Grave Peak, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, North Idaho
One of the most amazing books-on-tape I listened to recently is Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Following the story of a life of a literal nobody — this was Johnson’s forte — Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West, he writes in unsparing style about Grainier’s life from his perspective. The events that happened, both good and bad, are raw, and unscripted. The basic plot — an orphaned man living in the Inland Northwest, outside of Bonner’s Ferry Idaho — is never broken by much comfort, at least for very long. Living here myself, and sitting here watching the December rain fall outside, it was an act of constant endurance, without a pile jacket or Gore-Tex raincoat in sight. Johnson, besides being an elegiac writer, also embodies Robert Heinlein’s concept of a fair witness. – an unsparing, but non-critical analyst of a situation.
The book reading is stunning, and if you have time, I highly recommend you listen to it. It is disorienting in a strange, immersive way, and showcases Johnson as one of the premier writers of the last 50 years, at least. Johnson doesn’t attempt any intentional emotional manipulation of the reader. Instead, there is just the narrator telling his ghost story from his point of view. The story centers around losing his wife and child in a fire, and I won’t say more than that.
At the same time I had the book recommended to me by an X pal (Amanda Fortini, also a writer, and wife of yet another X pal, Walter Kirn) a movie made from the plot of the book was also released. While the movie is not terrible — the cinematography is evocative, and if you’re familiar with the landscape, as I am (I live adjacent) they do a fine job of capturing what it means to be set in the wild landscapes of the Inland Northwest — an area crossing over from eastern Washington to Northern Idaho.
But instead of scrupulously adhering to Johnson’s book, the movie struck me as a psy-op designed to manipulate the viewer on the issues of our day – not the issues of the 1920s. In the book, for example, a Chinaman caught stealing from the company store is attempted to be executed by a mob, but manages to escape. In the movie, he commits no crime (of course) but is summarily executed, and becomes a ghost that haunts Robert. And Grainier, after the fire, instead of being befriended by a drunk Indian with a bad habit of laying on railroad tracks, as happened in the books, is instead lifted up by a prosperous local native merchant. Magic realism is one thing. But this is so preposterous as to defy belief, especially when one considers the dominant time period being set in the early 1920s. Finally, Grainier isn’t even allowed the elevation of his enlightenment through meditation. Instead, he is lifted up by a woman. White men really cannot save themselves.
I actually enjoyed the movie as much as I’ve enjoyed any movie made in the last five years. And I find myself pondering whether I’m hallucinating these things. But that’s the thing about a good psy-op, especially one aimed at sophisticated audiences. When they had a black vigilante kill a white preacher in the movie, an absolute plot insertion with no match in the book, I was pretty sure I was being had. But the scenery was nice — I love my backyard, having dedicated an enormous amount of my life to saving it from destruction, and the movie turned into at least a watchable movie.
Maybe that has to pass for “good enough” in a time period with a collapsing film industry. But it’s still a shame. Ordinary people — even drunk Indians — can walk through life with a certain dignity that does not ascribe to Hollywood’s current morality plays. And people deserve to understand exactly how difficult life was for all the actors on the last frontier of the lower 48 states.
Where’s a cinematic fair witness when you need one?
It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been a social activist, almost completely unpaid, my entire life. It started back in 1989, after I moved out to Pullman and became involved with the environmental movement. I fell under the tutelage of Leroy Lee, a Native American wannabe as close to being a Nez Perce Indian as one could be. Leroy was no Pretendian — but he was as ingratiated with both the Coeur D’alene and Nez Perce tribes. And he decided I was smart, which has always been a curse, and enlisted me in helping him with what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. Leroy was a timber stand examiner, and worked in the woods measuring exactly how much actual timber was present on both private and mostly National Forest land. So he drug me along as he compiled damning evidence on the US Forest Service, showing that they had kept two sets of books regarding sustainability of that resource — one inflated, to justify increased cutting. And one actual — because in the end, the USFS had to sell that timber. I was a protege — not an architect. But I learned a lot from Leroy, who had intuited that I would go on to continue his work.
Leroy died young — 18 years ago, but I still remember him fondly.
And that launched my own benighted career — defending beautiful places that no one knew, and no one really cared about. Most people, when it comes to saving forests, sort the world into what they can see from the highway. And if there’s a “beauty strip” — a row of trees that blocks the view of clearcuts from the road, most will never question any of it. Even in this latest round of dealing with Donald Trump and ostensibly renewed calls for more logging on National Forests (most people don’t even understand that National Forests are NOT National Parks — they can and are logged) I’ve found that most people, even while professing care about ecological integrity, haven’t the foggiest what that means. Even professional environmental activists have fallen into line defending agencies I literally spent decades fighting.
But that’s the memetics for you. We’re in the middle of a war, as I’ve written here, between elites and counter-elites, and the elites long ago managed to figure out, regardless of whatever the noble cause was, to hack the institutional income stream from whatever the charitable, front-and-center projection du jour. I’m a huge fan of Mike Benz and Jennica Pounds, a woman that goes by DataRepublican on X. They have deconstructed the NGO-Industrial complex better than anyone. And along with the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) have been responsible for bringing the pain to the deep, ingrained corruption on the Left. None of this doesn’t mean that a mirroring corruption wasn’t already present on the Right. But I was one of the people that at least thought that, by being a Lefty, I was on the right side of these large issues.
Along the way, I started writing for the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News — a bi-weekly op-ed column under the tagline ‘Reality-Based Lefty’. I have, and still do believe that local news reporting is essential in smaller communities. I’ve seen various studies that show local newspapers profoundly damp down the corruption in governance . So as much as I believe anything coming out of the academy nowadays, I, once again, thought I was working on the right side.
I had written at least 23 years of columns until I quit in 2023. The column made me recognizable, and notable in the communities of Moscow and Pullman. My administrators at the university notably also hated the fact that I was writing, and found various and sundry ways to persecute me (bogus ethics violations, etc.) for writing it. Academic administrations are about power and control — and that matters in small, university communities. And though I’ve always been excellent in my job (raising money, publishing, blah, blah, blah) as university governance has declined, my ability to speak has also gone down. I’ve enjoyed some reprieves dependent on the university president, and WSU has had some good ones. But my colleagues and lower level factotums memetically have had an impossible time believing that a professor could or should speak with an independent voice.
As far as external audiences, I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of potential directed violence. During the Cove-Mallard campaign, my phone was very likely tapped by the FBI. At various public hearings, I had other forces of the timber industry threaten me. And I went toe-to-toe with millworkers and loggers as well. I’ve written about some of this in my book, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, which was published in 1998 by WSU Press. At least at the time, I couldn’t have been so far out of the blessings of the university hierarchy.
What I found with folks that worked in the woods was that, while they had problems, and would threaten me, if I also matched their approach, and talked to them, they would back down and we would talk. There’s a certain pattern to the dance when someone threatens to kick your ass — they step forward, and yell. And you better step forward, chest-to-chest as well. Fear doesn’t wear well. But then they would inevitably step back, and you would talk. Mill owners and timber magnates were worse. But the industry just wasn’t, and isn’t about killing people for their political views. That’s not true for all natural resource industries — I’ve always told people I’d never mess with Basque sheep farmers (those guys are nuts). They’d kill you at the drop of a hat. Maybe it’s just the fact they’re the only humans alive still pretty much descended from Cro-Magnons. But while there was indeed tons of political skulduggery in the timber/USFS game, murder is just not in the cards. Or I’d be dead.
I took a hiatus after Clinton’s Roadless Initiative got passed. We had managed to move off the table most of the remaining public wild country on National Forest ground (no roads) off the table. I had kids to raise, and I wanted to make change in the university landscape. So I became the Chair of the Faculty Senate — kind of like the elected president of the faculty — and went to work on the issues of the day, which mostly revolved around DEI. This led to me participating in hiring Elson Floyd, a black man, who turned out to be a narcissistic psychopath. He spent WSU into penury, and we’re still struggling financially from this. He also made sure to wreck my career in administration as well. He simply couldn’t tolerate having another powerful person in his orbit. That’s a longer story in itself that will have to wait until retirement. I also got divorced, and ended up in a protracted struggle with the mother of my two sons, who was aided and abetted by a school system, which calling it corrupt would be mild. It was painful as hell, but it did yield profound insights into how our country has gotten the problems that it has. Short version — we didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not gonna get out of here overnight either.
And then came COVID. I was involved in the ramp-up to the lockdowns and masking, and I’ve written extensively about all of it, as well as my eventual discovery that it was all a farce — a diabolical one that still goes on today.
And along the way I wrote my column in the local newspaper. I was, at the first, earnestly attempting to communicate with the public about civic issues while hewing to the mainline science. This, though, went sideways during COVID, when it became obvious that the powers-that-be were deliberately lying for lots of reasons — the largest being what I named Elite Risk Minimization. Elite Risk Minimization is the psychopathic manipulation of public interventions, using the force of government, to minimize any perceived risk elites have to their well-being. It is absolutely anti-empathetic, and it utilizes other ensconced elites (like professors at universities) to propagate bullshit beliefs. The guiding principle became “if it saves one life” — as long as that life belongs to an elite. If you’re poor, your life can be wrecked — and many were. It’s a well-worn story how elites sat at home and had food delivered to them, while ostensibly the poors wandered about waiting on them, dropping food in bags outside their doors while ostensibly subjecting themselves to clouds of the virus. Fortunately for the poors, the lethality of COVID turned out not to be true — though it is still BELIEVED to be true. Especially in small university communities like Moscow, ID.
And around the world, folks found out that all that science, and all that elite opinion, had largely been arbitrary, or manufactured by the folks paying the bill. Which, more often than not, turned out to be the taxpayer.
So I wrote about this. Initially, I wrote about the need to follow government mandates. But then the data came in, and I made some influential friends (hi, Jay, if you’re reading this!) and the whole fraud got grounded. So, I started out, initially kindly, and then more forcefully, telling elites in the two university towns that the rational case behind their affectations and hero worship of criminals like Tony Fauci was a crock of rotten fish.
And they responded. Boy, did they ever. I received all sorts of emails about “staying in my lane” and how I was killing people with my op-eds. I was screamed at in public, and ostracized. What was also unusual was that other citizen columnists for the paper, instead of covering their own viewpoints on issues, started writing libelous columns about me. The ethics of the op-ed game are pretty simple. You write your opinion, and then the public gets their shot. What was wild about all this was that it wasn’t just letter writers. It was other op-ed columnists. After three years of all of that, I decided it wasn’t worth the $25/column I was receiving. I figured the persistence of hate against me wasn’t worth it.
The residue from my column still haunts me. The latest incident happened just four days ago. A retired lab manager from a biology department at WSU, that I used to work on Democratic politics, while at the dog park where I run my border collies, picked up dog feces in a bag, came stomping and screaming at me about how irresponsible I was as a dog owner, and threw the feces at me. He then attempted to steal my dog. There were plenty of witnesses — I hang out with a bunch of, well, elderly ladies at the dog park, who are on my team. The perp didn’t leave until I called 911.
But even as he left, as I was running the calculation in my head on who exactly he was, he walked away with a smug grin. His point to be made, in a veritable community of elderly immiserators, was that there would never be a price I could pay to not be tormented by these people in public. Am I 100% sure it wasn’t just about the fact that my dog took a poop? Of course not. But if there’s been any theme in my life over the last four years, is that once you are declared an outcast in a Lefty community, you are fair game for whatever happens to you. And if that thing is evisceration, you may have a Greek chorus weeping for you on the sidelines. But no one will do a thing. You deserved it.
There’s a pattern here that’s worth noting, that I’ve seen over and over since Trump got elected — but was really in play during COVID as well. It plays into the whole Elite Overproduction thing I write about. If you piss off a logger in a logging community, they may threaten to kick your ass. But it’s a direct threat. You square off, size each other up, and then take your chances. The logger (or miner) isn’t counting on some institution to manipulate to change the circumstances. They know that they’re likely breaking the law to kick your ass, and they’ll end up having to explain this to the judge. But they’re functioning inside some rational understanding of an ordered society.
That is no longer true on the Left. When I’ve been assaulted — and it’s happened three times, full-on — the expectation of the person screaming at me/spitting on me/hurling a bag of dog shit at me is that, in their minds, they have functionally been deputized by society to punish me, and any institutional authority summoned would back them up. Ostracism is guaranteed. And because Trump is evil/a rapist/a criminal, they have decided that the rules of a civilized society no longer apply. At least to them — but in the case that I act (in all three cases of assault and battery, I had to passively absorb the abuse) I will be the one that the cops haul away.
