I would love to see us come up with a way to turn the non-psychopathic "elites" against the psychopathic "elites". It appears that currently, a supremacist attitude toward "regular people" is a defining characteristic "our" evidently now thoroughly pathocratic "elite".
I don't know. I do think populism is part of it. Another is having enough sane people survive the next several years to be around for the rebuilding, at which point hopefully they can have the support of enough people to have some influence.
Now you're onto something useful. Forget about winning this. If your brains could hold the odds (it can't) you'd already know this is going to end much, much worse than it seems right now. Start to think with real optimism and begin doing the planning to assist people surviving now, during and after this madness runs its course. Superman will not be coming to save us at the 11th hour. Americans have an average IQ of 95 now, which was legally labeled a clinical cretin in 1955 and could get you absolved of responsibility for your actions in a courtroom back then. Koko the Sign Language gorilla was tested at 91 under clinical conditions. Anybody who thinks Ozzie and Harriet will be back shortly doesn't know what the situation is like now. They just don't understand anything. Start to think about protecting females from gangrape by Red Chinese troops, you'll be closer to the real priorities. Planning to publish a new magazine that tells people to try to be nicer to each other is just for the lulz during the apocalypse, it's all pointless in that direction.
I wonder if that IQ stat holds true for actual Americans...and by that I mean those who can trace their ancestry to Northwestern Europe and their ancestry in this country to before the War Between the States at the latest. We have a great many "newcomers" and new "citizens" who, I'm sure, are a significant downward drag on general IQ.
I wonder. It's almost as if we needed some sort of religion or something. Wow, I feel you're going to crack this case at any moment. Round and round we go. The latter Romans after they saw wealthy elites dragged from their homes and torn apart by horses during the food riots immediately took up a collection afterwards to restore the old temples and re-introduce the old rituals that they had been critiquing as old fashioned superstitious nonsense only a few years earlier. The universal common quality of mankind is that they are almost all breathtakingly stupid. Same mistakes, another century. Good luck with your planning to fix mankind by appealing to their better angels. What a shame mankind has no better angels.
"However, their one-sidedness makes them prone to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people who, in their opinion, are mainly guided by their emotions.
"Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, but pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme, moralizing positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situations and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. ...
"Human nature does in fact tend to be “no good,” especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives as a result of their shortcomings ..."
"Since I was little I have taken great pains to avoid leadership roles and shrink from dominance over others. I have never suggested that it's all a matter of adjusting the environment with grand schemes of social engineering to "teach" and "modify" behaviours of others. (Utter madness)"
This is admirable. It also has remarkably little to do with anything.
"Also, it's not my imagination I am one of the brightest prodigies ever born on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I was scored at the University of Charlottesville in Virginia at age 9, again by the Army at age 22, both times proving I breathe very rarified air indeed."
Congratulations!
"Also, people who argue by reprinting DSM are gay. It's a sign of repressed homosexuality to try to ignore someone's arguments and insist they have yet another "mental illness" "chemical imbalance" "personality disorder"."
Oh really?
"I think that man is inherently evil because I have seen him for what he really is, not what you talk about over cappuccinos at Starbucks. Mankind is nothing but bastards"
This kind of schizoidal nonsense is not allowed here.
It’s sad that you’ve lost the childlike innocence that allows you to believe that Gods and angels exist and are engaged in a spiritual battle all around us, unseen. Mankind is not and never will be angelic. We are fallen, and Christ has paid the price. Your cynicism is blinding you to the beauty that exists all around us even as evil exists as well. Never forget that God has already won, and this world is playing out the aftermath as Satan struggles, knowing he is damned for all eternity soon. Jeering at this does not change it as fact. Praying for your soul, and all those that have given up on victory.
This is a pure problem of marketing, education, and spiritual counseling. Hubbard has invented the only way I am aware of that is in use and working. Though it feels not fast enough.
We start with the problem of the psychopath. We can't move forward until we have confronted that problem. In our online educational materials, this is referred to as the Anti-Social Personality.
I'm ignorant of Hubbard's work (perhaps as a consequence of the demonization / aversion conditioning applied by The Regime?) so I admit I've not given it careful consideration. Rather, I've avoided looking, as the stories of cult-like exploitation of devotees have kept me away thus far.
"We start with the problem of the psychopath. We can't move forward until we have confronted that problem."
This key insight is a prerequisite to any real solution to our dilemma of systematic victimization of decent people by an anti-social minority. I'm curious to learn more of Hubbard's perspective on this.
I do not think this is accurate. Even in a pathocracy, per Lobaczewski, only 10% of the ruling class are psychopaths. (The rest have other personality disorders or disturbances.) Plus, the "elites" are a fuzzy category. In the American plutocracy, where is the cut-off point? The top 0.1%? 1%? 10%? If you count the credentialed class as elites, that's 10% of the population. No one things the number of psychopaths is that high, and even if it were, there are demonstrably psychopaths in all other economic brackets, which would necessitate the percentage of psychopaths to be significantly higher than 10%. Basically, it might be a fun and edgy soundbite, but it bears no resemblance to reality.
Harrison my point I realized was not explicit. "Revolution won’t come from below." It never has. Elites exploit and fail. New elites arise. Every election cycle the knotted rope on our neck we tighten.
Ok, then we're actually in agreement. Revolution from below is probably a poor term. But there's still a different between the 1917 revolution "from below" and the 1991 revolution "from above". One way of articulating the difference is that the former comes from counter-elites, and the latter comes from a split segment of the existing regime.
I think elite theory has become dogma to some, and is over extended.
For rare examples of revolution from below; Ireland 1916-1922 (lower middle class leadership at best, at best).
Not without help, but Ho Chi Minh’s revolution against the French 1945-1954. For that matter Mao, which is somewhat of a process of the most fit warlord rising to top over 30 years, but Mao was not elite.
Russia February 1917 was a (French inspired)* military coup against the Tsar to harness democracy in the war against Germany, in truth it did work 25 years later.
Russia 1917 was Lenin as Ludendorff’s counter coup.
Other examples; King Zog of Albania began as Sergeant Zog, Batista in Cuba was a personnel clerk, numerous Roman Emperors of humble roots and not always rising through the ranks first.
It’s usually elites vs Elites, not always.
*The French had paid to rebuild the Russian army after the defeat against the Japanese and had tremendous influence over the Russian military in WW1.
I'm not familiar with all the details of your examples, but could a lot of these (most? all?) be examples of counter-elites, as Turchin calls them? Mao and Lenin were both educated counter-elites, for instance. As far as I understand it, part of elite theory is elite *dynamics*, i.e. how people become elites who aren't elites currently - elite aspirants as Turchin calls them.
Ho Chi Minh was what you might call a professional ideologue and intellectual, hobnobbing with international socialists in multiple countries, writing articles, and even studying in the Soviet Union. Sounds like an educated counter-elite to me.
My main caution here is the model of elite theory is being overextended. It’s not wrong, just not a universal absolute. It’s usually true.
With respectful humor; there’s two kinds of people in the world, those that classify all people into two kinds, and those that don’t.
🤔
It’s both too broad and too narrow.
I think to call Collins (Ireland) or Mao, Ho Chi Minh elites is a big stretch...educated certainly, although not elite education by any means. Collins as a teenager went to England to work in the post office bank, he ended up at Bank of New York London before the revolt began. That’s talent, not education. Can you call a humble family boy from Cork although literate and given a modest education “elite?”
Neither Mao nor Ho Chi Minh were “elite” , of modest although not poor peasant stock. Ho Chi Minh worked as a cook in New York, a sailor...before he became a professional revolutionary for the Comintern. He wasn’t in elite circles at all, nor Mao who was fighting for decades.
