I can testify as someone who had many opportunities to watch closely how activists in many institutions/organizations operate (luckily from a safe distance, most of the time) that this is definitely true.
Many organizations purporting to be about justice and positive goals are in reality led by highly disordered individuals and stirred by mentality infected with disordered patterns of reasoning and emotion. These people gravitate toward positions of power and influence, and if there aren’t any, they’d generate ones and proceed to push unhinged agendas behind the scenes, without accountability.
The wider public needs to get wiser and understand this dynamic, as many of these people generate a huge amount of false advertising of what they’re actually doing – often they’re so delusional that they don’t see how disordered and damaging their behaviors are. Just because someone claims to be fighting for justice, human rights, or charitable causes doesn’t mean that this is what’s actually happening. There needs to be much more transparency and, hopefully, a way of reporting, monitoring, and holding people accountable for these activities, just as would be expected with elected representatives. No more carte blanche based on abstract declarations of positive goals.
True. Too many have been naive. It might even be a delusional feature of a too secular society - believing that people will naturally gravitate towards good morals and a sensible understanding of the world. This has never been the case. The vices and sirens are often/usually more seductive, especially if cloaked in deceptive language.
Yes. Also, I think that ordinary people often simply don't understand why someone would act like that, invest so much time/energy in certain goals, etc., if they weren't good and rational ones. Contrary to the perception often there isn't much money involved either. The reality is, however, that the motivations of many activists are influenced by personality disorders.
That’s interesting and totally makes sense of why we (presumably balanced people) ascribe benign motivations to people who aren’t balanced and whose motivations might be anything but benign. We simply dont think alike.
Yasss the political elite in red and blue states allowing it based on manipulated information usually by the activist bureaucracy that absolutely includes activist judges and magistrates. The destruction of the family is something that's been done and being done to every demographic with the use of the saturated industrial complex and process manipulation as well. Michael Volpe has been covering it. What's been happening to real women with family values is abhorrent. It's a manufactured cluster b society for sure. Maybe the AI insta model deep fakes will get sick of it too 🤣 wait why do that in the first place? Lol World gone mad for sure. Bad is good and good is bad. I'm not saying that in a glib 80s hip hop quoting way but the way the Apostle Paul did.
David Starkey describes how our constitutional changes introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour created spaces for Cluster B people to garner influence and power.
I don't agree with DeSantis much just because I want a Trump/Vivek ticket feeling like he left those of us Floridians who had voted him in before the pandemic but he is correct about the woke mind virus.
I disagree. Trump likes Vivek and Vivek or anyone else running can't beat Trump. Vivek is speaking up for those millenials like myself who essentially were made to be Conservatives in the closet based on our values. It finally got to the point where I just absolutely can not even pretend that any of what's happening is in any way,shape or form ok and what exactly are our kids going to be left with. I think he's very genuine.
I think perhaps the greatest degenerative element of our Western social psychology over the last 60 years has been the displacement of a mentality of "we are all sinners" (all of us mixtures of good and bad impulses) by a narcissistic mentality of maximal "self esteem". Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a 'Victim'....ooow that feels nice....now where's my therapist....and who needs to be cancelled?.....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
A missionary to Haiti in the 1960's and 1970's wrote of how Haitian culture had evolved to exteriorize evil. He gave many interesting examples. Your comment reminds me of his essays; and we can all see what happens in a culture that maximizes that idea by looking at that island nation back then, and now.
Also, James Sire said in his book, "The Universe Next Door", that Existentialism is Nihilism wearing a mask called 'value' that is stripped away at death. This Cluster B personality seems to me to be a rather malignant form of existentialism.
True. A plain definition of Intellectual Hubris and Pride, the root of Sin, and warned against for millennia in cultures across the globe. We live in embarrassing times.
I once tried the '3% do 21%' argument on an acquaintance of mine when he was drunk. I could almost hear the electrons moving through the sub-routines before they arrived at the acceptable answer "that's because of racism". It's always someone else's fault.
However, how do you square that which you've said with the white (Anglo) response of 'it's all my fault because we are/my ancestors were racist'?
Good question. I think the answer is that white (Anglo) guilt-tripping is always PROXY guilt. Not "it's all MY fault" rather "it's all my 'deplorable' fellow whites' fault." (I talk a lot about the crucial subconscious aspects of the psychology underlying progressivism on my own Substack). By the way, out of interest, what specifically is the 3% do 21% ?
OK I think that works. Very few engage in significant acts of penance, they might read some stupid book about race that's doing the rounds but none will sell their house. Words are cheap too of course. I have noticed that a few lunatics are actively handing power to incompetent blacks but this seems more to be subordinates paying the price e.g. in Brit adverts huge numbers of the actors are black. The casting directors who make these decisions will be white, but it's the middling white actor who is now out of a job.
3% of the population of Britain is black, and they commit 21% of the murders: proportionately worse than American blacks.
You're the first person I've come across, other than me, to pick up on the breathtaking and nauseating creepiness of the mental universe of British advertising 'creatives'. I talk about this - and the also nauseating virtue-signalling script-writer tick boxes in UK tv dramas - in this post which I think you'll find interesting: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
There are a number of dramatisations that I really wanted to watch which have been ruined by casting incompetent coloured women in male roles. The most recent was 'Foundation' which I've read several times but there are others which I can't remember off the top of my head. It's just never-ending and becomes almost sinister, the reluctance to show the native population of my country in its own programmes. Jesus, the country's even called 'Angle-land' for fuck's sake.
