psychology – Page 100

The Government Religion

God was dead, but God has returned to life in the form of government. This essay examines a terrifying proposition: taken together, the number of people who are willing to do violence to others on behalf of their government greatly exceeds the number of people willing to do violence to others on behalf on any other mentality or ideology. Worship of government is its own religion.

For those who follow the Government religion, any pronouncement from the government is the same as if the clouds have parted and the voice of God had boomed from the heavens. The government simply cannot lie – its size and power makes it both omnipresent and omnibenevolent. Therefore, every law and decree passed by government is regarded by its followers as if it was written in holy scripture.

If all the available scientific and medical evidence says, for example, that cannabis is medicinal and can be used to treat nausea and insomnia, but the government says that cannabis is not medicinal, then the followers of the Government religion will say that cannabis is not medicinal. The scientific literature and all the evidence be damned – the government says it’s not medicinal, therefore it isn’t.

Before any decision can be made, the question has to be asked: does the government approve of this? This is the government-worshipper’s equivalent of the Christian question “What would Jesus do?”. All actions must be viewed through the prism of whether they serve government objectives. If not, those actions are sinful and must be discouraged.

Police officers are usually fanatical followers of the Government religion, which offers a ready excuse for them to discharge their baser, sadistic instincts on members of the public. Without the Government religion, Police officers would not have the authority to physically abuse people without punishment. The Government religion raises these people, who would otherwise mostly be criminals, into a position of prestige, and they return the favour with obedience.

Mental health workers are another. The job of a mental health worker is to determine when a person has lost touch with reality and to guide them back to it. The problem with this is that they have no natural or philosophical explanation of the nature of reality and so they rely on the government to provide one. This means that the government literally decides what reality is for mental health workers. They are consequently hopelessly mired in the religion.

Bureaucrats are a third, and arguably the worst of all three. Bureaucrats are to the Government religion what the cardinals are to Catholicism. They are the ones that seek to organise the world so that their religion might be dominant. In the case of the bureaucrat, the objective is to use Police officers and mental health workers to destroy those who oppose the religion.

If one reasons by analogy to dogs, we can see why government workers behave the way they do. Dogs are completely loyal to the people that feed them, on account of the gratitude created from that dog no longer having to worry about where its daily food comes from. In a state of Nature, the majority of creatures must live in a state of extreme anxiety on account of the pressure to acquire sufficient food resources to live. Anyone feeding a dog takes all that anxiety away, and the resulting gratitude leads to loyalty.

By the same token, the natural stress of finding enough money to live on has been alleviated, in the life of the government worker, by the government. Therefore, the government worker regards the government with the same undying, arse-licking loyalty that a dog regards its owner with. The government provides food and shelter like God provides manna from Heaven, and in exchange the government worker obeys the orders they are given.

Because Government-worshippers treat the desire of their government as if it was the Will of God, they are capable of causing immense destruction and human suffering. All of the death camp guards on both the Nazi and Soviet side were Government-worshippers, as were the Chinese mandarins responsible for the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. Those responsible for destroying their own young people through conducting the War on Drugs on them also commit their crimes out of a sense of the holiness of government directives.

Because Government-worshippers are responsible for most of the crimes against humanity committed throughout history, the rest of us need to oppose the spread of the cult and the fanaticism of its followers, for our own good. The best way to do this is to cause the Government-worshipper to realise that the authority they worship is fallible. This is why they are extremely reluctant to consider the possibility, much like any religious person.

The discovery that the government may have actually been wrong about something is enough to shatter the life of the government-worshipper. This will cause them to have a crisis of faith, which, like the crises of faith suffered by followers of other religions, can lead to the complete rejection of the Government religion.

The more doubt a government worker has in the infallibility of their paymaster, the less likely it is that that worker will commit a human rights abuse. Therefore, causing people to lose faith in their government is essential to keeping the rest of us safe. Making Government-worshippers realise that the authority they worship is fallible is the key to undermining the Government religion.

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The True Eternal Struggle

Elephants have traditionally been seen as noble animals

Most people intuitively feel that life is a never-ending struggle between two opposing forces. Some call them good and evil, some call them darkness and light, some have even called them Aryan and Jew. As this essay will examine, the true eternal struggle is none of those things, but rather the struggle between the K and r-selected.

R/K selection theory is a theory within the biological sciences that seeks to explain the various reproductive strategies of different species and subspecies. According to this theory, the selective pressures of the environment drive organisms towards either an r strategy of producing as many offspring as possible in the hope that some survive, or a K strategy of producing few offspring but investing heavily in them so that they have the best chance of survival.

These are other factors involved, such as gestation time and overall life length, but the essential division is a matter of parental investment. Among r-selected species are insects, fish, crocodiles and rodents, who are known for spawning huge numbers of offspring who are mostly left to their own fate. Among K-selected species are whales, horses, elephants and humans, who are known for long gestation times.

