These answers and more this week on MindMatters, as we continue to delve into the sickest parts of the collective mind and conduct a forensic exploration of what is unfolding. If one is to help heal the mental illness that we see all around us, we'd better understand what exactly we're seeing - as objectively as possible. In order to discard the doublespeak of pseudo-reality being aggressively foisted upon us, the first person it is necessary to assist is oneself.
Running Time: 01:28:59
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Here is the transcript:
Adam: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Mind Matters. Today we're going to be launching off from our previous show where we detailed all of the ground work that you would need in order for us to get into this episode without doing a lot of explication on the kind of individuals that we'll be discussing and the ways in which they act and manipulate. So if there's anything that you need more background on, feel free to go back to that previous episode or any of the other episodes that we've done on Political Ponerology would also be good as well.
So for this one, what we're going to be talking about is the rollout of global tyranny that is currently ongoing and is sure to ramp up now that he who shall not be named has been sworn in. So on that note, where do you guys want to start off?
Harrison: Well I'll start with a little reminiscence. For some reason when I was a teenager I liked utopian and dystopian fiction so I read Brave New World, 1984 and a bunch of other ones, some Kafka. 1984 is probably one of my favourite novels ever regardless of genre. I think that prepared my mind for a lot of the interests that I had in my 20s and now in my 30s and I guess that's one of the reasons why Political Ponerology appealed to me because it was about the kinds of things that I was interested in on an unconscious level and increasingly more conscious as I actually started reading more in-depth about these sort of things; not just novels but history and philosophy and things that are directly relevant to the stuff that Orwell was writing about in particular.
So when Ponerology came around I read it and was struck by how it was an explanation for all the things that were left nebulous. Like Lobaczewski himself says in one of the introductory chapters, reading just regular books about these kinds of topics, if you're looking for an actual explanation it will leave you dissatisfied. If you're reading a political science book it's going to be limited to a political science interpretation of history and oftentimes that will be either limited to economics or just pure geopolitics and doesn't really explain what's going on.
Then if you've got literary descriptions like novels, like Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler or the accounts of people in concentration camps or the gulag, very descriptive and interesting in their own right and edifying, but again doesn't really explain it. You can get an idea of what was going on and the depth of suffering and you can see the outlines of what was going on but again, without an adequate explanation to satisfy the drive in you that looks for a cause, looks for a rational and coherent explanation of how things actually play out. So Ponerology provided that.
Putting all those interests together, as scary sometimes as it is, it's also kind of like, "Oh wow! We get to watch this play out in real time now." We got a hint of that with the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq where you saw a textbook example from Ponerology of the rise of a totally pathocratic state out of nowhere. But that was never going to last. It was too in your face and too conveniently strategically placed in the cross-hairs of American and NATO interests in the region. That was never going to go very far. But still it was an interesting phenomenon to watch grow and, like I said, we're now seeing what seems to be the rise of a similar sort of ideology and resulting authoritarianism, soft totalitarianism in the countries in which we live.
So it is a great learning opportunity. It's kind of like instead of just reading about it you get to live it and while it might end horribly, hey, at least you got to watch it happen having been prepared for it. I can't imagine what it would be like to not have been prepared for it. What I mean by that, I watched a clip from a video that's been on YouTube for a while about this ex-KGB guy that defected to the US in 1970 or something and the interview is from the 1980s and he's talking about the Marxist/Leninist plot to infiltrate and subvert American culture and the different phases it goes through. He was talking about what Nicholas Taleb calls the intellectual butt idiots and what James Lindsay calls very smart people, basically the intellectuals who are in a sense so open-minded that they let the most idiotic ideas in. So all of these either pro-communist or fellow travelers or people who got onboard with the communist ideology throughout the period of the Cold War.
He made the observation that nothing's going to change their minds, not just the intellectuals but the students and all the people getting onboard with socialist or communist ideology back then. Nothing's going to change their mind. You can present them with facts and figures and evidence and you could even take them over to Russia then and show them the prison camps and that won't change their mind. He said the only thing that will change their mind is finally when they're getting their head kicked in.
So that's what I can't really imagine. I don't know, I don't want to toot my own horn but maybe that's what reading all these things at an early age kind of prepared me for, to hopefully be able to see it when it comes without falling for any of the ideologies. It's very easy to see when someone else does it. When you're outside of an ideology it's very easy to see someone else believe it, hook, line and sinker, with no critical mind. It's like, "What's going on with them?" Of course for the person who actually believes in it, they can't see it. They just think they're right and everyone thinks they're right.
So you're in this impossible situation of not being able to prove to that person that they're wrong because you think you're right, they think they're right. It's the same from their perspective. But the only thing that will actually change someone's mind who believes in a total pseudo-reality - and by believe I mean actually believes in it, believes it's true, has no hesitations, reservations or skepticism about it. I know that what I might even consider that I believe, I still have reservations or think in probabilistic terms, "Well this is probably the case". For most things I leave room for a margin of doubt and the possibility of being wrong.
But when you look at people who have bought into an ideology hook, line and sinker, they know what the truth is, right? That's one of the big problems. So this KGB guy identified it and could see it in that context. I can see the same thing playing out currently in various different forms of absolute certitude and unshakeable belief in the truth about "x" even when it can be totally bat shit crazy and demonstrably wrong.
So that is a recipe for disaster. As we were talking about last week, in James Lindsay's article, he talks about why pseudo-realities are pseudo-realities, why he uses that word. It's because it has nothing to do with objective reality and the further you believe something and try to put into practice something that isn't based on reality, the harder the shock is going to be when you confront actual reality. He had a good tweet some weeks ago in response to someone talking about communism and authoritarianism or something like that. I think part of the background for this tweet, at least for the person he was responding to, was that the common response when a criticism is made of, let's say, Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or any of the other instantiations of socialism and communism in the world it would be, "Well that wasn't real communism." We've heard discussions. I think we've even had our own discussions about it before.