We can move this out of revolution; was Ben Franklin elite? Certainly not by birth or education, nor Andrew Carnegie, nor William Knudsen, nor Edison.
Nor by anything but dint Elon Musk. These are self made men.
So were the successful revolutionaries named above.
Usually there’s a common element of basic education. The most impressive Russian Bolshevik revolutionary was actually Stalin, of modest birth and given a modest education in the priesthood, which he rejected. As did another contemporary...We shan’t overlook the most self made revolutionary of all; sorry, it’s Hitler. The others had a lot of help he didn’t. No way son of a postman with basic education rates “elite.”
What German or Russian elites supported either movement?
For that matter Mussolini?
Again, I’m not completely rejecting elite theory model, I’m saying it’s not universally applicable. No need to shoehorn people into the model;
AND ...🥁 drumroll...
...you’ll miss things.
When you evaluated the capacity of elites to adapt you estimated 10-15% success. That’s overall I think...
...15% on these Pederasts schizophrenic 🤡?
Keep your eyes open and mind open to what is observed, the model isn’t useless... it’s just limited like anything else we flawed humans do.
Oh, someone and somethings coming, don’t miss it because it didn’t fit the template.
You see...
...As the Republic 🗽💀 died America 🇺🇸 asked her 🗽;
I see your point, but I can't help but think it's splitting hairs. Maybe you have a certain version of elite theory in mind, but the one Turchin presents accommodates your objections, as far as I can tell. Elite theory isn't caste theory. You don't need to be born into a hereditary aristocracy to be an elite aspirant. That's Turchin's point about elite overproduction. In pre-crisis times there are always a ton of people scrambling to BECOME part of the elite. They get degrees, like law degrees, hoping to make a lot of money and/or get into politics. When that doesn't happen, they become disaffected elite aspirants (counter-elites), and those are historically the ones who lead revolutions. Peasant rebellions get crushed unless they have the support of counter-elites.
Great article Harrison ! Thanks you. The thing I recall with psychopathic structures, is eventually they all self implode. I see that as a near term possibility for Democrat/Woke crowd, coming real soon !
I think the key phrase here Harrison is "above a certain size." I'm putting the finishing touches on a response to Turchin. And as with the solutions of Lobaczewski, my problem is the somewhat paradoxical one that the solutions offered are the same technocratic forms of bureaucratic rationality which give rise to the original problem. The solution is in a return to gemeinschaft, but of course I'm not promoting any crude voluntarism. The return, if I'm right, will be a product of the very civilizational collapse baked into the crisis of the iron cage of rationality. Getting below that certain size, however long it lasts before the countervailing pressures come into play, may not entirely be fun. But for a lot of people neither is this size.
Do you envision a return to gemeinschaft that doesn't contain *any* technocratic bureaucratic rationality? If so, wouldn't this simply resemble a return to paleolithic hunter-gathering?
Doesn't this just bring us right back around to the "above a certain size" standard? I was only reacting to the idea that paleolithic hunting bands were the threshold. History is full of societies based in traditional authority. But certainly, yes, above a certain size the growing impersonality of gesellschaft relations, the size of the potential tax base, and given the social complexity the valid appeals to the necessity of rational authority at scale, all lend themselves to bureaucracy. Though what that size is depends upon numerous factors which vary between contexts.
Yeah. I guess my point is just that unless humanity transitions back to hunter-gathering/pastoralism/small-scale agriculture, with no polity larger than a relatively tiny (from our perspective) self-sustaining community, there will continue to be elite classes and bureaucracy, to some degree. Could a system that incorporates some degree of bureaucracy (necessitated by size) and populist federalism come about so that small-scale communities can coexist with a degree of centralization?
I fear we're moving into territory which cannot be fruitfully hashed out in a comments section. "To some degree," like "above a certain size," is probably inevitably true. It's just the devil is in the details. I would warn against succumbing to the Frankfurt School's gambit of finding the seeds of bureaucratic rationality in all of human history. Seeds are not the same thing as trees. Even Tocqueville, who claimed more continuity than most between the old regime and the French revolutionaries, conceded that there was substantive difference between the administrative apparatus of a regime still largely grounded in traditional authority and the regime of radical rationality ushered in by the technocratic revolutionaries. Whether that difference was based in temperament, aptitude, skill, or some combination I suppose is open to interpretation. But yes, the kind of gemeinschaft society which militates against bureaucratic rationality will likely be less industrial, less prosperous and more subject to harsh Darwinian conditions, weeding out the spatials, as I call them/us. The question as you correctly pose it is whether some kind of pluralist federalism might maintain the virtues of gemeinschaft without a complete return to an agrarian society. I suppose time will tell.
One thing draws my attention "to privilege stability and high societal well-being in the future over maximizing immediate status and wealth regardless of the impacts on other groups (Levi 1988)"
Of late, it seems that elite attempts to increase societal well-being have been at odds with stability, primarily because society doesn't much like the elites' definition of well being. This seems a fundamental problem, as the quoted section assumes that elites can identify the best way to increase societal well-being ahead of time, which I believe to be fundamentally impossible. It seems much more a matter of discovery of what works out best, and not something figured out ahead of time. I find myself thinking this must be why such writers say that all societies will have elites and administrators etc., without seeming to question how many they should have or what they should be doing; they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it.
In other words, they assume the end state and the top down ability to get us there, as opposed to society being a bottom up exploration of what the end state is, and discovering how to get there.
"they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it."
Not sure I'd say that, at least not in this context. I think guys like Turchin would say things are the way they are precisely because they don't know what they're doing.
"without seeming to question how many they should have or what they should be doing; they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it."
Good things to figure out. On numbers, the limit of what they would say at present, I think, is that, regardless of the ideal number, there are currently too many. General well-being, when proxied by biological health indicators like height, and economic by something like relative wages, tends to be better when the number of elites is lower. But that's not to say even that situation is ideal - just that people tend to be happier and healthier all around (relative to precrisis and crisis phases) under those conditions.
"The way out is through:" Robert Frost wrote, "the best way out is always through." L. Ron Hubbard's version (referring to the Dianetic method of psychotherapy) was "the way out is the way through." Then more recently we have Trent Reznor and Alanis Morissette expressing similar sentiments.
The psychopath's motto is "avoid at all costs." Medical doctors and many other elites have similar philosophies. This results in a ruling class operating over a quagmire of lies. A traditional remedy which has been adapted to modern times begins with "confess." Take responsibility for the bad results you have been creating.
Now I will go woo-woo on you:
The Fourth Invaders, which some of us know as Reptilians (though that may not be totally accurate), prevailed in this galaxy for millions of years and based their power, as far as I can tell, on their willingness to deceive and kill. They also developed highly advanced technologies for disabling free beings.
The Fifth Invaders, also known as The Domain (and by other names) seems to have achieved supremacy in more recent times (though not on Earth). Though they have lost most (or all?) of their free beings to the Fourth Invader's technologies, they still seem to be able to use Limited Free Beings, which operate through inorganic bodies. This gives them an advantage in war, as those beings can perceive the environment directly without the need for technologies and have little or no fear of death.
The Fourth Invaders still control Earth for all intents and purposes. Though there may be much we can do to improve our situation without recognizing this basic fact, we will eventually need to confront it. A prisoner will not have a very good idea what to do about his situation if he doesn't even realize he's in prison. This is the theme toyed with in the Matrix movies.
The human personality did not evolve on Earth. Not even the human body, or any other biological forms that exist here evolved here, except for rather minor adaptive modifications. They were all invented elsewhere. Our planet may not be the ultimate fairyland, but it is one. All cultures, all religious traditions (except the Vedic?) were put here with the idea of keeping us imprisoned here. Our urge to be free is an ancient urge that survives here in an extremely uninformed state. Recognizing the problem of the Psychopath is a first step in walking away from what would be our ultimate fate. But only the first step.