One great paradox of our modern West is that the 'higher education' that our academia/media complex gives to its media class (and intelligentsia generally) is the enhanced intellectual capacity to hold beliefs that are manifestly absurd.
Same! In the Canadian acting world it’s almost impossible to get a job, even in Shakespearean theatre, if you’re white. You need to pretend to be alphabet army to have a chance in an audition. Where would Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Patrick Stewart be if they were starting their careers today. I went to see Macbeth last season in Canada’s Stratford. Diversity over talent.
Society, government, institutions is now under the same equivalency as that of being raised by a single mother that is deranged, vindictive, and fully subsidised by the state.
Only the state is our deranged, spiteful single mother. For now, she's living off credit and alimony. But not for long since she has taken a hit out on dad and her cards are being canceled.
It's what Lukianoff and Haidt were saying in "The Coddling of the American Mind". We're relying on Great Lies instead of Great Truths (like "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" became "what doesn't kill me makes me traumatized/weaker for good.")
You've put your finger on the exact problem with our society, Christopher. Thank you.
As the commenter said, this is the thesis of my show launched 2.5 years ago. I connect it to the "domestic" abuse in the home, and child abuse, now exploding onto the public stage. Today's public world is an enlarged version of the home I grew up in, headed by an unstable and violent single mother (and some years of a similar stepfather). My mother has both Borderline and Narcissistic personality disorders, is a feminist leftist, and, well, you can fill in the rest of the picture.
I'd love to connect with you when you have a spare few minutes (ha, I know). Thank you for putting this issue front and center. It's a service to the world.
Christopher Lasch wrote about this in 1979 with his book, "The Culture of Narcissism," and M. Scott Peck wrote about the issue of cluster B - specifically narcissists among us - in 1983 with his book, "People of the Lie." That we are in a culture dominated by cluster B pathology was foretold in Scripture: 2: Timothy 3: 1-8: "But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected."
Simple diagnosis: idle hands are the devil’s playground. Our society is technologically advanced enough so that most citizens are idle, looking for amusement and attention. One can analyze incessantly but that won’t repair the underlying problem that most of our citizens are insouciant and lazy with no accountability. The minority of us must continue to insist on civilized standards for any hope of saving our country.
A fair point I used to be a fan as I thought it might allow people the luxury to leave corporate PMC jobs and escape to the country. But seeing the WEF agenda plan, the effects of inflation by increasing the money supply without increasing production, and what you have said I have changed my mind.
Chris, this is absolutely spot on! The sheer number of Cluster B members of society is horrifying. They feed off of each other and seek to control each other and normal citizens at any cost. Couple that with societal power, and we are on a sure path to self-destruction. Undoubtedly, this happened to Ancient Rome and more recently to modern Germany, Japan, and Russia. We need psychiatrists to step up and help us call out these mentally ill members of our political class for what they are, and to help inform voters that they must not choose them or enable their elevation to power. They are truly sick.
unfortunately, the last people we should turn to are psychiatrists who, in my limited experience, are often as "mentally ill"as their patients. One grief therapist I went to with my sister who was grieving over our mother's death, spent all her time telling us about her grief at the death of her cat. Another one told me that all children iie and steal when I was having such problems with my son when he was 8. As an adopted child,. he was acting out over abandonnment issues which the therapist knew nothing about.
My mother had more common sense in her little finger with only a grade school education than all of the PHd's now practicing. The best advice I have ever heard came from the author Norman Finklestein, whose parents were in a concentration camp during the war. When as a teenager he used to complain to this mother that he was bored, she told him to lie on the floor and look at the ceiling until he got over it.
This is not so say that people don't have some real problems and need help getting unstuck. . But in my long years spent talking to a lot of "troubled" people,not as a therapist I hurry to say, i have found that just finding someone to listen to you without judgment and maybe even point you to something transcendent will help more than hours and hours of theraphy.
Yes, I hope it's clear that I'm saying that our *culture* exhibits many of the traits of Cluster B disorders. I'm emphatically not saying that the people who exhibit them are "mentally ill" as individuals, which I am not in a position to judge.
Chris, please don't doubt that we understand your observation. But the Cluster B disorders prevalent in our culture almost looks like an epidemiological condition. And as I mentioned, we are being too polite in society by not calling it what it is: mental illness. One only has to observe how dangerously unhinged and irrational Cluster Bs behave, not only to our detriment, but also to their own. When you absolve yourself of finally judging this toxic behavior for what it is, a blind eye exacerbates the problem. Failure to hold these individuals accountable, either through direct criticism or actual punishment, only serves to condone and embolden them.
In my years as a high school teacher, the only parent who really scared me was a psychiatrist. It was so bad that during parent-teacher conferences, for my safety, I was put together with a male colleague in his classroom rather than alone in mine, as would be normal, so that I would not have to meet with him alone.
Yep. They are master mind-fuckers. And most of them have no one holding them accountable. They believe they are using their powers for good but with no real feedback or accountability some inevitably stray into evil.
I work in an industry that has some overlap with therapy and the priority should always be to steer people towards accountability and agency. 1) Define your goals, 2) explore possible ways to achieve them, and 3) own up to it when you are out of integrity with yourself and/or others in regards to 1) and 2). Anything else is a distraction or rationalization. Any decent parent, like your mother, knows these things intuitively. Unfortunately our society has a dearth of decent parents, which is why people need therapy in the first place.
