Clown World Chronicles: What Is A 'Behavioural Sink'?

Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Behavioural Sink’?

The story of Clown World is a story of collapse. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that all of the signs and symptoms of social collapse in other mammalian species can also be observed in our societies today. The concept of the ‘behavioural sink‘ is an ethological observation that applies just as well to human society.

In the 1950s and 1960s, ethologist John Calhoun ran a series of experiments with Norwegian rats. This involved creating a controlled environment where the rats could thrive – food and quality shelter were limitless. These are sometimes called the Mouse Utopia Experiments on account of that the environment was so conducive to life.

In one of these experiments, known as “Universe 25”, the easy nature of life led to a population explosion, as the natural birth rates of the r-selected rodents (mice in this instance) were not kept in check by the natural death rate that would have existed had they lived in the wild. The overpopulation eventually reached such an extreme degree that the inhabitants of Universe 25 began to exhibit some strange behaviours.

Beyond a certain degree of overpopulation, asocial and then antisocial behaviour became much more common.

First the rodents would start to become asocial. The typical expression of this was a passive form of withdrawal. Some rodents would avoid the others during the daytime, only becoming active at night when the others had settled down. Other rodents, dubbed the “beautiful ones”, came to devote all of their time to grooming, withdrawing from social interaction completely.

If overcrowding became worse than this, the rodents would become aggressive. They would start to randomly attack each other, sometimes fatally. The slightest irritation could trigger a murderous assault. At its worst, infant mortality came close to 100%, as the rodents came to completely neglect their parental duties. Eventually the population would collapse on account of all this homicidal and suicidal behaviour.

Calhoun coined the term ‘behavioural sink’ to describe this societal collapse. He described it as a kind of “spiritual death” that preceded physical death. Observing the disintegration of rodent society on account of this overpopulation gives us great insight into the nature of Clown World. The terrifying truth is that the human animal in Clown World is not so different from the rat and the mouse in the Mouse Utopia Experiments.

The human animal did not evolve in a state of overcrowding. For the vast majority of the 100,000 or so years that humans have existed on this planet, we did so in small bands like the other primates. These bands rarely exceeded 150 or so – if the population of one band would swell beyond this, part of it would split off and form a colony elsewhere.

Because living conditions were so harsh during this time, there was never a time when the birth rate was significantly higher than the death rate. Hunger, disease, natural disaster, tribal warfare and predation from larger animals all worked to keep the human population in check.

This all changed when sanitation and then modern medicine were invented. These two advances meant that the death rate dropped sharply. Because the birth rate initially stayed the same, the human population ballooned. The human population has quintupled since 1900, and most of that growth has been concentrated in urban areas close to the major international trading hubs.

By 2019, the human animal is presented with a set of living conditions very similar to the rats in Calhoun’s study. Perhaps inevitably, we have responded in a similar fashion. The essence of Clown World is the collapse in social behaviour that has come about from the massive overpopulation on our planet. We are exhibiting the same behaviours as the rodents of Universe 25.

In Clown World, many people have withdrawn from social contact completely. This phenomenon is one that we share with the Mouse Utopia. The overpopulation of Clown World has led to a sense that all possible social niches are filled, therefore striving for social success is futile. Many of these people have turned to cyberspace, which offers social contact without being forced into close physical proximity with extremely unpleasant people.

The phenomenon of the beautiful ones is replicated with the rise of the hipster. The 21st century hipster, with his grooming obsession, is simply the result of heavy overcrowding. This is why he is only seen in urban areas. As with the rodents, the modern hipster does not pursue females for reproduction and he does not fight for dominance with the alpha males. He simply withdraws.

Parental incompetence is another feature of overpopulation that the Mouse Utopia shares with Clown World. In the Calhoun experiments, rats in heavily overcrowded pens failed to look after their offspring properly. It was as if the rats became even more r-selected, and adopted attitudes to their offspring normally held by reptiles and amphibians.

This shift towards r-selected patterns of child rearing is also replicated in humans. There have never been a higher proportion of deadbeat dads than there is today. Never before have there been so many single mothers on welfare. Despite the protestations of many conservatives, this isn’t because the welfare system is too generous. It’s because people no longer give a shit.

Consequently, a number of children are growing up feral in Clown World. Their parents have all but given up on life, and so the children wander the streets of their neighbourhoods looking for entertainment. Many of these children end up joining the recluses on the Internet. Others, as in A Clockwork Orange, turn to mindless crime. This breakdown of social order is at the core of Clown World.

