derangement syndrome as symptom of paradigm shift

the campus has become a cathedral mistaken for a bazaar and this is driving its clerisy mad

trump derangement syndrome. musk derangement syndrome. climate derangement, gender derangement, the list goes on and on. at a certain point with derangement of such multifarious and ubiquitous nature perhaps one must inevitably be drawn to ask some pointy questions about whether it is, in fact, an entire movement that has become deranged and to seek the deeper cause behind and beneath this recurrent pathology.

are the individual instantiations indicative of some deeper, more universal pathos? are they emerging as symptoms of a more profound underlying sickness rather than constituting stand alone maladies in their own regard?

i suspect the answer is yes.

let’s look.

the authoritarian/leftist intersect seems to always focus on individuals and avatars as “prime movers” imbuing movements and times with purpose and doctrine. they do not become fixated upon the positions or the values of that which they oppose so much as the people. the idea of emergent order or opinion is conspicuously absent.

they may care about roe v wade or climate, but it’s always “trump did this” and “musk did that” and always myopia and selective blindness to european standards for abortion or celebrities taking private jets to collect climate awards. there is no consistency nor any seeming whole or holistic framework.

such variance of standard on in group/out group belies a lack of general case logical or ethical thinking or extrapolation from first principles. instead, this collage of viewpoints tends to be tribal allegiance rather than intellectual underpinning. the fact that the tribe has mistaken itself for intellectual and critical (right down to naming their theories after it) makes this far more flagrant. in fact, this is to a great extent what gives rise to the problem:

there is no critical thinking allowed in critical race or gender theory.

the simple and harsh fact is this: very few humans are critical thinkers. it’s probably about 10% of humanity that is truly able to reason critically as native thought process, roughly the number who used to go to college. but with ~50% now attending at least some collegiate/university schooling the nature of “higher education” has inevitably altered.

4 in 5 (likely more) of the new would be denizens of the ivory towers cannot engage in the sorts of critical thinking and reasoning that allow extrapolation to the specific from the general or enables the cross checking of a process or pretext as representing a general case solution vs a narrower one in order to determine how it fits into broader moral precepts. it’s a not a capability they possess. you cannot teach it, train it, or inculcate it. you might as well teach linear algebra for schnauzers.

so what is taught instead is the aping of critical thinking by the rote memorization of case by case tribal position enabling and ennobling what ultimately amount to arbitrary sets of rules to “be in the tribe” and be assured that you’re a good little boy or girl or whatever dizzyingly complex bespoke pronouned ersatz identity has been foisted upon you.

this elevates a very different sort of person to prominence, captive thinkers and memorizers rather than free thinkers and analyzers.

it’s also simply awful for those who do think critically, a suppressive tour of false education and assessment, a doctrinaire force feeding devoid of nourishment. it drives them away. selection become adverse.

and pretty soon you have a complex system of thought that few (if any) of the individuals who comprise it are capable of actually assessing for accuracy or consistency. everyone is just following some guru who followed some other guru turtles all the way down until just about no one has any idea what any of this means and a few “bosses” are interpreting everything for everyone with the hyper-prickly exclusionist zeal of medieval popes.

what pervades is not as spirit of inquiry but rather one of inquisition.

meanwhile, such a system is infinitely seductive to low identity followers who form the marrow and musculature of a new sort of cargo clerisy. these are the “upper midwits” who so willingly subsume self to the useful idiocy of playing at tribal teleological enforcer because to gain the coveted hall monitor sash and lord power and position over those smarter than one, all one need do is memorize by rote, regurgitate upon demand, and brook no deviation or dissent. you just learn whatever new word be it “racist” or “sexist” or “fascist” or “transphobe” that has been semantically mapped onto “heretic” and off you go! easy peasy.

the selector is not for intellect but rather for obedience.

as a result this scupper collects all the aspiring head girls and lead boys as it offers the promise of vaulting the lesser up onto the vaunted perches of elite intellect by displacing and discrediting those who belonged there.

perversely, this seems to carry with it an inherent need for the organizing dogmas to be false, even ostentatiously so.

after all, what better way to purge the sound of mind and extensive of vision than to claim that up is down, sideways is straight, and ruin is renovation until no right thinking person can inhabit the hallucinatory landscapes of your contrived cancel culture?

what could be a more perfect strainer to remove competence and accuracy and supplant it with doctrinaire dictatorship than immediately casting anyone who gets the right answer to “how many genders am i holding up, winston?” into struggle sessions and branding them bigot and oppressor?

this rapidly harrows academia into compliance and inevitably flows down to the students. to be allowed to profess, the professorial must be ideologically pure. in order to get the grades and grants and scholarships, so too must the students and as most are ill equipped to think their way out of this indoctrination as education and wind up (at least subconsciously) riddled with imposter syndrome (and self hate) driven by memorizing “the answers” that people in such positions are supposed to be able to derive, the whole regime becomes a stultifying, self-policing orthodoxy unable to adapt and unable to change: ossified, bigoted, and reliant upon dictators to interpret the canon for the lay.

