Amerika

On the bell curve, we can map how many people think they are exceptions to how things normally operate. As the IQ level drops, just about everyone thinks they are exceptions because they know little of the world but their own desires, impulses, and so on.

This means that we have a worst-case scenario: lots of little individualists who think what they want matters more than anything else who are unable to understand the “everything else” required to realize that they are basically saprophytes on the corpse of civilization.

Democracy comes about because inevitably, any society will end up with a small group of leaders and a large group of people who must con themselves into thinking that things are going well. Leaders tire of accountability and hide behind the vote, compromise, committee, etc.

We thus become manipulated by signals and accept it because we, too, are dependent on these signals to communicate with others:

“Without the benefit of facial expressions or tone of voice to draw on, interactions in the digital world can quickly become complicated.

“People may claim that they aren’t offended, but if they simultaneously describe comments as toxic or morally wrong, this looks very much like offense-taking behavior.”

The study shows that offense isn’t just an emotional reaction, it also performs a social function. It can be used to signal disapproval, make a moral point, or shape how we want to be seen by others.

Being offended is a personal reaction, at its core, but being offended in public means sending a signal of outrage and therefore, causing problems for the person you are claiming to be victimized by. Playing the victim is an old human method of getting the group to attack.

This creates a market for victimhood, and as such, the right to be offended confers power and becomes competitive, at which point it tends to totalitarian outcomes:

People higher in the belief that words can harm tended to be younger, female, non-White, and politically liberal. People with higher [Words Can Harm Scale] scores rated themselves as higher in intellectual humility, empathy, moral grandstanding, and the belief in the importance of silencing others. They were also more likely to support political correctness and endorse trigger warnings and safe spaces. People who believed that words can harm had worse mental health: they reported being more anxious and depressed, less resilient, and having more difficulties in emotion regulation.

When you look at democracy, it reveals its essence as egalitarianism, or the notion that all people are equal or should be made equal if not in ability in social ability, such as political power, wealth, and prestige.

Egalitarianism is based on the fiction of victimhood. If people were actually equal, their degree of social ability would be more consistent. But they are not, so “equality” must be enforced like any other human illusion.

They enforce it through symbolism. They do that because otherwise, people tend toward a system of biological functionalism which rewards the most competent over the rest. That threatens the individualist and its fragile mental state.

For this reason higher education mostly consists of propaganda for the current political system, egalitarianism:

Inherited traits, such as natural cognitive ability or deeply ingrained personality characteristics, might still influence both a person’s academic trajectory and their political orientation. For instance, people born with a high openness to new experiences might naturally gravitate toward universities and naturally repel authoritarian dogma.

In other words, the people calling you “authoritarians” are in fact doing authoritarian stuff, but because it is non-violent, they insist on a means-over-ends morality that says because they are not using forbidden methods, achieving bad ends is okay.

Everything in democracy is signaling. If you signal that you are not authoritarian, you are free to pursue authoritarian goals, including takeover of the society. The signals and optics look okay, so it must be okay.

Underneath this attitude is a desire for manipulation. Sane people have ends-over-means morality; they care about the end result, not what you had to do to get there. Wars have to happen sometimes; killers must be killed; bad people must be treated badly.

The Leftist mentality suggests a preemptive retaliation against those who “might know better” based on the psychological inflexibility of the Leftist:

First, they looked at harm avoidance, which acts as a basic temperament trait. This dimension describes a fundamental sensitivity to threat, punishment, and potential danger. People with high harm avoidance often fear uncertainty, exhibit heightened vigilance, and spend excessive energy anticipating negative outcomes.

Second, the researchers examined self-directedness. Unlike harm avoidance, self-directedness is considered a character trait shaped by experience and learning. It represents goal orientation, self-reliance, and the ability to adapt personal behavior to fit a given situation. High self-directedness generally protects individuals against excessive stress by fostering a sense of personal responsibility.

Psychological inflexibility describes a rigid, avoidance-based response pattern to negative thoughts and emotions. Instead of accepting uncomfortable feelings and moving forward, mathematically rigid individuals try to suppress or escape them. This emotional avoidance demands heavy cognitive effort and often distracts a person from their actual goals.

