conflict – Page 74

Writing Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is characterised by repeated temper tantrums, pointless arguing, vicious outbursts and rulebreaking for the sake of rulebreaking. It’s what used to be known as “being a little shit.” The name comes from how a person with it sets themselves up defiantly in opposition to authority figures or anyone else trying to impose rules upon them.

If it is the protagonist of your story who is the character with ODD, they are extremely unlikely to think that the problem lies with them – but this is where their story gets interesting. If your protagonist has ODD you will be able to show someone whose thoughts twist through all manner of justifications for their behaviour, but who will not willingly take the blame themselves.

After all, your protagonist might actually have a point. Unlike the pure malice exhibited by a psychopath, someone with ODD might have a legitimate grievance against an asphyxiating rule-obsessed bureaucracy, or a surveillance state. This might make for an interesting story about an antihero who came into conflict with authority for the sake of his people or family (or for great justice).

For other characters in your story, a protagonist with ODD might appeal to them as a lovable rogue, or as a troubled soul with a heart of gold. The protagonist likely has a like-minded group of friends, as people with ODD often share the same grievance. This group of friends might have made a mission out of their shared grievance – and then you have a story ready to go.

In this sense, characters with diagnoses of ODD are especially well suited to fiction that appeals to the outsider, such as cyberpunk. Kris Smashtonati of The Verity Key is probably one such character. After all, any person with this condition is going to have some difficulty adjusting to live as a gainfully employed citizen, and that will put them on the margins, where life is more precarious (and dramatic). A properly integrated character with ODD might be better suited to comedy than to drama.

For the antagonists of your story (who are inevitably authority figures of some kind) ‘vindictive’ is a word they might describe the ODD character with. They would say that this character has difficulty regulating emotions or tolerating frustration. Such antagonists would dismiss the protests of the ODD character that the rules were too onerous – the rules are there for everyone’s good, like it or not.

In many ways, telling the story of ODD is really telling a story of an environment. There are believed to be biological factors involved, such as unusual neurotransmitter function or amygdala damage, but a person with ODD rarely develops it in the total absence of family or environmental factors.

Mood disorders are extremely common among the children of parents who have ODD, which gives a major clue about the etiology of the condition. If the protagonist of your story had ODD, it’s possible that his father was a real unpredictable sonofabitch, and the mother likewise. Inconsistent punishment is usually found among the childhoods of people with ODD.

ODD is capable of manifesting in a variety of different settings. Generally speaking, the broader the range of settings in which it manifests, the worse the ODD is. The most common is for oppositional and defiant behaviours to begin in the family home, so that the damage is done long before their first classroom experience.

This generalisation, or one like it, might be the key to understanding your ODD character. Usually the condition arises in response to the perception of unfair treatment from a parent, which may generalise into a belief that any and all authority figures are likewise unfair (and so to be defied). We can then predict that a character with this condition might have conflict with any other character that metaphorically represented a parent (teacher, policeman, bureaucrat etc.).

There is a sense in which ODD is on a spectrum that continues onto Conduct Disorder and, in the worst case, Antisocial Personality Disorder. In this regard, someone with ODD is likely to be much easier to get along with than someone with either of the latter two disorders. They might even be surrounded by such people so that they seem calm and reasonable by comparison.

Esoterically speaking, a character with ODD could be considered a chaotic element. It is unlikely that such a character will contribute to the good order of your story world, and their entrance might even be the spark that gets your story going. Indeed, it’s well possible that the ODD character has taken exception to a particular manifestation of order, and has resolved to break it up at any cost.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Have You Realised Yet That We’re The Bad Guys Now?

In order for a person to be found guilty of a crime, the Police first have to be presented with enough evidence to justify an arrest, and then that person has to be tried in front of an impartial jury summoned to examine the evidence. In realpolitik however, as this essay will examine, such trivialities can be cast aside at the first sound of the war drums – provided you accept you’re the bad guys.

The leaders of the Anglo-French alliance just started a war without the approval of the representatives of their people. The US Congress, by law, has to give its approval before wars can be started. The precedent set by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, is that the American armed forces will do whatever the fuck they’re told to do. Donald Trump, in ordering airstrikes in co-operation with British and French forces, is simply following this precedent.

Supposedly the reason for the missile strikes was to respond to a chemical strike allegedly ordered by the Government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the civilian population of Douma. The difficulty comes from the fact that the leaders of the Anglo-French alliance did not wait for widely accepted proof of the chemical attack to be made public. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has yet to complete its fact-finding mission, meaning that there is no expert opinion yet on who was responsible.

Proof doesn’t matter for those leading the Anglo-French countries. Proof only matters to those who care about their reputation, and bad guys have no need to care about their reputation, long since lost. Worst of all, these countries have no credibility when it comes to claiming that the actions of a second party were heinous enough to justify military action – they’ve gone to war on utterly fictitious casus belli several times before.

New Zealand says it “accepts” what has happened, on the grounds that any attempt to go through the United Nations Security Council for approval would have been vetoed by Russia. This threat of veto is considered justification for ignoring the UN entirely. No questions are asked by the mainstream media. Neither do they mention where the New Zealand special forces are right now, or what they are doing there, or how long they have been there.