This thought is not with rational merit. One of the problems with being a large, muscular human (I’m a big guy, though at 62, not as strong as I used to be) is that they also assume bias in the police, and after I literally break them, I will be the one to pay. Even if it’s obviously self-defense. When the person that was attempting to steal my dog was trying to clip a leash on her collar, I was very careful to not touch him, all the while yelling at him to stop. Witnesses, as I said, and another gentleman were on my side. But so certain he was of his righteousness — it was me, a local societal pariah — it never occurred to him that he would ever suffer any consequences. It’s fundamentally a pattern of psychopathic inversion — claiming self-victimhood as the tool to justify whatever cruelty they decide to mete out. Remember that the next time one of these psychopaths start talking about “the cruelty being the point” when talking about Donald Trump. They’re self-identifying and projecting one of the key behaviors they’re familiar with. And they get to be the judge.
This phenomenon is not just limited to me. There have been numerous other situations where various lefties acted out to disrupt events with no expectation of consequences. In March, a Republican Central Committee meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was disrupted by Teresa Borrenpohl, an official at North Idaho College and a Democratic candidate who was forcibly removed from the meeting by private security after disrupting the meeting. She claimed ‘free speech’, though she did not follow the rules of the hearing. While I can understand her actions, at some level, the bottom line once she was thrown out of the meeting was to demand reparations for not being allowed to continue to disrupt the meeting. She was the authority, and she would not tolerate the fact that a group of people might object to her declaring her authority illegitimate. Further, she made it abundantly clear that this was not an act of civil disobedience, where an entity breaks the law, fully expecting to face consequences. There would be no consequences – at least not for her, she informed the press, other than the Kootenai County Republicans paying her tribute. She controlled the morality of the event.
I was heavily attacked as well on Facebook after the event by many people by bringing up similar points. Many of the people on the FB thread know me personally and deeply. It was clear — any questioning of her moral authority would result in permanent ostracism. Some of the people on that thread were individuals who had also participated, or supported our own Civil Disobedience efforts. Clearly, at least in their minds, the rules have changed. As Lefties, they now embody the law, the judge, and the jury. As well as the executioner.
It is worth pausing for a minute and considering what is happening in communities, or rather tribes on the Left. And here’s the thing — Trump Derangement Syndrome is just a symptom. There has been an overall psychosocial v-Meme devolution on the Left. There is still some hanging onto higher-level narratives from Legalistic and Authoritarian v-Memes. But overall, the corpus has adopted a psychopathic perspective based on the psychological condition known as ‘splitting’ — where there’s a descent into black-and-white thinking, where only the current observer, as long as that observer is correctly tribally aligned, gets to decide on the veracity of any given situation. Tribal Taboos have been established (e.g. there will be no firing of any black official, regardless of their self-evident level of corruption) and they will not be broken. And if they are broken, it’s like an entire unraveling of worldview that takes place, instead of any attempt to relate a change of condition with society, or any functional integration of their worldview with what’s actually happening in current affairs. They are literally operating in a fantasy world of their own creation.
But it is reinforced through large-scale LARPing as social-justice warriors, or some other icks. No grounding necessary. The problem is that scales of their fantasies keep growing. As well as the concomitant gaslighting of the general public.
Core characteristics of much of this involve what I call ‘narcissistic shielding’ — where an ostensibly innocent, group-declared victim is moved into a position between the out-group and the psychopathic champion of the in-group. “Don’t approach, or I’ll be forced to shoot the baby panda!” to paraphrase Elon Musk. Agency goes to zero with the Lefties. But the result of that is that it’s all the suspect outsider’s fault. All my attackers were their own narcissistic shields — champions of virtue. And while they threatened physical violence to me, had I responded, they were absolutely sure that the institutions would have been on their side. One of the screamers in my three incidents was a women in a motorized wheelchair who took it on herself to accost me for saying wearing masks were B.S. She accused me of wanting to kill her family.
All the confused outsider sees is the results of psychopathic projection from the Lefty insider. And this projection is both constant, and relentless. Consider the current Russiagate situation. Trump was pathologized, largely by a cabal under ex-President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to be a Russian asset, controlled by Putin. This is now being revealed as a combination plot that refuses to die. But the Left still persists in projecting this ostensible lack of agency on Donald Trump, due to their judgment of (of course) his lack of moral character, as well as mental incontinence, through sophisticated advocates like Heather Cox Richardson, even while there is nary a peep about the fact that Democrats were propping up mental invalid Joe Biden for basically his entire term.
Some of this stems from mental deterioration from the aging of the Left’s core group, which seems to mostly consist of AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) and men and women over the age of 65. I suspect some of this has to do with degenerate cognitive decline — as people age, unless they really work at it, they march back the cognitive development v-Meme ladder, becoming more and more tribal and authority-driven. Much of this seems also like schismogenesis — the creation of a self-image through negative reverse polarization. They must be the opposite of everything they hate about Trump, or else their own, fragile ego boundaries, decaying in the face of their own death, are shattered. It’s a reverse role of the stereotype of Uncle Bob showing up as the arch-conservative at Thanksgiving dinner. But it’s still emblematically characterized with a focus on Trump himself. The various policies, that are simply disastrous for society (like open borders, or masking small children) are conveniently shunted to the side. As they decay, they lose more and more sense for precise time, which then helps them construct Collapse Narratives, based around dubious moral principles, as well as policies only rejecting what is occurring, as opposed to creating alternate solutions that would even have measurable outcomes. The only thing uniting their worldviews is the desire for collapse.
From a neurogenic relational perspective, the Lefties are also moving back down the relational/agency development scale. If you’re not an Externally Defined expert/Tribal Elder, you can’t be listened to at all. And if you go against the drumbeat of dread, then you’re immediately scapegoated. Contrast that to my confrontations with the loggers. It started out Externally Defined (I was an environmentalist, they were timber workers) but over the course of our relationship, their view of me evolved. I became a person — with an independently generated relationship that was fundamentally data-driven. We had talked, and exchanged perspectives, which were likely never completely resolved. But I was still, at the end, a human. Contrast with the current crop on the Left. I know at the end of any conversation with a Lefty True-Believer I’m merely to be added to the list of people to be, at best, re-educated. Or put up against the wall. I gotta get my mind right.
