#accusation in a mirror

[wat3rm370n]

Tech tycoon guru reveals the Accusation in a Mirror of conservative pandemic rhetoric.

Curtis Yarvin is reportedly a guru to tech tycoons and their acolytes like JD Vance, and he articulated that the aristocrat revolution should involve pandemic-type measures.

If you want to know more about Curtis Yarvin, there have been 2 recent podcasts: Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, and the Behind the Bastards podcast had a 2 part episode. I found one of Curtis Yarvin’s publications because Julia Black, who wrote about Curtis Garvin in The Information, references some of what’s in Curtis Yarvin’s monarchist piece, on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. 

I would like to just present some excerpts from the piece, which I think there's a reveal here of the disingenuous lockdown revisionist rhetoric, saying the quiet part out loud, some covid for thee but not for me, and also Accusation in a Mirror.

Gray Mirror - A conversation about monarchy "Now and for the foreseeable future, any election is either plenary or nugatory." Mar 12, 2024 Yet the entire transition must remain orderly. Is there a huge difference between life in the public and private sectors? One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot. It is not the 20th century. At most a week of Covid-style lockdown should be enough to secure the new regime—not only are the Americans of today, especially the blue-state ones, no Minutemen, but unlike most historical urban populations they do not even know how to be a mob. Today, civilian numbers are as irrelevant to contests of force as in the 13th century. 21st-century Americans are a civilized people. We do not chimp. Let’s go through some critical steps in a real 21st-century regime change. Here is what a real “unitary executive” would do if he was a real “dictator on the first day.” Libs: if you are used to squeaking fearfully about far-right conservatives, this very reasonable and if anything mild program will make your prostate gland quiver.  And yet, nobody needs to get shot—or even thrown out on the street. While there are many things to say against a government running on a soft currency, the power to print money sure makes it easy to run a regime change. All the civil soldiers of the old regime—and there are a lot of them—can be severed very gently from their positions. [...] Of course, journalism is just one category of education. While education (and even religion) are long-term responsibilities of government, they are not immediate needs in the same way as, say, nutrition. The exception is their function as daycare—for which we can do what we did during Covid. If you are a caregiver who needs to stay home because schools are closed, you should get your current salary to homeschool—at least until the new schools are spun up. [...] Finally, once the new regime has universally demonstrated the incompetence of the old regime, both through historical re-education and by its own vastly superior performance, any remaining interest in reversing the transition will belong to antiquarian cranks. There are still people today who want to restore the Holy Roman Empire, or Covid masks, or something. Whatevs. [...] “No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard. Covid doesn’t put everyone on a ventilator, either. So everyone should get Covid?

Every accusation is, indeed, a confession apparently.

The idea that the right and conservatives are just against disruption, and that protecting people from covid was just too disruptive to be tolerated, is clearly simply pure bullshit. (Of course we already knew that.) They’re all for disrupting the status quo if it serves elite interests - a revolution to thwart any attempt at democratic government oversight of business or to protect public safety.

I seriously suggest that whenever there’s opposition to single payer health insurance in the U.S., and some conservative comes along railing about the jobs that will be lost in the private health insurance industry, even though it will likely mean people just move from one job to another because it’s not like there will be less patients… I suggest saving this quote of Curtis Yarvin: “One big company is going out of business—another is being founded. No one is being dragged away and shot.”

The weird part here is of course that the right-wing cohorts are actually suggesting “live streamed swatting raids” — according to Ivan Raiklin they’ll be carried out by deputized anti-vaxxers at the county level. I don’t know who needs to hear this but typically swatting raids involve guns, and surprise raids with guns usually at least sometimes involve people being shot and or dragged away. These operations rarely stay neatly confined when you’re dealing with, as Rwandan Jill D. Rutaremara described in a masters thesis: “the interests and fears of the masses, and why they responded to genocide ideology and elite incitement.” And, after all — “No widespread or systematic execution” is a hell of a standard.

They already for a long time have deployed astroturf activism to serve anti-regulation interests. They don’t want oversight by the people. But anti-government doesn’t mean anti-governance, because it appears that they want to install full corporate control by elite CEOs exercising power like a boss in the round the clock lives of all of us. They always say you’re free because you can quit your job any time. But can you quit a monopoly? Matt Stoller says no, that’s what makes monopolies an authoritarian governance — it’s totalitarianism.

These people are not willing to tolerate mitigation measures that might remind people of danger and might quell interest in shopping in person, and are against remote work because it threatens commercial real estate interests. But in an authoritarian regime change — they would totally bring it.

The “Dark Elf” Leading Tech’s Extreme Right w/ Julia Black - Tech Won’t Save Us - Oct 17 Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 18 Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance | Behind the Bastards - Sep 20

If you’re wondering where JD Vance got his idea that a little monarchy might be good for America — these people are on the same page. They possibly see themselves as aristocrats, like those from the 1700s, who viewed as a possible threat, so-called tyranny from below - equality and democracy is seen as that by aristocrats. I’ve mentioned before that the billionaire cryptocurrency proponent Balaji Srinivasan was supposed to be the Trump pick to run the FDA back in 2017, favoured by Peter Thiel, because of course he’s anti-regulation. So Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire up for cabinet positions. This guy had also claimed back in late 2020 that broken trust in the pandemic that supposedly led to anti-mask sentiments could be solved with blockchain — you really can’t make this stuff up. Gil Duran reported that Srinivasan said “No Blues should be welcomed there” - meaning in San Francisco - referring to Democrats. And on the Tim Ferriss Show interview from 2022, Srinivasan got details about the Lance Armstrong doping timeline wrong, and admitted that he probably was getting things wrong (multiple times in the same interview). He references Andrew Huberman positively — that’s the scientist influencer from Stanford who has a podcast that promotes unregulated supplements that are unproven and dubious, and who was revealed as a serial liar in his personal life and who repeatedly recounted an apparently made up clinical study about sunscreen. And Srinivasan says we should view doping in a positive way, saying: "So in the same way, once we flip that moral premise and say optimalism good, enhancement good, then we start shifting it out of Game of Shadows and Soviets and the doping scandals and cheating, all those negative adjectives and we start going to the positive stuff of what Huberman is doing and what David Sinclair is doing. And so on and so forth. The reason I just want to identify this, I actually think that moral language, that moral premise, is everything and it’s often not articulated."

Performance drugs, pseudoscience, re-education, and a tycoon-run monarchy corporate government. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently the revolution will be gaslit.

The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. — Bob Black

(crossposted)

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-3

Accusation In A Mirror

The most relevant example of projection in politics was covered in the paper Accusation in a Mirror, by Kenneth L. Marcus, and he explained the conscious awareness of these tactics, the strategies involved, and their aims. "Accusation In A Mirror (AiM) is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one’s enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them...AiM has historically been an almost invariable harbinger of genocide. [It] has been commonly used in atrocities committed by Nazis, Serbs, and Hutus, among others. This is a peculiar feature, not of genocide, but of AiM since non-genocidal forms of AiM have also been ubiquitous with respect to other forms of persecution."

For many people, they can see a projection of this enormity if they pay attention to politics and watch news stories unfold with continuity, but what about people who aren't political junkies and are busy with their lives? Marcus described this odd strategy and how it can work with people who are unconscious of the motives. They all steer a population into a fear state where the only response is to be pre-emptive, which is ultimately an incitement for one side and a chilling effect on the targets. The goals are "...to shock, to silence, to threaten, to insulate, and, finally, to motivate or incite...[and] do unto others as they would do unto you..."

