the fracture

the disintegration of the media cult and its followers

imagine you are the enterprising head of a would be doomsday cult. you’ve got a great song and dance. it’s atavistic, scary, it calls to action, you’re really packing the public into the tent. but you have a problem: the world is not actually going to end on tuesday as prophesied. obviously, this poses some issues for you: can’t have a doomsday cult when the doom keeps stubbornly refusing to turn up.

or can you?

the reality is that when the end of the world fails to be nigh, you do not actually lose your flock. many of them wind up becoming more rather than less devout. you’re going to lose some, but you can, if you’re clever and take a few elementary precautions, actually deepen the devotion of the devotees and how many you keep and how rapt they become will come down to how well you handle this transition. in the end you’re playing on one key aspect of human nature:

“rubes will happily believe damn near anything in order to avoid admitting that they have been played for rubes.”

in the end, cognitive dissonance is your friend here and you can use it to not only prevent the changing of minds but to bind them more strongly to your doctrine. it comes down to three things:

1. isolate

2. alienate

3. indoctrinate

and that’s it.

you need to be the only one speaking. no outside noise or perspective.

you need to make the outside look hostile, predatory, and menacing.

and then you push your dogmatic payload again as “us vs them” and “only we love you and they carry the awful taint of heresy” and faster than you can say “branch davidian” they are all back in line and rarin’ to go.

it’s culting 101.

of course, the problem with this is if you push it too far, you actually break their brains and they fall apart and have breakdowns and reality schisms and fractures, but hey, omelets, eggs, whatever. nobody said the cult business was easy.

OK. why am i telling you this?

it’s because an awful lot of people are recently noticing a “sudden” trend and it’s one i worry about. the trend is this:

this is real human tragedy. it’s wild, divisive stuff. and it can get A LOT worse than that. i’m not sure the folks pushing these ideas understand quite what they are playing with. (or worse, they do and just do not care)

and it’s pretty clear where this is coming from.

anyone who gets their news from TV or NYT is living in a parallel universe, one where the cult still reigns.

and these outlets have an actual, vested interest in keeping their viewers from understanding or even experiencing reality.

watch as simple ideas about “hey people voted their self interest” are instantly dismissed with “latinos are just misogynist.”

no argument, no rationality, just assertion and repetition and censure.

it’s a shouting down. watch how frantic and sub rational it is.

it’s obvious that even hearing this idea is threatening them viscerally.

they erupt in response because they literally cannot listen

this does not speak well of psychological state.

“but hey, OK that’s “the view” an actual livestream from an asylum,” you might object. but keep in mind, that’s the top daytime TV show in america. roughly 1% of american adults (mostly boomer women) watch it.

it might be irrelevant to you, but not to them.

these are beloved characters, friends, confidants, and thought leaders, those who help decide consensus. and this kind of message is getting very pointed and intense.

the view viewers are home all day drinking this in and basically only speaking to other view viewers and presuming the world outside is ever more hostile to them.

great model for ratings, not so great for mental health.

ok, so “they voted badly because they are bad people.” that’s “alienate.”

now let’s have a look at “isolate” shall we?

here’s MNSNC host (the hilariously misnamed and always angry “joy reid”) asking an “expert” psychologist “should we all be cutting off our families because of how they voted?” and madame shrink saying “why yes, of course you should!”

in no way should you speak to people whose ideas are not our ideas. stay in the smothership and we’ll take care of you.

it’s sort of amazing watching the whole pundisphere of female talking heads adopt the techniques of abusive husbands. this is the sort of stuff that cracks people. like, really cracks people.

i’m not sure we have all the facts here yet, but this one looks like it was full “it’s 1933 so let’s go jonestown.”

an awful lot of unsafe psywar ordinance is being played with.

the issue with so much of this group remains the same one i’ve discussed before:

these are low identity people who, internally bereft of substance or morality became "people who are their ideas" rather than "people who have ideas." this sort of external fixation and validation of self causes one to experience all criticism or disagreement as a form of personal attack.

you cannot dispute "their ideas" without disputing "who they think they are."

they literally experience pluralism of ideas as erasure.

the very existence of ideas other than their ideas causes them plain and threatens their sense of self.

this is laura helmuth, the editor of “scientific american.”

and she was among the nicer of the crowd.