An incredible example of this popped up in my FB feed. I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. A relatively famous Native American writer is condemning her fellow writers for not coming to her Struggle Session workshop, and directly faults one of the people that did come for leaving early. She freely admits that the framework was a Struggle Session. But simply cannot acknowledge that maybe the reason for why the various feminist authors did not show up was that they were just human. And busy. Her response is emblematic of collapsed egocentricism — which is itself a prime symptom of Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.
And here’s the thing, folks. She did this publicly, in a regional magazine, to people who are her ALLIES. If these people ever manage to gain power again, you can imagine what they’ll do to apostates like me. We continually believe we cannot have a Chinese Cultural Revolution here. But I’m here to tell you that we can. These people are laying the groundwork for it. There are steps — devolution of relational development, followed by rigid appropriation of various orthodoxies, mixed in with no absolution possible.
I’ve had in-laws like this — and they were psychopaths. They are hiding behind the screen of a culture that has, what we believe, an intrinsic, if not invisible thesis of forgiveness. It is a core Christian philosophy. But what I’ve learned in my own life is that there are various rituals for you to confess your sins. However, at the end, you are not granted absolution for your ways, nor elevated for your transcendence. You have merely acceded to a guilty judgment against you. And now you must be punished. Preferably by execution. I’ve got stories.
Civilizationally, we’re in a tight spot. It is true that a lot of these people are literally aging out of the population. But they are exceptionally weak-minded. It’s also true that Lefties are also not reproducing at the rate that conservatives are, which, for all the problems the conservative movement has, it is fundamentally a Christian movement, which does have paths for redemption. Time will tell. But it is also time to start punishing with the judicial system those that break the law. They are not breaking the law with the expectation of societal elevation, as in the past with large civil disobedience campaigns. They are breaking laws expecting that their moral hegemony will dominate.
If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. The clip below can happen here.
Punta Marenco, Costa Rica — Corcovado National Park
I haven’t really written much about the Trump administration since the election. Most of it, quite frankly, because of the derangement of the Left, and unfortunately, in particular, my age cohort (I’m 62.) Upon being told that I voted for Donald Trump, I’ve dealt with long-time friends basically disowning me. And even though I live the life of an oddly functional hermit, I still find it disturbing.
There is an axis of civilization that runs N/S through society, with independently generated, empathy-driven relationships on the north end, and with externally defined, belief-based, and title-driven relationships on the south end. One of the reasons that you make so many friends when you’re young is your neuroplasticity is high, and you have few ingratiated experiences leaving isolated biased tags in your hippocampus, causing you to have limbic withdrawal for nonspecific reasons. As people age, though, most folks do not continue to proceed upward along the path of wisdom, acceptance of metacognition, and a more conscious, questioning and data-driven perspective toward life’s circumstances. Instead, biases become even more rigid, and if you’re not in an environment where you’re encouraged to keep a flexible perspective, mental decline is inevitable.
And so it’s happened with my friend cohort. I have yet to be asked by almost anyone exactly “why” I voted for Trump, among anyone that I’ve known over 10 years. I have my reasons. The Democrats kept a man with a pudding brain in office for four years, and offered up a combo cipher/alcoholic as the replacement, in a midnight coup that turned out to be disastrous for their political fortunes. I voted for the counter-elites I describe in this piece.
But worse were the narratives that the Ds rallied behind. Almost all of these, outside of the typical bland “we’re going to fix the economy” non-specifics, were what I call Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It’s a governing story that can be detected by a series of factors:
No absolute metrics of any particular policy issue. Everything is relative, and explained in relative terms.
Expectation of the national interest to forfeit any larger sense of self-survival.
Demonization if one protests the myth, instead of consideration of personal interest of any constituency.
Boundary collapse across the psycho-social landscape of a society.
It’s not hard to dissect any of the policies of the Democratic Party along these four lines. Take open-border immigration, and the flood of illegal immigrants into our country. While there were vague discussions of immigration (we need more LEGAL immigration, whatever that meant!) there were never any numbers discussed (#1). Additionally arguments were constantly generated along the lines of allowing more people in, regardless of national origin, because relative to the general population, suspicious figures were floated saying “any immigrants are just better people than the people already here.” Things like the fact that more people add a quantum to your chance of being murdered, raped, or robbed simply didn’t matter. If they weren’t here, your numbers wouldn’t go up.
And subsequent to that is the current war over deportation of various gang members and criminals that are already here. Look folks — if you entered the country illegally, then you are a criminal by definition. But there is quite a gradient even among that crew. The recent procedural doubling down on Juan Abrego Garcia, a domestic violence perpetrator and likely gang member, shows that the Democrats aren’t really interested in having a functional country. All the various cries about “due process” are largely irrelevant, as “due process” as a term means, a la Humpty Dumpty, whatever we want it to mean.
The Democratic goal is derailment of society, building on the efforts already started by the non-functional Biden regime. What is especially laughable is that currently, in our legal system, what is known as “prosecutorial justice” — where a perp strikes a deal with the prosecutor — dominates some 97% of all criminal justice. That means “due process” means someone accusing you, with a modest basis, and then you figure out how you’re going to give in to avoid time in the Big House. It only involves an investigation by police, with the prosecutor’s assent. And that’s for citizens — which is NOT required in immigration law. “Due process” is another Collapse Narrative.
That leads us to #2, which then gets back to some needed sense of cultural homogeneity. Countries can be diverse — but you get to the point where societies have no assimilative power whatsoever. That is inevitably going to lead to conflict among parties, in unexpected ways. I was raised as a Catholic, with a Muslim background (my father was Iranian, but an avowed atheist) — but I have no desire to live in a predominantly Muslim country. Islam has lots of problems that I’m directly familiar with, that I haven’t written about because it would distort a lot of the other information I’m transmitting on this blog. And I can tell you there are reasons that various Islamic countries are societal backwaters.
