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Why Lesbians, Indians and Beta Males Run Today’s Universities

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Who needs a throw rug when you have a borzoi?

Note: This article is chock-a-block full of triggering models and language, and cultural relativity that many people in power will find extremely offensive. And not because it’s wrong.

I’m fresh off reading the recent university self-study for Cornell University, titled the Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University. I don’t know if I should encourage you to download it and read it for yourself — but the link is above. It’s like sitting in a 238 page faculty meeting with earnest, but clueless group of diverse/not-diverse not-so-cool kids trying to figure out how they can justify not doing their jobs and doing what they want while being incessantly bullied by a group of professional mountebanks who are using the institution to rob the public blind while policing their language. In fact, policing the language is a big part of what universities have elected themselves to do. It’s part of the destructive strategy that essentially alien agents have pursued to collapse the host that feeds it.

The report was commissioned by the Cornell Provost, an Indian woman named Kavita Bala, who happens to come from both a computer science background, and Mumbai where she received a B.S. degree. She has a Wikipedia page. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, which gives her something like 25 years in the Sausage Factory (my colloquial name for the academy.) What is notable is that a.) she is the head of one of the most prominent (if not THE most prominent) public/private universities in the world. Cornell has a blended background that way, and you can investigate if that intrigues you. Bala is negatively impressive in a metacognitive way — she’s no thought leader in anything, having never issued an opinion that I could find, and she’s in a fascinating, collapsing discipline — especially in higher education, and one of the absolute first educational disciplines to be subsumed by AI. She is the force who ostensibly is going to lead us out of the wilderness. Good luck with that.

The report, like so many faculty meetings, exists to reassure the disordered people running the show in higher ed, that they really are nice folks, and all they really need to do is tune up their niceness to each other a little, while riding herd over the lower castes of autists and disciplinary slaves. The fact that they are sucking up inordinate amounts of public cash interests them only in that this public largesse appears to be coming to an end, and they are mostly likely unemployable in anything other than producing their bullshit, which the public, or rather parents of the next generation and the entire business enterprise of the country aren’t buying. What is stunning is there is no awareness, self- or otherwise, how they got into this pickle. Their mommies and daddies all were profoundly congratulatory at the various gates that were necessary for someone like Bala to pass through to draw her inordinate salary, likely north of $700K/year. Why are the lower castes not bowing down?

The report’s solutions to the academic crisis are milquetoast — more experiential education, more neglected publics, don’t short the all-important research, preserve the liberal arts, and so on. A renewed emphasis on Academic Civility — as if the reason that there are no dissenting opinions at Cornell was because people just aren’t being nice enough. There’s no mention of the obvious capture of the university by the DEI apparatus, as well as NO disclosure of the endless haranguing every employee at a university must be subjected to as part of their job conditions. No mention of the devastating effects COVID lockdowns had that drove some of these changes. No mention of the effects of DEI on student admissions, nor their expectations, and the university’s desire to service those, instead of stand for something other than the endless immiseration of its adherents.

So let’s cut to the chase and resolve how we got here. It’s a collapse story, just FYI. But its origins are actually mathematical in nature. I know that won’t satisfy folks looking for the red meat of racism, or anti-racism. But it’s the closest thing to a complicated truth. The problem is to get out of the hole requires some serious modifications of the transmogrified OS that runs places like Cornell, and those aren’t likely to happen, at least from an internal, conscious perspective.

Back in the early ’90s there was kind of an awakening across academia that academia as a whole was too white. I was part of that, and participated. It WAS true that most folks across the top of the institution were white men. What was interesting, though, was that even back in the ’80s, things were different. There was increasing “administrative professionalism” that was settling in across the nation.

What does that mean? We used to have administrators, but we also had faculty at the top in key positions. Yes, there would be a formal business manager for business administration. But top VP positions were also held by older professors. The way it would work was that IF you had a successful career, and you were personable and outgoing, you, one day, would get a call from the president. He (they were almost all ‘he’s’) would say “Chuck, we need an outgoing dealmaker who understands how to collegially adjudicate some of the various issues, as well as likes students enough to make the rounds to the dorms. We need a VP for Student Affairs. The gig will run 3 years, and after that, you can return to the faculty, and we’ll make sure you have time to write your book until you retire. Are you interested?”

You had been called to service, and would assent. And then coast off into retirement with time to finally put that long, career summative manuscript together. Deal.

