Amerika

For some time, it has seemed appropriate to describe the pathology of civilization-destroyers as contrarians: in an effort to avoid being blamed for their bad deeds, they blame whatever exists outside of them. The world is at fault in their view, and therefore unjust, and they are justified in their acts against it.

This mentality forms the basis of a number of dysfunctional forces, including most criminal behavior, vandalism, and of course, egalitarian politics. The feeling that the world has wronged you provides a powerful motivator which justifies any means necessary as a response.

That mentality inverts morality. If something is normally bad, but done in service to a “good” goal, it becomes good in proportion to its extremity. For this reason, people who believe that the world is bad and therefore deserves punishment, murder is more desirable than lesser (and perceived less-effective) methods.

This is means-over-ends thinking however because the “goal” is a method, not a goal in itself. An actual goal involves an end-state; methods-as-goals are the reward and goal in themselves, since people simply want a reason to justify and rationalize that behavior.

Proponents of this type of thinking inevitably come up with an open-ended, ill-defined, and emotional appeal such as Utopia, art, love, peace, or justice as a catch-all excuse for their bad behavior. Taking them seriously is a mistake because since they have no goal, the Utopian pathology is simply an attempt to explain away their transgressions.

Some researchers have found this same pathology in extremists, but most likely this was simply picked up by those from the wider society:

Individuals who endorsed violence for their cause indeed scored highly on feelings of “group-based relative deprivation”—that their group was unjustly disadvantaged.

This study believes that individuals low on honesty and an emotional attachment to their world become likely to use violence, but looking more broadly, we can see how this mentality of “unjust disadvantage” justifies a great deal of retaliation against other groups or the world.

Contrarians make this the essence of their appeal. They find something that they think is wrong with the world, and use that as an excuse for retaliating against the world, which justifies what they wanted to do in the first place. If you want to be selfish, claiming victimhood is the only socially acceptable way of doing this.

The mental process described here explains why contrarians do what they do, but not how their method works. Their goal has always been to demoralize any who might notice their scam by insisting that reality is not understandable, and therefore is bad, justifying whatever they want to do in revenge to it.

Multiple groups of people will tell you that reality is not as it seems. Metaphysics fans believe it is part of a larger process; philosophers see a world of patterns in which our daily reality is the result of those. Contrarians however want to tell you that reality is not as it seems because they want you to believe that it is unknowable.

Hiding behind “well, we just don’t know!” was probably popular during the earlier cave days of humanity and remains popular now. Instead of having knowledge, we have mystery, they tell us, which means that you might as well stick with what is here right now and tangible, namely social interactions.

Contrarians use this gateway to subvert what you know and replace it with obligation toward what the contrarian uses to justify his perspective. At some level, life is not working out for him; like a suicide he either hates it or has a lack of belief in it ever turning well for him.

Consequently he forms a group of people like himself dedicated to the idea that reality is not only not real but not good, therefore in the binary of simple morality, it is bad and should be opposed. This possibly occurs when groups form without purpose as a result of pheremone signaling out of control:

In 2020, Dr. Kang’s team identified the locust aggregation pheromone 4-vinylanisole (4VA) using multiple approaches. 4VA is exclusively released by gregarious locusts but is able to attract and recruit solitary locusts.

They found that solitary locusts typically required 48–72 hours of crowding to exhibit gregarious behavior. However, exposure to 4VA significantly reduced this transition time to only 24 hours.

When RNA interference (RNAi) was applied to the olfactory receptor OR35, which is responsible for detecting 4VA, solitary locusts were unable to initiate the behavioral phase change, and gregarious locusts were unable to maintain their gregarious behavior—instead exhibiting behavior similar to solitary locusts.

When creatures cluster, the pheremones they release in order to make others not attack them work to form a cohesive group dedicated to itself, and this creates a swarming behavior that manifests in the locusts densely concentrating and then consuming everything in their path.

Humans behave in similar ways to the resulting swarm, which changes itself biologically to be more social. The insects perceive a reward for the socializing itself, and consequently become aggressive and ravenous:

When desert locusts begin to group together, a brain chemical called serotonin is released into their bodies, triggering a series of changes in their appearance and behaviour.

The insects not only change colour, becoming brighter, but also get faster, more hungry and extremely sociable.

Once in this “gregarious” phase, locusts actively seek out the company of their fellow insects, start reproducing explosively, and form groups that can develop into huge marauding swarms.

This resembles how humans become in the phase before contrarianism. They socialize, become voracious, and aggressively consume all around them as a side effect of the excitation produced by the socializing. They will even consume their own societies, caught in a feedback loop of egotism and socializing.

Contrarians recognize this on some level which is why they seduce each other with Utopian notions of egalitarianism. To sate their hunger, everyone must have his share. The goal of civilization is forgotten. In this way, a contrarian swarm resembles a virus, or a fragment of a cell cut off from its purpose and reflexively reproducing rapidly.

Tags: contrarian, socializing, swarm, virus