New Show: MindMatters (RIP Truth Perspective)

Though we had discussed a few of the intriguing ideas in the novel Flatland on a previous show, we decided that the book was so chock full of insights it deserved its own show.

MindMatters: Exploring Flatland: A Romance of Hyperdimensional Space

Before Orwell's masterpiece novel, 1984, about a dystopian society and what politically motivated and propaganda-induced groupthink looked and sounded like, another Englishman by the name of Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a semi-satirical, allegorical sci-fi novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, in 1884. In his story, Abbott ingeniously uses flat geometric shapes to represent different strata of society in his contemporary experience of Victorian England. Taking aim at his era's biases, prejudices and social mores, Abbott satirizes the thought processes and modes of oppression towards those who would begin to consider other, higher, levels of reality, and allegorizes the reception of divine inspiration using a mathematical conceit that may have more reality to it than perhaps even Abbott supposed.

On this week's MindMatters we discuss Flatland in all its cosmological glory. Like a dimensionally flattened, but fleshed-out, Plato's cave, we delve into the book's significance as a profound allegory, its many intricately bound insights, and what Edwin Abbott was entertainingly imploring us to think about and consider. In a world where ever greater numbers of people actually believe that the world is flat, we'll be thinking on a story which suggests that higher dimensions are not only possible - but probable - if only one can open one's mind enough to 'see' it.


 
Though we had discussed a few of the intriguing ideas in the novel Flatland on a previous show, we decided that the book was so chock full of insights it deserved its own show.

Caught the show (and have an old copy) - excellent job guys!

Oh, and the 'Improbability Drive' :-D

------------------

It was actually a triple header back to the last episode on Panspermia/ID/Role of Psi (thought provoking indeed) and 'Brave New Normal' presented by the Objective:Health crew (unbelievable, and just the tip of the iceberg presently).

Anyway, in all seriousness (and indeed the C's said something about video and larger audiences a long time ago being beneficial), all you folks are remarkable in bringing people here and on SOTT what you do. Keep it up and thank you! :flowers:
 
The book is freely available from Guttenberg Project and can be downloaded to Kindle, there are two versions, one with images and one without images, The mage version is preferable for comprehension. I am just starting to read the book.


A movie was created using computer imagery, representing the concepts in the book. It's really interesting. It's about 140mins in length.

Flatland (also released as Flatland: The Film and Flatland the film), is a 2007 computer animated film based on the 1884 novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. The film was directed and animated by Ladd Ehlinger Jr. in Lightwave 3D. The screenplay was written by author Tom Whalen. The music was composed by Mark Slater.

 
Just finished Sufism - An Introduction To Its Meaning and Purpose, after listening to Harrisons comment, I couldn't help but to make a connection with Paul.

Harrison said:
[...] Comes across in some of what Chittick writes about Ibn 'Arabi and Rumi is that this idea that there are, there are three, [...] modes of transmission or or just three aspects of Sufism, yeah, just the three main aspects of Sufism, the way he describes it is that there is basically knowledge, works and spiritual realization. So there's the knowledge, which is basically, this is the transmitted form this is the the original revelation of the Quran to Muhammad that is passed on, that's knowledge of the law, and then there is the works, this is what the Sufis would call the way, so this is the actual practice [...] spiritual practices that a Sufi or a Muslim puts themselves through and actually does.

So you've got law, works and then, probably the most important to - or one of the most typical - to Sufism is the third, spiritual realization, which is the truth.

So you've got [...] the form that the knowledge takes which is in the case of Sufism the Quran and then there's the inner meaning that is discerned through the experience of the practitioner and through their own practice so this would be meditative practices, contemplation, in modern Sufi orders for instance [...] they basically engage in certain types of prayer and meditation and dancing of course, Rumi started the the whirling dervish thing so that's where whirling dervishes come from, apparently.

And with the goal, so that would be like the way or the path is the actual practice, leading to the goal of spiritual realization, the realization of truth and at that level of spiritual realization as Rumi puts it in some of his poetry that kind of negates the necessity now for the law and the way because once you've achieved the goal you no longer need the path because you're already at your destination and you only you no longer need the form which is the law because you embody the law as Chittick puts it the Sufi becomes the doctrine at that point so there's no need for the doctrine because you embody the doctrine in your very being and the way you get there is through the middle section the works or the way that is what would be the kind of the inner alchemy or climbing the ladder, these are two symbol systems or image or forms of imagery that the Sufis used that also show up in more like Western esotericism like the latter, that's in hermeticism that's in Gurdjieff too, the inner alchemy of course in western alchemy as well as again Gurdjieff too talks about alchemy...

Put this way, the equivalence between Paul and the Sufis is striking, specially when speaking of a way forward to the spiritual realization. Paul talks about the law in very similar terms and also puts it at the beginning of the "quest" I suppose. A "childminder" as Ashworth reinterprets the fragment of Galatians:

Tim Ashworth said:
“Now before faith came, we were restrained under the law, protected until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our childminder until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a childminder , for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal 3:23–26, adapted RSV)”

And the works of the Sufis could be related to Paul's "living in faith"? It sure directs behaviour through practices. This middle "stage" also is not the last one for Paul. Chapter 8 of "Paul's Necessary Sin" starts with an apt summary:

Tim Ashworth said:
  • (a) ‘living by faith’ excludes ‘living by law’
  • (b) ‘living in the Spirit’ brings to an end ‘the deeds of the flesh’
  • (c) ‘the law’ is no longer needed once ‘the deeds of the flesh’ are brought to an end
  • (d) ‘living by faith’ is not equivalent to ‘living by the Spirit’

So the third stage or step, living by the Spirit relates strongly with the spiritual realization of the Sufis. Which is also something that is also received, and which as mentioned in the show about Paul, means to be able to receive and discern the truth.
 
Though we had discussed a few of the intriguing ideas in the novel Flatland on a previous show, we decided that the book was so chock full of insights it deserved its own show.

That was a great show, thanks! It's worth a rewatch/listen. I checked out the Rucker book and it seems interesting: The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (Dover Books on Science): Rucker, Rudy: 9780486779782: Amazon.com: Books

So doing what is out of the ordinary for one's self is accessing 4D potential realities. Or at least that's how I understood it. This is something that is difficult for me, because I don't know how to stray healthily from my routine. It also reminds me of this Don Juan quote:

Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations.

I think I know what is meant by movement toward somewhere being the 4th dimensional direction. It seems you get glimpses or feelings of it when you're in the right place and time doing the right thing. Is it perhaps movement towards Union with the One, or your destiny?
 
Following the discussion regarding Flatland, I found this interesting article and set of videos from the Solari Report (think Catherine Austin Fitts). Start with video at the top of the article for context.


Wikki for Ulrike Granogger


I don't have the knowledge background to even contemplate if an element of truth exists in the article or videos represented, but to my mind it seems to be using a mechanical explanation of how the human brain interfaces with the cosmos and the reality we live in. The reason for this post is to figure out and leave it to open discussion, to help me understand the concepts and also it's impact on our understanding of how our behavior, thought and ideas all stem from our neurological system as one of the primary drivers of consciousness.


The only portion of the video for me that I could relate to in a human sense. Is the effect of social distancing in our society, which, I believe will continue for the duration of the life on this planet at this time. And from my perspective has been spectacular in it's success, using fear and manipulation. The rest looked like some geometrical models, it reminded me of back in the day when sacred geometry was all the vogue. I even cught up with the bug, and have a set of sacred geometrical models, in quartz. Can't find them now.

From the article - some snips of interest

For most people, the thought of hyperspace is frightening and complex, but for our brains it is just a way of being.

However, we should not leave the domain of hyperdimensions to the physicists and mathematicians alone. There is "intelligence" in hyperspace that goes unnoticed if we do not claim our place in it. This starts by consciously thinking about dimensions higher than our familiar 3-D (Cartesian) coordinates. Something changes in us when we grasp at least an aspect of the next dimension. So, with this Future Science report, I hope to take us on the first steps of that journey.


My question is why the domain of hyper dimensions and mathematical models by physicists and mathematicians is negated? Seems to me that is all we have at this time for the explanation of "high Strangeness" in our reality.

Such a report is bound to remain transitory and incomplete. The idea is not to give you a full explanation of what hyperspace and hyper dimensions are—not even the best scientists can do that. My intention is to provide some teasers and insights into how essential it is that we all learn to think in hyperspace.

Again, to me is gobbledygook, what is thinking in hyper dimensions and hyper realities, when the vast majority of the population of our world, are struggling with 3D reality. And even the best scientists cannot do that, so we are informed by the article.


For Let's Go to the Movies, I would like to suggest seeing the film Interstellar. If you haven't seen it, it is beautifully made Hollywood entertainment with great elements from hyperdimensional physics—it gives a good backdrop as to why we should know about the next few dimensional steps "up.".

The example of a tesseract if rather vague (not sure I can really understand it myself). I think Dr. Who had a better handle on it.

Regarding social distances, there is an area called social place cells, (which was apparently discovered in bats) in the hippocampus, note the article given as an example in the beginning video links to the article, Social place in the bat hippocampus. From the above dialogue from the video at the top of the page, it starts at almost the end of the video, the conclusion of you will.

"It makes her wonder if the whole social distancing experiment, that we are observing now is a giant experiment on place cell mapping. Is the whole mystery of space encoding into the whole brain cell of a species? And how does the whole seclusion and separation of "species" we living with NOW affect our brain maps, when we no longer see other members of our "Species" any longer moving around us so we could see a relative brain map. What does this do to our sense of space, and could this be possible or to attenuate a species brain map of space and reprogram it"

I also wonder about the effect on out DNA as a human family


There was another link in the video to an article that struck me from Google "Our Mental Maps" as a layer to Google Maps.

From the above information, it suggest to me destroying the link of the divine of true conscious capabilities in our younger members humanity (our future generations) for those that choose the path, that long and winding road, of true being.

Just my thoughts, that have again sent me off into a mosaic of thought by the "Brilliant" team of Mind Matters

Thanks for the mind bender, hope this makes sense.
 
Regarding social distances, there is an area called social place cells, (which was apparently discovered in bats) in the hippocampus, note the article given as an example in the beginning video links to the article, Social place in the bat hippocampus. From the above dialogue from the video at the top of the page, it starts at almost the end of the video, the conclusion of you will.

"It makes her wonder if the whole social distancing experiment, that we are observing now is a giant experiment on place cell mapping. Is the whole mystery of space encoding into the whole brain cell of a species? And how does the whole seclusion and separation of "species" we living with NOW affect our brain maps, when we no longer see other members of our "Species" any longer moving around us so we could see a relative brain map. What does this do to our sense of space, and could this be possible or to attenuate a species brain map of space and reprogram it"

Thank you, Joan, and a good review - and you have added more of your thoughts.

Given that this was brought in by Fitts, and there was some focus on "place cells' by the presenter, Ulrike Granögger - who also discussed AI implications, and as you mentioned, Googles interests (social distancing and place cells), all very interesting. The concepts of geometrical arrangements and building forms needs more reflecting, and was thinking of its elasticity, the way it learns, and even how NO might play a role to help focus and stimulate. The hyperdimensionality of the brain is weaved in and out here.

Examples of geometrical structures in connecting networks:

1591683292195.png1591683331160.png

Here is the video link that it can be downloaded from for future reference. Here also is the link to the Blue Brain Project ("The goal of the Blue Brain Project is to build biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the rodent, and ultimately the human brain."), which has not been explored. Here also is the paper reference in the film 'Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function'.
 
You also talks about comets that appeared in 6th century, but the alchemy appeared in 12th. So why was there a 600 years of time lag, if the comets really had an effect on people?

I forgot about Islamic Golden Age that happened after the fall of Rome: Islamic Golden Age - Wikipedia

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Caliphate and the Islamic civilization. Much more is known about Islamic alchemy as it was better documented; most of the earlier writings that have come down through the years were preserved as Arabic translations.

 
We hope everyone gets something out of our most recent show:

MindMatters: Try Not To Lie: The Value Of Honesty With The Self And Others

As the old adage goes, "The truth shall set you free." But if that's true then why do we quite often have such a difficult time of being honest with ourselves? And just as importantly, why do we struggle so much in being honest with others? Programmed or wired to deny that we have personal shortcomings - or fearing the consequences of honest communication about others' failings - we quite often opt for the easy out, keeping things to ourselves and attempting to avoid the potential pain and discord that may come of telling it like it is. Like a festering wound, the lies we tell ourselves and accept from others infects the very quality and well being of our selves and the lives of those around us.

On this week's MindMatters we discuss why one should have less fear of truthful communication - and a greater willingness to be honest. While there is always a risk of hurt, the uncertainty of misunderstanding, and the discomfort of vulnerability - what is easily overlooked is the greater meaning, understanding, and intimacy that may be added to one's life and relationships - if we were only more honest (assuming the people around you share this value). At at time in human existence when we are struggling to make sense of complex and rapidly occurring world-changing events, how can we achieve a semblance of true understanding when, at square one, we are dishonest with ourselves and the souls immediately surrounding us?


 
Thanks guys for the new format and the Youtube versions. Adds so much to be able to see you when listening.

With some help from the YouTube transcript, I've transcribed the most recent show below (a fantastic listen). Edited for grammar etc. Looking forward to (as Harrison so lightly put it) finding out what happens next in the story of ‘Pathocracy’. Some bedside Grimm fairy tale!


Inside Ponerology: What Is A Pathocracy?

MindMatters

Published on May 4, 2019
On Chapter 5 of Andrew Lobaczewski's "Political Ponerology".

Harrison Koehli
Corey Schink

Elan Martin

INTRODUCTION

Harrison Koehli

Hi everyone welcome back.

Today we are going to return to discuss one of our favourite books. We've discussed this book many times on our previous show ‘The Truth Perspective, which is ‘Political Ponerology’ by Andrew Lobaczewski written originally over a period of many years but in its final form in 1984-1985 (but only published in 2006).

So for those of our new viewers who may not have previously listened to the ‘Truth Perspective’, I'll just give it a short introduction. Just a note that eventually sometime in the near future we will be putting up all of our old shows on Ponerology (though they don't have video so we'll just be throwing them up on YouTube with some background images so they're all in one place) so you can check those out after the fact.

So we've discussed several of the chapters in the book covering various topics that Lobaczewski covers. Today we're going to look at CHAPTER 5 which deals with what Lobaczewski calls ‘Pathocracy’.

Just to give a little bit of background; ‘Ponerology’ was what Lobaczewski attempts to describe from what he specifically experienced in communist Poland, with also some reference to Nazi Germany and World War II, with the rise of communism and the effect that had on not only the Soviet Union but all the countries that were, as he might say, infected by the communist ideology and system of government. He chooses not to call such a system of government either communist or totalitarian but to come up with a new word ‘Pathocracy’ because he argues that the most important feature, the most important way of understanding and explaining such a system of government, is through psychology. In that approach he has something in common with Jordan Peterson who, if you listen to any of his lectures on these topics, doesn't regard political analysis as the be-all-end-all of coming to terms with phenomena as the world saw in the Soviet Union as well as in several other kinds of totalitarian systems of government in the 20th century (and also in the past).

When look back at history and try to understand what was going on and why things happened, Lobaczewski (?) said political analysis will only get you so far; the same with economic analysis. For if you look at everything through an economic lens you're going to have an impoverished view of what's actually happening, because to understand human movements, human organizations, social structures, etc, you need to have as good and accurate understanding as possible of the human individual, of human psychology, and that means in all variations of human psychology, because if you just assume all humans are correct and you take just one or two parameters and you say all humans are like this, you're going to get a really inadequate framework with which to look at these phenomena.

So as a clinical psychologists himself - as a psychotherapist - he would argue that thanks to the education system in Europe prior to the communist takeover that he had a pretty good grasp of human nature, at least better than the Communists did and arguably better than Western psychologists today have for numerous reasons.

Luckily at that time - the 1930s and 1940s - there had been a lot of good Eastern European psychologists and psychiatrists who had looked at psychopathology in a particular way – at personality disorders in a particular way - and when the Communists took over those were some of the first books and ideas that were essentially banned from the Universities and couldn't be taught. Luckily Lobaczewski graduated the year after the communist party took over in Poland and so he was in the last generation of psychologists there who had been instructed in that old school, and right away when that happened this academic community - the community of psychologists, sociologists and related fields - had an inkling that something was going on in the country (5:00), that at its root it was psychopathological, that what they were seeing was like a macro-social phenomenon - a widespread social phenomenon - that could be explained and understood in terms of the things that they were teaching, the things that they knew about psychopathology.

So for decades Lobaczewski and numerous other colleagues, most of whom remain unnamed as Lobaczewski didn't even know their names as they operated in secret and he called it a ‘scientific conspiracy’, like an underground research community that were psychoanalyzing… they weren't psychoanalysts but analyzing the system, the people in charge, through the lens of psychopathology. And so over the decades there were numerous run-ins with the law; I think most people in the Eastern Bloc knew someone who was arrested at one point or another, and Lobaczewski himself was arrested numerous times and tortured on several occasions and eventually exiled from Poland and lived for years in the United States before moving back to Poland where he eventually died.

So he wrote this book in New York in the 1980s after having lost previous manuscripts - having to destroy them because of secret police raids and things like that - and so this is the chapter that we're going to be looking at today… it would be good to search out our ‘Truth Perspective’ episodes on the other chapters to get some background because some of what he says in here is dependent on those earlier ideas, but I think any new viewers will be able to follow what's going on regardless and we'll try to give some background to.

So as I said, this chapter is Chapter 5 on ‘Ponerology’, a form of social government system in its final form, because in previous chapters he described stages in history and how history seems to ebb and flow - there's highs and lows - and one of the lows that some societies fall into is this one he calls ‘Pathocracy’ which is a totalitarian system of government that effects everything from the lowest level of social organization to the highest; from the top leadership positions down to village functionaries and police chiefs and indeed any system in which there's a hierarchy… any mini-hierarchy within a larger hierarchy is like a fractal of the whole – you find the same dynamic at every level. If you've read Solzhenitsyn for example, then you have some idea of what life is like.

You could describe it as a system of terror coercion, censorship, the search for complete control over people's lives, and in a sense that touches their lives and touches everyone's life. No one can remain outside the system and Lobaczewski would argue no one can even escape the reality of the system; no one can be deceived, for it touches the vast majority of people and the vast majority of people will have some inkling of what's going on.

Skipping ahead a bit - so this is a spoiler alert - there's a point in a ‘Pathocracy’ that Lobaczewski describes where it reaches a societal polarization – and here he’s not talking about the polarization as we see in the United States for instance between the left and the right or where we see polarizations and dynamics like that in many other countries where we have division within the populace – no; what he's talking about is a division between the populace itself and the leadership. So you actually have a uniting of the people of a nation in opposition to the tiny group of people who, as in the communist system, constituted the party, the people affiliated with the party and the people doing the parties dirty work. So actually one of the perhaps positives of a ‘Pathocracy’ is that its does actually does unify the people against the Pathocrats.

So in this first section of the chapter (10:00) we're going to be looking at what he attempts to lay out as the three phases of a ‘Pathocracy’, so we'll be getting into those, but before we’ll give a bit of background on how Lobaczewski argues that a ‘Pathocracy’ first comes about, that is the main way in which it comes about is out of what he calls ‘a period of maximal hysteria in a society’. In a previous chapter he described what he called like the hysterical or the ‘hysteroidal cycle’ - that there's first a cycle where people have relatively good common sense for a period of time and then suddenly societal hysteria just increases to the point where, for instance, psychotherapists or psychoanalysts in the late 1800s-early 1900s saw a rise in the instances of actual cases of hysteria. Today we don't seem to have the same kind of hysteria that they had back then, so hysteria seems to take on different forms depending on the culture and the times we're living in. Back then there were a lot of hysterical illnesses such as hysterical blindness or loss of the use of a limb and these were not actual physical problems with individuals rather it was some form of a psychogenic illness. So for some emotional reason or other someone might lose their eyesight and that's the way that hysteria was characterized back then. Basically a physical symptom caused by an emotional disturbance.

We appear to see similar things in the United States today for instance… and there have been several kind of outbreaks of hysteria in the last 30 years as in the 1980s with satanic ritual abuse and in the 1990s there was bulimia (I think it was in the 1990s) and multiple personality disorder, and if you compare the numbers for multiple personality disorder now compared to back then you'll see that there were way more cases back then. We did a show on social contagions actually on the ‘Truth Perspective’ and how a lot of these things are spread by social contagion, emotional contagion, so the actual manifestation of it might change from time to time… and so those are just some of the examples of things that have kind of cropped up in the last 30 years… and just recently I’d argue that there are at least a few indicators of the level of growing hysteria in Western culture today, particularly in the US. For instance there's the anti-Russian hysteria that has infected the educated elite class of media personalities and what you might call like the establishment class, but I don't think the majority of just regular people are really hysterical about the Russian Menace. Only to the degree that it filters down from the media.

