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Lindsey Clancy and The Consequences of Valorizing Mental Illness

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci on the Big Joe Beanbag Chair

As I am typing this, I am inundated with the wake of commentary regarding the Lindsey Clancy case. For those reading this in the future, the short version of this horrific tragedy is that Lindsey Clancy was a mother of three young children, including an infant three months old, who systematically strangled all three with a rubber exercise cord, one at a time. There’s no physical rebuttal that she committed this crime. What the case does revolve around seems to be solely about her state of mind when she did this. Was she aware? And though new facts may arise, it appears she was. But the argument is being made that she was having a psychotic break when she killed them, which she then followed by throwing herself off a second story platform, paralyzing herself from the waist down.

What I would like to talk about is a different perspective on how to view not just her situation, but mental illness in general. I would argue that she is a cold-blooded psychopathic killer. But there is a lot of extant noise in the news media that would not just condemn my viewpoint. There is, insanely enough, quite a large body of support for Lindsey Clancy, along with the justification that because she had postpartum depression, she should really be held innocent of this crime.

It is important to note that a fair number of people have put their money where their mouth is. Clancy, as of this writing, has raised north of $1M for her parents, ostensibly to fund their expenses during the trial. Volumes of online support have been generated for the position that somehow Lindsey was not in her right mind, and deserves pity instead of justice.

To be honest, I don’t really care about whatever justification may be generated about Clancy’s innocence. Clancy is a cold-blooded psychopath by any definition, and has forfeited her position and her own right to life in society. What is interesting (pathologically) involves the downstream position of society after what has turned into a very public event. The trial has been declared a mistrial, after apparently, one of the jurors refused to roll on the notion that Clancey was guilty. 10 out of 11 of the jurors apparently thought she was INNOCENT. The jury was composed of 9 women, and 3 men, and as much as we know, it was one man who refused to accept the explanation that she was not responsible for her actions.

Let that sink in.

The deeper problem with all this is the wild precedent that women cannot be held responsible for control of their thoughts if the belief is that they were in some version of a hormonal cycle. And they get to decide.

Believe it or not, this gets back to the issue of what is agency and happiness anyway? If we take the relational perspective of this blog into account, this boils down to the level of psychosocial development of the individual — and how society should view this, especially in edge cases. A better question than “is she a psychopath?” (she obviously was/is) is “what kind of societal constraint would have prevented the brutal murder of her three young children?” Would her hanging have a prophylactic effect towards other crazies killing their kids? It might give them pause.

Right now, the lionization of Clancy, and her probable walk from guilt, is sending a terrible message across society. It establishes that yet another form of insanity, or the claiming thereof, is a divine right given to women. And if society establishes that under most conditions, if a mother is found to have murdered her children, she gets off. This is NOT without mythic historic precedent. The legend of Medea, wife of Jason, hero of the Golden Fleece fame, has her in various permutations, murdering her children. And conditions like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy has all sorts of various “slow murdering” of children as a more contemporary example. With MSBP, mothers slowly poison their children to appear sick to medical service providers for attention. You can read more here.

The problem with normalizing such pathological neurodivergence is that it is a collapse strategy for a society, and as I’ve written about here, a profound tool of OTHER psychopaths looking to find ways to spread anarchy and chaos. And it literally makes no one happy — not even the individual bestowed with some absurd hall pass for insane behavior.

The biggest societal level demonstration of this is probably not Clancy strangling her children. But you don’t have to look far. The trans movement stands as the real icon. The argument for men and women presenting as the opposite sex is couched in terms like “showing up as my authentic self” will somehow make them happy. As long, of course, as the government pays for the self-mutilation necessary for that to occur.

But that ignores the fact that there is some balance related to Internally Generated Self Image and Externally Determined Self Image. The argument, in the case of transgendered individuals, is that their internally generated self image is not incoherent, and if somehow society just allowed them to let their freak flag fly (regardless of larger cost to others in society) they would FINALLY be happy.

But so many of these pathologies count on their taboo nature, even in order to bring orgiastic stimulation to the various disorders of autogynephilia. By society giving in to their disordered requests, the mentally ill are actually more miserable than if they were up in their distressed wive’s closet trying on panty hose. The idea that a crazy person, through virtue of their own insanity, could know what makes them happy is ludicrous. As well as the corollary that society should dispense with constraints that protect other members of society from their incoherence and insanity, because of some fundamental right an individual deserves in their pursuit of calming the cockroaches in their brain. Or hormones. Should women, because of postpartum depression, be relieved of the responsibility to keep their children alive, because they declare themselves a protected class, that needs to strangle infants for peace of mind? There is a sizable contingent of women who seem to think so. Just like there is a nonsignificant cohort of men who believe, in a delusional fashion, that their participation in rituals inside women’s restrooms, is a sacrosanct right.

What we end up with, when we decide to grant such agency to murderers and self-mutilators, is not a more fair and just society. We end up with a society where normalcy of even modest means is in retreat. And the only people in public spaces are crazy. A version of this plot line is going on regarding homeless people in large Blue cities in the US. To go to Portland is to traipse through homeless encampment after homeless encampment. And it might be fine if the homeless were the least bit societally productive. But sooner or later, some contingent of the society has to tote that bale. “Live and let live” might sound fine with doubled over fentanyl addicts. But it’s parasitic to the core.

