Woke Logic Is Just Dissociative Thinking

The real Matrix is your own mind

“Aha! I found the error in your reasoning.” An Operation for Stone in the Head (16th century).

Recently I implied that Woke politics is simply normalized and compelled psychopathology. What I meant by that is that the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving adopted by Woke adherents are essentially “isomorphic” to psychopathological patterns, specifically those of the “Cluster B” personality disorders. And like a type of forced resonance, it’s contagious, spreading down to whoever falls under its spell.

This goes for everything that falls under those three fundamental categories of experience. Actions—behavioral responses, patterns of personal interaction, political activism, argumentation tactics—will have the appearance of “Cluster B” behavioral dynamics. Feelings—both the emotions themselves (feigned or not), and the typical situations that evoke them—will resemble those emotional dynamics. And thinking—the cognitive processing of information about ourselves and the world, ideation (idea generation), verbal formulae, etc.—well, you get the idea.

The main point is that there are patterns to be observed, and patterns to be followed if the Woke happens to be your social group. These patterns are never original, always of a type. As such they resemble more a set of programming operations than anything else. Which is why memes like this work:

This may come as a shock to some, but there is such a thing as clear thinking. Eliminating personal bias entirely may approach the impossible, but it’s certainly impossible to deny that some thinking is better than other thinking. And Woke thinking has all the hallmarks of a stereotyped, pathological thought process.

In my post on symbolism I briefly summarized “conversive” or dissociative thinking:

We can be emotionally motivated to block out or deny certain memories or facts. … We can selectively give preference to certain memories over others to create a biased representation of the thing being thought about. We can become creative with our memories, rewriting our own and others’ personal history and to create a more palatable and self-serving (or self-deprecating) version. Thought of in this way, most political thinking is simply pathological memory: ignoring inconvenient facts and highlighting others, real or imagined.

Lobaczewski calls these processes the blocking of conclusions, and the selection and substitution of premises which lead to conclusions. If A and B imply C, but we cannot accept C for some reason, we may simply block C from our awareness. Or, if denying C is not so simple, we can block B, or even substitute it for X. Now, A and X imply Z, which may be logically valid, and we happen to like Z. And if we really like Z, we can do this to everything, so all the evidence of our experience leads to our desired conclusion. Like this:

Heads I win, tails you lose. Here it is in a nice flow chart:

Rather than interrogate the logic of their own thinking and encounter the dawning realization that something ain’t right here, however, those who use this type of thinking most frequently will instead look at all those scenarios at the top of the chart and come to the conclusion that racism is in fact everywhere. It turns out that everything is racist.

While that would be a thinking error, it is possible to look around and find it difficult to escape the conclusion that this type of thinking is everywhere (well, practically everywhere). And it’s a sign of something deeper.

From Ponerology:

Any human association affected by the [ponerization process] is characterized by a progressive deterioration of natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality, even more so of objective rationality of thought. Someone considering this in terms of traditional categories might consider it an instance of “turning into half-wits” or the development of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings, resulting in criticism. However, a psychological analysis of this process indicates the typical effects of psychological induction, or that the more normal members of the union are being pressured towards an abnormal manner of experiencing by carriers of various pathological anomalies. (p. 163)

The ultimate source isn’t some amorphous, generalized loss of thinking ability. The vectors for this type of thinking have an origin point: those for whom it comes naturally. And when such types gain an audience, they psychologically induce the same type of thinking in others, like some hypnotist savant.

This process is not without its consequences. On blocking:

A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be extremely harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness.

On selection:

An ever-greater amount of such repressed information is collected in our subconscious memory. Finally, a kind of habit seems to take over: similar material is treated the same way even if reasoning would have reached an outcome quite advantageous to the person.

In other words, such thinking is ultimately self-defeating. Like this:

Dr. Sydney Watson @SydneyLWatson

Rapes and beats woman. "Can't be deported because homeland is too dangerous" Sweden is lost.

The above is not only an example of conversive thinking and its self-defeating effects, but also of the first criterion of ponerogenesis: the inability to recognize pathology for what it is, and take the necessary steps to control it.

A related example has always struck me as desperately illogical: mental illness as a mitigating factor in criminal sentencing. As it happens, I’m mostly with Lobaczewski on this, though I vacillate: I tend to think personality disorders and other forms of psychopathology should be a mitigating factor when it comes to moralizing and the concept of guilt. But this does not necessarily have the implications many think it does for what we do about it. Let me elaborate.

It’s perfectly logical to use the “exclusionary hypothesis” to come to the conclusion that if a particular serial killer, for instance, hadn’t had a psychopathic personality, he wouldn’t have become a serial killer. The same goes for any other necessary factors that go into the creation of a serial killer. In a sense, given those contingencies, he can do no different. And how can you “blame” someone who has no choice in the matter? Some generalize from this logic of causation to come to the conclusion that such killers can’t be held legally or morally responsible for their actions, and their sentence should reflect that fact.

But it’s just as easy, and perhaps more logical, to use that as an argument for harsher sentences. He can’t help it. He doesn’t want to help it. Ergo, since he cannot control or change his personality disorder and his pathological impulses, people would be better off if he were never allowed another opportunity to do what comes naturally: serial killing. We don’t moralize rabid animals for attacking humans (at least, not anymore), but we also don’t use their sickness as a mitigating factor. We isolate them so that they cannot cause any more damage.

Woke thinking gives all kinds of excuses for excusing blatant pathology, whether in the form of normalizing pedophiles, sexualizing children, taking a “compassionate” approach to defenseless rapists, and any number of self-defeating policies that we simply have to do, because to do otherwise would be mean and potentially conservative. Why else would it be possible for a criminal fetishist and pathological liar to become Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy? What would have been obvious even to a progressive liberal of the 90s somehow has become the mental equivalent of performing spinal surgery while nursing a hangover, with no prior experience.

Woke thinking isn’t the only contemporary form of conversive thinking—it’s just the most prominent. You can find it anywhere to varying degrees. And just as it has negative consequences the more you use it, the more you identify it in yourself and root it out, the more positive the outcome.

The succinct and accurate analysis of phenomena, made possible thanks to the conquest of the expendable emotions, conversive thinking, and egotism characterizing self-satisfied people, opens the door to causative behavior, particularly in the areas of philosophical, psychological, and moral reflection; this tips the scale to the advantage of goodness and order. If these values were totally incorporated into humankind’s cultural heritage, they could sufficiently protect nations from the next era of “errors and distortions.” (p. 60)

Just don’t be surprised when you step on the corns of those in your peer groups most enslaved to their own unconscious patterns of reasoning. Their response will be proportional to the amount of material blocked up in their own subconsciousness.

I asked what is the Matrix in a recent post, but I didn’t give an answer, so here is one. There is at least one “Matrix,” and its extent is defined by the boundaries of your own degree of conversive thinking. Escaping that Matrix is part of how to become a quality man or woman.