To even voice these types of observations — that there is a scale we can measure cultures on regarding being better or worse for human flourishing — can rapidly lead to demonization (#3) of the writer. Post-modernism has led us to the point where we see LGBTQ people protesting FOR Palestine as some kind of Promised Land. I can guarantee the idiocy of this level of affinity of self-interest is appalling. I view the current Israeli/Palestinian War as a profound tragedy, for both sides, which is also why I haven’t written about it. But it’s also true that the same constituency screaming against Israel would be rounded up and exterminated by those same people they’re ostensibly attempting to save. It’s just a fact.
I also view the outcome as historically predictable. You fly a bunch of males organized by a neo-medieval government in motorized parawings into a country, who then kill, rape and kidnap 1400 or some odd women and men, you’re asking for total war. The only parallel I can come up with is Arthur “Bomber” Harris in World War II, head of RAF bomber command. Given the job of stopping the Nazis, he was paramount in making a Nazi surrender irrelevant. He did this by functionally leveling literally every German city of a particular size, by fire-bombing them. I absolutely do not condone genocide — but patterns of history repeat themselves.
And getting back to the point — it’s a profound Collapse Narrative when you advocate for people who, given the chance would kill and enslave you.
Finally, looking at #4, boundary collapse is written all over the various Collapse Narratives the Left ascribes to. Men in women’s sports, or bathrooms — talk about a historic removal of sex boundaries. The war in Ukraine — we have nothing to gain by continuing the war, other than loss of national treasure as part of a perverse globalist enterprise. Yet I have many acquaintances that would demonize me if they knew my views. That’s a crazy Collapse Narrative — that our friendship is more worthless to them than a particular In-group view, on a conflict with no geographic resonance, that has absolutely no bearing on our actual relationship.
Organisms, including nations, collapse if they cannot maintain homeostasis and intact boundaries. Every organism alive exists with some combination of flux of nutrients and influences from the outside world, along with the ability to modulate those same inputs. A human being is itself only a modestly 3 dimensional prospect, with a mouth, fractal structures called alveoli in one’s lungs, and an alimentary system for absorbing food. Too much stuff comes in over the boundaries and a person dies. Collapse Narratives demand exceeding those boundary limitations, both biological and psychic.
What’s even worse is that we have an entire elite class championing obvious Collapse Narratives as virtuous. None of the dominant myths used to signal virtue by our elites have any practical benefit to the majority of the population. And they’re directly fraudulent. When Trump’s immigration crackdown commenced, all the major news outlets binged on the notion that vegetables would rot in the fields, and a famine would ensue across the land. Yet every day, going to the grocery store, there was nothing but the usual fresh vegetables available for sale.
On the issue of Trump’s tariffs — an attempted re-balancing of trade, at least with the intention of moving us back from the heavy financialization of our work sector to more manufacturing, the elite class screamed bloody murder. I’d like to think that at least a little of this screaming was rational — tariffs and global trade are an evolutionary system, and interconnections are many, and hidden. But it turned into more screaming that an international order that had benefitted elites was actually what was at stake. The isolation of the professional class from the needs of the working class had been thorough before 2020, and certainly exacerbated by COVID. Populism had been mapped to Nazism in the press. And the resistance toward this was another example of a Collapse Narrative.
One of the most pervasive of the Collapse Narratives has been the very real societal war around mainstreaming transgenderism — especially in youth. California and other Blue states have been famous for going so far to hide childrens’ depression and gender dysphoria away from parents with legitimate guardianship rights. Destroying families is directly advocating for collapse. Families are far from perfect as support mechanisms for individuals. But I can tell you, as someone who only has my immediate children and wife, they’re far better than nothing.
And then there is the issue of men in women’s sports. Democrats, even in the face or realizing how divisive this issue is to the public, constant dissemble on it. “It’s only a few kids,” is the classic riposte. If it’s only a few kids, then why die on that hill? The more I dig into this, the more obvious it becomes that there is a ton of psychopathy behind many of the transgender champions, as well as the champions of the champions. Giving in would mean giving away a powerful tool of disruption of society. And so another Collapse Narrative is born.
Societies are oriented, North/South, along a line that maps to the v-Memes I talk extensively about on this blog. The north end of societies are predicated on cultures that support individual choice, and develop people who are actually capable of handling those individual choices in a responsible, connected fashion. Down at the bottom are non-differentiated Tribal societies, where everyone inside the dominant group are “the people”, and everyone outside is worse than disposable.
You cannot have the current complexity of society without a well-scaffolded stack, because without that, your society has no hope in hell of generating the complex web of information such a society needs to exist. And that stack is based on data-driven, trust based relationships. You have to have scaffolded trust not just for moral values. You actually need it or you can’t support the number of transactions, information and otherwise, to make it happen. Transaction velocity matters, and translates to sophistication of products, as well as diversity and quantity of goods on the shelf.
And the core of that is development of the individual, as what my friend Daniel Goertz calls the “dividual” — the person in context of themselves, and the society.
Collapse Narratives are crafted by psychopaths to undermine that concept — through an advocacy of self- and societally destructive myths that break down an individual and their boundaries and turn them into an organic soup, not unlike what happens to a caterpillar in a chrysalis. But it’s highly unlikely, after the mass killing that actual collapse will entail, that much of a butterfly will pop out.
If you try to immiserate Cecilia, she’ll let you know what she thinks of that.
I’m writing this on the eve of our Nov. 2024 election. It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on in the US, as well as around the world. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time pondering (too much, actually) is how, after the end of the Cold War, when we were literally on the edge of blowing the planet up, we ended up, instead of seeing a flourishing and evolution of the human spirit, we ended up being probably as miserable in society and culture as any time in my lifetime.
Let me give a little background. For those that don’t know, I live in a small college town (Pullman, WA) adjacent to yet another small college town, just six miles away (Moscow, ID). Both towns are simultaneously adjacent to some of the most magnificent mountains, wild rivers and forests in the Lower 48, which most of the residents have no inkling exist at all. You have to drive a little ways to get to them (2.5 hrs) but a sizable hunk of folks that have any interest in that kind of thing will get in the car and literally drive seven or so hours to a National Park for their yearly fix. That’s how insular they are.