I think we as a society need to wake up and realize these things. Every dog might have a tick or two on them in the springtime. But there are limits. And like it or not, our modern society is held together by mental coherence. And when you’re killing your own children without consequence, you’re pushing up against societal survival.

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.

Zohran Mamdani’s Grocery Stores – A Tour de Force of Psychopathic Manipulation

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci and Ghillie, Living it up, Truckee River, Reno

One of the most positively insane manipulations the American public has been subjected to in the past year has to be newly elected New York City mayor’s follow-through on a campaign promise to start city-run grocery stores in the five boroughs of NYC. He’s promised five (I’m assuming one per borough) with the notion that the reason, in a land swimming in EBT cards, that the reason people in ostensible NYC food deserts are going hungry is because some failure of capitalism.

The intent of the campaign, of course, is to get people to focus on the whole notion of state-run grocery stores as a viable solution to NYC’s retailing dilemmas. And Mamdani’s been hamming it up — with various press announcements, and him holding up bananas as some secret, exotic fruit that, if reduced in price by 30%, might redeem his ostensibly stunted view of everything that’s wrong with NYC. Here’s a photo from the New York Daily News.

He’s insisted that all staples will be discounted 30% because all the thousands of other grocery stores and bodegas in NYC are raking it in and starving people on that 30% figure. And that somehow, if he opens FIVE stores in the vast expanse of NYC’s retail landscape, that’s going to make any difference at all.

There are the basic facts of NYC — more than half of its denizens are overweight or obese, though this is somewhat less than the national average. And, also not surprisingly, most of those people are poor or lower income. Affluent people aren’t nearly as fat. But honestly, I digress.

What is amazing about this campaign is NOT that they are going to build/remodel/whatever five spots across the massive urban landscape that is NYC. Nor the extremely likely catastrophe of those five stores quickly failing, as they have done in every similar experiment like this. It’s the fact that Mamdani successfully kidnapped the national attention to talk about this ridiculous nonsense. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would know that five stores are a minuscule drop in the bucket of NYC’s retail landscape. But instead, what one gets across the media blogosphere is are endless discussions on communism and failing grocery stores, as well as detailed descriptions of why such a scheme can’t work. No one’s even talking about the fact that if you really wanted to get people reacting, you’d cut off their supply of Nacho Cheese Doritos and Monster drinks. Everyone’s fat, bloated and poor.

Instead, you get endless scheming from the pundit class positing that people will come into said grocery stores and RESELL the bananas that are going for 30% off. Like they’re some kind of designer tennis shoes. You can’t really counterfeit a banana (I don’t think) so these Very Intelligent people are telling us that the best case scenario for any banana grifter is to buy those bananas, take them out and put them on a blanket on 125th Street, and jack up the price 25% so they don’t have to compete with the local bodegas, whom I guarantee sell produce like that on extremely tight margins.

In short — if there even was a real financial angle, it would have to focus on turning Harlem into an open air fruit market, by the wild invasion of Africans looking to make a buck on the back of the local African-Americans. Who, once again, are likely already fat, and could give a shit about paying an extra dollar for their bananas, especially because they already have EBT cards, and can buy bananas to their hearts’ content. What’s wild isn’t just the idea. What’s wild is that the whole scheme is highlighting how easily the pundit class can be distracted, and how THEY believe playing along with Mamdami’s game gives them an opportunity to appear virtuous to the masses.

To be clear — it’s ALL insane, and most importantly, it’s ALL ungrounded. There’s no reality in any of it. But if you can do the space alien thing, which, of course, I am known for, it’s an amazing point of interest to watch people who claim to be smart produce words that have drifted so far from reality that you’ve got to wonder if they ever think through anything at all.

Of course, they don’t, which is why when someone who is an actual position of power — and Mamdani most certainly is — is pulling such a baseline ruse. I’ve written about how psychopaths have been using the whole issue of hunger as a weapon here — or really, the PROJECTION of hunger as a tool to hire phonies in NGOs to distribute raised funds to their crony class that then provides the larger base to really rip the pig off. The real banditry in a big city like NYC is always behind-the-scenes, and having never served in municipal government myself, would require a residency to understand the need for a media/pundit virtue-fest like this to really execute the true Long Con. Which is going on, of course.

But that doesn’t involve sending an intern to a printer to make a 30% off a banana sticker. With a little imagination and place-taking empathy, you can imagine the conversation whoever is the propaganda psychopath and the intern that had to take place. “This would be a lot more convincing if we had a sticker on those bananas with a QR code. That would look super-official!” And then, if you really wanted to lose your mind, imagine that same flack walking out of the office, smugly believing in a job well done. And convinced their $150K salary they were likely making was deserved. WELL deserved.

Mamdani’s bananas, complete with sticker

Your tax dollars at work.

I honestly don’t know how to get people to stop falling for these obvious psychopathic manipulations — trust me again that people will fight over this, and it will cause the usual cascade of gaslighting, and relational disruption, while distracting from something real. But it’s such a simple play in showing how scaling really does matter in understanding how people DON’T understand things, well, I had to write about it. Which is kind of meaning that Mamdani pulled me into the stupidity vortex as well. It reminded me of “don’t notice the gorilla in the background because the woman in the foreground has a great rack” deception that gets played on us all the time.

But here we are.

For those wanting an even deeper dive in how psychopaths use mental models, this piece is more complex, but evergreen.

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.