This amateur biologist has a theory about hormones underlying the rise and fall of political entities. He contacted Turchin but Turchin ignored him. However Neil Howe,from the Strauss-Howe generational theory, was intrigued and decided to work together. https://odysee.com/@JollyHeretic:d/miettinen:b
This guy is light years ahead of all those hacks, he was writing in depth about it in the 80's long before people even recognized something was wrong with modern people. I have three hard copies of his BIOHISTORY on my shelf and I bought his HUNGRY APE for .50 at a garage sale back in 1992 and thought it was the most brilliant book I have read in my life. Jim Penman passed more brain cells in his last bowel movement than Neil De Grasse Tyson has in his entire head. Jim predicted that examination of their brains would reveal leftists were missing their amygdalas altogether back in the early 90's. The science later confirmed it with hundreds of thousands collated CT scans. Owed a Nobel Prize a long time ago. They don't give them to real geniuses any more. They just barely gave Linus Pauling one.
Re: the amygdalae, what exactly did he predict? Because they (I presume psychopaths) are not missing their amygdalae. They have a deficit in function, but they still have them.
By the way, since that man Peter Turchin you linked to above clearly lacked sufficient native intelligence to understand a single word of that book, he did what all mediocre minds do in the presence of real genius ... he drifted off into some weird, schizophrenic rant about how we have moved into an era when the individual no longer matters (classic marxism, dialectic theory) and people who seem smarter than he is are not because of ... drifts off into bizarre blathering about mathematical formulas and other crap to show he has probably already lost focus on the subject ... which happens when your frontal lobes aren't working very well. Turchin IS the decadence, he IS the decay spoken of in Penman's book. He IS the problem. Guys like this are not bright to deserve to crawl 100 meters over broken glass, clamber up on a step ladder and plant a kiss in the crack of Jim Penman's ass. As I said, the reason that Penman hasn't gotten a Nobel prize yet is that in an age of bonsai tree people there is nobody left tall enough to even comprehend stratospheric IQs like Penman. I bet you I am four standard derivatives above Turchin and I am in awe of the sheer Foundation like brilliance and insight of Penman's book. It's tragic like in the story "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov that just as we begin to get the perspective of where we are and what is going on with the last bright lights of people like Penman, the darkness and madness and the Red Death destroys everything and sends us back to the Dark Ages all over again. No guarantees we will ever come out of it.
"However, their one-sidedness makes them prone to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people who, in their opinion, are mainly guided by their emotions.
"Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, but pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme, moralizing positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situations and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. ...
"Human nature does in fact tend to be “no good,” especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives as a result of their shortcomings ..."
Psychopaths and sociopaths missing their frontal lobes. Leftists missing their amygdalas. Less brain is never better than more brain. If your society is being run by people with tennis ball sized vacuous holes in their heads on CT scans, your society is not going to be around much longer. Welcome to Amurikwa. It all stems from failing to put people out onto ice floes when it becomes obvious there is something wrong with them. During the Ice Age people like Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. wake up to find the tribe gathered around them with a bag of beef jerky, some flints for firestarters and an ice floe parked right outside they intend to push you off on as soon as they can hustle you onto it. These people weren't stupid and they knew something was wrong with these kids by the time they were 9 years old. In our society, these same people become President & Supreme Executive. In our past, they were Orca bait. Otherwise how could our gene pool ever have maintained itself to achieve a civilization at all? These things about brain development were well understood in the 1920's. Science hasn't moved forward since the 70's, it's been steadily moving backwards in every single discipline. Note : In many leftists, they also have smaller frontal lobes, marking them as psychopathic lunatics who can't see the consequences of their own actions. Typical democrats, in other words.
Imagine how pathological mankind must be that these are our leaders. Put yourself outside it all and look in at us for who we really are. We are so decadent and degenerate that dangerous damaged defective people are thrust into our leadership roles. I continue to insist that it is impossible to gangrape your way into a better gene pool. When the Cro-Magnons genocided the Neanderthals and cannibalized them, taking their women as war brides, they were drinking from a poisoned chalice. You might get enough genes to produce our modern civilization but you will never keep it for long because of inherently whacky defects in your basic makeup. Our women don't seek Neanderthals for mates, they seek the Dark Triad, which means they will always be breeding against civilization. Once the nuts have the numbers, no amount of rational thought is going to be able to keep that good old Cro-Magnon crazy in it's cage. That's the real reason for the 200 year cycle of civilizations.
Evidently Mr. Turchin does not know the Russian Bolsheviks were funded by non-Russians. Perhaps he forgot. Perhaps he forgot whose money financed the Bolsheviks, forgot the Germans found it expedient to have Lenin go "To the Finland Station" or why German money financed Trotsky. Or Mr. Jacob Schiff's interests in Bolshevik finance. One might go on, books have been written on the subject but our scholar does not read them.
And in regards to the Democrats-please. Not only BLM was financed as a proto-revolutionary shock troop by Democrats, but now the new wood on the racial fire is Reparations for injured groups. Everyone except Native Americans, Irish, Italians, other ethnic groups who were mercilessly persecuted deserves a kick back. LGBTQ for example is yet another concocted entity by Democrats.
Lastly, Covid proved that there are no checks or balances. We live under the American Uniparty. One globalist ideology. And most ironic is the Bureaucratic State Institutions of the USA created this organization called the WEF. https://stegiel.substack.com/p/france-is-burning?utm_source=activity_item
Consider then Maurice Strong: President of Power Corp. President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Chair of Petro Canada. Chair of Ontario Hydro. Head of the United Nations Environmental Program. Founding member of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Father of the IPCC. Committed globalist.
But how did arch-globalist Maurice Strong, a dirt-poor high school dropout from Oak Lake, Manitoba, rise to become an international wheeler-dealer who is responsible for shaping our modern-day globalist institutions? The story is as unlikely as it is instructive, and it leads us from the heart of the oil patch to the formation of the IPCC.
Given Strong's remarkable ascent through the ranks of political power to become a globalist kingpin, it won't be surprising to hear that he had political connections in his family. But it may be surprising to hear where those connections were placed. His aunt, Anna Louise Strong, was a committed communist who befriended Lenin and Trotsky (who asked her to teach him English) before she ultimately settled in China, where she was on familiar terms with Mao Zedong. She became close with Zhou Enlai, who wept openly when she was buried with full honors in Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
"Evidently Mr. Turchin does not know the Russian Bolsheviks were funded by non-Russians. Perhaps he forgot."
He doesn't say, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was aware of this. It wasn't relevant to his point, though, so he didn't bring it up.
"And in regards to the Democrats-please."
You mean the fact that he calls the Repubs revolutionary and not the Dems? That's because only the dissident Repubs are out to change the existing ruling class. The Dems are not, thus they are not "revolutionary." Radical yes, but not revolutionary according to Turchin's definitions. The Dems would not support BLM if it was a threat to the ruling elite.
As for your third point re: Covid and the uniparty, I agree there!
I do doubt considerably any Republican dissident is out to change the ruling class. Are they openly Anti-Federalist? The political party is not exactly a plurality of voices and Republicans are as manipulated and fragmented as Democrats but in a different way than Democrats.
Trump is an outstanding example. His relationship with the CIA via Resorts International remains undiscussed.
And this in the age of Epstein and JFK Jr. makes me smile.
"I do doubt considerably any Republican dissident is out to change the ruling class."