Leon Mugesera sentenced to life for 'inciting' genocide in Rwanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABrVyinrD8s

The stigma surrounding Christine Anderson - True North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ETB-y_FKds

Hillary Clinton Says Trump Poses Danger to America's Democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ-N0dHJAaE

Clinton calls for ‘deprogramming’ of MAGA ‘cult members’: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DH3SgIY7S5A

Tucker Carlson - "Always trust your gut." - https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1727090631850492257

Brace Yourself For What's Coming in 2024 - Victor Davis Hanson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6jH-6F6K0&t=630s

When AiM is first used the first effect that is intended is to shock. "No one tells Holocaust survivors—or a nation of Holocaust survivors and their children—that they are Nazis without expecting to shock. The same can be said of the inversive accusations leveled at Bosnians, Tutsis, and Copts." As mentioned on prior episodes where Social Psychologist Susan Fiske was quoted, there's an inherent trust in accusations in that people believe that they must be true, otherwise why would they lie? The target then is afraid that there will be a confirmation of guilt if there's a strong response to the unjust accusation, meaning the strength of the response becomes a confirmation of the accusation. Silence follows because the targets are "...afraid of seeming too powerful." The freezing of any response to the outrage is also a threat of being disciplined. "...Ascription of guilt carries with it the threat of punishment." As the freezing continues, the outrage of the false accusation can insulate because it is treated as a legitimate accusation. Kenneth described how "holocaust inversion has been protected from normal anti-discrimination enforcement by its ability to replicate or mimic the tropes of a dissident political discourse." AiM at this point can swirl around without too much violence until the perpetrators are able to legitimize their arguments. The difficulty is to be able to manufacture a danger to the population that Aim needs for incitement. False flags need to operate where people who are on the side of AiM dress up as the targets and they say and approve those shocking comments to bring reality to the false pretenses. "With such a tactic, propagandists can persuade listeners and 'honest people' that they are being attacked and are justified in taking whatever measures are necessary 'for legitimate self-defense.'" Something that is not in the paper, but could be easily inferred is the use of mentally ill people who can be incited much easier. If they can say those shocking things with ease, and even more, if they commit an act of violence, it can catch a population unawares and goad them towards pre-emptive attacks that are worse. "AiM is motivating or inciting. That is to say, AiM not only provides a reason or justification for aggression, as other less effective forms of incitement also do; more insidiously, it also communicates to the listener that it is necessary to attack another group in order to avoid having the same fate visited upon one’s own community...Other rhetorical techniques such as demonization can make mass-murder seem acceptable, but AiM makes it appear necessary."

Biden delivers address outside Independence Hall on 'extremist threat to democracy': https://www.youtube.com/live/XC-k-lhml4o?si=a96yknsZ44SGxhZF

Naomi Wolf: Joe Biden Demonized Almost Half Of The American Nation With Speech Meant For Unity: https://rumble.com/v1iklcj-naomi-wolf-joe-biden-demonized-almost-half-of-the-american-nation-with-spee.html

Laura Loomer uncovers Massive Conspiracy: Nazi Terrorists being Protected by FBI & CIA - InfoWars: https://rumble.com/v3gp88q-laura-loomer-uncovers-massive-conspiracy-nazi-terrorists-being-protected-by.html

Joe Rogan's Opinion On Patriot Front: "You Ever Seen Anything That Looks More Like Feds?": https://rumble.com/v188ksx-joe-rogans-opinion-on-patriot-front-you-ever-seen-anything-that-looks-more-.html

A New Development in the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Trial: https://rumble.com/v3hzmfa-a-new-development-in-the-gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-trial.html

Why politicians, the military, governments, businesses, or even gangsters want to use any of these techniques is because they all want a monopoly of one kind or another, which is their idea of success. All the manipulation and bullying that one finds in school extends into the adult world. Corrupt people are always looking for an angle, and the unaware, the distracted, or the busy, don't know what's happening until their dreams start to shatter. Now that we have moved from the ancient past to recent history it's time to face modern politics of power and money to see how it can chase you down, even when you are living life inconspicuously.

Psycho-Political-Economics

"It's Friday and I'm mad as fuck...When was America ever great? Did you all forget that underneath my President Donald Trump we were the biggest producer of crude oil in the fucking world and now we ain't got no gas four months later are y'all serious?

Anybody else need their fucking Trump back? When was America ever great? We had gas. We had electricity. We had jobs. We had food. Now we sitting at home with no gas, some people no electricity, no jobs, waiting for a stimulus check, waiting on the goddamn extra food stamps. What's going on?

We wasn't going through this shit for the last four years. We were winning, winning, winning, winning and all ya'll sitting home being quiet and shit. Now somebody say something. Tell me why the fuck you support Joe Biden. Right now! Everybody want to get rid of fucking President Trump. What's up?

Look at this goofy ass shit. People ain't got shit to say no more, just sitting around like sheep, goofy ass sheep. All they can do is wait. All they can do is wait. All they can do is fucking wait. The Democrats tell us that they got a Green New Deal for 2030. You ain't got no fucking plans for everything to run off electricity in 10 years. You DO got a plan to fuck up everything within the next 10  years.

I want my goddamn Trump back...Everybody had a lot to say when Trump was in the White House. Ain't anybody got shit to say with this fucking old ass bum in there. Fucking about fucking country fucking up the economy. These motherfuckers projected that we gonna have a million new jobs, two hundred thousand new jobs, and where the fuck are they at? Probably two hundred thousand illegal immigrants that you motherfuckers proud about the border got new jobs, but we don't. We hurting in America!

Everybody quiet as shit! Where the fuck are the Joe Biden supporters? I can tell ya'll why I support Trump. Tell me why ya'll support this motherfucker? Ain't doing shit but fucking us up everyday, fucking us up...

When was America ever great? I guarantee you motherfuckers could wish you could go back to the day that Donald Trump won. That was a good fucking day. You might was mad in your fucking mind but I bet your ass was on the way to work. I bet you was on your fucking way to work. I bet you weren't standing at a fucking gas station looking for gas. I bet you wasn't waiting for a fucking stimulus check. I bet you weren't waiting for an extra $300 on your fucking food stamps. I bet you!

I'm pissed! The people walking around anybody saying shit. Everybody had a lot of fucking energy when Trump was the fucking president, a lot of fucking energy. It was never their plan for Trump to win. For four years they've been brainwashing ya'll to get rid of Trump so they could do what the fuck they want to do...

We right back to where we was four years ago! What part ya'll don't get? You made a mistake! You made a fucking mistake! 'Get rid of Trump,' stop Trump for what? We right back to where we was four years ago, drawing lines in the sand, people with motherfucking Russia, bombing the fucking Middle East. All types of kids coming across our fucking borders, all this shit to we're trying to stop.

Can't tell me shit better for you. You can't tell me nothing is better for you underneath your body. Not nothing is better for you. You sitting at home waiting for more fucking money on your food stamps. You had $300 worth of food stamps and now you got $800 worth of stamps that the Democrats want your ass depended upon them. I want to go the fuck to work, well I'm at work, but I want my motherfucking peoples to go to work! This is fucking stupid!"