So Lindsay's tweet was replying to something along those lines, factoring in authoritarianism, that communism is a pipe dream that always leads to authoritarianism. So when you say something isn't real communism it's because communism is a pipe dream. It will never actually happen in the ways in which communist theorists want it to and think it will happen because it will never happen, because it is a pseudo-reality, it will inevitably lead to authoritarianism. That's the natural way an ideology plays out in reality because it confronts reality and authoritarianism is the only way to enforce it, the only way to enforce the lie.
So when you have millions of people believing a lie and even believing a lie that they think is good and progressive and will lead to a better future and ideally to a utopia even though utopias don't exist, then if it's a pseudo-reality, it can never reach a utopia because it's impossible. It's not based in the actual rules of objective reality and because it will never work, the only way to keep it going is to force people to pretend that it will come and to force people to pretend that it's either already here or it will be coming. 'We're on the vanguard and we might have to sacrifice this generation because our grandchildren will be living in the communist utopia' or whatever utopia. It doesn't have to be communist but it will never happen.
That's one of the biggest lies about these ideologies, that 'We just have to sacrifice the current generation, just put up with the terror and the torture and the concentration camps, because history is more important than us. It's just the playing out of history and we are the self-sacrificing vanguard of the revolution. I might not be self-sacrificing but all of you peasants that are going to die in all of these wars and oppression, it's for the greater good.'
Adam: I like the way that you tied that all in together because it helped to pull some strings together in my own mind as far speaking of pseudo-realities. The covid narrative is another such example of a pseudo-reality where hundreds of thousands of billions of trillions of people are dying every second of every minute of every day and we're always on the brink of sheer destruction and terror. That's a pseudo narrative of a pseudo-reality or it's a narrative of a pseudo-reality that's not true.
So one of the other things that is in that narrative is, like you were saying, the sacrifices that must be made in order for the utopia to come. The utopia on their idea is this realm where we can all - I'm still not even sure what their grand ideal is on that.
Harrison: Whose utopia though? In what scenario?
Adam: Well that's the question then isn't it? I guess you could say what the populace would consider part of the end goal. So I guess the end goal for a normal person would be to go back to normal.
Harrison: Yeah.
Adam: I guess that would be what they think is going on, which kind of gets into the paralogistic nature and the paramoralistic nature of the whole narrative because they're being told these things. You have to go along with these authoritarian dictates. You have to wear your mask, you have to get your shots, you have to do this, that and the other.
Harrison: All of which we highly recommend. Just saying.
Elan: But just to drill down a little bit, you asked what is this utopian vision that say, the righters and far left, to use an example, have been engaging in? The whole pseudo-reality that they're engaged with is so subjective in some sense that I can partially imagine them having delusions of grandeur about acquiring more power in life and having things bestowed upon them that they feel haven't been fairly allocated to them without the requisite work involved in earning it.
So you can just imagine how a lot of individuals who have gone in that crazed direction have their own place in their minds for themselves and where they imagine they should be or what they deserve to have and what that will look like. So there is that.
I do want to go back to something that was said earlier about very smart people, as Lindsay puts it, and the resistance involved in questioning the paramorality and the paralogic that so subsumes them into the prevailing ideological idea that has been brought into being by basically psychopathically-influenced individuals. In having a conversation recently with someone I know, I realize that there was such an incredible amount of resistance to information that would call into serious question their beliefs on certain things, that it was impossible to make any kind of headway in understanding, for themselves. Even with ideas that are patiently and caringly conveyed and expressed and shared, there is an incredible amount of resistance to.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is the idea that we first heard expressed about 18 or 19 years ago out of the mouth of George W. Bush: "If you're not with us, then you're with the terrorists." So what we're seeing now unfold in real time again is this incredible psychological and emotional pressure that's being brought to bear on individuals who may otherwise question certain ideas and with this pressure, the underlying message and threat is, "If you don't believe in these ideas, if you're not taking the side of, for instance, social justice or anti-fascism in the ways that it's being presented right now in the west, then you must be evil and you will be cancelled and attacked! If however, you can acquiesce and submit to these ideas then your job will be protected and you will be thought of as a good person because it's only good people who can really see this, right? You have to be evil in order to not see this."
So this is an incredible amount of psychological pressure and coercion and manipulation that a lot of very smart people are subject to, but they don't realize that they're being subjected to it. It's not something that they have a fair enough distance from psychologically or emotionally to look at and to say, "Okay, this is how I'm being conned and the reason I'm being conned is because there are people who are extremely malevolent who are wearing a kind of shroud of righteousness and goodness that would tear my head off if I don't agree with them."
Lindsay has a couple of great passages that explain this a little bit. I'm going to read one. He says,
"Because the paramorality is, in fact immoral, participants in the pseudo-reality will experience vigorous, usually totalitarian enforcement of the ideological para morality. It is in this way that the requisite social pressure is created to maintain the lie and its immoral system. In turn, following the cycle of abuse, they will then use the same tenets and tactics to paramoralize normal people outside of it, eventually far more vigorously. The trend toward Puritan style pietism, authoritarianism and eventually totalitarianism in application of this paramorality, is a virtual certainty of acceptance of an ideological pseudo-reality and these abuses will be visited not only on every participant in the constructed fictional reality but also to everyone who can be found or placed within its shadow which can come to include entire nations or peoples or in fact, everyone, even those who reject it. Again, this is a true alchemy of the pseudo-realist program. It transforms the normal moral people into immoral agents who must perpetrate evil to feel good and perceive as evil those who do good."So it's rather sophisticated in some ways in that the level of manipulation involved, the dynamics that we're bearing witness to, the descriptions that Lindsay gives, describe something that is Machiavellian on a manipulative level that I think is difficult to fathom for most people who may have been trained or brought up or raised to think of good and evil in very simplistic terms. But when it's applied to social movements and political movements, there's a whole other set of considerations to be had that I think we've been attempting to get at here for the past however many shows.
