is supposed to work, things get more challenging. 

An example is in order. Let’s talk about my job as a professor. One of my favorite multi-panel pastiches is below. It’s wildly accurate on how people perceive my position.

There are multiple versions of this meme. Here’s another one. 

Or this one… (you have to have some deep memory to get all the frames on this meme…)

It IS true that (at least before the Age of Laptops) that most of what I did was pushing some version of paper around. Now, of course, I push the electronic version. Last week, for example, I had to confirm for one of my grants that I had not stored nor kept any equipment from a given project (the sponsors take my word for it!) that should have been returned THREE YEARS AGO. I’m lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast — not the equipment requirements for one of about 80 projects I’ve had in the meantime. 

But even that doesn’t convey the actual complexity of my job. Let’s say I write a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the branch of the federal government that hands out money to people like me to do research on things various people might, temporarily, consider to be VERY IMPORTANT as an up and coming area of national interest. I, as an expert in something, am supposed to be paying attention to announcements from the NSF, where Very Smart People have figured out what we’ll need to know in the future. And then pay people like me, or rather have people like me pay graduate students to actually figure out that knowledge so the national interest is served. 

On the surface, this seems reasonable. 

  1. VSPs figure out where our knowledge deficit is.
  2. They publish a Request for Proposals (RFP) .
  3. I read the RFP, and think I have some ideas that might help.
  4. I write a proposal to NSF.
  5. NSF reviews my proposal, along with others, and then gives me (hopefully) the money.
  6. I supervise the graduate students who then generate the knowledge.
  7. We publish the knowledge in journals, where other scientists have reviewed our work to make sure it’s right.
  8. Science, my career, and life march on!

All this maps to what I would call a meta-linear progression that would make sense to most people. Except, of course, it’s not how it works at all. 

It’s not impossible to draw a block diagram of how this ACTUALLY works. But it would be complicated. And what are the complicating factors?

  1. In order to have any hope in hell of getting the money for a given RFP, I likely have to have something like 50% of the work already done that I might propose.
  2. I might have participated, if I have a close relationship with NSF and the program manager, in constructing the RFP, so there are potential (but never acknowledged) conflicts of interest in getting the money.
  3. If I’m reading the RFP for the first time, the odds are I could never write a competitive proposal, because NSF really only funds mostly incremental research that will only stretch out about 1-2 years in the metacognitive space.

I could go on. There are also memetic forces inside the agency I’ve written about here that make the agency resistant to funding any truly innovative work at all. All this is counterintuitive, and in a complicated and complex fashion, have most people either a.) rubbing their heads in disbelief, or b.) assuming there’s a conspiracy afoot to make us all stupid. 

In order to actually believe what I’ve written, you’ll either need some grounding validity experience yourself in the process, meaning you’ve written proposals to NSF that alternately were or were not funded, you think I’m a sour grapes kook that hasn’t had much luck with NSF funding (kinda true) or you’ve lost the plot and thrown all this into the ‘government is a fucked up conspiracy anyway’ bin.

Here’s the point. Somewhere along the plot line, unless you’ve had a lot of experience with NSF (as I have) you hit your complexity limit. You had likely a straightforward interpretation of how things work in getting a government grant, and when I started loading all the other stuff in the hopper, you got lost (or you didn’t care.) In short, I lost you. Either the story itself wasn’t so great (very possible) or my authority on the issue, in your mind, was weak, and so you just flushed the whole thing down the garbage chute. 

The knowledge structure work that I’ve done can help you understand this — here’s a recycled picture.

Short answer — once we get off that relatively straight line progression, most humans hit complexity limits relatively quickly. 

What’s the takeaway? All we have, especially when communicating with the public, is to remember the straight line principle. Make sure to use models that people understand when making analogies, especially when blended into narratives. 

Or you’ll lose virtually everyone. 

Quickie Post — What is Memetic War?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
Big Sand Lake, Clearwater NF, Idaho

One of the terms I bat around occasionally is the concept of ‘memetic war’. But what, exactly, is a memetic war? It’s a great buzzword, for sure. But it’s actually a complicated idea.

A memetic war is a war that occurs in an information space, between information generated by different v-Memes, or meta-value systems that then in turn generate real life social structures — and conflict. Memetic wars can turn into actual wars, when the information generated in the meme-space boils over and grounds itself in reality. The reverse is also true. Real wars can give rise to memetic wars, that then feed back in consequences on the real world battlefield. Information, and its virality can influence who provides real-world materiel and support for the folks actually shooting each other in the trenches. 

