Much has been said about how fear has been used to drive the narrative and help impose restrictions on personal liberty we have faced during the pandemic. In this article I would like to suggest that anxiety, rather than fear itself, has become the much bigger concern, and one whose effects will haunt us for years to come.

If we take a step back for a moment, we can see that psychological language has been in the spotlight throughout the last two years. Some sections of the media and various bodies of experts have undoubtedly used their influence to generate fear in the general public. Although fear can paralyze our thoughts and actions, I believe that what we have actually been subject to has been a deliberate attempt to generate massive levels of societal anxiety. As a psychologist, I believe that anxiety, rather than fear, will turn out to be a major health problem facing individuals in the years ahead. Due to a number of complex factors operating at personal and community levels, the incidence of clinical and sub-clinical anxiety has never been higher in the U.K. population. The data to support this claim are well known, and yet, we have just been through a situation where psychologists on SAGE supported by others have deliberately stoked anxiety to increase compliance around various Covid measures.

For a generation we've watched academia go slowly mad. These past two years we found out why that matters.

In the previous post in this series, I laid out a bird's eye view of why the academy is DIEing.

There are real consequences to the death of the academy.

Societal institutions are meant to serve specific functions. The police are meant to keep order. The military, to defend the frontiers. The media, to inform about important current events. Of course, sometimes there can be multiple subsidiary functions - traditionally, for instance, the military has served as a coming-of-age mechanism that turns boys into men. But the subsidiary purpose is always something that flows naturally out of the primary purpose. To use the military example, turning boys into men is a natural outgrowth of the hardships of training and, during war time, the emotional impact of being blooded in combat; as such there is no conflict between the secondary purpose of providing a male coming-of-age ritual and the primary function of national defense (or, for more aggressive nations, conquest).

The primary function of academia is to serve as an arena in which the truth of the world is ascertained, to whatever degree of accuracy and precision it is practical to do so. Academia is the place where facts about the world are gathered, and the veracity of those facts and interpretations of those phenomena developed and debated, in order to arrive at an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that explain that which is actually observed. That might be a scientist's way of seeing things, and you might object that there's a certain arrogance there - do scholars of literature use the scientific method? But even in the soft disciplines it is not so different: the existence of works of culture in the human world is a fact, and it is the function of humanities scholars to understand their subject matter - the psychological, historical, and cultural contexts in which creative works were born, and the subsequent cultural and historical impact of those works - just as it is the function of an organic chemist to understand the properties of chemical structures of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.

Quantum mechanics and the organic light of consciousness.
Quantum mechanics suggests that particles can be in a state of superposition - in two states at the same time - until a measurement take place. Only then does the wavefunction describing the particle collapses into one of the two states. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function takes place when a conscious observer is involved. But according to Roger Penrose, it's the other way around. Instead of consciousness causing the collapse, Penrose suggested that wavefunctions collapse spontaneously and in the process give rise to consciousness. Despite the strangeness of this hypothesis, recent experimental results suggest that such a process takes place within microtubules in the brain. This could mean that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, arising first in primitive bio-structures, in individual neurons, cascading upwards to networks of neurons, argues Roger Penrose collaborator Stuart Hameroff.

Consciousness defines our existence. It is, in a sense, all we really have, all we really are, The nature of consciousness has been pondered in many ways, in many cultures, for many years. But we still can't quite fathom it.

Consciousness is, some say, all-encompassing, comprising reality itself, the material world a mere illusion. Others say consciousness is the illusion, without any real sense of phenomenal experience, or conscious control. According to this view we are, as TH Huxley bleakly said, 'merely helpless spectators, along for the ride'. Then, there are those who see the brain as a computer. Brain functions have historically been compared to contemporary information technologies, from the ancient Greek idea of memory as a 'seal ring' in wax, to telegraph switching circuits, holograms and computers. Neuroscientists, philosophers, and artificial intelligence (AI) proponents liken the brain to a complex computer of simple algorithmic neurons, connected by variable strength synapses. These processes may be suitable for non-conscious 'auto-pilot' functions, but can't account for consciousness.

Finally there are those who take consciousness as fundamental, as connected somehow to the fine scale structure and physics of the universe. This includes, for example Roger Penrose's view that consciousness is linked to the Objective Reduction process - the 'collapse of the quantum wavefunction' - an activity on the edge between quantum and classical realms. Some see such connections to fundamental physics as spiritual, as a connection to others, and to the universe, others see it as proof that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, one that developed long before life itself.

It was a story I just couldn't get out of my head. A young teen had died in a town not far from where I live, a town where I used to live. I knew people who had kids who knew this girl.