Psychopaths and Institutional Triangulation

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Still Life with Boo Boo

One of the more powerful tricks psychopaths exploit against individuals is what I call institutional triangulation. This consists of taking a legitimate government organ, like a state auditor’s office, and using devices like whistleblower protections, to pursue harassment or destruction of some target of their pathological rage. The psychopath doesn’t have to do the work, other than filing the complaint. If the accusation is well-constructed, even if not truthful, the agency will do the dirty work for the protagonist.

I myself have had this perpetrated against me numerous times — at least 7-8. I’ve honestly lost count. But the template is as follows.

  1. The complaint is crafted in classic narcissistic fabulist fashion — some ratio of verifiably real information, coupled with a description of either the condition or the targeted person that is completely made up. The key element here is to exploit extant negative mental models that exist in the institutional investigator’s mind so they become passionate about pursuing the complaint vigorously.
  2. The psychopath takes advantage of some property of their anonymity of complaint. In reality, the psychopath wants to include enough detail in the complaint so that you know who is attacking you, but preserves plausible deniability in the context of the complaint. This is handy because if you then disclose who you think is using the institution to persecute you, they can then use the legal system to sue you for money for ostensible destruction of their reputation.
  3. The complaint will fall into “hot button” issues of the day, so as to reinforce the institutional investigator’s motivation to pursue the complaint. “Me Too” complaints are great examples of this. As an older white male, I can attest that universities are weaponized to attack specific demographics for valorous reward. The targets may change according to public opinion.
  4. There will be a paucity of actual information written into the complaint, but at least one plausible example so that the institution, steeped in the hot button issues du jour, that if there are any screens for sorting complaints, the efforts will not be killed by any kind of pseudo-judicial process existing inside the institution. There is no “risible” bar in most complaints. Accusation is enough.
  5. The process is indeed the punishment the psychopath seeks. While a strong psychopathic personality might want to see harsh punishment meted out from the agency — someone may be fired from their job, or actual criminal charges might be pressed by a zealous state attorney — that really is not the end goal. The end goal is to make the target’s life miserable, and constrain their behavior over a long period of time. Remember — there will be enough detail that the target will know who their persecutor actually is. That’s the point.
  6. By making an incendiary, but unsubstantiable complaint, the process can and will draw out for years. Institutional investigators will often quickly see that a given complaint has “no legs” — but at the same time will operate under a “whataboutit” assumption that will not allow them to summarily dismiss the complaint because of fallout from above. A great example in own career was I was accused of sexual harassment by a woman who basically attended class only a handful (I think about 3 times) in a semester, whom I barely knew her name. The investigation took over six months, and I was resoundingly cleared. That investigator — an African-American woman, who was honestly depressed by having to investigate me — was released from her duties sometime shortly after my complaint had terminated in my favor.
  7. The institutional process, which is, of course, the punishment, will cause relational disruption and isolation around the target, involving innocent bystanders, who then also stand to be accused of whatever the preferred “ism” is of the day. In the case of a classroom situation, this contaminates the student experience of others, who likely cannot comprehend the fabulist part of the complaint, and become confused and withdrawn.
  8. The complaint will usually resolve with some trivial finding of wrongdoing, as to protect the institution from being sued for a pattern of harassment. In one of my cases, I was investigated for close to three years for listing my e-mail address on a functionally inactive website that had been inactive for a number of years, stating that photos were for sale. I was found guilty by the state ethics board of using university property for “financial gain” even though the website was inactive. My whistleblower case was so appalling that after the close of the entire cycle, the state auditor apologized to my lawyer and indicated they were reviewing generalized whistleblower procedure because of the procedural abuse.
  9. Boards that can decide these types of complaints typically also attract representatives of ostensibly aggrieved groups. If the target is from supposedly a privileged group, then it is open season as long as the community board is constituted from minorities, both sexual/gender and racial.
  10. There are never any performance audits for any institutions when it comes to persecution of preferred targets, like white males. As such, psychopaths know they can count on sympathetic audiences for whatever pathologically whimsical complaints they can generate. If 300 complaints yield 30 investigations, yet only result in one substantive result, that is good enough. Institutions have deep pockets, and their lawyers have to have something to do. Citizens, on the other hand, are stymied by lack of funds as well as their stress and mental health. Coaching from the institutions is rampant as well. If someone from a preferred group, regardless of veracity of the complaint, approaches the given institutional entity, they will then receive instruction from the professionals on making their complaint stick. “Micro-aggressions” are a key tool in all this. I found out during my sexual harassment complaint that one of the key things the protagonist is told to look for is if I sat in a chair, with pants on, of course, but spread my legs “wide” — whatever that meant — that might be considered a “power position” and sexual harassment. Fortunately for me, I always sat behind a desk. Another professor friend accidentally dropped his phone in his lap during a Zoom call that his wife was also attending. He was investigated for sexual harassment.
  11. Most processes have some alternate process for punishment for malicious complaints. These, however, are never pursued, regardless of how much false information nor fabulist representation of situation, ostensibly because of the “chilling effect” they might have on future complaints. Likewise, if you are viewed as being from a group that is “powerful”, the service of institutional mechanisms is not available to you. A man complaining about abuse of his children, even when well-documented and investigated, has no recourse with Child Protective Services, barring a broken arm. Two standards of justice exist. Family Court in states without default 50/50 custody, where judges are elected as opposed to appointed, are some of the worst offenders. They allow a spouse with a personality disorder to wreak havoc on the opposing party, because of the ability to know enough intimate details to convince a court to proceed with an “abundance of caution” — as long as that caution services accepted mental models, such as men propagating the majority of spousal abuse. While it is true that when it comes to real domestic violence (~10% of cases), men run at about an 8:1 ratio, actual spousal abuse is far more of a 50/50 proposition. Yet any accusation will result in institutional activation if it is directed at the male in the relationship.

