Imitation Triangles

I highly recommend the counterpart article to this, IDEA WORLDS.

Foreword

By better identifying real power, truth, and ability, we can select for actual leaders who support an abstract-material understanding of reality rather than conmen and emotional-social natures of reality.

Key to this is understanding the role that imitation and word choice plays in upholding others’ abstract power base and ideas.

Reading that forms a mental base for this article:

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman
• Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti
• Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun

I would add René Girard’s stuff about mimesis on here, but I haven’t read his actual book yet. However, his thoughts have influenced the pop culture: people are repeating “mimetics” to where it has become a hot phrase.

I’d also add ribbonfarm’s series. I also think his terminology reflects that of a normal person looking up (he admits it himself, which is why he enjoys shows like The Office, which I’ve always found strange and boring).

If you’re a person on a flight who watches movies or Netflix this already classifies you into a specific category. Emotions (and movies, films, and shows) are derivative products for the masses, like the run-off that feeds into a stream. Whether good or bad the stream will become what feeds into it.

Like how the slave detests but also fears the master, the median person detests the actualized and aware. His usage of the word ‘sociopath’ simply reflects his own fear and lack of understanding for people in leadership positions like Jamie Dimon or Elon Musk, who actually care a lot about others, though they may frustrate and annoy, and even though those at the top do not easily relate using the emotional pattern matching that the median person seems to somehow have. There’s that one video with Eric Schmidt at Stanford where he tells it like it is. When people have a way of speaking that shows they understand things, you can just tell.

Humans are creators of an idea-world. Intelligence just furthers us on this direction. Creativity, being a fundamentally future oriented process, creates the world that others live in. Apple produces

I have to give credence to Jason Lowery for also influencing my thinking on this, although his writing was very unstructured and hard to follow. Nevertheless, it has significant takes on groups coming together to defend themselves and abstract versus real power.

Vocabulary words

• Imitation triangles
• Abstract thought
• Recognize hierarchy
• Recognize ability
• Tact
• Idea-world

Definition

Imitation triangles describe a form of common social organization. Rather than society being composed of many people with unique ideas, some people do the thinking while other people do the templating of their ideas. It stems not from a lack of being able to do it—there are many suburban houses that could be adjusted however the homeowner sees fit—but from a lack of creativity, independence, perception of the world, energy or money to make changes, and willingness to do so.

The pattern of urban development in the USA with a yard and some sparse trees is much more suited to the Northeast and Midwest rather than the South. If you’ve ever been to a jungle-like island such as Taiwan or certain parts of Georgia where the trees are growing in dense bundles where you can sort of see the trees hold on water vapour around them, THAT is the normal environs for the American South. Trees must be planted in bunches so that they intersect and help each other grow. The patterning of yards in an unsuitable environment just causes dry and parched land.

That is why I am in favour of localism as putting incorrect patterns onto a people and places that are not a good fit for it causes damage.

Words generate feelings which generate action through manipulation

Once you get to a certain point in life, I believe the “thinking” portion overrides the “intuitive” portion.

I roughly view being polite/friendly/code-switching as deceptive, which is why my preferred method of relation is based on understanding, that is, I can see someone’s perspective and state it but don’t try to personally emphasize unless I actually understand. I also use curiosity to understand someone’s worldview or when I simply see something interesting.

Someone who states things without actually believing them is not trustworthy, which means future behavior cannot be predicted from past behavior. This is a complex issue but I am not inclined to believe a society can run without trust.

I recognize when people generate feelings for material ends frequently. This one girl freshman year who “acted nice” because she didn’t have a meal swipe. I should’ve told her that I offered it because I wasn’t an asshole, not because her expressions were convincing. As one becomes more metabolic and aware, their compassion and sense of justice may also increase.

Lying, in engineering contexts, causes destruction and death. There is always an absolute source of truth. But most people do not think like engineers, who are a small fraction of the population, and any sort of social arrangement must consider this.

For these reasons I talk to children as if they were adults. To speak the truth and the unsaid assumptions is conducive to building understanding and a social reality.

Coordination

Human coordination at scale is difficult. In a pack as described by Elias Canetti, most people are individuals. This is the top-quality sports team or special operations team. Everyone thinks for themselves and acts in response to others and the environment.

Characteristic of the pack is the fact that it cannot grow. It is surrounded by emptiness and there are literally no additional people who could join it. It consists of a group of men in a state of excitement whose fiercest wish is to be more. In whatever they undertake together, whether hunting or fighting, they would fare better if there were more of them. For a group consisting of so few, every single man who joined it would be a distinct, substantial and indispensable addition. The strength he brought with him might be a tenth or twentieth part of their total strength. The position he occupied would be clear to all; he would really count in the economy of the group, in a way that scarcely any of us count today.