SemoreViews "I Want My Trump Back!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqxwWXqRkA

In the modern world, as in the past, conflicts don't just appear out of nowhere. They come from people pursuing their self-interests and the interests of their family and friends. For example, in the micro you might witness nepotism and cronyism in your workplace. This can expand into alliances and cultures throughout governments and businesses and then spill over internationally. Summarizing from the René Girard chapter above, if you are in a weak position where you can't retaliate in anyway or fight back, you tend to be scapegoated and any aggression can vent itself on those individuals or groups through scapegoating. Boring contract disputes can suddenly be not so boring when the consequences are different groups turning to resentment when left behind. In economics, money is a form of power that allows one to access resources and relieve the tension of poverty for extended periods of time. If tensions cannot be released and if emotions can't be regulated, pathological behaviors ensue. Some people commit crimes, others turn to court systems, and if there are no laws that protect individuals, then gangsterism moves into the forefront, with politics being a legalized form of gangsterism. If all those avenues fail, especially if there is a violent incitement, war typically breaks out until a negotiation for peace can be arranged.

In the 21st century, economically there is still a 20th century hangover from the period after WWII, the rise of the United States, and then trade with Asia. Throughout this thread psychologically there is always one common denominator: People don't like being disrespected. The area that is not so common is for people to give respect to others at the same level they demand for themselves. This all relates to power and as the tables turn, the actor parts may change, but the complaints don't and are based on the same power differentials.

These cycles have been with us since the beginning of human awareness, as can be seen in the prior chapter on human ancestry. You can either produce what you need to consume, trade what you produced with others, or steal what you don't have through violent means. In the modern world, violence and theft has typically been denounced and trade has been considered the adult way of distributing resources. You can imagine the complexity of Freudian psychoanalysis and how everyone is trading with everyone else to satisfy libido, or cravings, which is essentially an energy exchange. Cravings always return but the ability to produce for oneself may not always be reliable, with the predictable mental health results.

As these cycles have returned again and again, along with war and strife, many theories arose on how to deal with conflicts. Almost all the theories involve some satiation that has to happen in the mind. When I'm hungry and I eat, I am satisfied for a few hours, until the hunger returns. If there's abundance there's a risk for addiction, and when there's poverty there can be a scarcity mindset and an escalating hostility. This is a tenuous balance where a people in an environment without social supports will want to save a lot of money, but then in order to earn a return they need to invest it in others, incurring a risk. As economies developed into the 20th century, tax and social support structures were developed from Marxist ideas as well as other older socialist ideas. Some countries went further with more centralized systems, but the fear of corruption has always hounded any centralized power scenario. The west settled for a solution where the government and the private sector negotiated repeatedly the different areas where it appeared that one side or another was best situated. Leaders in the private sector showed a distain for anything not related to the bottom line and they liked the simplicity of paying taxes so that others could deal with the homelessness, poverty, core social programs for education and healthcare, with cultural differences in each western country.

With the industrial revolution and the abundance that was offered for those who worked hard, some countries outperformed others. Some of this had to do with borders, domestic resources, and intellectual capital. Governments learned that if they didn't kill the goose that laid the golden egg they could get more tax revenue from less than 50% taxes rather than greater than or 100% government ownership. Humans are generally reward oriented and rationing systems tend to be jealous and miserly. In environments like the latter, motivation to work reduces, and since money is simply a medium of exchange, to decrease the limitations inherent in a barter system, less production = less wealth. This was a big problem for the Soviet Union, and as it collapsed, there were many triumphant theories on how the way of the West would influence the rest of the developing world.

The main Communist country that avoided that fate was China. Being very close to a similar fate as the Soviets, as seen after the Tiananmen Square riots, the U.S. went in the direction of working with the government, much to the chagrin of freedom protestors in China who complained about government corruption. The students protesting the government had sympathy from leaders like Zhao Ziyang who was the most supportive of liberal reforms and a successor to Hu Yaobang who was also in favor of market reforms. Unfortunately Deng Xiaoping and other party members felt threatened by the power shift. Deng determined that "'the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the control of international monopoly capital and onto the capitalist road'; he stated further that if China did not up hold socialism then it would be turned into an appendage of the capitalist countries." The protest crackdown led to thousands of casualties, but the total number of dead has been an ongoing controversy. In A World Transformed, Deng was explicitly admitting the desire to punish when he told the U.S. that "China will persist in punishing those instigators of the rebellion and its behind-the-scenes boss in accordance with Chinese laws. China will by no means waver in its resolution of this kind. Otherwise how can the PRC continue to exist?" The protest never got the support it needed to overthrow the Communist regime, and the rest is history.

When Globalism was born - Jack Posobiec: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1608528342843592706

From George H.W. Bush, through Clinton and the younger Bush, China did liberalize the economy but not without protections for the political class. By the time China entered the World Trade Organization, they were given most-favored-nation status by the U.S. which allowed them to setup a mercantilist system where they were able to protect their markets while having access to western markets under a system of slave labor that tempted corporations and owners of capital to take advantage of the increased profits. The loss in jobs in the west was dubbed the China Trade Shock.

China Trade Shock: https://chinashock.info/

Since that time, many trade experts could not avoid noticing the changes, including former trade advisor to President Donald Trump, Robert Lighthizer. He grew up in an affluent manufacturing area in Ohio, but then saw the devastation since the North American Free Trade Agreement and China's WTO inclusion. "We had lost millions of jobs and thousands of factories while wages had stagnated." Despite the obvious destruction that was happening, there was not enough of a push to reverse what happened. "The political establishments of both the Republican and Democratic parties, under the influence of multinational corporations and importers, were unwilling or unable to recognize their mistakes. Instead, they remained convinced that rather than protect American workers and manufacturers, government policy had to put them at risk amid a quest to maximize corporate profits and economic efficiency while minimizing consumer prices."

The difficulty of course is that cheap prices only matter when you have a good paying job. If you are displaced and have to renegotiate wages to a lower level, the result is that nothing is cheap. "While corporate profits soared for a select group of importers and retailers, many of America’s manufacturing companies were hollowed out—forced either into bankruptcy or into moving their factories abroad. And what about ordinary Americans? Though prices for some products declined, wage growth in this country has utterly stagnated since the 1980s—driven in large part by the decline of manufacturing sector employment. As a result, increasingly, working-class families must rely on two full-time incomes in lower-end service sector jobs to maintain the same quality of life one manufacturing sector income once provided. It is no exaggeration to say that American leaders traded the health of the US industrial base and the good-paying manufacturing jobs it supported for current consumption and little more."

Lighthizer was a trade lawyer and he felt that a more nuanced view was required that looked at how skills are developed and the variety of jobs available. People have different personality types, different levels of skill and intelligence. The new model always relied on cheap products from Asia while workers without a super value-added education in the area of high tech could only try to get reeducated or work more hours in service jobs. The manufacturing gap was neglected and in many ways it still is. "When all citizens—including those without college degrees—have a chance to be productive, it’s good for the country...International trade, like all economic policy, is beneficial only if it contributes to the well-being of most of our citizens, if it makes families stronger, and if it makes our communities better...I feel strongly that the course we set for trade policy must rest on a more complete and nuanced understanding of the effects of international trade in the United States—and throughout the world—than can be captured by the question of how much we pay for televisions and toys."

For many Gen-Xers and later generations, they found that when they left school that finding a job that matched their education was exceedingly difficult compared to what baby boomers experienced. They found little sympathy from economists and politicians of any stripe. "Advocates for free trade seemed to accept the growing distress in so many manufacturing-centered communities with the easy assurance of those whose understanding of the calamity was wholly theoretical. It was also hard to dismiss the sense that the proponents of free trade whose voices were heard the most were not trying very hard to see the reality of those costs in the context of the people and families whose lives were affected. Impersonal, inexorable market forces provided an acceptable fig leaf for the turn to globalization that was always the preferred course regardless." Since increased profits from lower wages, and wages being the largest expense on an income statement for most companies, owners didn't have a vested interest in changing their good fortunes. Profits are either given to owners in dividends or reinvested. "New jobs would develop in new industries that would grow. Workers would move to new locations. Government job training would fix any remaining problems. Everything will work out, they said and continue to say. By the time that it became apparent that everything was not working out and that there were devastating costs to many communities, most people in DC didn’t worry very much, because it was all happening someplace far away to people they didn’t know. Nothing useful could be done to hold back the tides of inexorable market forces. This was all aided, of course, by the fact that many in the Washington business trade associations had become far more concerned with the interests of importers than those of US manufacturers. The lobbying money was on the side of free trade."

Even more, popular presidents like Ronald Reagan were quoted all the time and used as a baton to bash critics of free trade, but "President Reagan distinguished between free trade in theory and free trade in practice. He imposed quotas on imported steel, protected Harley-Davidson from Japanese competition, restrained imports of semiconductors and automobiles, took on the overvalued dollar, and pursued similar steps to keep American industry strong during the 1980s. Indeed, after he left office, one group of rabid libertarian free traders said that he was the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover. I can’t hide the fact that I always took that as a compliment...The costs and benefits of trade liberalization were calibrated relative to national interests and changing political circumstances. No one would have argued for free trade and economic interdependence with the Soviet Union."

Donald Trump Teases a President Bid During a 1988 Oprah Show | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI

In glib news reports of Chinese trade practices, many in the world ignored what was going on and focused on cheaper prices. The access to world markets for China was much larger than what China allowed on their turf for the rest of the world. "The reality is that it is a mercantilist nation that wants to impose its system on the world. It is opposed to the liberal democratic order and wants to put an end to American hegemony...The post–World War II strategy of reducing barriers to imports in return for the hope of new exports seriously went off the rails in the 1990s. The United States placed an all-or-nothing bet on free trade in the form of three consecutive deals. Since that time, we have seen the loss of millions of jobs and exploding trade deficits. The United States needs to insist on fair trade in our market and reciprocal access in foreign markets. Decades of poor trade deals have produced neither. We need a policy that assures balanced trade. We cannot afford to continue to transfer our wealth to foreign countries in return for consumer products. These are the realities...Extensive state ownership, enormous state subsidies, a closed home market, currency manipulation, rampant government-sponsored theft of intellectual property, and every other mercantilist practice. Trade deficits skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. We were allowing China, a foreign adversary, to use all forms of state-sponsored, government-organized unfair trade to run up a more than $270 billion trade surplus with us and to take US jobs in the process...The 'China shock...was so severe that even the usual advocates for trade started to get a little nervous."

Conservative critic of modern schooling and abstract economic theories, Charlie Kirk, had to renounce his old opinions because reality couldn't be ignored. "If I had to indict philosophical libertarianism, of which I used to believe a lot of this stuff, because it's young. It's compelling. You read Ayn Rand. You read Hayek, and some of it's interesting, and some of it I still agree with, but a lot of it is nonsense because it's an indifference to the result." The results of course affect the psychology of the displaced, which moves out of scope for so many globalist economists. "Between 2000 and 2016, the United States lost nearly five million manufacturing jobs. Median household income stagnated. And in the places that prosperity left behind, the fabric of society frayed. Since the mid-1990s, the United States has faced an epidemic of what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have termed 'deaths of despair.' They have found that among white middle-aged adults who lack a college education—a demographic that has borne much of the brunt of offshoring—deaths from cirrhosis of the liver increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2013, suicides increased by 78 percent, and drug and alcohol overdoses increased by 323 percent. From 2014 to 2017, the increase in deaths of despair led to the first decrease in life expectancy in the United States over a three-year period since the 1918 flu pandemic." For those who ignored those results, often by blaming the people for being morally inferior, there were other arguments about the benefits of currying favor with enemies to change their tune, but like in situation with Deng Xiaoping, the trade negotiations changed the West much more. "One hears about the need for America to use its economic prowess to gain friends and to influence events. We need to trade more—read: import more—so that other countries will like us instead of, say, China. For others, trade is really about obtaining the cheapest products for our consumers. For these people, if the result is the loss of manufacturing and related jobs, that is a fair exchange. Cheap televisions trump American factories." There was also an argument based on fears related to trade protectionism before the U.S. entrance into WWII. "Anything other than full-throated support for free trade was regarded as a throwback to protectionism and isolationism, as well as an invitation to trade wars."

Charlie Kirk: The CATO Institute Deserves No Seat In The Conservative Movement: https://rumble.com/v1n00vo-charlie-kirk-the-cato-institute-deserves-no-seat-in-the-conservative-moveme.html

Adam Posen and displaced workers: https://humanevents.com/2022/10/09/posobiec-ultra-capitalist-adam-posen-admits-he-wants-your-family-to-suffer-so-elites-and-ccp-can-get-richer

Gen Z chicks are finding out that their college degrees are totally worthless - Benny Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vT6FMnIj3C4

[wat3rm370n]

April 2010 The Devil in the Details: “Life Force Atrocities” and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict Elisa von Joeden-Forgey In peacetime, public rituals are generally aimed at the reaffirmation of long-standing collective values and structures.13 Genocidal ritual, in contrast, is aimed not at the reaffirmation but at the transgression of long-standing cultural truths. The cosmological scheme that it brings to life is an anti-cosmos, the embracing of an inverted world based on death and transgression rather than the maintenance of and respect for life. Ordinary genocidaires often allude to this space of the anti-cosmos themselves when they refer to the time of killing as a separate universe, a madness, or a diabolic inspiration.

MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

In her unmissable 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein paints a picture of a "mirror world" of right wing and conspiratorial beliefs that are warped, false reflections of real crises:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.

Klein is at pains to point out that other political thinkers have described this phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, leftists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Socialism – the idea that working people are preyed upon by capital – is reflected in the warped mirror as "working people are preyed upon by international Jewish bankers."

The mirror world is a critical concept, because it shows that far right and conspiratorial beliefs are often uneasy neighbors with real, serious political movements. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, in other words:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

Once you understand the mirror world, you start to realize that many right wing conspiracists could have been directed into productive movements, if only they'd understood that their problems were with systems, not sinister individuals (this is why Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"):

https://mamot.fr/@Lazarou@mastodon.social/113943287435897828

This also explains why the "tropes" of right wing conspiratorialism sometimes echo left wing, radical thought. I once had a (genuinely unhinged) dialog with a self-described German "progressive" who told me that criticizing the finance industry as parasitic on the real economy was "structurally antisemitic." Nonsense like this is why Klein's "mirror world" is so important: unless you understand the mirror world, you can end up believing that "progressive" just means "defending anything the right hates."

Historian Erik Baker is the author of a new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which has some very interesting things to say about the mirror world:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674293601

In a recent edition of the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, the hosts interviewed Baker about the book, and the conversation turned to the subject of pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-the-entrepreneurial-ethic/

MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").

The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).

Rank-and-file members of the Amway cult lived in dire poverty, convinced that their financial predicament was their own fault for not faithfully following the "sure-fire" Amway method for building a business. Andrea Pitzer's gripping memoir of growing up in an Amway household offers a glimpse of the human cost of the cult:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZxYkntna5M_rYEv4707Zqqs

Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.

Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.

At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.

Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."

Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:

Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:

“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-organizing-activism-friends-family-conversation-presidential-election

The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.

The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.

In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.

The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.

Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.

Hearing Baker's interview and reading Pitzer's memoir last week made it all click together for me. Not just that MLMs destroy social bonds, but that within every person who gets sucked into an MLM, there's a community organizer who could be building the bonds that MLMs destroy.

[discordiansamba]

I've been sort of passively rotating this one idea for a few days now, of like... not exactly a soulmate type thing, but an AU in which Rin and Shiemi are able to communicate with one another through the usage of mirrors. They both stumble upon it when they're around seven years old, and are shocked to see a face that isn't theirs reflected back in the mirror. The key difference here is that the attack upon Amahara has not happened, so Shiemi is still in training to be the Saio.

They don't really understand what's going on, but they end up becoming fast friends anyways. They each start carrying around a little foldable pocket mirror so that they can talk to each other whenever they want. Rin gets an eyebrow raise from Shiro when he asks for a full length mirror to be put in his room (Shiemi already has one in hers) and they talk in secret whenever they get the chance.

Some key points:

Rin learns about the existence of demons through Shiemi, though he still can't see them. Shiemi holding Nee in her hands and Rin just squints intensely at them until he gives up and Shiemi resorts to drawing a terrible picture instead.

Rin now stuck in the position of having a friend that he can't tell anyone else about, so yes. He has a friend, who is a girl. But uuhhhh. you can't meet her. for reasons. but he totally has one!

Rin realizes Shiro probably isn't joking about being an exorcist, but he just thinks he's like. a regular priest who does exorcisms on the side, not the Paladin of an entire global exorcist order.

Despite having met Shiro once or twice herself, Shiemi doesn't realize he's Rin's father. She hears Rin talk about a 'Father Fujimoto', but she doesn't have any reason to associate him with the Paladin. It's not like she's ever seen a picture of him or anything.

Rin gradually recognizing that he's slowly starting to fall in love with Shiemi, even though he's pretty sure they'll never have a chance to meet in person.

(Shiemi is a little bit slower to notice this.)

All good things must come to an end, and when Shiemi is fifteen, Amahara is attacked. She's in her room, speaking with Rin when she hears a loud commotion from outside that seems to be drawing closer. Without thinking about it, Rin reaches through the mirror and pulls Shiemi over to safety just as her door breaks open.

...which is not something they knew they could do, by the way!

I mulled a lot over what point in the timeline this event should happen, but I settled on pre-awakening ultimately because the mere idea of Shiro hearing a loud sound come from Rin's room, and upon investigating, he finds Rin lying on the floor with an ornately dressed girl lying on top of him is just. so incredibly funny.

shiro: is that the fucking saio

shiemi: the paladin!?

rin: HUH!?

(something something shiemi ends up borrowing rin's clothes at some point because he's the only one even close to being her size.)

[thomas-the-goat-of-satan]

you're ugly when you act like that.

[astroloquacious]

Somebody give Brennan Lee Mulligan an Oscar for that Steel scene because goddamn. I haven't heard somebody so clearly, CLEARLY lying their ass off TO THEMSELF about why their own hurt justifies them in hurting other people since---

checks notes

-- since Brennan Lee Mulligan played the Lord of Lies doing what he does best in explaining why his own hurt justified him in hurting other people.

[wat3rm370n]

Accusation in a Mirror

I'm just not understanding why everyone isn't apprised about how this works. It seems a pretty basic thing to spread the word about it. It would absolutely take some of the wind out of this as a cognitive attack, if people understand it's happening to them, on either end of it. So people are warned about when they're being whipped up to commit genocide, or warning people that they may be the targets.

Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror, 43 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 357 (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter 2012 Article 5 The basic idea of AiM is deceptively simple: propagandists must "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do." 9 In other words, AiM is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one's enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them. For example, if one plans to kill one's adversaries by drowning them in a particular river, then one should accuse one's adversaries of plotting precisely the same crime. As a result, one will accuse one's enemies of doing the same thing despite their plans.,, It is similar to a false anticipatory tu quoque: before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed." This may seem an unlikely means of inciting mass-murder, since it would intuitively seem likely not only to fail but also to backfire by publicly telegraphing its speakers' malicious intentions at times when the speakers may lack the wherewithal to carry out their schemes.12 The counter-intuitiveness of this method is best appreciated when one grasps that its injunctions are to be taken literally. There is no hyperbole in the Note's directive that the propagandist should "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do."I 3 The point is not merely to impute iniquities that are as bad as the misdeeds that the propagandist's own party intends. Instead, AiM is the more audacious idea of charging one's adversary with "exactly" the misdeeds that the propagandist's party intends to commit. But why, out of all of the serious allegations that one might level at one's enemy, should one accuse the adversary of precisely the wrongs that one's own party intends to commit? After all, the risks are apparent. By revealing the propagandist's own intentions, AiM deprives the propagandist's party of the advantages of speed and surprise and gives the adversary an opportunity to anticipate and prepare. At the same time, this method provides independent observers and subsequent judicial tribunals with evidence of intent. Moreover, AiM is not based on any evaluation of what misdeeds are most plausibly ascribed to the enemy, such as those that are based on traditional stereotypes, defamations, or actual culpability, since it relies instead on the plans of the propagandist's party. Despite its counter-intuitive nature, AiM has proven to be one of the central mechanisms by which genocidaires publicly and directly incite genocide, in part because it turns out to be quite effective. Once AiM's structure and functions are understood, its pervasive and efficacious presence can be discerned not only in mass-murder but also in a host of lesser persecutions. These qualities can make AiM an indispensable tool for identifying and prosecuting incitement. The Genocide Convention criminalizes "direct and public incitement to commit genocide,"l 4 regardless of whether actual genocide occurs.15

(I read some of this aloud in pod.)

[psychreviews2]

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7-2

Projection

Psychological projection is a very complex topic that is often badly explained because it's a catch-all term for many different phenomenon. If you are a successful person or are trying to rise in a social hierarchy, it's impossible to do that without experiencing the projections of others. A lot of the common projections you find in politics today involves a normalization of corruption and moral inventories. If enough people are so corrupt, it's easy to accuse others of what you're guilty of, because you may be right. Some of the projection is more unconscious and has been studied in dreams in Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology. Marie Von Franz saw more globally that "wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image." That image could be a good guy or bad guy. Typically, the bad guy is always the one who interferes with our goals, even if we are the criminal and the police are trying to stop us. The good guy is often an idol to be inspired by and given outsized expectations. Through moral inventories, our weaknesses, mistakes, and faults can be well known to us and become the material we use to accuse others, especially if we have a cynical worldview that assumes everyone is the same way. Carl Jung was also aware of how this could happen in therapy when the unknown for a patient has the blanks filled in by the therapist. When extended outside of therapy the example could be an "assumption that what the [onlooker] perceives or thinks is equally perceived or thought by the [recognized.]" Projection can also happen where there is a lack of understanding for real personal human struggles, through a lack of experience, and people mistakenly assume who they are judging are more unique that they actually are. The typical hypocrisy, as pointed in the Bible by Jesus, is when one is looking at a speck of dirt in another's eye while ignoring the plank of wood in their own. When one wants to do a moral inventory against someone else, most therapists agree that it's best to start with oneself before moving forward.

In the view of Jung's Shadow, which is the collection of all the weak parts of our personalities, that territory is often tender when there is a humiliating comparison with people who are better than us in these exact areas. There is a threat that they can be critical of us at any moment and we may lose our status and resources. They often appear like the bad guy, trigger defenses motivated to start moral inventories, and because the accused is more skilled or intelligent, and therefore hard to understand, we make assumptions based on what we know, which is all about us and our weaknesses. There's also a danger of annihilation because critical people who threaten resources, also threaten the well-being of the self. It's like a psychological murder attempt. You feel unconsciously like they are trying to kill you and you unconsciously harbor feelings for their demise. This means a reformer of a system will look extreme and scary, because one doesn't know where one will find another angle for survival. Like anyone looking for a new job, it's a stressful process.

Dreams also can provide symbols that can be interpreted outwardly towards predictions of the future, or they can be a displacement of internal struggles that are now symbolically appearing externally. The unconscious can be confusing in this way because thoughts in a meditation, or dreams in sleep, can just appear out of a nothing and they can already be fully formed projections and unrecognized as being so. For example, a person dying of a terminal disease starts to predict the end of the world, which is really a projection of the ending of their world. Jung felt that politics was an area where projection was common. "If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a 'projection.'" Politics is full of individual ambitions tied to the ambitions of political groups and leaders. Threats of reform, revolution, and counter-revolution can easily spark a wave of projection.  The confusion happens when we don't ask the questions about our own dreams and symbols that appear in sleep or meditation. You can illuminate the situation by asking "are these symbols or ideas about the conflicts in my life? Would I feel better if others were proven guilty as I predicted? Does it feel better because those who I accuse are now seen as broken as I am?" When there is a lot of blame to go around, one way to escape the projections is to face all the problems of one's life truthfully and go through the process of self-correction. Once the self-correction is complete, is the blame for others still there? Is there more forgiveness? In some cases, the blame is justified because the evidence is glaring, but when the evidence is not there and there's no searching for evidence, it is likely a projection from a culture bound understanding of the world or a playing out of internal conflicts.

With projective identification, it goes even further where a person has an agenda with a narrative that will make themselves feel better and they have opportunities to brainwash a suggestible person who is open to introject, imitate, and identify with the new view. Connecting the psychology of victimhood and Girard's scapegoating, you can see examples in children or powerless people, who need resources from the powerful and they introject blame as a way to maintain survival along with other behaviors as found in Stockholm Syndrome, where there is real guilt taken on with the identification. You may stay alive longer in a kidnapping if you help the kidnapper for a period of time, but the cost of that is when you survive, you survive with guilt because you helped them. Other examples are when people adopt a worldview that others want them to have, to serve their agendas. This can be from a personal intimate point of view in a seduction, all the way up to religious or political agendas. Everyone on Earth more or less projects some of the time because it's tiring to do reality tests, or we are totally convinced of our point of view in one subject or another.

The need to blame to improve self-esteem is a clear demarcation between an honest prediction and an agenda. Blaming because there is an external reality and responsibility required, is less of a projection precisely because of the facts and reality involved. Also we sometimes criticize others because we are conscious of our mistakes and learned a lesson but can see that many other people are stuck where we were. Where it starts looking like an unconscious projection is when there's a holier-than-thou attitude to feel superior to elevate self-esteem. Why was there a low self-esteem in the first place that needed such a boost? A search for content in the mind that is creating feelings of low self-esteem can be a key to a projection that was unconscious. If there's wounding because others are superior in one arena of life or another, and if their downfall would make us feel better, it can numb the pain of having to face unpleasant facts about ourselves and the changes we need to make. Those projections also stay unconscious as long as the person avoids facing self-development. Projections can be recognized and forgotten because it's more comfortable to avoid change.

Milli Vanilli - Blame It On the Rain: https://youtu.be/BI5IA8assfk?si=DVkSZh8UeClQcQHT

How a Botched Bank Heist Created ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYsGbvrmr68

From the point of view of Carl Jung and Analytical Psychology, projection is an unconscious process of "...projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection...In these imaginary relationships the other person becomes an image or a carrier of symbols." Marie Louise Von Franz used an example of childhood play and how children playing with dolls are making associations that don't belong to the inanimate object. This primitive layer continues on into adulthood unconsciously, but for her it's only when projections have become problematic do we have something worth investigating. "The archaic identity of subject and object, which is the basis of the phenomenon of projection, persists subliminally, even in highly cultivated men and women. In the unconscious the inner world and the outer world are not differentiated. Only that which has become a content of consciousness is described as an inner or outer phenomenon, that is, either than an introspectively perceived condition, like a welling up of an emotion, or as an 'outer' event or object. Everything else, of which we are not conscious, remains, as before, an undifferentiated part of the occurrences of life." When there is finally an investigation this is "...only when we gain enough insight to see that they are imagos of peculiarities that are part of our own makeup; otherwise we are naïvely convinced that these peculiarities belong to the object." Because dreams and thoughts appear out of the unconscious fully formed, it's the lack of questioning that leads to the projection being undetected. When people are walking around with their worldview, the gaps in knowledge provide an opening for the "...archaic identity of subject and object...Whenever it prevails, the unconscious is merged with the outer world." Through awareness and meditation of mental content there can be a "...complete and final detachment...when the imago that mirrored itself in the object is restored, together with its meaning, to the subject. This restoration is achieved through conscious recognition of the projected content, that is, by acknowledging the 'symbolic value' of the object." The gap in knowledge is one way to catch a projection but also when there is a distorted label applied to the world. "Exaggeration indicates, in most cases, an interpretation on the subjective level."

Because projection is an "...involuntary process..." full of "...dreams, waking fantasies, and mythological traditions," energy is wasted on error and judgment. "An inner mental image, the object-imago, must be recognized as an inner factor; this is the only way in which the value or the energy invested in the image can flow back to the individual, who has need of [this energy] for his development...The presence or absence of an exaggeration, however, can often be determined only through a feeling evaluation, which in dream interpretation demands a high degree of sensitivity to nuance and atmosphere. It is, moreover, important to differentiate, as Jung emphasizes, between a quality or property that is really present in the object and the value or meaning this object possesses for the dreamer, that is, for the energy invested in the assessment." Energy of course is wasted when there is a negative criticism connected with the anger and stress. If one is interested in real success in the world, a projection-meditation can be a way to save energy for self-development. One can ask "Why was the judgment inaccurate? Does it have to do with my self-development? Are there any wishes embedded related to self-esteem and comparison? Is there an agenda I want to force on the object?" The energetic body language and countenance sets off a countertransference in the person being judged with a back and forth between two or more projecting people. This understanding can also help therapists who don't have the routine of questioning their symbols, or they don't have a regular therapist of their own.

Jung's method was always about self-development and he saw how both negative and positive projections could suppress areas of the personality in most need of development. "...Everyone tends to project their less-preferred functions onto others. Unconscious dislike of a [skill] often leads to conflict with those for whom the [skill] is prominent in the personality. Negative projections are a way of denying our own deficits, and thus they keep us blind to ourselves and others, but idealizing projections may be even worse, since they externalize positive attributes, deluding us into thinking we do not have the assets that others have...Our judgments against others’ personalities suppress parts of our own minds. These 'inner conflicts' always erupt in disturbances of our inner peace." Carol Shumate of Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model, concurs. "The goal of Jung’s system was to help individuals avoid becoming self-fulfilling prophecies based on their early preferences." Another question is to look at those we idolize and see if there are any inferior feelings when we look at their abilities. We should ask if it's really true that we can't develop skills in the same direction. Certainly the therapeutic effect would arise if weak skills were successfully developed. The concern would evaporate as people get used to operating at a higher level.

From the psychoanalytic point of view, there's also a question of weakened ego boundaries where children were not able to develop a sense of inside and outside, much like the above examples of conscious boundaries and unconscious boundarylessness. There's a "...tendency to search for an outside cause rather than an internal one..." There's a selective focus based on a worldview and then a desire for relief. Freud surmised that "whenever an internal change occurs, we can choose whether we shall attribute it to an internal or external cause. If something deters us from accepting an internal origin, we naturally seize upon an external one." There are several theories as to why, including a desire for purity in the ideal self. If we feel that any of our own behavior tarnishes the ideal self-image, or ego-ideal, that feeling can manifest as a form of self-hatred that looks for an influence to blame, to find relief from the tension. Again, this can be accurate if you were young and copied bad behaviors from parents or culture, and now as an adult you have rejected those influences, but there can be a hunting mentality to attack societal influences, and again there can be scapegoats if the perpetrator from long ago is inaccessible. If there's enough unconsciousness, what Freud called a pre-conscious, a person could also partially forget their past purity-tainting behavior but still make a mistake in their guess of another person, because the content was conscious enough to be a form of knowledge to draw upon, but not conscious enough to be a form of self-reflection.

It's common for people to find internal conflicts that they struggle with and assume others are in the same situation. Many examples include anything related to identity, like sexual orientation, political affiliations, ethnic values, and internal religious conflicts. For example, a bisexual could hate their homosexual self and start attacking others for being openly homosexual. You could then apply this to struggles over deep seeded values. Another example would be a person who is now unsure of what they believe, in terms of having adopted a toxic worldview in the past, and then they could look for social influences to blame. This gets more pernicious when you look at pleasure. Many points of view, identities, and values, all contain pleasure at different levels of intensity and they can violate boundaries of others with varying levels of damage. The anger at bad influences increases as people fail to accept the the dark side of their personality. Drawbacks to pleasures don't change the fact that one CAN get pleasure in many different ways that can hurt oneself or others. When someone realizes that their pleasure can be replaced by subjectively "better" pleasures, a therapeutic method can be to ACCEPT that one can have lower pleasures and one has simply developed into something more peaceful or longer-lasting. These identities relating to anything addictive can be a mire to be stuck in when there's an obsession over purity.

The problem is time and identity. If you were impure in the past that means you can't ever be pure no matter what you do. You can blame other people. You can attack yourself, but you're still a person with potentials for being impure. This projective exaggeration is called splitting in psychoanalysis and one can do that to oneself if one can only love oneself if one is pure. To accept impurity can be moral if people are also accepting of drawbacks to desires and are moving on to better pastures. It becomes pathological if people feel they can ONLY experience pleasure in certain situations. It takes a lot of mistakes, that many don't want to experience for practical reasons, to learn about the limits of one's pleasure template, and unfortunately many take their childhood history and solidify it into a self-belief that prevents new healthier experiences of pleasure. Carl Jung said this about about how to deal with counter-transference when patients are judged harshly by their professionals that "if the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must be able to accept him as he is, and he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is." The advantage of acknowledging your dark side is that what is conscious can be targeted for control. People who say they are pure may not actually know themselves that well and may act on the slightest temptation to the surprise of everyone around them including themselves. Learning for many people requires a lot of feeling and experience. Abstract knowledge may be accurate but it may also be sterile and not provide enough of a deterrence for bad behavior because of the possibility that one can get intense pleasure from something damaging. Any attempts to teach younger people may require more admission that something bad, like a drug habit, can include incredible pleasure along with the risks of wrong doses and adulterations. There needs to be an impure identity, which matches common humanity, so that exploring improved behaviors becomes possible. Rigid identities lead to hypocrisy and they can demotivate change as a way to defend the all-or-nothing identity.

Carl Jung - Ending Your Inner Civil War (read by Alan Watts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15pjQRA80bs

90s Ravers Gurning On Ecstasy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfWBd9Eg3rI

Discotheque - U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpvF7Qq9svk

It's been a perennial criticism of psychoanalysis in how it is hard to test for projection, but some tests have been done on how obsessive thinking can lead to projection. Deep wounds, shameful mistakes, and past addictions can be chewed on in the mind for long periods of time, swallowed with suppression, but then regurgitated when there are reminders in the environment. In A new look at defense projection, researchers found that "people dislike certain traits and are particularly loath to believe that they themselves have such traits. It is also clear that they seek to deny some of their faults and to suppress thoughts about evidence that paints them in certain dark colors...Cognitive suppression of unwanted self-knowledge may have an unintended side effect: It may lead thoughts about the problematic personality trait to rebound and become chronically accessible...The level of discrepancy between the undesired self and one's actual self-concept can be an important predictor of life satisfaction."

Almost all life choices involve some compromise and when weighing choices it's usually not so black and white. One of the modern illnesses is attributing too much to identity, but when one looks closely, identity is shifting all the time according to priority. If your priority is to send an e-mail, you're an e-mailer right now, but as soon as the priority changes on the list you're something else. In Identity and Identification, a case study illuminated the variety one finds and all the trial and error searches people engage in when they have to adapt to the economy and changes in the world. Identity is compartmentalized. Different lifestyles and ways of living, especially if you live in a multi-cultural society, can broaden horizons of what's possible and allow people to experiment and change lifestyles. To the question Who Are You?, Mark Walport responded: "It depends on the circumstances. That's what's very interesting about identity. So, talking to you now, I'm the Director of the Wellcome Trust, but at home I'm a husband and father. On Flickr, I'm someone else, and so on. In all sorts of different circumstances, we're slightly different people." Then when you add age and experience, complexity accrues in the character of the person. After a lot of trial and error, certain preferences become more solid and many others may have fallen away due to obsolescence, boredom, or an acute awareness of drawbacks. Keeping a flexible attitude of learning and development weakens rigid judgments about purity of character. The safety one finds in boundaries is enjoying a life where the enjoyments already include those healthy boundaries. The need for purity can rest.

Case Studies: The 'Wolfman' (3/3) - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

Unfortunately, so many people will not read psychology with any real depth and they are going to be stuck with inflexible thoughts and they will project on the environment with an intense need to control. With projective identification people as well as the environment are manipulated to conform to the personal worldview that allows for relief. There's a "...manipulation of the external object in order to make it comply with what the subject is attempting to externalize." This makes the job of a therapist dealing with these ego disordered patients more difficult. Warren Brodey in, The Dynamics of Narcissism, described that selection process. "Projection is combined with the manipulation of reality selected for the purpose of verifying the projection. Reality that cannot be used to verify the projection is not perceived [because it's about the selection]. Information known by the externalizing person but beyond the perception of the others [in the family] is not transmitted to these others except as it is useful to train or manipulate them into validating what will then become the realization of the projection...The identity that the patient sees may be unknown to the therapist (although it holds a kernel of truth, which is usually disturbing to the therapist). The therapist's active denial of the patient's presumption may serve as confirmation of the as-if identity, particularly because the patient, constricted to his own externalized image, does not perceive the context of the other characteristics." Truth is used in projection, as Von Franz quoted Jung, who spoke of "a 'hook' in the object on which one hangs a projection as one hangs a coat on a coat hook." Therapists are treated like a coat hanger and all the realistic details about their life can be a form of brainwashing if not careful.

Brodey then expanded on the Narcissus parable and the lack of separation between the subject and the reflection in the water due to pathological parenting, with the distorted rewards and punishments, that didn't allow for boundaries between self and other for the child. A narcissist in therapy could easily take personal any perceived slights coming from the therapist as a form of self-injury while at the same time project one's content into the therapist. No boundaries. "Consider again Narcissus and his reflection: the not-self that is set at a distance for relationship exists only as a relocation of a part of 'I.' The reflected image of Narcissus has no separate existence. It is perceived outside of the self but is continuous with the self; it owes its existence to the primary self image rather than to the transfer of energy to the perception (or misperception) of an existent other. The existent child is not libidinized. He is responded to by his mother as an as-if child—that is, responded to only when he validates his mother’s projection." This tethering of the sense of self to authoritative people is a developmental trap that predicts a de-centering of the personality in the child preventing further independence. Brodey quoted Deutsch: "When a distanced self-reflection is [emotionally invested in] as an existent other, this is delusion." Like a puppet the child is stuck in a limited world partially separated from reality. "The image in the pool, having no separate existence, is wholly governed by expectation and can never be spontaneous. It can give nothing...This makes the work with ego-disordered children technically more difficult. The child patterned to the mother's expectations will not easily relate to a therapist who rejects these...The pseudo ego is that organization which validates the parental projection. It is [emotionally invested in] energy that aims to prevent abandonment and the threat of its own dissolution...The child's reality and his mode of organizing reality are altered. An identity grows that is unsupported from within."

As the child grows older and looks to find gratification in the adult world, the desperation to find objects to be pseudo-parents and objects to challenge for domination leads to bewildered victims. Anthony Hopkins in an interview described the feeling of talking with someone who could manipulate your attention span. "I met a madman who was on the loose in London, and that's pretty scary. I had coffee with him one day. I realized how nuts he was. He never blinked. He kept asking me questions and before you could answer he would ask me another one and another one. In the end it made you feel so that you were in a different reality."

Anthony Hopkins Reveals Why He Didn't Blink While Playing Hannibal | The Dick Cavett Show: https://youtu.be/rkh-bOujn40?si=D3KA9GF5fHPHVb2C

Going further than psychology patients, many psychoanalytic books talk about projection being common in the world of politics, but the reality is that so many people who use these tactics are not entirely unconscious of their effect. They find political rewards in the real world and those rewards guide them to be more strategic with their messaging. This is especially true for those who want to destabilize societies. They have a conscious agenda that is unpopular and it will only work if it is unconscious in their targets.

Patterson, N., Richter, D., Gnerre, S. et al. Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Nature 441, 1103–1108 (2006).

Moorjani P, Amorim CE, Arndt PF, Przeworski M. Variation in the molecular clock of primates. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Sep 20;113(38):10607-12.

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M., Baquedano, E., Organista, E. et al. Early Pleistocene faunivorous hominins were not kleptoparasitic, and this impacted the evolution of human anatomy and socio-ecology. Sci Rep 11, 16135 (2021).

Lahr, M. M., Rivera, F., Power, R. K., Mounier, A., Copsey, B., Crivellaro, F., … Foley, R. A. (2016). Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 529(7586), 394–398.

Violence and the Sacred by René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801822186/

Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable by Peter S. Ungar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780195183474/

General History of Africa - Vol. 1 by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Unesco Staff, Mokhtar: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780520039124/

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-function Model by Carol Shumate: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780367341381/

Transference And Projection by Jan Grant, Jim Crawley: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780335203147/

Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology by Marie Louise von Franz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780875484174/

Newman, Leonard & Duff, Kimberly & Baumeister, Roy. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of personality and social psychology. 72. 980-1001.

Identity and Identification by Ken Arnold, James Peto, Mick Gordon, Chris Wilkinson, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Wellcome Trust: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781906155865/

Brodey WM. On the dynamics of narcissism. I. Externalization and early ego development. Psychoanal Study Child. 1965;20:165-93.

Marcus, Kenneth L., Accusation in a Mirror (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 357 - 393, 2012

Atrocity Speech Law by Gregory S. Gordon, Benjamin Ferencz: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780190612689/

A World Transformed by George Bush, Brent Scowcroft: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679752592/

No Trade Is Free - Robert Lighthizer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780063282131/

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199347704/

Prisoner of the State - Zhao Ziyang: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781439149393/

Dark Aeon : Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781648210105/

HOU Lulu, LIU Yungang, Life Circle Construction in China under the Idea of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Study of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Geographical review of Japan series B, 2017, Volume 90, Issue 1, Pages 2-16

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

Fear of Success Pt. 1: https://psychreviews.org/fear-of-success/

Fear of Success Pt. 2: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-2/

Fear of Success Pt. 3: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-3/

Fear of Success Pt. 4: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-4/

Fear of Success Pt. 5: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-5/

Fear of Success Pt. 6: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-fear-of-success-pt-6/

[oneirocide]

Over here bashing my head into a wall @ people calling Hold Them Down problematic like NO ITS NOT. IT IS NOT PROBLEMATIC TO HAVE A REALISTIC REPRESENTATION OF ANYTHING. YOURE PROBLEMATIC FOR TRYING TO BURY AND ERASE ONE OF THE FEW PIECES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA WE HAVE THAT SO SHAMELESSLY AND WONDERFULLY PORTRAYS THESE ISSUES.

Like what is their issue? This shit HAPPENS and turning your nose up at even the implication of someone victimising someone in such a way is directly contributing to the issues and stigma around SA that caused such harm to survivors and victims, and which allows perpetrators to get away free. JFC

[rootless-cosmopolitan]

During the cold war, East Germany was like “those dirty capitalists in West Germany are harboring nazi war criminals!!!” And West Germany was like, “no, we’re perfect, those dirty communists in East Germany are harboring nazi war criminals!!!” And actually they were both right

Just remembered that for some weird reason, nothing to do with current events or politics or anything

[acourtofthought]

harassing businesses? GO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF

That's a bold statement without any proof and no thank you.

[echo-lore]

Au where everything is the same except Mk monkey form looks like an exact copy and paste of younger macaque (aka. Long White fur, only thing that differed is the ears and the peach colored mask) (going off that headcannon that macaque had white fur but then once he got revived it turned black btw) and it pisses wukong of to no end. Because like how??? You have brown hair as a human. How the fuck do you have white fur as a monkey?? How do you not look like me at all???? You have my powers???? How come we share nothing else?? Wtf??

It also pisses macaque off too because Mk does NOT know how to take care of his new fur at all. For the longest time everyone thought his fur was grey or like light brown and Mk just has to awkwardly explain that “oh yeah no my fur is white but it gets dirty really easily so I kinda just let it fester all day until I shower”

Macaque having had white fur for centuries and having it just come back thanks to lady bone demons ice thing: “YOU DO WHAT NOW???”

Bro gets so unbelievably offended about it too- he literally drags Mk to the nearest lake when he first hears about this on flower fruit mountain and washes him like his a baby monkey. He takes out a brush from his shadow portals and starts brushing mks hair and everything. Wukong just stares wide eye at the fact that macaque was treating his successor like a little kid and going off on him like “I cannot believe you. Did wukong never teach you proper hygiene or what? In the new age of human technology and you decide to just let your fur suffer? I did this because I didn’t have a better option back then but you- I will teach how to take of your fur like it or not you little shit-“

Wukong is just in shock through most of this process but does start laughing his ass off of once the shock wears out and just a sad soggy Mk getting chewed out by macaque remains

Mei, Baihe, and Redson are all absolutely in love with Mks white hair btw.

Baihe and Mei love to play around with it and the biggest reason as to why Mk keeps his fur fairly long. Baihe loves to braid it and decorate while Mei just want to dye it constantly (and also loves to play with it during cuddles)

And because I love spicynoddles: Red son just thinks mks looks fucking majestic. Especially when he has the really intricate braids with gold decorations because Mei knows how to make her best friend look fabulous and will weaponize it

[equalperson]

I fucking hate being traumatized because why am I bawling the hardest I've bawled in god-knows-how-long because someone I didn't even like that much berated Me. gasping wailing trembling and snotting over this for several minutes.

[age-of-moonknight]

Variant cover for Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #4 by Alexander Lozano.

[widowshill]

r/v + matching outfits.

[boleynqueenes]

g lawrence commiting the (singularly?) eerily resonant arc of 'what if hviii not only knew norris had had a crush on his wife for years, but was also a little fucked up about it?'