The memetic war, whose boundaries exist only in the noosphere/information sphere, functions on very different statistical principles and speeds than the real world, because spatial separation is NOT the primary decelerator in it. In fact, the ability of like-minded/like-valued others to find each other in the information sphere allows allies who may have absolutely NO physical connection or grounding (or even specific knowledge!) to join in a conflict. I would remark that the modern age is NOT the first to generate societies that have participated in memetic war. I’d guess that the Crusades might have been the first, with the Children’s Crusade being the best example. But the comment on spatial deceleration still stands.

The first time I used the term was to describe what my now-pals, Jay Bhattacharya and the other Great Barrington Declaration authors were facing from all sides when they proposed focused protection as a strategy to minimize the damage from COVID. I remarked back then (it was October 2020) that they were very likely unprepared for the fall-out, being high-status, extremely intelligent professors from famous universities, used to the power of persuasive argument built on reason. That turned out to be true, but all of them also were quick studies, and are still leading the charge on the information war front for public health to this day.

Since memetic wars run on information, the structure of that information, and the social structure that generates that information, matters greatly. A memetic war based on complex informational structures will have a hard time propagating its ideas. That’s bad news for reason- and evidentiary arguments. They require both the ideas, and the people that transmit them, to be highly developed and robust, as well as operating in their conscious minds. No bueno! 

Contrast that to dichotomous emotional appeals. In a world full of strife, these easily map across the minds of people/agents with access to the same communication network. Exactly for this reason, the PRC’s CCP has the Great Firewall across their Internet, and stringent constraints on internal chat systems like WeChat. The leaders of the CCP might have eugenicist tendencies, but they are acutely and intuitively aware of the stage of development of their population, and what an angry mob of Chinese nationals can do. As well as how the Internet can spread this

We are witnessing both a real war, and a memetic war in both Ukraine AND Gaza right now. In the case of Gaza, Hamas regulars staged a real attack, reflecting the pre-medieval value system/v-Memes of fundamentalist Muslims, involving rape, kidnapping and hostage-taking, even going so far as to circulate video of the atrocities. This ran directly counter to more Western v-Meme states, but also due to some belief of decorum as well as obscenity and violence standards, and the video logs of their actions did not virally propagate in any convincing fashion. There’s a crazy-ass lesson there, if you think about it.

Instead, disillusioned Leftist youth, hearing only the top level of the conflict (sans details, folks) and traumatized by their own prophets of apocalyptic despair, turned into the willing memetic receptacles of some belief and longing for a concept of a utopian independent life. Armed with simplistic messages of “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!” these memes rapidly propagated across the information space, and turned into real protests, shutting down traffic and airports across the world. 

The actual memetic generation functions of the conflict are still intact. Fundamentalist Jewish factions are in part to blame for actions in the real space — I can remember Jewish colonists building kibbutzim INSIDE Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu talks about the destruction of his Arab opponents constantly. That meme-plex complements and empowers the high-conflict meme-plex on the Arab side of the aisle. Money matters to reality — both sides have billionaires with essentially medieval v-Meme sets that are more than happy to fund the ideas that have led to the current precipice. And when you add on the almost certain embezzlement of international aid funds into the Hamas treasury from weaponized empathetic fundraising campaigns for refugees, well, you get what we’ve got in that part of the world. It’s just a field day for the psychopathic jet-setting caste. They can eat their caviar, and participate in the craziest LARP they could imagine. All in the name of Allah. Or something.

To summarize, memetic war occurs in the information space, between different value sets/v-Memes in the noosphere/information sphere. This piece explains the rules of conflict.  The death of geography, along with different information topologies made possible with different types of social media, makes it possible. And as with all wars, it behooves us to remember that they are not so easily contained.

Quickie Post — Weaponized Empathy

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments
Sharing a lovely bottle of Sancerre with my 14 year old son at L’Express, in Montreal

One of the terms that gets batted around quite a bit lately is the phrase ‘weaponized empathy’. I’ve been talking about ‘empathy as a weapon‘ for a while, but I think it was my Twitter/X pal, Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) who certainly rearranged the word order.