Adam: Okay, so bringing that back to the question that I asked earlier, or maybe Harrison brought it up and I just reiterated the fact that it was a question, what is the utopian vision? Because we have to define that along the different lines that are at play. So at the bottom rung of it, as I said earlier, there's the normal person who just wants to get back to normal. That's the only reason they're going along with these things. Well at the top of it, there's the people who are instituting these things, the people who are warping the language and warping morality and warping logic to serve this agenda that they have for their utopian vision. Well what is the utopian vision of these psychopathic individuals?
I'll give an attempt at fleshing it out a little bit and then you guys can comment on where you think I'm wrong or could use clarification. We'll start off with the idea that they want power for the sake of power. That's one aspect. They want to be able to do whatever they want without repercussions, without responsibility for the ramifications. They want money. They want the ability to own everything and everyone even. They have no qualms about taking people as slaves and doing all kinds of horrible and horrendous things with them or to them.
So I guess to further flesh it out in real terms, I guess you could say what they really want is a technocratic total control system where they can decide who does what, when, where, why and with whom and they can dictate that on whatever one they have at the moment. So if that's their utopian vision or utopian dream, is some variation on that scheme where again, they have total control over everything and everyone, do you guys have any further additions or comments on that?
Harrison: No. Keep going with it. Finish your thought.
Adam: Okay. So that's what they want. Well the normal person would definitely not want that. He does not want that because that means that their freedoms are being curtailed. That means that their ability to do as they see fit, which automatically takes into consideration not wanting to hurt other people - a normal person's desires for life are to accrue some to themselves but also to do so in a way that doesn't destroy everything around them. Somebody who just wants to reach the pinnacle of a mega-corporation, they just want to be a CEO, they have the drive, the ambition, the ability and that's what they want to do. And they can do that and do it in a way that doesn't lay waste to the corporation or destroy other people's careers along the journey.
So that's normal and natural and that's what normal people are like. So to give these pathologicals the ability to dictate who, what, when, where and why is completely antithetical to their moral values and to their value structures. It's not something that they would naturally want. If the pathocrats want to impose the system on everyone else, well they have to do something in order to get people to change their value structures. That's where the paramoralisms and the paralogical systems all come into play because it all comes into service of this pathocratic ideal, of this pathological utopia where they would be able to do whatever they want and get all of their needs and wants met, as just horribly depraved as they actually are, and they can't do it with normal people's natural moral structures that are based on objective reality and natural human interactions intact.
So that's why there's this onslaught that you were talking about Elan, this psychological pressure. All of these different pressures and authoritarian structures and things all go to serve to breaking normal people down to where they can be manipulated, to become, like you were saying Harrison, about these very smart people who inadvertently support the rise of the totalitarian state.
Elan: First, I think that was a good analysis of it. I would add that the technocracy, the pathocrats, the people at the top, the ones who speak the rhetoric of the ideologies, the ones who send memos down to corporations about putting billboards in their company and changing policies to reflect diversity and inclusion and tolerance, they are using this ideology. It's being instilled and propagated in the minds of the masses basically and to most people, with the full knowledge that the rank and file soldiers of these thoughts and feelings and actions and protests are utterly disposable.
It's basically a lure, a hook, a carrot, that draws people into the belief in and support of, policies that fit into and are sold as, progressive, liberal, benevolent, when underneath all of that, just beneath the surface, is a rotted, corrupted, greedy, callous will to power and accrual for more power.
So there are these various levels I think, to who's influencing whom and how it presents by a certain strata of society.
Harrison: I want to comment on a few things both of you said, maybe in reverse order. I think that a lot of people, even at the top, are very smart people. They're people who are so smart that they're just dumb. If you look at a lot of the very smart people that tweet on Twitter, the big intellectuals of the day - not THE big ones, but some of the big ones like Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer and people like that, they're so very smart and I'd say a lot of them aren't evil people who have evil designs on taking over the planet. They're so enured in the culture and going with the flow of the mainstream that they can't see it.
So they're totally behind all these policies because for a lot of them, I think they see themselves as good people, they can't see themselves supporting anything that's bad and they can't see how this is bad because that would mean that the other people propagating these ideas, some of whom are their friends, might be evil too. It's like, "We're not like that. We are above that."
I read the article recently with the KGB interview in it and the author of the article had asked the question, "Why do intellectuals support this kind of thing? Why have they always done this?" She referenced the British writer Paul Johnson, I think, and he concluded that it came down to arrogance and egocentrism. That's what you see in very smart people. They're very arrogant and very egocentric and part of that is what Lindsay describes when he talks about very smart people, one of the aspects of that arrogance is their open-mindedness because scholars, academics, are open-minded. In order to understand something it has to be premised on the idea that there's something to understand.
So they'll go into a new idea with the assumption that there is something to be learned from it, that there's an internal logic to it. So a lot of them will get into reading postmodernism, for instance, because 'there must be an answer, it must actually make sense', not realizing that sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Sometimes there's nothing to it and sometimes when it seems to make sense, it only seems to make sense because some things seem to make sense and it's actually total BS.