But by my estimate, by the early ’90s, this kind of deal was dead. In place was a rapidly expanding administrative cohort. In my own university, I’ll never forget the beginning of an early presidential search. One of the candidates looked out across the sea of VPs, Vice-Provosts and the like and said “there sure seems to be a lot of you.”

At the same time, the nascent DEI apparatus was starting to be formed. You had true believers like myself (I did this!) going out in communities with diverse constituencies (in Washington, our primary minority was, and is Latin American) and recruiting students. And at the same time, there was a push to make both the professoriate and the administration look a little less white.

And there WAS racism. But the way the racism was baked in was that even back then, to get hired as a faculty member, you needed to come from a very constrained, elite group of universities. And like it or not, THOSE places mostly had white students. I graduated from Duke with my Ph.D. in 1987. My advisor was the Dean, and he had formerly been a full professor at Princeton. Folks in the academy actually thought a Duke Ph.D. degree was an inferior degree.

The key thing to remember here is that no one group of anything is monolithic. There might be some probabilistic variation, but for the sake of this piece, it’s fair to assume that people are distributed in some kind of normal, bell-shaped curve with talents and intelligence. What racism did (or even the inherent racism of institutions) was distort that bell curve. Where it did it the worst was on the right side of the distribution. People who were talented were suppressed.

And so you could march down the phenotypes. Black, East Asian, South Asian, Mexican, whatever. But most importantly, WOMEN. White women. When that dam, that vertical wall on the right side of the distribution came down, the best got picked first. African-Americans were the most highly prized in the treasure hunt, mostly because there were so damn few of them. The best got vacuumed up at places like Harvard, and displayed prominently across the literature produced by those organizations. Women were kinda down there on the list, as well as Hispanics. Native Americans were non-existent — a college degree has always been a tough sell on the Res. Those people want to go back to their place. Asians were obviously far easier.

But it didn’t matter. The quantities favored white women. And so across academia, women started getting hoovered up into both faculty and administrative positions. Obviously, disciplines like engineering were still poorly represented — there were (and still are) almost no women to hire.

And while I’ll admit it is a generalization — who is more likely to get ahead in their career? We were still bean-counting resumes on hiring committees. Who had more beans to count? Women with kids, or women without kids? If you can’t guess that, you’re probably not going to grok this essay anyway.

And then, who is more likely to not have kids? The answer is part of the subject of this essay. Lesbians. Lots of them. I noticed this by the late ’90s. Our provost was a lesbian, though it was not talked about as freely as today. There was no gay marriage either, so there was major consternation on how her partner was going to be compensated. This was 30 years ago. Think hushed tones.

And the tide continued. Like attracts like. More and more. And as all the lesser universities attempted to move into the research game (this happened around the turn of the century — 2000) there was increased demand for students, which could not be acquired locally. But people living in Third World countries were happy to oblige. They sent us their sons, and to a lesser extent, their daughters.

With more demand from lower prestige schools, there also was more demand for technical Ph.Ds to fill those slots. And with looser financing, even white kids who wanted a delayed adolescence would be encouraged to fill up those humanities slots. They were paying their way. And whom were we to discriminate against the cultural predilections of entire minority communities? One undiscussable point is how so many of these communities a.) thrive on status, as opposed to performance, and b.) eat their young. The African-American community is terrible about this. Getting to be called “Dr.” is a big deal. I think it comes out of the faith tradition — but it’s also because the majority African-American community is very authoritarian. Lots of the Ph.Ds in the softer arts were auto-ethnographic. So if you were willing to pay the university $200K, which the government would finance, you could write a report on how you spent your summer vacation and how oppressed you were, and they would give you a Ph.D.

At the time, I was the Chair of the University Faculty Senate — kind of the political head of the entire faculty. I was given the job of university restructuring by the current president, an old Mormon leader who ended up being my biggest fan – a story for another time. I went around to all the minority faculty and talked to them. “We only have money for one thing — 20 recruiters, or 1 VP? Which do you prefer?” They unanimously said “we want the VP.” I admonished them. “A VP is not boots-on-the-ground,” what I now understand as a performance-based perspective. They were convinced that being in the room was enough to get something done — a lesson 1619 founder Nikole Hannah-Jones is learning now is utter bullshit. So they got their VP (a nice guy and friend of mine.) Which led to setting up an even larger bureaucracy. I was heavily involved — the Director of a good hunk of it was my best friend, and honestly, we did quite a bit of good. Students got through and got degrees, and got jobs.

But back to the staffing situation. After the best were peeled off the right side of the distribution, you were left with depleted pools of demographic variations hostile to the success of their own in-group members. I’ve got stories. But there still was a hiring bias for those minorities inside the university, and at some level in corporate America. But inside the university, increasingly the only white males who could be tolerated were definitely in the ‘beta male’ category. I was already a rarity as a declared Alpha male. So the LGBTQ community subversively took towards assassinating the remnants. They were increasingly in the bureaucratic caste, as well as some of the disordered humanities. They were also not stupid, and heavily recruited, especially from the first generation students, who really just wanted a degree. And if they couldn’t hack the math, they were not going into engineering.

I could go on. But the whole point is that if you think there was some conspiratorial master plan to take over universities, that’s not what happened in the beginning. It was the mathematics of memetic cascades. The end result is we’re now stuck with a lot of mediocre people in academic administration, with not very much to do, that know they could never get a job that pays what they’re getting paid now.

While things STARTED with mathematics, though, that is NOT how things have ended. And how have they ended? With a phenomenon called polyphenism. And what the hell is that? It’s the reason bees that get born in the hive differentiate into workers, kings, and that one queen. They have the same genes. But some combination of epigenetic, hormonal and environmental factors drive biological differentiation.

What is going on now in universities is the cultural variant. Cultural polyphenism is what we’re dealing with. We may have inadvertently selected, through mathematical memetic cascades for more women without kids, which then turned out to be lesbians. But once the lesbians aggregated, we saw a profound political bias that directly came from putting all of them together in a group. We did NOT select for gay males — there is no equivalent on the masculine side of the system. And gay males tend to be more politically spread out than the female side. So we ended up with a hyper-feminine system, that not only sucked in the LGB side, it also gave the gender shape-shifters, the TQ part, the ability to mimic (lots of personality disorders in that crowd, along with narcissistic mirroring) and seize control. Which they did.

At the same time in tech., the demand for research faculties in lesser universities, and the plethora of grad students from places like India, Pakistan, and China, created faculties that are minority white. But they aren’t JUST phenotype-problematic. That’s an easy diversion. People like the provost of Cornell only recently came from India. They are not American, and especially in tech., they do not function the same once you pass a threshold of aggregation that once again triggers cultural polyphenism. It’s gotten so bad, with the decline of at least second-generation Americans in the faculty, that the Indians and Chinese faculty are publicly fighting with each other.

I’m glad I ended my academic career when I did. Why? I had great relationships with my Indian and Chinese colleagues. I toured China, and met with the Dean of Peking University’s engineering college, who we then ended up hiring one of his graduate students. I’ve mentored notable Indian and Chinese scholars myself. But what is going on regarding values will lead to the downfall of the university. Every system has some ability to absorb a certain number of cultural variants. But if you think a primarily Indian faculty is going to service, and more importantly predict the future needs of Americans and American students, you’ve got another thing coming. Their cultures have too many overlaps with the dynamic drivers of university collapse. And while I’ve always felt like my various projects of mentorship were wonderful people, I never counted on servicing the inherent biases in their backgrounds. It’s not just some pick-and-choose smorgasbord, culturally, out there. Core American culture is far superior than most of the homeland cultures these people derive their baseline OS from. And for the majority, that culture is NOT why they came here. They came here for the money.

I could also go on that some of it, towards the end, was a cultural clash with core American values, emblematic in my dogs, which I would take everywhere. If you think a dominant Muslim culture likes dogs, I’ve got news for you. But I digress. Trust me — they trash the bathrooms. It’s gross.

The deeper problem is that all these constituents are authority-driven identity structures. We’re so stuck on phenotypes that we think that kind of thing actually matters. But it doesn’t. The primary commonalities that exist between South Asian and Chinese cultures, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, is that there relational modes are externally defined. The Muslim/South Asian cultures relate to different people inside their communities, as well as the LGBTQ+ communities exactly in the same memetic framework. You are a declared external identity. Agency is low. And because agency is low, folks in the beta male cucks cohort fill out the rest of the hierarchy. And no one could be happier about the collapse of the larger, more genteel hierarchy established literally 100 years ago by their white male forebears. Few of any of these constituencies preserve the passion for particular discipline. They’re happy to declare themselves as professors – the status is what really matters, and if there’s another group out there who’s separate, realms can be established and peace uneasily maintained. In fact, destruction of the overall hierarchy maintains the neo-tribal social structure that makes sense to them. And sense of larger commitment to the larger university prospect is really foreign to the majority. And if the LGBTQ+ group is trying to Queer everything (that’s their term, not mine) all the better to be left alone — especially in the technical disciplines. That collapses the overarching controlling hierarchy anyway, leaving some loose association of confederate states, free to do whatever the hell they want.

The problem is that you end up with the perfect storm. These people do not care about undergraduates hardly at all. Or in a condescending way — servicing them is alternately equivalent to servicing the lower castes, and there’s baked in discrimination there, or in the case of the LGBTQ+ folks, getting them into some frame for perverse sex or genital mutilation, all in the name of reinforcing identity — sometimes permanently.

There’s more to write. But these are the problems that have to be fixed. And the only way they will be fixed is to realize that these problems are real. And they will only be fixed with human evolution of the agents involved.

I do want to end this on a somewhat positive note. I have had a minority of folks in each of these groups who realize there are problems exactly like I describe. Some of them have turned into champions who at least call out the bullshit at the local level, in a way that culturally cuts like a knife. They KNOW what perdition awaits. But we have a policing system inside the university that even squelches those voices. The people in control have divided up the pie. And you’re supposed to be happy and sing for your supper.

Back to Basics — Grounding Validity and Common Sense

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Trip back to the homeland – Portsmouth, OH — in front of the mural wall. Steel mill art in the back

One of the most important elements to understand regarding my work, as well as the confusion extant in most debates in modern society, is the concept of grounding validity. Grounding validity (the noun) or validity grounding (the process) is exactly what the words say — it’s grounding what you observe/believe in your thoughts with what is happening with the outside world.

A simple example — you’re looking at a stovetop. You THINK the stovetop is hot. You touch the stovetop and you burn your fingers. The mental model that stovetops are hot has been validated by your touching it. You are now GROUNDED in the notion that stovetops often can be hot.

Nature/Darwinian evolution has given us a complement of senses with which to establish grounding validity with all sorts of things. We have eyes for visible light, ears that can detect vibrations from 20Hz-20Khz, and other scaled phenomena like sense of smell. On and on. These integrate in the brain to help us make sense of our world. You may LOOK at something that looks like Grandma’s apple pie. But you’ll know it is if you taste or smell it.

Different senses feed different memories into our brains with different levels of persistence. You may witness a complex pattern in a second, but will likely not remember that pattern enough to reproduce it in even 15 minutes. Likewise, apparently, smells are amazingly persistent, and smelling something years later will still stimulate recall of the scene where the smell took place!

Grounding validity can be more complex than just our five senses integrated into an experience, though understanding this opens the door to appreciating why experiences are so important as part of knowledge persistence. Experiences traverse the entire knowledge structure stack, and our brains have evolved to store those in ways we really do NOT understand. As such, when someone tries to tell you a particular theory they have, it’s perfectly VALID to respond “well, not in my experience.” One of the great examples of this that has come out involves “gender affirming care”, which usually involves some version of chemical sterilization or castration, or actual physical mutilation, sold as a cure for adolescent depression. It is, once again, perfectly valid, and grounding to say “well, if someone cut off my testicles, I don’t think that would cure my depression.” The fact that we have to do extensive research and measurements on such a thing is great proof that many in the medical profession have little grounding validity in their practice.

Theories are an important part of how human thought moves forward. But they are only important in the long run if they can be grounded with measurement or experiment. A great example is Hawking’s work on black holes. Stephen Hawking, using mathematics, proposed that black holes could exist. But the evidence that grounded this took another 27 years of radio telescope measurements.

In this piece, I discuss grounding validity in the context of McDonalds, the restaurant chain. Much work has been done by that corporation to statistically improve the uniformity of the hamburgers they produce. Every hamburger you eat from McDonalds will taste like that hamburger in any of their restaurants — or the hamburger you ate ten years ago. That implies that their process is RELIABLE. But their PRODUCT is only valid if people will buy it. And the process of validity grounding matters if you chart their revenue earnings. Currently McDonalds profits are in decline, not because of the reliability of their product. It is because their UNGROUNDED corporate office decided to remove McDonalds’ PlayPlaces — slides and such that kids would play on — because they were germy and had potential injury liability. But McDonalds’ hamburgers were only valid (they’re mediocre hamburgers at best) because of the entire ecosystem of a given restaurant. When they removed the PlayPlaces, they cut a huge part of their market of parents with young children. Apparently, McDonalds, REGROUNDED THROUGH THEIR BALANCE SHEET, are spending some $8.5B in a modernization initiative to create a valid business proposition once again.

What is interesting about the McDonalds’ experience is that while the corporate boardroom was likely regrounded THROUGH their balance sheet, they could have just interviewed customers all along the way and NOT removed the PlayPlaces in the first place. It was deletion of their empathetic system that got them into trouble in the first place. The knowledge structure way to understand this is they created a closed information system which excluded their customers, and they paid the price because they didn’t want to believe that their hamburgers were garbage. As such, they deleted their real asset — the PlayPlace experience — that actually was the reason people came to McDonalds in the first place. It was only when their boardroom realized, by losing money, or as we would say on this blog, got driven down to the Survival v-Meme, that they fundamentally needed to reground their understanding of their business model.

Actually applying some process of grounding validity adds complexity to the knowledge you might base a product development decision on. As I said earlier, actual experience teaches you stuff you might not learn any other way. Take one of my affectations/hobbies — whitewater kayaking.

You can create a kayak in your boat shop, based on whatever theories of fluid mechanics that you may have mastered. But whitewater is a complicated and complex environment. Grounding validity happens when you paddle off the edge of a hard rapid. That environment has tons of coded information that makes it what it is — it grounds your intuition. And if your kayak responds the way you think it should, then that is the experience of validity grounding. And if it doesn’t? Old Daddy River pulls your pants down around your ankles gives you a spanking.

Being aware of a lack of validity grounding, and then using manipulation to change a debate or political view is a prime tool of psychopaths. I’ve written here how psychopaths use food scarcity as a way of convincing you to give money every time you go to the grocery store. In the US, you can walk into ANY grocery store, or down any street, no matter how poor, and see obese people stumbling around. It IS a national crisis. And by doing so, you are participating in your own experience of grounding validity. Availability of food is NOT a problem.

Yet you’ll be told, over and over, what a heartless and cruel administration we currently have (not that it doesn’t have problems, mind you) because the current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has banned purchase of sugary beverages with food assistance money. Whenever I feel poorly motivated to exercise, a trip to Walmart fires up my urge to get on the bike. It is a validity grounding exercise to see the collapse in our nation’s health by looking at the representative population sample of a Walmart on a Wednesday afternoon.

Another one, far less easily grounded, was the march through my engineering clinic of water purification projects for Third World countries. This one is more complicated, involving drilling wells, and various water filtration schemes. It has many redeeming features as an exercise. But grounding validity for all of them hit me square in the eyeballs when I visited remote villages in West Papua, Indonesia. No matter how many wells you might drill, the reality is that everyone drinks bottled water. No one counts on water coming out of the ground as being safe — no matter how many times you might educate for it. So — it might be a great school project. But it is academic.

I recently wrote about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s grocery store proposal for NYC. He was going to start a city-run, discounted grocery store in each of the five boroughs. We can assess the validity of his efforts by drawing from a locus of information on how many grocery stores already exist in the five boroughs. Depending on which AI is doing the counting, we’re into the thousands. So if we look at validity grounding for even the concept of opening city-run grocery stores, instead of them existing as a manipulative tool, we can quickly see that the whole grocery store deal is a psychopathic stunt, distorting people’s worldview to deliver political blame because of the impacts of inflation.

To sum — validity grounding is taking a given piece of information, and then finding something physical that ties that piece of information to reality. And THAT is what creates COMMON SENSE.

I leave you with this famous scene — with multiple instances of grounding validity. From ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’.

Never be afraid to say “that don’t make NO sense!”

P.S. — this is a great piece about one of the empathy pioneers — Franz de Waal and his famous monkey experiments. Greater validity and opportunities for grounding is determined by expanding the system-in-question’s boundaries. It’s really funny — and exhibits how you can twist the truth by cleverly moving those system boundaries around. One last point — what you exclude in your argument often matters more than what you include.

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.