When there is elite overproduction, it creates a class of elite wannabes. People who technically aren't in the ruling class, but think they should be. They're still "elites". Turchin calls these counter-elites. Lenin was a counter-elite. Bannon is a counter-elite. Lenin much preferred being in power to being under the tsar. Bannon would much prefer owning the Dems than being under Biden.
"Are they openly Anti-Federalist?"
A dissident elite doesn't need to be anti-federalist. They just want to be in a position they're not currently.
"The political party is not exactly a plurality of voices and Republicans are as manipulated and fragmented as Democrats but in a different way than Democrats."
Agreed. Except for counter-elites, they are not currently in power, and would prefer to be in power, by occupying the positions of those who currently are.
"Trump is an outstanding example. His relationship with the CIA via Resorts International remains undiscussed."
In other words, he's a counter-elite. There is only ever a circulation of elites. That's what revolutions are.
Concur on "Circulation of Elites" with a modest proviso that the elite badge need not represent ability to do the job given the Peter Principle. I recognize of course perception is crucial. A ruler or set of rulers can be incompetent and predecessor extremely able. Counter elites are interesting. Nietzsche was a counter elite. Evidently in our Fallen world the longer a given social order creates "civilization" the greater the emotional reaction in the sensitives. Thus issuing forth the "Anti-Christ."
"In a logocracy, all of these things would be monitored in real-time, with each institution factoring them into their planning and actions. For instance, the wise council would track primarily the social/psychological indicators and factor them into their public addresses and counsel to the head of state, senate, and government. The head of state and education council could track elite overproduction in university admissions. And the logocratic association would ensure policy issues take all these indicators and trends into account."
This just sounds like an admission to wanting technocracy, 'trust me guys we can make this new material ideo about measuring people to prevent crisis's from happening too badly'.
Yes, Lobaczewski was not against technocracy. He was not a revolutionary, so given that we live in a technocratic world, he proposed technocratic solutions.
Me neither. I think Lobaczewski would actually agree, too. Like with the ex-communists states, a lot would need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, and even that seems unlikely.
In 🇺🇸 this ends when Biden breathes his last. DC, the Army already melt away. The present political class has no succession, no legitimacy, no Constitution.
Getting rid of Trump the Victory that ruined them.
There’s no real challenge, its just there’s no support. DC unravels along with its too prolonged Depression/WW2/ColdWar over centralized Emergency government, taking much of the Federal and most of the International System with it.
The extremely densely Federated nature of the American polity as a nation will provide a great buffer and cushion in much of the nation, geography and nuclear weapons will ensure that whatever America becomes, it will be one nation.
Humans don't change, they don't evolve and they don't learn. Just insisting that they are not trying hard enough and that if we initiate grand social engineering schemes is itself strongly symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorders. Real geniuses outgrow these notions in their teenage years and learn to accept the world that way that it is. Just like time travel movies, you'll often notice human beings are so rigid and intractable that even achieving a small positive outcome will have unforeseen consequences like Cane Toads in Australia. Our society already achieved a near utopia in 1955, it was quickly destroyed by the improvers of mankind as soon as President Kennedy was out of the way and they could repeat all the same mistakes of the last 2000 years. Bizarre pseudo-religious mania like the LSD cults and whacky hippies declaring the Age of Aquarius are all part of the problem. It's all chimpmanzee drivel and biped madness. A nation must be homogeneous and subscribe to the same basic world view in order to survive it's neighbors and hostile outsiders. The idea that if we only experiment with enough ideologies (most of them already tried which is why sane people promote the study of history) that we can alter the fundamental biological nature of mankind is part of the ponerology that accumulates as a society ages. It is itself a malevolence born out of megalomania. I outgrew this stuff at the age of 12 and never bought a single tenet of this childish crap.
"Humans don't change, they don't evolve and they don't learn."
Individual humans do.
"Just insisting that they are not trying hard enough and that if we initiate grand social engineering schemes is itself strongly symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorders."
Gross overgeneralization.
"Real geniuses outgrow these notions in their teenage years and learn to accept the world that way that it is."
There is some wisdom hidden in here, but such "real geniuses" also tend to be egotists with a schizoid deficit in psychological insight.
"Just like time travel movies, you'll often notice human beings are so rigid and intractable that even achieving a small positive outcome will have unforeseen consequences like Cane Toads in Australia. Our society already achieved a near utopia in 1955, it was quickly destroyed by the improvers of mankind as soon as President Kennedy was out of the way and they could repeat all the same mistakes of the last 2000 years."
So was this near utopia an "achievement" or a "small positive outcome" with unforeseen consequences?
"Bizarre pseudo-religious mania like the LSD cults and whacky hippies declaring the Age of Aquarius are all part of the problem."
Agreed.
"It's all chimpmanzee drivel and biped madness."
Another somewhat schizoidal overgeneralization, IMO.
"A nation must be homogeneous and subscribe to the same basic world view in order to survive it's neighbors and hostile outsiders."
Turchin details something like this in Ultrasociety.
"The idea that if we only experiment with enough ideologies (most of them already tried which is why sane people promote the study of history) that we can alter the fundamental biological nature of mankind is part of the ponerology that accumulates as a society ages."
Lobaczewski would agree with some version of this.
"It is itself a malevolence born out of megalomania. I outgrew this stuff at the age of 12 and never bought a single tenet of this childish crap."
The unforeseen consequence is what happens when your society is too successful. Again, tempting fate by trying to change human nature to create an extremely high civilization like the one in 1955. We even held onto it a few years. Then the rest of the human race got their boots on.
I was brought forward to a room full of psychologists specializing in the study of gifted children in 1974. They basically shook my chain and impatiently barked at me to "say something smart" like the gang in the IDIOCRACY brawndo discussion.
I came out with my classic line, the one I have been using for 40 years. It's my classic quote, probably needs to be on my tombstone.
"All successful things soon sow the seeds of their own destruction. This will never change because mankind will never change." They all nodded and their department head motioned for me to be taken back into the other room like a circus monkey. The humans called this "getting me the help I needed."
The difference between me and Charlton Heston is that Heston at the end of his journey got a good rifle, a box of ammunition, a strong horse and a beautiful woman to ride off into the forbidden zone with. The humans never even let me have that.
I would love to see us come up with a way to turn the non-psychopathic "elites" against the psychopathic "elites". It appears that currently, a supremacist attitude toward "regular people" is a defining characteristic "our" evidently now thoroughly pathocratic "elite".
How do we encourage a circulation toward virtue?
I don't know. I do think populism is part of it. Another is having enough sane people survive the next several years to be around for the rebuilding, at which point hopefully they can have the support of enough people to have some influence.
Now you're onto something useful. Forget about winning this. If your brains could hold the odds (it can't) you'd already know this is going to end much, much worse than it seems right now. Start to think with real optimism and begin doing the planning to assist people surviving now, during and after this madness runs its course. Superman will not be coming to save us at the 11th hour. Americans have an average IQ of 95 now, which was legally labeled a clinical cretin in 1955 and could get you absolved of responsibility for your actions in a courtroom back then. Koko the Sign Language gorilla was tested at 91 under clinical conditions. Anybody who thinks Ozzie and Harriet will be back shortly doesn't know what the situation is like now. They just don't understand anything. Start to think about protecting females from gangrape by Red Chinese troops, you'll be closer to the real priorities. Planning to publish a new magazine that tells people to try to be nicer to each other is just for the lulz during the apocalypse, it's all pointless in that direction.
I wonder if that IQ stat holds true for actual Americans...and by that I mean those who can trace their ancestry to Northwestern Europe and their ancestry in this country to before the War Between the States at the latest. We have a great many "newcomers" and new "citizens" who, I'm sure, are a significant downward drag on general IQ.