So a lot of these very smart people see an idea - and this is what Lobaczewski talked about, critical correction - they see an idea that's somehow faulty at its root and they gloss over the errors in it to create in their mind, what the author MUST have meant, what the motivation MUST have been. Of course they colour that and they project their own psychology a bit, that 'There mustn't be any bad intentions behind it'.
So you look at people totally behind the great reset or whatever is going on and ideas about central bank digital currencies and total control of the economic system just because they think it's a great idea because they genuinely believe, "Oh, most people don't do anything wrong. The only people that are hiding their financial transactions are doing something bad anyways, so what's the problem with total information control and being able to track every transaction and knowing every transaction that ordinary citizens make? Because ordinary citizens, as long as they're not doing anything wrong, what's the problem, right? We're going to find money launderers and terrorists using digital currencies to cover up their shady acts."
So in their mind it makes perfect sense. "We just want to do good for the world."
Adam: That brings up something that I've thought about this totalitarian system. It's not necessarily inherently evil. It could be really beneficial. Some of these people have in their minds that, "Yeah, we could catch money launderers. That's great. That's good."
Harrison: Yeah.
Adam: So there are some aspects of this that are or could be genuinely good and useful and for the benefit of all mankind. But the problem is that they're not taking into consideration who's actually at the board playing with all the control mechanisms and that's where they go wrong.
Harrison: Yeah. That's the problem with very smart people. If you have very intelligent, kind people who are running everything you don't have anything to worry about because everything will go right. "Me, as a very smart person, if I was in that position I'd do all the right things. I'd make sure that no problems were made." Again, there's this arrogant projection of goodwill and competence that doesn't actually exist in reality because that's not the way things play out.
When you have totalitarian structures in place you're not going to get benevolent people at the top of the food chain that are in charge of them. It never works out that way. That's what very smart people don't realize; very smart people are useful idiots. They're the ones that make the way for the worst of the worst and cover for them, pretty much out of their own self-image issues, I think. It's because of their arrogance, because they are good people, they support these good policies, they would never do such a thing and so then that causes them to ignore the possibility for evil because they wouldn't associate themselves with any of that evil in their own minds, even if that's what they're actually doing.
I want to get back to 'what is the utopia' and something that you said Elan, about the various levels. I think you gave a pretty good description of what it's like in the most pathological mind, that the utopia for psychopaths and people like them is that they want total control. They want to be able to do whatever they want. They want everything to be able to express themselves in the most perverse ways possible - and I mean perverse on every level - without any repercussions because, like we said last week, people like this, psychopaths in particular, know that if other people knew what they were actually like they'd be lynched in the streets or put away for life. That's the fate of a psychopath when they are exposed.
So they know that. The political ones want to create a system where they are immune from any of those repercussions, when they're the ones in charge. Like you said, what they need, most people wouldn't be behind that. The vast majority of people would say, "No thank you. I'm not putting Ted Bundy in charge of my country or the world." So what do they need? They need a palatable, plausible ideology to get behind, to rise to the top with, that other people will support.
So communism and social justice ideology are perfect. This is the pseudo-real utopian vision. The pseudo-real utopia for both of them, in its most simple form, is the end of human suffering. Now you can frame that suffering in different contexts. For Marx it was class conflict. But when it comes down to it, "We just don't want anyone to suffer." So in its current clothing, in its current variety, the perfect world, the utopia will be the end of all inequalities, whether they're sexual, gender, racial. The perfect world will have all of those eliminated. Never mind the fact that a lot of the problems and a lot of the ways that they define the problems aren't even real in the first place.
This is where we get to 'communism is a pipe dream'. Well Social Justice is a pipe dream, like Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose write in their book. That kind of social justice is also a pipe dream because the actual problems themselves that they're identifying, aren't real. They don't actually exist. There's no such thing as systemic racism. There is such a thing as racism but social justice theorists don't actually believe in racism. That's not what racism means for them. They're talking about something that can't even be identified concretely.
So when you have a problem that can't be cured because it doesn't exist, as long as you can convince people that it's a problem, then people want to get rid of that problem. So, "Okay, now this problem exists. We need to get rid of this problem so that the suffering ends, so that people are equals, so that people are treated with common decency and respect." People will naturally get onboard with that, not realizing that there isn't a problem in the first place and that they're not looking at the actual problems that can be fixed.
So a lot of good-natured people, well-intentioned people get behind it because their goals are normal. They do want good things to happen. The thing is that the people behind the ideology and the people using the ideology don't want good things to happen. That's the whole point. They actually want bad things to happen because what's good for them is bad for other people. Again, using Ted Bundy or any serial killer, they lie and they manipulate to get what they want, which is good for them, which is really bad for the people they torture and kill. That's why we mentioned serial killers last week and why it's good to read nonfiction accounts of serial killers because you see how this plays out in a micro-dynamic and the kinds of lies and manipulations of a serial killer.
Ted Bundy, famously would pose as having an injury, using crutches like he broke his leg or something, to gain the sympathy and the support of some young woman that he would then abduct, do horrible things to and kill. In the victim's mind, she just wants to be a good person and that's what she is being. "Oh, there's someone to help. I really want to help that person. I want to eliminate suffering in the world. This is one way I can eliminate a little bit of suffering, by helping this person," not realizing that she is being conned and that it will lead to her eventual destruction.
This is what plays out in the macro scale. "We," - the people that believe in social justice theory or the ideology - "want all these bad things to go away. We want good things to come in their place so let's eliminate all the bad things," not realizing that they're being conned and that by wanting to remove the bad things, then it's very easy to say, "Okay, well what are the bad things?" "Well here are all the bad things. You have to eliminate this and this and that person and that person and that person. Oh, didn't you see what that person did? Look what they said! What that person said! Can you believe that they said that?!"
