manipulative-reproductive-suppression

Is Michelle Obama a Man? (and other psychopathic double-binds)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Boo Boo on a fine summer day

One of the sort-of humorous Internet memes bouncing around in the noosphere is the allegation that Michelle Obama, wife of President Barack Obama, is a transgender male -> female. I don’t particularly take any of it seriously. While I think Barack Obama was actually a terrible President, and accelerated an era in US politics of active deception, I don’t think his wife is a dude. As the Joker would say, “Even for me, that’s cold.”

But it’s still an interesting problem. And a classic example of what is called a ‘double bind’ — a process of psychopathic manipulation used to establish control over people through channeling interpretation through a person looking to dominate a circumstance. I went to ChatGPT for a more normative definition, and this is what the AI said. I don’t use AI much in writing, but this is expository.

“A psychopathic double bind is not a formal diagnosis or recognized term in psychology. It’s a descriptive phrase that combines the ideas of a double bind (from Gregory Bateson) with the interpersonal tactics often associated with psychopathic or highly manipulative personalities.

A useful working definition would be:

A psychopathic double bind is a situation deliberately engineered by a manipulative person in which every available response carries a negative consequence, allowing the manipulator to maintain control, create confusion, or justify further exploitation regardless of what the other person does.

Several features distinguish it from an ordinary double bind:

  • Intentionality. A classic Batesonian double bind can arise unintentionally in dysfunctional families or organizations. A psychopathic double bind is typically constructed on purpose.
  • Asymmetrical benefit. The manipulator benefits no matter which option the victim chooses.
  • Moral inversion. The victim is made to appear guilty, incompetent, or disloyal regardless of their decision.
  • Escape prevention. Attempts to point out the contradiction become further evidence that the victim is “the problem.”

General structure

The manipulator creates two incompatible demands:

  • If you do A, you are condemned for A.
  • If you do B, you are condemned for B.
  • If you refuse to choose, that refusal is itself treated as wrongdoing.

This produces a “heads I win, tails you lose” dynamic.”

The case of “is Michelle Obama a man?” is a classic example of this type of thinking.

  1. If you believe Michelle Obama is a man, it means in a given circumstance that she is to be valorized for being “stunning and brave.” Not only was she the First Lady of the United States, she was the first Trans First Lady!
  2. But of course, we certainly recognize that unless you are in the correct, unplaceable and impossible context, what you’re really saying if you attempt to point out the bulge in Michelle’s trousers, you are actually attacking her femininity, and also declaring her a fraud for having produced (ostensibly) two daughters.

Which it is depends on the manipulation the psychopath wants to use to subordinate your status. I personally think the Michelle Obama situation is borderline ridiculous, because I am not a psychopath. But one of the interesting things I did notice in my teaching career was that any declaration of any race or ethnic category by an older white male (myself) was treated as a racial slur by the class in general, but by the white students in specific. You were supposed to be racially blind, even if you were attempting to move a particular underrepresented minority towards a job opportunity where people were implementing a DEI strategy to increase minority representation.

This was particularly vexing for me because I have a long history of coaching primarily Hispanic students from extremely poor backgrounds, with no professional representation in their immediate family. The actual Mexican or Mexican-American kids had no problem with me standing up and telling them I was available for career consultation (the standard circumstance I’d do for my divination) but as time went on, it became instantiated as a slur if I said it. I was once accused of racism by a group of white students for attempting to wheedle a bag of Christmas tamales from some Mexican-American students I was helping. Do note that THEY thought it was funny. But they also knew their abuelita’s tamales were the real thing.

What this implies is that minority students in a classroom environment, especially if backed by white female students, could have a pocket veto on the professor in a class, as long as that professor was white and male. They would be backed up by a university’s Compliance and Civil Rights office, often in a criminally nonsensical fashion. Though no punishment could ever be meted out for declaring something that we were basically required to divine on our grant applications, that did not stop the institution from basically commissioning their own version of Stasi to create a psychopathic control environment toward speech and interaction with students.

Why did they do this? Now we get back to the N/S axis of civilization. If a university can get a professor to police their own speech, then the institution doesn’t have to. But what it also did was create an environment where the professor/student relationship was also severed, especially if the professor was white, and the student was from a minority or a women student. No one was winning. But that was the point. Do note you can keep going with this, into the domain of Manipulative Reproductive Suppression. By recruiting more poor students, but then disallowing them the mentorship to succeed, which will, dollars to donuts, be provided by older white faculty, you’re still getting your Elite Overproduction goals met of alternately recruiting students into degree programs and taking up slots so that the elites end up having to compete against less students when it really matters – at the end of the line when getting jobs. Wild how that works.

