making idiots useful

more adventures of chairman meow

people speak often of “suicidal empathy” as a plague consuming the west, and to be sure, they have a point. but where does this come from? from whence did it arise and take hold? i have an idea around a dovetail. hear me out on this:

the other day, i spoke about communism being a failure of second order thinking and that basically anyone capable of asking the question “but if we do that, it creates a certain set of incentives and won’t those incentives then lead to X?” does not become a communist. (apart from the select few who know exactly what it will do and see it as a path to personal power. more on them in a minute.)

well, how is “suicidal empathy” not functionally the exact same thing? you see someone “in need” and say “we should give them free stuff/preferencing/whatever.” never does the thought of “but what incentives does that create and where would such incentives lead?” intrude and then everyone acts surprised when you get overrun and taken for a ride and then goes into the denial ritual of “not happening, no big deal, actually good, you are evil for noticing.”

but turn this frame and put yourself in the seat of the “select few” mentioned above. your goal is power. to get and keep it you need a movement behind you, folks who do as you say and hold ranks. and the world is full of idiots. so how do you make them useful?

consider the situation one is in if one can play on 3 and 5 move look ahead against people only capable of playing 1: all you have to do is figure out which second and third order effect you want and then work backward to “what first order perception must i produce in order to lead people there?” and the lemmings will rush unwittingly toward your cliff of choice without any idea what the real game is.

if you think about it, it’s kind of perfect.

and “suicidal empathy” is the first order manifestion of being tricked into second and third order domination.

it’s also basically bottomless because the thing about people who can only think in first order modes is that every time something goes horribly wrong, you just say “them! they did this to you! let’s get ‘em!” and they fall for it because they are, by definition and selection, not capable of the kind of thought process that would allow them to see the hand that shakes the jar to make the bugs fight; they see only the opposing insect.

i suspect this embedded necessity/control surface shows us a great deal about what sorts of memes can replicate and metastasize into durable and effective wrecker/faux moralistic authoritarian movements.

you need something that sounds great on a first order basis but that is actually awful on second and third order outcomes.

this selector is actually critically important, and the “awful” is not optional. when running this screen, it’s a feature, not a bug.

if it we propose something with positive second and third order effects, it does not weed out those able to see consequences, and weed them out you must if your goal is a final consequence like “i am going to subjugate you.”

the parallel to the broken english in the nigerian finance minister scams is quite strong: the goal is to be obviously bad/dangerous in order to sift out, right from the start, anyone who will later wise up and walk away. that way you don’t bother wasting time and energy on them and can focus on the easy marks who you can close.

you also need something that feels good and gives license for bad people to do bad things and call themselves good. lots of people have base, cluster B desires and tendencies. what holds them in check is the need to feel like they are the good guy. we’re all the star of our own movie, the one in the white hat. and you need a story that keeps it from going black. groupthink and external validation is a great way to do that.

the process is opposite to what many suppose:

you do not kill him for being an infidel. you call him an infidel so that you can kill him.

that’s how we get folks like this:

hasan is not an intellectual. he’s an embarrassment to submidwittery. listen to him speak. he’s actually, legitimately stupid.

but being a leading light is not his role.

piker is a permission giver. he says wild, accusatory, hateful things and brands out-groups as evil.

people follow him not because he's smart, they follow him because he gives them justification to hate while casting it (at least in their own minds) as justice and tolerance. it allows them to view some people as less than human. this belief unlocks permission to act beastly toward others and call it virtue.

his entire product is "feel good about being a bad person, feel good about being a coercive crybully taker instead of a builder or a maker."

he sells license. and a lot of badly adjusted cluster B jerks are lined up out the door to buy.

it's pathology club: external validation for those with externalized identities.

it’s catnip for becky from vassar as she moves into the karen stage of her pokemon cycle.

but once you’re in, you’re caught. many will know the expression that “those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities.”

well, once you commit an atrocity (or create any sort of problem or failure), now you have a problem of your own: you made the world worse. but most, especially those with highly external identities, cannot or will not admit this to themselves. in fact, they will go to great lengths not to.

and this creates a new set of complexity that forms a feedback loop:

when you treat someone badly, you need a story about why and if that story is not going to include the idea of “because i am a jerk and should apologize” then it pretty much needs to shift to “because the other person is a jerk and deserved it.”

devon put this well the other day:

this is the counter intuitive part of cognitive dissonance:

“A man who has harmed you needs you to deserve it, so that he can still feel good about himself. And he will find excuses to think that, because humans are good at telling stories.

Welfare takers don't hate you even though your taxes keep them alive. They hate you because your taxes keep them alive.

The criminal underclass doesn't rob you because they hate you. They hate you because they rob you.”

now consider how that fits together with the first part of our story:

you, the manipulator of midwits, use their inability to see second order effects to recruit them with your “front end empathy, back end calamity” offering that they lack the cognitive tools to see coming.

it doesn’t matter what it is so long as it meets those criteria.

• rent control? great.

• welfare for illegal immigrants? perfect

• socialist grocery stores? yup.

• a “right” to free healthcare and housing? that one’s a doozie.