Elan: Yeah.
Harrison: "They need to be gone because they're contributing to the problem," the problem that doesn't actually exist but now in all these people's minds there is a problem that does exist and now I have the moral force of "That person is evil. I have to get rid of evil. I want to create a better world. The way to create a better world is to get rid of these evil people, to eliminate them." That's why you're seeing lately, in the last few weeks, all kinds of statements like this in the news, on Twitter, from sometimes very smart people, some from just very dumb people, using those words exactly. "We need to eliminate the threat from half the American population."
Elan: It's a really incredible bait and switch. You talked about presenting these problems that are not really problems and deflecting the attention away from what are some incredibly big problems. Pointing to one would be the amount of war and destabilization and regime change and institution of coups all around the world by elements of the US government.
Harrison: But it's all for the greater good!!
Elan: That's how it's been sold and now it's even less of a focus and a point of contention among those very same people who would otherwise be engaged in bringing more attention to these subjects and to calling out those figures in politics, in positions of power, that are engaging in the wholesale destruction of lives around the world. So what was very evident among many in the early 2000s has almost completely dissipated in awareness among many in the west.
Along those lines, it's fascinating to see the number of people who have such successful resumes in that direction under prior administrations, come back into prominence, into positions of power, where they can resume all of those policies in a more overt and aggressive way. We're going to see it. Whatever we saw under Obama or Bush, we will see again in overdrive. There's a lot of lost time to make up for in the aggressive power-hungry behaviour of certain people and individuals and institutions that exist to do what's good for them but bad for very many people.
So that's another development that we're seeing. As for this domestic war on terror so-called, it reminds me of what you said a few minutes ago Harrison. You mentioned how psychopaths would do things to not be subject to the law, to not be vulnerable to the persecution that they deserve for their crimes. In taking this defensive posture and knocking everyone over the head who would even dare question the positions and the policies that we're going to see going forward, they've basically knocked 80 million people on their heels, or have attempted to and will continue to do, in order to assert themselves on the stage once again.
So this is quite a development that we're watching unfold here and it's happening very fast and it's like a shadow falling over the west, and the US in particular. It's kind of like Sauron farming out all of the Orcs and having the wizard dig out all of these Orcs from the ground and create the army, to use the Lord of the Rings analogy.
Harrison: It's a racist analogy. You can't use it.
Elan: I know, but I thought I would indulge myself a little bit.
Adam: There are a couple of things I wanted to say. First, it just really dawned on me as you were explaining earlier Harrison about what naturally happens to psychopaths in a society, why they hate normal people, why they're afraid of normal people really. That's why all of these high-standing, highfalutin psychos are doing so much to the detriment of normal people. It's because they KNOW that if they were ever really found out, they'd be dead! They'd be done for!
So I just wanted to throw that out there. It was part of the reason for why they have a war on normal humanity.
Elan: Quick interjection Adam. A quote from George Bush Sr.. He once said - and you know what I'm going to say - he once said, "If the American people knew what we had done, they would run us out in the street and lynch us." It was an incredible thing to hear out of the mouth of somebody like him.
Adam: It's incredibly honest.
Elan: It's incredibly honest and true! If you've done a little bit of reading - we've heard a lot about him just on the very surface of politics - but he was into all manner of things that would make the average citizen drop their jaws in disbelief. Much earlier in the show Harrison, you mentioned the literature, moving back into that topic for just a moment.
Literature and fiction that has helped create the groundwork for understanding the soil from which to grow our comprehension of psychopathy and the systems that it grows and espouses and what that looks and feels like - I think you mentioned Kafka at one point - Kafka The Trial was a wonderful explication of what a pathocracy really, is capable of doing to an individual where someone stands accused of something but of what exactly is never clear, only that there is this monumentally oppressive system in place at the company he works for, at the local court house, at the higher levels of government, that would seek to crush this individual. It's wonderful in that it puts you in the shoes of this character who has to make sense of all of these developments in his life and what he's standing accused of and how he's supposed to defend himself in a court where the accusations are not so clear.
So domestic terrorism as it is now being used, would seem to be one of those abuses of language that Lindsay describes, that is so broad in scope so as to be almost completely meaningless and intangible and appropriated to be used in any way that a particularly pathological system, which we're seeing unfold, sees fit to use against individuals who would dare to voice dissent.
So that's the psychological terror. That's the real terror that we're being faced with, the chilling effect that is, by design, being used by the media, by politicians, by the think tanks, by elements of the ABC agencies and the military, to scare the shit out of everybody and to disempower. Before the end of the show today we'll get back, I think, to some of the ideas that Lindsay presents in his piece and also in Rod Dreher's book that we've been discussing some weeks ago, about how we can continue to approach some of these problems.
Harrison: One point I wanted to make, going back to George Bush's comment and what you reiterated Adam about why sicko leaders are doing these kind of things, I think there are a couple of different phenomena to parse out and one is that a lot of people in power in any country, in any system, can get away with a lot, just using the existing structures, even in a relatively normal country. That's how pedophiles and con men work so all a pedophile has to do is get a socially acceptable and respectable position and then they can largely do whatever they want. And a lot of them have been doing whatever they want. If you become a judge, or a police chief or if you run a kids' charity, in the church or wherever. That's where a lot of these pedophiles get caught. When they finally get caught you realize that they've been doing it for years and years and years and getting away with it because they've managed to put on a real good show, like any good psychopath.
So those people don't necessarily need a new social structure. They don't need to form their own government. They're getting by pretty well and a lot of people - I'd guess Bush Sr. and the sickest of the sick in aristocracies and ruling positions all over the world - probably are and have been comfortable in their position. On some level they have a knowledge that people would lynch them in the streets if they knew what they were really like but they're not scared of it because they've always been in power. They've gotten away with it for so long, there's no real fear. They don't really need to change anything.