What does ‘weaponized empathy’ really mean, though? Most people misunderstand the basic core — empathy — as wanting to give someone a hug, or rather, your predilection to give someone a hug, if you’re slightly more evolved. This is not what it means at all.

I created a modified version of Frans de Waal’s empathy pyramid that folded in my understanding as far as what happens when you put all the researched areas of connection together. These are represented in my own Empathy Pyramid. Short version of a long story (like the rest of this blog!) the stuff at the bottom is fired by the base of our autonomic nervous system, and it goes up from there in complexity, and utilizing the later evolved parts of the brain. The realization of the blocks on the side were one of those “angels singing” moments when my brain makes up for torturing me the other 98% of the time.

What empathy REALLY is is some version of coherence matching of brain states. I’ve written a TON about this already. If you see someone yawn, you yawn. If you see someone crying, you feel sad. If you’re more evolved, you read other people’s faces and body language and attempt to predict what has upset them. This is really NOT novel. Honest researchers have been studying this since forever (everyone knows, for example, that a big hunk of communication is nonverbal, amirite?) 

But the problem is that empathy research ALSO attracts more than its share of psychopaths. They’re looking to make things more confusing, because they’re anti-empathetic. And like it or not, academia houses a lot of these people. For reasons, mostly emergent. Meaning that “it’s the way we do things around here in our rigid, pathological, title-driven hierarchy.” How the hell do you think we can spend so much time grading young people if we weren’t against empathy? We’d understand too much about our young people’s predicaments. 

But back to weaponized empathy. Weaponized empathy is when you have an actual empathetic sense, but instead of really connecting and feeling someone else’s pain, or predicting how someone else might be thinking in a given space, you sneak in, and you use that knowledge to twist the knife. And the knife is best twisted at the bottom of the empathy pyramid, deep in the brain’s core survival and emotional functions.

How does that work? The more sophisticated are familiar with the range of mental models of their targets, and then manipulate them directly with their virtues, hopes and dreams. It’s like the trolley problem, where you set people up to pull the switch to murder the grandma of your choice, instead of theirs. Or you get them convinced to tie everyone up, and reverse the trolley so it goes over both tracks.

The relationally disruptive in the world — the Axis II/Cluster Bs and Cs of the world — are the best at this. They do it because it provides clarity for them to manipulate situations as THEY see fit. Take the current sadness of the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, originating from the Gaza Strip. All of it is a wildly sad and crazy situation, because there is a larger history of Authoritarian v-Meme provocations on both sides that have degenerated this entire coupled social system (Israel and the Gaza Strip) into a pre-medieval developmental state, where raping women and killing children is just part of the deal.

But the weaponized empathy part is taking how you feel about something as raw as Palestinian children being killed in bombing attacks, and then distorting the reality that what is going on is a genocide. Look folks — it’s appalling. It’s terrible. But killing even 20K folks, in a nation of 2 million, isn’t genocide. That’s weaponized empathy at work.

Weaponized empathy lays a black-and-white, splitting pallor on complex issues, in an attempt by the manipulator to take their side. They connect with you, and understand your own personal biases, then use those biases against you to flip your brain. And they can do that with material that is factually true, factually false, or somewhere in between. It affects your core because the smart wielders of weaponized empathy know that they’ve got to get down to YOUR base level — the deeper in the brain the connection, the better. 

I just wrote a (for me) somewhat simpler piece on the complex issue of transgenderism, which lays out the case that some transgender folks have honest problems, while others manifest either Borderline Personality Disorder or Anti-social Personality Disorder. You can read it and decide if it’s fair-minded or not. But someone interested in using weaponized empathy will distort this current societal travail and tell you things like this is the same as the Civil Rights movement, or more recently, LGB rights. It is preposterous. Jim Crow in the past was NOT the same as transhumanism today.

But if you believe that it is, it’s because a psychopath has weaponized your own empathy, your own ability to connect with others, whether emotionally or predictively, against you. And if reading this makes you irrational toward my argument, then you’ve been brain-wormed.

And that’s the power of weaponized empathy. Especially in a space where we are really fighting memetic wars.

Transgenderism and its Context in Society

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments
White Sand Lake, Clearwater NF, Idaho

It’s been more than a year at least since the issue of transgenderism, and its effects on divisive politics, have been raging in our society. But even with the passing of that year, there seems to be little clarity on how society should move forward. Red states are passing bills making, essentially, child mutilation illegal, while various Blue states are attempting sanctuary legislation that will make parental rights moot if a child, or worse, a child’s guardian wants to “transition” a child to the opposite gender.

