What Is the Matrix?
A short post on Andrew Tate and negative maladjustment
After social-media influencer-pimp Andrew Tate, his brother, and two associates were arrested in Romania on charges of rape, human trafficking, and creating a criminal organization, he allegedly wrote on Twitter: “The Matrix sent their agents.” The implication was that a) he hadn’t done anything wrong, b) he was being set up to take him out for his dissident views and generally being awesome, and c) the deep state got him because he’s so dangerous to our “Matrix” controllers.
Many people, especially among his groupie fans and conservative supporters, fell for it, just as they’ve fallen for Andrew Tate himself, a shameless con man, pornographer, criminal reprobate, and epitome of the dark tetrad deviant who self-styles as a fearless culture warrior who thinks the only thing women are good for is making men money by selling their bodies on the internet. He’s the kind of guy who 100 years ago would’ve been beaten to a pulp by any woman’s half-decent brother.
Here’s a poll posted on his Twitter account recently:
The two options are: “Innocent, Matrix attack” and “I believe the media.” 970,418 voted, 86.3% choosing “Matrix attack.”
Tate made his billions selling porn on Skype, pretending to be a woman on chat to scam money from horny men while his multiple “girlfriends” posed and pretended to type on their keyboards for his “webcam” business, and establishing subscription-based “courses” that, as far as I can tell, essentially teach guys to make a lot of money by getting their girlfriends to be webcam girls and taking most of the money.
Conservatives as a lot are desperate for people to agree with them. It’s a sad but understandable weakness given the primacy of an ideology so hostile to them, so when a con artist like Tate comes along, they’re just happy to have someone popular and confident-sounding saying the things they say. Tucker Carlson even had him on his show. I’ve talked a lot about the blindness to pathology on the “left” (it’s practically a doctrine—actually, it’s the explicit basis of queer theory), but the “right” can be just as blind. It’s the first criterion of ponerogenesis in action, not to mention conversive thinking—selection and substitution of premises, specifically.
Syrian Girl on Twitter has Tate’s number. (Scroll through her profile for more than enough footage and screenshots to get an idea of the kind of person Tate really is.) This tweet in particular made me laugh:
I’ll keep this one short, just recommending to read the paragraphs in these two articles of mine on “negative maladjustment”:
For deviants like Tate, the “Matrix” consists in things like: common decency, social mores, and normal sexuality. For all his culture warrior posturing, he’s pretty damn “queer.” If this is the Matrix, Tate is Cypher, not Neo.
I’ll leave you with these quotes, which regular readers will find familiar:
Upon this defective instinctive substratum, the deficits of higher feelings and the deformities and impoverishments in psychological, moral, and social concepts develop in correspondence with these gaps.
Our natural world of concepts strikes such people as a nearly incomprehensible convention with no justification in their own psychological experience. They think our customs and principles of decency are a foreign system invented and imposed by someone else (“probably by priests”), foolish, onerous, sometimes even ridiculous. At the same time, however, they easily perceive the deficiencies and weaknesses of our natural language of psychological and moral concepts in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of a contemporary psychologist—except in caricature. (Political Ponerology, p. 111)
[Psychopaths] are virtually unfamiliar with the enduring emotions of love for another person, particularly the marriage partner; it constitutes a fairytale from that “other” human world. For them, love is an ephemeral phenomenon aimed at sexual adventure. However, many psychopathic Don Juans are able to play the lover’s role well enough for their partners to accept it in good faith. After the wedding, feelings which really never existed are replaced by egoism, egotism, and hedonism. (Political Ponerology, p. 115)
“Let the reader understand.” —Mark 13:14
I think the reason figures like Tate are able to garner the notoriety they do is precisely due to their characteropathy. One of the traits that comes with e.g. sociopathy is a lack of concern with what others think of you. The peculiar conditions created by a social order smothered by nonsensical and contradictory formal and informal rules, and suffused with obvious and absurd untruths, mean that those who dislike this state of affairs are primed to applaud any who speak against them. Normal people viscerally experience the social pressure to conform, at least publicly; sociopaths have no such emotional response. Thus a cheap e-pimp like Tate can present himself as a warrior against untruth, or whatever, and the less discerning will fall for the act.
As an aside, I'm extremely skeptical that he's as wealthy as he claims. It's much easier to project the image of success than to actually achieve it, and for someone like Tate the superficial image is all that really matters.
Nailed it. The age-old dream of the pathological scumbag to be free - free from anything decent, from morality, from normal man's society. Others begin to envy him because he seems to be free of fear, self-doubt etc. and get infected with the pathological mind. Like in the vampire archetype, normal people can become predators too once "bitten".
BTW, I'm always sceptical when people get widely succesful and popular but without any sign of a struggle, an inner hero's journey, without caring what others think.