Clown World Chronicles: What Is 'Learned Helplessness'?

Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Learned Helplessness’?

Of all the psychological tricks that the ruling class uses against us, instigating learned helplessness might be the nastiest. Learned helplessness, as the name suggests, is a particularly abject form of conditioned apathy. In Clown World, it’s everywhere.

The concept of learned helplessness comes from a series of studies performed with dogs by psychologist Martin Seligman. The dogs were placed into boxes and given electric shocks until they learned that there was no escape from the suffering. At this point, a strange apathy came over them. These animals later refused to escape the shocks even when an obvious opportunity was presented to do so.

The dogs that refused to escape electric shocks were said to be suffering from “learned helplessness”. This was a conditioned state of extreme passivity. Further experiments demonstrated that most people will become depressed if exposed to extended suffering without being able to do anything about it.

Learned helplessness is also seen in elephant training. A young elephant can be tethered by a chain or strong rope, and soon learns that it cannot escape its bonds. Eventually it becomes passive. An elephant can remain so conditioned for the rest of its life, so that even as an adult it can be tethered by a thin cord and will not try to escape, despite being easily strong enough to break free.

When it comes to learned helplessness, humans behave in the same manner as other mammals. Given repeated adverse stimuli with no chance of escape, the human animal will also “give up”. This occurs for the same neurophysiological reasons as in other animals, namely a kind of nervous exhaustion. Learned helplessness feels a lot like depression, and it arises for similar reasons.

Learned helplessness explains, to a major extent, why we don’t resist the rulers of Clown World.

Most people are conditioned into being helpless through schooling. School teaches us – and is designed to teach us – that defying authority can only lead to suffering. Anyone who stands out from the crowd is ruthlessly abused back into position, either through physical or social violence. This is why depressive apathy is so common among high school students.

The purpose of all this abuse is to induce a state of learned helplessness.

School graduates can then be passed over, like broken-in slaves, to those who are effectively their masters. Sometimes these are military officers, who can then command the graduates to charge machinegun emplacements, safe in the knowledge that they would never dare to disobey. More usually, the new masters are employers, who can work the graduate all day for a wage on which they can’t raise a family, likewise safe in the knowledge that no protest will be forthcoming.

The leadup to the Iraq War intensified the widespread sense of helplessness in Clown World. The millions of people protesting the war had no influence on its course. We learned that, no matter how earnestly we expressed our lack of consent for a war being waged in our name, our supposedly democratic representatives would simply do as they liked. Protests and petitions didn’t matter and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

This state of advanced apathy endured for some years. In the end it seemed like war was going to be part of everyday life from then on. We simply got used to daily reports of drone strikes hitting weddings, schools and hospitals, and of Islamic terror attacks.

The rise of Barack Obama brought hope back. Obama campaigned on a ‘Hope and Change’ platform and there was no doubt that a black man, of all things, would mean a definitive change from the status quo. His 2009 Nobel Peace Prize win reinforced these sentiments, leading the whole world to feel that the dark days of George W Bush’s psychotic indifference to human suffering were over.

However, Obama turned out to be just as much part of the Establishment as everyone else. He surrounded himself with the same people as had surrounded the previous Presidents, and continued along an equally megalomaniacal path. With the destruction of Libya and murder of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Clown World realised that not even voting the Republicans out of power was going to change anything.

The realisation that Obama was actually another bad guy coincided with the realisation that the Global Financial Crisis had condemned a whole generation to be poorer than their parents were. For so many in that generation to put their hopes in a messiah-like figure, only to have them dashed like that, caused many to simply give up in despair. And that was all part of the plan.

When it comes to the subject of inducing a state of learned helplessness, we almost move out of the realm of psychology and into the realm of black magic. It is by so inducing a state of helplessness that the ruling class manufactures acquiescence. With their psychological hold then established over the population, the ruling class can do as it likes without interference.

This is partly the reason for the ongoing refusal to legalise cannabis. The point of cannabis prohibition – and many similar arbitrary and cruel laws – is to show who’s in charge. Putting someone in a cage for an act that doesn’t harm anyone might be immoral and it might increase the net suffering in the world, but that’s the whole point – they’ll learn to obey next time if they know what’s good for them.

Overcoming learned helplessness is mostly a matter of understanding that we do, in fact, have the agency to prevent our own suffering. This requires that we recondition ourselves to become more optimistic. Although this is a process that may take some time, the key aspects are threefold. One must learn to see problems as external to oneself, as temporary and as specific to the situation one is in at the moment.

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 January 2021.

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 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.