Though this is a good analysis, I would NEVER validate modern psychology by using their DSM categories.
My approach would be to see the attacks on our society as resulting in a lowering of emotional tone level across the board, which triggers different behaviors depending on the exact line of experience of each person who succumbs to it.
The emotional tone that is most dangerous is Fear. One mechanism that can occur when a person is triggered is to attempt to adopt the behaviors of some prior "winning" entity. These behaviors, for the most part, mimic the personalities of dominant or winning personalities. Unfortunately the self-knowledge and emotional ability to actually win or dominate is not present in a person who is merely triggered by fear into this defensive reaction.
MacDonald can call this set of behaviors "feminized" because of the Mother archetype that is so common to our collective experience, not because all women actually act like this.
Though social media sites like TikTok are often targeted for spreading these behavior models, we should not overlook "TV" (which now means paid streaming services) which is widely used by children and is full of this stuff.
Rufo also fails to mention the psychopaths, which are the people who tend to be in the driver's seat when it comes to pushing others down into fear and then providing these aberrant behavior models for their victims to embrace.
I don't want this to turn into a New Age witch hunt. Women should not be the target. The proper target is the psychopath, a personality type that has been adequately described by several researchers. And the handling for psychopaths does not involve annihilation or destruction. It does involve proper identification and some degree of restraint - physical if necessary - to prevent such personalities from infecting the general population with their insanity.
"I don't want this to turn into a New Age witch hunt. Women should not be the target."
What is interesting to me is how much the right uses the same strategies that it decries in the left. The left (psycho)babbles on about 'toxic masculinity" so the right matches it with an increasingly loud and virulent "toxic femininity". Not to mention the fact that "feminine" and "masculine" are the same crazed gender stereotypes used by radical trans activists. Witch hunts, real historical ones where real women, lots and lots of them, were burned at the stake, tortured, drowned, etc. started with exactly the kind of finger pointing, blaming, "THEY are responsible for all our troubles" messaging. Oh but you think atrocities like that can't happen in this country. Salem????
Rufo does the lamentable mirroring of the left in focusing on individual psychopathologies. I am not saying these do not exist but suggest he read Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism", written in 1979, to unders tand all the ways in which the economic, educational, political, etc institutions in this country have fostered and encouraged that narcissism.
Lastly, as a former lefty, I can say unequivocally, that Rufo mirrors all of the same self-satisfied, self-righteousness of the left.
I think human psychology is an extremely important factor in this whole mess, though. Even if we say that the entire culture has been pushed in certain non-optimum directions, someone was pushing it in those directions. And it is their psychological state driving them to do that, and the psychological state of people in general that results in those pushes gaining popularity (or acceptance).
We have a lot to learn about human psychology, and until we do, it is very hard to sit in the middle of a conflict and not be pulled to one side or the other. Both extremes seem to be motivated by irrational fears (even if there is some historical precedent for those fears) which I think indicates that the Left-Right paradigm is not useful. The more radical factions on "both sides" are operating from a similar place psychologically, but believe in different realities which may both be unrealistic. Even the "sane" people, for the most part, do not see life as it really is.
I did my graduate work in psychology and though they call economics "the dismal science" that nomenclature could be just as easily be applied to psychology...which is, in fact, mostly tarted up to be "science". What you are not taking into account is the power institutions can wield to get people to do as the powerful wish, the most obvious example being take the jab or lose your job. (Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism is important reading here as he does a credible job of explicating the interaction between individual psychology and institutional power.) Furthermore the 'discipline', such as it is, of psychology is increasingly, and quite eagerly, being used by governments and corporations to enforce whatever the dominant narrative happens to be, for example the Nudge Unit of the UK’s Behavioural Science Team or Obama’s White House Social and Behavioral Science Team. And, let us not forget, NIMH (i.e. the government) is the largest funder of research into psychological disorders. More opportunities to trust the “science” peddled by the government? Lastly, one has to ask “Cui bono? Who is served by the idea that all our collective troubles are the result of the disordered mental and emotional lives of huge numbers of individuals?” One obvious answer is the men behind the curtains who don’t want anyone to see who is pulling the levers of power and precisely how those levers are being pulled. In a certain sense I would say the use of the narrative of individual psychopathology is part of the psy-op. It is the reinforcement of the idea that we are weak, sickly, alone and powerless, tortured and held hostage to our inner demons. It is yet another attempt to infantilize the citizenry and to convince us of the impossibility, as well as the undesirability, of collective resistance. Luckily, there are more and more people who understand the game that is being played. The pushback is ever more visible on any number of fronts. Glenn Ellmers of the Claremont Institute believes that conservatives, to their detriment, have very little understanding of how institutional power works. Suggest you might want to read his book “The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault and the possibility of political philosophy.”
So, where does the governmental inclination to use physical and emotional duress on its populations come from? Is not this ultimately a choice that is tied to the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings or beings similar to humans?
Read my reply again. I am not saying that individual psychology is absent or that individual responsibility does not exist;, see reference to Lasch. What I am saying, and this appears very difficult for people steeped in binaries to grock, it is BOTH the psychology of the individual AND the power of institutions as those institutions are created and inhabited by individuals. Institutions take on a life of their own in that their existence becomes paramount no matter what individual may be a participant, the deep state being a prime example. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, to put it simply.
OK. I'm not going to read your references. I could tell you to read some of the thousands of references I have read and you wouldn't, either, right?