Those who have trouble with negative thoughts and emotions are those who already consider themselves victims and/or failures, and therefore find too much resonance in these dark thoughts, so they try to manage the dark emotions by changing reality to remove all the scary parts.

This is why they like means-over-ends morality; it allows them to remove scary stuff like war, criticism, and fistfights. It is why they like political correctness; they can simply ban any ideas that upset them. And they like democracy because the oblivious herd buries the smart.

A defensive psychology of this nature tends toward authoritarianism as a means of suppressing that which makes it unstable. The psychologically inflexible person tends to be individualistic and if they cannot get what they want, will self-destruct, taking others with them.

Individualism by its nature reflects psychological inflexibility because it is passive-aggressively preemptively retaliatory, styling the individual as a victim who is justified in removing the parts of life that cause him discomfort.

The advantage of victimhood is that it creates the exception. That is, everyone else might have to follow the rule, but the victim is a special circumstance. Thus: “rules for thee, not for me.”

All sociopaths think this way. So do most third world people and poor people in any nation. They acknowledge the rules, but think that because of their own presumed suffering, those rules do not apply to them… at least not right now.

This creates an ethical void where ethics themselves are inverted by hypocrisy justified through victimhood:

Most ethical choices involve a basic trade-off between personal gain and doing the right thing. When people make decisions for themselves, they face a direct temptation to secure a reward. When they watch someone else make a decision, they do not face that same temptation.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is located deep in the lower frontal lobe of the brain. It acts as an information hub during decision making. It helps individuals evaluate risks, weigh potential rewards, and process social rules.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex typically communicates with other brain areas that process rewards and ethical rules. In hypocritical participants, this brain region had weaker connections to those other areas during the behavioral task.

That ventromedial prefrontal cortex keeps us from being hypocrites, but if we are victims, are we really hypocrites? The symbol changes to reflect the desires of the audience, and reality is far away… so far away.

To the psychologically inflexible person, the question of hypocrisy is contingent upon the balance sheet of who is a victim and who is an oppressor. Naturally this ends with the victims stealing everything from the presumed oppressors!

At its core, human sentiment is driven more by envy than by a desire for creation, except in exceptional individuals:

Psychologists use the German term schadenfreude to describe the distinct pleasure derived from another person’s misery. People typically experience this emotion when they believe the suffering individual deserves a harsh punishment. It frequently surfaces during competitive situations, such as watching a rival athletic team lose a championship game. It also appears regularly in interpersonal conflicts when someone feels deeply wronged by an acquaintance.

Witnessing a transgressor suffer can help restore a sense of justice or alleviate a feeling of personal inferiority. Research shows that expressing schadenfreude decreases the social dominance of the resented individual. This reaction rebalances the power dynamics between two people. When individuals feel inferior due to social comparisons, seeing the other person fail provides a potent emotional reward.

A heavily competitive environment often reduces a person’s natural empathetic response to pain. Observers sometimes react to an opponent’s physical distress with subtle displays of happiness rather than sympathy. A zero-sum game, where one player’s victory guarantees the other player’s defeat, strongly encourages these counter-empathetic reactions.

Life is a zero-sum game. That is, Earth is finite, and therefore, so are the choices before us. This is why they are choices; to select one is to deny all the others.

To choose one thing over another is to exclude the other. This is the essence of a zero-sum game, enforced by time and entropy. Such is life!

We see again and again how average people prefer the suffering of others to a situation where some rise above the rest:

In each trial, participants pressed buttons to choose between a single person experiencing a hand in ice water or a group of three or four people each experiencing the same harm for shorter times. Crucially, however, the total time of the group was larger than the total time for the single person, representing more harm overall. In some trials, the screen shown to participants included a default option already selected. In these cases, participants could not press any buttons at all, avoiding personally causing harm.