Elite theory may be overrated and presently over extended.
We don’t know, yet.
What's your alternative?
1. Grow Balls or it’s hopeless.
Leaders need followers.
There are leaders, but the 🇺🇸 people are Sheep.
THERE IS NO PEACEFUL SOLUTION.
2. Here’s some cadre PERHAPS, certainly resources, certainly they are making practical alliances.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50/
That list 50X that size is not enough without followers.
See Step 1.
I wonder. It's almost as if we needed some sort of religion or something. Wow, I feel you're going to crack this case at any moment. Round and round we go. The latter Romans after they saw wealthy elites dragged from their homes and torn apart by horses during the food riots immediately took up a collection afterwards to restore the old temples and re-introduce the old rituals that they had been critiquing as old fashioned superstitious nonsense only a few years earlier. The universal common quality of mankind is that they are almost all breathtakingly stupid. Same mistakes, another century. Good luck with your planning to fix mankind by appealing to their better angels. What a shame mankind has no better angels.
"However, their one-sidedness makes them prone to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people who, in their opinion, are mainly guided by their emotions.
"Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, but pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme, moralizing positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situations and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. ...
"Human nature does in fact tend to be “no good,” especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives as a result of their shortcomings ..."
"If you're DSMing me, you're not even close."
This is not DSM.
"Since I was little I have taken great pains to avoid leadership roles and shrink from dominance over others. I have never suggested that it's all a matter of adjusting the environment with grand schemes of social engineering to "teach" and "modify" behaviours of others. (Utter madness)"
This is admirable. It also has remarkably little to do with anything.
"Also, it's not my imagination I am one of the brightest prodigies ever born on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I was scored at the University of Charlottesville in Virginia at age 9, again by the Army at age 22, both times proving I breathe very rarified air indeed."
Congratulations!
"Also, people who argue by reprinting DSM are gay. It's a sign of repressed homosexuality to try to ignore someone's arguments and insist they have yet another "mental illness" "chemical imbalance" "personality disorder"."
Oh really?
"I think that man is inherently evil because I have seen him for what he really is, not what you talk about over cappuccinos at Starbucks. Mankind is nothing but bastards"
This kind of schizoidal nonsense is not allowed here.
Dude was King of the Edgelords.
Live by the edge, die by the edge.
"Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrasing others."
It’s sad that you’ve lost the childlike innocence that allows you to believe that Gods and angels exist and are engaged in a spiritual battle all around us, unseen. Mankind is not and never will be angelic. We are fallen, and Christ has paid the price. Your cynicism is blinding you to the beauty that exists all around us even as evil exists as well. Never forget that God has already won, and this world is playing out the aftermath as Satan struggles, knowing he is damned for all eternity soon. Jeering at this does not change it as fact. Praying for your soul, and all those that have given up on victory.
I was hoping someone would say something like this. Thank you.
Wow! My pleasure. Thank you for the article. You’re writing is very interesting to me.
This is a pure problem of marketing, education, and spiritual counseling. Hubbard has invented the only way I am aware of that is in use and working. Though it feels not fast enough.
We start with the problem of the psychopath. We can't move forward until we have confronted that problem. In our online educational materials, this is referred to as the Anti-Social Personality.
I'm ignorant of Hubbard's work (perhaps as a consequence of the demonization / aversion conditioning applied by The Regime?) so I admit I've not given it careful consideration. Rather, I've avoided looking, as the stories of cult-like exploitation of devotees have kept me away thus far.
"We start with the problem of the psychopath. We can't move forward until we have confronted that problem."
This key insight is a prerequisite to any real solution to our dilemma of systematic victimization of decent people by an anti-social minority. I'm curious to learn more of Hubbard's perspective on this.
I hope it doesn't seem too crass to refer you to a link: https://www.scientology.tv/series/l-ron-hubbard-library-presents/the-anti-social-personality-the-social-personality.html
Non-psychopathic "elites" do not exist.
I do not think this is accurate. Even in a pathocracy, per Lobaczewski, only 10% of the ruling class are psychopaths. (The rest have other personality disorders or disturbances.) Plus, the "elites" are a fuzzy category. In the American plutocracy, where is the cut-off point? The top 0.1%? 1%? 10%? If you count the credentialed class as elites, that's 10% of the population. No one things the number of psychopaths is that high, and even if it were, there are demonstrably psychopaths in all other economic brackets, which would necessitate the percentage of psychopaths to be significantly higher than 10%. Basically, it might be a fun and edgy soundbite, but it bears no resemblance to reality.
They have in the past: Aristotle. Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius.
Harrison my point I realized was not explicit. "Revolution won’t come from below." It never has. Elites exploit and fail. New elites arise. Every election cycle the knotted rope on our neck we tighten.
Ok, then we're actually in agreement. Revolution from below is probably a poor term. But there's still a different between the 1917 revolution "from below" and the 1991 revolution "from above". One way of articulating the difference is that the former comes from counter-elites, and the latter comes from a split segment of the existing regime.
I think elite theory has become dogma to some, and is over extended.
For rare examples of revolution from below; Ireland 1916-1922 (lower middle class leadership at best, at best).
Not without help, but Ho Chi Minh’s revolution against the French 1945-1954. For that matter Mao, which is somewhat of a process of the most fit warlord rising to top over 30 years, but Mao was not elite.
Russia February 1917 was a (French inspired)* military coup against the Tsar to harness democracy in the war against Germany, in truth it did work 25 years later.
Russia 1917 was Lenin as Ludendorff’s counter coup.
Other examples; King Zog of Albania began as Sergeant Zog, Batista in Cuba was a personnel clerk, numerous Roman Emperors of humble roots and not always rising through the ranks first.
It’s usually elites vs Elites, not always.
*The French had paid to rebuild the Russian army after the defeat against the Japanese and had tremendous influence over the Russian military in WW1.
I'm not familiar with all the details of your examples, but could a lot of these (most? all?) be examples of counter-elites, as Turchin calls them? Mao and Lenin were both educated counter-elites, for instance. As far as I understand it, part of elite theory is elite *dynamics*, i.e. how people become elites who aren't elites currently - elite aspirants as Turchin calls them.
Ho Chi Minh was what you might call a professional ideologue and intellectual, hobnobbing with international socialists in multiple countries, writing articles, and even studying in the Soviet Union. Sounds like an educated counter-elite to me.
My main caution here is the model of elite theory is being overextended. It’s not wrong, just not a universal absolute. It’s usually true.
With respectful humor; there’s two kinds of people in the world, those that classify all people into two kinds, and those that don’t.
🤔
It’s both too broad and too narrow.
I think to call Collins (Ireland) or Mao, Ho Chi Minh elites is a big stretch...educated certainly, although not elite education by any means. Collins as a teenager went to England to work in the post office bank, he ended up at Bank of New York London before the revolt began. That’s talent, not education. Can you call a humble family boy from Cork although literate and given a modest education “elite?”
Neither Mao nor Ho Chi Minh were “elite” , of modest although not poor peasant stock. Ho Chi Minh worked as a cook in New York, a sailor...before he became a professional revolutionary for the Comintern. He wasn’t in elite circles at all, nor Mao who was fighting for decades.
We can move this out of revolution; was Ben Franklin elite? Certainly not by birth or education, nor Andrew Carnegie, nor William Knudsen, nor Edison.
Nor by anything but dint Elon Musk. These are self made men.
So were the successful revolutionaries named above.
Usually there’s a common element of basic education. The most impressive Russian Bolshevik revolutionary was actually Stalin, of modest birth and given a modest education in the priesthood, which he rejected. As did another contemporary...We shan’t overlook the most self made revolutionary of all; sorry, it’s Hitler. The others had a lot of help he didn’t. No way son of a postman with basic education rates “elite.”