I say this later in the article, but in this triangle-shaped coordination pattern we see in society today people having similar thoughts are like ants wiggling their antennae at each other, like if you say something and the other person disagrees heavily.

Because most people struggle to see base reality, they live inside other triangles, idea-worlds, etc. Reasons include decrease in intelligence due to vegetable oils, baby formula and environmental pollution, lack of contrast or different experiences in life, lack of reading and introspection, and increased distance from nature.

Given that the internet spreads certain ideas, people fall into basins where their personality already has proclivities toward. Being born in a specific culture or country is already a giant hole one struggles to climb out of and understand.

Uniqueness and agency

We define a human as agentic as follows:

• Humans have three parts
  • Local state (the brain or genetic intuition/algorithms)
  • Actions that update the environment (changing the global state)
    • Speech, writing, choices, habits, material constructions/tools, social constructions
  • Perceiving the environment (updating local state from global state/natural selection)
    • The discriminating factor (perceptiveness, taste, knowing what is important and what is not)
    • Mimesis

Agentic humans have high discriminating factor and many actions. Local state, perceptiveness, or intelligence affects how far they’ll go.

A human that is plant-like perceives the environment and updates the local state, but takes little action. This might be someone who spends their whole time watching movies, or someone deep in zen and meditation so that they think taking action in the world is unnecessary.

Many creatures simply put their local state onto the global state. Ants and bees have genetic templates that cause them to create structures in society based on those rules. Molds and bacteria just appear to “grow.” They do adapt to the environment–but we would be remiss if we said that they did it in an advanced and thinking way in the way that animals can learn to avoid things. Not to underplay their significance–it may just be that we don’t understand them well enough!

Humans can’t survive just by existing in the wild with their genetic template. Some degree of updating internal state (learning from others, mimesis) is needed.

Based on genetic templates, people of certain ethnicities may feel more comfortable in certain environments. Think about the prevalence of red, green, and yellow rasta-type colors among sub-Saharan African countries. May this not be a reference back to the historical savannah with multitudinous words for each sanguine shade of red? Or that of monochrome in East Asia, for whom I think a natural environment is the arctic plain. This extends beyond colors—it includes bed height and chair height because ethnicities have different limb proportions and all manners of human design.

Organisms have the desire to expand the environment in a way that is beneficial for their own survival. Think of bacteria changing the pH to make it more suitable. Different languages can be viewed as a function that keeps different humans out: think of the unfamiliarity of viewing a wall of Arabic, Cyrillic, or logographic scripts for Latin script users.

Though the spread of English worldwide gives native users of this language a certain comfort in far-flung places, it comes with the risk of their own language and culture being endangered. Niger-Congo peoples (I am not sure of the verbal ability of East African people such as Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somali) are some of the most verbally creative and innovative people out there. Of course that comes at the cost of written language and large-scale group coordination.

I’d suspect words such as “body count,” “t-boned,” and “rear ended” may have similar origins. But I am here to paint no bogeyman: the clear distinction in which those of Western European stock themselves have become more emotional compared to the people of old is a gap not to be understated.

We see this in the supposed idea-framework of desires in modern asks: for someone who is funny, to be one who lives in the present, and all of these are in some way that of an emotional and consumptive attitude of which the role of women and Bantus in society one must take heed to across time and place to truly understand. Take for example the butt-shaking of British “royal” family Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

Language itself is an expression of certain internal mental states. Why do I put a dash between some words like “down-weighting?” Because it felt right. The leader says what is thought, the followers have to align themselves to a dictionary.

So people should update the global state not only from what they’ve learned, but also their genetic template for what feels right to them by changing the language and material constructs. It is in everyone’s self-interest to change the local environment as they see fit.

That brings a question to me: if airports internationally are all similar, what class of people do airports really belong to? How does the design of an airport reflect these people’s values? Are they as close to “neutral” as possible?

The significance of ideas

As I take a forest walk, I ask myself what these plants do. I see the outside of green leaves and bark and thorns, but I then went to an abstract world beyond reality. I saw these plants as just representations of internal states, internal states with a self-coherence that were repeating themselves in the environment. DNA, a book, an ideology: these were the source codes and we are but a program running them with some degree of adaptability.

Ideas form a template for action that change faster than genes. Given that internal state is necessary for outward action, and that this internal state can come from either genes or ideas, and that ideas spread and change much faster than genes, we see there is a more significant level of competition above genes.

This brings me the question: is there a level of internal state above that of ideas? My best hunch is that algorithms compete at a level higher than ideas–they have internal state set by human ideas, and they can use this internal state to take actions in the world quickly.

Primitive examples include a human-detecting drone or an algorithm which responds to online comments, but also financialization of the markets. Despite the internet existing, I suspect we are in an age where the battle is of ideas, not yet of algorithms.

If we were in a world where algorithms battled, we would see our environment and society change at a speed incomprehensible to us. We would be like animals in the environment now as masses of inorganics reconfigured themselves to fight other idea-algorithms. And even our current state is extremely fast: these superstructures of cars, cement, steel, and electricity took but decades. A mere blip in the scale of things.

And if the progression of life is toward self-reproducing internal states that are faster and more adaptable than others, what is its end destination? I can imagine super-humans with super-nutrition and super-coordination already. But what is beyond that I cannot see, only that there is a physical limit and a speed limit.

What is success in life? Is it when one organism reaches unity? When the entire planet is covered by something that is exactly the same? History tells us that only leads to unadaptability and destruction. Is it finding a balance within an ecosystem? And if the progression is toward more speed, what does it say that one extremely high-speed alien has not yet come for us?

—back to human conflict: This is positive news because it means that if you have an internal state that contradicts another group’s internal state, you can simply defeat them by squashing their ideas rather than their genes. They would become a populace rather than a people. This distinction exists in some languages. But this means it is all the more important than your own ideas are not wrong.

The fear for any independent individual is not so much that some AI will come over and destroy humans, it’s that other humans become the body of a rigid set of ideas and rules making living in society itself like interacting with non-human individuals. The mind of the person is elsewhere while in the body exists a ghost.

Bacteria, of course, do not engage in idea-based competition, so our battle there is still genetic.

Most humans are not unique or agentic

Most humans repeat things they heard. I think to get an accurate perspective on things, you need lots of contrast (different experiences), which itself requires high open-ness, which means down-weighting the advice of your family, teachers, friends, and tribe.

Down-weighting the advice of people around you is certainly a maladaptive behavior for ancient times. It probably explains why most conversations are that of the right picture, “echo chamber,” rather than that of the left, “idea lab/insight generation.”

Most humans are not good at discriminating good from bad. That is, they have bad taste.

Having good perception is a necessary precondition for agency because most of the world is human-constructed. Hence taking action depends on internal state from perceiving the environment, not genetic templates. Without seeing the shape of the world, taking the right action is difficult.

However, perceiving the right things isn’t enough: taking actions is limited by one’s family circumstances and intelligence, which are multipliers.

Here are some common American repetitions:

• Healthcare in the USA is bad. We need socialized healthcare.
  • If you ask these people about different types of healthcare plans (HMO, PPO, etc.) or more technical details they often have no answer.
• We need democracy.
  • What is democracy? The reply: an independent media, the government is elected by the people, free and fair elections.
  • Can most people elaborate on how democratic norms are applied in practice?

Look, it doesn’t matter what a society is called: democratic, autocratic, socialist, etc. As long as it is adaptive and procures goods and health and invents new things for its members at a higher rate than other groups, it will expand and others will be influenced by it. Such terms are only used as signaling indicators that someone is “in” a specific group.

The distinction should be made between highly adaptive States and slowly adaptive States. The former addresses issues as they come up and promotes the health of its populace. The latter clings stubbornly to incorrect ideas, destroying the country.

If you’re Islamic, you might believe something like this:

• I should be allowed to have 4 wives.
  • If you ask them why? They say: it’s because the Quran said so.

Stubbornness and intransigence are not unique to any human culture, and it is simply not possible to force creativity and unique thought onto most people, or the response will be that of a soul-less automaton, like that emblematic of Communist times, but is certainly not unfound in the modern world (see IDEA WORLDs article).

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

But we cannot blame people for being like this. It is who they are because it takes too much energy and thought to think, and if one is at a low metabolic state, then creativity is naturally impaired. Perception, however, can certainly be improved by exposure.

Triangles

Most humans today live in the worlds of other humans. A delivery driver exists in this maze created by developers, who themselves live in a world created by those who make the actual decisions of what is to be done. That many men do not and cannot live in their own idea-world but that of others, I’m convinced, is key to understanding why there is fertility decline in the modern world.

Imitation triangles create clones out of those who follow: they repeat words and customs rather than truly understanding or interacting at the base level. They aren’t exactly slaves, and some certainly recognize the predicament they’re in, but their actions are all based on enforcement of someone else’s world. Stephen Wolfram, like Elon Musk, is a hegemon who heads an organization meant to put their vision into the world.

If you repeat a certain way of talking, a style, or a perception: you are lending credence to that version of the world. Examples: San Francisco “all lowercase” text.

If American society has mainly moved from manufacturing to non-productive work, it means that since most people repeat things, their work and labor has gone from enforcing material constructs to social constructs in the world. Though American cultural strength is still very strong and spreads through the internet, this will decrease if living standards decrease and people are forced to maintain material rather than social constructs.

Ibn Khaldun explains imitation quite well. People imitate those they believe are superior, but if people have poor recognition of who is actually superior and what actions matter, they only socially reinforce a retard who will bring great harm upon them.

22. The vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive mark(s), his dress, his occupation, and all his other conditions and customs.

The reason for this is that the soul always sees perfection in the person who is superior to it and to whom it is subservient. It considers him perfect, either because the respect it has for him impresses it, or because it erroneously assumes that its own subservience to him is not due to the nature of defeat but to the perfection of the victor. If that erroneous assumption fixes itself in the soul, it becomes a firm belief. The soul, then, adopts all the manners of the victor and assimilates itself to him. This, then, is imitation.

Or, the soul may possibly think that the superiority of the victor is not the result of his group feeling or great fortitude, but of his customs and manners. This also would be an erroneous concept of superiority, and the consequence would be the same as in the former case. Therefore, the vanquished can always be observed to assimilate themselves to the victor in the use and style of dress, mounts, and weapons, indeed, in everything.

In this connection, one may compare how children constantly imitate their fathers. They do that only because they see perfection in them. One may also compare how almost everywhere people are dominated (in the matter of fashion) by the dress of the militia and the government forces, because they are ruled by them. This goes so far that a nation dominated by another, neighboring nation will show a great deal of assimilation and imitation.

At this time, this is the case in Spain. The Spaniards are found to assimilate themselves to the Galician nations in their dress, their emblems, and most of their customs and conditions. This goes so far that they even draw pictures on the walls and have them in buildings and houses. The intelligent observer will draw from this the conclusion that it is a sign of domination (by others). God has the power to command.

In this light, one should understand the secret of the saying, “The common people follow the religion of the ruler.” This saying belongs to the subject under discussion. The ruler dominates those under him. His subjects imitate him, because they see perfection in him, exactly as children imitate their parents, or students their teachers. God is wise and knowing.

Recognizing Hierarchy vs Ability

Anyone who recognizes both hierarchy and ability will always feel lonely inside of a triangle of imitation, company, school, or whatever organzation. They will feel that the games people play are silly. These games include nicknames for company team members “Hi Owls!!!” for Twitter, bonusly where you can give other team members $5 in recognition of their work, and other feelings-based performative behavior. I am inclined to agree with the catchy phrase that feelings are the opiate of the masses.

Like Ibn Khaldun said, people follow those who they believe to be superior. If they have high levels of perception, they’ve built themselves up to a level where few are superior to them.

They can perceptively see things as a sham, which means they will refuse to follow, or if they do it’s to pursue their own goals. These people will only follow those who are genuinely better than them (real power) and refuse to follow those who hold abstract power (words). Only those with profound weakness would follow a child in mental thought.

Someone who only recognizes ability is a technician: unable to scale things into the human world beyond the technologies they work with. In fact, they often don’t care about social dynamics and want to stay out of it. But these people are needed to build modern society.

Someone who recognizes hierarchy but not ability may be decent enforcers of an existing system. You can actually collaborate with them to compete against other groups. But they’re only useful in primitive competition and popularity contests: modern society has extreme technological complexity.

We see that in the modern age, the most interesting leaders combine both ability and hierarchy. Transformational ability of material goods is correlated with power and human well-being. There are a lot of people with money. How many people seem to be using it well and shaping the world?

Refusing Abstract Power Hierarchies

Certain people refuse servile activity. You cannot put a price on them. Even if they are in this position, they will seek to self-actualize.

It may be related to the foldiness of one’s brain–if we consider human ability as recognition of “abstract thought,” then those with more defined brain grooves can think and lead more deeply. They see the world clearer, they are better at doing things, their metabolisms are higher, they are more intelligent.

For example, many people just repeat phrases and are creatures of habit because they literally don’t have the mental capability to do otherwise. I’m not saying these people are incapable–they are certainly functional human beings–but education cannot make a retarded child competent. Some people are just born with less ability to do things, so they have to follow, and they are the majority of people.

From an energy perpsective it makes sense. Thinking and memory requires energy. A low metabolic person is more likely to base their conclusions off of other people because their brains are structured in such a way that conserves energy.