That would be what I might call the Fish Head scenario, the movie Fish Head which was about psychopathy and narcissism and the line was, "A fish rots from the head down" I think. So you have this rot at the top and that just happens. You're going to get evil people in positions of power anywhere in any social system. It's just going to happen unless you have a really developed psychological awareness in the society to be able to find these wolves in sheep's clothing.
But there's another phenomenon with this ideology because the ruling class, the ruling individuals are only ever a tiny percentage of the population, right? Let's just use the common number; you've got the ruling one percent, right, however many that actually is. Out of that one percent you're going to get a certain number of them who are absolutely reprehensible individuals because they've managed to game the social hierarchy in order to get that position to provide the cover for doing really evil things. That's whatever fraction of one percent.
Well there are a lot of equally pathological people in the 99% and they want something too. This is where the advantage of an ideology comes from and the real danger of an ideology because now you have an ideology for all of the regular psychos and mentally ill people who want to create a new world. These ones are actually at the bottom of the ladder in some sense, even if it's only in their minds. The guys at the top are already at the top. They don't really need things to be totally reorganized. The people at the bottom are the ones with the resentment because they look at the guys at the top and think, "I want his position. Why aren't I getting a piece of the pie?"
So the ideology does a couple of things. It reinforces their own resentment against society because they're not getting what they want and they think they deserve more and then it provide this culture-wide - and nowadays it would be worldwide - this worldwide framework in which to operate and the outcome of which will provide them with social justice because social justice for them, too, is like we were saying, about power. "Well for me now, I will be the one on the top. Right now I'm oppressed. Society is structured in such a way that it just oppresses me all the time. I deserve more than this."
This ideology feeds that pipe dream in their mind - well more like a fever dream - that "Things are so horrible, I'm not accepted for who I am and I'm going to crush and replace the people that have been oppressing me for my whole life."
That's a great ideology because it can apply to so many people. Anyone who has had anything bad done to them can find a way of identifying the person responsible or the group responsible and now all of their problems are someone else's fault and the way the ideology is structured, the practice of the ideology, is to get revenge and replace those people to make the world right.
So that's where you get this mishmash of different motivations. You have relatively normal people who have had bad things happen to them, who have been mistreated, who then fall victim to their own resentments. They allow that to be nursed within them by the ideology and by their new social group. "Oh yeah, you really have been wronged and everything wrong in your life is because of those people." Even if you have a pretty great life, no, your life is actually pretty crappy because of those people. So you can actually victimize people who aren't actually victims and who have nothing to complain about so you can create even more resentment, pseudo-resentment - resentment for something that doesn't actually exist.
So you have pseudo-resentment for people like the upper class white kids going to college who now all of a sudden think that they've been totally oppressed their entire lives. Then you've got people who actually have some resentments because bad things have actually happened to them and people have mistreated them. Then you've got the pathological group who are oppressed just because they're sick in the head and ordinary people don't like them.
This is like one of the points that I heard James Lindsay make. I think he was talking about a study that was done on some trans activists and how the most vocal and active trans activists were actually a group of people with a word I don't remember describing them. A male in this condition gets sexually aroused by the impression that they're actually an attractive female. So the more people that will acknowledge them as an attractive female, the greater their sexual arousal and pleasure. I guess it's kind of like a paraphilia or whatever, a kink.
So guys like that are the ones on the leading edge of fighting for trans rights, not for a genuine reason - well it is a genuine reason - but not for a reason that most people would get behind. "Okay, here's a person who's transgender and...
Adam: It's not a selfless reason.
Harrison: Right. Because a lot of people can and do get behind transgendered rights just like gay rights, just like the liberal value that everyone should have rights. You shouldn't necessarily be discriminated against for reason X or whatever. But these are people with a sexual...
Adam: Fetish?
Harrison: Fetish, yeah, that the best word - a sexual fetish, who are trying to create a social norm that will then get their sexual fetish not only accepted but then be able to fulfill their sexual fetish. That's a good example of how this works for the pathological end. There are people essentially like serial killers, who are advocating for equal rights because they feel oppressed because they can't serial kill. That's kind of along the lines of what goes on with psychopaths in political ideologies. They want different things than the other people in the ideology. Normal people can't realize that and don't realize it. They want normal things. Sometimes they want things that don't exist that they've convinced themselves exist, but the seriously mentally disturbed people actually want different things. It might be akin to a sexual fetish and sometimes it is.
Elan: Well just to interject there, I think a better example might be how pedophilia, in particular, has been normalized in the west and how certain laws in various places have been watered down and...
Harrison: Have they really?
Elan: I thought there was a law in California that reduced the sentence for abusing a minor to a lower age or something. It's certainly an idea that's been foisted upon the west in various ways, at least culturally. I know in France there were some laws that made it easier for pedophiles to do their thing. So that just came to mind as an example of a sexual psychopathic proclivity or tendency or desire that only, it would seem, people in more normal cultures, healthier societies, are able to take a look back from and say, "Wait a second! Do you realize what you guys are advocating here? Do you see how this is in fact a kind of a sick way of making permissible, that you are giving sick people a freer, and freer, and freer rein towards engaging in certain activities?"
Adam: I guess we could take what you were saying with the people at the forefront fighting for trans rights, then I would venture to guess that the people who are at the forefront of pushing for child sexual rights, however the words are actually used, essentially whoever is pushing for 'children have a sexuality and should be free to express it in however or whatever way they see fit', I would venture to guess that any of those people who are really pushing hard for it are probably pedophiles and probably should be locked away.