“how to learn” is lost in “what to learn” and most of what is learned bears little resemblance to reality.

the whole of the system finds root in external validation, a validation that cannot be reasoned with or reasoned to by its acolytes and who therefore must attack with ruthless relentlessness any who dare find fault.

these are not students, they are disciples cum crusader. they are thought police. they know what they are taught and attack all else until it falls into line.

this is and must be an inherently top down system. it rests in suppressive power and justifies this with self-granted authority. we are the inquisitors because we have anointed ourselves inquisitor with the authority granted by others just like us.

this must be so because the system cannot stand without such. it’s a mono-culture of belief pushed downstream by a few “leaders” or “leading lights.” it must inevitably place its foundations upon credential, position, and presumed right to dictate and cancel. the “future leaders of america” follow it like ducklings. they know no other way and the space they claim to inhabit is not one they can reason through as individuals, only as a captured collective.

and so it is natural for them to presume that other ecosystems function likewise. but they don’t. those capable of critical thinking did not go away. they did not stop thinking, they were silenced, buried beneath omerta and proscription.

but cheese has a funny habit of moving and this sort of intellectual energy may not be bottled up for long.

the university as institution has been destroyed and stripped of its original purpose, colonized by weak, useless people, but the purpose itself perseveres persisting and thriving in new environs and ushering in an era of unprecedented access and true popular populism in intellectual, economic, political, and philosophical ideation.

social media is the new academy.

the education available there to those who know how to use it and who thrive in unstructured and associative ecosystems (read “critical thinkers”) are experiencing a glory like flight as the distributed campus and working group coalescences from lines of reputation, respect, and reason. at once faculty and student body, this semi-structured endless realignment of idea and refutation, criticism and collaboration is breaking walls in ways not seen since the renaissance as fields cross pollinate and access expands.

it extends way past education into politics, technology, and perhaps most interesting teleology. what is the system and what does it do? this is inherently oppositional to ivory tower regurgitation culture. it actively assesses and dismantles it.

no one cares about your credential, welcome to the arena.

let’s see what you brought.

this does not require a leader, it’s an embedded incentive. purpose coalesces around it like iron filings aligning in a magnetic field and vast, complex emergent structures of voluntarism rapidly arise from it, robust structures, capable structures, structures that may not be shaken down and conducive to evolution and flourishing.

and the “head boy” mindset cannot comprehend it.

it is at once anathema and alien.

this is the reason that the unmistakable power and (far more enraging) the fun of this trend is driving the good boys and girls of mnemonic regurgitation as intellectual credential mad.

they HATE this world.

they hate it because they cannot participate. they shout the magic words they learned in righteous repetition and lockstep solidarity and no one cares. no one listens. they are not a part of the conversation because they do not have any experience with or ability to engage in conversation. their world is the “credential to crowd” one way flow of professorial polemic sans criticism or creativity.

they have made it their identity, ideology, and status marker.

and no one online cares.

no one cares because they are not useful, they’re just dogmatic rocks in the stream of collective discourse. i think X. “no,” wails the angry head girl, “<insert memorized talking point and wall of text>” but why? ask i. “how do you reconcile this with Y and Z and is this not a contradiction with ABC?” and absent critical thinking and engagement, there is nowhere to go save shouting “heretic” in whatever semantic mode is in fashion.

they “studied” all their lives to meet the standards of a paradigm that just became irrelevant.

the surprise at being disagreed with rapidly turns to anger and frustration, the kinds of anger and frustration that only those way past their peter principles can experience when the identities and status they have built for themselves though compliance with and evangelization of external validation are threatened.