There is plenty of literature out there on what I call the “societal top level” of this issue, and no need for me to repeat much of this. What I’ll attempt to do is explain the societally disruptive forces in play. I also have no interest in discussing the microscopic number of people inflicted with legitimate chromosomal disorders that need help treating their condition. The few that exist are trotted out as a psychopathic weapon for reasons we’ll discuss below, and whose rights and needs should not be in play. I’m referring to the much larger cult of “souls of people born in the wrong bodies” which is the real, relevant issue to be discussed. Hardware is hardware folks, and software is software. It is utterly amazing to me how little this is really considered.

First off, just a cursory look at the transgender statistics, though rarely cited, involve women=>men. Not so long ago (20 years?), transgender issues were really discussed only in the context of those children with genetic disorders, and middle-aged men with gender dysphoria, who after a lifetime of mental conflict, wanted to undergo formal transition. That might have included everything from wearing dresses, and some form of autogynephilia, or surgical removal of sex organs. There is a whole comedic backlog for this kind of thing, like the famous Monty Python song “He’s a lumberjack…”

An old classic…

What we’re talking about in the current milieu is not the campy, vampy drag queen shows that are historic. It’s much more radical than that.

By my sensing of the issue (not scholarly, but I am paying attention) there really are a number of categories for people dealing with gender dysphoria. They are:

  1. Middle aged men seeking transition for mental peace in their middle/old age.
  2. Adult males suffering from autogynephilia — the process of finding yourself sexually exciting through transition to the opposite gender.
  3. Butch lesbians wanting to assert themselves as actual males in their relationships with their partners.
  4. Teenage girls seeking transition likely because of a past of sexual abuse.
  5. Teenage boys seeking transition because of inherent homosexual tendencies, in the context of the social media stream elevating the status of transitioning.
  6. Parents with some version of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, looking to use their children as virtue-seeking social props in the public eye.
  7. Adolescent and post-adolescent males seeking perversion/narcissistic supply in women’s private spaces through manipulation of current social norms.
  8. Deliberate psychopaths seeking out paths for destructive abuse and pedophilia of young people.

There are probably more that I’ve missed, but I think these are the big ones. Note that while all of these categories may be bound together on the top level of ostensible gender dysphoria, once you get off the projection image of moving from one gender to another, the causal reasons are dramatically different. 

And therein lies the rub. It’s far more useful to understand this list in terms of individuals who are seeking some version of peace of mind for themselves (1, 3, 4, and 5, probably) and those who are looking for a manipulative advantage in their immediate social networks for impulsive self-gratification (2,6,7, and 8.)

And when you add three more categories to the mix —

  1. The medico-pharmacological complex that will profit off all of this, because any gender transition will involve lifetime medicalization.
  2. Unwitting virtue seekers looking for life meaning through a projection of the continuation of the civil rights movement.
  3. Pathological virtue seekers/politicians looking to exploit the issue of the day.

You have a pretty compact representation of the public space of this issue, that is serving as both a pathway for creating more damaged people, as well as distracting whole societies from solving more pressing problems that affect far more people than those immediately suffering through gender dysphoria, or looking to gain social/financial advantage from it.

One of the most interesting aspects of this that I noticed early on in the social media sphere is that if numbers mattered, there would be far more focus on young women and girls in the transition space than there is. I’ve read varying statistics that the number of female->male transitions vs. male->female transitions run as high as 10:1. I’m relatively convinced that the thing driving that adolescent/post-adolescent transition F->M is sexual abuse and trauma. There is simply no question that sexual abuse is one of the worst things that can happen to any young female, or male for that matter. It is a gross boundary violation, and has the strong downstream potential to disrupt an individual’s ability to form healthy attachments to other people in their social sphere. It’s bad whenever it happens, but it must be absolutely catastrophic when it occurs inside one’s familial group, and is the reason that there are mythic taboos against incest of any variety that spread across cultures and developmental stages. 

And as I wrote in this piece, it likely was part of forming psychopathic corps of individuals inside tribal societies that were strangely enough required for tribal persistence. If you didn’t create enough psychopathic warriors for your tribe, the tribe over the mountain would come over and wipe you out. Or on the feminine side, if you didn’t have enough women with disrupted attachment styles, your genetic variability would suffer, and you would also go extinct.

