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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As mentioned in the previous chapter, everything in Clown World is now political. Like a toxic gas, the political world has seeped into every pore of every realm of being. The scientific world has not escaped this phenomenon. Clown World science is very far from a sober examination of reality.

In theory, the beauty of science is that it is apolitical. The archetypal scientific mind is one that has no fear for the truth, nor any fear of worldly terrors. As such, the true scientist is not influenced by political concerns. They have no desire for the world to be a particular way; they only wish to discover the world as it is, in all its florid, multivariate glory.

Unfortunately, true scientists are extremely rare in this phase of the political cycle. They’re even more rare in the university system, because the maverick mentality that makes a true scientist gets ostracised by the politically correct groupthink of the academy. This has led to a scientific establishment which is extremely easily influenced by the political fashions of the day.

In Clown World, science is subordinate to politics. What science says is one thing, but what politics says that science says is another. This is mostly because of cancel culture. In Clown World science, many topics of scientific study are taboo. Any scientist who speaks honestly about them risks having their entire lives destroyed by social pressure mobs.

The greatest taboo in Clown World relates to the science of human biodiversity. Although Nature is replete with diversity, with life flowing into every possible niche, the Clown World dogma is that all human groups are precisely the same when it comes to genetic intellectual potential. Anything one human group can achieve can be achieved by any other.

The reality is very different, with the science suggesting that between 60-80% of intelligence is hereditary. If intelligence is 70% hereditary, that means that the often-noted IQ gap between whites and blacks is mostly attributable to inherent genetic differences between the two populations, and not to environmental factors such as poverty during one’s upbringing.

Indeed, experts believe that 45% of the variance in socioeconomic status can be explained by intelligence alone. Once one factors in things like conscientiousness, drive and luck, there is very little room left over for structural discrimination to explain variance in socioeconomic status between races.

However, this line of reasoning is forbidden in Clown World. This is because the scientific facts about race and IQ demonstrate a major flaw of neoliberalism. If intelligence is mostly hereditary, then it isn’t possible to simply import cheap labour from overseas and have their offspring grow up to behave indistinguishably from the natives.

The offspring of immigrants will behave as their genes induce them to behave, with a small amount of variation due to environmental influence. This means that immigrants from low-IQ countries will tend to have children with low IQs, and being low IQ they are likely to end up criminal and poor. This, in turn, means that immigration from low-IQ countries ought to be opposed – but this belief is a threat to the powers that profit from it.

In Clown World, a scientist cannot publicly state the facts about race and IQ without their reputation getting destroyed. This even happened to no less a luminary than the discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson. Watson was stripped of honourary titles because he stated that genes caused a difference in IQ test results between blacks and whites.

Not even winning a Nobel Prize is sufficient to make you a scientific authority in a subject if your opinions contradict the political fashions. Anyone with an interest in race and IQ is a racist, and therefore the findings of that entire field of science can be dismissed (and replaced with political dogma).

Sex differences between men and women also are another taboo subject where the science is denied. Clown World scientists talk about something called the Gender Equality Paradox. This refers to the observation that the proportion of women in STEM subjects is lower in countries where women are more free (such as Scandinavia) than in countries where women are less free (such as the Islamic ones).

Clown World dogma holds that women have been unfairly excluded from scientific communities because of the prejudices of men. Men wanted to subjugate women and keep them in the kitchen, and so women were not allowed in. This dogma contrasts sharply with the observed reality that free women tend not to study STEM subjects.

The reality is that women don’t think the same way that men do, and so they don’t value the same things. In all species, the female is the gatekeeper of sex. As such, the male must strive to distinguish himself from the other males if he wants to reproduce. So the male is generally much more motivated than the female to strive for high status: this is true of nearly every species.

Women in free countries choose not to study STEM because women in general are interested in other subjects. There is no paradox. When a woman is free to study what she likes, without the pressure to earn prestige for her family that exists in less free societies, she will study what’s in her nature to study. Usually that isn’t STEM.

The rulers of Clown World don’t want to admit that the different sexes are motivated by different things, because they want cheap female workers in the labour force, and not at home raising children. The real threat, too dangerous to be spoken, is that if women were given absolute freedom most of them would prefer homemaking to the pointless stress of the Clown World workplace. This would drastically reduce the supply of labour and cause wage costs to spike.

In Clown World, even mathematics gets decolonised. The rise of the concept of ethnomathematics represents the absolute pollution of scientific space with political influence. The true absurdity is that the politically correct deny that human subgroups are different when it comes to IQ, but also assert that those populations are different enough that each one has its own mathematics.

The push to diversify everything has led to a promise from NASA to put a woman on the Moon by 2024. It can be predicted with confidence that, once this is achieved, the next mission will be to put a black man on the Moon, and then a gay man, and so on down the list until every minority group is ticked off.

Science is now pozzed root and branch. Today, many science departments are more worried about diversity than about making original contributions to human knowledge. Clown World logic insists that, because all human groups are perfectly equal in all measures, any proportional under-representation of any group must be because of exclusionary prejudice. Therefore, diversification is an end unto itself.

Because diversity is now prized above merit, scientific journals are flooded with garbage articles about ludicrous concepts like stereotype threat. This concept, invented to excuse away lower black academic performance, has now come under suspicion on account of that it could not be replicated. Unfortunately, so much of social psychology has failed replication that the reputation of the science is now in tatters.

Clown World science is everything science shouldn’t be, which is coming up with a desired conclusion first and then finding evidence that fits it. The reason for this is, as mentioned above, politics. The desire of people to force the world to conform to their political conceptions is stronger than their desire to discover the truth. Many people enter the scientific world with the intent of winning the political battle for their team. These people do not advance science.

In fact, it has now been argued that scientific progress is slowing down. Even worse, scientific literacy is decreasing, which means that we’re going backwards by at least one major measure. In Clown World, scientific activity destroys knowledge as often as it uncovers it.

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Category: science

Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Learned Helplessness’?

Clown World Chronicles: Science In Clown World