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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Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy’?

Some psychiatric conditions are inherited, despite not being genetic

Of all the weird and rare psychiatric conditions, one of the strangest is Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. This is a particularly malicious kind of disorder that involves a parent or guardian deliberately abusing their child for the sake of getting attention for themselves. As this article will examine, Munchausen by Proxy may be making a comeback today.

Regular Munchausen Syndrome is fairly common. It’s the act of feigning an illness or infirmity for the sake of drawing sympathetic attention to oneself. Every schoolchild has done it at least once, usually to get off school when a particularly unfavoured event was on the day’s schedule. The trick is also often pulled when visiting the grandparents, in hope of some sweets or some money.

When adults do it, it’s considered a psychiatric disorder. Part of the reason for this is that Munchausen Syndrome can cause many thousands of dollars of money to be wasted in endless medical tests, as well as being a fraudulent attempt to manipulate.

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is less common. This involves abuse of another, usually a dependent such as a child. Part of this involves a drive to create symptoms in the child, such that outside observers believe that the child is sick. The child itself may also believe it is sick, or may even genuinely be sick – the linked article above refers to a phenomenon where “a disease may actually be initiated in the child by the parent or guardian.”

All this raises a question. Given that many of the children who are supposedly realising themselves to be transgender are themselves the children of people who are transgender, it is possible that some of these cases of “trans kids” are really cases of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy?

Articles such as these create the impression that the parents of trans kids are brave warriors fighting the prejudice and bigotry of hordes of poorly educated morons. “Transphobia” is a new term that is designed to shame people into accepting the existence of trans kids, and to shame people away from asking questions about whether or not the child is being abused. Being the parent of a trans kid brings a lot of attention.

It’s very possible that many of the parents who find themselves looking after a “trans kid” are, in fact, child abusers who are initiating the idea of the child being trans. After all, there were very, very few such children back in the day before the idea became normalised, but now that the idea engenders sympathy (for both child and parent) there are many.

It’s certainly true that the parents who end up taking care of a “trans kid” end up getting a large amount of attention. Some of the individuals who have been featured in Internet articles for having trans kids have had their faces put in front of millions of people all around the world. Others have lengthy, sympathetic feature articles written about the struggles they faced with a transgender child.

Most people would dismiss all this sudden interest in being transgender as slightly narcissistic attention whoremongering, but the issue shows no sign of stopping there. It has now perhaps reached a decisive juncture thanks to the James/Luna Younger saga, in which the parents of a Texan 7-year old do not agree on whether the child is a boy or a girl.

The problem with this disagreement is that the mother wants the child, who is biologically male, to undergo hormone therapy treatment in order to “transition” into a female. This will effectively sterilise them and render them incapable of later functioning as an biological adult male. Naturally, this transitioning process is not reversible.

The father in this case is putting a lot of resources into preventing the child from undergoing this therapy. This means that a courtroom may soon have to make a ruling on whether the whole trans idea is legitimate or a mass psychosis. The father has done this under the belief that “detransitioning” is a nightmare, and an experience that any loving parent would rightly wish to guard their child from.

Is it possible that the modern media environment, with its unprecedented ability to reach new audiences faster than ever before, has also provided an unprecedented level of incentive for parents to publicly abuse their kids for the sake of seeking attention? Could this have incentivised some parents to manipulate their children into thinking they were transgender for the sake of gaining sympathy for that parent?

Some of these supposed “trans kids” may be children who have been manipulated into questioning their gender identity by a parent who is effectively subjecting them to medical abuse for the sake of attention. Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy may be be making a comeback in the social media age.

It might to time to commission a study that looks into the phenomenon of transgender children in order to investigate whether it is what it claims to be. If some of these children are not genuinely transgender but are merely reflecting the ideas that one or both of their parents have pushed on them, then they might be child abuse cases rather than actual transgender cases. This might necessitate that some parents are prosecuted to stop the trend.

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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The Cult Logic Behind Modern SJW Culture

A 1981 entry in the Harvard Mental Health Letter describes the basics of cult psychology. Describing cults as “ideological fundamentalism”, the letter by Dr. Robert J Lifton lays out the characteristic qualities of cult psychology and cult formation. As this essay will examine, there are many parallels between cult psychology and the psychology of modern Social Justice Warrior culture.

According to the Lifton paper, “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence” are the typical ways that cults seek to control the thoughts of their acolytes. An investigation into the nature of the SJW culture shows that it tries to achieve exactly the same thing.

The desire for milieu control involves “the control of all communication within a given environment”. This is commonly referred to as ‘brainwashing’ because it features the targets being soaked in cult propaganda. Cult members must be exposed to lectures, seminars, news reports, websites and Internet forums that all say the same thing. This milieu control makes it possible to normalise any idea, no matter how crazy.

Modern SJW culture achieves this through Internet echo chambers. Websites such as Reddit commonly ban anyone who thinks differently, which creates communities of people who continually reinforce each other’s prejudices by parroting back to them everything they say – an echo chamber.

This is also achieved through the common cult tactic of excommunication. People who deviate too far from the SJW orthodoxy are shunned, their reputations smeared and their social support networks deliberately destroyed. This creates a fear of wrongthink among cult members. This fear of wrongthink prevents them from disrupting the milieu with novel thoughts.

Many SJWs are astonished to meet a person who believes, for example, in the genetic basis of intelligence. Despite the fact that the science clearly demonstrates that intelligence is mostly hereditary (i.e. genetic), the milieu control of SJW culture means that few of them have ever been exposed to the actual science. Consequently, they respond to people who talk about the science with mockery and abuse.

The demands for purity can be seen in the never-ending escalation of virtue signalling. Inside SJW culture is a constant struggle for social status, where the most pure of heart is thought to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the great conceit is that the top of the SJW hierarchy is also the most virtuous, and not the one who most successfully lowered the social status of their competitors by shaming them into submission for wrongthink.

Because the Nazis were nationalists, purity of thought requires that SJWs be globalists. Consequently, any kind of national loyalty must be completely rejected. Open borders must be embraced, because any nationalist sentiment is impure. The strongest bonds of loyalty, in SJW culture, are with those as different to you as possible. This is as true of race and religion as it is of nation.

SJW culture has gone so far in its demands for ideological purity that they even attack people who say it’s okay to be white. Even expressing a will for the continued existence of white people is equated with supremacism and a desire to exterminate other races. This bizarre logic inevitably leads to a purity spiral, and this inevitably leads to cult members becoming unhinged from reality entirely.

Part of this drive for purity is emphasis on confession. This is the origin of the commonly expressed sentiment that “we’re all a little bit racist.” The purpose of saying this is to instigate a moral self-flagellation session. One confesses to harbouring lingering racist sentiments (or other wrongthink) as a kind of public ritual humiliation. These ritual humiliations serve to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among people who have been through them.

The irony, of course, is that the only other people who think like this are other people in the SJW cult. The demands for purity are so stringent that only those with plentiful leisure time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the etiquette can ever meet the standard. This has led to the absurd outcome of SJWs who virtue signal all day hanging out only with other white and middle-class people.

SJW culture also has its own sacred science. This sacred science has a number of cherished truths that cannot be questioned (lest one get shamed into silence). These cherished truths often run entirely contrary to the established science, because they are determined by expedience, not by truth (here it is meant expedience to globohomo values).

Actual science, which states clearly that intelligence is mostly hereditary and therefore genetic, is rejected. The sacred science of SJW culture dictates that evolution stops as the neck. The great variety of physical environments, although they have clearly led to a great variety of physical expressions, have not led to a commensurate variety of psychological expressions. All human subgroups are precisely identical in every behavioural measure.

Likewise, the sacred science of SJW culture dictates that the mass importation of cheap labour has no impact on the wages of the native working class. Despite the fact that a high schooler could tell you that increasing the supply of cheap labour will reduce the price of said labour – in other words, it will destroy working-class wages and the ability of working-class people to have families – SJWs are happy to support it.

This suicidal masochism is perhaps the defining feature of the cult mentality that possesses the average Social Justice Warrior. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the logic that underlies religious cults that the entirety of SJW culture follows it. Not only do they practice milieu control and possess an obsession with purity, but they also have their own sacred science distinct from mainstream science.

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The Truth May Incite Racial Hatred

Otago University professor James Flynn has had a book about free speech, In Defence of Free Speech, scheduled for and then pulled from publication by British publisher Emerald Press. A representative for Emerald Press wrote to Flynn and said the book “could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law.” This essay examines whether or not the truth itself incites racial hatred, and if so what we can do about it.

Professor Flynn is by no means a racist. There are many former students of his willing to attest to his sparkling intelligence and deeply thoughtful nature. He has never been accused of treating another person with disrespect on account of their race, and has never even been accused of making a racist remark. Measured in terms of hate for other races, Flynn is an entirely decent person.

Professor Flynn is, however, a scientist. This means that he is passionately committed to discovering the truth, and to helping the truth shine through from among all the misconceptions and lies. Being good at science means being able to tease out strands of truth from the tapestry of confusion that forms the background of our lives. A really good scientist will be able to do this even in the face of social pressure pushing them to lie.

Something known to all scientists is that there are no two identical things in Nature. There are no two identical mountains, no identical trees, no identical snowflakes. No two identical dogs, no identical cats, no identical people. This is true at all levels of nature, from stars down to ants, and is even true across the dimensions of space and time.

The fact that there are no two identical things in Nature is so deeply understood by real scientists that they even understand the laws that explain how this has come to pass. Gause’s Law, or the competitive exclusion principle, describes how no two identical things can exist in ecology because they would compete for the same niche and thereby destroy one another.

All of this means that the idea that all races must have the same IQ can be dismissed right off the bat. There is no reason to think that all races must have the same IQ any more than there is to think that all families or professions must have the same IQ. The way that intelligence is measured doesn’t matter in this regard.

This logic deeply upsets the many who passionately believe in racial equality. Those who cling tightly to the belief that all races are precisely equal in all non-physical characteristics tend to become enraged at the assertion of scientific evidence that suggests otherwise. Their position is known as equalitarianism, and the assertion that all races are the same in all intellectual and behavioural measures is known as the equalitarian dogma.

Social justice warriors have pushed for decades the idea that questioning the equalitarian dogma is the same thing as spreading racial hatred. This lazy, self-righteous line of thinking claims that the only reason a person would want to talk about racial differences is if they were a racist trying to sow discord between peoples, or to exclude or exterminate some disfavoured races. This tactic is, in reality, an example of the broader authoritarian strategy of silencing all opposition by whatever means necessary.

A 1994 article in the journal Intelligence by IQ researcher Philippe Rushton describes the same thing that happened to Flynn last month happening to Rushton 25 years ago – and to Hans Eysenck 20 years before that. Already in 1994 it was possible to state, of the documented difference in average racial IQ, that “Today the evidence has increased so much that it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it.” But evidence does not appease the mob.

The abuse that Rushton documents in the linked article is eerily reminiscent of that facing scientists today. Eysenck was physically attacked in 1973 by activists marching under the slogan “Fascists Have No Right To Speak.” In 2019, Jordan Peterson comes in for similar treatment for similar reasons (a phenomenon this newspaper has previously described as Peterson Derangement Syndrome).

The Emerald Press decision might be ideosyncratic, but it also reflects the prevailing attitude among those who control the apparatus of propaganda. The world’s ruling class is implacably committed to the doctrine of globalism, for a variety of reasons. Globalism is a lot easier to accept if a person already assumes equalitarianism, because such an assumption implies that borders are arbitrary and people interchangeable. Therefore, assertions of other doctrines are suppressed.

The difficulty is that the science itself demolishes equalitarianism.

Books like IQ and Global Inequality, published in 2006, conclusively demonstrate that the average IQ of a population is the primary factor that determines that population’s standard of living. The fact that IQ predicts future wealth and earnings is one of the best documented phenomena in all of psychology, both at the individual and the group level. The higher the IQ, the wealthier is all but a law.

This suggests that allowing people from low-IQ countries to immigrate to the West is a recipe for lowering the standard of living that the West currently enjoys. Because intelligence is mostly hereditary, low-IQ immigrants will have low-IQ children, who will then grow up to make low-IQ decisions, thus impoverishing and lowering the living standards of those around them.

Unfortunately, this entirely reasonable position is equated, by the globalists who control the apparatus of propaganda, with the position that all races need to be segregated from one another, or worse. This deliberate conflation means that it’s all but impossible to discuss the science of race and intelligence without being accused of being a Nazi, supporting Nazis, furthering Nazism, or dogwhistling to Nazis.

All of this means that we are presented with a dilemma. We either speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that we expose ourselves to being attacked by hysterical mobs of virtue-signallers shrieking about Nazis, or we don’t speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that the superstitious fools who think with emotions and their authoritarian puppetmasters win the day.

Perhaps the best move, as has been discussed here previously, is to pull back to the secret societies who meet behind closed doors for the purposes of being able to discuss taboo subjects, safely away from hysterical moralisers. This is supposed to be what the universities are for, but now that the university culture has been corrupted by the mass entry of plebs it may be necessary to reform it under new conditions.

It’s either that or hope that the sands of public opinion shift to supporting free speech and free inquiry.

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