A third feature that the Mouse Utopias share with Clown World is this mindlessly random violence. Just this week there was a diversity incident in London where two passers-by were killed by a knife-wielding Muslim. These incidents are becoming so common that they are hardly news anymore. It’s just taken for granted that people are under so much stress nowadays that some will randomly flip out and start killing others.

It’s impossible to understand Clown World without understanding the concept of the behavioural sink. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiments gave us the chance to observe the behaviour of social mammals in a state of extreme overcrowding. Now, with 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, we can see those same behaviour patterns arising in humans.

We’re going down the plughole of the behavioural sink.

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.

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The Equalitarian Dogma – The World’s Most Damaging Lie

The most strenuously defended falsehood in the world today is not a religion (at least not a recognised one), but a pseudo-scientific dogma. It is the dogma of Equalitarianism. This is the assertion that there are no inherent differences between different human groups, or at least no psychological ones. This dogma, as this essay will show, is the world’s most harmful lie.

There is no doubt that there is large variation among and between almost all human groups in almost all measures. Over a hundred years of scientific literature establishes that this is the case. Not only is there great variation in physical traits such as height, body build and skin colour, but there is also great variation in psychological traits such as IQ and proclivities towards certain behaviours.

The question that does get debated is whether or not this variation is natural or whether it is a function of the environment. This is the great debate in psychology, and is known as the nature versus nurture debate. It’s an extremely important question, because a person’s answer to it is strongly related to their political beliefs. As has been discussed here before, people’s beliefs about human nature are closely tied to their political beliefs. One often predicts the other.

One could argue that the elementary political question is: should the differences between people be made smaller?

The response to that question is usually “It depends.” More specifically, most people usually feel that the answer depends on whether those differences between people are natural or not. Responses to the elementary political question tend to vary based along these lines.

Those who think that the differences between people are natural tend to think that it’s pointless to try and make them smaller. These people would point to the clear differences in height between different races, even when you control for environmental factors such as wealth – just compare the Japanese and Koreans with the Russians and Mongolians. Nature throws up a great amount of variation, and it’s more efficient for us to just let it be.

Those who think that the differences between people are unnatural tend to think that it’s immoral to let them continue to exist. If differences are unnatural, then they must be the result of prejudices inherent to the structure of society. Therefore, we’re morally obliged to restructure society such that those prejudices no longer exist. The favoured strategy for achieving this is mass brainwashing campaigns.

The trouble is that an elementary grounding in science is enough to know that different races will be different in all kinds of ways, it’s just a question of by what measure, in which direction, how much and how meaningfully.

By the time most people are eight years old, they have learned that no two snowflakes are the same. The reason for this is that there are no two identical things anywhere in Nature. There are no two identical people, or mountains, or even worms. All are different by virtue of the fact that there are no two identical things anywhere in the material world.

A more advanced understanding of Nature, in particular evolution, teaches us that no two subgroups of the human species will have gone through precisely the same selective pressures over the course of their biological past, and therefore no two subgroups of the human species will be the same either. This is true no matter which measure one uses. In order words, all subgroups of the human species are different, despite the presence of underlying similarities.

Therefore, we can conclude that the Equalitarian Dogma doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. It’s not just that the evidence doesn’t support it – elementary scientific principles rule it out from the beginning. However, the Equalitarian Dogma and its supporting dogmas such as the Blank Slate Theory still hold immense sway among the vast majority of people unqualified to understand the science.

The Blank Slate Theory holds that genetics have no influence on a person’s behaviour or personality – all of their behaviours can be best explained by reference to the environment in which they were raised. Humans are born into the world as if a tabula rasa – or blank slate – upon which practically anything can be inscribed.

This is the basis of the Equalitarian Dogma. If we are all the same, then the only way to explain our transparent differences is by appeal to the different environmental influences that have been present during the lives of each person.

A corollary to the Blank Slate Theory is that, as people are simply the products of their environment and nothing else, it’s possible to shape them into anything at all, simply by controlling the schedule of rewards and punishments under which they are raised. Any child could become a university professor or a gang member – it all depends on what shapes their minds when they are growing up.

It’s true that human infants are born into a state of extreme juvenility, and that they learn very quickly by mimicking their elders. It’s also true that the human brain at birth is the most plastic organ of any invertebrate creature. This means that human personalities are supremely malleable – but only up to a point.

The reality is that human behaviour can be shaped by the environment, but only with the bounds of possibility determined by genetics.