Nobody in any of the countries whose armed forces just committed an act of war without Congressional or Parliamentary approval (i.e. legal approval) will take any action to hold the politicians who gave the orders to account. We don’t care that our countries are run by war criminals. We didn’t lift a finger to make either Bush or Tony Blair pay for Iraq, and we won’t lift one here either.

It’s time to chew on a bitter realisation: we are now the bad guys. The Anglo-French alliance is not fighting for freedom or liberty or human rights or anything like it. We’re not fighting to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world. Such considerations are inconsequential. What matters is silver and iron – i.e. money and strategic positioning.

We’re fighting for power, or what of it we can hold onto as the West slides into irrelevance from our own greed, hubris and crapulence. We’re not fighting for any higher moral value. Proof for this contention comes from simply reviewing the evidence.

The American soldiers who just fired cruise missiles into Syria don’t get paid in one decade what one of those missiles costs. Some American cities – Detroit the most notable – already look worse than Damascus, without having to get bombed. This decay of physical infrastructure simply reflects the decay in psychological infrastructure that is the root cause of our civilisational failure.

We know this because we can observe how poorly we treat our psychologically vulnerable. We don’t invest anything into healing them, and the collective psychological damage incurred by this negligence has grown to monstrous proportions. America regularly denies housing or benefit coverage to the veterans of its military adventures, and the thought of them getting proper mental health care for their PTSD is a bitter joke. There’s only money for defence contractors.

New Zealand is no better, spending $400,000,000 of its own citizens’ money every year (over $100 per adult) to persecute them for using medicinal cannabis, while thousands of its children go to school too hungry to concentrate on studies. In a double cruelty, many of those children going to school hungry are the same children of the parents imprisoned for medicinal cannabis growing. How could we possibly be the good guys?

This pattern of gross indifference to the suffering within their own borders is characteristic of the fading powers of the West and the cowardice of its population. The political class uses our tax money to build missiles to fire into Syria, and they use our votes to give themselves permission, and we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re too scared, too lazy, too weak – we’re the bad guys now.

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

The Two Faces of Trolling

The distinction between good trolls and bad trolls is subtle

Trolling is more than just an art; trolling is a lifestyle. It attracts a very wide range of people. So wide a range that some of the people who troll are quality, while many others are dogshit. This essay attempts to distill the range of trolling behaviours on the Internet into two major categories: bullying and challenging.

Not everyone can tell the difference, and the more narcissistic a person is, the more likely they are to confuse a challenge for bullying. Moreover, the more a person dislikes the person making that challenge, the more likely they are to confuse a challenge for bullying. Keeping on the right side of this fine balance is where much of the art of trolling takes place.

In short, bullying is attempting to knock down something good while challenging is attempting to knock down something bad. For the person who values the target of the knockdown attempt, the distinction is seldom meaningful. But for the person who regards that target with low or negative value, the distinction is colossal.

Challenging in the form of gentle pisstaking and banter is a regular part of verbal discourse between friends. In essence, friends challenge each other for the sake of knocking down that which is weak in the other, so that their friend might replace it with something strong. The friend might not know they are weak in a certain area, or perhaps they cling stubbornly to the weakness and need to be disabused of it for their own good.

This pisstaking is an essential part of the culture in New Zealand and Australia, and in the other Anglo countries to a lesser extent. It’s how we keep ourselves humble in the absence of a shared spiritual tradition. The idea is that anyone who becomes too prideful is mocked back down into a more socially useful level of humility.

Bullying is different, because it seeks to shame for qualities that cannot be changed. Ripping someone down because they are short, or because their parents are poor, or because they are of a certain race or hair colour are all acts of aggression because the person targeted cannot do anything about those things. There’s no mutual exchange of sentiment.

The intent of pointing out these qualities is to humiliate, not for the betterment of a person who may have become too prideful but for the self-aggrandisement of the bully. Thus, the targets of bullying need not have become too prideful to get attacked. For these reasons, bullying is in most cases vile and gratuitous.

The art of trolling is to skate close to that edge where challenging becomes bullying, for the closer to it one skates the more effective the challenge will be (especially if there are neutral onlookers). Too much bullying and the troll will look crude and aggressive; too little bullying and the troll will appear meek and ineffective.

The best kind of trolling is when you can get an egotistical person to make an arse of themselves. Hopefully they learn something in the process, becoming less of an arse and thereby more pleasant for others to deal with, but that’s not the main concern. The important thing is that the egotist is made to look like a chump, thereby lessening the chances that anyone observing the interaction will go on to behave like them.

Usually this is achieved by goading them into telling obvious lies or making transparently false boasts about their current or future prowess. If the troll can bait an egotistical person into destroying their own reputation through rank hypocrisy, logical incompetence or descending into mindless abuse then the troll wins (and so does society).

The worst kind of trolling is to cause suffering for suffering’s sake. In fact, this sort of behaviour is unjustly dignified by calling it ‘trolling’. Really it’s just rank bullying of the kind inflicted by schoolchildren before they develop the wit to examine their own motives – the discharging of a sadistic animal impulse. It’s very different from a challenge that brings out the best of someone.

Why Immigration Is a Weapon Of The Parasitic Rich

The parasitic class has many different strategies for destroying the mutual trust among the people – and opening the borders achieves several of them at once

Many were surprised, and many were not, by the news that the New Zealand Bus Drivers Union was opposing the request of Ritchies to import 110 indentured servants in the form of “migrant bus drivers”. Those who were surprised were those who thought that the union, being comprised ostensibly of leftists, ought to support bringing third-world people in to compete with the indigenous working class, because leftists are supposed to be all about solidarity for poor brown people.

Those who were not surprised were those who understand how reality works. The reality is that Ritchies put in such a low bid for the bus drivers’ contract that they couldn’t fill the positions with Kiwi staff, because the supply of people willing to work at wages that they can’t live off is almost nil. There is now an established precedent, however, for Kiwi employers who can’t find enough local suckers to subsidise their parasitic lifestyles: immigration.

Much like American employers with illegal Mexicans, Kiwi employers have cottoned on to the fact that maximising profitability is a function of minimising wages, and that minimising wages is a function of the leverage the employer has in the negotiation, and that this leverage is vastly increased if the worker is illegally in the country or wholly dependent on the whims of the employer for future work.

Not only does immigration give the local ruling class great power by populating the land with people dependent on them, but it also strengthens their economic position by destroying the leverage that local workers have in employment negotiations. This destruction of leverage is achieved by destroying the amount of trust that people have for each other, because solidarity is necessary to resist the depredations of the parasitic class and solidarity is primarily a matter of trust.

Game theory* tells us about the factors necessary for the evolution of trust.

The first is repeated interaction. People rarely trust others if they believe that they will never meet that other again, and for good reason: it makes sense from a game theory perspective to be more likely to exploit a person who you will never see again, for the reason that they will not be able to take revenge.

The greater the flow of people, the less repeated interaction there is. At one extreme end, there is very little solidarity in an airport terminal, for the reason that the vast majority of interactions here will not be repeated. At the other extreme, there is immense solidarity among members of a pioneer family deep in the Canadian wilderness, for the reason that virtually all interactions will be repeated.

The second important factor is the capacity for social interactions to be non-zero-sum games. In other words, trust only develops when social interactions result in clear mutual benefit. If either side feels like they lost out from the exchange, trust will dissipate.

Many people will make the claim here that immigration grows the overall size of the pie, for the reason that each new immigrant, even if they take up a job, creates at least one job’s worth of demand for other goods and services. This argument is often touted as a counter to the “Lump of Labour Fallacy” and, to that end, it has merit. But this argument ignores the impact of social status on a person’s well-being.

Social status is a zero-sum game in the sense that the higher one person is up the dominance hierarchy, the lower someone else must be. Low social status is extremely stressful – perhaps it wouldn’t have to be experienced as such in an ideal world, but we don’t live in one. In our world, a native person having to accept a lower social status than an immigrant is regularly experienced as a humiliation, for the reason that the native feels pushed out, as if by a cuckoo hatchling.

In a social environment where immigration means that the natives have to accept lower positions (such as an unemployment benefit in lieu of a living wage, as in the case of the indigenous bus drivers in the opening paragraph), there will naturally and understandably be resistance from those natives. This means that forcing it on those natives, against their will, will inevitably have the effect of causing those natives to hate the immigrants instead of trusting them.

The third important factor for the development of trust is to have low levels of miscommunication. As everyone who has spent any time on the Internet knows, clarity and precision are the cornerstones of communication, and when you have hordes of jabbering retards you end up having arguments and fights.

The greater the diversity, the greater the levels of miscommunication. This is because you have more languages and dialects to contend with, and any given person has an upper limit as to how many of these various forms of communication they can master. Exceeding this limit – which is guaranteed to happen if diversity keeps increasing – will cause miscommunication to happen.

Increasing the rates of immigration has the effect of bringing a diverse range of different forms of communication into everyday life, which increases the likelihood of someone misunderstanding someone else. So the greater the levels of immigration, the greater the levels of miscommunication and therefore the lower the levels of trust.

Who benefits from all this destruction of trust? The cheaters. The very same parasite class who entreats the Government to let them import indentured servants instead of paying a fair wage to local workers who are looking for employment. They benefit immensely from the destruction of trust, because an environment of distrust makes the people less able to organise to resist the hoarding of wealth, and this shifts the balance of power in favour of the wealthy.

The greatest trick the rich ever pulled on the poor was to convince them to open the net of solidarity so wide that no-one in it has anything in common with each other any more. The circle of trust has been cast so wide that it has fallen apart, and the traditional ways of re-forming bonds of trust have been destroyed or are severely discouraged.

This makes about as much sense as opening your pantry for the neighbourhood rats and mice to come and take their fill, on the grounds that rodents are disadvantaged compared to humans and therefore solidarity with other humans is a form of supremacism.

* For an outstandingly brilliant demonstration of the basic principles of game theory as it pertains to trust, see http://ncase.me/trust/