People fantasize about retiring in a small college town — the theatre! An almost pro- sports experience! Concerts! Young people! But they don’t realize that the two communities, while great places to visit, are, at best mediocre places to live. It’s the reason they don’t really grow. And they’re not particularly cheap, either, for small town living. The residents running the show are a mix of locals from the conjoint farm community (we live in the most productive wheat country in the world) some strong church affiliates, as well as some professors.
But there’s no question what runs the culture. It’s the university, and the people associated with it. And as university culture either rises or falls, so do the fortunes of the culture. You may have noted that universities are on the wane in our society — declining demographics certainly play a part. But Woke politics have become so obnoxious, it’s intolerable for anyone who is remotely “normal” in today’s contemporary culture.
What does “normal” even mean any more? It used to mean a reasonable level of independently generated relationships (friends) with institutions to live your life and raise your kids with. I do realize that this hardly exists anywhere any more, especially if you compare it with where I grew up — a dysfunctional steel town on the Ohio River. But it’s saying something that there was a much more profound sense of community in a town in economic freefall than there is in a cosseted island of privilege, funded solely by outside revenue.
People think about retiring here because they come here to become educated, and that produces a lot of memories. They return here because of those memories are powerful, and they want to watch football, get drunk with old friends, and tailgate. It’s a powerful tribal alignment. In a time when the Immiserators (we’ll get to a more precise definition of them in a moment) have destroyed anyone’s desire to affiliate with state or nation, folks migrate to the university to recover that sense of community. But then, after the game, they leave. And leave this community, dominated by the ethos of the current academy, which is relationally disruptive, and inherently elitist, to its own devices. Which is not in the community’s favor.
One of the interesting things about being a professor for my entire career (north of 37 years) is that I’ve seen exactly every different stereotype of what the rest of the world think a professor is. I’m a Renaissance Man with a potty mouth — I write, I craft, play musical instruments, and talk about politics as well as engineering. Blah, blah, blah. People say “hey — you’re what we always thought a professor should be!” Because they know, from their own experience, what professors actually are. If you think, in the modern academy, you can succeed by NOT being neurodivergent in some form or another, I’ve got news for you. You’ve got to have some form of OCD to study flea anuses, or squirrel penises (I had a friend that actually did that, and was wildly successful – he was/is a decent human being, so don’t get carried away with that) for your entire life. But you have to be different.
And inside that difference, the majority become anti-rational. They might apply logic or complicated methods in their research. But when it comes to human relations, they sit in a rigid, hierarchical system that heavily penalizes any developmental nonconformity — such as actually evolving as a human being. University towns are filled with functional adult toddlers with some form of oppositional defiant disorder. It might move the science of squirrel penises forward. But it’s hell to live here.
Before we move forward, let’s define what an ‘Immiserator’ is. An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)
And those rules must be enforced. The joy is in the enforcement! At least for the Immiserator. You may be miserable, and the exception may never occur again. But rules allow immiseration to be applied across-the-board. Everyone gets to be miserable! Which is, of course, the point.
Immiseration is a primary tool of relational disruption. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re miserable. They might say the wrong thing, or blow up. That would lead to more enforcement of more rules, and more emotional flow to the Immiserators. So people start shutting down. That doesn’t really suit the Immiserators either — if everyone is quiet then there’s no one to punish. So instead of just letting people re-form social networks outside the Immiserators, they want to send you to talk therapy. Or Healing Circles. Or other such icks.
As we’ve seen in the last 10 years, Immiserators are very often female. Immiseration profoundly fits inside the foundational elements of women’s personae of Nurture and Social Control. When Nurture is minimized, then that energy has to go somewhere, and Social Control is where it goes. Whole societies are built on this. Who enforces the Taliban’s anti-woman edicts? It’s the Taliban grandmothers. Who are at war over the increasingly confusing rules governing access to young women’s uterine real estate? Middle-aged white women.
But if you think men are off the hook, you’re also wrong. Men pivot around the dyad of Protect and Provide. We see this on the Right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly hostile edicts for Protect also provide immiseration – we can get back to the extreme example of the Taliban preventing young girls from attending school. And Provide, at some level in recession because of failing differences in M/F incomes and job positions (note — women get more college degrees, more promotions, and lots of other stuff) still has the ability to hold hostage and immiserate people dependent on that good old Do-Re-Mi.
But back to my university town. In my town(s) we have a local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. For over 20 years, I’ve written for the newspaper as an op-ed columnist. It was a biweekly gig, paying the handsome sum of $25/column, which NEVER changed over the time . But I was happy to write. I figured it was my charitable donation to news in the area. I’m an educated man, with broad, international experience. By sharing my insights, I’d improve the information level of my community. I did try to write about local issues, as well as the larger ones more in my expertise.
Sometime in the last 15 years, the newspaper made a decision to go every day with op-eds from people like me. Well, at least ‘like me’ in the community. This was relatively innocuous, until the community (especially the folks in Moscow) decided to double down on religious persecution of a fundamentalist, Full Bible Church in their community. Their pastor, Doug Wilson, has even appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. The paper’s op-ed columnists would regularly scream and wail about Doug, and his congregation, which interestingly enough, are maybe a little older than the college kids, but far younger than the liberal/progressive elite that believed they ran the community. Doug is indeed an asshole, and he DID make it easy. We have (believe it or not) about 6 mega-churches in our combined towns, population of 65K. Doug is that nail sticking out begging to be hammered down by the Immiserators. He may or may not have had it coming. But as Clint Eastwood said famously, when it comes to the Immiserators, we’ve all got it coming.
But if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And those progressive didn’t have kids. And now they’re old. They’re almost entirely composed of people that perceive themselves as the intelligentsia. But in reality, they’re idiots. Screaming idiots.
The Moscow/Pullman Immiserati.
During COVID, they screamed so much at me, as I made my steady progression toward the truth of COVID, and ended up profoundly on the ‘defending young people’ side of the non-issue for them, I finally quit. They would write their op-ed columns about me and my op-eds — what I would consider an op-ed journalistic violation. When you have a column, you have an obligation to inform your readers. You get the bully pulpit. And the first word. But your readership gets the last word — in the letters. Instead, they wrote columns that would probably be considered libelous about me. They would dance and holler. And so I finally just gave up.
