Our tale begins in medias res and ends in nihilo.

Johnny watches as the ashes of his arch-nemesis Jimmy's home rise up to the heavens, the flames casting little Petey's form in stark silhouette as he blows out the match. The screams of the family, now barely audible, are quenched in the roar of the consuming fire.

"But Petey, this isn't what I thought you meant!"

"But Johnny, I said the rich could burn in hell, and you agreed."

Johnny holds the stool steady as little Petey adjusts the noose around Father Johnson's neck. The makeshift gallows they've constructed under Mrs. Montgomery's giant oak tree is sturdy. It will bear the weight of the neighborhood priest.

"But Petey, this isn't what I thought you meant."

"But Johnny, I said God is a tyrant and his priests corrupt, and you agreed."

Johnny holds the gun, his arms outstretched and trembling. Tied to the chairs across from him are his parents. A hand placed on his shoulder gives gentle encouragement. Little Petey is standing there beside him, patient.

"But Petey, this isn't what I thought you meant..."

"But Johnny, I said that parents are oppressors, and you agreed."

Johnny looks out over the blackened landscape. The stench of death and decay is making his eyes water. The absence of any sound of life is alarming. Just the heavy breathing of little Petey, close behind him, the pale dawn reflected in his cold grey eyes.

"What now, Petey? There's nothing left."

"What now, Johnny? Why, Johnny, now we can do whatever we want."

Those who routinely read these substack essays and our social media posts know that Jill and I have been on a journey of discovery, a root cause analysis approach, trying to make sense of the horrid public policy decision making that has resulted in the COVIDcrisis. Key milestones along the way have included recognizing the role of the trusted news initiative (see here and here), the rise and global penetration of advocacy journalism, developing a deeper understanding of the role of the World Economic Forum/Great Reset and its young leader training/indoctrination program, the process of Mass formation or Mass Psychosis (the psychological basis of totalitarianism), widespread regulatory and other forms of government capture, the role of the administrative state, exploitation of the "crisis" by central banks and massive investment funds, the weaponization of infectious disease fearporn as both a media business model and a political tool, "Nudge" technology and governmental behavior control, and so many other factors that have contributed to the emergent global "COVIDcrisis" phenomenon that has destroyed millions of lives, businesses, children's education, faith in the integrity of science and medicine, and triggered an economic crisis that threatens to bring down the pillars which support western economies and banking systems.

The tendency of many is to focus on one of these as the root cause, and to overlook the complex global interplay of all factors, a very human bias to seek a single factor or individual that should be held accountable. Favorites are often the WEF/Klaus Schwab (who somehow created himself as a caricature of evil), Bill Gates (likewise), Larry Fink/Blackrock as well as the Vanguard and State Street investment funds, the small number banking families that control most of the central banks, the United Nations, the World Health Organization/Veterinarian Dr. Tedros, the rise of the Administrative-corporate state/inverted totalitarianism, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, the list goes on and on. All have played a role in fostering this global disaster which began with introduction of a new variant of an existing RNA respiratory virus into the global human population and seems to be winding down as one of the greatest global policy failures in human history.

Borrowing a term from Economics, most of these interacting factors are more macroscopic in scope. But what about the more microscopic phenomena. Are there systemwide or general organizational behaviors or processes that have contributed to the resulting clusterfrack? Have any of these types of effects contributed to the decision making? Are there widespread organizational practices that have enabled something like an emergent fractal process such as that described by Harrison Koehli in his recent essays which critically compare and contrast the work of both Mattias Desmet and Andrew Lobaczewski (see Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism). Is there a component of this mess which is a consequence of how our governments and large businesses are organized, some seemingly benign fundamental organizational behaviors that could be clearly identified and therefore are amenable to being altered so that we could reduce the risk of future overreaction and collective global madness?

Why do globalists have a deep rooted obsession with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What is it about the fervent quest for an autonomous digitized brain that sends them into fits of ecstasy? Is it all about what AI can do for them and their agenda, or, is there also a darker "occult" element to the concept that is so appealing?

The World Economic Forum, an organization dedicated to the globalist "Great Reset" agenda, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the "Shared Economy," dedicates a large portion of every annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland to discussion on AI and the expansion of its influence over daily life.

The United Nations holds extensive policy sessions on AI and has been spending a considerable amount of energy to establish "ethics rules" for the development and use of Artificial Intelligence. At the core of the UN's efforts is the assertion that only the UN is qualified to dictate and control AI technologies; for the good of all mankind, of course. AI governance is slated to go into full effect by 2030 according to the UN's own white papers (All globalist institutions have set 2030 as the target date for all of their projects).

Several hundred years ago, a small force of Spaniards landed on the shore of a land heretofore wholly unknown to European man. What followed has been characterized as the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and as a genocide.

It was all of those things.

But try to see it from their perspective.