R/K selection theory can tell us a lot about the different strategies used by various subspecies. Crucially, they can help explain some of the behaviour of different human subspecies. For instance, a human group that is more K-selected will have fewer children and will invest more time and resources in them while growing up. Among this group, rates of paternal abandonment and child abuse will be lower than among the r-selected.

Developmental psychology tells us a few things about how children will turn out based on differing levels of parental investment in their upbringing. R-selected groups of humans, like their biological analogues, will produce larger numbers of offspring without a great concern for whether they live or die, a strategy which the K-selected groups eschew in favour of heavy parental investment.

If one takes the extreme example of being orphaned, one can observe the deleterious effects of parental neglect on the psychology of the child. Orphans are often hard, cruel people. They are often angry, bitter and resentful. These personal qualities bode extremely poorly for success in the modern industrial world, where people need to work together prosocially to solve complicated goals.

Conversely, it’s apparent from looking at people from stable, happy family environments that they themselves are much more stable and happy. For them, stability and happiness have been normalised; they expect people to treat them well, and they usually treat other people well. These people naturally have a much easier time meeting the challenges of the workforce.

One thing is immediately apparent from following this reasoning – the economic outcomes of the r-selected must necessarily be worse. All other factors being equal, children whose parents were following a strategy of r-selection will produce offspring with less human capital, and they will consequently be less able to lever it into financial capital. These children will find it harder to get jobs, and to keep them, than the children of the K-selected.

A curiosity that becomes evident after a bit more thinking is that these differing reproductive strategies must necessarily lead to differing political outcomes. K-selected people don’t tend to use much in the way of government resources, because their parents tend to invest a lot in them and this tends to lead to economic independence. This naturally tends towards a kind of right-wing, frontiersman’s thinking because economically independent people lose out from greater resource distribution.

By contrast, r-selected people will naturally tend towards the left. Because they have had less investment made in them on average, they are less able to achieve financial independence, and therefore win from greater resource distribution. As far as the interests of the r-selected are concerned, voting for a political ideology that taxes the K-selected then seems like an obvious move.

Evolutionary game theory tells us that this situation cannot last indefinitely. If one thinks about the mathematics of resource distribution, it can be seen immediately that a society cannot function if it contains only r-selected people: if everyone is r-selected, they will keep breeding to the point of ecological collapse. There must be at least some K-selected people for a society to be viable, otherwise there is no-one making an investment in the future.

However, an oversupply of r-selected groups is the inevitable result of a political system that distributes wealth from the K-selected to the r-selected. There comes a level of taxation that will cause K-selected people to abstain from reproducing on account of not being able to provide a sufficiently decent life for their offspring. R-selected people have no such qualms, and will continue to breed under any circumstances. So high taxation, within a society, shifts the reproductive advantage to the r-selected.

It’s impossible to maintain a society where the K-selected are taxed so heavily to pay for the offspring of the r-selected that they cannot afford to have children themselves. Such an arrangement is essentially a form of biological parasitism, and can only lead to an increase in the numbers of r-selected at the expense of the K-selected. Sooner or later, the K-selected will either rebel or become subsumed in the teeming masses of the r-selected.

The fact that such a society is what we have right now means simply that the current situation cannot continue to exist for long. The K-selected, being more capable of long-term thought, are becoming aware that they have essentially been enslaved through the tax-welfare system to subsidise the breeding of r-selected individuals. This can only continue up to a point, because beyond that point society starts losing cohesion, and then the r-selected and K-selected must fight each other for territory.

This is the true eternal struggle, which will run as long as humanity itself does.

The Incel Problem is Older Than the Human Species

People are afraid of a dark shadow looming on the horizon of our culture: a spate of angry men who can never get laid, and who take their frustration out on others violently. Names like Elliot Rodger are now synonymous with explosive acts of vengeful mass homicide. They are otherwise known as the involuntarily celibate – incels – and this essay looks at how to deal with them.

The incel problem is fundamentally a question of biology. The reason why the problem is so hard to solve is that the problem itself is a byproduct of a greater, more fundamental problem within animal species. This is why we can observe behaviour analogous to the violent human incel in other primates.

The essential challenge for females of sexually reproducing species is to find a breeding partner that is going to give the offspring the highest possible chance of success. Because the female investment in the production of offspring is heavy (compared to the male), the female is very choosy about who she breeds with. Because the male investment in the production of offspring is light (in a state of Nature), the male tends towards promiscuity.

This combination of high female investment and low male investment creates the possibility of multiple partners for high-quality males. This can be observed in extremis in walruses, but it is also evident in gorillas. Adult male silverback gorillas tend to control a small harem of females, most of whom carry his offspring. What’s more, this is evident in humans, only to lesser degree.

For the most part, the female of every species is happy with this arrangement. As long as she is capable of acquiring enough resources to raise the offspring, she might as well go for the best male genes she can get, even if another female already has done so. Because women have evolved to go for males with good genes and reject those without, given enough free female choice, a certain proportion of the male population must be incels.