This cadre definitely immiserated me. And when I left, they went back to the standard themes. We are all racists. Donald Trump is a fascist. If you’re not hanging your head in shame for living in our little isolated enclave, you’re a member of the KKK. And so on. A lot of people in that caste (as well as the letter writers) had done yeoman work in the past, when we actually had problems, at least regionally. Coeur D’Alene, and Hayden Lake, ID are not that far away. Who can forget Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations? But that ship has sailed, or at a minimum, burrowed underground. Escalating real estate prices are never good for true believers.
It’s too painful to count, but at least in the last year, every op-ed that runs from the ostensible Left side, is about Donald Trump, or Christ Church, and how their supporters/followers are evil racists. Folks, we don’t functionally have an African-American community in this middle-of-nowhere burg. There are no reported instances of racism, though we have had black-on-black gang violence. Every now and then, we do see something directed against the Native American community, the Nez Perce. But even that is literally a once-in-two-years episode. If that. Hell, we don’t even have a Hispanic community outside the university.
But Immiserators gonna immiserate. And well-meaning people who are NOT the members of the Immiserati line up behind them. When you have a community where a fair share of the members have OCD or OCPD, and you stand up and say surgical masks don’t work to stop COVID, and we should stop torturing our students in grade school with this crazy bullshit, you should expect to take some heat. In the fragmented world of Pullman/Moscow, they managed to completely isolate me. I literally was screamed at in the street. No shit.
How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.
And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do. It doesn’t make any difference how preposterous it is — how crazy is it, really, that anyone would advocate for middle-aged men sporting a euphoria boner in a girls’ high school locker rooms, or how rare it is (if this was happening all the time, I guarantee there would be dead bodies in the street.) That’s NOT the point. The point is misery. Yours. Oh, and the self-righteous screaming.
Which brings us around to Donald Trump. I’ve written extensively about Trump on this blog (you can Google it) and none of it is complimentary. I’ve called him a narcissistic psychopath, among other things. But I’ve attempted to keep it real. Trump was, and is a moderate Republican in policy. He is not a fascist. He has a big mouth, and he violates institutional social codes of speech by saying the quiet part out loud. We have been seized by an institutional class that has, in league with the Immiserators, figured out how to successfully loot the Treasury, on every level of American society. Does he care about the American people? I think at some level he does. But he cares far more about his own personal image. I’m not as sure as I used to be that he is a narcissistic psychopath. But he’s still definitely a narcissist.
And he’s found his niche — fighting the Immiserati. He’s got some allies who actually have some policy sense on the misery — Vance, Kennedy, and especially Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who in any other time in America’s history would be a hero — putting people into space, creating WiFi for the world, electric cars, and the list goes on — is now chronically vilified by the Immiserati. One of Elon’s main messages is to young people — look forward to your life, there are not too many people on the planet, have children and families — the Immiserati beat the drum, and the sub-Immiserators chime in. Musk is bad. Evil, in fact. People are not nearly immiserated enough. Get ready for de-growth. They’re still functioning, aren’t they?
And a peace deal for Ukraine? Nothing is more immiserating than the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over everyone’s head. Lest you get carried away and think the Immiserators actually WANT nuclear war, I really don’t think that’s the case. But operating where they do, in the limbic zone, with its desire for depressive emotional state matching, they don’t care. It’s short term misery they seek, and damn the long-term consequences. I’ll still bet dollars to donuts that 95% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on the map. And Ukraine has its own Immiserators that are propagating policies that will annihilate their young male class. They’re emotional state-matching with our own US foreign policy Immiserators, that are watching the rivers of blood run while our own arms merchants get fat.
In order to fix this problem, we first have to recognize it. We have to dismantle the Immiserati, and their larger caste of Immiserators. That’s why the latest head of the Immiserati, a sock puppet as far as I call tell, Kamala Harris, tried to float the whole ‘Joy’ message. The fact that this whole campaign fell flat tells you that the public isn’t falling for it. Kamala went back to the drumbeat of the other side being Nazis, fascism, and the Handmaid’s Tale. They were more in form, and didn’t cause so much cognitive dissonance that people just tuned out.
We’ll see who wins. We’re still in a tight spot, regardless of who wins. But I’ve found that naming something is the first step in either saving something, or defeating. Let’s get out there and get busy.
A book so interesting, I’m listening to it twice, as I digest the implications is Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. In this book, Turchin explains his approach toward cliodynamics — a new field of his and his friends’ invention about mathematical modeling of history. Turchin uses large data sets to identify large-scale trends in history, borrowing from his own background in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. He is down deep in empirical data, which has its problems. But his top-level insights are outstanding, and his book is well worth reading twice, if nothing except for the fact that it fits the historical moment so well. (I’ve attempted to contact him a couple of times, but he doesn’t write back. Which is a shame, as many of my more faithful readers know my own work in this field is highly complementary to his own.)
Turchin’s work is significant in that he tracks the rise and fall of elites in human societies, and their influences and antics. He notes there’s somewhere between a cycle of 50 to 200 years in which societies rise, and then must go through historic readjustment based on one important phenomenon — elite overproduction. The short version of this is that elites rise for various reasons, then have too many kids which want the same thing (or more) that their parents had, and then upon not being able to achieve this, form counter-elites and other disintegrative forces in societies. Polygamous societies, for obvious reasons, are worse than monogamous societies, primarily along the lines of one elite man being able to produce many multiples of offspring that a monogamous couple cannot produce. It would be fascinating to read Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of Saudi Arabian society.
Along the way, what accelerates decline is creation of what Turchin calls a Wealth Pump — some mechanism that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This varies, obviously, dependent on the bases of the society, and is also driven by the number of elites’ children that need that Wealth Pump to insure their own entrance into elite society. We’ve seen this phenomenon ourselves in the last 50 years. Our own wealth gap has grown and grown, while the poor have grown demonstrably poorer, largely because of increased tuition costs at colleges and universities.
Turchin doesn’t talk about relational dynamics beyond his concept of popular immiseration — as the rich need more, they get more and make the poor more miserable. One can hopefully see how this separation might be attenuated a bit if we focused on empathetic human development. But this doesn’t fall under Turchin’s purview as a major factor driving societal evolution. And another factor Turchin ignores is the multiplication of psychopaths and their manipulation of mental models that also happen as societies stagnate. Considering the resurrection of racism through the drumbeat of anti-racism is a great example of this. Pot, kettle?
