The author of The Sociopath Next Door found that 4% of the general population are sociopaths, 60% are predisposed to obey sociopaths and authority, and 36% are disagreeable free thinking people like us. Proportion of sociopaths is much higher in government, corporations, and cities. Meanwhile, the CDC just extended the vax travel requirement again...
Wow! We’ll said. My mind has been cracking now and then from the utter madness of Covid crazy around me. Now that the ‘crisis’ seems to be receding no-one says a peep about it. They just go on about their lives as if the threats of me being fired, the restrictions me and my family were placed under never existed?!?!? Not one shred of concern, not one apology. All’s good?!?!? I’ve been stunned at the people close to me who I respected fell for this insanity hook, lime and sinker. They would have reported me to the authorities. In fact one did report my anger on social media about the restrictions, where I never mentioned my employer by name, but brought it to the attention of my team leader, who brought it to the attention of Management and forced me to delete the post. My career, what’s left of it is done at work. I’m sure I’m effectively blacklisted. I’m off FB for life at this point and I will never trust anyone from work as long as I live. I will never be the same after being treated like a dangerous leper by almost everyone. It’s deeply wounded me in relationships. Thanks be to God above for that 15% of my friends who stood with me. I’d never had made it out in jabbed. 🙏🏻
I said this yesterday but it’s even more relevant to this post. Chesterton said, “The purpose of having an open mind is to close it on something solid.” I’ve always prided myself on my high trait openness and my ability *and desire* to steelman my opponents’ arguments. I did not waver during Covid.
BUT, I have come to realize that this very personality trait makes me vulnerable to gaslighting, at least as a distraction and an anchor, because I feel compelled to fully subscribe to every viewpoint for the purposes of examining my own.
And I discovered that I *have* to block people. I *must* turn it off. Instead of spending hours trying to debate, in good faith, the question of what it means to say “2+2=5” or “it’s rude and aggressive to refuse to call a biological male a woman if he/she/they demands it,” I need to recognize that there is a weakness in this openness. It allows too much debate to occur. At some point, it’s my responsibility to say,
“No. Children cannot consent to sex. ‘Gender affirming care’ is abusive. Etc.”
Overall I'd say that intellectuals are MORE susceptible to conformity manipulations. PhDs and MDs have done nothing but conform to attain the highest levels of their fields.
How do you get into a PhD program? Good grades and acceptable ideas. How do you get good grades? Absorb the information and regurgitate it. How do you get acceptable ideas? Believe what you're told. This occurs at every level of education. So what happens when you inject cancerous social ideas into that information stream and then grade students on that material? You get intellectuals who are well credentialed but can't think. Since credentials are proxy for intelligence, those who have no way of assessing the information themselves listen to the "experts" with credentials and those experts simply believe what they're told to believe.
Growing under communism made us keenly aware of propaganda. Americans are the most propagandized people in the world and the least aware of it. A major handicap! Since most of my American friends and family have read 1984 and Brave New World in high school, and since most did not “get” these books, I no longer believe the original intent was to educate but, instead, to program people. In fact, most of our schooling here is not education but programming, plus trade education. It seems to me that the more years of schooling one had the less likely one was to discern the psy-op. Schooling did not make us smarter, and most definitely did not make us wiser. The third of the population who questioned and remained skeptical comes from across the spectrum but it would not surprise me the over-schooled as group were underrepresented in that third.
The fact that people who write such things have access to oxygen troubles me beyond words. Referring to that insane tweet about opening the schools. My sister, a science teacher, no really- shrieked on Facebook that she was being “sentenced to death” when she had to return to classroom teaching. Masked her kids all alone at a lake in Vermont. We can’t discuss Covid because her opinions are based “on science”. Unlike mine. I asked her for scientific justification of those actions , still waiting.
Your story about the conformity test reminded me about a similar experience I had way back in elementary school..........
----------------
That particular day we were being tested on our ability to read and draw clocks. Simple stuff, and the first few questions went by just fine. 6 o’clock? Big hand 12, little hand 6. Easy Peazy!
The issue came when I was asked to draw 4:30. Because I understand how clocks work, I put the big hand on the 6 and the little hand halfway between 4 and 5.
BZZZZZZT
I was instructed that the proper way to draw 4:30 was to put the big hand on the 6 and the little hand directly on the 4.
For a second I thought she was joking. I even looked at the clock in our classroom: 12:15. And that little hand was definitely NOT right on the 12. “Holy shit, my teacher can’t even tell time!” I thought in second-grade language.