The other interesting part of the phenomenon was if one considered the dichotomy of Independently Generated, Trust-Based Relationships (of which action-drive friendships are a subclass) and Externally Defined, Title-driven relationships, what the entire movement did was place control of those definitions in the hands of the psychopathic clique. That meant that an entire psychopathic contingent could disallow friendships (you can only approach a person XXX ethnicity with a phony script generated by the psychopaths) and only allow, at best, awkward and unfulfilling attachment among the obedient populace. Literally saying that the only relationships that were allowed to exist were under Sauron’s eye. And defined by Sauron himself. Which also develops the training materials that HR forces down everyone’s throat.

So which is it? Is Michelle Obama a dude? If you’re in the outgroup, like Mrs. Robinson, any way you look at this you lose.

Psychopathic Meta-Strategies — What happens when you combine DEI, Manipulative Reproductive Suppression (MRS), and Elite Overproduction?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Kelly Creek Hoodoos, Clearwater National Forest, Idaho

One of the most striking examples of psychopathic meta-strategies has been the transformation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into a tool of relational disruption. Through a process of endless refinement of sophistication, DEI has turned from “I believe I should recognize my biases and give people who are different than me a chance to be my friend” to a wholesale institutional shift towards low empathy, externally defined relationships. And that, of course, has led to the destruction of an independently generated, rational relational environment, to a set of belief structures used by psychopaths to adaptively break down society.

But how that actually has happened depends on which demographic group of psychopathic actors developed sophisticated meta-strategies to achieve their end goals. In the era of Elite Overproduction, where our modern society has produced too many elite children for too few seats at the elite table, it is women that have dominated the psychopathic milieu. There are many roles for these individuals that have been discussed in detail on this blog (Immiserators, for example, as well as Propagators of policy), as well as chronic luxury-belief holders and virtue signalers which are dominated by AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) .

How all this happened really depends, though, on a time-dependent perspective. The negative aspects didn’t always used to create the society we live in today. Things change. I was one of the university leaders in DEI back in the ’90s, working on bringing Hispanic kids into engineering education from the Yakima Valley. I can’t say I practiced any layered moral calculus like I discuss in this piece in my efforts. I liked Mexican-Americans (still do) , wanted to learn Spanish, and if I picked up a girlfriend and some of her abuela’s tamales along the way, what was not to like? I ended my career as a professor with lots of tamales, no Hispanic girlfriend, but lots of Mexican and Mexican-American students whom I am still fond of. I’d also argue that there was plenty of room at the professional table for more engineers, though definitely much fewer spots now.

Hence the influence of elite overproduction. As my career advanced, and time marched on, available spots in engineering became less and less. Now, even in a field like mechanical engineering, which is about as general an engineering discipline as a society can have, there are far fewer seats at the table. Which then directly influences the Elite Overproduction Musical Chairs game. Elites never expected there to not have enough engineering slots — so it was a full court press merely to contain salary inflation, which then morphed into the current disaster involving the disordered H1B program.

This is where things get complicated. As aggregate elite slots declined some 25 years ago, it’s not clear to me that the current elite actors were aware of the potential for salary collapse among their children. Further, it seemed like the actual discrimination against minorities was profoundly on the wane. So it became safe, and potentially lucrative to trumpet causes like DEI. You could achieve virtue points on your social credit score and not be affected by any of it (a classic function of luxury beliefs), while absorbing many of these ostensibly aggrieved minorities in newly established university bureaucracies. No one would dream of making anyone other than an African-American individual as a VP of Minority Affairs, regardless of his or her relative competence. And at the beginning of the whole DEI, there were plenty of suppressed, qualified minority candidates available. The analysis of the framework seemed to hold up — discrimination HAD indeed delayed career advancement in minorities. As someone there watching it, AND participating in building our student body around this principle, it all made sense.

But there were signs. When I started recruiting Hispanic students out of the Yakima Valley, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. All the very top students (high SAT/GPA) had been snatched up by institutions like MIT. We were left at my state land-grant institution with the secondaries, who were still pretty good. But not the top by a long shot. These students, even going to a school like WSU, struggled, and required additional programs to make sure they could get through.

As Elite Overproduction progressed, this created an interesting signal inside the system. It is fair, and safe to say, white male advancement started being unfairly targeted and decremented post-2000. This created a vacuum in qualified candidates for many positions. As a result, more ostensible minorities (mostly white women) started making up the preferred hiring demographic. In the case of universities, their bureaucracies expanded, now being filled more with white women than any other group. And that group were far more likely to be filled with women WITHOUT children. And in any group like that, they were vastly overrepresented by lesbians. LGBTQI+ is championed in universities for reasons. It is protected caste politics at its worst.

At the beginning, the reason for this might be attributed to various conscious social and suppressive (even diabolical) policies and strategies. But I really don’t think so. I think that what happened was a natural demographic cascade. Those were the hiring strategies, no one had thought much about the downstream effects, and things just happened.

But what happens when you group aggrieved minorities together, and then deplete the actual capital available for moving into elite ranks, is you end up with a rising tide of virtue signaling and luxury beliefs. And THAT was then responsible for the growth of the Immiseration class and the persecutorial environment that we now see inside of universities.

Now couple this with a society increasingly unable to provide enough Musical Chairs seats for the children of women who were either already members of elites wanting their children to be elites, or aspirational elites from minorities, seeking “the American Dream” for their own progeny. It was literally a moment in time of “let the games begin!” And the games were relationally disruptive meta-strategies by multiple seekers attempting to get their children ahead. Enter Stage Left Manipulative Reproductive Suppression (MRS).

Here is a list of some of those strategies.

  1. Get other people to not have kids in the first place, through discouragement of feminine chastity, ubiquity and destigmatizing abortion, as well as strategies such as delayed marriage and loss of fertility as being somehow “wiser” than having a child at a younger age.
  2. Encourage interracial dating and marriage as a supreme sign of virtue. Interracial and intercultural relationships are far more difficult than marrying within your own racial or social group, so when you encourage this, you are inherently putting your thumb on the scales for lack of reproductive success. If you doubt this is being held up as a paragon, look at the ad feed before any sporting event.
  3. Support DEI in elite institution admissions. Women looking to lower the competition for their own children would look to recruit students from underrepresented minorities because on average, those kids from the lower societal caste would lack the social coding necessary to compete in elite job markets post-graduation. Short version — would you rather have your kids competing against 100 other White/Asian kids from prepared backgrounds, or would you rather have them competing against 50 White/Asians, and 50 from scattered, underqualified minorities who managed to barely limp through the curriculum?
  4. Support elimination of modestly objective intelligence measurements like the SAT so that the incoming college classes could be constituted with under qualified students, and protected by virtue signaling regarding racism if they didn’t come up to the bar.

The list goes on. But what was NOT anticipated is that these strategies would prove so destructive that they would potentially COLLAPSE the institutions the elites required to assert their own elite status in the job market. As a signal around this, we are now seeing a wave of messaging around the theme “should all kids go to college?” The answer is obviously no, but the strategy of going to college was sold so hard, to the detriment of both under qualified minorities as well as elite co-competitors, it’s literally attempting to back away from the precipice while the ground crumbles underfoot.

There is a short-term upside to sabotaging other people’s children’s success – resources that the sabotaged child brings to the table are real, and those resources can be made to flow to elites. A great example is tuition dollars in colleges that are spent in lower level mass classes that are revenue generators for every university out there. In our own university, we had one student who had taken Calculus 1 six times! And I can guarantee that the cost of that student’s education was far less than a student in an upper division elective. So essentially that student’s student loans (non-dischargeable in bankruptcy) were feeding students up the chain of command — as well as the senior administrative caste salaries, also increasingly dominated by women in general, and lesbians in particular.

The problem is the lack of societal benefit. Elites would be raking in the cash (and they have been) but the long term is the investment depends on harnessing lower-caste students to nondischargeable debt, essentially making them indentured servants.

What this means is one can start understanding the whole late-stage DEI mechanism as another strategy, driven by MRS, leading first to institutional collapse (people are figuring out that college is not going to get their kids into the elite caste) but if maintained long enough, societal collapse.

And what people fail to acknowledge is that MRS is inherently a Matriarchal Societal Strategy. Though implicit, women, through luxury beliefs and virtue signaling are controlling relational formation and destruction in society.

AND — matriarchal structures, who have had their praises sung as part of MRS, also lead to collapsing birth rates inside their home societies. And here’s the unpleasant, psychopathic rub. That collapse then leads to rape, and the return/pre-eminence of a degenerate patriarchal society. Anyone that doubts this can look to the rape gang catastrophe happening now in Great Britain, and driven by the immigrant South Asian sub-caste, primarily from Pakistan.

All of this returns to the title of this piece — which is a psychopathic meta-strategy with reinforcing societal loops. It’s sort of a societal anesthesia and autoimmune disorder which allows the destruction of core relational scaffolding — the family unit — that will allow temporary control of an elite overclass.

But in the end, it will all come tumbling down.

Editorial Note: I want to make it very clear that two of the subclasses of intellectual thought in all this have been developed and championed by Dr. Rob Henderson and Dr. Dani Sulikowski, who have respectively written extensively on luxury beliefs, and Manipulative Reproductive Suppression. I’ve linked to my work that describes their contributions, and have actively promoted their work. It is far more accessible, and data-supported than my own (it’s the problem when you go bigger picture) and needs far greater dissemination. Rob has a Substack that I support as well. Dr. Dani can be found on X at @DrDaniS. I also recommend reading Peter Turchin’s work, which I also use.