Liberal Education as Psychic Vaccination

Posted by Jeff Morris on February 3, 2022
Posted in: Homeschool, Politics. Leave a comment

In my last post I barfed up over 2000 words about how leftist ideology is making everyone miserable and destroying society — trans insanity, socially mandated racism, mind-altering pharmaceuticals, the willful destruction of culture. I hinted that the examples I brought up all came from my own personal experience over the past few years, and that is true. The proximal way that all of these issues have directly affected my family, is that they collectively contributed to our decision to homeschool our children.  Every one of these issues came up during our kids’ time in the public school system in some direct way, causing us to either have to stand up to a school administrator, supplement our kids’ learning at home because the curriculum the government was peddling was either blatantly false or grossly incomplete, or have absolutely insane conversations with our kids to try to fix the hurt that some school-based message caused.  Imagine trying to explain to a six-year old that they aren’t bad people because of their skin color, or to explain to a pre-pubescent girl that liking video games doesn’t mean she’s really a boy who needs hormone treatments to keep from growing breasts.  If you can’t even get away from that shit by moving to rural Alabama, things have gone too damn far.

In the language of evolutionary biology, these ideas have become so common because they spread like viruses – specifically, they are memes, or brain viruses – and they do so not because they are true, nor because they are good for the brains that house them, but simply because they are neatly packaged in a way that spreads efficiently from one brain to another.  The best way to think of them is as information pathogens; they are thoughts which occupy “clock cycles” in one’s brain for their own purposes and, left to run free in one’s mind, will cause pain and suffering and may be incurable.  (These should be distinguished from information hazards, which are generally a good thing.) To our thinking, homeschool gives us an opportunity to immunize our children against these pathogens.  Indeed, classical education probably functioned as a type of psychic vaccination, where exposure to diverse thoughts, including really bad or evil ones in their most undiluted form, in a relatively safe environment at a young age protected one against the weaponized propaganda that one is likely to encounter as an adult.  If I wrestle fairly with the arguments of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Adolf Hitler, or any other of history’s greatest villains in a non-partisan classroom before I am forced to contend in real life with the harsh realities that motivated such people, I am far less likely to succumb to flat, extremist ideologies, childish “good guy bad guy” narratives, or to lose the capacity to understand, and compromise with, those with whom I disagree.

One might argue that education obviously doesn’t prevent political extremism, because all the worst examples of it come directly from our universities; indeed, the universities are all absolutely lousy with raving political loonies.  But I would argue that is because universities only half-educate people now.  Most Western people have only the vaguest exposure to the liberal arts and a depressingly shallow grasp of their own culture; they are shoe-horned into increasingly narrow majors that either train them for some specific career (most STEM programs), or else indoctrinate them to become some variety of left-wing political activist or NGO apparatchik (the “humanities”).  The latter have little grounding in tangible reality and so have no reason to find Foucault less plausible than Darwin; the former have little grounding in history or morality or ethics, and so have no real reason to question the wisdom of gain-of-function microbiology, or artificial intelligence research, or autonomous drone bombers, or face-recognition security software, or deploying leaky vaccines in the middle of an active epidemic, or whatever other technological horror they can dream up.  No – a fully-educated person studies all of this, and should start at it early.  That’s why we don’t harp on math and science exclusively, and give equal time to a rich and detailed study of history, literature, and philosophy for our teenage kids.  They are not likely to get this level of exposure to the Western canon anywhere else; so it’s up to us to vaccinate them with it against whatever parasitical memes the enemy flings at them later on. Such a person might nevertheless become a political extremist — I mean, we do live in pretty extreme times — but at least they will do so for reasons, as opposed to merely at the whim of random brain parasites chewing away at their neurons.

Other right-wing writers (well, really just David Cole) have lambasted the idea of giving up on institutions like public schools and ceding them to the enemy. I guess there is something to be said for making a scene at school board meetings and fighting for every inch of intellectual real estate before giving it up — but to be honest the decay is so deep-set it’s hard to know even where to start. How could Critical Theory really be “banned” from schools? Even if you could somehow legislate it, how would it be enforced? The problem isn’t the ideology, so much as the people who believe in it, who are a fanatical cult and are dug in like lice at all levels of the education system; without figuring out some way to purge them en masse from the school system, there’s next to nothing that can be done. The first goal has to be to stop the damage, and the only way to do that is to prevent the Woke from having any access to your children, just like you would keep your kids away from any other kind of pervert or psycho. Which means you move to a place where it’s easy to homeschool or have access to an affordable, non-woke charter school of some sort (move to Red states, sane people, and drive out the Woke like St. Patrick drove out the snakes!). Those of us with school-age children have little choice. Yes, you have to re-organize your entire life to make it happen, but yes, it’s worth it. To be quite honest teaching my kids has been the most rewarding experience of my life, and has made me a better person (and a better scientist) in so many ways.

But this doesn’t mean we have to abjectly surrender the school systems to the enemy. All of you who don’t have school-age kids, there’s stuff you can do as well. If your kids are grown or you don’t plan to have any, take up the burden of scrapping with the school board for your like-minded friends or coworkers — your property taxes are paying for the damn things so you deserve a say even if your kids aren’t currently using them anymore. If you’re really pushy, maybe you can browbeat your state legislature into considering giving you back some of your taxes to cover homeschool expenses, like Alabama is considering this session*. If you have grandkids, volunteer to help homeschool them — my retired mother takes care of math for our kids, for instance. If you don’t have kids yet but want them, plan your own life around the high likelihood you’ll have to homeschool them when you do have them — make sure you get yourself into a stable marriage, move to a Red state, and start educating yourself in the Western canon so you’ll be prepared to teach it when the time comes (not to mention all the other ways that completing your own cultural education will benefit you, both practically and spiritually). If you’ve got some money to spare, donate to a charter school or a charity that supports homeschoolers. If you’re active in your religion, suggest starting something to assist homeschoolers in your church family.

The enemy’s entire power structure is dependent on viral memes to maintain its control. Well-educated people are virtually immune to them, so the greatest threat to their power is the homeschooler, who is vaccinated against the Cathedral’s dark magic. It’s absolutely subversive — in my opinion, the most effective resistance (and the least likely to land you in prison) is simply to keep these horrid people away from your children, and dedicate yourself to preserving the knowledge of our ancestors through whatever is coming our way in the next few years by making sure it gets taught effectively to your own kids.

* The Alabama law under consideration would let people recoup $6500 of their state taxes (that’s a flat amount, irrespective of their income level) to cover expenses associated with moving kids out of public schools. That could go to private schools, charter schools, or homeschool expenses, as best as I can tell. One thing it apparently doesn’t allow is for homeschool parents to pay themselves a small salary, which is a shame, because it’s quite difficult (i.e. impossible) to manage homeschooling without one of the parents leaving the so-called “work force”, or at least seriously curtailing their hours, which of course has a sizable financial cost. Seems like something that advocates for women (i.e. “feminists”) ought to care about, right? Right? Then why do the Democrats oppose it so vehemently — oh right, can’t have people bettering their lives or attaining happiness or stability….

A Catalog of Bad Ideas

Posted by Jeff Morris on February 1, 2022
Posted in: Politics. Leave a comment

Looking back on it I think maybe my articles last week may have been a bit too vague regarding the Democrats’ consistently misery-inducing policies.  I laid out the basic framework – because the Democrats brand themselves as the party of the downtrodden, the only way they can win close elections is by creating more downtrodden people – but I didn’t give a lot of specific examples of policies that cause this effect.  So in this post I’m going to go over a few that have affected me or my family personally over the past decade or so.  Some of these may resonate with you; and you may have thought of some that I have missed.  Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

1. Trans ideology.  Probably nothing stands out today so starkly as a symbol of our crazy era as the ideology of transgenderism.  According to one recent poll, 40% of Gen-Z Americans identify as some flavor of LGBT, up from just a couple of percent in the recent past, and my educated guess is that a huge amount of that increase comes from disaffected teenage girls suddenly identifying as boys.  As an anecdote, shortly before we pulled our kids out of the public school system, 3 girls in my daughter’s sixth grade class (in rural Alabama!) decided to “come out” as transgender boys – considering that female-to-male transsexuals were approximately non-existent just a few years before this, it seemed pretty clear to me that something was afoot.

Much has been written about this phenomenon, whereby the girls who in my youth would have been afflicted with anorexia or bulimia have now begun to gravitate toward transgenderism and “gender affirming” body mutilations and hormone abuse; I won’t even bother to link anything here, just go to Quillette and read every third article for the past five years, or pick up Abigail Shrier’s much-censored book.  To some degree, these girls have probably been affected by viral memes and social media – although that was probably also true of other forms of self-harm in the pre-Awokening days of the early 2000s, so it alone can’t explain this massive increase in transgender ideation.  More likely, some professional LGBT political activist groups, having won huge victories like Obergefell, had to justify their existence with something other than opposing nearly non-existent public disapproval of gay people. So they astroturfed, through a massive PR campaign on social media, an oppressed transgender class whose rights they could fight for with the help of generous donations from billionaires who needed alternative ways to launder their shady income streams.

Regardless of what caused the massive surge of late-onset gender dysphorics, it’s certainly true that Democrat media apparatchiks actively cheerlead transgenderism, doing everything they can to make the public believe that it’s totally normal that millions of young people suddenly want to radically alter their bodies.  Anybody that pushes back against this becomes a right-wing Nazi extremist in their propaganda, justifying more censorship and more power grabs for Democrats.  But it’s horrible; not only does it feed the narrative that America is somehow ruled by a cabal of bigots, but it directly harms the young people who buy into the story.  “T” is radically different from LGB.  LGB can change their mind at any point and become straight, or vice versa – nothing about gay sex renders one incapable of straight sex, and indeed I have known a number of people, particularly women, who have wiffle-waffled over the course of their lives about their sexual orientation.  T, on the other hand, is encouraged to make changes to their bodies that can’t be undone, and that indeed tend to eliminate one’s capacity for anything like normal sexual pleasure.  The use of cross-gender hormones at a young age permanently alters the development of one’s body, and blocks the development of a sexually mature human being.  I can’t imagine anything that is more likely to cause long-term suffering than that – and it is a major platform of the Democrat party to normalize transgenderism, including for the very young.

2. Psychological drugs.  One facet of transgenderism that is often ignored is its dependency on synthetic hormones, which of course are manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry for profit.  Surely it can’t be the case that corporations would encourage social trends that led to greater profits for them – but just imagine for a moment the windfall that would come to the manufacturers of synthetic testosterone if the government were to mandate that insurance companies cover hormone therapies for legions of unhappy young women who want to pretend they are men.  And consider all the other drugs that have been pushed – even mandated, in a soft way – on us over the past few decades.  When I was a young adult in the 1990s it was Prozac – it seemed like all of a sudden everybody was taking it.  Later the range of psychological drugs expanded – Zoloft for instance, and gods only know how many other manipulators of neurotransmitters; Ritalin and Adderall for “attention deficit disorder” – they tried to push these on my daughter because she liked to draw comics instead of paying attention in class – and arbitrary quantities of Xanax for anybody willing to shop around for a shrink that would write.  All of these shared several characteristics in common: 1) they were prescribed for people with social difficulties of one kind or another, 2) they were not very effective at improving the problems for which they were prescribed, 3) they had a nasty tendency to lead to things like suicide and addiction, and most importantly 4) they required long-term consumption, leading to immense profits for their manufacturers.

Now I wouldn’t say that Democrats pushed the drugs on people per se, but it is striking how common it is for self-identifying leftists to be in therapy, and/or to be on these chemicals:

Are the lives of white leftist elites really that difficult, that they should need mental health treatment 2-3 times more often than people who actually work for a living?  Seems more likely that this is a consequence of their worldview – the medicalization of everyday life, the dependency on the state to fix their problems, and the willful eradication of the organic social systems, like religion and family, that used to provide solace for people in pain. To embrace this Weltanschauung – that life’s problems are illnesses to be treated instead of obstacles to be conquered – is to embrace an identity of oneself as an agentless pawn, at the mercy of inhuman forces one can scarcely understand, much less resist. Not exactly the route to eudaemonia.

I can’t find the quote (maybe I wrote it?), but I remember reading once a suggestion that mood-flattening drugs like Prozac and Zoloft were absolutely necessary for human animals to tolerate the conditions we have created for ourselves in the modern technological world.  Maybe it’s true?  But ask yourself who in our society bears the most blame for creating that corporate cubicle dystopia, and which party they embrace in today’s political climate.

3. The victim narrative of human history.  Democrats have also whole-heartedly embraced a version of Western history that makes everyone into either a villain or a victim.  So-called “Critical Theory”, of which “Critical Race Theory” is one particularly Nazi-like incarnation, is essentially a conspiracy theory vision of humanity, wherein a hypothesized cabal of “white people” has somehow orchestrated all of human civilization, for the past several thousand years, into a diabolical plot to make the lives of “BIPOC” people (whatever the fuck those are) miserable.  It’s laughably simplistic and silly – really a comic book version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rewritten for resentful moderns – but it is unquestionably politically useful to frame history in an us-vs-them narrative that is nebulous enough that one can change out the villains to suit the current needs of the regime.  One might ask, for instance, how Clarence Thomas’ ancestors benefitted from white supremacy culture, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s did not.  But of course it doesn’t matter, because most of the people this messaging is directed toward have never heard of either one of those luminaries.

For the purpose of this essay, however, the relevant point is that this narrative demeans everyone it describes.  Obviously Critical Race Theory is nothing more than a racist jeremiad directed against inconvenient white people, and therefore demeans and dehumanizes people of European descent in exactly the way the Protocols dehumanized Jews.  But it also does the same thing to the people it supposedly elevates as righteous martyrs.  By portraying everyone else as the doleful victims of white depredations, it reduces non-whites to dependency on whites.  Do Indians and Chinese have cultures of their own, independent of the baleful influence of Europe?  Have black Americans accomplished nothing of their own since 1865, except insofar as they have fought against their white countrymen?  To embrace one’s status as a victim, to make that the source of one’s identity, is to permanently embrace a kind of psychic subordination.  Presumably that’s not the route to a healthy conception of oneself, yet it is what the Democrats relentlessly push on society.

To say that this attitude has not traditionally been the only one, or even the dominant one, amongst non-white Americans is an understatement.  Consider this quote from great Alabaman Booker T. Washington, from his autobiography Up From Slavery: “I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.”  Dude was literally born as a slave; if he had put that Critical Theory shit in his head, he would have stayed one for the rest of his life.

4. The erasure of culture.  The last point I’ll make here is that Democrat policies have aggressively cut society off from its own history and culture over the past few years.  We could talk about the changing of school curriculums to cancel “problematic” authors from antiquity (or even the recent past); or the iconoclastic temper tantrums of the 2020 BLM rioters who tore down statues of cultural heroes all over the world in support of some random drug addict who got killed by a cop.  But the thing that has stood out to me – as trivial as it might seem – is that my kids have far less exposure to the pop culture I grew up with than I had to the pop culture of my parents’ or even my grandparents’ age.  It occurred to me recently that I was at least familiar with pretty much all of the popular TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, through re-runs or whatever, even if I didn’t particularly like all of them.  I had seen dozens of classic movies by the time I was an adult, and read a lot of the bestselling novels from decades past as well.  Obviously this created ties with previous generations – these were things that helped keep the generations together even in the wake of fairly enormous levels of social change taking place in the late twentieth century.  But millennials had none of that, and my kids’ generation has even less.  Mostly they entertain themselves with YouTube videos produced only a few days before they watch them, which deal with memes or games or whatever only a few days older than that.  There is almost no connection to even the recent past, no ties of affection with their family, and definitely not with their country or their ancestors.

This isn’t even an accident, or a product of social media and reduced attention spans.  The media companies actively try to steer people away from classics by re-making nearly everything that was ever popular.  The number of classic films that have been re-made in the last ten years, but with the genders or races or sexualities of major characters swapped to suit “modern sensibilities”, is staggering.  It’s not just that Hollywood has no vision anymore; I think it represents an intentional obscuring of the past. But even if it’s just the effect of an industry cannibalizing itself for profit, the effect of this graying-out of culture, or its outright cancellation, is to render people rootless, unanchored, and atomized.  Without ancestry or posterity, there is no reason to particularly care about anything other than one’s own immediate pleasure; no reason to struggle or sacrifice; no reason, importantly to resist whatever your betters tell you to do.  There is nothing left but to consume products.

So that’s a pretty long diatribe about the many ways that the policies and worldviews of Democrats specifically, and leftists more broadly, immiserate the human race and degrade our societies.  Neither side’s voters benefits from any of these policies — they cause pain to everyone affected by them. None of them correspond with reality either, so they have no redeeming qualities, other than their ability to get Democrats elected. It’s a bit of a blackpill, I know, but in my next post I will talk (much more briefly) about how I’m doing my part to resist it, and how you can as well.

Setting the Record Straight re: EO Wilson

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 29, 2022
Posted in: Academia. Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the vile Scientific American screed sliming not only E.O. Wilson, but the whole field of behavioral genetics and maybe all of modern genetics back to Gregor Mendel himself. It’s one of those articles that can really blackpill you — that is, convince you that there’s no hope, the Academy has fallen to the woke hordes like Jerusalem to the Saracens, and we’ll be teaching Lamarck and Lysenko and goddamn phlogiston theory in STEM 101 by 2023 because Darwin was just too damn white.

And then you read this rejoinder, I believe primarily written by Razib Khan, which helps restore some of your faith in the self-correcting nature of science. More than the article itself, the list of co-signatories brings a happy tear to my eye. This is not a list of cancelled black sheep like Razib (and me). It includes National Academy members, including many whose politics are on the record and very much to the left, and including several who were deeply critical of some of Wilson’s pet ideas. And not only were they willing to sign a letter in defense of Wilson, they were willing to do it alongside unapologetic right wing thought criminal Razib Khan. Maybe because, you know, Razib is a careful scientist and prolific science communicator with important and novel insights on human evolution, and who cares what his politics are?

Consider also the fact that Birmingham, Alabama — Wilson’s hometown and my base of operations — honored Wilson’s legacy. Randall Woodfin, Birmingham’s Democrat mayor and probably not a white supremacist, participated in the ceremony:

Left to right, UAB professor Jim McClintock, Mayor Randall Woodfin, and I think UAB Dean Paul Erwin (who knows with that mask on)

Maybe there is hope after all. Probably not, but maybe…

Psychological Abuse as Campaign Strategy (Part 2)

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 27, 2022
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: . Leave a comment

This essay is a continuation of a previous post which may be found here.

In the first part of this essay I outlined a game theoretical framework for understanding the difference between Republican and Democrat approaches to election campaigning. Basically, payoffs encourage Republicans to improve people’s lives and mental states, whereas Democrats are encouraged to increase people’s suffering and anxiety. We looked at a couple of examples — specifically the Black Lives Matter phenomenon and COVID hysteria, both of which irresponsibly magnify small or non-existent threats in order to “get out the vote”. I promised that this second half of the essay would examine how that tactic for winning elections might affect the country in the longer term, and also I said I would suggest some possible ways out.

First, I don’t want to seem too flippant about what is going on. Even though it seems obvious to clear-headed people that there is neither an epidemic of racist police violence nor any serious threat from the coronavirus, millions upon millions of people truly believe that these threats are real, and are genuinely, deeply afraid of them. These people are clearly hurting – and it is my belief that this mental damage has been inflicted on them intentionally as an electoral strategy by the Democrats.  Their playbook for two election cycles now has been to utterly terrorize and gaslight their own constituents as their primary plan for victory.  They never actually provide any real benefit to their voters’ lives – obviously, because if they improved their lives, they would start voting Republican, see above – with the one exception that they turn down the propaganda somewhat during the ever-shrinking time period between elections.

And the result is that they are seriously hurting the people who listen to them.  A recent survey-based study, summarized here,  shows that politics are causing a plethora of mental – and even physical – health problems in Americans, with a very strong bias toward younger white people who participate in politics but do not have well-formed political ideas of their own, in other words the bread and butter of the Democrat party. Here’s the crux of the paper’s findings — positive values indicate increases in poor health, negative values indicate the opposite; “negative partisanship” basically means “Democrat”; the different “scales” are different varieties of the same questionnaire; and asterisks indicate that the predictor had a statistically significant impact on health in the authors’ model:

From the paper (emphasis mine):

What is the public health relevance of these findings? First and foremost is the fact that huge numbers of Americans clearly and consistently perceive politics as exacting a chronic negative toll on their health. Based on the 2019–20 Census Bureau population estimates, the resident population of the United States included approximately 255 million adults at the time of the 2020 survey. Based on that number, the findings from the pre-election survey suggest that somewhere between a fifth and a third of adults—roughly 50 to 85 million people—blame politics for causing fatigue, lost sleep, feelings of anger, loss of temper, as well as triggering compulsive behaviors (e.g. difficulty in stopping thinking about politics and consuming political information), and difficulties in impulse control (e.g. posting social media comments they later regretted; these estimates calculated using the percent agreeing or strongly agreeing with relevant survey items).

Distressingly, it doesn’t appear that the Democrats’ 2020 “victory” alleviated these people’s suffering – in fact surveys administered in the early aftermath of the 2020 debacle showed increased political stress in everybody except people who voted for Trump (probably because we were already about as stressed as we could get after 5 years of Democrats trying to destroy us). Although if one is looking for a silver lining, the study showed that black Americans appear to be significantly less vulnerable to politically-induced stress than everyone else — almost as cool and collected as Trump voters. This supports my “Democrat chimera” hypothesis — that the Democrat party is an unsteady alliance of sensible black people and batshit insane white people. So if black Americans can survive the riots and crime waves inflicted on their communities by Democrat electoral strategies, they should be okay.

The political game I described in the first half of this essay describes a system with a stable equilibrium of 50-50 Republican good guys and Democrat bad guys, maximizing suffering and conflict forever. Is there a solution to all of this — a way out?  I can see two possibilities.  First, we can approach the political game like Pascal approached belief in God.  In Pascal’s wager, as it has come to be called, There are two strategies – worship God or don’t – and two possible realities – God exists or he doesn’t.   The payoffs are certain, if you accept the framework offered by the Christian Bible as the only alternative to atheism – if there is no God, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in him or not (payoff = 0 if you don’t believe, payoff = negative the cost of worship if you do), but if God is real, you can either believe in him and go to Heaven when you die (payoff = infinity) or you can not believe in him and go to Hell (payoff = negative infinity).  There is no possible cost of worship so high, nor probability of God’s existence so low, as to outweigh the threat of eternal damnation under that formulation. In other words, there is really only one solution where you prosper, so no matter how wrong it seems to accept that solution (believing in God), you should nevertheless believe in him, for your own good.  Similarly, if one accepts the game theoretical framework of American politics I laid out above, one should vote Republican even if you disagree with everything the Republicans say, because there is a stable equilibrium at 100% Republican that would break the cycle that is currently making our lives miserable. While this wouldn’t necessarily make Republicans care about you — remember, they only need 50.1% of the population’s support — it would at least have the possibility of breaking the framework itself and leading to the existence of a new dichotomy more similar to the non-zero-sum world of past decades.

(It’s worth noting that there is also a stable equilibrium at 100% Democrat that would break the cycle — but it seems unwise to give absolute power to a group of people who have spent the last generation or two perfected the art of torturing their own constitutents…)

The other solution is suggested by the PLoS ONE paper I linked – better education in critical thinking about politics and history.  There was a clear immunization effect of political knowledge against the negative health effects of the US political environment in the study: while people who were more politically active suffered more health problems, those with more political knowledge suffered fewer.  In Lukianoff and Haidt’s excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors contend that much of the sorry mental health of recent generations — and their readiness to engage in the politics of personal destruction from which “cancel culture” is born — extends from their inability to grapple calmly with contentious issues.  People with sophisticated political opinions tend to have read extensively in history, religion, philosophy, and so forth; they understand that the problems we face today are not new or unique, that humanity has survived worse, and that there are solutions short of Armageddon for most issues.  At the very least they understand the thinking of their political opponents, and they know that the best way to achieve political victory is to find common cause with their opponent’s constituents.  Such people are more likely to see that the scorched earth tactics of the 21st century left are ultimately counterproductive – that hubris invites nemesis.  So the answer, in this case, is to encourage people to read more deeply about history and politics and develop more “grown-up” attitudes about politics — in other words, to return the population to a framework where opposing parties are differentiated by something other than childish, combative notions like “progress” and “reaction”.

The only way to achieve such a goal, however, is to completely change how we approach education – because the game theoretical framework I described extends directly from the American university, whose activist professors are exactly the mentally imbalanced people we have considered in this article.  Only once those individuals have been marginalized and education has been returned to a classical liberal perspective – or centralized education has been abolished as a general requirement – will there be a chance to restore sanity to our political process.

Psychological Abuse as Campaign Strategy (Part 1)

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 25, 2022
Posted in: Politics, Vaccination. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

This post got too long, so I decided to break it up into two somewhat independent pieces. The second half will be released in a few days.

One of the things that evolutionary biologists do, is to look at competitions from the perspectives of relative pay-offs to competitors for different strategies – i.e., game theory.  For some time now I’ve been looking at the American political divide in these terms, using one very simple and straightforward framework.  I think this framework started in the US but has spread outwards to much of the world where American media is routinely consumed. I also think it is incredibly destructive, and it is difficult to see how to displace it.

Imagine two political parties.  One party is largely seen as the party of the wealthy and successful, or at least of people who are mostly content with their lives as they are and do not want to change them.  The other party is the exact opposite – the majority of its constituents are either poor, perceive themselves to be victims of some sort, or both; they are not happy with the status quo and want it to change.  I think it is reasonable to perceive the Republican Party as the first party, and the Democrat Party as the second.  One could retort that Republicans are quite angry these days, but that doesn’t disrupt the framework, because what Republicans are angry about are the extreme ways that Democrats are trying to change Republicans’ lives against their will.  Using the hoary terminology of the legacy left, they are reactionaries, reacting against the agendas of the grievance party.

One might look at the state of the lives of many Democrats in the US and sympathize with their desire to change things; there are, no doubt, many injustices and hardships out there.  The problem, though, with the framing of our politics becomes evident when we consider the competition between these two parties, and the victory conditions that obtain.  Imagine a district that is 49.9% Republican and 50.1% Democrat.  How do the Republicans go about reaching a majority?  If we agree with the definition of the two parties above, their goal should be to make 0.2% of the population more content with their lives.  To do this, they can either a) drug them, or b) actually improve their lives in some noticeable way.  Solution (a) is not easily achieved, therefore one expects that the Republicans in such a district will be motivated to help the people of their district – in other words, to do the sorts of things that most of us believe good politicians should do.

What about in the opposite case, in a 50.1% Republican, 49.9% Democrat district?  The answer is clear.  To attain an electoral majority, the Democrats should create conditions that hurt their constituents, or at least convince their constituents that they have been hurt – victimized – in order to make them aggrieved enough to leave the Republicans and vote Democrat.  Anything a Democrat politician did that actually improved the lot of their constituents would necessarily drive some fraction of them into the arms of the Republicans, eventually returning power to the other side.  Therefore, if they want to retain their positions, it is in their interest to tighten the screws and keep the suffering hot.

There’s ample evidence that this is exactly what they do.  If we discount the plethora of Democrat policies exclusively geared toward rigging elections (e.g., “election reform” and immigration policies), the biggest disconnects between Republicans and Democrats are on how the government should deal with issues of race, climate, and COVID.  In all of these cases, Democrat messaging aggressively hyperbolizes threats, creating a sense of impending doom in voters over problems that are relatively minor, if they exist at all.  The agitated citizens are then, in principle, motivated to vote for Democrats to protect them from the imminent existential threats they believe in because of the efforts of Democrat PR teams and ground-level activists.  Sure, people sometimes behave erratically when under the influence of terrorizing propaganda, doing things like burning police precincts, attacking government buildings, ambush-murdering police officers, advocating imprisonment of unvaxxed people, or foregoing reproduction to “save the planet”.  But none of that matters, because politics is a machine optimized for winning elections; within the framework described above, any strategy that doesn’t increase voter fear and suffering will result in Republican victories, and therefore any candidate that moves toward sanity will be defeated by one who moves farther toward the Chicken Little extreme.

Don’t believe me?  Consider the chart below, which shows interest in the term “Black Lives Matter” over time, according to Google Trends.  The vertical dashed lines correspond to the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.

This image should dash to pieces any illusions one might have that BLM is a grassroots movement focused on injustices in the black community.  Did police suddenly stop shooting unarmed blacks from 2017-2020?  If so, why didn’t BLM give President Trump a medal for this amazing downturn in racist violence?  If not, why did BLM – presumably a well-organized coalition of activist groups – apparently evaporate during that time period?  The simplest answer is that BLM is a direct agent of the Democrat party, existing to drum up hysteria in the black community – and increasingly in the itinerant university community as well – in the run-up to elections, as a tool to “get out the vote”.  The massive sudden spikes in interest correspond to injections of propaganda, executed through Democrat media flunkies, followed by what looks like exponential signal decay, as the chaos is allowed to relax after it has done its job.

But so what?  All politicians have to try to get people excited about their campaigns in order to get elected.  What’s different about this strategy is that it fucks people up severely.  Leaving aside the undeniable fact that the BLM movement rioted all over the country in both 2016 and 2020, what’s even worse is that the propaganda used to start those riots left tens of millions of people with dangerously false beliefs about the world they live in.  Statistical analysis does not support the hypothesis that police are more likely to shoot blacks than whites in an encounter.  But the BLM propaganda machine reinforces the exact opposite belief.  How does it affect the minds of everyday people to go about their daily lives believing that they are surrounded by racists and murderers, and how does it impact how one would deal with a police interaction if one goes into it believing the police are likely to kill them for no reason?  It must keep them in a constant state of anxiety and worry, and lead them to mistrust many people they encounter who bear them no ill will – indeed, it may even encourage self-destructive behavior.

COVID hysteria is cut from the same cloth.  I don’t think that Democrats literally created COVID to win the 2020 election, but they certainly exaggerated it to great effect.  They pushed fear of the virus the same way they pushed fear of cops to get the BLM surge started, with the same intent – to blame it on the President they were trying to defeat.  Terrified people shut down their economies, destroying the one great victory of the Trump administration – the best financial situation for most people in at least a generation.  They mau-maued research into therapeutics that might have brought a swift reduction in death rates and defused the general public’s fear of the virus.  They pushed useless mask mandates that created a constant reminder of how terrifying everything was, and reminded you at every turn it was all Trump’s fault, somehow.  And infamously, they used fear of the virus to change election laws in swing states to make it easier to harvest ballots from politically disinterested “citizens”, impossible to tell who voted, or tell if anybody cheated.

Well, they won their election.  But whereas the BLM signal decayed after the election was over, COVID is slow to go away.  I can’t express how many of my colleagues – highly educated biologists every one of them – remain terrified of catching COVID.  They cling to vaccines and masks like a drowning man will cling to any solid object to keep from going under – but in this case, if he just stuck his feet out he’d see that the water’s only a few feet deep.  They worry that their healthy children might catch the virus, even though the risk to them is infinitessimal. “Your pandemic is over – their panic continues”, says Peachy Keenan in an article at The American Mind (links from original):

You and I will be fine. We can now abide, even thrive, in the post-pandemic universe, rip off our masks and burn our (fake) vax cards. But what do we do about the mind-flayed women, usually the mothers of young healthy kids, who literally think their children will die without multiple vaccines? Even the WHO admitted that healthy children don’t need boosters. But it’s too late for facts. Hordes of terror-stricken fanatics are already posting photos of their five-year-olds getting their first Pfizer shots on their birthdays, the way you’d post about your 16-year-old getting their driver’s license.

She later posts this quote from a mother who is all too reminiscent of people I encounter every day in my job — according to Keenan, and I whole-heartedly agree, “it’s like reading a dispatch from Mars:”

“I want to scream. The pandemic is not fucking over, because children under 5 cannot get fucking vaccinated. Do not tell me it’s usually really mild for kids. I won’t mention that if I get it, too, I’ll be able to take off the mask I will have been wearing around the clock inside my own home. He’ll get his second and third shots or however many he needs, and eventually he’ll be just like you, as protected as possible, safe enough to go about his toddlery business with COVID being just another risk like accidents or the flu. But we aren’t there yet. And what’s worse than not being there yet is how the world seems to have utterly forgotten we exist.”

So there’s the problem — widespread gaslighting and psychological abuse as a campaign strategy by a party with a vested interest in reducing quality of life for its constituency. In the second part of this essay I’ll consider the long-term effects of this kind of treatment, and how it might be possible to break free from its grip.