Most people chose to allocate the harm to the group, causing more harm overall but less unfairness. Participants chose to give 68 seconds of additional icy-cold discomfort to the group, on average, to save the lone individual from being disproportionately targeted. There was little evidence of a bias toward the default option, suggesting that participants did not feel that personally causing harm was prohibited.

“Equal suffering” is socially popular. Everyone gets treated the same and so there are no winners or losers, only mutual mediocre outcomes. This way, there is no hierarchy or power structure created that can violate pacifism and introduce conflict.

Most people fear conflict because conflict interrupts their daily activities and can lead to losing. Better that everyone lose halfway than that they, as individuals of an individualist persuasion, be subject to the chance of losing everything.

In a social context, if you assign pain to someone who has not violated the rules of the herd, you will both make an enemy and have everyone else wondering when their turn will come. If you hand out equal pain, you can scapegoat a source of that pain to distract from the absurdity of shared suffering.

Humans, in their weird sadomasochistic way, would prefer shared pain to being left out. The group can bond on negativity, as most humans do, because of their shared suffering. Even more, no one rises above the rest, so no one needs to change.

This insistence on “equality” — intelligent societies suppress it — leads to people treating each other as things to be manipulated for personal gain, instead of as collaborators toward a shared goal like having civilization.

As a result, societies like this manipulate each other to death, emphasizing the dark traits in the name of doing good:

While past research emphasized the toxic impact of these dark personality traits, such as selfishness, willingness to manipulate others or a lack of empathy, the new findings reveal why such individuals continue to be hired and promoted.

Candidates who displayed manipulative or self-interested tactics were rated more positively by managers who prioritized their own career advancement.

The findings suggest that employees with dark traits may be more willing to take on tasks others avoid, so managers see them as useful for work that could harm the manager’s own reputation, such as enacting unpopular policies, disciplining staff or conducting layoffs.

When there is no goal except what benefits you, other people become disposable pieces. This means both that you do not care about what happens to them, and you use them despite their tendencies to be harmful.

In a society of this nature, people with power accumulate Useful Idiots around them because they have no qualms about doing the dirty work of forcing others to fall in line. Everyone cons everyone else, everything gets stolen, and prices go up the next year.

We tend to think of this type of society as run by narcissists, but really it is run by individualists who exhibit emotional fragility because they hate the world for competing with their sense of self-worth:

A recent study reveals that the physical structure of a specific brain region acts as a bridge between narcissistic personality traits and the habit of hiding one’s emotions. By looking at brain scans of healthy adults, researchers found that the volume and surface folding of the anterior insula correspond to both narcissistic tendencies and emotional suppression.

Narcissism is often thought of as a single personality flaw, but psychologists divide it into two main dimensions. Grandiose narcissism is characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. Vulnerable narcissism is marked by fragile self-esteem, hypersensitivity to criticism, and social withdrawal. Both types share an underlying core of self-focus and difficulties with interpersonal relationships.

A common thread linking both grandiose and vulnerable traits is a struggle with emotion regulation. Emotion regulation refers to the mental strategies people use to manage how they feel and how they express those feelings to people around them.

No one needs emotional regulation except individualists. Regular people have emotions in response to events but otherwise have an even keel because they believe life is good and worth living. Individualists can never have enough, never be satisfied, because the world is not comprised of their desires only.

You can tell an individualist because they have a pathology of “rules for thee, not for me.” What they want right now is of supreme importance, and since they base their mental state on that, their emotions are dysregulated by contact with reality which does not obey their desires.

In a healthy society, people have a transcendent goal or shared ongoing quest, and they act to achieve that together through collaboration and cooperation. Once that consensus is lost, society falls into bickering, and the dark traits emerge and take over.

All of democracy is signaling because it is the triumph of the egalitarian state, which is what the individualist wants because that way he always has a claim to victimhood and therefore, to demand what he wants right now to balance his emotion regulation.

To get out of this hole, we have to rediscover a shared goal in which everyone can participate despite unequal results, from which we come to accept that we benefit from a hierarchy of the competent and the culture (which is genetic) that supports it.

Tags: dark traits, democracy, emotion regulation, emotional dysregulation, hierarchy, individualism, signaling