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.