Observing how this plays out in other primates, we can see why the presence of incels is a problem in human society as well. In other primates we can observe that young males who never get laid, and who have no chance of it because of the monopolisation of sexual resources by violent alpha males, stop contributing to the overall wellbeing of the tribe. They start to attack the other males in their tribe (the ones who are hoarding the females) and may even refuse to defend the tribe against outside invaders.

We can see, therefore, that the incel problem is older than the entire human species. The problem itself can be stated thusly: what can be done with men who are involuntarily celibate, and who have no incentive to fully participate in society? It’s worthwhile looking at how this problem has been dealt with historically.

Nature has developed a panoply of strategies for dealing with this problem. At the most primitive level, the incel problem has traditionally been solved with violence. The reproductive capacity of the female of the species can be considered a resource and fought over in exactly the same way as territory or bananas. So there was no incel problem – any male wishing to get laid simply had to find a fertile female and then beat the shit out of every other male she attracted.

Abrahamic religion is a particular way of solving the incel problem. The idea is that if all men get together and throw women under the bus, collectively, then every man gets one woman and that’s the end of it. Having more than one woman is a crime (bigamy), having sex with anyone outside of marriage is a crime (adultery) and divorce is not permitted.

This means that the number of incels, and their rage, is minimised by way of stripping all rights and dignities from women. The “Women’s Liberation” movement was a reaction away from this logic. Many intelligent women (correctly) came to perceive themselves as having been sacrificed to further someone else’s political objectives, and through their efforts the Abrahamic solution came to be seen as unsuitable.

Another potential solution might be described as the “Bonobo solution”, which is basically that everyone gets laid, regardless of any sexually unappealing quality they might have. This solution replaced the Abrahamic solution in the West, and is usually encouraged by the liberal consumption of drugs, listening to rhythmic music, and use of the contraceptive pill. One can observe the outcome of the application of this solution in any Western city on a weekend night.

The logic of this solution is that enough men get laid and often enough that there are no incels, because any male wanting to get laid simply has to hang around drunk women long enough and one of them will eventually let him have a crack. As a consequence, there is no incel rage to discharge. This strategy has arguably had a deleterious effect on the structure of the average family, but it has nevertheless persisted until very recently.

Today, the incel problem has taken on new forms. Because of the fact that socialising at a pub or bar is falling out of fashion, and because of Internet dating and apps such as Tinder, it’s never been easier for high-quality men to find willing sexual partners wherever they go. Commensurately, it’s never been easier for women to avoid low-quality men.

In other words, not only are there more incels than ever before but ever more of those are hopelessly incel. This has had manifestations already in the form of men like Rodger, but there are festering forms of it that might yet find dark expression. There are several online communities where young incels gather and where their rage turns to hate. Future political movements might exploit this energy.

It’s not clear how the incel problem is going to be solved in the future. Possibly with the (even) wider promulgation of pornography, perhaps state-funded prostitutes, perhaps teledildonics. The alternative to successfully redirecting this sexual energy might be some kind of orgiastic bloodshed that makes the Eastern Theatre of World War II look friendly.

Te Reo With Mnemonics: Truth and Falsehood Words

Truth, to be true – pono

An adolescent boy’s parents are scolding him for his computer use habits, asking “Is it true that you watch all these pornos?”

Lie, to lie, Bullshit – teka

A salesman is asked by his boss how the day has gone. “Any takers?” the boss asks. The salesman shakes his head, and the boss accuses him of lying.

Secret – toropuku

A man reads something in a book, and shows it to another man. The other man rips the book into pieces, and says “Now it’s a secret.” He tore a book up.

Belief, to believe – whakapono

At a camping ground, a woman points to a cabin on a hill and says to a family “I believe yours is the far cabin, yo.”

Claim, to claim – kerēme

A woman appears on television and claims that “The claim of the country is that this is our best cream.”

to admit, confess, disclose – whāki

A man shows a strange looking contraption to some friends, and says “Now, I admit that this looks a bit fucky.”

The Maori word for ‘fact’ – meka – sounds like the English phrase “me car”

to confirm, confirmation – whakaū

Some spies are holding a man’s head underwater. They pull it out and say “Can you confirm what we told you?” The man says “Fuck you!”

to deny – whakahore

In a courtroom, a judge asks the defendant “So you deny that on the night of 12 August you did fuck a whore?”

honest – matatika

Some policemen show a video of a holdup at a supermarket to a seated suspect. They say “Be honest. Are you the mart attacker?”

dishonest – hīanga

A twenty-dollar note blows along the ground, and a man picks it up. Another man comes along and says “Did you see my twenty?” The first man says “Here? Nah.”

Fact, to be true – meka

Beside an expensive car, a man is pleading with a skeptical policeman. “It’s true that it’s me car! It’s a fact!”

to pretend, deceive – hangarau

A lady is hanging some clothes in rows on a clothesline. She says “I’m pretending to be a laundrywoman! Come, hang a row!”.

The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.