V-meme alignment is a key element in how psychopaths both manipulate and embed themselves in various institutional structures. Psychopaths are adept at using externally defined relationships, and negative stereotypes associated with them when they are useful. Elder white professors are powerful. Minority students are racially discriminated against. Young women are irresistible sexual prey. And so on. Fathers are abusers. Women are victims. The problem with all this, besides destroying trust, and the ability to assess trust, is that it creates irretrievable and un-confrontable bias in how the information is then filtered and applied. Truths in all human situations are often ambiguous, and not black-and-white. But if you embed enough personality-disordered people in these processes, then you already have an affinity for splitting and black-and-white thinking.

And when you embed financial incentives inside the institution, through over-staffing and continual creation of extra-judicial organs that are poorly trained to “root out” various societal and social ills, you are going to have to have SOMETHING for these people to do. And once you’ve marched the size of these institutions upwards, re-containing them is almost impossible. You build a Gestapo, you’re going to get a Gestapo. There will always be psychopaths on the outside looking to feed these people raw, imaginary meat, using them to execute their pogroms and vendettas. And no one in the institutional structure wants to take on the necessary downsizing.

And most people will retreat from connection with others. My experience is primarily, obviously, with universities. The end result is the easiest thing to do is NOT interact with students, and just make a Powerpoint presentation to be posted on the web. But learning, especially of difficult material, falls off a cliff with that kind of approach. And while a certain number of disordered students might be satisfied, most retreat.

Who wants to deal with any of it?

P.S. Of course, I have names that I could name. But one of the problems with naming names is that narcissistic psychopaths are sue-happy. I’m convinced that more is not written about this NOT because it doesn’t happen, but because no one wants to end up in court. The process is indeed the punishment. And that just costs more money and drags things out. Gotta remember — psychopaths will willfully lie about just about anything. That includes any details in an obscure blog post.

Immigration as a Psychopathic Boundary Attack

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

In the Welsh countryside

Two days ago, there was a videotaped attempted beheading by a Sudanese illegal immigrant in North Belfast, Ireland. The event, which involved gouging the eye with a knife of a local Belfast resident, followed by the perpetrator attempting to saw off the head of the individual. The act has caused explosive riots across Northern Ireland.

The official census in Northern Ireland is taken in the years 2011, 2021, with the next official census taken in 2031. From 2021 to 2021, though, the population of ostensible asylum seekers from Muslim countries, primarily from Syria and the Sahel (Somalia, Sudan, etc.) has tripled, and continues to increase. Both these areas feature populations that are decidedly non-assimilative. The Syrians are obviously Arabic in feature, and the the Somalia/Sudan contingent are obvious Africans. They would stick out like a sore thumb in Belfast, which is white, Anglo-Saxon stock. Consulting various AI platforms, like ChatGPT and Claude, offers little elite sympathy for the natives, who historically have been economically marginalized. Additionally, the AIs give a story that attempts to distract from the obvious cultural influences around the various murders and rapes that have originated from the Muslim community. Similar to the grooming gang scandals, these resettlement efforts are recast into bigotry and hatred against immigrants AFTER a given incitement (such as the attempted beheading) occurs.

Immigration of this type is never in the interest of the lower class/caste groups that are expected to absorb these different groups. As I’ve mentioned in a previous piece, immigration applies pressure to availability of lower income housing, as well as economic opportunities, elevated crime rates and such. Various Collapse Narratives – stories told by elites wanting to drive collapse- are inevitably spun by the press regarding these types of immigrant groups, almost always in a positive light. But the obvious reality is that had those people not been imported into the country, that particular crime would not have occurred. And things become even more problematic when one considers that there are critical mass cultural sizes for non-assimilation of given populations, that are actually shrinking due to technology by the year. As the child of an immigrant myself, I can attest that my own father would call back to Iran once every 2-3 years, for a weeping and wailing session that would last at most 30 minutes. Anyone with an iPhone can reach anyone anywhere in the world through WhatsApp for hours on a daily basis. Why get to know your neighbors at all?

The problem as well, at least in the Northern Ireland situation, is also the differential treatment of women inside Islamic cultures. Women are obviously far more constrained inside Islamic culture, and especially inside fundamentalist Islamic communities, because the women themselves are the primary enforcers and immiserators against younger women. But the deeper problem inside the Matrix is not Islam itself. It’s the fact that the Islamic faith pairs perfectly, in its persecution of women, with the desires of white females inside the British and Irish governments to conduct pogroms of manipulative reproductive suppression against other potential white offspring, who may have the cultural coding to advance in society. Perusing X today, there were the usual voices condemning the nominal “far right” in perpetrating violence in the wake of the beheading from the masculine side. But front and center were women, armed with the same message, not decrying the violence perpetrator — the Sudanese dude that attempted to saw off his victim’s head.

Quite the opposite. These women were attacking alpha males inside their own immediate community — their potential defenders — for assuming a rational posture against a culture that promotes decapitation as a way of conducting civic discourse.