“i have been the good boy, learned my lines and repeated them faithfully, why will the world not bend to me?”

domination of institutions led them to believe they were adults and being once more relegated to the children’s table invokes frustration and fury.

the world has moved on, found new outlets, and the “head children” have no tools to join the discussion.

they are not tall enough to ride.

they are simply sand in the gears of academy 2.0, rapidly cleared and ignored so that progress may resume.

they have been led as sheep among the wolves by their “leaders” and find themselves on a field on which they cannot compete.

when their leaders controlled the censorship industrial complex, they could, as they do on campuses, shut down dissent and protect the ducklings from predation by critical thinkers. this allowed them to mistake social media as an extension of their dominion. no longer.

now they must face it and their wailing refrains of “twitter is a far right wasteland now” are belied by the simple fact that they are still the majority there. they perceive anything less than total domination of discussion as proof of rigging and extremist influence.

because they cast all issues as top down and presume that all influence is so exerted, they cannot imagine a bottoms up structure.

they cannot conceive of genuine populism of concurrent confluence emerging from many streams of many thinkers, of alliances between those who agree about some things and disagree about others.

the “campus” that mistook itself for “the bazaar” is having to confront the fact that it is, in fact, “the cathedral” and that it cannot compete in the land of the free and fair where the fabled bestiary of the critical thinkers for which they mistook themselves reside and evolve amidst challenge and refutation.

the institutions that once comprised the commanding heights of intellectualism were so rotted from within by uncritical ideologic capture that they are collapsing and the control they once exerted is collapsing with them.

“the university” has become a backwater, an evolutionary failure increasingly unable to adapt to compete for resources.

its cosseted denizens assume our evolved world to be like their world of artificially unintelligent design. they assume there must be a prime mover, an authority telling the other side what to think as they themselves are told what to think.

they cannot comprehend the anti-hierarchical nature of emergent order.

so they get it backwards.

trump did not make MAGA. MAGA made trump.

elon does not express his power though twitter. twitter expresses its power though elon.

the left are deranged by the individuals, raging and ranting, presuming that somehow “they did this” that trump and musk and ill intentioned felines of questionable goodness have lied and misled and pulled the populace astray. but that’s not what’s happening.

one of the most common comments i see here on BC is “you have put into words something i have long known but been unable to say or to cohere into a system.” (obviously, i’m paraphrasing a bit) i suspect this is the same for most of the newfound punditry and science slingers from the modest reach of certain internet cats to the vast scope of muskrats and trumps and rogans.

they do not tell reason-twit and crit-stack how or what to think, they simply join in the dialogue, making points and conceding them, growing and sharpening insight and belief. they cannot lead a mass like this to falsity, only help guide it to pursue some sort of truth. this is a process, not a product. that’s the nature of the adversarial/collaborative blend of online association.

that which is not challenged is weak.

that which does not cooperate cannot expand and thrive.

neither selector functions top down.

these are not our prophets nor our dictators, they’re just folks who grasp and express effectively the same truths that the rest of us have similarly deemed self-evident or worthy of exploration and have helped to clear the way for us to align around and assess them and find community and collaboration.

the authoritarian left experiences this as assault and erasure, as genocide. they keep doubling down on “but muh credential” and “but all this stuff i memorized” but bringing doctrine to a critical thinking fight is like bringing concrete foot blocks to a game of tag: you just lose. bigly.

“tag! you’re it!”

this drives deep derangement among those who devoted their lives to studying for the wrong exam.

it’s the intersection of the perception of personal threat as low identity people lose their privilege, the frustration of being way over your head, and the horror of ego rugpull after ego rugpull of “you are not the intellectuals, you are not the majority, you are not morality.”

this anguish grounds to individuals as perceived source of attack because that is how this group thinks.

someone must have done this to me! let’s cancel them!

the do not seek to refute a message. they seek to erase the messenger.

it seems like a sort of rationalization to avoid the admission that it’s really a majority lining up against them. they imagine it as a pied piper leading hamlin to fake news because it’s at once an idea they can understand and one that gives them a target to cast as villain.

the idea of many independent people with ideas collaborating and finding agreement and shared purpose does not make sense to them. they assume the snake must have a head and that they must just find it and cut it off. but that’s not how this works and the harder they try to cancel these liberty leaders, the more they prop them up by unifying the movements underneath them not because they rally around a leader but because the calculus of “how much of a threat are these authoritarians to my life and livelihood?” keeps ramping up with each new derangement as does the divergence from critical thought which only makes critical thinkers more aware of and interested in disassembling it.

trump, elon, whoever are just the lightning rods, the places where the static grounds. but the energy from it just fuels the populist and intellectual purposes that raised them up in the first place. change the input data, and many independent calculations all seem to shift as if commanded. emergent order is like that.

the whole thing has become wonderfully self defeating, a doubling down on becoming less rational and less consistent and ever more dogmatically demanding with each new interaction with the very critical thought the authority left apes but cannot achieve. each iteration invites and enables the next takedown and weakening of “the campus” yet further.

it’s like fighting ants with jam.

this battle is long since over.

and the fun is just getting going as we retake that which was ours.

and so as ever may the wisdom of the master inform us here: