As The Rabbit pointed out, from our perspective, communicating truth and accurate, researched, reporting in even a slime infested environment can help any of those who have some spark of humanity in them to understand that there IS another way to be.
What is interesting is that, statistically speaking, places like shoutwire and abovetopsecret only attract a small percentage of the human population. Unfortunately, many of those they attract are young people who have not yet had enough life experience to understand that it's not all a big game.
What comes across from the Shoutwire people so strongly is their own paranoia. Yeah, I know they accuse us of being paranoid for simply researching reality, analyzing it objectively, and reporting on the results, but the fact is, their own terror of this process is a kind of deep-rooted and conversive paranoia.
I mean, how rational and normal is it to consider people who are educated, who think and analyze, who study, read and contemplate, as a "cult"??? Get what I mean here? Anybody who isn't boozing, whoring, drugging, and video gaming - being among their major declared pastimes - is a cult!!!
How paranoid is that?
So, maybe it is time to look again at psychologist Lobaczewski's description of this disorder and how it can influence others.
Brain cells are very limited in their ability to repair themselves. If any part of the brain is damaged, what generally happens is that another part of the brain takes over the function of the damaged part to some extent. Unfortunately, this substitution is never quite perfect and there will always be some deficits in skill and thinking that can be detected by specialized tests. Such damage can be caused by trauma, infections, drugs, childhood vaccinations, poor nutrition, and I suspect, even food additives and environmental poisons that are present in our air and water. One should also note that it is important as to WHERE the damage to the brain occurs and also WHEN in the individual's life it occurs. Damage that occurs in infancy and childhood are more detrimental than damage that may occur later.
In those individuals with brain damage as described above, the negative deformation of their character increases over time. It is, of course, quite varied depending on where, when, how, and how serious the original damage was, not to mention the environment of the person. But in any event, these things are what are called by psychologist Lobaczewski character disorders, or characteropathies.
Characteropathies - standing alone and without other disorders being brought into the picture - all have certain similarities, as Lobaczewski reports.
The undamaged brain is founded upon the species' template of natural psychological properties and abilities. These properties and abilities include instinctive and affective (emotional) responses, which are natural even if, as we grow, we are supposed to learn to control them with our larger, more plastic brains.
People with brain damage characteropathies grow up - generally - among other human beings; some of whom are perfectly normal and others of whom may also be brain damaged in some way. Their oddness or different way of thinking, their emotional violence, and their generally extreme egotism are, in today's world, dealt with in ways that do not address the root causes of their difficulties: brain damage. Quite often, their differences are considered "creative" or "special" because of the demands of parents in a so-called democratic society who do not want to acknowledge the possibility that their offspring could be deficient in some respect.
And thus, in a democracy, such brain damaged individuals with unusual ways of thinking and perceiving are easily (or forcibly) admitted into social groups and perceived within the categories of the everyday world.
However, the behavior of persons with such character disorders traumatizes the minds and feelings of normal people, gradually diminishing the ability of the normal person to use their common sense. Other children, growing up alongside the characteropath - into whose society they are forced because of the aforementioned "democratic ideals" - become accustomed to the rigid modes of pathological thinking and experience. The result is, particularly in mandatory educational settings, that the personalities of other, normal, young people suffers abnormal development leading to an inability to perceive reality accurately.
Characteropaths and their victims thus represent pathological factors which, by their covert activity, perpetuate cycles of negative social experience and inaccurate reality perception which leaves the individual wide open to be taken over by individuals with serious pathologies later in life.
So, when normal people who have been raised in this sort of environment, subjected to this sort of interaction, with minimal normal interaction from their parents or perhaps even subjected to additional pathology from the parents, they are "ripe for the plucking," as one might say. And then, along comes a serious characteropath like the editors of Shoutwire, and those crowds of young people who are still trying to figure out who and what they are, are easily vacuumed into a world that they have no idea will lead to their ultimate destruction, and abnegation of anything that leads to normal happiness and mental and emotional liberty.
So, here is Lobaczewski's description of one of the main types of brain damaged characteropath, a type that will seem SO familiar after observing the activities of the Shoutwire crowd.
Paranoid character disorders:
It is characteristic of paranoid behavior for people to be capable of relatively correct reasoning and discussion as long as the conversation involves minor differences of opinion. This stops abruptly when the [discussion] partner's arguments begin to undermine their overvalued ideas, crush their long-held stereotypes of reasoning, or forces them to accept a conclusion they had subconsciously rejected before.
Such a stimulus unleashes upon the partner a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion.
Do we have a hit here on the type of individual selected to be editors and moderators of Shoutwire???!
Utterances like these inspire aversion among cultivated and logical people, who then tend to avoid the paranoid types.
And that is so true. I think that most members of this forum find the discourse and atmosphere at Shoutwire to be truly perverse, illogical, deviant and repellant.
But here is the problem that we have to always consider:
However, the power of the paranoid lies in the fact that they easily enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, who have been victims of the egotistical influence of individuals with character disorders, and, in particular, a large segment of young people.
A [member of the working masses] may perceive this power to enslave to be a kind of victory over higher-class people and thus take the paranoid person's side. However, this is not the normal reaction among the common people, where perception of psychological reality occurs no less often than among intellectuals.
In sum then, the response of accepting paranoid argumentation is qualitatively more frequent in reverse proportion to the civilization level of the community in question, although it never approaches the majority.
And certainly, in the dumbed down and degraded American society, among young people raised by television and video games, there is likely to be a good number of followers of such deviants. It is to this type of individual that Shoutwire appeals.
Nevertheless, paranoid individuals become aware of their enslaving influence through experience and attempt to take advantage of it in a pathologically egotistic manner.
We saw exactly that explicated by Bulshoy in his article about polarizing readers and thereby attracting attention to himself.
We know today that the psychological mechanism of paranoid phenomena is twofold: one is caused by damage to the brain tissue, the other is functional or behavioral.
One of course wonders if some of this brain damage is not deliberately caused by poisonous childhood immunizations? That would certainly expand the potential field of deviants.
Within the above-mentioned process of rehabilitation, any brain-tissue lesion causes a certain slackening of accurate thinking and, as a consequence, of the personality structure.
We have certainly seen very good examples of this slackening of accurate thinking and slack personality structure in the comments of the Shoutwire editors made here on our forum, as well as their behavior throughout this extremely interesting episode.
Most typical are those cases caused by an aggression in the diencephalon by various pathological factors, resulting in its permanently decreased tonal ability, and similarly of the tonus of inhibition in the brain cortex. Particularly during sleepless nights, runaway thoughts give rise to a paranoid changed view of human reality, as well as to ideas which can be either gently naive or violently revolutionary. Let us call this kind paranoid characteropathy.
In persons free of brain tissue lesions, such phenomena most frequently occur as a result of being reared by people with paranoid characteropathia, along with the psychological terror of their childhood. Such psychological material is then assimilated creating the rigid stereotypes of abnormal experiencing. This makes it difficult for thought and world view to develop normally, and the terror-blocked contents become transformed into permanent, functional, congestive centers.
As noted above, young people are particularly susceptible to this type of deviance. Generally, when a young person is trying on different ways of acting and being in order to discover who they really are, (defining their own ego), they often have the tendency to repress from their mind any idea that anyone or anything "out there" has any control over them. They resent the idea of anyone controlling them, and are certain that they - and they alone - are the deciders of what they like, don't like, want, don't want, and so on. Young people in particular want to believe they freely chose their intentions and make their own decisions. They are not yet old enough and experienced enough to realize that they are, in fact, already "made" and are "mechanical" and reactionary. Most of their choices are made by their early childhood conditioning and, without extraordinary efforts, they are simply unable to choose to do or be other than what they have been made to do and be by someone or some thing, else.
So, let's look at what is really happening on Shoutwire; what we are seeing is the actual formative stages of a real CULT. Lobaczewski describes the situation as we have observed it at this point, and then goes on to sketch its further development so that we have some idea of where it is going:
In order to have a chance to develop into a large ponerogenic association ... it suffices that some human organization, characterized by social or political goals and an ideology with some creative value, be accepted by a larger number of normal people before it succumbs to a process of ponerogenic malignancy. The primary tradition and ideological values of such a society may then, for a long time, protect a union which has succumbed to the ponerization process from the awareness of society, especially its less critical components. ...
This is reminiscent of a situation psychopathologists know well: a person who enjoyed trust and respect in their circles starts behaving with preposterous arrogance and hurting others, allegedly in the name of his already known, decent and accepted convictions, which have - in the meantime - deteriorated due to some psychological process rendering them primitive but emotionally dynamic.
However, his old acquaintances - having known him for long as the person he was - do not believe the injured parties who complain about his new, or even hidden, behavior, and are prepared to denigrate them and consider them liars. This adds insult to their injury and gives encouragement and license to the individual whose personality is undergoing deterioration, to commit further hurtful acts; as a rule, such a situation lasts until the person's madness becomes obvious. ...
The earlier phase of a ponerogenic union's activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process.
Recall here the power of the paranoid characteropath lies in the fact that they easily enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, or who have been victims of individuals with character disorders, and, in particular, a large segment of young people.
At this point in time, the union still exhibits certain romantic features and is not yet characterized by excessively brutal behavior.
Soon, however, the more normal members are pushed into fringe functions and are excluded from organizational secrets; some of them thereupon leave such a union.
We have just witnessed this part of the process, though I'm sure it is ongoing. It was a definite maneuver to push us to the fringe BECAUSE of our normal, thinking, rational approach as well as our aversion to the paranoid violence.
Individuals with inherited deviations then progressively take over the inspirational and leadership positions. The role of essential psychopaths gradually grows, although they like to remain ostensibly in the shadows (e.g. directing small groups), setting the pace as an eminence grise.
In ponerogenic unions on the largest social scales, the leadership role is generally played by a different kind of individual, one more easily digestible and representative. Examples include frontal characteropathy, or some more discreet complex of lesser taints.
A spellbinder at first simultaneously plays the role of leader in a ponerogenic group. Later there appears another kind of "leadership talent", a more vital individual who often joined the organization later, once it has already succumbed to ponerization. The spellbinding individual, being weaker, is forced to come to terms with being shunted into the shadows and recognizing the new leader's "genius", or accept the threat of total failure.
Roles are parceled out.
The spellbinder needs support from the primitive but decisive leader, who in turn needs the spellbinder to uphold the association's ideology, so essential in maintaining the proper attitude on the part of those members of the rank and file who betray a tendency to criticism and doubt of the moral variety.
The spellbinder's job then becomes to repackage the ideology appropriately, sliding new contents in under old titles, so that it can continue fulfilling its propaganda function under ever-changing conditions. He also has to uphold the leader's mystique inside and outside the association. Complete trust cannot exist between the two, however, since the leader secretly has contempt for the spellbinder and his ideology, whereas the spellbinder despises the leader for being such a coarse individual. A showdown is always probable; whoever is weaker becomes the loser.
The structure of such a union undergoes further variegation and specialization.
A chasm opens between the somewhat more normal members and the elite initiates who are, as a rule, more pathological. This later subgroup becomes ever more dominated by hereditary pathological factors, the former by the after-effects of various diseases affecting the brain, less typically psychopathic individuals, and people whose malformed personalities were caused by early deprivation or brutal child-rearing methods on the part of pathological individuals.
It soon develops that there is less and less room for normal people in the group at all.
The leaders' secrets and intentions are kept hidden from the union's proletariat; the products of the spellbinders' work must suffice for this segment.
An observer watching such a union's activities from the outside and using the natural psychological world view will always tend to overestimate the role of the leader and his allegedly autocratic function.
The spellbinders and the propaganda apparatus are mobilized to maintain this erroneous outside opinion. The leader, however, is dependent upon the interests of the union, especially the elite initiates, to an extent greater than he himself knows. He wages a constant position-jockeying battle; he is an actor with a director.
In macrosocial unions, this position is generally occupied by a more representative individual not deprived of certain critical faculties; initiating him into all those plans and criminal calculations would be counterproductive.
In conjunction with part of the elite, a group of psychopathic individuals hiding behind the scenes steers the leader, the way Borman and his clique steered Hitler. If the leader does not fulfill his assigned role, he generally knows that the clique representing the elite of the union is in a position to kill or otherwise remove him.
We have sketched the properties of unions in which the ponerogenic process has transformed their original generally benevolent content into a pathological counter-part thereof and modified its structure and its later changes, in a manner sufficiently wide-scale to encompass the greatest possible scope of this kind of phenomena, from the smallest to the largest social scale. The general rules governing those phenomena appear to be at least analogous, independent of the quantitative, social, and historical scale of such a phenomenon.
I think that observing this process in a group, in real time, and having the opportunity to actually interact with some of the "inner circle" of such a group undergoing this process, has been very educational. Thus far, we have generally only had isolated individuals to deal with, or have only been able to observe groups from the outside without any inside experience.
We know, of course, that Vincent Bridges and Jeff "Stormbear" Williams came onboard and that they have had an interesting impact on the Shoutwire community. We suspect that the site was created more or less for financial gain, however, it will be interesting to observe it over time and see how the current editors and moderators - and even owner - survive this gradual take-over by true psychopaths. As Lobaczewski points out:
A spellbinder at first simultaneously plays the role of leader in a ponerogenic group. Later there appears another kind of "leadership talent", a more vital individual who often joined the organization later, once it has already succumbed to ponerization. The spellbinding individual, being weaker, is forced to come to terms with being shunted into the shadows and recognizing the new leader's "genius", or accept the threat of total failure.
When you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