the party of joy certainly did not seen joyous. they were braying for blood. the one on the right lost her job with an OBGYN over this. she was actually a woman treating pregnant women. and this is where her mind went.

look, it’s obviously not everyone or even most people, but it’s more than a few and they seem to be in real psychological trouble.

jim jones would weep to see this kind of success.

darth vader would smile fit to break his mask at how their hate has made them come over to the dark side.

they seem unable to see what they have become and that’s because such victims escape through projection.

up becomes down. free speech becomes fascism. free choice becomes right wing extremism.

you see it everyplace and it feeds on itself especially if your peer group all avidly agrees.

it rarifies into self-reinforcing echo chambers that take on all the aspects of a cult: utter devotion to in-group and ideology, disdain, hatred, and threat perceived from out-group and this divide keeps growing in intensity.

it leads to paranoid persecution fantasy.

and the water carriers for the campaign that called its opponent “literally hitler” and his supporters “garbage” are now live on TV clutching their pearls and trying to imagine how to live near neighbors that are so hateful.

it seems to be the whole of their message. (again)

there’s really nowhere else for them to go.

when the world fails to conform to model, the story one must tell oneself to sustain belief intensifies and the rage comes from holding so much cognitive dissonance at bay.

folks are now reaching a breaking point where they simply cannot hold this together no matter how hard they try and it's spilling out in dramatic fashion.

the self-protective instinct is to retreat further from all challenge and surround themselves with only people who agree with and bolster them and in this quest their friends on the idiot box are all too happy to help. stay home. stay mad. stay with us. tune in. drop out. it’s a drug pusher upping you to fentanyl because the heroin is just not cutting it any more. worse, it’s political pimps getting the pushers to do it for them so they can turn you out.

show your fealty for all to see.

commit to the tribe.

this drives some really weird and incongruous seeming behavior that plays like mass psychosis mostly because it is.

it winds up as the fragile grasping other fragiles and projecting their hate onto those whose views threaten to force them to re-evaluate their own.

in no small irony, this turns them into exactly that which they purport to despise: narrow minded, bigoted, dogmatic, and hateful.

and self-hate has a gravity all its own, bending and distorting all around it.

the discarded stone has become the cornerstone.

that which they cannot face is now their center.

and so here we are.

this is real mass formation psychosis and its levels have intensified to schizophrenic proportions in many who have not managed to break out.

this is the late stage effect of long term exposure to psychological warfare, perhaps not deliberate war, but war nonetheless. war for viewers, war to keep butts in seats. every trick, every tactic to keep the dying beast of old media alive and eyes upon them.

the goal was (probably) not to break people but that just turned out to be the most profitable way to re-arrange deck chairs on the titanic. the brainwashing was for ratings. turning brains to pudding was incidental.

buy boy oh boy did it work.

people are now having fantasies about “starlink having been used to steal the election.”

it ain’t good.

i don’t know that there is a helluva lot that can be done for or about these folks who have been so media mindwiped. it’s just going to have to kind of play itself out. keep them away from sharp objects and levers of power. but it would help if we could at least stop pushing the toxin in, stop the influx of fake facts and faker accusations.

what makes social media so incredible is that it has broken the “one to many” media paradigm and now allows a motley of characters, even disreputable internet felines, to go toe to toe with people who buy ink by the barrel and rip them from their commanding heights with meow-lin temple meme-fu. it’s the medium of 1,000 stars burning bright in their own light and 100,000 experts waiting for something that looks like their field to come along so they can weigh in.

and “the media” cannot compete with that. nothing can.

we are reality and we are here to stay.

losing in a rout an election the media assured them was in the bag has shaken the faithful. they are worried about their position and their prophets. they are panicked about the impending end of the world as the world’s worst president leads the world’s worst voters in an unholy purge of all that is good an light.

this is the end state tapioca brained delusion of fact free reality the television built for them.

the only real role of mass media for the last 10-15 years has been as a persuader captive to and used by regimes and socio-political elites to push their gospel. it’s nothing else. that and selling pharma products is all they have left.

and it just died. and the media mavens are terrified. this is existential threat to them and they, like the cult leaders they are, will run the 3 steps: isolate, alienate, indoctrinate. the push to get people off of twitter where reality reigns is acute.

always awful but wonderfully emblematic robert reich had this to say:

