I was recently interviewed by Daniel Natal on his show. Check it out on YouTube:
Also, I am currently reading Arthur Versluis’s latest book, American Gnosis: Political Religion and Transcendence. Aside from directly citing Political Ponerology and using it as a lens for part of his analysis of American neo-gnosticism, the book is just plain interesting.
It has everything from conservative MAGA lightworkers and Antarctic Nazi UFOs to Böhmean hyper-number mystics and internet They Live memes. So far, at only about 100 pages in, Versluis has covered: Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Harold Bloom, The Matrix, They Live, Dark City, Twin Peaks, Eyes Wide Shut, Miguel Serrano, Samael Aun Weor, and the obscure but fascinating Charles Musès. And peeping ahead, I see that readers will be treated to an assortment of controversial and fascinating figures: Daniel Pinchbeck, John Lamb Lash, David Icke, Bronze Age Pervert, Stephen Hoeller…
It’s an academic press book, with academic press pricing, so check it out if you can (or wait and pray for a paperback release).
I will be writing a review when I’m finished.
Hi Harrison,
(99% Cut and Paste from my YouTube comment)
Applied linguist in Japan here (undergrad in biology and former undergrad bio lab director) agreeing with blackquiver's comment about language. I follow the ponerology substack, but because of the time difference and/or pay wall, have not begun to weigh in on live discussions.
There is so much too unpack, but I would say that logic and language itself are at the heart of how most people define and misdefine 'morality'. I realize I am an outlier here in believing any morality beyond the immediate empathy within families or small communities (of Dunbar's number or less) necessarily depends on provisional social constructs as shortcuts for empathy. I am gaining a new respect for Derrida and deconstructionism here, but will have to do some more reading to sift the wheat from the chaff.
I am getting my cue on morality from the primatologist Frans de Waal's study of empathy among some social animals, but differ with him in that I don't place "reciprocity' at the same level of necessity as "empathy' for morality. Reciprocity (in good faith) first requires empathy, but not vice-versa. I see reciprocity as merely one of many behavior patterns arising out of empathy. Jill Bolte Taylor also exemplifies the contradictory nature between our more intuitive/empathetic neural pathways as opposed to the pathways and behavior of language and logic.
As those familiar with mystic experiences ( psychoactives, transcendent epiphanies, etc. ), close-to-nature ethnic traditions (zen, sufi, taoism, etc. ), and the limitations of language and logic (Wittgenstein's Ladder, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russell's paradoxes) ... all of those proxies for empathy (habits, customs, traditions, rituals, rules, laws, algorithms) inevitably tend to minimize the original empathetic intent, and provide a wealth of niches for those high in Cluster B behavior traits (narcissists, opportunists, morphologically defined psychopaths, and sadists). And such "dark tetrads' have neither the capacity nor willingness to employ empathy.
Lobaczewski was a dense read, and I sometimes found myself learning more in footnotes than in the main text. But I prefer Lobaczewski to Desmet, particularly in his identification of individual responsibility for atrocities, and for pointing out how the skeletons in the family closet are a fractal of what happens at larger scales of population.
But one point where I disagree with Lobaczewski is that those high in Cluster B traits are damaged or sick — below intelligence of the social norm for 'healthy' humans. On the contrary, I think the average intelligence of those people is higher than the neurotypical person driven by empathy. Without the capacity to empathize, from a very young age, Cluster B's tend to develop keen skills of observation and mimicry ...first to survive and fit in. But then they soon learn they are as good at gaming systems as building them.
Three cases in point (updated) ...
1) Having worked 3 summers as a mountain fire fighter in Northern Arizona, I was suspicious of the Lahaina Fire from the beginning. Bayesian logic alone is enough to indicate a miniscule probability of so many anomolies leading to an 'accidental' fire and massacre. This thing has been long in planning and includes some very clever people behind the technological weaponization of weather (unnatural winds for a cloudless hurricane 500 miles away, aluminum oxide as an accelerant, hot enough to melt concrete and metal, and DEWs which effect concrete and metal but without reducing trees to ash) — and then there is the political / legal infrastructure and heuristics, all working together to displace native Hawaiians — pretty much a continuation of how native Americans have been consistently displaced.
2) The plandemic. This has been long planned by bad actors (philathropaths such as Bill Gates), CEOs of Big Pharma, mainstream journalism, and directors of three letter agencies such as the DOD (see Sasha Latypova's substacks), the CIA (mentioned in the interview above), etc. These people are far more clever than the brute sadists more personally involved in violence. But also several steps ahead of empathetic people who find themselves fighting a rear-guard 'good fight'.
3) I just finished watching "Hellstorm" BY Kyle Hunt (Documentary, 2015) on Bit Chute. I am still in shock.
I also think restricting evil to Lobaczewski's definition of 'psychopaths' is limiting. A case in favor of 'good' pscychopaths is James Fallon, Prof. and author of "The Psychopath Within". And a good case for Hanna Arendt's "banality of evil' within us all are the behaviorist experiments of Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo (though the latter is somewhat flawed). Especially Asch and Milgram show that in particular circumstances, we are all capable of evil ... inflicting pain on others.
A couple of assumptions that I must take on faith include the belief that Cartesian duality is a good heuristics for catching our biases in thinking, but not an insight into metaphysics. I am probably more influenced by T.S. Kuhn than I am of Karl Popper. I am also a believer in the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity and believe all language and logic are ultimately metaphorical in origin, but necessarily so.
To slip into one traditional metaphor, the moment Eve ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have all fallen. Joni Mitchell mirrored that metaphor in the lyrics of her classic , "Woodstock".
All in all, a good chat, and though by no means the final word, Lobaczewski is one of several good starting points towards understanding the pathologies of collective human nature.
Cheers from Japan
@ $0.30 a page, Versluis' writing better be golden! Amazon has his book for $90 new...