• racism dressed up as inclusion? wunderbar.

it’s all the same: here’s a first order empathic appeal that walks you into bad second and third order effects and makes them your fault.

it’s probably better if the first ask is small.

it’s like a mobster asking you to “do me a favor” or a confidence man getting you to scam someone so that they have you on the hook and can scam you bigger by threatening to expose you only here, the copper who catches you is you and your own self-regard.

they’re getting you started on “being a bad person” addiction.

call it a gateway drug.

you think you are helping. then it fails and things get worse/go wrong/people get hurt.

you belived an absurdity, you assisted in calamity, and now, you have to chose:

are you the bad guy or is the other guy?

and every time you pick “the other guy” the very fact that you harmed them becomes a reason that you hate them and therefore makes it ever easier to blame them the next time and project your own bad actions onto them.

it’s a deepening spiral into excusing ever worse actions by dehumanizing the “others.”

every one of these movements does this: the bourgeois, the capitalists, the reactionaries, the prejudiced, the racist, phobic, whatever.

the monniker is immaterial and fungible.

the designation as “other” is all that matters.

“we” are strong, “they” are evil. let slip the dog of war!

it’s why propagandists like “rolling stone” use framings like “why are they afraid of hasan?” no one is afraid. we think he’s a twerp. but if you want to use him as a source of your own licence to act the tyrant, it’s an empowering idea.

it really is one helluva reinforcement cycle.

adding the moral screen for actual ability or desire to accept consequences of one’s actions to the first pass screen for “inability to think in 2+ orders” strains out a very potent group.

it’s how you select for idiot, then add useful.

they will not see the trick and they want you to tell them who to blame when it goes splat so that they avoid culpability and, best of all, they get to go be beastly to whomsoever you scapegoat all while telling themselves a story that their acting mean and wrecking things is high morals builder behavior to make a better world.

it’s the opiate of the disasters.

once you see the underlying selector, it becomes clear why collectivism is always some power hungry, triple machiavellian nefarious svengalis at the top leading an army of the low morals mindwiped at the bottom and whipped into shape by the cluster B cadres who really never cared about the cause but just wanted to be the whip hand in a place where whipping is going on.

you get a sort of grotesque parfait with the worst of the power hungry schemers on top, the sea of useful idiocy at the bottom desperate to believe what it is told and feel purposeful without having purpose egged on and slapped into line by narcissists and sociopaths who were happy to join whatever team would set them loose.

it generates a sort of edge-lord aspect where becky from vassar and zander from oberlin feel positively tame hating landlords and demanding free housing for immigrants in comparison to this diatribe and where their second order incapabilities prevent them from asking questions about just whose visages the leopards eating people’s faces party will be salivating over next.

again, the point here is not to be middle of the road plausible or even palatable. it’s to select for the useful idiot.

like so much of modern political discourse, if this sounds awful, it’s because it’s not aimed at you.

(also note that this was an early hasan clip, before he refined his message. the underlying sociopathy is still right on the surface; he had not yet learned to disguise it.”)

and the problem with this process is that it’s emergent and basically unstoppable because, once you meet the selectors, it beats “real morality” within a group and chokes it out.

no one has to sit down and make this up on purpose. it surfaces based upon memetic ability to replicate and sustain control.

the scum rises.

once you have “good first order and bad second order” and “coercion” the parfait is essentially inevitable and this is why “what are the second and third order effects?” and “with or without the consent of the governed?” are basically the only meaningful questions about any movement or proposal.

and this is why collectivism is always so pernicious.

it doesn’t matter how well intentioned the original leading lights are. as soon as the bad outcomes or ascriptions start, they will get run over by the memes with optimized reproductive fitness and the self-digging hole of projecting ever more guilt outward and needing ever more vilified enemies to bear the brunt.

the idea needs someone to be in charge and take your rights and someone to take the blame for the catastrophe that engenders.

the rest is just time and emergent pressure.

you get tyranny, calamity, and enemies of the state to attack for it.

there are no (and cannot be) collectivist movements that can scale without this issue.

maybe (and it’s a real maybe from what i have seen) you can scale it to a family. not much beyond. the incentives bite once you have a sample of humanity sufficient to have the idiots, the leaders, and the jerks.

and if you import loads and loads of people into a society who all thought this way already and are not only used to it but see it as correct, you can swing the game in a big hurry.

collectivism and rights are inherently at odds because positive rights must, of necessity, violate negative rights like self determination and property. (and, of course, you need second order thinking to see it.)

this is why they all say “real communism has never been tried” and why they are always wrong and why it always goes the same way then winds up with the people who burned the world down glaring at the ones who tried to stop them and accusing them of reactionary arson.

human nature does not change much.

“smarter people this time” would be irrelevant even if it were true (and it never is.)

you cannot fight emergent process from midstream.

you have to remove the incentives that cause it.

and once you cede the idea that “the rights of the individual are paramount to the state and inalienable,” you’re on the slippery slope.

too many get mired in trying to teach second order thinking to chickens.

it’s about as fruitful.

arguing about what rent regulations should be means you have already lost.

and so long as we keep fighting the first in the second order world of “how shall we structure your taking of my rights?” there is no win state and the emergent cycle will run.

the only off ramp is “the state does not hold that right, the individual does.”