Saying this is obviously an explosive take. But the shift in v-Meme perspective regarding condemning the people being attacked is emergent in the structure of any argument that must be made. The higher virtue-signaling moral ground, at least in these white women’s mind, must be held by decrying violence, because the position itself is what I’ve named a Collapse Narrative, and inherently irrational and ungrounded. In a healthy community, once an obvious threat was established, the leadership would move to neutralize an individual, or a contingent of individuals who assumed that the right path was beheading of adversaries. Especially if there was deeper cultural context. Not this bunch.

I put this up on X earlier today, that I thought was quite succinct, in the difference between an irrational fear, which racism is used as a moral status-assertion mechanism, and a rational fear, where grounding evidence indicates the potential is real and demonstrated.

This is a hard issue to unpack. It has Survival v-Meme level implications, in that once you admit a certain critical mass of individuals into your country who are at the Tribal v-Meme levels, such as the Somalis, you can’t easily just send them back. But they are indeed an invading army, and are being used as such in the current milieu — amazingly enough, by women, using them against other women and their children in this period of Elite Overproduction. It’s also no surprise that elite women in that society are more than happy to wage war against their own perceived adversaries — high-T males who are acting nominally along the course of protect-and-provide for their own communities. And the women doing so have no problem enlisting beta males, who populate most institutions, in triangulating institutional authority against those selfsame alpha males.

One of the most interesting psychosocial aspects of all of this is that once a non-assimilative immigrant population grows to a certain size, it starts destroying the protective boundaries of the host community. Especially with importing already extant tribal and war torn societies, this is done with increased crime rates, as well as having their young warrior caste out wandering the streets. The protective boundary that formerly existed around the original community is shrunk down, at best, to the individual, which is hugely relationally destructive, and detrimental to social cohesion. And that leads to a scale-up of psychopathic behavior. Now instead of just working on an individual relational basis, the psychopathy becomes a group phenomenon. And in the case of Northern Ireland, with its long history of sectarian strife, this could lead to extremely unpredictable outcomes. And here’s the other thing. No one knows what those actual population sizes are that trigger violence, or nonlinear, deviant behavior. It’s a very dangerous, unpredictable game.

And make no mistake — the apparent pawns — the immigrant communities and their constituents — have no intention of staying pawns. So just because the virtue-signaling women have decided that they’re going to play a very deadly game of non-allegiance with their original communities doesn’t mean they’re not going to bring perdition down on all of us. Do remember — it’s partly a wild genetic, hardwired game. And the genes, and the psychopaths don’t care. The genes are playing the long game, for sure. But the psychopaths are playing as impulsive a short game as can be played.

And what could be more exciting than a good beheading?

Memetic Conflict and Perceived Moral Order

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments
North Fork Clearwater, Idaho, Drone Shot

One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.

The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.

Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.

Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.

This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.

This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.

The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.

And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.

Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.

This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?

Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.

Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.

And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)

But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.

Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.

And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.

And that means someone is going to get severely burned.

Brave New Memetic World

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

With my little buddy, somewhere in the Arabian Desert

“You can’t fix stupid.” Ron White

One of the most disturbing videos I’ve seen in the last couple of days (and that’s saying something) is this press conference involving a potentially second generation Somali woman, Nasra Ahmed (she’s 23) who apparently got wrestled by ICE after spitting on some agents during a detainment and banged her head. She was being used as a prop in a press conference, by an ensemble of civic leaders who, of course, want ICE gone. It’s become obvious that Minneapolis/St. Paul has evolved into a hub of public corruption, and apparently the various NGO and political leadership have some belief that everything will just return to normal, and the illicit federal dollars will just start flowing again if the current federal Republican administration will just go away, taking ICE with them.

All this is pretty sordid, of course. But what the video shows is not that. What the video shows is a group of leaders, along with their prop, that are obviously functioning low on the complexity scale across all their behaviors. They don’t really appear to be all there — especially the young woman. And while it’s easy to chalk this up to nerves (her interlocutors definitely want this to be the case, and when they realize she’s atom-bombing on the big stage, get out the shepherd’s crook) there’s something else afoot. They are not processing data at anything necessary to be a compelling force in society. Ahmed’s story is monotonous and repetitive. And her handlers are not much better.

ChatGPT says that Ahmed is likely born in the US, and her accent likely indicates she was raised in this country. Her father, also the father to six more siblings, is likely married to his cousin, and is definitely an immigrant. The problem is that these people would be considered hopelessly stupid. Various aggregations of Somali IQs indicate the average is 78. And while this might be OK back in their Somali homeland, it is problematic when navigating in, or integrating into a complex society like the US. They aren’t mentally handicapped per se (or whatever the politically correct term is.). And our expectations of them are to be able to navigate all our complex systems — like filing taxes, or purchasing a home. Good luck. None of these things are simple. And across the board, even in the last 40 years, our culture has been shot out of a cannon as far as information complexity. It’s all been done for all sorts of ostensible reasons of fairness, justice and whatnot. But even simple tasks now are not simple.

And we are both importing, as well as creating through the decline in educating our own children, a whole sub-caste of people who just cannot keep up.

We have current measures like IQ, or even SAT scores, that are brandished like some means of accurately sorting who goes where. But academia has really not shown any interest in really diving deep into the epistemological roots of knowledge, or how they are functionally used. The amount of interest in work like mine, in the limit, approaches zero. But I’m not the only one working in knowledge complexity. I often cite the Grand Old Man of epistemology, Michael Lamport Commons, and his model for hierarchical complexity (MHC) as a more agnostic form of understanding which thoughts are harder thoughts for human brains to think. One of the more interesting, which comes more naturally to intellectuals, is cross-paradigmatic reasoning (e.g. a giraffe is like a penguin… etc.). But this mode is almost inaccessible to more and more people. They don’t even understand why you would draw such an analogy. Or even what an analogy is in the first place. This is difficult for most advanced cultures to accept — surely, everyone uses analogies. But analogies are difficult in the neural sphere. I’ve been fortunate to be in enough classroom situations, and have students NOT get it, that I know this is far from a sure thing with undeveloped audiences. Not the analogy itself — but the IDEA of a dissimilar comparison.

One of my buddies I’ve been working with, Dr. Joseph Biello, is a mathematician and atmospheric scientist at UC Davis. While I do not teach any introductory classes, Joe still has to shoulder the burden of teaching introductory calculus every other year or so. He remarks on how slippage in intellectual capacity is haunting his efforts. And what he talks about is the variability — the range of ability of students. It’s not just having the background classes (everyone’s go-to explanation when trying to explain why students suffer in math.). It’s that the range of kids in our classes is becoming so extreme, we cannot, through tutoring or other extraordinary efforts, lift those kids into passing Calc 1.

There’s something else going on — and that something might be called Structural Memetic Reach. They cannot think the thoughts necessary to pass Calculus 1, because the fragmentation of thought, and their ability to process rule-following algorithms, cannot permit it. They are memetic inferiors to the kids who can pass and actually even understand the material in the class. It’s a DIFFERENT problem. And trust me — we, in academia, are not discussing this in any meaningful framework that would matter. Most go back to the notion of remedial work, and poor teaching.

But the reality is that it’s more like mathematical dyslexia. The symbol set we’ve used to define the principles of Calculus, which really is more about understanding how to relate different rates than anything else, for those that know nothing, or are intimidated by the notion of calculus, appear in a hopeless jumble above the students. They simply cannot make these things into anything resembling a coherent narrative, because that level of complex narrative structure, that requires first mapping some words to symbols, and those symbols to sequences, and then those sequences to an algorithm/rule, don’t reside in enough connected circuits in their heads. You’re not going to teach these kids Calculus, any more than you would hope to teach a monkey calculus. The circuits are just not there. And no — the kids are NOT monkeys. But we are starting to see divisions in cognitive complexity that sort the haves versus the have-nots.

(I should note — calculus itself is kind of a hot-button term for lots of the math-phobic, who may be limited in their mathematical ability. But I happen to think there’s also a lot of bad math instruction out there too. )

In earlier times, this complexity problem sorted itself out through representative scales of human societies. In the 1800s, if you wanted to be a true internationalista, you had to board a sailing ship. You were a microscopic part of any given population. And even 50 years ago, you had to get on a jet if you wanted to evolve your worldview. But with the globalization of the Internet, the forces driving complexification are literally everywhere. That dumps on our head the problem that folks with the hardware for complexity can access knowledge and become higher level thinkers. But if you don’t have the requisite background or hardware, you’re really screwed. You are going to be shunted into a lower caste whether you like it or not.

Relational modalities, as I’ve written extensively about on this blog, are going to matter. Coming from a high trust society, even one in decline like the US, is still an enormous advantage with regards to cognitive ability. But if you start in a tribal society, it’s going to be almost impossible to bootstrap yourself into higher modes of thought complexity. It’s not just work ethic, or tribal taboos. You don’t even know what you’re missing, because those modes are literally above your head.

And this is going to drive conflict. Lower complexity societies live in a world where violence is part of life. What happens when a lower complexity cohort abuts a higher complexity cohort? Does anyone think this is going to work out swimmingly? Civilization, and especially Western civilization is a real thing. It’s a way for lots of people to live next to each other, with enough complex systems, so everyone has enough and people don’t kill each other, while persisting through knowledge transfer to younger generations so they can assume future roles necessary to keep the whole machine rolling. When we fail to understand the core elements of complexity in our civilization, and openly attack it because of some nonsense moral value, we are shaping our own demise.

In the near future, there is going to be a cacophony out of academia that this baseline of thought doesn’t exist (the idiot post-modern nonsense), that anyone can be educated, and all we need is a little more time. As universities lose enrollment, the wishful thinking that education can cure all ills — all we need to do is tweak the software — is going to come on fast and hard. Higher education is a major industry in this country, and one that caters to the export market. But aside from creating a pleasant respite for four years for those that have the money, there is going to be a growing caste of people who simply can’t do Calculus, or other complex thought, for hardware-based reasons. And there aren’t enough smart people in universities either who can meaningfully confront this problem. When it comes to teaching, I always laugh when I hear people say the problem is that people just need to take some courses in the College of Education. I’ve met vanishingly few people in those Colleges willing to even talk about this. And they never ask me to come lecture. Note to audience — as we sort through all this, it can’t just be intellectuals at the table. Intellectual communities are prone to psychopathic takeover. After they figure out how to rate and rank, they inevitably want to kill all those in some arbitrary outgroup.