These were not sophisticated men. They were second and third sons, with no inheritance to secure their futures, who had struck out on their own to chance their fortunes in the New World as soldiers and adventurers. They hailed from a military culture, which had within living memory concluded a reconquest of their ancestral peninsula that had taken seven centuries to complete. They were hard men from a hard people.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to understanding the nature of human evil is the tendency to think everyone is the same: like you. Reading some of the socialist philosophers of past centuries, one can't help but smile at their quaint oversimplifications of human nature and naive utopianism.¹ If only we could eliminate all private property, break the parent-child bond, and (in many socialist utopias) just share each other's wives (or better, get rid of "oppressive" marriage and just make women communal sexual property),² well, then everything would be golden. All the world's evils would disappear (or at least be easily dealt with). Everyone would live in harmony, thinking the right thoughts (because parents and priests would have no influence on the children) and sharing all in a brotherhood of man (well, there might be a few holdovers who refuse to give up the old ways, but there's always slavery or death for them). Treat everyone the same, and everyone will turn out the same — the way we want them to.

It's kind of difficult to grok how men so seemingly intelligent could have been so profoundly stupid. It's like the story of Aristotle (probably apocryphal, but who knows), apparently convinced until the time of his death that men had more teeth than women. As Bertrand Russell once quipped, he could have cleared up this misconception very easily by simply asking his wife to open her mouth. You don't need to have had children to see it, but for those who have it's obvious that even from a young age, the same tricks don't work on everyone. There's a very simple reason: people are different. Some are so rebellious that even a heavy hand won't dissuade them from causing trouble; others so compliant that even the hint of a criticism is enough to change their behavior and inspire a lifetime of neurosis.

By undermining the Western canon in the 1990s, leftist academics paved the way for today's 'woke' hurricane.

When I finished graduate school at UCLA in 1988, I believed that English sat at the top of the academic heap. The department claimed nearly 1,700 majors; the nonmajor survey courses I taught during the year after I filed my thesis had more than 400 students each; and professors and administrators across the quad were eager to know what this thing called "deconstruction" was. The department required of every major a yearlong survey course, from Beowulf to W. H. Auden, with a syllabus that proclaimed, "This is English, the full sweep!" Earlier, in 11^th-grade English, I got the same thing for American literature, a grand patrimony from Hawthorne to Hemingway, implying the country's own grandness. English was where you found the meaning of the past. Without a flagship English department, a university could not be a tier-one institution.

As a psychologist treating homosexually oriented men, I've watched with dismay as the LGBT movement has convinced the world that "gay" requires a revised understanding of the human person.

The psychological profession is much to blame for this shift. Once, it was generally agreed that normality is "that which functions in accordance with its design." There was no such thing as a "gay person," for humanity was recognized as naturally and fundamentally heterosexual. In my 30-plus years of clinical practice, I have seen the truth of that original anthropological understanding.

Homosexuality is, in my view, primarily a symptom of gender trauma. Although some people may have been born with biological conditions (prenatal hormonal influences, inborn emotional sensitivity) that make them especially vulnerable to such trauma, what distinguishes the male homosexual condition is that there was an interruption in the normal masculine identification process.

Joshua Slocum is back! Not only is his Disaffected show bigger and better than ever, Josh has recently launched a new consulting service for all those poor, unfortunate souls dealing with high-conflict people in their lives. And he's back to tell us all about it.

Today on MindMatters we ask the big questions: What do you do if someone close to you has a serious personality disorder? What are the possible links between borderline personality and homosexuality? And perhaps the biggest question of all: why do gay men like Madonna and Disney villainesses? So join us as explore these controversial topics and more, in style.

• Disaffected on Rumble
• Josh's Substack

Running Time: 01:54:11

Download: MP3 — 157 MB

For my previous summaries and commentary on Mattias Desmet's The Psychology of Totalitarianism (PT), see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

I liked Desmet's book, and I recommend reading it. But I have a few criticisms in addition to the ones already mentioned in parts 1-5 of my review (like his dismissal of psychopathy) — mainly aspects he neglects. If you haven't yet read Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology (PP), consider this post a supplement to Desmet's PT, a kind of "10 More Things You DIDN'T NOTICE About Totalitarianism S03E22!" Except there probably won't be ten points.

First, there's his sources. I've read books with more pages of footnotes than actual text, books where the footnotes were more interesting than the actual text, and scholarly books with relatively few or even no footnotes whatsoever that were nevertheless were amazing, and didn't need them. Heck, the original manuscript of PP itself barely had any. So I don't mean to be pedantic. However, I think Desmet would have benefited from a wider reading of the existing literature on the topic.

I recently started hearing about the work of the Russian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky. The guy was a brilliant scientist - he was the founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, so not exactly a fringe thinker in his time. Vernadsky took Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere and grounded it in his own deep appreciation of biological, geological, and chemical processes - which was a profound understanding indeed as he pretty much invented the field of biogeochemistry. His views seem to have gone far beyond the Gaia hypothesis, probably ultimately inspired by his writing, that was popularized well beyond his death, which merely posits that the biosphere achieves a high-level homeostatic equilibrium.

Full disclosure: I haven't actually read Vernadsky, so everything that follows is just me riffing on what I've gathered from a few podcasts and blogs. I first heard of the man's work from that brilliant lunatic Clif High (see for instance here), the conspirasphere's bald old mountain wizard; while I take everything Clif says with an extra helping of salt, he's consistently one of the Internet's most interesting people. Matthew Ehret's study group has also been getting into Vernadsky recently.

What the heck is life for?