What German or Russian elites supported either movement?
For that matter Mussolini?
Again, I’m not completely rejecting elite theory model, I’m saying it’s not universally applicable. No need to shoehorn people into the model;
AND ...🥁 drumroll...
...you’ll miss things.
When you evaluated the capacity of elites to adapt you estimated 10-15% success. That’s overall I think...
...15% on these Pederasts schizophrenic 🤡?
Keep your eyes open and mind open to what is observed, the model isn’t useless... it’s just limited like anything else we flawed humans do.
Oh, someone and somethings coming, don’t miss it because it didn’t fit the template.
You see...
...As the Republic 🗽💀 died America 🇺🇸 asked her 🗽;
Who shall rule us?
And she whispered:
The Strongest .
I see your point, but I can't help but think it's splitting hairs. Maybe you have a certain version of elite theory in mind, but the one Turchin presents accommodates your objections, as far as I can tell. Elite theory isn't caste theory. You don't need to be born into a hereditary aristocracy to be an elite aspirant. That's Turchin's point about elite overproduction. In pre-crisis times there are always a ton of people scrambling to BECOME part of the elite. They get degrees, like law degrees, hoping to make a lot of money and/or get into politics. When that doesn't happen, they become disaffected elite aspirants (counter-elites), and those are historically the ones who lead revolutions. Peasant rebellions get crushed unless they have the support of counter-elites.
OTOH
Some of the elites have noticed
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50/?mkt_tok=MzgyLUpaQi03OTgAAAGItX0ntb3rdfKiQDJ4ZdjV9yiKe6fM0lgx3EwUAIQAMX_0Z53sTByIjLT5p0DMpctPjgyaebwoM0WwSryxDEW2yZfie-tNEkhjHhcYM7QvzIjuPg
American Dynamism
(Substack links awful)
Great article Harrison ! Thanks you. The thing I recall with psychopathic structures, is eventually they all self implode. I see that as a near term possibility for Democrat/Woke crowd, coming real soon !
Within the decade, I'd guess!
Agreed. Hold on everyone it's going to be a wicked ride !
I think the key phrase here Harrison is "above a certain size." I'm putting the finishing touches on a response to Turchin. And as with the solutions of Lobaczewski, my problem is the somewhat paradoxical one that the solutions offered are the same technocratic forms of bureaucratic rationality which give rise to the original problem. The solution is in a return to gemeinschaft, but of course I'm not promoting any crude voluntarism. The return, if I'm right, will be a product of the very civilizational collapse baked into the crisis of the iron cage of rationality. Getting below that certain size, however long it lasts before the countervailing pressures come into play, may not entirely be fun. But for a lot of people neither is this size.
Thanks for this, Harrison.
Do you envision a return to gemeinschaft that doesn't contain *any* technocratic bureaucratic rationality? If so, wouldn't this simply resemble a return to paleolithic hunter-gathering?
Weber would beg to differ. And he was a lot smarter than me. ;-)
Did he provide any historical examples which were not part of large states (with bureaucracies)?
Doesn't this just bring us right back around to the "above a certain size" standard? I was only reacting to the idea that paleolithic hunting bands were the threshold. History is full of societies based in traditional authority. But certainly, yes, above a certain size the growing impersonality of gesellschaft relations, the size of the potential tax base, and given the social complexity the valid appeals to the necessity of rational authority at scale, all lend themselves to bureaucracy. Though what that size is depends upon numerous factors which vary between contexts.
Yeah. I guess my point is just that unless humanity transitions back to hunter-gathering/pastoralism/small-scale agriculture, with no polity larger than a relatively tiny (from our perspective) self-sustaining community, there will continue to be elite classes and bureaucracy, to some degree. Could a system that incorporates some degree of bureaucracy (necessitated by size) and populist federalism come about so that small-scale communities can coexist with a degree of centralization?
I fear we're moving into territory which cannot be fruitfully hashed out in a comments section. "To some degree," like "above a certain size," is probably inevitably true. It's just the devil is in the details. I would warn against succumbing to the Frankfurt School's gambit of finding the seeds of bureaucratic rationality in all of human history. Seeds are not the same thing as trees. Even Tocqueville, who claimed more continuity than most between the old regime and the French revolutionaries, conceded that there was substantive difference between the administrative apparatus of a regime still largely grounded in traditional authority and the regime of radical rationality ushered in by the technocratic revolutionaries. Whether that difference was based in temperament, aptitude, skill, or some combination I suppose is open to interpretation. But yes, the kind of gemeinschaft society which militates against bureaucratic rationality will likely be less industrial, less prosperous and more subject to harsh Darwinian conditions, weeding out the spatials, as I call them/us. The question as you correctly pose it is whether some kind of pluralist federalism might maintain the virtues of gemeinschaft without a complete return to an agrarian society. I suppose time will tell.
I will have to pick up Turchin's book, thanks!
One thing draws my attention "to privilege stability and high societal well-being in the future over maximizing immediate status and wealth regardless of the impacts on other groups (Levi 1988)"
Of late, it seems that elite attempts to increase societal well-being have been at odds with stability, primarily because society doesn't much like the elites' definition of well being. This seems a fundamental problem, as the quoted section assumes that elites can identify the best way to increase societal well-being ahead of time, which I believe to be fundamentally impossible. It seems much more a matter of discovery of what works out best, and not something figured out ahead of time. I find myself thinking this must be why such writers say that all societies will have elites and administrators etc., without seeming to question how many they should have or what they should be doing; they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it.
In other words, they assume the end state and the top down ability to get us there, as opposed to society being a bottom up exploration of what the end state is, and discovering how to get there.
"they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it."
Not sure I'd say that, at least not in this context. I think guys like Turchin would say things are the way they are precisely because they don't know what they're doing.
"without seeming to question how many they should have or what they should be doing; they simply assume they know what to do and will have just the right amount to do it."
Good things to figure out. On numbers, the limit of what they would say at present, I think, is that, regardless of the ideal number, there are currently too many. General well-being, when proxied by biological health indicators like height, and economic by something like relative wages, tends to be better when the number of elites is lower. But that's not to say even that situation is ideal - just that people tend to be happier and healthier all around (relative to precrisis and crisis phases) under those conditions.
Thanks HK. Good post.
Michael Shellenberger says in this talk with Russel Brand that he and his team are really into the Political Ponerology book right now. I tried to tag him in a Note to alert him to your work, but it wouldn't let me. Might be worth you trying to make contact with them https://rumble.com/v2x5x8y-exposing-the-censorship-industrial-complex-part-1-158-stay-free-with-russel.html
Thank you, Gary! This is great.
Hope they take notice!
Great content
"The way out is through:" Robert Frost wrote, "the best way out is always through." L. Ron Hubbard's version (referring to the Dianetic method of psychotherapy) was "the way out is the way through." Then more recently we have Trent Reznor and Alanis Morissette expressing similar sentiments.
The psychopath's motto is "avoid at all costs." Medical doctors and many other elites have similar philosophies. This results in a ruling class operating over a quagmire of lies. A traditional remedy which has been adapted to modern times begins with "confess." Take responsibility for the bad results you have been creating.
Now I will go woo-woo on you:
The Fourth Invaders, which some of us know as Reptilians (though that may not be totally accurate), prevailed in this galaxy for millions of years and based their power, as far as I can tell, on their willingness to deceive and kill. They also developed highly advanced technologies for disabling free beings.
