critical mass in the echo chamber

the ideovidual event horizon and the swamp donkey swan song

the human mind does not like internal contradiction; it struggles to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously. 99.9% of humans when possessed of belief of “A” and faced with data of “not A” must either change their belief or find some way to reject or ignore the data. which way people go depends a great deal on:

• commitment to the belief

• the quality and quantity of the new data

• the availability of other rationalizations or explanations

many try to argue that intelligence is some sort of proof against doing stupid things to preserve one’s cherished views, but this is simply false. it may well make the matter worse by allowing more intricate and compelling rationalizations and dodges. more powerful computers just generate GIGO faster. nothing runs downhill faster than a thoroughbred.

it’s one of the few truly non-intuitive internal human processes and it’s non-intuitive precisely because it evolved as a defense mechanism to protect you from these sorts of intellectual divide by zero dissolutions.

in moderation, it’s useful. in excess, it’s a one-way ticket to hallucination inhabitation.

you’ve seen it and felt it 1000 times. some new study on masking to stop covid comes out. basically everyone sees the conclusions and immediately decides if it’s right or wrong before even reading it. they “know” if masks do or do not work and by this point in the game, pretty much no one is changing their mind again. the positions are too dug in.

you accept it or deny it depending on its alignment with your preconception.

cognitive dissonance is an incredibly powerful process and those who are sufficiently committed to some version of reality or self-conception will actively and without a hint of irony or self-awareness reject any and all new data that contradicts their existing beliefs.

the intensity and baroqueness of the subjectively inhabited landscapes can get pretty wild.

and lunacy loves company to a degree to which misery could never hope to aspire.

it requires no consistency, sense, or checksum.

in no small irony, the more absurd and internally contradictory it becomes, the more intense the effect. this is what happens when you really push down to critical mass in the echo-chamber:

it’s all special pleading of unfalsifiable solipsistic nonsense.

there is no fact nor any analogy that can penetrate the distortion field.

you can ask this woman "if quarter horses can identify as seahorses and go live under the waves or if perhaps objective biology might have some veto on this idea, and the idea will roll off and she’ll claim that “gender, unlike species is a social construct.”

you can ask if one can express their blackness by identifying as an african american and simply be a black man. she’ll call you a racist and argue that race is fundamental and whiteness defined by the absence of melanin and some other biological markers far less central to biological form than sex.

there will be zero cross talk between these ideas and her thoughts on gender. sufficiently powerful cognitive dissonance is a kind of fragmentation where every belief becomes a sort of “special case” a unique set of facts to be learned and held separate from challenge, analogy, or cross-checking to other similar systems.

this is, to a great extent, why i suspect it becomes such a trap for those with externally validated identities and that therefore subsume themselves to movements. this is the distinction between people who HAVE ideas and people who ARE their ideas that we have discussed previously.

a person who has ideas suffers no loss of self when an idea is challenged or overturned. maybe there’s a moment of embarrassment about “wow, i was wrong” but the self still stands at the end. you’re the same person, you just changed your mind about something.

but those who ARE their ideas and build them into the marrow and integument of self and self-regard have no such flexibility.

they experience disagreement with any of their notions as personal attack for they and the idea are one and the same.

they experience disproof of these ideas as literal erasure.

once you realize this, this meme snaps into sharp focus:

this is how what was, in the 1990’s the center left of US politics became “right wing” and why the current left sees it as “far right.”

as the ideas of the “progressives” move increasingly away from any sort of defensible reality on race, gender, economics, social structure, energy, politics, human nature and who knows what else, a disaster curve sets up.

first it shucks anyone able to change their mind out of the movement. it’s our way or the highway, you must agree with us or you're the bad guy and we turn on you with the special vitriol that cults reserve for renouncers. this is the natural self-defense mechanism for an ideology or individual seeking to avoid being overturned and when individual and ideology merge into one unit, the “ideovidual” they become the worst aspects of both and the useful parts of neither.

ideoviduality is a rigid state and ideoviduals held in place by external validators become even more so because it is not even their mind that needs changing but that of a tribe and the need to remain a part of that in which one has foundationally anchored one’s sense of self and self-worth exerts extreme pressure to conform and reject outside stimulus and contradiction. in effect, this dials the “commitment to belief” up to 11 and renders its protection the most acute and desperate of personal internal needs.