Harrison: I've thought about this pedophile thing a few times in the past. That's one thing that I would argue will never be normalized in the sense that any time an actual pedophile is exposed, that's when those types of people will get lynched. Pedophiles are at the top of the list. Always have been and probably always will be. What has been created, I think, is a culture that makes it a bit easier to be a pedophile. Even with the Cuties movie and all that stuff, if there IS any actual pedophilia going on, again, it happens all over the place. There's usually stories pretty regularly that come out of Russia about some pedophile getting lynched, but it's the same everywhere. I think.
Maybe not everywhere. But it's analogous to the very smart people thing. You have movies like Cuties and the hyper-sexualization of children and for more normal people who are just part of the social justice progressive climate, they might just say, "Oh, it's good to see young girls expressing themselves like that." They're not pedophiles so they are kind of okay with it. Maybe it will make them uncomfortable on some level but they don't want to be paramorally bullied for saying anything about it so they'll go along with it. But that new environment creates just a bit more ease for pedophiles to operate.
So yeah, they'll push for anything that will ease the climate for their manipulations. For the transgender example, I think one of the points of this article, wherever Lindsay was getting his information, was that these guys are the most vocal and what they're actually doing is bullying other people to accept and reinforce their own fetish essentially. So it's not just a matter of 'let me do whatever I want and don't judge me for it'. It's forcing other people to then accept and make it easier for them. Well that's not the best way of putting it. There's an aspect of actually coercing other people into accepting your own mental illness.
Elan: What we've seen in the past few years with the gender dysphoria, I think plays into some of this conversation because children are basically being encouraged to not only question their sexuality and genders but they're being put on the fast track to getting biologically transformed into male to female or female to male when they're hardly developed enough to make decisions about what they're going to eat for dinner. The idea that we are empowering children to be who they really are is actually doing a great injustice for children and also plays into what one of you just said about the idea of children being - I think you said this a moment ago Adam - children being adult enough or sovereign enough to make decisions for themselves about who they're going to have relations with.
So this fast-tracking, this imposed pseudo-empowerment of children to make decisions for themselves that are so drastic, that can be so life-changing and so detrimental ultimately, not only to their bodies but to their very being, it's like an attempt to destroy a whole generation of young people who need guidance and perhaps therapy and support, but definitely not the full-on freedom to do things because at such a tender age they might feel a certain way, however strongly. Most adults don't know who they are in some sense or another or individuated or integrated to such a degree that they can clean their room on a regular basis!
How is it that we have allowed this terrible ideological paradigm to infect the minds of kids to the extent that it has?
Harrison: I know. {laughter}
Elan: The answer!
Harrison: I may know part of the answer. I don't know. There are a few things going on. I'm trying to think of an example from either the USSR or Mao's China, but basically it relates to what we were talking about regarding ideologies and the pipe dream nature of them and the impossible goals, that when you create something impossible, then you have to enforce it totally, 'totalitarianally', and so with the thing about transgender surgeries in kids, by first of all amplifying the ideology and getting a large percentage of the population to believe in it, now you've made your pseudo-reality real in some sense. So it's not impossible to fight but now it's a lot easier to bully the people who point anything out about it. Because it has been normalized, that then creates the paramoral evil now. The evil is anyone who says it's wrong to do that.
So it's a total inversion of reality. It's no longer wrong to mutilate and potentially ruin a child's life and future for what they think they want at the age of seven or something like that, or however old they may be. It's now evil to say even that that might be wrong. So you've created your own enemy now and the enemy is any rational, normal person with common sense who says, "That might not be a good idea." Now you're the person going to the gulag. You've created the evil. You've created a paramoral evil to then be able to bully. You've created an internal enemy and that's the way that pathocracies operate, by creating fake enemies and that puts any normal person in the position of being put in this Kafkaesque reality where all of a sudden, just for having a common sense reaction or opinion about something, now you're on trial and you deny your guilt, proclaim your innocence and that is then taken as further evidence of your guilt. The Kafka trap.
So it is the willful manifestation of a pseudo-reality that then creates the framework for a totalitarian crackdown. There's so many parts that feed into each other. You have to create this evil. You have to create the system where normal things become evil, good things become evil and evil things become good and that puts normal people into this crazy reality where they have no idea what's going on because they can't understand it because they can't understand that there is this other reality, that there are crazy people who will totally invert reality for the sake of destroying other people and accruing power for themselves.
It's very disorienting for a lot of people. That's why it was totally disorienting for a lot of people in all the countries where communism took root because now you're thrown into this new reality where everything is upside down and nothing makes sense anymore and you can be thrown in prison for no reason and not understand why you're there, not understand the charges against you because the charges themselves might just be made up or totally false. Then you have been determined to be guilty. So when you try to prove your innocence, 'Well no, we already know you're guilty. We already have evidence of your guilt. You've already been found guilty.' It's like, 'What the hell's going on?! I didn't do anything wrong!' That's the position that people are put in, this totally crazy-making situation.
And this one of the biggest features of what's going on. The mass induction of mental illness. I think that points to the source of what's going on, is mental illness to begin with. You have the creation of functional forms of all kinds of mental illness. So these things are being amplified and induced in normal people and you can see all of the main forms of serious and dangerous mental illness - paranoia, hysteria, asociality, psychopathy, sociopathy. What are some other ones? Those are the main ones. I think there's one other one, but pretty much you have these types of problems and then it's like they're being actively created in the population and it's the media that does it, the media and Twitter. It's so easy to amplify and create mental illness in people.