The Fifth Invaders, also known as The Domain (and by other names) seems to have achieved supremacy in more recent times (though not on Earth). Though they have lost most (or all?) of their free beings to the Fourth Invader's technologies, they still seem to be able to use Limited Free Beings, which operate through inorganic bodies. This gives them an advantage in war, as those beings can perceive the environment directly without the need for technologies and have little or no fear of death.
The Fourth Invaders still control Earth for all intents and purposes. Though there may be much we can do to improve our situation without recognizing this basic fact, we will eventually need to confront it. A prisoner will not have a very good idea what to do about his situation if he doesn't even realize he's in prison. This is the theme toyed with in the Matrix movies.
The human personality did not evolve on Earth. Not even the human body, or any other biological forms that exist here evolved here, except for rather minor adaptive modifications. They were all invented elsewhere. Our planet may not be the ultimate fairyland, but it is one. All cultures, all religious traditions (except the Vedic?) were put here with the idea of keeping us imprisoned here. Our urge to be free is an ancient urge that survives here in an extremely uninformed state. Recognizing the problem of the Psychopath is a first step in walking away from what would be our ultimate fate. But only the first step.
This amateur biologist has a theory about hormones underlying the rise and fall of political entities. He contacted Turchin but Turchin ignored him. However Neil Howe,from the Strauss-Howe generational theory, was intrigued and decided to work together. https://odysee.com/@JollyHeretic:d/miettinen:b
Interesting!
https://biohistory.org/
This guy is light years ahead of all those hacks, he was writing in depth about it in the 80's long before people even recognized something was wrong with modern people. I have three hard copies of his BIOHISTORY on my shelf and I bought his HUNGRY APE for .50 at a garage sale back in 1992 and thought it was the most brilliant book I have read in my life. Jim Penman passed more brain cells in his last bowel movement than Neil De Grasse Tyson has in his entire head. Jim predicted that examination of their brains would reveal leftists were missing their amygdalas altogether back in the early 90's. The science later confirmed it with hundreds of thousands collated CT scans. Owed a Nobel Prize a long time ago. They don't give them to real geniuses any more. They just barely gave Linus Pauling one.
Food for thought: https://peterturchin.com/biohistory-my-thoughts-on-jim-penmans-book/
Re: the amygdalae, what exactly did he predict? Because they (I presume psychopaths) are not missing their amygdalae. They have a deficit in function, but they still have them.
By the way, since that man Peter Turchin you linked to above clearly lacked sufficient native intelligence to understand a single word of that book, he did what all mediocre minds do in the presence of real genius ... he drifted off into some weird, schizophrenic rant about how we have moved into an era when the individual no longer matters (classic marxism, dialectic theory) and people who seem smarter than he is are not because of ... drifts off into bizarre blathering about mathematical formulas and other crap to show he has probably already lost focus on the subject ... which happens when your frontal lobes aren't working very well. Turchin IS the decadence, he IS the decay spoken of in Penman's book. He IS the problem. Guys like this are not bright to deserve to crawl 100 meters over broken glass, clamber up on a step ladder and plant a kiss in the crack of Jim Penman's ass. As I said, the reason that Penman hasn't gotten a Nobel prize yet is that in an age of bonsai tree people there is nobody left tall enough to even comprehend stratospheric IQs like Penman. I bet you I am four standard derivatives above Turchin and I am in awe of the sheer Foundation like brilliance and insight of Penman's book. It's tragic like in the story "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov that just as we begin to get the perspective of where we are and what is going on with the last bright lights of people like Penman, the darkness and madness and the Red Death destroys everything and sends us back to the Dark Ages all over again. No guarantees we will ever come out of it.
"However, their one-sidedness makes them prone to consider themselves intellectually superior to “ordinary” people who, in their opinion, are mainly guided by their emotions.
"Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, but pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme, moralizing positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situations and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people’s intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. ...
"Human nature does in fact tend to be “no good,” especially when the schizoids embitter other people’s lives as a result of their shortcomings ..."
Write like an adult, please, or you will be banned.
Not sure what that means.
Psychopaths and sociopaths missing their frontal lobes. Leftists missing their amygdalas. Less brain is never better than more brain. If your society is being run by people with tennis ball sized vacuous holes in their heads on CT scans, your society is not going to be around much longer. Welcome to Amurikwa. It all stems from failing to put people out onto ice floes when it becomes obvious there is something wrong with them. During the Ice Age people like Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. wake up to find the tribe gathered around them with a bag of beef jerky, some flints for firestarters and an ice floe parked right outside they intend to push you off on as soon as they can hustle you onto it. These people weren't stupid and they knew something was wrong with these kids by the time they were 9 years old. In our society, these same people become President & Supreme Executive. In our past, they were Orca bait. Otherwise how could our gene pool ever have maintained itself to achieve a civilization at all? These things about brain development were well understood in the 1920's. Science hasn't moved forward since the 70's, it's been steadily moving backwards in every single discipline. Note : In many leftists, they also have smaller frontal lobes, marking them as psychopathic lunatics who can't see the consequences of their own actions. Typical democrats, in other words.
"Psychopaths and sociopaths missing their frontal lobes. Leftists missing their amygdalas."
?? This is not even wrong.
Imagine how pathological mankind must be that these are our leaders. Put yourself outside it all and look in at us for who we really are. We are so decadent and degenerate that dangerous damaged defective people are thrust into our leadership roles. I continue to insist that it is impossible to gangrape your way into a better gene pool. When the Cro-Magnons genocided the Neanderthals and cannibalized them, taking their women as war brides, they were drinking from a poisoned chalice. You might get enough genes to produce our modern civilization but you will never keep it for long because of inherently whacky defects in your basic makeup. Our women don't seek Neanderthals for mates, they seek the Dark Triad, which means they will always be breeding against civilization. Once the nuts have the numbers, no amount of rational thought is going to be able to keep that good old Cro-Magnon crazy in it's cage. That's the real reason for the 200 year cycle of civilizations.
Please Google "not even wrong."
Hey I read Biohistory real quick, that was great. I owe you one.
Evidently Mr. Turchin does not know the Russian Bolsheviks were funded by non-Russians. Perhaps he forgot. Perhaps he forgot whose money financed the Bolsheviks, forgot the Germans found it expedient to have Lenin go "To the Finland Station" or why German money financed Trotsky. Or Mr. Jacob Schiff's interests in Bolshevik finance. One might go on, books have been written on the subject but our scholar does not read them.
And in regards to the Democrats-please. Not only BLM was financed as a proto-revolutionary shock troop by Democrats, but now the new wood on the racial fire is Reparations for injured groups. Everyone except Native Americans, Irish, Italians, other ethnic groups who were mercilessly persecuted deserves a kick back. LGBTQ for example is yet another concocted entity by Democrats.
Lastly, Covid proved that there are no checks or balances. We live under the American Uniparty. One globalist ideology. And most ironic is the Bureaucratic State Institutions of the USA created this organization called the WEF. https://stegiel.substack.com/p/france-is-burning?utm_source=activity_item
Consider then Maurice Strong: President of Power Corp. President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Chair of Petro Canada. Chair of Ontario Hydro. Head of the United Nations Environmental Program. Founding member of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Father of the IPCC. Committed globalist.
But how did arch-globalist Maurice Strong, a dirt-poor high school dropout from Oak Lake, Manitoba, rise to become an international wheeler-dealer who is responsible for shaping our modern-day globalist institutions? The story is as unlikely as it is instructive, and it leads us from the heart of the oil patch to the formation of the IPCC.