We’ve just started to run into the brutality of a Brave New World, a la Huxley, but along information complexity lines. And it’s not going to get better. What we are going to do with those that have true ability, vs. those that do not, will decide our fate as a species. If there’s a distant anthropological analogy, it’s more akin to what Homo sapiens sapiens probably did to Homo Neanderthalensis – kill them all off. It’s my fervent hope that we recognize this in advance of the crux.

Addendum — I’ve done a lot of work on knowledge complexity. Here’s a graphic that can help you understand a little. IQ does not dent this, primarily being a measure of sophistication — not evolution.

Train Dreams

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

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?

Mental Illness and its Weaponization Against Society by Psychopaths

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Blanket Chest — Khaya and Sapele

One of the radical changes in the structure of our society in the USA is the dramatic shift in how generalized populations are supposed to not only address mental illness, through care modalities, but how mental illness is supposed to be mainstreamed into the various operations of our corporations and institutions. No longer is mental illness a condition to be treated and overcome. Rather, now, it must be accommodated in your normative social environment. And if you, as an individual cannot accommodate a given neurodivergent condition, then you face punishment or loss of employment.

Worse, if you are trapped with a severely mentally ill person in your immediate family, the “mainstreaming rehabilitation” mindset is so powerful that if you are dealing with a violent version from a protected class who ALSO has a mental illness, the current systems and institutions supposedly set up to protect society as well as family units collapse. YOU are the bad person for refusing to accept aberrant behavior, and not go along with disordered social service agencies who offer little, if any help.

There can be no more terrible example that the recent arbitrary murder of Iryna Zarutska by DeCarlos Brown on the commuter train in Charlotte, NC. Brown had been convicted and released 14 times for violent crimes, including armed robbery, and his own mother had attempted to have him involuntarily committed. But despite violent schizophrenic outbreaks, this failed, even in light of his extensive criminal history. My suspicion is that had Brown not been African-American, he would have been committed. But our social institutions are so contaminated with the notion that racism must be the root of all evil, even Brown’s own mother’s concerns — she had taken him to a homeless shelter because she could not control his behavior — landed on a tin ear in the justice system. She didn’t persist — and Iryna Zarutzka, a person honestly seeking refuge in this country paid with a violent death, and her life.

When such a crazy, violent event happens, one needs to reflect on what principles are our society structured around. It’s easy to go through some litany of the usual list of the various v-Memes, laying out safety and security at the bottom, moving up to rules to regulate such areas as commerce, or even traffic, and then ending up in the space of opportunity to create new economies, or protect the environment. The list would certainly go on.

But if we were to look at things from a more generalized relational substrate, we might come up with profoundly different answers. From a guiding principles perspective, a society is supposed to lay the groundwork for fundamental coherence of action among its residents. Dependent on the overall psychosocial development of its members, societies should create structured environments that allow members to participate, within reason, in an environment that allows enough predictability for people to join some group action, and have some set of expectations about what the outcomes will be.

The short version is coherence, within the context of development and values of a given society, must be the desired end state. It is one of the hallmarks of Collapse Narratives that they promote other, decidedly more disordered, egocentric outcomes.

When people read that word “coherence” it is very easy, without an understanding of v-Memes, which code how people change and grow over a lifetime, to assume that somehow it means that everyone should be a goose-stepping minion. This is ridiculous. A simple example is in order. In contemporary society, the guiding principle of coherence implies that you ought to be able to get in your car, drive to the local supermarket, and provided you have cash or credit cards in your wallet, buy yourself a six-pack of beer. All those activities rely on a much larger stable system to instantiate this simple action.

And psychopaths know this. So if they want to relationally disrupt the coherence of the system, they have several pathways available to them. One is the obvious, conscious mode of throwing a brick through the grocery store’s window. While that is dramatic, it’s also highly unlikely that brick throwing is going to be mainstreamed as a stated societal value any time soon.

Better to co-opt mental models of virtue that a society might hold dear, that inherently are unstable, and arm different cohorts of society, with these as attack modes to the foundations of a society — which inherently includes coherence — and get people inside the system, functioning on different temporal and spatial scales — to fight. Then the psychopath gets to sit back and quite literally watch the world burn.

Much of this has manifested in the last 30 years. My own mother had a relatively profound personality disorder — she was likely Avoidant/Borderline. She was an absolute fire starter when it came to manipulating people into a constellation where people believed they were justified in starting a fight, especially as she aged. But her demeanor, projected as someone who was introverted, gained her allies across the community, especially in the face of my father’s alcoholism, which was also real. It took me to about 48 years of age to realize that at least part of the reason my father drank was because he was married to my mom.

Yet at the same time, my mother functioned relatively well in society. It was because society had imposed constraints on her behavior. As a doctor’s wife (my father was an obstetrician in good standing in the community) she had a role to play, and she knew it. We were Catholic, and she befriended the local sisterhood, who played no small part in our social lives. They also had problems, but once again, they were constrained by social expectations. There were particular situations where it became obvious my mother had problems. But here’s the key — for the most part, because her role was scripted, and she did have a couple of bright kids, she had little latitude for finding or displaying any deep, disordered feelings.

The key element in her progression through life in the ’60s and ’70s was that she was supposed to be an upstanding citizen, PTA leader, and mother. Any activities straying out of that would have been considered aberrant and anti-social. Her focus of her identity, which was madly scrambled inside her own head, was EXTERNAL to her true self. It is also true she had a brutal childhood, full of poverty and uncertainty, and my own grandmother had multiple husbands that she had. to navigate. But her path was set. And that was a GOOD thing.

Contrast this to any young woman emerging into modern society. As part of the bedrock belief structure of any version of late stage feminism, you get to be, ostensibly, whatever you want. But that means very little if you have a combination of disorders, as well as a lack of family structure. Young men, even though they are an aggrieved and attacked group in modern society, have far more. Bedrock ‘Protect and Provide’, though diluted, still exists. Focusing on the egocentric needs of some women does benefit some — I have some outstanding female colleagues that I wouldn’t trade for anything. But most people have little integral sense of self until they are north of 26. Couple this with the very natural drive to have children, which is then wildly confounded by extant societal messaging, and it’s no wonder we’re in some version of societal crisis. Short version — like every society, we have some percentage of crazy people. We then strip away boundaries for normative behavior, and then additionally arm young women in particular with powerful legal tools to lash out, and we end up with a lethal stew for relational disruption.

The people that suffer most from this are, not surprisingly, healthy young women, who then inherit a hostile relational environment that they are poorly equipped to navigate.

And while there is more to say here from a gendered perspective, the real point is that the de-centering from some version of societal conformity as an expectation for young people, to a re-centering on the poorly developed needs of the self is a recipe for societal chaos. And chaos goes directly against the need inside a society for coherence. The society simply cannot function effectively at the complexity level that it may have evolved to. And so it begins to decline.

Psychopaths love this circumstance of combining what has been called a “moral racket”, combined with my term, “narcissistic shielding.” The more out of it a given person with alternately neurodivergent issues that might have been more manageable in a more constrained environment, or someone who actually suffers from mental illness, the more they show up on the psychopath’s radar as someone who can be co-opted and manipulated against the relational hierarchy in a social setting. In my clinic program, which is somewhat unique in that I send students out into the real world, I noticed a pattern where a more well-formed psychopath would adopt a functional “child” — and then wait for affront from me. It was relatively unconscious, though the impetus for “splitting” by the personality-disordered ‘parent’ was usually a bad grade for work.

Then the bias towards centering the social situation around the person with mental illness or neurodivergence would come into play. It’s well known, for example, that people on the autism spectrum are often literalists, and have a very difficult time with irony or sarcasm. So the student would misunderstand something I said (I use a lot of humor in the classroom, akin to a football coach goading players to higher performance) and then the psychopath would raise the interests of her narcissistic shield in order to gain power and control.

This has happened on systemic levels across society. Academia is well-known to include more than its fair share of mentally ill people (who could study a particularly obscure, minute area for their entire career without the advantage of OCD?) and it’s not surprising, with its development of complex micro-aggressions, often developed by its own psychology and sociology faculty, that there is a rapid relational collapse into externally defined, low empathy, relational modes. The problem with this is that our brains will only do what they practice, and when you end up with entire modern systems that enshrine siloed thinking, exacerbated by a heavily siloed social system, there is a profound decay in the ability to synergize larger solutions that society needs.

As the society plunges ever deeper into the meaning crisis, it exposes even more avenues for psychopaths to use the narcissistic shields of the mentally impaired to focus on ostensibly empathetic solutions for problems — “let’s focus on making people who are severely disordered feel comfortable everywhere.” This creates a wild level of cognitive burden on the rest of society. If a 50 year old man with lipstick wants in your high school daughter’s locker room, she must be accommodated. If the homeless person refuses being housed, and prefers to sleep in the open-air drug market they’ve established at the local park, they must be accommodated! This re-centering causes everyone else to retreat from public spaces, which causes further social degradation, as well as establishing hyper vigilance as the norm for public interaction. Everyone you meet doesn’t mean you well — because they probably don’t. During the recent Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, I brought up on social media the likelihood that homeless people had helped spread the fires. My ultra-virtuous liberal friends immediately went on the attack. How dare I impugn such an obvious source (homeless people in LA often live at the mouths of canyons, and have burn barrels they gather around)!

And it hardly helps the mentally ill, either. I had a memorable adventure once chasing a bipolar schizophrenic through the streets of Vancouver, BC. I don’t know if that sounds like fun — but it wasn’t. He had actually escaped from an institution, but real mental illness is no joke. Mentally ill people need help because they are not normal. And they are often very low functioning. A lack of understanding that differential actually worsens the societal consequences for them. It does not help to pretend.

But for psychopaths, it’s any manipulative virtue/narcissistic shield in a storm. And when your goal is relational chaos, there are multiple paths to get there. Facilitating the crazy is just another tool in the toolbox.

If you think it’s almost designed to make you crazy, or at a minimum, retreat from society, you’d be correct. That’s the key game in the psychopath’s playbook — relational disruption, or make you nuts. And what could be more delicious than using the helpless against society?

One final note — I was in Vietnam looking for venues for international projects, when I happened to encounter a British psychiatrist. We hit it off famously, and ended up having drinks at the Hotel Metropole with another Vietnamese mental health care provider. He had been working in Laos, and I asked him what they did in the villages there. “They build a set of pole cages outside the villages, and when they have someone go on a manic episode, they lock them in the cage.” He went on to tell me that there were only eight psychiatrists in all of Laos, a country of approximately 7.7 million people.

As always — perspective — use it or lose it.

Hotel Metropole, Hanoi, Vietnam