I heard she was a swimmer, bright and popular. At first the talk was about how she'd died. I heard someone surmise that she was killed. Someone else said it was a horrible accident, and of course, there were murmurings that maybe she had done it herself. And then, I heard nothing.

Months passed and I eventually put the whole incident out of my mind, until I came across an article in our major metro newspaper. The girl's parents had come forward to share the terrible truth about their beautiful teenage daughter who threw herself off an overpass.

Just a week or so after the new edition of Political Ponerology was published in March 2022, I saw this tweet:


As something of a nerd, I was quite excited. Especially after I saw that Robert Hare was the lead author. Dr. Hare is the leading expert on psychopathy, developer of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, and this was his first foray, to my knowledge, into the explicitly political dimensions of psychopathy, something of an obsession of mine (though his work with Paul Babiak did introduce and popularize the idea of the white-collar, corporate psychopath).

You can read the full paper here. I discuss it in depth here (audio), video form below.

We live in an age of maximum arrogance. When you watch companies with some of the most marketable brands in the world torch them on an altar of political correctness, it's easy to just think them stupid or going with the flow of history.

But they aren't.

Because not only do we live in an age of maximal arrogance, we also live in the biggest self-created false realities in human history.

It is the height of irony that the biggest brand in storytelling, Disney, has succumbed to its own arrogance and self-delusion, becoming trapped in a false reality that Disney should dictate the direction humanity should accept.

That's what lies at the heart of Disney's troubles today. It arrogantly believed it has an obligation to decide what is and is not culturally acceptable to a majority of its customers. It completely misread the room in thinking a large percentage of its business comes from the insufferably woke suburban moms who are just as fucked up as the kids they've raised.

The good news is Disney got the message loud and clear that they are not the arbiters of when it's appropriate to groom children for adulthood. The bad news is they may not have heard it.

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock.

But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.

How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual.

A crisis in physics

Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes how things work in the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions. General relativity describes the big picture of gravity and how objects move.

Not since Nuremberg have political leaders and functionaries accused or guilty of crimes against humanity been accessible to psychologists for close study, specifically with regard to the presence of personality disorders like psychopathy. A new paper by Robert Hare and colleagues is the first of its kind to examine men convicted of crimes against humanity and test for psychopathy using the PCL-R, specifically, members of Pinochet's armed forces convicted of crimes like torture and murder. Today on MindMatters, Harrison reads portions of the paper and discusses its main conclusions and implications. (See his substack post on the subject too.)

Sources:

• Hare et al.'s paper
• Political Ponerology

Running Time: 01:08:55

Download: MP3 — 94.7 MB

Cluster B Blindness always leads to disaster

I figured for the inaugural installment of this new Substack I might as well choose a subject that is juicy and probably controversial. But we'll get to that. First, a short introduction. Political ponerology is the scientific study of political evil. It is inspired by the trail blazed by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski in his underground classic, Political Ponerology, written in 1984 but more relevant than ever. I recently edited a new edition of the book to bring it into the present time. If I do my job right here, you'll still get something by reading just these posts, but I recommend reading the book for the essential background it provides. So with that said, let's get right into it.
Ponerogenesis is simply the origins of evil: the essential ingredients and steps that go into baking a cake of human suffering. The main ingredients: specific personality disorders, especially those labeled "Cluster B" (antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic), and the "Dark Triad" or "Dark Tetrad" personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism). These "ponerogenic factors" combine and interact with the processes of everyday human life to give rise to evil. Philip Zimbardo's definition will suit my purposes:

Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others — or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage and permit others to do so on your behalf. (The Lucifer Effect, p. 5)

In the conclusion of Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, the question is asked:

"What would the left hemisphere's world look like if the left hemisphere of the brain became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere's world altogether?"

In this series of posts I'd like to break down his conclusion and discuss just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere's perspective.

We could expect, for a start, that there would be a loss of the broader picture, and a substitution of a more narrowly focussed, restricted, but detailed, view of the world, making it perhaps difficult to maintain a coherent overview. The broader picture would in any case be disregarded, because it would lack the appearance of clarity and certainty which the left hemisphere craves. In general, the 'bits' of anything, the parts into which it could be disassembled, would come to seem more important, more likely to lead to knowledge and understanding, than the whole, which would come to be seen as no more than the sum of the parts.

Ever more narrowly focussed attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information, and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience. Knowledge, in its turn would seem more 'real' than what one might call wisdom, which would seem too nebulous, something never to be grasped.

One would expect the left hemisphere to keep doing refining experiments on detail, at which it is exceedingly proficient, but to be correspondingly blind to what is not clear or certain, or cannot be brought into focus right in the middle of the visual field. In fact one would expect a sort of dismissive attitude to anything outside of its limited focus, because the right hemisphere's take on the whole picture would simply not be available to it.
- Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary