Clown World Chroncles: What Is 'Groupthink'?

Clown World Chroncles: What Is ‘Groupthink’?

Much of the psychology of Clown World is the psychology of the herd. Although the human ego likes to place itself above the rest of the animal kingdom, the reality is that we are just as much a herd animal as any wildebeest. Understanding the psychology of Clown World requires that we understand the phenomenon of groupthink.

William H Whyte Jr., the sociologist who came up with the term, described it as “a rationalized conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.” This sense of righteousness is key to understanding groupthink. It’s what motivates groupthinkers to destroy outsiders.

The Asch Conformity Experiments demonstrated the power that groupthink exerts over human behaviour. In these experiments, participants were placed into a group, all of the other members of which were conspiring with the experimenter. These other group members then pretended to believe something that was clearly false, so that the participant was forced to choose between conforming to group norms or speaking the truth.

In about a third of cases, the participants went along with the false information, despite that it was obviously false. When asked why, most of them said they were afraid of social disapproval.

Humans have always been a social species, right back into the biological past. Because of the threat of ostracisation, we have always had to take the social environment into consideration. This has had consequences for how our minds have evolved. We have learned to be afraid of assuming a low social status, lest it lead to us getting kicked out of the group. The more dependent a person is on others, the more afraid they are.

The desire for social harmony leads people to go along with things that they know aren’t true. This has always been the case when it came to cults, but in Clown World it’s the case in general. Today’s groupthinkers insist that mass immigration has made us all wealthier, or that all racial groups are precisely the same in all psychological measures, or that cannabis causes mental illness. The existence of evidence demonstrating otherwise is simply denied.

Characteristic of groupthink is that it increases the likelihood of dehumanising the outgroup. The more a person becomes convinced that their ingroup is morally superior, the more they become convinced that any outgroup is morally inferior. This line of thinking can have lethal outcomes.

The most prominent example of groupthink in Clown World was the leadup to the Iraq War in 2003. Although many people expressed a feeling that the war was a bad idea (a million people protested in London, and three million in Rome, the largest protests in the history of the world), no-one close to George W Bush seems to have done so. Iraqis were dehumanised; civilian deaths in the invasion were written off as “collateral damage”.

In principle, any time a group of people get together and start irrationally hating outsiders could be considered an example of groupthink. The war-like mentality that fuels it seems to be built into human nature. It’s as if that, sometimes, it’s just time for killing, and when it is the group needs to work together as a single unit, with no dissent.

The ruling class is aware of all this, which is why they like to hype the population into a war mentality whenever possible. One of the most unpleasant aspects of Clown World is that the war hype is now permanent. There is always an enemy, always some terrorist out there who will destroy us the moment we relax. The mainstream media keeps us in this state of combat readiness with 24/7 reminders of the world’s danger.

In an age where the average person is so weak, groupthink is much more common than it was. The average person is now so cowardly that the prospect of going against the authority of the group is practically unthinkable. Only abject submission can reduce anxiety to tolerable levels.

This was demonstrated amply by the hysteria around the need to wear masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus. All it took was for the mainstream media to create the perception that anyone not wearing a mask was endangering the public, and people were happy to rip into them. At no point was it necessary to demonstrate scientifically that wearing masks was worth all the grief. Groupthink ensured that dissenters were destroyed.

The general propensity for groupthink is made worse by situational factors. Increased anxiety makes people more liable to put group approval above truth. The prevailing sense of panic in the West since 9/11 has made groupthink a common phenomenon. When a wartime mentality prevails, you don’t want to go against the group, lest you be declared a traitor and cast out (or worse).

The rise of social media has made groupthink much more intense. Because dissenting views can be, and are, silenced so easily on online platforms, it’s very common for people to get an illusory sense of consensus. Anyone accused of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia or Islamophobia will soon be shut down, creating the impression that everyone agrees with the main globohomo narrative.

Perhaps the most archetypal examples of groupthink in Clown World are the SJW vs. Alt Right conflicts that are boiling over all across the West. An alt centrist can try to stay out of the fray, but the outgroup hostility possessed by both groups will inevitably cause them to accuse any neutral party of being an enemy.

Groupthink is why political activists can get so hysterical when encountering their declared enemy. This is a grave danger – such hysteria has motivated some of the worst atrocities of times past. Given the extent of social discord in Clown World, it’s easily possible that it could motivate some terrible crimes in the future. The presence of cancel culture is an unmistakable sign that the will to destroy the lives of perceived enemies exists.

Fortunately, perhaps, groupthink is also a function of group cohesion, and neither SJWs nor the Alt Right have the group cohesion to enable any truly malicious outgroup prejudice. At least not yet. As Clown World gets worse, though, we can predict that the hunkering down phenomenon will intensify and this will lead to increased groupthink and increased outgroup hostility.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: Justice In Clown World

Aristotle considered justice, and its application, to be the basis of civilisation. A just society will lead to few resentments, which will keep tyrants out of power and everything running smoothly. An unjust society leads to many deep resentments, which leads to the people championing a tyrant to get revenge for them. In Clown World, injustice reigns – and it’s getting worse.

As with a few other areas of life, the justice system arguably became clownified before 9/11. For many people, the OJ Simpson trial in 1994 made apparent that something was severely faulty with the world’s moral reasoning.

For a while, most places were able to delude themselves into thinking such verdicts were unique to America. The hysteria that followed 9/11, however, caused the West to totally lose the plot. In this hysteria, the average person lost their sense of proportionality. With that went any accurate conception of justice. It took a while for this mentality to filter up to the upper echelons of the justice system, so it wasn’t until recent years that the Western justice systems became truly clownified.

Now, however, our justice systems are run by morally defective people. Ultimately, these justice systems stopped being just because we drifted away from our foundational moral philosophy: the works of Plato and Aristotle.

The logic used to be that “the punishment fits the crime”. In other words, the more suffering caused by the crime, the more severe the punishment had to be. This was the only way to both assuage the victim’s desire for vengeance and protect society from future crimes. Up until recently, that logic worked well.

In Clown World, however, the severity of a sentence depends on the social status of the person committing the crime.

The wealthy and powerful are exempt from full justice. This is why George W Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did not, and will never, stand trial for the war crimes they committed. Not even leaving one million dead (as Bush and Blair did in Iraq) is too heinous to get away with. In Clown World, laws are for the weak.

The Sackler family is another example of this principle. Facing thousands of lawsuits on account of their central role in inflaming America’s opioid crisis, the Sacklers arranged a settlement with the Trump Administration that would see them completely escape all criminal liabililty. This is despite the fact that opioid deaths in America rose from 21,088 in 2010 to 46,802 in 2018.

Certain categories of supposedly underprivileged people are also exempt from full justice. If you’re a Pakistani or Bangladeshi living in Britain, you can form a grooming gang, rape tens of thousands of underage British girls and get away with it for decades, because the Police will be too afraid to investigate you in case they get called racist.

Clown World justice, like so much else of Clown World, is beholden to politics. Whether or not justice is served is primarily a political question, in particular the question of whether or not justice would serve the interests of those in power. It doesn’t even matter if thousands of teenage girls are getting raped by foreign men in racially-motivated hate crimes – justice has to serve the Establishment to happen at all.

Working-class people, whatever their race, get hammered. The New Zealander Philip Arps, who shared a video of the Christchurch mosque shootings, was sentenced to 21 months in prison for the act, despite that it didn’t harm anyone. It’s common for Black Americans to be sentenced to decades in prison for drug offences that caused less harm than the Sacklers.

The severity of a sentence also depends on the social status of the victim.

Muslim rape gangs in Britain got away with it for so long because they were raping working-class girls. These cases encapsulate justice in Clown World. If you’re the wrong type of victim you don’t get justice, unless it coincides with the political intentions of the Establishment. Getting raped by a foreigner doesn’t mean much if you’re working-class and if drawing attention to the case would jeopardise the multicultural project.

In a similar vein, if you are a working-class person and report a petty crime against you to the local police, chances are they’ll just tell you to fuck off. The likelihood of them investigating a burglary on a working-class home or an assault on a working-class person are minimal. In Clown World, the police are the army of the rich.

Normally, a system this corrupt would be overthrown. However, the rulers of Clown World have learned that they don’t have to rule society justly as long as a sufficient pre-emptive effort is made to crush dissent. Today’s propaganda techniques are so sophisticated that, as Huxley feared, we have been taught to love our servitude.

A consequence of this is no-one protests outcomes of the justice system anymore. The moral sophistication of the average Westerner has disintegrated to such a degree that a celebrity saying something racist elicits more outrage than a child getting beaten to death. Our philosophical foundations are lost, and with them has gone our sense of justice.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Social Justice Warrior’?

If Clown World can be summarised as the combination of excessive capitalism and excessive Communism, the Social Justice Warrior, or SJW, is the foot soldier of the Communism. They can be found all over the West, in a variety of different environments. The SJW is one of the major forces contributing to making Clown World more like a circus.

SJWs can be found at the forefront of any delusional attempt to improve the world for the sake of the greater good. Like the Communist revolutionary of a century ago, the SJW is obsessed with the greater good. This nebulous and ill-defined concept justifies any amount of totalitarianism. It means that anyone resisting their will is, by definition, on the side of the greater evil.

The SJW doesn’t have much time for the argument that Communism, if ever truly implemented, would naturally evolve back into a hierarchy based on who can best interpret the greater good, and that the people at the top of this hierarchy would be just as tyrannical as the people on top of all the others. Not even when it’s pointed out that this is precisely what happened in Russia, China and Cambodia.

This wilful naivety is one of the main reasons why the SJW is so roundly despised. Not only does it lead the SJW to personal danger, but it leads those around them to danger. The SJW’s child-like faith in the goodness of all humans leads them to support policies that endanger their fellows, such as open borders and prison abolition.

The SJW wants to fight, they want war, they want conflict. This is the ‘Warrior’ part of Social Justice Warrior. They have defined themselves by the struggle for their cause, and their every waking moment is devoted to victory. They believe that there is an evil out there that is plaguing humanity – creating social injustice – and that it’s their mission to fight it.

Characteristic of the SJW is that they strive for social justice despite not having their own lives sorted out. This is why Jordan Peterson’s advice to “clean your room” aggravates them so much – it reminds them of the personal shortcomings that they have tried so hard to deny. Like all evil people, the SJW is focused on controlling others, and not on controlling themselves.

Also characteristic of the SJW is that, in their minds, they are the good guys in a war against evil. As such, they are disinclined to be reasonable towards their enemies. To the SJW, as to the Abrahamist, being reasonable is considered a form of submission. So the nastier they are, the more virtuous they feel.

Part of this warrior mindset is the need to have enemies. In the absence of proper enemies, the SJW will make some. They are fractious, rude, and quarrelsome. This is also why they are so ineffective – put several SJWs together, and they will inevitably end up competing with each other in a purity spiral.

It is from this unhinged desire for confict that the SJW loses their ability to correctly identify who their actual enemies are. Because the desire for conflict comes from within, and not from without, the SJW always finds enemies around them. A person can be neutral to the SJW or even an ally, and end up getting attacked because they said a single unfashionable word.

One consequence of this mentality: the true enemy goes without blame. The SJW seldom raises a peep about the gargantuan profits made by the banks. They hardly ever complain about the working conditions of iPhone factories. Nor do they care much about housing affordability. The most important thing is to signal the highest level of virtue one can.

The SJW imagines that they’re fighting Nazis, but most of the time they’re just getting trolled by alt centrists. They are easy to troll: it’s usually as simple as stating that intelligence is mostly genetic, or mentioning the gulag system. Glorifying the Finnish resistance to Soviet invasion during the Winter War is another common trigger.

Curiously, SJWs and Christcucks spend a lot of time fighting each other, despite being a very similar sort of person. Although they are both preening, sneering, self-righteous hypocrites, their point of distinction is that the SJWs consider the Christcucks hopelessly misguided while the Christcucks consider the SJWs hopelessly degenerate. They are near-identical personalities despite clashing head-on when it comes to sexual freedom, drugs and Muslims.

If the Christcucks are the Establishment Right, SJWs also spend a lot of time fighting the Alternative Right. The alt right is all kinds of problematic. The authoritarian alt right is problematic because it seeks to take away rights from SJWs; the libertarian alt right is problematic because the SJWs seek to take rights away from them. Both have problematic views on human biodiversity.

The best way of explaining the psychology of the SJW is to make reference to both Ted Kaczynski and Friedrich Nietzsche. In short, the SJW represents left-wing slave morality (as opposed to the right-wing slave morality represented by the Christcuck). This is a collectivist, hive-minded, henpecking nanny mentality.

SJWs mostly propagate through the education system. This occurs when a SJW infiltrates the education system and then brainwashes impressionable young people into becoming SJWs. This has been going on since the 1960s. Ever since then, young people have been taught to hate nationalists, and to love globohomo.

Even without being created by the education system or by media brainwashing, SJWs arise as a consequence of the course of history. Whenever you have wealth and comfort for too long, you end up with soft-headed weaklings, and when you get too many of those they start wanting to change society for the greater good. The multiplicity of the SJW is a function of Clown World’s disconnection from reality, both physical and metaphysical.

The only cure for an SJW mindset is to move from a slave to a master mentality. There is no easy way to do this. The likeliest path is the one that involves intense, honest self-inquiry and a reconciliation with one’s own shadow. That sort of thing won’t become popular until Clown World is overcome, and, until that happens, the SJW will continue to proliferate.

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Ten Reasons Why The Sixth Labour Government Should Legalise Cannabis Despite The Referendum Result

New Zealand cannabis users were gutted yesterday by news that the cannabis referendum had failed. New Zealand’s reputation as a place for intelligent, compassionate decision-making was shattered by the result, which revealed the presence of a virulent strain of religious bigotry. Despite the outcome, there are at least ten good reasons why the Sixth Labour Government should legalise cannabis anyway.

The first reason is that the referendum result showed that the sentiments of the New Zealand people are moving rapidly in favour of cannabis law reform.

It was not long ago that an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders opposed cannabis law reform. When I began campaigning for it in 2007, I often got spoken to like I was the enemy of society. If 46.1% of voters support it now, this means that the trend is moving rapidly in favour of reform, as it is elsewhere in the world. Legalising cannabis now would simply recognise this trend.

The second reason is that the true will of the New Zealand people was confounded by Jacinda Ardern’s cowardice.

National Party Leader Judith Collins was forthright with her position against cannabis law reform. Ardern, who was perhaps worried about losing support from brown religious voters, didn’t state her affirmative position on the referendum until afterwards. If Ardern had not been so gutless, and had stated her position like Collins did, that may have been worth 4-5% (given Ardern’s current level of popularity).

The third reason is that a majority of Labour’s constituents voted in favour of the bill.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, most of Labour’s voters are young people and Maoris. This is also true of supporters of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. Although the final statistics are not in yet, it’s already clear that the young and Maori voters who gave Labour their majority also voted in favour of cannabis law reform. Legalising cannabis would accord with Labour’s duty to do right by their supporters.

The fourth reason is that a majority of actual Kiwis voted in favour of the bill.

For whatever reason, you don’t have to be an actual Kiwi to vote in a New Zealand election. Being little more than a fishing village of cheap whores, we’re happy to let permanent residents vote. The problem here is that these newcomers don’t understand New Zealand culture or values. So a majority of them voted in favour of more prohibition.

As with the above point, precise statistics are not available until the final results are in. But McGlashan has predicted, from the strong correlation between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 and being born in New Zealand (0.73), that an absolute majority of New Zealand-born voters will have voted in favour of cannabis law reform.

The fifth reason is that most No voters are old, and will die soon, and it isn’t fair for them to have so much power over a world they won’t even be living in.

Many of the people who voted are 65 years old or over. Understanding New Zealand found a correlation of -0.43 between voting for the ALCP in 2017 and being aged 65+. People this old are incapable of changing their minds to accommodate new information. They will simply reject any new knowledge on the grounds that, if it was true, they would already know it.

As such, their votes should be discounted. If such a discounting is made, and the votes of the people who will have to live with the consequences weighed more heavily, the balance shifts in favour of cannabis law reform.

The sixth reason is that the National Party has already set the precedent, with the asset sales referendum, that it can do what it likes despite the will of the people.

The Asset Sales referendum of 2013 saw John Key’s Fifth National Government soundly defeated, with 67% against. Key sold our assets anyway, on the basis that National’s General Election win in 2014 gave them a mandate to do so. If winning an election gives a party a mandate to override 67% of the people, then the Sixth Labour Government definitely have a mandate to override 53% of the people.

The seventh reason is that a considerable proportion of No voters were dissatisfied with the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill itself, and not with the idea of legal cannabis.

The Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill had a number of major flaws. Most obviously, there was no good reason to restrict cannabis to 15% THC, nor to a miserable two plants per person (which makes cloning from your own mother plant impossible). Some people who wanted legal cannabis did not support the bill on account of these flaws. Some other cannabis supporters didn’t want to pay taxes on cannabis, fearing that this would make their current supply more expensive.

Others just thought the Legalisation and Control Bill was poorly written. So there are many groups of people who are all cannabis law reform supporters but were not supporters of the Legalisation and Control Bill. Therefore, their No votes cannot be taken as votes in favour of cannabis prohibition.

The eighth reason is that a large number of voters were misled by a well-funded campaign of lies.

Democratic referendums assume that the population is correctly informed about the issue under discussion. This assumes that both sides of it are somewhat honest. In the case of the New Zealand referendum, the likes of Bob McCoskrie and Aaron Ironside lied without shame about every aspect of legalisation, claiming falsely that experiences with cannabis legalisation overseas had led to more teen use, more violent crime and more injuries from traffic crashes.

It was never a level playing ground. The campaign of lies from Say Nope to Dope needed to be countered by an official response that made reference to the facts, and it never was. Accounting for the effect of this bombardment of falsehoods would be to credit the Yes side with a large number of extra votes.

The ninth reason is that the No side had a great deal of foreign funding.

The American Church of Scientology funded the No campaign to the tune of at least six figures. Another American outfit known as Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which helped to defeat cannabis law reform measures in several American states, also worked closely with the Say Nope to Dope campaign. The Family First charity mysteriously doubled its income in a few short years, and this resulted in letterbox drops and large advertisements in major newspapers and television.

Many New Zealanders are appalled by the fact that cannabis prohibitionists in this country would team up with foreigners against their own people. In any case, most New Zealanders agree that we shouldn’t allow foreigners to influence New Zealand elections. Cannabis should be made legal to defy the foreigners who sought to interfere in our election.

The tenth, and major reason, is that cannabis prohibition has still failed. Just because 53% of the population support it, doesn’t mean that it has succeeded.

All of the arguments for cannabis law reform, such as the ones laid out in The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, are still valid. Prohibition has still failed to keep vulnerable people safe, it still funnels millions of dollars to gangs, it still causes people to hate the Police and it’s still an affront to human decency.

The ten reasons outlined in this essay are enough that the Sixth Labour Government ought to legalise cannabis despite the referendum result. The arguments that saw support for prohibition fall from 80% to 53% over the past decade are still valid, and those who support prohibition will soon be a minority.

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