"Everyone I Don't Like Is a Presbyterian"

Paramoralisms in everyday life, or why Kathleen Kennedy is not a serious person

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In my last article I wrote that psychological warfare comes naturally to psychopaths and other “dark triad/tetrad” personalities. Because of their cognitive-emotional deficiencies, they develop a substitute “special psychological knowledge” that gives them an almost instinctive understanding of normal people’s weaknesses and how to exploit them. And they are pathologically egotistical.

Not everyone has the psychopath’s “special psychological knowledge.” But everyone has at least a bit of egotism, and even normies can have a lot of it. It’s what drives us to just know we’re right about something and to think other people are complete idiots for not realizing something so self-evidently obvious. It’s also what drives us to wish to impose that understanding onto others. We can be egotistical about our food preferences, our taste in music, our religion, our humanistic values, our understanding of scientific consensus, or our interpretation of current events and geopolitics. Egotism is the fire that has fueled kitchen-table arguments for generations. (Religious egotism in particular is perhaps the real target of many hardcore atheists—their disdain for religion itself is misplaced, and they can be just as egotistical.)

Pathological egotism is just an extreme version of this. Such types are convinced that their abnormal way of experiencing the world—their exaggerated or inappropriate emotional responses, their deranged ways of thinking about the world and other people—is self-evidently correct, because to them it’s all they can see. And their hyperactive, persistent nature makes them effective bulldogs in making their case and attempting to coerce others to adopt it for themselves. They are tyrants in their daily interactions with family and coworkers. Finding oneself on the receiving end of such treatment can be like getting hit by a freight train. Our minds are unprepared for it, and the weaker of us succumb, the end result being that we start sharing in those emotional responses and adopting the same self-evident “talking points.”

This is what happens to children and youths, in particular, when they are taught by ideologues. The confidence and force with which such views are presented are sufficiently convincing enough to make a significant number of youths adopt them for themselves.

On the interpersonal level, this is a form of psychological warfare and terror. Just as the intelligence agencies adopt psyops on a mass scale, these techniques have been used by law enforcement forever. It’s how you break down a suspect and extract a forced confession, even if the suspect is innocent. It’s also how cultural offensives are won. And cultural offensives are just another form of psychological warfare.

I saw the following video pop up in my YouTube feed, and the thumbnail alone prompted me to write this article: “LucasFilm Boss [Girl] Says Women in Star Wars Struggle with Toxicity Due to ‘Male Dominated Fan Base.’”

Kathleen Kennedy is a textbook toxic female narcissist. Star Wars fans and pop culture aficionados in general don’t dislike her because she’s a woman. They just don’t like her. (Same goes for the characters, writers, and directors she has championed, but more on that below.)

Narcissists have difficulty accepting what Lobaczewski calls “self-critical associations.” In other words, if they experience pushback from the people around them, it can’t be because of anything they have done, or their personality traits. It must be some flaw in the critic. If a person lacks any creativity or talent, and the social sphere reflects that back to her, it must be due to some moral flaw in the social sphere. The uncomfortable truth—that this person is an unlikable hack—gets converted into a conclusion that is more emotionally palatable. “The fan base must be toxically male.”

This is at once a “paralogism” and a “paramoralism.” It is a paralogism because it is based on manufactured premises. And it is a paramoralism because it ascribes moral deviance where there is none. The reason it works is that every culture has words that are charged with moral connotations, and moral connotations are extremely psychologically “sticky.” Call someone a Presbyterian and no one will raise an eyebrow. Call them a Presbyterian with some vitriol in your intonation and you might catch some bystanders’ attention, but the response will mostly be confusion. But call them a racist, or a Nazi, or a Russian propagandist, and the label will stick.

Normal people normally only accuse people of some moral stain when they have some good reason for doing so (though they can be mistaken). So when they encounter someone else doing this loudly and with conviction, they are inclined to think there must be something to it.

As Lobaczewski writes: “any insinuation framed in moral slogans is always suggestive, even if the ‘moral’ criteria used are just an ad hoc invention. By means of such paramoralisms, one can thus prove any act to be immoral or moral in a manner so actively suggestive that people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found.

This is how such “conversive” thinking spreads. Public relations experts and their natural exemplars (psychopaths) understand this. As long as you are first to make the accusation and/or can reach the widest audience, it will be extremely difficult to remove the stain that accusation has caused. This drama has played out in court rooms forever:

Child-abusing mother: (Crying) Judge, my husband beats our child.

Innocent father: (Yelling) No judge, my wife is the one who beats our child!

To most observers, this defense just comes across as uncreative and childish. After the initial accusation, it has all the persuasive power of “I know you are, but what am I?” As soon as you have two people blaming each other for the same crime or character flaw, inexperienced people seem to lose all capacity of determining who the liar is, and are more likely to believe the liar. The guilty party often comes across as wronged and sympathetic, the innocent party as unreasonably angry and disagreeable.

The conversive thinking thus spreads even more insidiously, in a complementary form. It’s not just that “mean people dislike female X because she’s a woman.” With so many people disliking so many women “just because they’re women,” an implicit premise is suggested and accepted: “female [or male] X is a woman, therefore she must be beyond reproach.”

This creates a climate in which people walk on eggshells around evil women (or any other category of evil people), because the unwritten rule says you cannot criticize a woman without being accused of misogyny. Does the female protagonist of some new film lack any redeemable quality aside from the structure of her genitalia (which most often is only suggested and does not appear on screen)? Is a certain presidential candidate or high-level political female a reprehensible sociopath? You’d better not say so, because the only possible motivation you can have for doing so is unseemly.

People with a basically normal psychological nature may engage in such behavior (paramoralistic name-calling). This is a result of the above-mentioned fact that conversive thinking spreads like a contagion. But when it becomes widespread, it provides cover for the real narcissists and psychopaths, who use it intentionally and for a purpose. If all you see is “misogyny,” “Islamophobia,” or “anti-Semitism,” for example, it’s hard to find an evil woman, Muslim, or Jew anywhere. Seeing the world in such paramoralistic categories only serves those who know how to exploit them for their own purposes.

Low-resolution worldviews obscure reality just enough so that truly evil operators simply get lost in a blur of unintelligible pixels. This is worldview warfare.

Now, back to Kathleen Kennedy. Fandom nerds never tire of trying to respond to her and her colleagues’ absurd paramoralisms with facts and logic. They say things like: “We actually like female characters! [Insert list of Ripleys and Leias here.] It’s that you’re writing bad characters, period.” This is true. But you can’t bring common sense to a paramoralism fight. It’s a losing battle.

As far as I know, there are only three ways to combat such nonsense. If possible ignore it. Don’t feed the troll. If that is not an option, mock it, ruthlessly. The best weapon, and the only way to make oneself immune to it, is to understand what’s really going on.

Lobaczewski proposes a new means of defense against worldview warfare: ponerology. As he puts it, it is a weapon that need not kill anyone. It’s the aikido of psychological warfare, using the enemy’s momentum against them by defusing and redirecting their attacks before they have a chance to land.