But in my concept of human psychology, the individual itself is only one aspect of human experience. And the most active and potent force in human psychology IS the group. For most people this is a love-hate relationship that is continuously challenged. For me the dynamics of human groups is part of the study of human psychology and gives the subject its meaning.
What do you think determines the "power of institutions" other than human psychology? You are making a distinction that doesn't make sense to me, that's all. The phenomena of human institutions is all a part of human psychology from my perspective.
Regaining some sanity in a world driven to madness will require much more than any of us are willing to realize. Let it be this generation that is willing to do what must be done so that our childrens children will have peace.
The internet effectively spawned the Cluster B Society.
Before the internet, psychotic humans were effectively shunned by real live human populations; they couldn't get any purchase on the culture, because the well-vetted norms of society held too strong a hold in a world controlled by direct human interactions.
Enter the world-wide-web and social media, and suddenly the unwell could "find" one another and develop cohorts--- this at the same time that old-fashioned journalism and media, faced with the competition of "free" news and entertainment on the web, entered their death spirals of chasing click-bait and lowest-common-denominator sensationalism. A PERFECT petri dish for psychotic behavior to thrive.
Meanwhile, grown-up humans were too busy working, studying, saving, paying the bills, raising the kids, to notice that the culture was utterly under siege. Too many still inhabit this space; until they are awakened to reality, they will continue focusing on their productive lives... until it is no longer possible to lead such lives, because the Cluster B's will have destroyed the world that these hardworking people built.
Chris is one in a million: He doesn't merely scream at the sky about this real-life Hieronymus Bosch painting, he DOES things about it. Cannot thank him enough!
Completely agree, Chris. As you've documented, and as your partner in crime James Lindsay (swords up!) has been explicating for years, it ultimately goes back to the 19th century. But as you trace in the book, things really got rolling in the '60s (a decade I have always despised; even as a child I sensed that the culture began degrading in that ugly era).
I was aware of the concept of The Long March Through the Institutions from reading Allan Bloom back in the late 80s, but never dreamed I'd see it come to fruition in my lifetime. It started to become more real in 2015 with the emergence of stories from academia like the Halloween Costume debacle at Yale (does anyone know what ultimately became of "Shrieking Girl"?).
Then Jordan Peterson was catapulted to fame with the Bill C16 lunacy, and I began to listen to his YouTube channel... then there was the Sokal Squared/Grievance Studies Affair... then there was Evergreen State.... and James Damore.... And then, of course, the horror show that was the year 2020.
I recall at some point in 2016 or 2017 seeing a few YouTube videos that frankly terrified me as James, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose discussed Woke as a new religion. I knew deep in my bones they were right, and that this was potentially an existential threat to the United States.
Between James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, I learned more than I was even comfortable knowing about the origins and goals of this "faith". And I definitely saw that the Internet was, as you say, an accelerant.
What gives me hope is that, just as the internet enabled this massively destructive new religion to spread, it has also helped EXPOSE it. When such unholy tyrannies sprung up in other nations in times past, there was no broad platform available for brave, intelligent souls like yourself to educate the masses to resist. So again I say: THANK YOU. Grazie mille!
Agreed. It's an important insight into human social behavior, that when everything is sped up and virtual, the net result is negative, even though many positive things happen as well.
The expression “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” is often thought to refer to having good intentions that are not fulfilled. Yes, but I think it’s more to do with these Cluster B people virtue signaling their “good intentions” while taking themselves, and us, to hell.
Very informative as always. Thanks Christopher Here is a link to the very articulate Dr. Theodore Dalrymple a doctor of more than 30 years, working in NHS, his summation of how we are, where we are. Although not a Christian he states that the more muscular, sturdy charity that Christianity offers is infinitely preferable to the wishy washy acts of “kindness” steeped in a blather of emotion. He emphasises the need for a more stoic view of life and his data on suicide rates was quite disturbing.
I can testify as someone who had many opportunities to watch closely how activists in many institutions/organizations operate (luckily from a safe distance, most of the time) that this is definitely true.
Many organizations purporting to be about justice and positive goals are in reality led by highly disordered individuals and stirred by mentality infected with disordered patterns of reasoning and emotion. These people gravitate toward positions of power and influence, and if there aren’t any, they’d generate ones and proceed to push unhinged agendas behind the scenes, without accountability.
The wider public needs to get wiser and understand this dynamic, as many of these people generate a huge amount of false advertising of what they’re actually doing – often they’re so delusional that they don’t see how disordered and damaging their behaviors are. Just because someone claims to be fighting for justice, human rights, or charitable causes doesn’t mean that this is what’s actually happening. There needs to be much more transparency and, hopefully, a way of reporting, monitoring, and holding people accountable for these activities, just as would be expected with elected representatives. No more carte blanche based on abstract declarations of positive goals.
True. Too many have been naive. It might even be a delusional feature of a too secular society - believing that people will naturally gravitate towards good morals and a sensible understanding of the world. This has never been the case. The vices and sirens are often/usually more seductive, especially if cloaked in deceptive language.
Yes. Also, I think that ordinary people often simply don't understand why someone would act like that, invest so much time/energy in certain goals, etc., if they weren't good and rational ones. Contrary to the perception often there isn't much money involved either. The reality is, however, that the motivations of many activists are influenced by personality disorders.
That’s interesting and totally makes sense of why we (presumably balanced people) ascribe benign motivations to people who aren’t balanced and whose motivations might be anything but benign. We simply dont think alike.