this drives ideoviduals to accrete like planetary masses out of the ideological ecliptic, forming like-minded worlds able to self-reinforce and, perhaps more important, able to all shout down dissent together, helping to keep one another in line.

cancel culture is a great homogenizer.

the rest is just emergent process.

iterate this activity over and over and you will select for those who reject others to preserve belief and belief uniformity until you wind up with groups of near perfect homogeneity. they profess to support “diversity” but ask any one of them their view on transgender and you can with near perfect accuracy also model their views on schools, energy policy, voting, race, covid, speech, economics, politics, food, and 400 other vectors.

you can see this in every attitudinal study of political groups.

it’s a positive feedback loop.

once you have begun to stake out and defend hallucinatory terrain, reality’s intrusion becomes ever more acute and persistent.

if your response to this incursion into your cognitive landscape is “ignore, this, double down, pay more loyalty to the group” your beliefs become ever more extreme and thus the very act you use to defend yourself invites and invokes greater and more persuasive challenge to your worldview.

before long, you’re responding to challenges to fabulism with more fabulism and planting flags atop ever more absurd hills upon which to die.

this is a disaster curve for a human and phantasmagoric delusion fuel for political movements and to the extent that the two are conjoined in ideoviduality, you get a runaway train to self-deception and ruin.

the cycle becomes inescapable.

the left moves ever further leftward because it rejects anything not like itself and it rejects anything not like itself because it is ever further left and needs to defend the increasingly indefensible territory it has staked out.

the stories that need be told in order to preserve illusions devolve from fairy tales into inversions projected onto others to allow the un-self-awareness to persist.

this is why it’s so common to see such people to obliviously ascribe to others that of which they themselves are guilty.

it’s also why they grow isolated and the rage builds.

the whole thing is a pressure cooker.

you become what you profess to hate, that which you claim your whole identity stands oppositional against, and you have no idea that this is so.

it takes A LOT of psychic energy to keep that at bay and the easiest outlet is accusation.

fascists name themselves antifa and authoritarians as liberators.

the irony grows so thick as to opaque self-regard.

the stone that the builder rejects becomes the cornerstone and entire mindscapes are arranged and cultivated to deny that this is so and to attribute all such faults to others.

there is actual data on this.

This isn’t mere speculation. Our scientific data demonstrate this very clearly. In a national survey of over five thousand Americans, we gave people a standard authoritarianism questionnaire and then afterwards asked them a simple question: “Do you view yourself as a dogmatic and authoritarian person?”

Conservative Americans who scored high on the authoritarianism questionnaire had no problem saying “Yes, I am authoritarian.” But liberals were a different thing entirely. Not only were liberal authoritarians less likely than conservatives to accurately identify themselves as authoritarians (when they were, in fact, authoritarian), but there was actually a negative correlation between left-wing authoritarianism (the reality) and liberals’ willingness to identify as authoritarian (their own perception). That means that the more authoritarian liberals are, the less they believe they are authoritarian!

key propositions included:

• our country needs a mighty leader;

• that the leader should destroy opponents;

• that people should trust the judgment of the proper authorities,

• avoid listening to noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds,

• put some tough leaders in power who oppose those values and silence the troublemakers,

• and smash the beliefs of opponents;

• that what our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush the evil;

• that society should strongly punish those they disagree with.

• They also deny that an opponent has a right to be wherever he or she wants to be, and support the statement that the country would be better off if certain groups would just shut up and accept their group’s proper place in society.

it’s not subtle stuff.

These items hit all of the hallmarks of the consensus conceptualization of the authoritarian person. When conservatives agree with those items, they subsequently admit (accurately) that they are authoritarian. When liberals agree with those items, they actually are more likely to say they are not authoritarian.

the left has an authoritarian problem (but doesn’t know it)

“As an academic psychologist who has taught prejudice for over twenty years, I’ve often said in my classes that one of the most dangerous people in society is the person who thinks they aren’t racist. Why? Because everyone has the potential for racism, and the person who denies that potential will never address their own problems and thus will spend their life engaging in racist actions. By parallel, a political party is particularly dangerous when it claims the loudest that it is not authoritarian. Why? Because that party has potential authoritarians. Every party has potential authoritarians—but a party that denies the problem also won’t address the problem.