But looking back on this incident with a little more experience, I find what happened next to be fascinating: The rest of the test, I answered the questions INCORRECTLY (using her rules) to save my score. Even though my brain KNEW that she was wrong, I went along with it. How many students were similarly docked that day? We’ll never know, because NOBODY spoke up.
The whole art world nonsense when they started to extol the greatness of abstract or modern art, obviously crap, yet promoted as brilliant. Random strokes or just a few shapes or smears or splashes of paint? Indistinguishable from a toddler painting.
WOKE is child abuse taken out of the home and spread to the populace at large. At 2 months of age, the human infant engages in the social smile towards the human face. It’s the beginning of learning reciprocity and reciprocity, reflection, back & forth honest social engagement builds frontal lobes & our capability to be human. Imagine this 2 month old infant has a “Helpless-Hostile” Borderline mother (like Susan would be in sure). She’s not interested in Reciprocity. She’s stuck in her own world and everyone exists to serve her. The infant doesn’t have an honest social partner. The infant is left in crazy-land on her own. This continues for the infant, now child. In order not to enrage the all powerful, self-centered and abusive mother, the child is forced to agree that 2+2 is 5. Not to agree is a sure way to be murdered quick but agreeing with all of this screws up you too. WOKE is child abuse taken out of the home and forced onto the masses. WOKE destroys frontal lobe development and human social capabilities by forbidding reciprocal dialogue, love and reason. There’s nothing empathic about it. It’s all personality disordered adults using power they shouldn’t have to hurt others and in doing this, they hurt themselves too. I hate Child Abuse and I hate WOKE.
Exactly right about authority, which is why there’s such a spiritual element at play here, as Tucker noticed too. If you don’t view God as being in charge, then you want to be in charge yourself.., and by the time you realize you’re actually enslaved to demons, it’s too late!
More on that in my recent piece at the federalist about the death cult of the modern medical establishment:
"So this is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy ... I think a lot of us are really working to divest from those ideas, but we haven't given ourselves permission to stop dieting or to accept our weight wherever it might fall."
As one who has battled his weight, body mass, and shape almost all of his teenage and adult life, I found this most interesting.
There is a fine line (not an invisible one) between acceptance of one's weight (and perhaps by extension, one's self), and insisting that one's morbid obesity is all right, even healthy, which is what the body-positivity movement is doing, and it's more destructive than the morbid obesity, itself.
Accepting that you are morbidly obese and admitting that it is not okay gives you a starting point to make changes (tiny, little ones, first) and work on becoming more healthy. In doing so, you are taking responsibility for your condition from that point, forward.
Whereas proudly (but ignorantly) proclaiming that your morbid obesity is a good thing, healthy, and even remotely attractive, is harmful. The odds are that if you are morbidly obese, you also are contending with other co-morbidities (type-II diabetes, high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, neuropathy, et al.) which, if not managed, will ultimately be prematurely fatal.
Being morbidly obese does not make you a bad person. It has nothing to do with your value as an individual. Being on the receiving end of someone maliciously fat-shaming you is no fun, and as difficult as it may be, there is likely something to take away from their ignorant remarks that smacks of truth.
It's okay to admit that you're not healthy. It's NOT okay to do nothing about it.
This would have been my guess prior to the previous three years. Alas, I’ve had a PROFOUND shift in my assessments many institutions and their employees.
I fall into that ~25% of not caving to Asch-style conformity not due to my intellect, but due to my stubbornness. Which has been a problem in the past, but served me admirably the last three years.
I didn’t really have doubts about my position, but the cognitive dissonance in watching (purportedly) intelligent/highly credentialed people act like a piece of cloth over their face would help prevent them from a microscopic virus, was REALLY hard to reconcile.
(Along with all the other safety theater based on nothing more than wishful thinking.)
I’m reminded of the meme you posted a few months back (I’m paraphrasing): we used to think that all people needed to behave in a sane, rational way was access to information. Now we have the internet. How’d that theory work out for us?
It just boggles the mind how educated we are, yet how fundamentally lacking in common sense, wisdom and courage.
The nuclear option is space aliens. Despite there being zero concrete evidence a recent poll indicated 70% believe in extraterrestrials. That’ll be the biggest avenue to bamboozlement of all time. And virtually everyone will buy it.
The author of The Sociopath Next Door found that 4% of the general population are sociopaths, 60% are predisposed to obey sociopaths and authority, and 36% are disagreeable free thinking people like us. Proportion of sociopaths is much higher in government, corporations, and cities. Meanwhile, the CDC just extended the vax travel requirement again...
Wow! We’ll said. My mind has been cracking now and then from the utter madness of Covid crazy around me. Now that the ‘crisis’ seems to be receding no-one says a peep about it. They just go on about their lives as if the threats of me being fired, the restrictions me and my family were placed under never existed?!?!? Not one shred of concern, not one apology. All’s good?!?!? I’ve been stunned at the people close to me who I respected fell for this insanity hook, lime and sinker. They would have reported me to the authorities. In fact one did report my anger on social media about the restrictions, where I never mentioned my employer by name, but brought it to the attention of my team leader, who brought it to the attention of Management and forced me to delete the post. My career, what’s left of it is done at work. I’m sure I’m effectively blacklisted. I’m off FB for life at this point and I will never trust anyone from work as long as I live. I will never be the same after being treated like a dangerous leper by almost everyone. It’s deeply wounded me in relationships. Thanks be to God above for that 15% of my friends who stood with me. I’d never had made it out in jabbed. 🙏🏻
I’m going to have to read this one a few more times to absorb everything. This is some serious red pill knowledge here. Thanks EGM.
I said this yesterday but it’s even more relevant to this post. Chesterton said, “The purpose of having an open mind is to close it on something solid.” I’ve always prided myself on my high trait openness and my ability *and desire* to steelman my opponents’ arguments. I did not waver during Covid.
BUT, I have come to realize that this very personality trait makes me vulnerable to gaslighting, at least as a distraction and an anchor, because I feel compelled to fully subscribe to every viewpoint for the purposes of examining my own.
And I discovered that I *have* to block people. I *must* turn it off. Instead of spending hours trying to debate, in good faith, the question of what it means to say “2+2=5” or “it’s rude and aggressive to refuse to call a biological male a woman if he/she/they demands it,” I need to recognize that there is a weakness in this openness. It allows too much debate to occur. At some point, it’s my responsibility to say,
“No. Children cannot consent to sex. ‘Gender affirming care’ is abusive. Etc.”
Overall I'd say that intellectuals are MORE susceptible to conformity manipulations. PhDs and MDs have done nothing but conform to attain the highest levels of their fields.
How do you get into a PhD program? Good grades and acceptable ideas. How do you get good grades? Absorb the information and regurgitate it. How do you get acceptable ideas? Believe what you're told. This occurs at every level of education. So what happens when you inject cancerous social ideas into that information stream and then grade students on that material? You get intellectuals who are well credentialed but can't think. Since credentials are proxy for intelligence, those who have no way of assessing the information themselves listen to the "experts" with credentials and those experts simply believe what they're told to believe.
Growing under communism made us keenly aware of propaganda. Americans are the most propagandized people in the world and the least aware of it. A major handicap! Since most of my American friends and family have read 1984 and Brave New World in high school, and since most did not “get” these books, I no longer believe the original intent was to educate but, instead, to program people. In fact, most of our schooling here is not education but programming, plus trade education. It seems to me that the more years of schooling one had the less likely one was to discern the psy-op. Schooling did not make us smarter, and most definitely did not make us wiser. The third of the population who questioned and remained skeptical comes from across the spectrum but it would not surprise me the over-schooled as group were underrepresented in that third.
The fact that people who write such things have access to oxygen troubles me beyond words. Referring to that insane tweet about opening the schools. My sister, a science teacher, no really- shrieked on Facebook that she was being “sentenced to death” when she had to return to classroom teaching. Masked her kids all alone at a lake in Vermont. We can’t discuss Covid because her opinions are based “on science”. Unlike mine. I asked her for scientific justification of those actions , still waiting.
Your story about the conformity test reminded me about a similar experience I had way back in elementary school..........
----------------
That particular day we were being tested on our ability to read and draw clocks. Simple stuff, and the first few questions went by just fine. 6 o’clock? Big hand 12, little hand 6. Easy Peazy!
The issue came when I was asked to draw 4:30. Because I understand how clocks work, I put the big hand on the 6 and the little hand halfway between 4 and 5.
BZZZZZZT
I was instructed that the proper way to draw 4:30 was to put the big hand on the 6 and the little hand directly on the 4.
For a second I thought she was joking. I even looked at the clock in our classroom: 12:15. And that little hand was definitely NOT right on the 12. “Holy shit, my teacher can’t even tell time!” I thought in second-grade language.
But looking back on this incident with a little more experience, I find what happened next to be fascinating: The rest of the test, I answered the questions INCORRECTLY (using her rules) to save my score. Even though my brain KNEW that she was wrong, I went along with it. How many students were similarly docked that day? We’ll never know, because NOBODY spoke up.
---------
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/why-are-you-like-this
I've often wondered why I and some others saw through all the BS but others did not.
Looking back to my childhood, I was never part of the 'cool kids' group and never really cared about that. I had friends and was fairly happy.
I think this made a difference. People like me sort of became immune to 'group think' and go-along-to-get-along.
I also think that having a strong faith life makes a huge difference.
The whole art world nonsense when they started to extol the greatness of abstract or modern art, obviously crap, yet promoted as brilliant. Random strokes or just a few shapes or smears or splashes of paint? Indistinguishable from a toddler painting.
WOKE is child abuse taken out of the home and spread to the populace at large. At 2 months of age, the human infant engages in the social smile towards the human face. It’s the beginning of learning reciprocity and reciprocity, reflection, back & forth honest social engagement builds frontal lobes & our capability to be human. Imagine this 2 month old infant has a “Helpless-Hostile” Borderline mother (like Susan would be in sure). She’s not interested in Reciprocity. She’s stuck in her own world and everyone exists to serve her. The infant doesn’t have an honest social partner. The infant is left in crazy-land on her own. This continues for the infant, now child. In order not to enrage the all powerful, self-centered and abusive mother, the child is forced to agree that 2+2 is 5. Not to agree is a sure way to be murdered quick but agreeing with all of this screws up you too. WOKE is child abuse taken out of the home and forced onto the masses. WOKE destroys frontal lobe development and human social capabilities by forbidding reciprocal dialogue, love and reason. There’s nothing empathic about it. It’s all personality disordered adults using power they shouldn’t have to hurt others and in doing this, they hurt themselves too. I hate Child Abuse and I hate WOKE.
Exactly right about authority, which is why there’s such a spiritual element at play here, as Tucker noticed too. If you don’t view God as being in charge, then you want to be in charge yourself.., and by the time you realize you’re actually enslaved to demons, it’s too late!
More on that in my recent piece at the federalist about the death cult of the modern medical establishment:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/28/prescription-for-parents-vet-your-childs-doctors-they-no-longer-deserve-your-trust/
Gaty.substack.com
"So this is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy ... I think a lot of us are really working to divest from those ideas, but we haven't given ourselves permission to stop dieting or to accept our weight wherever it might fall."
As one who has battled his weight, body mass, and shape almost all of his teenage and adult life, I found this most interesting.
There is a fine line (not an invisible one) between acceptance of one's weight (and perhaps by extension, one's self), and insisting that one's morbid obesity is all right, even healthy, which is what the body-positivity movement is doing, and it's more destructive than the morbid obesity, itself.
Accepting that you are morbidly obese and admitting that it is not okay gives you a starting point to make changes (tiny, little ones, first) and work on becoming more healthy. In doing so, you are taking responsibility for your condition from that point, forward.
Whereas proudly (but ignorantly) proclaiming that your morbid obesity is a good thing, healthy, and even remotely attractive, is harmful. The odds are that if you are morbidly obese, you also are contending with other co-morbidities (type-II diabetes, high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, neuropathy, et al.) which, if not managed, will ultimately be prematurely fatal.
Being morbidly obese does not make you a bad person. It has nothing to do with your value as an individual. Being on the receiving end of someone maliciously fat-shaming you is no fun, and as difficult as it may be, there is likely something to take away from their ignorant remarks that smacks of truth.
It's okay to admit that you're not healthy. It's NOT okay to do nothing about it.
“is intelligence proof against authority?”
This would have been my guess prior to the previous three years. Alas, I’ve had a PROFOUND shift in my assessments many institutions and their employees.
I fall into that ~25% of not caving to Asch-style conformity not due to my intellect, but due to my stubbornness. Which has been a problem in the past, but served me admirably the last three years.
I didn’t really have doubts about my position, but the cognitive dissonance in watching (purportedly) intelligent/highly credentialed people act like a piece of cloth over their face would help prevent them from a microscopic virus, was REALLY hard to reconcile.
(Along with all the other safety theater based on nothing more than wishful thinking.)
I’m reminded of the meme you posted a few months back (I’m paraphrasing): we used to think that all people needed to behave in a sane, rational way was access to information. Now we have the internet. How’d that theory work out for us?
It just boggles the mind how educated we are, yet how fundamentally lacking in common sense, wisdom and courage.
I would wager the percentage is considerably lower than 25% today.
The "sample size" is much bigger due to the velocity of info.
So the pressure not to be wrong is even more intense.
The effect is levered because of visibility and exposure.
There's more to "lose", the bigger the audience.
I believe covid is prima facia evidence of this.
The nuclear option is space aliens. Despite there being zero concrete evidence a recent poll indicated 70% believe in extraterrestrials. That’ll be the biggest avenue to bamboozlement of all time. And virtually everyone will buy it.