For example, the precise height of a man may be influenced by the quality of the nutrition that he received as a child, but this influence only applies to a particular range of height. A lack of nutrition might mean a man grows up stunted, skinny or even sickly, but it won’t make him a dwarf. Likewise, it’s not possible to reliably produce seven-foot tall giants simply by feeding them great quantities of food as children.

The reason why this is so important is because incorrectly understanding the reality about the human condition causes us to make terrible decisions.

The popularity of the Blank Slate Theory among political leaders in Europe caused them to open their borders to millions of Muslim and African immigrants this century, in the belief that those people could simply be conditioned into becoming the same as the native Europeans. Everyone knew they were different, but because of the Blank Slate Theory it was assumed that their children would grow up just the same as any European.

The idea was that, owing to the immense gratitude they would have from being so generously raised from the filth of their home countries, the Muslims and Africans would throw off their old cultural values like so many iron shackles, and embrace the cultural values of Europe. Having done so, they would then be identical to other Europeans.

The reality, of course, was that these Muslims and Africans behave differently to the natives for genetic reasons, and cannot simply be conditioned to suppress their sexual and violent urges the same way a European can. Consequently, all the education didn’t do much. Europe has learned this the hard way, through suffering hundreds of millions of sex crimes and crimes of violence, but they did not need to suffer in this manner.

They only suffered because they made incorrect assumptions about the nature of the human animal.

The Equalitarian Dogma has caused, and continues to cause, tremendous suffering to the people of the West by exposing them to the presence of people who aren’t the same as Westerners when it comes to civility or natural empathy. The assumption that all people are exactly the same implies the assumption that all people commit sex and violence crimes at the same rate as Westerners. It leads to a failure to correctly discriminate between relatively harmful and relatively harmless influences.

The Equalitarian Dogma is the greatest evil in the world because it causes more suffering than any other dogma.

The most evil thing about it is that, like all dogmas, it makes violence between those who submit to it and those who don’t all but inevitable. Those who submit to it truly believe that they are morally superior to those who don’t, and that their opponents are Nazis who only believe in human biodiversity out of pure hatred. This sneering superiority makes dialogue with them all but impossible, and therefore makes violence all but inevitable.

The Equalitarian Dogma has led to a situation where there are now forty million Muslims and Africans in Europe who cannot realistically be integrated, and their continued and growing presence in Europe means continued and growing misery. Eventually one of two things will happen – this population will be expelled violently, or the ruling classes will be destroyed in the native people’s desire to punish someone for what’s been done to them.

Inaccurate, dogmatic conceptions of reality must be opposed at every turn. No matter how virtuous a person may feel for holding them, they cause nothing but misery.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

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VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda X

This reading carries on from here.

The tenth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Art And Science.’ Here Bernays discusses how one can use propaganda in the service of culture.

As in other chapters, Bernays emphasises that the success of almost any enterprise today depends on public acceptance. Therefore, if a gallery is to successfully run an exhibition featuring a particular artist, they will need to first ensure that their works have public acceptance.

Bernays gives us the maxim “In art as in politics the minority rules,” by which he means that those who understand “the anatomy of public opinion” can shape it. He claims that propaganda gives the artist the opportunity to collaborate with industry to improve society.

As in previous chapters, Bernays mentions that the interest of the public can be captured by associations and by dramatic incidents. He gives the example of an American silk manufacturer who forms industry links with Parisian fashion houses for the sake of forming an association.

The effect of aesthetics is laboured in this chapter. Bernays writes that, because mass production has driven the costs of producing propaganda to the floor, propagandists must look for other ways to stand out. One way is by applying aesthetics to their product. There is an economic incentive to meet the public demand for more beauty.

Part of propaganda is to give people something to talk about when they meet up at tea parties. To that end, it’s important to bring people the best of art and aesthetics as they relate to one’s industry. Museums have an interest in making their message intelligible to the public, and to that end they must employ propaganda.

Even in the late 1920s, Bernays was able to write about the phenomenon where scientific research is sponsored by large corporations. This phenomenon was already powerful enough that Bernays could write about it changing the whole world over decade previous to Propaganda being written. Science needs propaganda in order to condition the public to accept the advances it makes.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘MGTOW’?

In Clown World, relations between the genders are not as they should be. As everything in Clown World is a twisted, tragicomic imitation of how things would be in a normal world, so too is dating and romance. One of the phenomena that this has created is that of the MGTOW. This essay explains who these people are and what motivates them.