The problem is that these patterns, while necessary down on the hardware level of human societies — both Survival v-Meme and Tribal v-Meme consistency, have little use in more developed societies. In fact, more evolved social structures likely became emergent just to counteract these tendencies, and proved to be successful. Sequestering women and children, for example, might appear in the contemporary societal context to be extreme and abusive. But if your next door evolutionary neighbor one click down in the Tribal v-Meme is allowing those women and children to be raped, you might not think it’s such a bad idea. And then emergence of these patterns will take over, regardless. Taboos are formed, social organizations, institutions and religions start popping up that enforce these things, and societies march onward and upward empathetically, hopefully out of the need for that transitional behavior.

But back to the main point. The focus of the current media stream is NOT where the majority of the problem is. The focus is mostly on disruptive young men, either directly exhibiting violent behavior in the context of their transitioning, or being used as psychopathic mental models in the name of “civil rights” for power and control in current societal debates. They are young and energetic, and will say everything from “I’ll kill myself if I’m not allowed to transition!” (a classic Borderline Personality Disorder trope) or “I’ll kill you if you don’t let me!” Straight out of the Narcissistic/Anti-Social Personality disorder description. 

These types of personality types, especially when coupled with modern social media, and hooked to historic themes of civil rights progressions, are especially potent. And not just for the young men seeking some type of advantage to fuel their narcissism, ranging from winning sports competitions by competing in women’s leagues, to a delusional belief in increased sexual access by becoming a woman.

And then there are the pure psychopaths in the ranks of the ostensibly afflicted. These are young men strutting in dresses, sporting beards in high fashion. These individuals, with their ensembles of what I call “reflective personalities” — meaning they have an extremely poorly formed sense of self, and reflect off others in power through some form of mimesis — are gravitating to a profound change in the power zeitgeist of modern society. In the past, the image one might map to/reflect off of would be some version of a tough guy. But with the profound shift toward feminine power, they are serving as a North Star for who really runs the show in our society. And it ain’t men.

This maps back very well to this piece I wrote about ossified mental models co-opted by psychopaths for reasons of power and control. When a society cannot successfully update its social change revisions, then it makes itself extremely vulnerable to installation of rigid hierarchies, primarily controlled by psychopaths. Rigid, complicated hierarchies are characterized by lots of titles and externally defined relationships, where agency is suppressed or eliminated in terms of social control. They inflict long periods of stasis on cultures (the various dynasties in China are great examples.) 

And the younger trans M->F are the Praetorian Guard of these people. They don’t have to understand exactly what’s happening inside the social system. Their impulsive, violent behavior serves to intimidate others. And when layered with a historic righteous cause that the vast majority considers as morally good — in this case, in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement– it’s a powerful force. 

It also pleases those controlling power in that it strikes profoundly at the heart of relational development in an agency-based society. If you can’t even understand the rules on who a male, or female is, through visual and interactive observation, what can you know? You will need to be told. And as with all psychopathic systems run by psychopathic actors, normal people just gravitate away from it.

But that isolation has its costs. If you believe the primary pretext of this blog — that relational networks create information at the complexity level a society can maintain — that isolation also works to kill the brains of people who need to handle a rapidly changing environment. That fundamentally leads to downshifting of well-being of people in that society, and potentially population reduction, either through people not having kids because of general despondency. Folks should talk to young people today about how they view their prospects. Or, of course, direct extermination and killing each other.

So why should you care? We are all maintained in modern society by the level of complexity that this society runs on. Though rarely discussed, it creates the food and clean water, as well as transportation, and social connection that we depend on to persist. 

And while I’ve constantly voiced the opinion that we should show compassion for folks suffering from gender dysphoria, in no way shape or form should they be the ones running the show. Because the ones who really are just seeking relief from whatever hormonally induced distress are not the problem. But their suffering is easily co-opted. And it turns to have brain-scrambling implications, which play right into the hands of our Reptilian Overlords’ handbook.

And if you think that their backers, especially the powerful ones, don’t have a larger agenda, I’d urge you to reconsider that perspective. Our society’s stagnation is being created by a whole ensemble of psychopaths that the vast majority of people can’t even seem to acknowledge they exist. And there’s no question in my mind that this is one of the biggest hacks in the Matrix we’re dealing with right now.

Quickie Post — What is a Black Sword, Anyway?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Ghillie and Boo Boo, on a cold day outside of Genessee, ID

One of my favorite literary tropes comes from one of the most talented fantasy writers of all time — someone who, with maybe a little literary polish, might give J.R.R. Tolkien a little run for his money. 

I’m talking about Michael Moorcock, known for writing pulp fantasy fiction, and notably expanding a number of genres in superhero fiction that are accepted de facto plot devices across lots of fantasy universes. Though he did not, for example, invent the idea of the Multiverse, Moorcock gave it real legs. And instead of Good vs. Evil, Moorcock introduced the idea of the Cosmic Balance — Law vs. Chaos. The gods of his creation were also semi-disposable — they could be killed by heroes in Moorcock’s Multiverse.

Moorcock achieved notoriety through his Eternal Champion series, which took place across space and time, on a variety of different worlds, and with a set of characters that roamed all over the Cosmic Balance. The most impressive thing about these ideas was that he came up with these in his 20s. It’s almost unbelievable.

One of his most famous characters was Elric of Melnibone’, a somewhat chaotic evil prince, with a conscience. He rules over the Kingdom of Melnibone’, an island kingdom, stagnating in decadent decline, as some kind of humanoid, half-elf prince, with a troubled mind. He’s supposed to just be taking advantage of his populace that he governs, and spend time screwing his sister — in fact, said populace can’t understand why he doesn’t. But instead, he embarks on a series of adventures in about six books, written in non-sequential order. For those interested in the fine detail, the Wikipedia page on Elric is pretty good. 

Elric is a weak albino prince, and counts on various herbal medicines to even maintain day-to-day. But most important in Elric’s world is his sword, Stormbringer. Stormbringer is the iconic Black Sword, actually an incarnation of an evil mage, and when Elric wields Stormbringer, every time he kills an enemy, he receives some of the strength through the sword of his fallen foe. But it’s more than that. Stormbringer eats his foe’s souls. No reincarnation, no afterlife, is possible if you are killed by Stormbringer. If that doesn’t give you shivers, you really are a true atheist. 

It should come as no surprise that in the end, Stormbringer kills Elric, and basically everyone he loves, even as he vanquishes the foes in front of him. 

Having fought long, pitched battles in the various wilderness timber wars, the Stormbringer trope has long been resonant for me. Though I spent a piece of my activist career on the famous 2001 Clinton Roadless Rule, that ended up protecting over 58M acres of roadless forests across the United States, most of my activism was centered on saving the Clearwater and Nez Perce NF in north-central Idaho. That story is here, in a book I wrote back in the mid-’90s. There, the US Forest Service – USFS – (not just there, BTW) was famous for having a given timber sale shot down, and then resurrecting it with some of the legal weaknesses wrung out of the various Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) that are required when you want to hack up a piece of pristine country. The USFS wouldn’t go back to the drawing board. They’d reissue basically the same sale with some allusion to the legal argument made by us in front of the federal judge, and then we’d go back through the rinse cycle. 

I don’t think I was the only person calling them Zombie Timber Sales, but they certainly were. And one can see why the Stormbringer idea was particularly appealing. If you didn’t have a tool to suck the soul out of a given project, it would be back. Again and again.

Naturally, when we would win a round, it was as exhilarating a feeling as one could get. But victory was only short-lived. Most of the public still doesn’t believe the USFS sells timber, and views the USFS like the National Park Service — people there to protect our remaining wild country. They basically wear the same uniforms, after all. And most of the places we were fighting to save were, and still really are unknown in the public eye.

Destroying timber sales, even if only temporary, taught me a lot about politics, though. The USFS had, and still has no problem with lying to the public on a whole host of issues, including exactly what they do. And while most people who know even a little bit might believe there are things like the Endangered Species Act (ESA) protecting rare creatures on the landscape, the reality is that statutory law like the ESA, or a host of other acronyms, are only part of the picture. The other real, emergent driver is what I call the Law of the Budget. If Congress decrees that money will be spent on planning timber sales, you had better believe that timber sales will run what is done on any given National Forest. Following the money doesn’t always take you to the end destination. But I guarantee it will get you close.

The whole idea of Stormbringer, though, is very useful in our current psychopathic political environment. It’s no accident that Stormbringer fit well in Elric’s hands for all his adventures. I’ve had the recent experience of helping consult on a number of national issues, and the biggest flaw I’ve seen across the board is people attempting to rationalize the irrational. Things are done in our society not so much for any rational purpose, and unpacking it basically makes you spend all your intellectual energy attempting to empathize with their position on the topical level. 

But that’s really not what’s going on now. We’re undergoing a psychosocial relational downshifting that is intended to fragment us, and it’s working. It is indeed amplified by social media, because while it is possible for social media to create larger connected narratives, it mostly doesn’t. Or rather, it hands the megaphone to the various actors who can create compact sound bites that quite literally “feel right”. They factually may not have anything to do with reality, but they map with the reality that people want, or their emotions are familiar with.

The lesson of Stormbringer is that if you really want to kill an unreal thing like a zombie, or our current batch of psychopathic politicians, you need a chaotic evil sword. You need to get down on whatever the Survival v-Meme level your opponent is really functioning on, and not listen to their bullshit reasons, which, if they’re psychopathic, are just stories made up to confuse you and drain your energy. You need to hack out the soul out of your opponent, and drink in all that chaotic energy for yourself. That’s the price — and the benefit– of dealing with the truly Undead.

But it’s all problematic, of course. Remember what happened at the end of the story cycle to Elric.

Understanding the Importance of Evolution and Cross-Paradigmatic Thinking in Medicine

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Nursemaids

For those unfamiliar with my health travails this summer, I had a mesenteric venous thrombosis — basically a blockage in the primary vein in my bowel. As such, I’ve been plunged into our health care system in far more depth than I ever intended. I wish I could tell you that being bedridden gives one plenty of time to think, but it turns out when your primary energetic systems aren’t working very well, your brain does a poor job of keeping up. My problems were in my small intestine, which is where you absorb the energy from the food you eat. And when you couple that with a morphine derivative (I was on two separate starvation diets both lasting approximately a week) you don’t get many new thoughts.

But I’m pulling out of it. And there’s nothing like having real skin in the game to make you realize how your medical care is actually operating on your system. I am not particularly medically literate — I do count on my medical professionals to tell me what’s going on. And, not surprisingly, I’m observing them — predominantly what v-Meme they’re operating under. Why? It matters deeply what knowledge structures your doctors use. Are they sophisticated thinkers, breaking down symptoms, and matching them to different titrated medicines? Or are they root cause analysts, asking that question “how did this patient end up in front of me in the first place?”

Depending on the problem you have, there are needs in the medical system for both kinds. Sometimes, knowing why you have a given condition really doesn’t do you much good. Other times, it may save your life. But the reality is that we are overwhelmed with the level that different mental models are ingrained in our understanding of medicine.

Which is fascinating — because our brains don’t really care. Brains are alternatively wired and biased toward evolutionary thinking, or sophisticated thinking. For those that haven’t pored through all the pages of this blog, the short-version upshot is this: sophisticated thinking has lots of fine-grained thinking, fractal, and self-similar; and evolved thinking is doing the pattern matching across domains that seems obvious — you drank too much, and now your liver is on the fritz. But when you back off from both your liver, and the drinking, one can see that this level of pattern matching requires being able to see things not only in the realm of cause-and-effect, but also across very different behaviors and symptoms. You drank wine because you were at an event. Now, your liver produces unbalanced levels of enzymes. This is VERY different than dialing in the exact dose of a given medicine, which occupies the same cognitive domain.

And your brain only knows the containers you’ve generated for it. So if your relational diversity is low, and grounding is weak, expect more sophistication, though there’s also no question that a good, sophisticated doctor will augment their knowledge through feedback loops with a number of patients.

But the second — the evolved, root cause thinker — has to follow a different path. I wish I could tell you I’ve done an extensive background survey with every doctor I’ve identified as a root cause thinker. I haven’t. But it’s pretty quick to the point of “I know it when I see it.”

So, all you doctors out there that happen across this short column. Something to think about — why do you care about alternately understanding exact dose, or deep reasons behind pathologies? How can you all up your game? I’ve had a pretty arbitrary journey through the medical system — but it would be great to get to a shared realization on why both areas of knowledge development matter to your patients.

And your receptivity is all in your shared experiences and relational development.