But something that is filtering down to the level of teenage life for instance, is certain forms of gender dysphoria where some researchers have argued that there are different types of gender dysphoria. One of them is a form of social contagion that happens, for example, when you have a group of young female friends that all together are showing signs of gender dysphoria - I think they call it ‘Rapid onset gender dysphoria’ - but it's something that comes on quickly and because of social influences, because of peer influences, and also on…. what's that website where there's a lot of stuff that kids go on…? I think it's Tumblr … but a lot of teens are on those, especially young girls, and there are a lot groomers on there that are really influencing primarily young girls but also young boys too - and it seems to be similar to another outbreak of social contagion.

Another example that we talked about on the show that we did on that subject was suicides, because suicides tend to spread in a form of social contagion. We gave the example of this one high school in Palo Alto I think and how there are suicide epidemics where one kid will commit suicide and all of a sudden you'll get a cluster. That's the way suicides tend to happen; that one person commits suicide and it influences (15:00) a whole bunch of other people to commit suicide and you get these clusters that pop up, especially if the person well-known. There are some cases of relatively well-known celebrity figures who commit suicide and that brings about just a huge cluster of suicides.

So there are various things that spread by social contagion, hysteria being perhaps a catch-all for a lot of these phenomena. In these periods of maximal social hysteria, that's the point at which Lobaczewski says that a Pathocracy could come about. It's not that it always comes about; it's not that all periods of hysteria lead to a totalitarian system of government but it can. So there are other features that need to be taking place concurrently with the period of hysteria to lead to this social breakdown and the formation of an entirely new social structure.

So according to Lobaczewski one of the prerequisites that needs to be there is that the overall level of reason and the ties that make up a stable social structure need to have degenerated to a certain extent and in a situation of social hysteria they do. For instance the period leading up to the Nazi takeover in Germany or leading to the Russian Revolution, a period of societal chaos of a certain type with a system breaking down but still there - like the Czarist system in Russia - then that hysteria naturally leads to a lack of reason, a lack of reasoning ability and the actual practice of reasoning in the population. The combination of those several different features creates the kind of perfect breeding ground for a totalitarian takeover.

The way that actually happens in its pure form is primarily through a revolution of some sort, because revolutions are what tear down an existing system and replace them with a new one. It's just that in this case there are particular features of the movement that is doing the tearing down and the piecing back together and this leads to what Lobaczewski calls the ‘Spontaneous generation of Pathocracy’, and he uses those words deliberately because it seems when you're observing these type of phenomena it seems to be this thing that just takes place organically… it seems to be like a disease process but on a social level, that's why calls it a societal disease. What he does in the book is try to explain the features and how and why it comes about.

Before we get into the phases, I'll just read one quote from the first bit of this chapter just to set the stage. He writes:

‘…a psychologically normal highly intelligent person called to high office normally experiences doubts as to whether he can meet the demands expected of him and seeks the assistance of others whose opinions he values. At the same time he feels nostalgia for his old life, freer and less burdensome, to which he would like to return after fulfilling his social obligations.’

I'll read another paragraph after that, but first I'll just a short commentary on the above.

I think that's probably the way most normal people feel even if they're put into a position of leadership in their regular lives. Like at work or on a non-profit board or something - some kind of volunteer work that they do that feels like a burden - for when we look in terms of politics it seems as if most of the people that go into politics are there because they want to go into politics for some odd reason; it's as if it's not thrust upon them and they have to just cope with it and would rather be doing something else - it's as if the chances are in our systems at least (and probably throughout all of history) people seeking power are seeking it for a particular reason and seem to be fine with it once they get it.

Of course there are a lot of people who are still relatively decent and responsible and do view their own political life as a service, a responsibility, a burden, especially the best leaders like Dag Hammarskjöld at the UN who viewed it as the gravest responsibility and didn't particularly like it. I think he liked the work and he liked putting everything he had into the work but it was a great burden on him and he was looking forward to retiring and finally writing (20:00) books and enjoying a regular life. But he devoted himself a hundred percent and, unfortunately in his case, as is the case too often with individuals like him, was assassinated before he got a chance to retire.

Then you've Bashar al-Assad in Syria who, though he's demonized in the Western press, never sought power. He wasn't even ever supposed to be the president of Syria – it was supposed to be his brother who died in a car accident or something - and it was basically ‘okay Bashar, it's up to you now’ and he was fine living his life as an ophthalmologist or whatever he was and he never had any pretensions to power and so got placed into it. State Senator Richard Black who’s met with Assad a couple times and did a recent interview about a month ago - or maybe it's just a couple of weeks ago - where he was talking about his impressions of Bashar al-Assad, basically said that anyone who listens to the media receives a total misrepresentation of the guy; that when you actually meet him in person, like Senator Black did, that he's almost shy… you can tell by watching the videos of him he’s a very soft personality… he's a soft-spoken eye doctor who's been placed in this wartime scenario… though the wartime scenario has paradoxically brought out some of his best qualities… again you can't believe everything you hear about him… and that in Senator Black’s opinion, Assad isn't like a normal wartime president, and he doesn't like war; he would much rather be leading over a peaceful country and if it were not for Assad the Syrian army, and whoever else would have been leading it, would have been much more brutal. Because of Assad the Syrian army is actually really reserved compared to a lot a lot of other nations engaging in warfare such as Saudi Arabia for instance.

That’s just to give a couple examples of their approach to leadership and the personal response to being placed in that position, but from their Lobaczewski goes on:

‘…every society worldwide contains individuals whose dreams of power arise very early, as we've already discussed in previous chapters. They are generally discriminated against in some way by society which uses a moralizing interpretation with regard to their failings and difficulties although these individuals are rarely guilty of them in the precise terms of morality. They would like to change this unfriendly world into something else. Dreams of power also represent over compensation for feelings of humiliation. A significant and active proportion of this group is composed of individuals with various deviations who imagine this better world in their own way, of which we were already familiar.’

There he's referring to people with certain types of personality disorders and we've had previous shows on those. In the inner life of individuals like this they do feel different because there is something fundamentally different about them… they don't experience the world in the same way that the vast majority of people do. This is most relevant in the emotional response that Psychopaths have; they don't have a regular emotional response to anything, at least not ‘normal’ in terms of the way people experience emotions, and because of that they feel oppressed by society and that society's out to get them. It's unfair, they're mistreated and they can't do what they want to do, they can't do what seems to come naturally to them and what they feel should be their right to act out, which is basically to live off of other people, be parasites with the worst of them wanting to torture and kill. This is where you get sadistic personalities and serial killers etc. (the most sensational stories that you read in the news). So from a young age they realize that there's something different about them, they don't really fit in, and they would much rather be the people in charge to create a society where they can essentially get whatever they want and have the masses of people as slaves for them. That is essentially what they seek to achieve and what they end up achieving if the processes that lead to a ‘Pathocracy’ happen together and manage to take place.

I'll end this short introduction there before we get into the three phases, so maybe before we go on (25:00) do either of you want to say anything or maybe just go straight into the first phase?

Corey Schink
I just wanted to touch on what you were discussing about hysteria and you gave a number of really good examples of hysteria and how it spreads through our society like a contagion.

I just wanted to talk about the common denominator that unifies all those different examples, and that's the possessive nature of the mental illness that causes all these people to behave in ways that are irrational… and yet at the same time its as if ones been imbibing a load of alcohol and you don't realize it until you wake up from it, don't realize how irrational and self-destructive your behaviour is until you it's too late… Lobaczewski says that's just a part of the historical cycle but one that still generates various forms of evils itself. It's not exactly the same as the phenomenon of ‘Pathocracy’ but it contributes quite a bit to the rise of pathology because you have to look at society in at least two different camps; one in terms of just normal people with all the normal human moral failings, and then a second with this ‘incompetence hierarchy’, this evil hierarchy that actually develops from an incompetence hierarchy of people who view the world as radically different.

When people live on cheap emotions and fetishes for so long and they see everything from an emotional point of view, moralizing about everything, they weaken their defences … I guess you could say their moral and spiritual defences… so that the things that are said by others who are, for all intents and purposes, snake oil salesmen or just pure consciously evil, they end up open to that influence, they open themselves up to not only believing but acting upon the orders and the advice of people who, in any other era of more healthy common sense, would be viewed as irrelevant at best - just like the local drunk who whines about how life is horrible for him and he's violent and he's always getting into fights… well when there's a huge crisis in society, somebody like that who is decisive and has a quick answer for everything, all of a sudden gets an elevated position in the eyes of ordinary people who don't know exactly who to turn to, they don't know what's going on. If there's famine, there are wars, there’s strife - all of these things that contribute to maximum hysteria, the hysteria in society - they leave the opening for all of these pathological individuals to make their way into forming a ‘Pathocracy’. It’s like you said, they spontaneously just join up; they all search each other out, because they know what they want in some way.

We’ll get into the actual differences between the different phases, but there are different types of individuals: there are useful idiots; there's people who really do believe in whatever ideology or simple belief, simple answers that they've been told or that they've heard from people who really do believe in them; then you get people in the evil hierarchy who are just good at brutalizing, they're just sadistic… when you need somebody to turn to in order to shape up a village and so you turn to them and they're just ‘good’ serial killers really and they're useful in that sense; and then you have individuals who are good at spellbinding others and in rallying people, spreading the contagion; and you have, as you said, just the purely evil psychopaths.

At every phase they all play different roles and it's really fascinating when you read this chapter to get an idea of kind of the sociological evolution of a ‘Pathocracy’ and an explanation really for why it is that we saw several develop - in Stalinist Soviet Union and the Nazis - you see how these pathocracies formed and it explains (30:00) also why they acted the way that they did.

You can see very different pathological leadership personalities of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and when you can see there are different forms of pathology you get an idea why things turned out differently for each group. You really need to factor in that dimension of how they were crazy. You look at Stalin and he was crazy, he was a absolute dictator, an absolute workaholic, who had absolutely no heart and murdered millions of people, but you also see you how he learned lessons from Lenin and Trotsky and all the others and was a political snake and able to craft a system that survived for decades based on terror –

Harrison Koehli
He was arguably a genius at it too!

Corey Schink
- That’s right. So where you get this hierarchy of evils you see different competencies. I guess you could say that these individuals need this whole system as a whole, in order to last for that amount of time (short though it was) before it basically implodes from its own incompetence.

Elan Martin
Well Corey you mentioned one of the roles in this ‘Pathocracy’ as being that of a Spellbinder. I couldn't help but reflect on what we've been seeing in the rise of Alexandria Acasio-Cortez (AAC) and her Green New Deal movement when reading this chapter on ‘Pathocracy’. She's young, attractive, charming and seemingly out of nowhere takes centre stage to put in the minds of many people that the grand social solution to everyone's ills - in terms of equality and environmental concerns among many other things - and if you look into how this is based on Agenda 21, in this global range of policies that seeks to regulate and transform society on every level, it seems as if this form of (on the surface of it anyway) soft power legislation of a ‘Pathocracy’ is where the oppression would be coming about in… well these things are always presented as good for the people and for the greater amount of people who are suffering in one way or another… but on every level if you pick apart these policies that she's been advocating, that she's been the new spokesperson for and showman of, you'll very much see that she fulfils this spellbinder role among many on the Left who are looking to her as this new figurehead.

It's very interesting that she has this whole cult of personality thing - that she's buttressed by. Behind the scenes there's an individual called Saikat Chakrabarti who's the silent partner in the wings of the whole movement behind the Green New Deal and who has been creating these brand new congress based and various other new Democratic organizations, that are decidedly meant to thrust forward into power people who subscribe to this ideology - into Congress, into the Senate.

They have a whole plan for this and she was really one of these people who was hand-picked by Chakrabarti and his entire little cadre of political apparatchiks. He's a Silicon Valley millionaire who made his career designing software and so he's self-made. Not six or eight months into forming some of these organizations he's already being accused of funnelling money out of the packs – the donations - so there's already this gray area of intention (35:00).

It's interesting that in one of his interviews he's wearing a t-shirt of an individual named Subhas Chandra Bose, an interesting figure (or was) in the 1930s and 1940s. Bose was an Indian nationalist who ostensibly was trying to fight British colonialism in India but made alliances with the Nazis and had sympathies with Stalin's Russia. Finally he had a group of three or four thousand nationals in Germany who were working with him and, as the biography goes, he turned his back on them and ultimately slipped away aboard a submarine to go to Japan where he thought he'd get more political support. This left the men he had recruited leaderless and demoralized in Germany.

I think that this is a very interesting person for Chakrabarti to hold up as an ideological hero, as someone who inspires him to be a proponent of ‘Agenda 21’ and other of these socialist policies that AAC is a ‘front man’ for. The fact that he would leave his people high and dry and his point of inspiration reminds me of a quote from Lobaczewski that describes this whole phenomena. There's something called ‘schizoidal psychopathy’ and what Lobaczewski says is that:

‘…schizoids are hypersensitive and distrustful while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situations and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous pejorative interpretations upon other people's intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature…’

I think the key here - or one of the keys here - is ‘they easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others’; so they become part of or lead organizations which on the superficial surface of things seems designed to help others, to be of benefit to society at large, yet ultimately - because they lack this fuller psychological understanding of people and of the depth of their policies and how they will affect things - they tend to screw up things more. So that's exactly what I see, at least in potential, with ACC and her Green New Deal. Even if
she's not meaning to - even if she's well-meaning - she has become a part of something which I think, if allowed to follow its natural course to its end without opposition, without people speaking up further on how these policies can be destructive, I think it'll be a pure disaster for the U.S.

Corey Schink
Just with regard to the Green New Deal, you do see this phenomenon in the impoverished worldview that went into creating it and pushing for it as legislation. But I also see positive signs in that it was laughed out of Congress by so many people, that we still are at that point where there's still enough common sense that sees through the schizoidal idea and it's not just taken as legal tender.

I'm thinking of Russia before the Russian Revolution where, okay Marxism, the Communist Manifesto, etc… but everybody's on board... even if it's illegal, let's all do this - why not? It can't get any worse, right?! (40:00) but in terms of schizoid individuals that you were talking about, it reminds me of the agrarian socialist revolutions that were carried out in Russia in the 19th century before Marx even was a thing, there was this large push to reform Russia and to make life better for everyone by arming the peasants and educating them. All these socialists thought the best way to do this and to bring down the evil empire was to assassinate thousands and thousands of Czarist officials and that's what they did. But the backlash against that was the imposition of a police state that then left Stalin with all of the recruits and the infrastructure that he needed to effectively impose his own police state.

So you see how the schizoidal world view of how we can save the world, with ‘oh let's kill the evil empire’, fed directly into a situation that was incomparable in terms of the suffering that was impacted on the Russian people, suffering that they're still reeling from today as a culture.

Elan Martin
One last point on that Green New Deal; you said that it was actually voted down in congress, that it hasn't been taken as legal tender, but what's so maniacal about this plan is that in anticipating such a rejection, the people behind this whole movement have actually gone directly to the expression ‘Think local’ or ‘Think global, act local,’, and have gone directly to the mayor's and the towns across the US creating these action plans, these community action plans, that are supposed to get people involved at a local level, so that they can ultimately overturn any kind of federal oversight on this. So whoever's thinking about how to push all this stuff through is absolutely Machiavellian in what they're attempting to do and how they're attempting to do it.

And on that note we can get into the three stages of Pathocarcy…

Harrison Koehli
Maybe just a couple comments on that discussion first.

Well it actually it’s a good lead-in to the first phase - because you brought up a couple of points such as the idea of spellbinders and schizoidals - so I just want to give a little background on that.

In the Truth Perspective show ‘What MAGA-hat Kid Can Teach Us About The Corruption of Ideology’, we talked about the section in ‘Political Ponerology’ about spellbinders. I’d just say I think that ACC has the potential to be a Spellbinder. I don't think she is one now though; I think she's just a smoke-spokesman who happens to not be very smart, like the guy that we were talking about - the black Hebrew nationalist. That guy was a Spellbinder. Spellbinders in the context that Lobaczewski is describing them have to have a bit more brutality to their spell-binding. It's as if there's a suggestiveness in the way they put their ideology into action; that in the case of a ‘Pathocracy’ it’s essentially a call to violent revolution. There's just a hint of - and not even necessarily a hint often but more an explicit call for - something extreme, whereas in any kind of politics you're going to get PR people, spokesmen, people pushing policies good or bad (and who can do it relatively well). So there's an extra thing on top of that when it comes to Spellbinder level stuff… so that's why I say she has the potential to be one because if the seeds of this ‘Ponorogenesis’ - the genesis of political evil - are allowed to progress further, could you imagine ACC being in the vanguard of calling for taking off the heads of the rich? Maybe. By then they'll probably find someone else….
That's the lead-in to the first phase of ‘Pathocracy’, because you mentioned the idea of schizoids. Lobaczewski calls it ‘schizoid psychopathy’ (45:00). Today in the West we'd call it ‘schizoid personality disorder’. In a show we did on personality disorders, if we look at it in terms of the ‘Big Five’, I think that schizoids would be a introverted and unemotional; basically that's the way I figured out how to how to say it. So because of their lack of ‘affect’ to the degree that most people have it and they're introversion, the way Lobaczewski describes it is that they come up with these grand doctrines.

Last week for instance we were talking about Marx and the hints of his own schizoidal ideas. (It’s individuals like him) who come up with the theory of how to fix everything. They can see what's wrong with the world and they have that link with the majority of people, with a more normal affect, more normal emotionality, so they do see problems with the world and they do want solutions. The problem is that because of that lack of affect and that lack of a deeper understanding of human nature, they come up with bad theories - theories that can't be implemented because of the lack of understanding of the way humanity actually works. So they come up with grand theories often with a simplistic narrative and a simplistic idea of what it is that can fix the world.

Communism is a great example. If you read Marx himself - and there's a lot to it - but the ideas themselves come down to something very simplistic, such as viewing people as primarily economic animals (or at least that's how a lot of people that try to implement Marxist ideas see it). That’s what contributes to the first phase of ‘Pathocracy’ where you've got these psychologically impoverished and eccentric individuals who come up with the theories which form the seed of the ideology which will then be used by the entire movement. And because they're identifying real problems and presenting what appear to be real solutions, they can get massive popular support.

That's why there were a lot - and there still are a lot of communists for instance - but especially before the Russian Revolution, there were a lot of socialists and communist like groups that were all supportive of the idea of a revolution. They might not have been happy with what they got but there was popular support for movements of these sorts. But what Lobaczewski points out is that it's this ideology that allows the first phase to take place because - as we said in a previous show - he distinguishes between ‘Primary and Secondary Ponerogenic unions’ which is essentially a group of pathological people.

A Primary Ponerogenic union is a group of pathologically criminal people, as you find with the mob, an organized network of criminality. Lobaczewski points out if you have someone that's officially running on the mob ticket in an election, he's (making it clear he’s) on the mob party and engaged in all kinds of shady business transactions and will kill a lot of people and try to get away with it. No one would vote for that guy - people won't resonate with that kind of in-your-face pathology.

But if you get a politician who is being secretly paid by the mob, who is pretending to be a great guy and he's looking for all these policies to help certain businesses and he appears like a normal guy, then people will vote for him. So a Secondary Ponerogenic union is basically a political group which appears to be aboveboard, that normal people can get behind. Normal people can say ‘those people are just like me; they won't want what I don’t want and I'll give them my support, because I believe in their ideals’, when actually that movement is essentially just a front; what they really want is something completely different.

So it's the schizoidal ideology that allows that to happen because that is the mask that is worn by a political movement as in the communist revolutions, and so people could get behind the revolution because there were real problems that people wanted solutions to - they wanted a change; and it seemed as if these communist revolutions were a good idea and they would give people what they wanted (50:00) and got massive public support. But the actual people behind and steering the movement have different goals entirely; they don't want what their supporters want and they don't want what their own ideology says it wants; they don't actually want, as in a true communist revolution, to give power to the people; they just want a vehicle by which they can take power and then further exploit the people, the very people that were supporting them in the first place.

So the first phase is really the development of this ideology and the support it gains from the people and actually the formation of a political and social movement. Some of the points that Lobaczewski makes about it is that the first mistake people make when seeing or reading the output of individuals of this sort - or engaging with this sort of ideology - the first a mistake is to take their ideas seriously because there will always be like a fatal flaw in that ideology. There will be something about it, as a result of that lack of understanding of human nature, which will inevitably lead to disaster. As we see with Marx for instance; I mentioned this in the show last week. There are three reactions to an ideology of this sort. First there's the rejection of the ideology and the reasons for that rejection - and he lists examples, personal reasons, such as you might not like the people, you might have intellectual reasons for rejecting it, you don't agree with the ideology for some reason, you're part of a different camp, part of a different school. So it's off limits or you might just be morally repulsed by it and reject it on those grounds.

But as I said last week for any of these rejections, (the danger lies in) not understanding the most basic reasons why these ideologies are bad or will lead to failure because they lack that human understanding… there will always be a moralizing interpretation in these, so there will be an irrational element in the rejection of the ideology as opposed to having good, solid reasons at every stage and for every point - and primarily on the psychological reason.

Then there's the people that accept the ideology; these would be the popular support that a social movement gains and he called that ‘critically corrective’ because it's the people that say ‘oh well, I can agree with these points in the system and that's kind of good. I don't really like those other things but we can ignore the bad stuff and just focus on the good stuff’, often to their peril. Because the bad stuff (in the ideology) is often what leads to the bad stuff that ends up happening or contributing to things that are unintended consequences basically.
So Lobaczewski gives examples of the people that will get behind a movement of this sort – e.g. it appeals to people who are downwardly adjusted. We talked about this in a previous show; so this is someone who's overqualified for their job and they're not in a position whereby they can fulfil their potential and who feel as if they should be doing better things but they’re just stuck in a bad job with a bad wage and they can't like raise themselves up. So that leads to a feeling of resentment especially towards the people who are upward adjusted. These are the incompetent people who are in charge, and that’s a breeding ground for this politics of resentment which a movement like a communist revolutionary movement appeals to; it's like ‘oh well, we can tear down the old order and I'll get what I deserve’.

A lot of young people to will get behind an ideology of this sort and also people who are socially neglected, which can be for example minority populations, especially if you're in a country that has a lot of religious and ethnic divisions. Last week I think I talked about various regions in Russia for instance where there could be 20 ethnic groups in the one region and a minority group might have control of that region and so the others feel neglected.

So wherever there is a fracture between society, wherever there's an internal polarization that can be exploited by a revolutionary movement of this sort, by a social (55:00) movement that wants change, wants to redress wrongs and make things more equitable and make everything good. So wherever there's a problem you can get the people that are experiencing that problem as supporters because the ideology identifies the problem, says ‘yes something's wrong and we know how to fix it’ – ‘Well great, so what else do you need!?’

The third one is what he calls ‘pathological acceptance’. These would be the people that essentially have personality disorders, who look at the ideology and say ‘oh well that's a great way to get power!’ There are degrees in there which also come into play in Phase 2 & 3. So this would be someone who joins say the Communist Party for instance because they know if it's successful, it's a great ticket to power which they can just ride the movement up to the very top and they'll be the ones on top now. So this is where we first see people joining the movement who take the original idea - as pathological as it is and as inadequate as it is – with still relatively normal people in that movement - just using and adopting a bad idea.

So you can see this in movements everywhere in every country and particularly in Western democracies - and wherever there are socialist movements and communist movements and others too. At the beginning when the majority of the people in the movement are just normal people, they're just maybe misguided, they've been duped by a false dream of a utopia that can be brought about.

But then you get people slowly joining the movement who are a bit more pathological. Lobaczewski would say this is when you start to get people with paranoid personality disorder and some people with frontal brain damage who lack self control and the ability to self reflect. So more of the kind of antisocial personality types start joining the movement and these would be the ones that end up acting as Spellbinders and what he calls ‘brutalizing the concepts’ – such as taking Marx and making a bit more of a brutal version of Marx - and they're the ones out in the streets using the ideology to call for a bit more violence, call for a bit more radical means of taking power, starting to make some hard decisions, making some hard choices that need to be taken and need to be made in order for the success of the movement.

For instance you can see a version of this taking place in resistance movements to foreign occupation; it's really easy for this to happen in the type of scenario that happened in Iraq after the American invasion. You have a ton of Iraqis who are rightfully resisting a foreign occupation and who are already engaging in guerrilla warfare and have already left the realm of normal society (because they’d been forced to in a sense) and so the restrictions on what is acceptable starts to break down. At that point it's very easy for more pathological individuals to start influencing a resistance movement and to say ‘you know if we really want to make our point we're going to have to kill all those people. They might be innocent but you know we're doing it for a good cause.’

Elan Martin
…and we'll rebrand ourselves Isis or ISIL…

Harrison Koehli
Yes, that eventually happens and happened - and that would from a bottom up that's how that's how the raw material is there for manipulation by even more pathological actors and even by foreign governments with their own agenda. ‘Here's something that we can use now’ (they say) and so you get all of these external factors influencing what was originally just a popular liberation movement. Look at the history of 20th century popular liberation movements - it's so easy for a movement of that sort that has a real wrong that (60:00) they want to fix - has a real grievance - it's so easy to pervert that into just another form of oppression.

Corey Schink
I've been reading a lot on the Russian Revolution (recently) and what followed after, and it reminds me of what was taking place when Russia set up the provisional government after the Tsar abdicated.

In 1917-18 they were (thinking) we don't have a Tsar anymore so now what are we going to do? Stalin and other prominent Marxist/Bolshevik politicians were grasping for power but they didn't quite know what to do with it so they were thinking that they had to create a coalition with other socialists and other Marxists because one of the things that anybody who had any sense of love for their homeland wanted to avoid at all cost was a civil war. That was the general idea, the general political will; we have all these soldiers returning, we have all of these problems, we have famine, we have disease, we have ethnic strife, and with this powder keg we have to form a coalition and just do whatever we can to avoid Civil War.

But then on the other hand Lenin had a completely different idea of what needed to take place, and so rather than writing to Stalin and to the others to say this is how we can form a plan with the other socialists etc or to gain power, he said we need to take the absolute revolutionary tack and we need to initiate that Civil War. Because Lenin was the archetype - that evil genius with that will to power who knew how to pull the strings in order to get what they wanted. He knew what they wanted and he knew that what they wanted above all was power, absolute power, and so then the only way to get that was not to share power with any of the other socialists, not to create coalition's - because then they would be divided and would have to make concessions to other political parties. So instead he hammered it home that it was time to increase the strife and increase the risk of civil war and then take power as soon as he could and that's what they did. They began arming themselves and I think a lot of people were disillusioned at that point. For at these stages in the rise of a ‘Pathocracy’, there's a breakdown between the adherence to the ideology and the natural human desire for well-being and the pathological mastermind, this archetypal evil that desires just pure power just to glorify the self and to dominate.

Harrison Koehli
We've already gone to the hour for today so maybe we'll just quickly cover ‘Phase Two’ and then next week we were planning on doing another show on this, so we'll then get into ‘Phase Three’ and then some of the next section in this chapter which is just some more features of a ‘Pathocracy’.

So just briefly getting into ‘Phase Two’, this would be where the dominance over the social/political movement starts to change over to what Lobaczewski calls ‘characterpaths’. These would be personality disorders of a certain type such as the ones I mentioned previously such as paranoiacs and those with frontal brain damage as well as more antisocial types.

This is where you get more of the spellbinding activity and the first time where the original ideology starts getting transformed bit by bit into what Lobaczewski calls it's ‘pathological counterpart’. This would be the point where the ideology is just a total mask, that there is nothing genuine about the ideology and there is a secondary purpose behind it. The ideology becomes just a Trojan horse for completely different motives and completely different purposes.

This has often been for me the tricky part; to see that the ideology itself, which for all this time leading up to this point has been genuine to a certain degree with people who believed in it… you've even have a lot (65:00) of the people espousing it as actually true believers and they're not even necessarily pathological to any great degree; they just have a bad idea. But as the movement becomes more Ponerized, as it becomes more saturated by individuals with personality disorders, the actual content and aims of the movement radically shift away from the original motivations.

As pathological as you might think Marxism is or indeed any kind of ideology… even right sector, or the alt-right or far right and neo-fascist ideologies, they're still ideologies; they still have things to believe in, as far out as they might seem to a lot of people. They can still get popular support because they appeal to emotions, to problems that normal people can get behind. But this is where you see that even that starts to be subverted, even these motivations which can have elements of violence and power seeking and of resentment and all the negative things that we might associate with ideology - there's something else even worse than all that behind the surface. That's what starts coming to the forefront in the Phase 2. So the way Lobaczewski would describe matters at this point is there may still not be any mass criminal acts… there still hasn't yet been any mass murders for instance (that's to come in the third stage)….

With that we will end it for today and come back next week where you'll find out what happens next in the story of ‘Pathocracy’.

So thanks Corey, thanks Elan for joining me and talking about this today. Take care everyone. Thank you.
Thanks for the show and the transcript Michael, it falls just in time, I am reading the book little by little everyday and it is not an easy book to read. Thank you!
 
From this post more than a year ago:

I'll be making a post sometime soon on the book "First Sight" by parapsychologist James Carpenter, who talks about this stuff - we'll also be doing a Truth Perspective on it in a couple weeks. (Spoiler: I've just started reading, but I have a hunch this book is very important!)

Was thrilled to listen to the MindMatters show today - the interview with Jim Carpenter and his book 'First Sight,' while hearing a bit about his life and what shaped his thoughts and work. The interview was back and forth, too, so there was some good sharing and alignments - yes, Sufism and Rumi.

Had just recently finished Malachi Martin's book discussed on the forum (put off for many years), and this interview brought up overlap; still thinking about it, the spiritual side vs the parapsychology side. Have not read First Sight.

Thanks a great deal for the interview!

 
Did not see this posted and caught the show last night:


Today on MindMatters we discuss these issues: conformity, originality, authenticity, and breaking free from the prison of ideological language designed not to find the truth, but as a weapon to bludgeon one's ideological enemies.

Each, the three of you, brought some important considering into the show, and as things have moved to where they are today, there is much more awareness needed of what one hears, how it is though of, and how one might respond where highlighted. Words get thrown out, nuance forgotten - launched to provoke a reaction i.e. from the SJW vocabulary of barbed words and statements. It's kind of a mine field.

Here is one (in this case now used at work), silly perhaps as it is, and as innocuous as the word seems it has incrementally taken on a different meaning; overplayed, used in the wrong way, a word that is as casual in time with its intent being pretty basic to understanding. It started a couple of years ago, not really being noticed as such, yet it has now fomented more recently with a new manager. The manager is a hybrid sjw/technocrat and it has been discerned that the word now used, repetitively as it is, has a sort of demeaning undertone, or at least as a subtle control word that takes individuality in a group and buttonholes it into a collective outside its original intent. The word is 'Team' and each address to all under the manager is team related in ways it has not been used before.

Team

team (n.)
Old English team "descendant, family, race, line; child-bearing, brood; company, band; set of draft animals yoked together," from Proto-Germanic *tau(h)maz (source also of Old Norse taumr, Old Frisian tam "bridle; progeny, line of descent," Dutch toom, Old High German zoum, German Zaum "bridle"), probably literally "that which draws," from PIE *douk-mo-, from root *deuk- "to lead."
Applied in Old English to groups of persons working together for some purpose, especially "group of people acting together to bring suit;" modern sense of "persons associated in some joint action" is from 1520s. Team spirit is recorded from 1928. Team player attested from 1886, originally in baseball.


team (v.)
1550s, "to harness beasts in a team," from team (n.). From 1841 as "drive a team." The meaning "to come together as a team" (usually with up) is attested from 1932. Transitive sense "to use (something) in conjunction" (with something else) is from 1948. Related: Teamed; teaming. The Old English verb, teaman, tieman, is attested only in the sense "bring forth, beget, engender, propagate.

Started reacting to its misuse in an incremental way, and asked myself what's with that, why does it bother. Perhaps it was built upon the fact that everything business-wise recently started to be framed as a team, including mass incorporation of the software from Microsoft Teams. Teams were everywhere. Teams R'US. The manger: Hi Team, the Team needs this, you are on my Team, you are on their Team, we have developed a Team, you are going against the Team - not part of the Team, the Team thinks this et cetera. The people who make up the team/group are never truly asked what they think, what they think is often provided readymade and dropped into the team, so don't ask where it came from if in disagreement, don't be in disagreement or you better watch your step underlines. No, many people doing the work have a different understanding and don't think the same way as the word is being used, used like an enforced group-think trigger.

With the proliferation of Microsoft Team online meetings, participants in the team might as well have a covid-team mask on. Individuality is being removed, not tolerated, it is against the team. Many people shut up - say nothing, don't want to appear offensive, because they also know that weaved into the word 'team' are all the other new social codewords that the team is supposed to frown upon, jump upon when there is the perception of the slightest violation against the Team's adopted ideological terms of reference.

Still processing this when it is seen in context, and many under the manager know there is no team in the context it is being used - thus again, no one says anything for fear of being branded for going against the team; mostly older people who are facing a new dawn of ideological group-think at work that has been noticed to have an increasing negative outcome.

Fwiw, that was just one word that came up after listening to the show, among many. So, bookmark, download or have a listen to the show if not done so, it's an important one, especially right now, osit.
 
Both inspired by the recent session (and already thinking about!), the subject of beauty, we made it the focus of our latest show:

MindMatters: The Ideal And Value of Beauty

From time to time we are struck with something we may deem "beautiful". We see a work of art, a landscape, or a face that speaks to an almost ephemeral ideal which demands our attention, acknowledgement and contemplation. But why does this occur? What is it that we, as individuals, are perceiving as beautiful? And what exactly is beauty anyway? In exploring this largely taken for granted dimension to human experience we ask: What place should it hold in our lives, and what value do we hold for it - and it for us?

This week on MindMatters we explore and expand on some common conceptions of things beautiful - from the mundane to the sublime. And we see how noticing and arranging things to be beautiful can be an invocation of our greatest ideals and values. In a time and place where we are surrounded by ugliness, the gifts and astonishment that may be found in beauty may be one more key in connecting to the highest part of the Universe, and to ourselves.


 
I've been having a blast watching the group on these shows. I have 2 questions though:

1) Will you guys be doing a show on process philosophy and Whitehead? It's often mentioned, and an overview would be helpful.
2) Will the Truth Perspective shows be uploaded on Youtube? They are also often mentioned, and I'd love to go listen to them as they are referred to in the Mind Matters show.

Thank you for your continuing work, I know quite a few people learning a lot from Mind Matters. Great job!
 
Back
Top Bottom