It was in Rob Henderson’s recent book, Troubled, that he introduced the idea of “luxury beliefs” — as elites ran out of money to buy goods and live lifestyles that appear elite, they tend to adopt beliefs to virtue signal to other elites that they were indeed part of that upper class. An example he explains in detail is the Defund the Police movement. Often these beliefs are sociopathic gaslighting, which the elites actually don’t adhere to themselves (he uses the example of decriminalization of drugs, which the elites can buffer, but is highly destructive to the lower classes.) But almost to a one, they are aimed at, if the poors follow them, immiseration to the lower classes. They’re a characteristic of how societies come to crisis. The basic pattern is this:
The elites overproduce kids.
The kids, having no truly economically beneficial way of becoming an elite, invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities (think of the explosion of NGOs and their staff) to assure their position.
These kids create situations for depopulation/beat the shit out of the poors, or their own ranks (think wars here for the most basic form) until there are finally enough chairs in the crazy musical chairs game they’ve started so that they all have seats again.
These behaviors seem to be memetically coded into entire populations. Witness the current U.S. Presidential race for a great example. Using Turchin’s framework, it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is, at least, declared on the side of the peasantry and anti-immiseration, while Kamala Harris is solidly on the side of making those Deplorables pay for being deplorable.
Many of the various tricks we’re seeing on a large scale have been tried before. Importing labor from immigrants to do this is a classic modality, and one in play, with elites in charge ignoring whatever historic restrictions might have existed in order to secure slave labor for themselves. This augments their own Wealth Pump, as well as deplete jobs for the poor and lower middle class, driving down wages even more, which then directly contributes to immiseration.
This coupling of the Wealth Pump to popular immiseration has multiple forms. I hadn’t really considered it before today, but the entire transgender movement is an amazing example. The larger blob takes advantage of people with gender dysphoria (someone who believes they are a sex other than their birth sex) whose presence, both passive (just dressing up and walking around) and active (entering opposite sex restrooms, advocating for pedophilia) causes a lot of misery, as these codes are enforced top-down on the peasantry. Simultaneously, the mainstreamed surgeries and hormone treatments demanded by the gender-confused individuals further enrich the hospitals and medical staff delivering these surgeries. Since the procedures involve essentially lifetime medicalization, the money never stops flowing from the general population to this group of people.
Much of this involves chronic gaslighting of the public. I wrote about this in my most recent piece on the normalization of obesity through propaganda here. Even the prurient pleasure of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has now been co-opted as a psychopathic weapon. You can’t even look at pictures of women with a nice rack and fantasize. Instead, you’re expected to, against your own deep genetic urges, to adulate a fatty. Because that’s the best you’re going to get.
Another current, ongoing example is the situation in Springfield, OH. “Someone” (not quite clear who) has resettled 20,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, OH, a declining Midwestern industrial town of 60,000. The hue and cry in Springfield in the news mostly surrounds the question whether the immigrants are turning local pets and waterfowl into barbecue. And while the mainstream press, an arm of the elites that has been more than happy to press forward with immiseration of the lower classes, declares such claims false, the reality is that 20K translocated Haitians, in such a modest size community, have no pressure to assimilate. They are also supported heavily by various federal refugee resettlement programs, distorting the local real estate market and availability of public services. And with such a skew, likely are actually governed by gangs.
The two political candidates, as stated above, in the U.S. Presidential election, perfectly exemplify this binning phenomenon. The Democrats are squarely in the elite’s corner, constantly condemning ordinary white people as “Deplorables” and even worse, gate-keeping any potential access to elite ranks through mandatory indoctrination in our colleges and universities. If you don’t subscribe to the belief structures, you don’t get your degree. And if you don’t get your degree, then ostensibly you’re condemned to the underclass you were attempting to escape. Talk about getting your mind right, indeed.
And on the Republican side, you have Donald Trump. Trump is hated perhaps on the surface for his manners and crudity. But the reality of what Trump proposes is a dismantling of the institutional class/caste. Trump as a President was a mediocrity — I can’t think of a single thing he did that was seminal. But by posturing himself against the institutions and threatening to stop the Forever War posture of the U.S. (drop out of NATO, stop sending arms to Ukraine, etc.) he’s attempting to kill two birds with one stone: stop the popular immiseration of the poor by not recruiting their sons to die overseas; and secondly, kill the Wealth Pump for the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. All this makes him a threat in both the memetic, as well as the monetary space. And that threat of destabilization of institutions, even though these very institutions are corrupt, creates irrational rage among those in the top 10% of the population that perceive themselves as elite.
And worse. Call it what you will (Trump Derangement Syndrome) but even when you speak against those institutions, you’re going to excite every Flying Monkey in the mainstream press corps that aspires both to be a member of the elite, as well as seeks to promote luxury beliefs in some way to prove their own virtue. This piece was written after the first Harris/Trump debate, which was notable primarily for the fact that the ABC network moderators continually fact-checked Trump while leaving Harris basically alone. Why there are even such a Praetorian Guard associated with a debate, where every larger societal truth is deeply nuanced, is mind-boggling.
I’ve already received feedback from friends and acquaintances who certainly don’t support Donald Trump. Yet when questioned on the basics of Trump’s policies — no Forever War, control of immigration, and stopping various programs of immiseration — they are firmly on that side of the issue-driven debate. Yet they’ll still declare themselves voting for Harris, even though Harris has promised more of the same, while actually delivering on those outcomes as Vice President. Why do people vote against their actual interests, even when issues are broken down clearly? Never doubt the power of the tides of history, or the devolutionary state of a country’s v-Memes. The Matrix rules over all.
How all this ends is fundamentally opaque. Other periods like this, as Turchin notes, ended when the various nobles killed enough of each other off. The problem with any total war where this might occur is obvious — not just mass immiseration of the entire population, but devastation as well. But other, more positive outcomes require elites to rein themselves in. It has happened in the past — Lyndon Johnson’s New Deal was also an example.
At this point, at least to me, it’s looking into a glass darkly. But at least, viewing things through Turchin’s lens, as well as understanding the memetic structure of the argument, the larger meme-scape is framed. Hang on. Let’s see how many folks wake up.
One of my favorite pieces of whimsical science fiction is Stanislaw Lem’s story in The Cyberiadabout 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?
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