“we should use our power as consumers to boycott X and all advertisers on X and on fox news, mount defamation and other lawsuits against platforms that foment hate, and push for regulations (at least at the state level for now) requiring that all platforms achieve minimum standards of moderation and decency”

jeez, someone sure does not like having his facts checked…

others are fleeing to other platforms.

they do this because they are wrong and they know it. they lie and they know it.

they just cannot have you knowing it.

it’s a base of need hierarchy stack plank for them.

so too is the need to vilify open media and call anything that is not them “super ultra mega right wing literally triple hitler obviously nefarious and the tool of awful people used to do awful things and hate did we mention hate!”

lol. sure.

this idea of a vast right wing media is hilarious. even fox and the WSJ are mostly on the big state authoritarian team now because they are the same dying model and need the same desperate cure.

they will seek to scare you into needing them.

it’s a parasite killing the host.

they simply cannot imagine the ecosystem vibrancy of social media because they have none of their own.

what remains of the swamp donkeys bolted to the neocons and the media industrial complex are the franken-party of “unless we can make up facts we cannot convince you.”

this was the superpower of the “progressives” who took over media. it lasted decades. they could go on TV, be the only one speaking, and even if you knew it was steaming bull excrement, so what? your voice was small. who you gonna tell? the deplatforming and shouting down of dissent was near perfect.

but the problem IS their message because their message is all lies.

DEI, ESG, climate scares, pandemics, white domestic terror, over and over they lie.

they got lazy. they got used to being able to proclaim “this is true” and have people act as if it were and so they stopped caring if any of it actually was, in fact, true. they just knew it must be because they said it.

and the world has now seen behind the curtain on that and we’re sick to death of having our empathy played upon by people who have none of their own but lay claim to moral superiority.

red pills and red waves abound.

they now seem to want to break off on their own.

please, try.

have at it, go for it.

you’ll never be able to build your own because your ethos contains nothing upon which to build, but that’s not what you want, is it? it’s not what the media wants.

you want yourself and your acolytes back in a controlled echo chamber free from fact check and free from alternative views that so hurt and threaten you.

you want the cult singled out and angry/scared and to get back to a monopoly on facts where none may gainsay you.

it’s going to be a small, stunted, and insular place.

“moderation” is just a dogwhistle for “ideological purity run by people like me.”

and that’s a road with a bumpy history.

in the end, it can go pretty bad and really dark really fast. these are the low energy thought and emotional pathways that emerge from all these psychological pressures:

it’s not me, it’s you.

this is the path to avoid self-examination. once you get sold on the idea of your own infallible rightness and are forced to realize that it was not your messaging but rather your message that was the problem, only 2 paths remain

1. realize that your message was bad and consider ways to change your mind and your platform

2. decide that the flaw lies in the listener and go seek to change them (by force if necessary)

and none of the ringleaders are gonna pick number 1.

you can see this setting up to go full authoritarian ugly. it’s surfacing all over.

it has the whole set of precepts for deathcults and holy wars.

we are good, they are evil.

the polity is sick and we of good faith must confront this to “cut out the cancer.”

it’s life or death for our way of life.

they are working up the nerve to just flat out say “we had to end democracy and impose a benign dictatorship of us to save self governance” and “we had to take your rights to protect freedom.”

watch.

this election was a watershed, but it has also left a large number of seriously damaged people, people who have been watching TV news for a decade and believing it, people sucked into these cultist tactics of isolation, alienation, and indoctrination.

their whole worldview is false, their facts made up, their whole calculus is garbage in garbage out. it’s all “big scary pseudoscience thing will end us all and the only solution is more intrusive global government”

it’s not that they are stupid. education or IQ cannot protect you from this. it’s that they are running bad data and are now so wedded to it that it’s some kind of wubbie.

hard lessons are coming for this group now that it has realized it’s a minority, not a majority and this cohort is going to keep shrinking which will just keeping making the pressures more intense.

this will make the war of mass media to keep the dwindling flock into something even more pernicious and awful and abusive.

they will pull out all the cult tricks to try to stay alive.

i don’t think there’s really anything much one can do for those in thrall to this except perhaps to help them see that it’s being done to them and that it’s actually OK and getting better out here and that it will keep doing so and that maybe they should come and check it out.

humans can only change so quickly. this will take time. but it’s really the only way.

the fears and bars are of their own making and so too must be their freedom.