Right now that party is the Democratic Party. We’ve tacitly raised a generation of liberals who think that it’s normal for Disney to fire actress Gina Carano for having a political opinion that some people don’t like, and yet also think they aren’t authoritarian for doing so”

quite literally: our brand is self-delusion.

once you see this, many other matters and practices also snap into focus:

the flimsy botnets that proliferate on social media and the instant lockstep of pay for prattle “influencers” who erupt in uniform talking points on and framings of issues every time someone puts a quarter in and pulls the sock puppet neck cord may seem ridiculous, but this is because the messages are not aimed at you. i would wager that basically no one they are aimed at is reading this. it’s not about the middle or about sense or even about believability, it’s about tribal signaling to keep what’s left of the herd aligned and in the pen. it’s noise to drown out signal and keep the idoevidiots useful.

it’s also a negative sum game. it keeps pushing further and further into febrile illusions fashioned as ideological and psychological firmament.

all reasonable ground disintegrates into untenable foundation and the gaps between “us” and “everyone else” widen past mutual recognizability.

this becomes a fearful time as some of the anchoring illusions come under pressure.

a big part of holding such a cohort together are claims to moral majority, and for such externally validated people, majority basically means morality. they are sure the world is with them and that by consensus they can make reality because this is how their inner underpinnings work. tribal consensus is the sense of self and this may work for a time on internal landscapes, but it cannot manage external. too many facts keep leaking in and physics, biology, economics, and human nature are ultimately undefeated in wars against ideologies.

things go shrill and desperate and dark, most of all as control slips.

you could see it even before the election.

the party of “do as you’re told and do not deviate from approved thoughts and narratives” tried to brand itself as “brat” and spewed hatred while demanding each and all join the party of joy.

and joy will be mandatory.

the close-minded and increasingly insular and reality divorced mindset crunches ever tighter as singularity approaches:

one party, one view, one mind.

they claim diversity to be strength, but refuse to allow any diversity of opinion.

pretty soon, it’s more struggle than session and any tiny divergence from canon gets you excommunicated.

cancel culture that began as a defense mechanism becomes an autoimmune disease, tearing the host apart and leaving them exsanguinated after fits of inflammation and self-destruction.

and pretty soon even your own one time allies need to back away.

(note that this attitude graph research was done under a grant from the european research council and published in the very liberal british journal of social psychology.)

it’s actually quite an interesting methodology that does not rely upon any preconceived maps of who holds what views.

The present research connects individual-level representations of attitude-identity links with macro-level attitude-structures (i.e., depicted as network), hence bridging two typically disconnected layers of analyses. Modelling attitude-structures as networks allows us to explore inter-attitude links through inductive computation, meaning that no “top-down” assumptions about the structural and distributional properties of attitudes are required.

and if you time lapsed their graph, i’d wager you’d see the left getting smaller and smaller year by year as more and more apostates are kicked out for wrongthink.

because that’s what cancel culture does.

and past a point, it simply cannot hold. there is no reason, no integrity, just purges and self-satisfied ideological purity testing.

none of the alliances can sustain.

it’s not stupidity, it’s desperation.

it’s not calculation, it’s need.

the core of this group is so far offside from reality that the fall from their current valence of “we’re the virtuous good guys, dammit!” to earth is more than they can bear or even conceive.

it would constitute utter erasure.

it’s easy to see how desperately the cope works from the outside, but from the inside, it’s just survival. they cannot allow themselves to see it. it would end them.

nor is it a coincidence that this is also the demographic most likely to end a friendship over political differences and to champion the mentally ill as though hormonal and genital inversion is a “lifestyle choice.”

the politics, the cognitive dissonance, the mental illness, it’s all one thing selecting for and feeding off of itself.

and the damage is very real.

the level of deprogramming that’s going to be needed as the democratic power base and democratic party come apart at the seams will astonish.

we’re sailing into a no joke mental health crisis and the great fear is that people jump from one cult to the next like chain lightning. robbed of easy answers and external identity validation, you just go find a new sponsor and become a new kind of ideovidual.

it will shred the political left like something out of fargo and leave them fractious and fractured.

the smarter of rodentia-democraticus can see this one coming and will not stay around to watch the final phases of self-immolation.

the last of the adults are leaving the room.

will the last rat off the ship please turn out the lights.