gender

Survivor, Psychopathic Fishbowls and Late Stage Feminism

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 12 Comments

My funny dinosaur Valentines having a morning laugh

Dunno about you, but friends send me videos, intending me to watch them. There’s only so much time in the day to peruse such content, but I’ll tell you — you send me a video of cute dogs, or some Florida hillbilly catching Burmese pythons, I’m all over it. Especially if it’s under two minutes.

One of my former, original students (from 1989 or so!), though, sent me the video below — it’s over 17 minutes! I initially wasn’t going to watch it — but now it gets my “MUST WATCH” recommendation, if you want to have any hope of understanding the chaos some of us are attempting to contain. Orion Taraban is the owner of the channel, and he gets it about 80% right, with only the sins of omission to really characterize. In my Global Holistic world, that’s really good.

Here’s the video.

In this video, he talks about a series of the TV show, ‘Survivor’ — this coming from Australia. I really don’t enjoy the show — the premise (which most people miss) is of relational disruption and psychopathy. It’s what I call a Psychopathic Fishbowl, where we sit on the outside and watch the psychopaths manipulate and trick each other while munching on a bag of Doritos. As such, it just gives me PTSD. But the fact is also that the show runs some showcase of the various Stanford Prison Experiment, or the Milgram Experiment, over and over while tweaking the boundary conditions. For those that like to watch some modestly friendly (frenemy) competition, and see some hot chicks bounce their boobs, it’s not bad. If you can stand it.

Here’s the key thing — the intrinsic dynamic in the show is psychopathic. Various people, playing a selection of Game Theory paradigms, attempt to end up at the end of the show as the Last Person Standing, and collect a million dollar (or whatever) prize. There are two tribes, these two tribes start off competing, before eliminating enough that it becomes some singular competition.

This particular series, though, intrinsically had a more profound premise. The tribes were separated by sex. There was a male tribe, and a female tribe. Originally, the men organized their societies, with some loose hierarchy. There were Alpha men, and there were Beta men. And as described, they all got along. I’ve seen this in my own kayaking groups from younger days. You might be a better, or worse paddler than your buddies. But there was some skill-based (and judgment-based) ranking, and we all drank beer at the takeout and made fun of each other.

In the show, the males, through coordinated action, quickly mastered their material circumstance. They were living comfortably. The women, however, were failing miserably. They were cold, wet and hungry. They simply couldn’t get their act together enough to provide for basic needs.

The short version of the video is this. The women were drawn into interaction with the male tribe. They quickly learned that they could not beat the Alpha men. But they aligned themselves with the Betas, creating relational disruption between the Betas and the Alphas. Once they had the Alphas eliminated, they set about eliminating the Betas. In the end, the women won. I’m not going to watch the show, for reasons stated above. But I am also sure, as I talked about in this piece on men and women, the women targeted the Beta men due to their susceptibility to social control, and maybe a little nurture, and got rid of those pesky Alphas, which of course were the ones who created the society in the first place with their strong Protect and Provide instincts. I’m sure the women did it with toxic emotional empathy, as well as appropriate shaming. And the psychopathic women assuredly looked at the strongest and most virtuous men for early elimination. In the long game, once the Alphas had been eliminated, the Betas might have had more access to females to spread their own genes – or believed they had. And the females likely tortured the Betas once they had control of them — established Elites ALWAYS have cohorts of Immiserators.

In such a psychopathic game, one ends up with a debased, low resource, poorly functioning society. But the women are running the show. Which was the whole point. “An evil man (or woman) will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” -Sun Tzu

There are now some more unsavory aspects of such a society that might be meta-stable, but is also weakened. Inside the parthenogenic system, the women now run whatever version of sociobiology you fancy. Older women are absolutely obsessed with control over younger women’s uteruses, and who gets to choose who produces the next generation. How this works is complicated, and spans across the lower v-Memes. If you need a primer on what gets older women off, read pulp romance novels. And if you need evidence of the first statement about controlling younger women’s uteruses, tune into the abortion debate, or any May/December (or even September) relationships. Yes, I could write about this, but I understand psychopathic women as well, and don’t want my own writing weaponized against me. (Note — not all women are psychopathic! – it’s a sub-category.) In fact, in any female community, there is powerful striving between the virtuous members and the psychopaths.

But the end result is still the end result. Societies that focus on ungrounded emotional amplification end up being controlled by women, and produce even weaker men. Anyone doubting this can see the crisis in our university systems. And then, once that system boundary defining that society is compromised by an external, invading tribe, the whole thing unravels. What you get is collapse. And societal collapse is monotonously the same. The men are killed, and the women are raped and enslaved. Society then devolves back to a Tribal/Authoritarian state. The psychopathic women don’t care about this — their time horizon is notoriously small. And in some weird “selfish gene” way, the genes don’t care. If they’re in a weakened fitness environment, and violence is the way they upgrade from far away, well that’s just the way the cookie bounces. A version of this is EXACTLY what’s going on with the Grooming Gangs in England currently. When you see 13 year olds offered up for the sexual needs of truly an invading nation, scroll your evolutionary calendar back.

What IS interesting is that there are ways out of this catastrophe that we seem to be heading for. Psychopathy is the real problem, and psychopaths suck in a high trust, high agency world. Making our systems more Performance/Goal based, where actual merit does the sorting, makes them far more robust than our BS DEI frameworks, which, being identity/assumed status/phenotype driven, are set up for manipulation. Independently generated, rational relationships will always carry scaffolding from the lower v-Memes. But when people engage their brains, I’m convinced that almost anything is possible.

You can now see how this ties in with importation of tribal elements from across the world, in the former administration’s immigration policy Trump (an obvious Alpha) is desperately trying to undo. And how, crazily, emergent drivers are present in the males (and families) that are coming from around the world — notably polygamy, societally sanctioned or not. But there’s a different long game when we have a collapse of both physical and psycho-social fitness in a society that can make such a game have more broad appeal outside the psychopathic cohort serving as collapse’s Praetorian Guard. Anyone that believes Haitians or Somalis are offering a leg up on the evolutionary Psycho-Social Ladder need to have their heads examined. Or go visit Port-au-Prince. Hence, it’s necessary to gaslight the public on the virtue of these folks, because the truth is so painfully obvious.

We’re used to the old Burke-ian saw “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” But I’ve become convinced that men simply can’t, in aggregate, figure out this game. And while I’ll stand up and use my perspective to point out the finer features of all this, at least until this election, men are no longer running the show. This one’s on the girls. I’ve met few guys that get that something is going on in this larger testosterone/estrogen conflict. But women figure this shit out almost instantly.

And here’s the thing — you virtuous strong women whom I admire and am friends with. We’re lost without you. Time to saddle up and come to the rescue. We’re in a tight spot!

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!

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.