This gets back to something that Jonathan Haidt and Lukianoff wrote about in Coddling Of the American Mind, about trigger warnings. You see a lot of this in progressive therapy, I guess you could call it, like social justice therapy - and Jordan Peterson talks about this - where instead of doing what actually works to get rid of a fear of something, what's happening is students for instance in universities and colleges, are being trained to take more offense to things, to be more sensitive, to be more triggered as opposed to exposing them to the thing that triggers them and reducing their reaction to it. They're becoming more sensitive. So it's like a mass induction of snowflakery, to use a pejorative, but it's happening on so many different levels and in so many different ways. If you read Ponerology it starts to make sense.
Wait a second. People are becoming more asocial, more paranoid, more hysterical, more violent and sociopathic.
Elan: More narcissistic.
Harrison: What could that mean?
Adam: When you think about the different measures and prescriptions for all of this covid pseudo-narrative, pseudo-reality, socially distance so you can go and see other people, like you were saying, one of the things that allows you to overcome a fear is exposure. Jordan Peterson gave the example of someone who's afraid to go in the elevator. The first day they just go and look at the elevator and that's all they can handle. That's great. They've now gone farther than they were before. The next one, they push the button and they stand in the door. And then the next day they walk in. And then the next day they'll actually go up in an elevator and eventually it gets to the point where they're no longer afraid of the elevator and it's part of their everyday life.
So you would have that with people of other political opinions, religions and everything like that. At first, say during the beginnings of the war on terror, the Muslims were evil and totally bad so you would want to isolate yourself from them. But really, what you would need to do was to go and talk to them and then you can realize, "Oh, not everyone who is a Muslim is a terrorist!"
So it's that exposure that gives people the actual awareness of what things actually are. When you're socially distancing yourself from other people, you're cutting yourself off from interacting with the very people that you need to be interacting with in order to understand who they actually are because if you're a liberal right now, you're being told to believe, whether or not it's actually the case for a lot of these people, at least in the media they're telling everyone to be afraid of anyone with any conservative bent or any conservative leanings. They are domestic terrorists.
But, if you were to actually go and talk to these people, they're very sane and they're just normal. They're normal and moral.
Elan: You know what that reminds me of Adam? There was a left-leaning lady who went to a Trump rally a number of months ago or a couple of years ago and she was warned by her friends who said, "You don't want to do that! These people are crazy! You really must take care...!"
Adam: "You're going to die!"
Elan: "...to not go there!" And she said, "I went and everyone was quite friendly and nice." This isn't to say that there aren't some Trump supporters who were nutty or far, far right. I'm not saying that at all. But what this woman realized in doing what you suggest in acclimating herself to what she's been told to fear was that she was being peddled a lot of BS.
I just wanted to read something. We're coming to the end of the show here and we do like to provide a little hope and advice when we're all facing such a shit storm of psychological, emotional and spiritual attack because we can have this knowledge but at the end of the day, we still have to assimilate it each for ourselves and come to some way forward, some approach, some strategy in processing all of this. So this is towards the end of Lindsay's essay. He writes,
"Simply refusing to participate in the pseudo-reality, utilize its paralogic or bow to its paramorality and to live one's life as though it is utterly irrelevant to yours is a powerful act of defiance against an ideological pseudo-reality. It requires nothing more of a person than a convicted statement that says, 'this does not apply to me because it is not me or not even real' a refusal to make decisions based in socially constructed fear and intimidation and a willingness to live one's life on the most normal terms possible. It may not always be possible but we try and do what we can to live as normally as possible. This is a powerful and peaceful act of defiance that many other normal people, those outside the pseudo-reality will recognize for strength and while it may cost you in the short term and in some ways, it will reap rewards in the long term and in others. At least up until the point that the paranormal totalitarian trap is fully sprung on a sufficiently broken and demoralized society. Just keep your head up and refuse to live your life on someone else's psychopathic terms and you will do much against such budding regimes."Now there's another option he gives. He says,
"Refuting pseudo-reality is harder as it requires much more specific knowledge along with skill, strength of character and courage. It also must be done at least by someone if an ideological pseudo-reality has already taken root. Such a pseudo-reality has to be shown to be a false reality, which is to say a pernicious fiction to as many people as possible. To do it, its distortions of reality, the contradictions of its paralogic and the evils and harms of its paramorality must all be exposed and explained as a first step. These objectives require devoting, which is in some sense wasting, a great deal of time and expending a great deal of effort intentionally learning something one knows is false and therefore if one is successful, useless. It is also demoralizing to learn, given the psychopathic nature of the material. It's not for the faint of heart even if all goes well."So basically being the antisocial justice warrior, being a voice like Lindsay himself, like Glenn Greenwald, like any number of other journalists and thinkers and philosophers who really have their finger on the pulse of what we're seeing, requires a great deal of strength, fortitude, knowledge and insight. So there you have two different ways of going about an approach to offsetting what it is we're seeing. The interview with Rod Dreher of a month-and-a-half ago, Live Not By Lies also has some wonderful insight about how individuals sought to defend themselves and live normally during the most trying of times post-WWII in Europe.
Adam: We'll definitely be discussing more of Dreher's book and how we can apply some of the knowledge and wisdom from those previous iterations of pathocracies to today, to keep our sanity. But more than keep our sanity, to live not by lies and make our lives something that's worth living.
On that note, thanks for joining us and again, we'll be revisiting all of these topics because it's the most important subject that we could talk about right now. So looking forward to having y'all join us again. Be sure to like and subscribe and hit the little notification bell so that way you guys always know when we're popping out new videos. So y'all take care and we'll see you next time. Bye.
The right also has no discernible demands either, because they just want government to just piss off out of their life. So ya, what does this "utopia" look like? What's a best case scenario? I'm sure it's so twisted and sick that they just don't want to talk about it in public right now.