Given Strong's remarkable ascent through the ranks of political power to become a globalist kingpin, it won't be surprising to hear that he had political connections in his family. But it may be surprising to hear where those connections were placed. His aunt, Anna Louise Strong, was a committed communist who befriended Lenin and Trotsky (who asked her to teach him English) before she ultimately settled in China, where she was on familiar terms with Mao Zedong. She became close with Zhou Enlai, who wept openly when she was buried with full honors in Beijing's Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
"Evidently Mr. Turchin does not know the Russian Bolsheviks were funded by non-Russians. Perhaps he forgot."
He doesn't say, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was aware of this. It wasn't relevant to his point, though, so he didn't bring it up.
"And in regards to the Democrats-please."
You mean the fact that he calls the Repubs revolutionary and not the Dems? That's because only the dissident Repubs are out to change the existing ruling class. The Dems are not, thus they are not "revolutionary." Radical yes, but not revolutionary according to Turchin's definitions. The Dems would not support BLM if it was a threat to the ruling elite.
As for your third point re: Covid and the uniparty, I agree there!
I do doubt considerably any Republican dissident is out to change the ruling class. Are they openly Anti-Federalist? The political party is not exactly a plurality of voices and Republicans are as manipulated and fragmented as Democrats but in a different way than Democrats.
Trump is an outstanding example. His relationship with the CIA via Resorts International remains undiscussed.
And this in the age of Epstein and JFK Jr. makes me smile.
"I do doubt considerably any Republican dissident is out to change the ruling class."
When there is elite overproduction, it creates a class of elite wannabes. People who technically aren't in the ruling class, but think they should be. They're still "elites". Turchin calls these counter-elites. Lenin was a counter-elite. Bannon is a counter-elite. Lenin much preferred being in power to being under the tsar. Bannon would much prefer owning the Dems than being under Biden.
"Are they openly Anti-Federalist?"
A dissident elite doesn't need to be anti-federalist. They just want to be in a position they're not currently.
"The political party is not exactly a plurality of voices and Republicans are as manipulated and fragmented as Democrats but in a different way than Democrats."
Agreed. Except for counter-elites, they are not currently in power, and would prefer to be in power, by occupying the positions of those who currently are.
"Trump is an outstanding example. His relationship with the CIA via Resorts International remains undiscussed."
In other words, he's a counter-elite. There is only ever a circulation of elites. That's what revolutions are.
Concur on "Circulation of Elites" with a modest proviso that the elite badge need not represent ability to do the job given the Peter Principle. I recognize of course perception is crucial. A ruler or set of rulers can be incompetent and predecessor extremely able. Counter elites are interesting. Nietzsche was a counter elite. Evidently in our Fallen world the longer a given social order creates "civilization" the greater the emotional reaction in the sensitives. Thus issuing forth the "Anti-Christ."
"In a logocracy, all of these things would be monitored in real-time, with each institution factoring them into their planning and actions. For instance, the wise council would track primarily the social/psychological indicators and factor them into their public addresses and counsel to the head of state, senate, and government. The head of state and education council could track elite overproduction in university admissions. And the logocratic association would ensure policy issues take all these indicators and trends into account."
This just sounds like an admission to wanting technocracy, 'trust me guys we can make this new material ideo about measuring people to prevent crisis's from happening too badly'.
Yes, Lobaczewski was not against technocracy. He was not a revolutionary, so given that we live in a technocratic world, he proposed technocratic solutions.
I see, I don't quite sense this playing out well with the current technocratic managerial system suffering from the Competency Crisis.
Me neither. I think Lobaczewski would actually agree, too. Like with the ex-communists states, a lot would need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, and even that seems unlikely.
Not end times, just end of this...
In 🇺🇸 this ends when Biden breathes his last. DC, the Army already melt away. The present political class has no succession, no legitimacy, no Constitution.
Getting rid of Trump the Victory that ruined them.
There’s no real challenge, its just there’s no support. DC unravels along with its too prolonged Depression/WW2/ColdWar over centralized Emergency government, taking much of the Federal and most of the International System with it.
The extremely densely Federated nature of the American polity as a nation will provide a great buffer and cushion in much of the nation, geography and nuclear weapons will ensure that whatever America becomes, it will be one nation.
Again, I do not allow schizoid misanthropy in my comments section.
Humans don't change, they don't evolve and they don't learn. Just insisting that they are not trying hard enough and that if we initiate grand social engineering schemes is itself strongly symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorders. Real geniuses outgrow these notions in their teenage years and learn to accept the world that way that it is. Just like time travel movies, you'll often notice human beings are so rigid and intractable that even achieving a small positive outcome will have unforeseen consequences like Cane Toads in Australia. Our society already achieved a near utopia in 1955, it was quickly destroyed by the improvers of mankind as soon as President Kennedy was out of the way and they could repeat all the same mistakes of the last 2000 years. Bizarre pseudo-religious mania like the LSD cults and whacky hippies declaring the Age of Aquarius are all part of the problem. It's all chimpmanzee drivel and biped madness. A nation must be homogeneous and subscribe to the same basic world view in order to survive it's neighbors and hostile outsiders. The idea that if we only experiment with enough ideologies (most of them already tried which is why sane people promote the study of history) that we can alter the fundamental biological nature of mankind is part of the ponerology that accumulates as a society ages. It is itself a malevolence born out of megalomania. I outgrew this stuff at the age of 12 and never bought a single tenet of this childish crap.
"Humans don't change, they don't evolve and they don't learn."
Individual humans do.
"Just insisting that they are not trying hard enough and that if we initiate grand social engineering schemes is itself strongly symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorders."
Gross overgeneralization.
"Real geniuses outgrow these notions in their teenage years and learn to accept the world that way that it is."
There is some wisdom hidden in here, but such "real geniuses" also tend to be egotists with a schizoid deficit in psychological insight.
"Just like time travel movies, you'll often notice human beings are so rigid and intractable that even achieving a small positive outcome will have unforeseen consequences like Cane Toads in Australia. Our society already achieved a near utopia in 1955, it was quickly destroyed by the improvers of mankind as soon as President Kennedy was out of the way and they could repeat all the same mistakes of the last 2000 years."
So was this near utopia an "achievement" or a "small positive outcome" with unforeseen consequences?
"Bizarre pseudo-religious mania like the LSD cults and whacky hippies declaring the Age of Aquarius are all part of the problem."
Agreed.
"It's all chimpmanzee drivel and biped madness."
Another somewhat schizoidal overgeneralization, IMO.
"A nation must be homogeneous and subscribe to the same basic world view in order to survive it's neighbors and hostile outsiders."
Turchin details something like this in Ultrasociety.
"The idea that if we only experiment with enough ideologies (most of them already tried which is why sane people promote the study of history) that we can alter the fundamental biological nature of mankind is part of the ponerology that accumulates as a society ages."
Lobaczewski would agree with some version of this.
"It is itself a malevolence born out of megalomania. I outgrew this stuff at the age of 12 and never bought a single tenet of this childish crap."
Congratulations!
The unforeseen consequence is what happens when your society is too successful. Again, tempting fate by trying to change human nature to create an extremely high civilization like the one in 1955. We even held onto it a few years. Then the rest of the human race got their boots on.
I was brought forward to a room full of psychologists specializing in the study of gifted children in 1974. They basically shook my chain and impatiently barked at me to "say something smart" like the gang in the IDIOCRACY brawndo discussion.
I came out with my classic line, the one I have been using for 40 years. It's my classic quote, probably needs to be on my tombstone.
"All successful things soon sow the seeds of their own destruction. This will never change because mankind will never change." They all nodded and their department head motioned for me to be taken back into the other room like a circus monkey. The humans called this "getting me the help I needed."
The difference between me and Charlton Heston is that Heston at the end of his journey got a good rifle, a box of ammunition, a strong horse and a beautiful woman to ride off into the forbidden zone with. The humans never even let me have that.