‘MGTOW’ stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The idea is that MGTOW is a rebellion against the expectations levied upon the average man by society. These expectations, MGTOWs contend, are that a man shall slave away for the vast majority of his life for the sake of providing for a wife and family, without any assurance that any of his work will pay itself off. It’s a raw deal, and so they reject it.

The average MGTOW has an extremely cynical attitude towards women. Their idea of the feminine is deceitful, manipulative, dishonest – women attract men like spiders attract flies. The attitude that women are evil underpins much of the MGTOW movement. After all, if it were true that women were evil, then it would make sense to avoid them.

MGTOWs speak of a time when the average man was afforded a lot more respect. During this time, marriages were stable and women were loyal. Men were not subject to “divorce rape” – in which a formerly happy wife betrays a man and then enlists a lawyer to take everything that man has in divorce proceedings. Cases like Jeff Bezos’s wife, who became a multi-billionaire through a divorce settlement, are emblematic.

The problem with today’s society, MGTOWs contend, is that women are no longer as they once were.

Women are no longer loyal – a combination of decreased social pressure towards loyalty, a legal environment unfavourable to males, and their own inner malice. Therefore, the old social contract, under which a man would labour throughout his productive years in exchange for a pleasant wife who would provide him a family, is no longer valid. Absent this, men are not obliged to be part of society. They can go their own way.

It’s true that the average Western man today has a much shittier situation facing them than the average Western man in the 1950s or 60s. Unlike his grandfathers, he has almost no chance of owning a home and raising a family on his wage alone. The average young New Zealander today has less than 40% of the house-buying power that his parents’ generation enjoyed. Being the breadwinner of a family is many times harder than it used to be.

It’s also true that the balance of power has shifted towards women in recent generations. Our grandfathers were able to literally beat their women into submission, knowing that both their neighbours and the Police would look the other way. Marital rape was legal in New Zealand until 1984. In the 21st century, however, women make up two-thirds of Bachelor’s degree recipients in New Zealand. It’s a woman’s world now.

Moreover, men today have to deal with the reality of hypergamy (all MGTOWs are familiar with this term). Hypergamy is the tendency of the female in sexually reproducing species to try to marry up by attracting the sexual partner with the highest possible social status. MGTOWs contend that the advent of online dating has exacerbated this tendency to such an extreme degree that, today, most women have no interest in the bottom 80% of men.

To many men, this makes the prospect of a fulfilling long-term relationship seem unlikely. MGTOWs will say “women are only as loyal as their options,” and because Tinder gives them effectively infinite options, women no longer have any reason to be loyal. Even worse, they don’t even need a man to raise children because the State will pay for it with welfare (there is great overlap between MGTOWs and the libertarian right when it comes to resenting welfare).

Because there is little reason to work hard and to hold down a job if one does not (or can not) have a family, a number of men have just said “fuck it” and dropped out of society in response to all this. They fill their time mostly with video games, Netflix and television. Others fill their time with pornography (see the Coomer meme). None of this is productive, but there’s no reason for a man who has abandoned (or been abandoned by) society to be productive.

There is a great overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and incels. Both of them share a deep frustration about their failed attempts to get what they want out of women. The difference, in theory, is that MGTOWs are no longer trying to find ways to co-exist with women, whereas incels are still trying but are getting rejected. The incel to MGTOW pathway is obvious.

Curiously, there isn’t much overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and volcels. In theory, there ought to be, because a man who is going his own way is a fitting description for a man who is voluntarily celibate. But a man who is voluntarily celibate is probably doing so for spiritual or mental health reasons – a MGTOW, by contrast, goes his own way out of bitterness and resentment.

One of the main drawbacks of the MGTOW strategy is that most men can’t achieve anything by themselves. Like it or not, individual humans are interdependent with other humans and cannot exist in isolation. Even the greatest of men can’t achieve much without a network of people who make that man’s greatness known to the wider world.

Inevitably, such a network will include women. Therefore, a man who hates or who wants to avoid women is unlikely to also to be supported by a large social network.

If the MGTOWs themselves are correct, then the phenomenon ought to become more prevalent as the economic and social balance of power shifts further in favour of women. This could have social repercussions. If a large proportion of the men in a society are unwilling to act to preserve it then it may well collapse. The prospect of this is something that many MGTOWs look forwards to with joy.

Being a sick and insane circus, Clown World is inherently unstable, and the MGTOW phenomenon may be one that heralds its demise.

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