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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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Clown World Chronicles: Immigration In Clown World

Few political topics create as much frustration as immigration. The discussion seems to be intractably divided into liberal and conservative camps, both of which accuse the other of jeopardising the future security of the entire world. Nevertheless, some hard facts rise above the flood of lies on the subject.

Immigration to the West today is characterised, like so much of Clown World, by the exertion of two wills: that of the capitalists and that of the Communists.

The capitalists want cheap labour first and foremost. The cheaper the labour, the greater the profits. They know that importing workers from the Third World allows for enormous profits; not only are those workers willing to work for cheap, but their presence destroys the solidarity of the native working class, and thereby their ability to bargain collectively.

The Communists want the destruction of national borders so that the international working class can come together as a cohesive force. They hate nationalists, in part because of lingering sentiments from World War II, but mostly because they have been conditioned to think that anyone who opposes mass immigration is guilty of the dread crime of racism. Immigration is supported because one’s enemies oppose it.

What the average person wants is for their quality of life to stay the same or to go up. To that end, they don’t care so much about immigration in and of itself. Their primary concern is that the immigration system lets in the sort of person who makes the local quality of life go up, and that it keeps out the sort of person who makes the local quality of life go down.

Unfortunately for the average person, the rulers of Clown World don’t give a shit about that. They have gone full speed on the immigration throttle for the reasons mentioned above, and this has led to an intensification of Clown World in three major ways.

The first is that it has led to a lack of social cohesion.

Unfortunately for the multiculturalists, it has been shown empirically that increasing diversity leads to weakening bonds of solidarity. A paper in the Scandinavian Political Studies journal demonstrated that “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital”. This is because the more diverse a society is, the less any randomly-chosen two people will have in common with each other. This makes them trust each other less.

A recent metaanalysis in the Annual Review of Political Science found “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies”. The effect was particularly acute at the neighbourhood level; a diverse neighbourhood was a strong predictor of low neighbourly trust. This low trust has a number of consequences that reduce the quality of social life.

However, unfortunately for us, the capitalists have correctly observed that diversity increases economic growth. Because economic growth is readily measurable, and social cohesion is not, we have weighed economic considerations more heavily, and been more readily persuaded by them. Clown World is, in this sense as well as many others, the consequence of prioritising money higher than happiness.

The second way immigration has intensified Clown World is by inducing people to tell lies.

Some immigrant groups are great. The waves of Far East Asian immigration to Western countries – in particular America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – have brought with them cultural enrichment and no relative increase in crime. This is primarily because Far East Asians are generally high IQ, and as such are generally able to meet the cognitive demands placed on them by the Western workplace.

Some immigrant groups aren’t so good. It’s extremely rare to find a person who claims that his neighbourhood became a better place because Muslims or Africans moved in. All over the West, Muslims and Africans commit more crimes and perform less productive labour than other groups. This is primarily because Muslims and Africans are generally low IQ, and as such are generally unable to meet the cognitive demands placed on them by the Western workplace.

In Clown World, the above facts are denied more strenuously than any others. Many people feel fully justified in telling blatant lies in order to deny them. It’s even easier to speak of God than it is to speak of genetically-based differences in racial IQ.

If there is a Noble Lie in Clown World, it’s the lie that all human groups are precisely identical in all psychological measures. This lie is considered noble because it is believed that the alternative is a relentless descent into Nazi totalitarianism. Once we admit that the races as different, the logic goes, then we’re forced to admit that some are better than others, and this ends up in extermination camps.

The reality is that lying about the subject spreads confusion and suspicion, and helps no-one but the globohomo alliance.

The third way that mass immigration has intensified Clown World is that the people were never asked if they wanted it, and this has led to extreme resentment. The ruling class simply decided that it wanted mass immigration, and the people’s electoral choice was restricted to parties who also wanted it. There was never a referendum on the subject, in any country.

Mass immigration has been forced on the people of the West without their consent, and has forever changed the nature of life in all Western countries. This has led to a deep sense of betrayal, which has led to a sharp decline in support for the Establishment, which has led to an increase in support for the far right, which has led to an increase in support for the far left.

Immigration and Clown World, then, are two parts of a positive feedback loop. When one increases, the other does as well. Clown World makes people forget about the obvious drawbacks to the mass immigration of certain peoples, thereby enabling it, and the immigration itself weakens the social bonds that prevent Clown World from intensifying.

The peak confluence of immigration and Clown World may have come when the Scottish Justice Minister, Humza Yousaf, declared that dinner table conversations in private homes must be prosecuted if they incite hatred. This means that it would be a crime to speak out against mass Muslim or African immigration in one’s own home. It’s hard to imagine Clown World getting any more insane than this.

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