Yes, the old "ye shall be as gods," promise. False promise, that is.
Yes, exactly. It's right there - from the beginning.
Yasss the political elite in red and blue states allowing it based on manipulated information usually by the activist bureaucracy that absolutely includes activist judges and magistrates. The destruction of the family is something that's been done and being done to every demographic with the use of the saturated industrial complex and process manipulation as well. Michael Volpe has been covering it. What's been happening to real women with family values is abhorrent. It's a manufactured cluster b society for sure. Maybe the AI insta model deep fakes will get sick of it too 🤣 wait why do that in the first place? Lol World gone mad for sure. Bad is good and good is bad. I'm not saying that in a glib 80s hip hop quoting way but the way the Apostle Paul did.
https://youtu.be/lu22nG7CN8Q?si=2M-Ofjy3JFj2IBAi
David Starkey describes how our constitutional changes introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour created spaces for Cluster B people to garner influence and power.
I don't agree with DeSantis much just because I want a Trump/Vivek ticket feeling like he left those of us Floridians who had voted him in before the pandemic but he is correct about the woke mind virus.
If there's a Trump/Vivek ticket, they're going to assassinate Trump to install Vivek. The VP must be genuine; Vivek is not.
I disagree. Trump likes Vivek and Vivek or anyone else running can't beat Trump. Vivek is speaking up for those millenials like myself who essentially were made to be Conservatives in the closet based on our values. It finally got to the point where I just absolutely can not even pretend that any of what's happening is in any way,shape or form ok and what exactly are our kids going to be left with. I think he's very genuine.
I have been wondering what to think of Vivek - can you share more on why you say this? thanks
Yep. It won't be long before all the women's rights orgs in the States, for example, are run by trans-identified men.
And they are so "passionate" that they intimidate all their colleagues and friends and family.
I think perhaps the greatest degenerative element of our Western social psychology over the last 60 years has been the displacement of a mentality of "we are all sinners" (all of us mixtures of good and bad impulses) by a narcissistic mentality of maximal "self esteem". Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a 'Victim'....ooow that feels nice....now where's my therapist....and who needs to be cancelled?.....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
A missionary to Haiti in the 1960's and 1970's wrote of how Haitian culture had evolved to exteriorize evil. He gave many interesting examples. Your comment reminds me of his essays; and we can all see what happens in a culture that maximizes that idea by looking at that island nation back then, and now.
Also, James Sire said in his book, "The Universe Next Door", that Existentialism is Nihilism wearing a mask called 'value' that is stripped away at death. This Cluster B personality seems to me to be a rather malignant form of existentialism.
These essays sound fascinating. You don’t happen to remember the name of the missionary?
William H Hodges. “A Philosophy of Christian Missions”. 1978.
Written from the Hospital le Bon Samaritan in Limbe, Haiti.
Thank you!
The booklet I have looks self published, so I am not sure it is obtainable. Good luck and if you can’t find it let me know.
True. A plain definition of Intellectual Hubris and Pride, the root of Sin, and warned against for millennia in cultures across the globe. We live in embarrassing times.
I once tried the '3% do 21%' argument on an acquaintance of mine when he was drunk. I could almost hear the electrons moving through the sub-routines before they arrived at the acceptable answer "that's because of racism". It's always someone else's fault.
However, how do you square that which you've said with the white (Anglo) response of 'it's all my fault because we are/my ancestors were racist'?
Good question. I think the answer is that white (Anglo) guilt-tripping is always PROXY guilt. Not "it's all MY fault" rather "it's all my 'deplorable' fellow whites' fault." (I talk a lot about the crucial subconscious aspects of the psychology underlying progressivism on my own Substack). By the way, out of interest, what specifically is the 3% do 21% ?
OK I think that works. Very few engage in significant acts of penance, they might read some stupid book about race that's doing the rounds but none will sell their house. Words are cheap too of course. I have noticed that a few lunatics are actively handing power to incompetent blacks but this seems more to be subordinates paying the price e.g. in Brit adverts huge numbers of the actors are black. The casting directors who make these decisions will be white, but it's the middling white actor who is now out of a job.
3% of the population of Britain is black, and they commit 21% of the murders: proportionately worse than American blacks.
You're the first person I've come across, other than me, to pick up on the breathtaking and nauseating creepiness of the mental universe of British advertising 'creatives'. I talk about this - and the also nauseating virtue-signalling script-writer tick boxes in UK tv dramas - in this post which I think you'll find interesting: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
There are a number of dramatisations that I really wanted to watch which have been ruined by casting incompetent coloured women in male roles. The most recent was 'Foundation' which I've read several times but there are others which I can't remember off the top of my head. It's just never-ending and becomes almost sinister, the reluctance to show the native population of my country in its own programmes. Jesus, the country's even called 'Angle-land' for fuck's sake.
One great paradox of our modern West is that the 'higher education' that our academia/media complex gives to its media class (and intelligentsia generally) is the enhanced intellectual capacity to hold beliefs that are manifestly absurd.
Same! In the Canadian acting world it’s almost impossible to get a job, even in Shakespearean theatre, if you’re white. You need to pretend to be alphabet army to have a chance in an audition. Where would Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Patrick Stewart be if they were starting their careers today. I went to see Macbeth last season in Canada’s Stratford. Diversity over talent.
Bingo!
Thanks...you might like these other essays too: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/265/in-defense-of-original-sin
Society, government, institutions is now under the same equivalency as that of being raised by a single mother that is deranged, vindictive, and fully subsidised by the state.
That can’t end well.
There is some truth to this, sadly.
Only the state is our deranged, spiteful single mother. For now, she's living off credit and alimony. But not for long since she has taken a hit out on dad and her cards are being canceled.
FFS. Whining about women is one of the examples of the BS we're dealing with. Quit blaming women for your own problems.
https://youtu.be/A6s8QlIGanA?si=VqHG78mQIv2_G8o9
It's what Lukianoff and Haidt were saying in "The Coddling of the American Mind". We're relying on Great Lies instead of Great Truths (like "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" became "what doesn't kill me makes me traumatized/weaker for good.")
Yes, although I think they are too coy about what's really happening.
Woke ideology supports and sustains pathological behavior. https://psychskeptics.substack.com/p/when-life-becomes-a-toxic-reality
It definitely does!
Out now, my Munk Debate Podcast where I argue that DEI is a toxic, hypocritical ideology that uses claimed moral superiority in a grift for power and control: https://munkdebates.com/podcasts/dei-workplace-training/
Indeed!
Chris you should talk to Josh Slocum.
Yes.
Seconding this
That we're living in a "Cluster B world" is the thesis of Josh Slocum, whose podcast is focused on that fact: https://rumble.com/c/Disaffected His Substack is here: https://disaffectedpod.substack.com/
Wow, interesting! I hadn’t seen this before.
You've put your finger on the exact problem with our society, Christopher. Thank you.
As the commenter said, this is the thesis of my show launched 2.5 years ago. I connect it to the "domestic" abuse in the home, and child abuse, now exploding onto the public stage. Today's public world is an enlarged version of the home I grew up in, headed by an unstable and violent single mother (and some years of a similar stepfather). My mother has both Borderline and Narcissistic personality disorders, is a feminist leftist, and, well, you can fill in the rest of the picture.
I'd love to connect with you when you have a spare few minutes (ha, I know). Thank you for putting this issue front and center. It's a service to the world.
Thank you for commenting, look forward to checking out your work.
Yeah we already figured out you're carrying a crapload of resentment against women Josh.
Christopher Lasch wrote about this in 1979 with his book, "The Culture of Narcissism," and M. Scott Peck wrote about the issue of cluster B - specifically narcissists among us - in 1983 with his book, "People of the Lie." That we are in a culture dominated by cluster B pathology was foretold in Scripture: 2: Timothy 3: 1-8: "But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected."
Lasch was a soothsayer.
We are either going to make a stand here and accept the cost, or wait and pay an incalculable cost later.
Truth.
Simple diagnosis: idle hands are the devil’s playground. Our society is technologically advanced enough so that most citizens are idle, looking for amusement and attention. One can analyze incessantly but that won’t repair the underlying problem that most of our citizens are insouciant and lazy with no accountability. The minority of us must continue to insist on civilized standards for any hope of saving our country.
A lot of truth to the idea that boredom, idleness, ennui, and affluence are causes of some of these problems.
Quite right. The final nail in the coffin of Western Civilization would be a Universal Income.
A fair point I used to be a fan as I thought it might allow people the luxury to leave corporate PMC jobs and escape to the country. But seeing the WEF agenda plan, the effects of inflation by increasing the money supply without increasing production, and what you have said I have changed my mind.
Chris, this is absolutely spot on! The sheer number of Cluster B members of society is horrifying. They feed off of each other and seek to control each other and normal citizens at any cost. Couple that with societal power, and we are on a sure path to self-destruction. Undoubtedly, this happened to Ancient Rome and more recently to modern Germany, Japan, and Russia. We need psychiatrists to step up and help us call out these mentally ill members of our political class for what they are, and to help inform voters that they must not choose them or enable their elevation to power. They are truly sick.
unfortunately, the last people we should turn to are psychiatrists who, in my limited experience, are often as "mentally ill"as their patients. One grief therapist I went to with my sister who was grieving over our mother's death, spent all her time telling us about her grief at the death of her cat. Another one told me that all children iie and steal when I was having such problems with my son when he was 8. As an adopted child,. he was acting out over abandonnment issues which the therapist knew nothing about.
My mother had more common sense in her little finger with only a grade school education than all of the PHd's now practicing. The best advice I have ever heard came from the author Norman Finklestein, whose parents were in a concentration camp during the war. When as a teenager he used to complain to this mother that he was bored, she told him to lie on the floor and look at the ceiling until he got over it.
This is not so say that people don't have some real problems and need help getting unstuck. . But in my long years spent talking to a lot of "troubled" people,not as a therapist I hurry to say, i have found that just finding someone to listen to you without judgment and maybe even point you to something transcendent will help more than hours and hours of theraphy.
Yes, I hope it's clear that I'm saying that our *culture* exhibits many of the traits of Cluster B disorders. I'm emphatically not saying that the people who exhibit them are "mentally ill" as individuals, which I am not in a position to judge.
Chris, please don't doubt that we understand your observation. But the Cluster B disorders prevalent in our culture almost looks like an epidemiological condition. And as I mentioned, we are being too polite in society by not calling it what it is: mental illness. One only has to observe how dangerously unhinged and irrational Cluster Bs behave, not only to our detriment, but also to their own. When you absolve yourself of finally judging this toxic behavior for what it is, a blind eye exacerbates the problem. Failure to hold these individuals accountable, either through direct criticism or actual punishment, only serves to condone and embolden them.
In my years as a high school teacher, the only parent who really scared me was a psychiatrist. It was so bad that during parent-teacher conferences, for my safety, I was put together with a male colleague in his classroom rather than alone in mine, as would be normal, so that I would not have to meet with him alone.
Yep. They are master mind-fuckers. And most of them have no one holding them accountable. They believe they are using their powers for good but with no real feedback or accountability some inevitably stray into evil.
I work in an industry that has some overlap with therapy and the priority should always be to steer people towards accountability and agency. 1) Define your goals, 2) explore possible ways to achieve them, and 3) own up to it when you are out of integrity with yourself and/or others in regards to 1) and 2). Anything else is a distraction or rationalization. Any decent parent, like your mother, knows these things intuitively. Unfortunately our society has a dearth of decent parents, which is why people need therapy in the first place.
Thanks for your comment.
Though this is a good analysis, I would NEVER validate modern psychology by using their DSM categories.
My approach would be to see the attacks on our society as resulting in a lowering of emotional tone level across the board, which triggers different behaviors depending on the exact line of experience of each person who succumbs to it.
The emotional tone that is most dangerous is Fear. One mechanism that can occur when a person is triggered is to attempt to adopt the behaviors of some prior "winning" entity. These behaviors, for the most part, mimic the personalities of dominant or winning personalities. Unfortunately the self-knowledge and emotional ability to actually win or dominate is not present in a person who is merely triggered by fear into this defensive reaction.
MacDonald can call this set of behaviors "feminized" because of the Mother archetype that is so common to our collective experience, not because all women actually act like this.
Though social media sites like TikTok are often targeted for spreading these behavior models, we should not overlook "TV" (which now means paid streaming services) which is widely used by children and is full of this stuff.
Rufo also fails to mention the psychopaths, which are the people who tend to be in the driver's seat when it comes to pushing others down into fear and then providing these aberrant behavior models for their victims to embrace.
I don't want this to turn into a New Age witch hunt. Women should not be the target. The proper target is the psychopath, a personality type that has been adequately described by several researchers. And the handling for psychopaths does not involve annihilation or destruction. It does involve proper identification and some degree of restraint - physical if necessary - to prevent such personalities from infecting the general population with their insanity.
Yep. The DSM is basically a Billing Category Key and little else.
"I don't want this to turn into a New Age witch hunt. Women should not be the target."
What is interesting to me is how much the right uses the same strategies that it decries in the left. The left (psycho)babbles on about 'toxic masculinity" so the right matches it with an increasingly loud and virulent "toxic femininity". Not to mention the fact that "feminine" and "masculine" are the same crazed gender stereotypes used by radical trans activists. Witch hunts, real historical ones where real women, lots and lots of them, were burned at the stake, tortured, drowned, etc. started with exactly the kind of finger pointing, blaming, "THEY are responsible for all our troubles" messaging. Oh but you think atrocities like that can't happen in this country. Salem????
Also suggest you read Brendan O'Neill's essay on the way witches were blamed for climate anomalies in the Middle Ages. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-modern-day-witch-hunts-led-by-the-climate-change-faithful.
Rufo does the lamentable mirroring of the left in focusing on individual psychopathologies. I am not saying these do not exist but suggest he read Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism", written in 1979, to unders tand all the ways in which the economic, educational, political, etc institutions in this country have fostered and encouraged that narcissism.
Lastly, as a former lefty, I can say unequivocally, that Rufo mirrors all of the same self-satisfied, self-righteousness of the left.
Interesting take on the situation.
I think human psychology is an extremely important factor in this whole mess, though. Even if we say that the entire culture has been pushed in certain non-optimum directions, someone was pushing it in those directions. And it is their psychological state driving them to do that, and the psychological state of people in general that results in those pushes gaining popularity (or acceptance).
We have a lot to learn about human psychology, and until we do, it is very hard to sit in the middle of a conflict and not be pulled to one side or the other. Both extremes seem to be motivated by irrational fears (even if there is some historical precedent for those fears) which I think indicates that the Left-Right paradigm is not useful. The more radical factions on "both sides" are operating from a similar place psychologically, but believe in different realities which may both be unrealistic. Even the "sane" people, for the most part, do not see life as it really is.
I did my graduate work in psychology and though they call economics "the dismal science" that nomenclature could be just as easily be applied to psychology...which is, in fact, mostly tarted up to be "science". What you are not taking into account is the power institutions can wield to get people to do as the powerful wish, the most obvious example being take the jab or lose your job. (Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism is important reading here as he does a credible job of explicating the interaction between individual psychology and institutional power.) Furthermore the 'discipline', such as it is, of psychology is increasingly, and quite eagerly, being used by governments and corporations to enforce whatever the dominant narrative happens to be, for example the Nudge Unit of the UK’s Behavioural Science Team or Obama’s White House Social and Behavioral Science Team. And, let us not forget, NIMH (i.e. the government) is the largest funder of research into psychological disorders. More opportunities to trust the “science” peddled by the government? Lastly, one has to ask “Cui bono? Who is served by the idea that all our collective troubles are the result of the disordered mental and emotional lives of huge numbers of individuals?” One obvious answer is the men behind the curtains who don’t want anyone to see who is pulling the levers of power and precisely how those levers are being pulled. In a certain sense I would say the use of the narrative of individual psychopathology is part of the psy-op. It is the reinforcement of the idea that we are weak, sickly, alone and powerless, tortured and held hostage to our inner demons. It is yet another attempt to infantilize the citizenry and to convince us of the impossibility, as well as the undesirability, of collective resistance. Luckily, there are more and more people who understand the game that is being played. The pushback is ever more visible on any number of fronts. Glenn Ellmers of the Claremont Institute believes that conservatives, to their detriment, have very little understanding of how institutional power works. Suggest you might want to read his book “The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault and the possibility of political philosophy.”
So, where does the governmental inclination to use physical and emotional duress on its populations come from? Is not this ultimately a choice that is tied to the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings or beings similar to humans?
Read my reply again. I am not saying that individual psychology is absent or that individual responsibility does not exist;, see reference to Lasch. What I am saying, and this appears very difficult for people steeped in binaries to grock, it is BOTH the psychology of the individual AND the power of institutions as those institutions are created and inhabited by individuals. Institutions take on a life of their own in that their existence becomes paramount no matter what individual may be a participant, the deep state being a prime example. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, to put it simply.
OK. I'm not going to read your references. I could tell you to read some of the thousands of references I have read and you wouldn't, either, right?
But in my concept of human psychology, the individual itself is only one aspect of human experience. And the most active and potent force in human psychology IS the group. For most people this is a love-hate relationship that is continuously challenged. For me the dynamics of human groups is part of the study of human psychology and gives the subject its meaning.
What do you think determines the "power of institutions" other than human psychology? You are making a distinction that doesn't make sense to me, that's all. The phenomena of human institutions is all a part of human psychology from my perspective.
Regaining some sanity in a world driven to madness will require much more than any of us are willing to realize. Let it be this generation that is willing to do what must be done so that our childrens children will have peace.
Social media has made everyone afraid to dissent against the madness, for fear of online retribution.
I’m not afraid to speak up but get censored or shadow banned when I do.
The internet effectively spawned the Cluster B Society.
Before the internet, psychotic humans were effectively shunned by real live human populations; they couldn't get any purchase on the culture, because the well-vetted norms of society held too strong a hold in a world controlled by direct human interactions.
Enter the world-wide-web and social media, and suddenly the unwell could "find" one another and develop cohorts--- this at the same time that old-fashioned journalism and media, faced with the competition of "free" news and entertainment on the web, entered their death spirals of chasing click-bait and lowest-common-denominator sensationalism. A PERFECT petri dish for psychotic behavior to thrive.
Meanwhile, grown-up humans were too busy working, studying, saving, paying the bills, raising the kids, to notice that the culture was utterly under siege. Too many still inhabit this space; until they are awakened to reality, they will continue focusing on their productive lives... until it is no longer possible to lead such lives, because the Cluster B's will have destroyed the world that these hardworking people built.
Chris is one in a million: He doesn't merely scream at the sky about this real-life Hieronymus Bosch painting, he DOES things about it. Cannot thank him enough!
The internet is an accelerator of these trends, for sure, but the genesis of them predates the internet.
Completely agree, Chris. As you've documented, and as your partner in crime James Lindsay (swords up!) has been explicating for years, it ultimately goes back to the 19th century. But as you trace in the book, things really got rolling in the '60s (a decade I have always despised; even as a child I sensed that the culture began degrading in that ugly era).
I was aware of the concept of The Long March Through the Institutions from reading Allan Bloom back in the late 80s, but never dreamed I'd see it come to fruition in my lifetime. It started to become more real in 2015 with the emergence of stories from academia like the Halloween Costume debacle at Yale (does anyone know what ultimately became of "Shrieking Girl"?).
Then Jordan Peterson was catapulted to fame with the Bill C16 lunacy, and I began to listen to his YouTube channel... then there was the Sokal Squared/Grievance Studies Affair... then there was Evergreen State.... and James Damore.... And then, of course, the horror show that was the year 2020.
I recall at some point in 2016 or 2017 seeing a few YouTube videos that frankly terrified me as James, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose discussed Woke as a new religion. I knew deep in my bones they were right, and that this was potentially an existential threat to the United States.
Between James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, I learned more than I was even comfortable knowing about the origins and goals of this "faith". And I definitely saw that the Internet was, as you say, an accelerant.
What gives me hope is that, just as the internet enabled this massively destructive new religion to spread, it has also helped EXPOSE it. When such unholy tyrannies sprung up in other nations in times past, there was no broad platform available for brave, intelligent souls like yourself to educate the masses to resist. So again I say: THANK YOU. Grazie mille!
Agreed. It's an important insight into human social behavior, that when everything is sped up and virtual, the net result is negative, even though many positive things happen as well.
The expression “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” is often thought to refer to having good intentions that are not fulfilled. Yes, but I think it’s more to do with these Cluster B people virtue signaling their “good intentions” while taking themselves, and us, to hell.
Very informative as always. Thanks Christopher Here is a link to the very articulate Dr. Theodore Dalrymple a doctor of more than 30 years, working in NHS, his summation of how we are, where we are. Although not a Christian he states that the more muscular, sturdy charity that Christianity offers is infinitely preferable to the wishy washy acts of “kindness” steeped in a blather of emotion. He emphasises the need for a more stoic view of life and his data on suicide rates was quite disturbing.
https://youtu.be/7zbkMRI4Fxs?si=OZX0UerNsCkHY_Ya
Dalrymple has been one of my favorite writers for years!