An independent person’s refusal to engage with or provide “tact” to the head of the pyramid is an indicator to the clones and slaves on the base of the pyramid to avoid them and an indicator for enforcers to destroy them.

Do you know that thing where ants wiggle their antennae at each other? That’s what humans talking to each other is like.

Now let’s see what tact is.

Tact and performances

Tact is a bit hard to explain because it’s a theory on top of a theory, and you’ll have to read The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman to truly understand, but I’ll give it my best.

We find that preventive practices are constantly employed to avoid these embarrassments and that corrective practices are constantly employed to compensate for discrediting occurrences that have not been successfully avoided. When the individual employs these strategies and tactics to protect his own projections, we may refer to them as ’defensive practices’; when a participant employs them to save the definition of the situation projected by another, we speak of ’protective practices’ or ’tact’. Together, defensive and protective practices comprise the techniques employed to safeguard the impression fostered by an individual during his presence before others.

A lot of people go through life with certain performances of their character. This describes people who dress well, speak in an careful way so as to appear special, or might send text formatted as monospace over Whatsapp (apparently you can do this by selecting the text and changing the formatting) to seem special and interesting . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ .

Tact means you validate the performances of others, like selling your friend to potential dates. If your friend is presenting himself as rich, and you act in ways that agree with that performance, that is tact.

While I and many others may at times also dress well, what separates people who have low ego and high ego is their willingness to give up the act if needed: to describe what is really going on and to speak the truth about the situation or themselves, even if it is unpleasant or unflattering.

I think what explains the modern world is an increase in communication showing all the things people don’t want you to see. Given the internet, you might see Jair Bolsonaro casually eating, leaders getting sick and unhealthy, the back-scene decision making of Macron, and other such events.

By shrinking this distance, no longer are people captured by appearances of superiority and prestige. By putting more information out there, people who create implicit power structures are weakened. By letting more people recognize talent and ability, we select for better leaders, one based around truth and object transformation rather than prestige and deception.

As people get older, they realize the nature of humanity is weakness: ill health, infirmness, age. Adaptability decreases as people age as well. The key to remaining young must hold the key to being infinitely adaptable.

Generalized examples

If somebody is being passive-aggressively rude, you’re probably not imagining it. You don’t have to defer to people who are acting this way, you don’t have to laugh at their jokes or use their vocabulary, and you don’t have to give them tact. And often they will joke or try to play it off or spin it as some moral thing.

It’s actually a bad sign for their own social skills.

I meet a lot of ‘social’ people and they have varying degrees of ability. The really good people are like teflon. There’s nothing to pin on them and nobody really dislikes them. They’re reasonable when talking to people: not just mirroring them. They really consider what is going on in your world. It’s not about using social skills to be lazy; those who are socially good are also diligent about doing the necessary work.

Women are often imitators, but so are men

This is speaking in general.

After a period of time many women will start imitating the words of a guy around them. I think they do it when they’re interested or if they see using the wrong words as a threat. Men also understand the need to fall into ideological harmony should there be a threat of violence. Jamie Dimon first speaks glowingly of democracy in this video to do so.

In the United States we were all living in the idea-world of the founding fathers: the Constitution, a due process where people agree on the rules, and so on. But now the differences are exacerbated so much that only real power (force and violence) may be capbale of resolving the dispute. Saying the Constitution is not real in the USA is like saying God is not real centuries ago. Donald Trump does not believe Constitution is real, and it is unlikely to be a limiting factor on his behavior, so disputes will be resolved with the threat of violence. But lately as I see some of his actions being rolled back, I think he is maybe too old so his political purge and MAGA will lose steam.

The only reason people can now say God is dead is that a different set of idea-patterns now allow for human coordination.

Killing someone is physically and easily possible. But to violate such a social reality harms the group, so such a person will be restrained in an area where they can no longer do so.

This phenomena (that of people repeating the other) has been confirmed over and over again in certain blogs. The next great leader must understand a few important things, and it’s good to learn things that don’t change because you’ll meet them over and over again, and that is: the psychology/nature/tendencies of most human beings, the nature of women, the nature of different ethnic groups, and the difference between people based on levels of intelligence.

Women often have an implicit understanding of power structures and who is in charge from a social perspective, but they often are not good at telling apart levels of technical ability.

Society and its destruction

Ibn Khaldun knows that men tend to be natural leaders, and depriving men of that leadership in society will lead to its destruction.

Here, we possibly learn another secret, namely, that man is a natural leader by virtue of the fact that he has been made a representative (of God on earth). When a leader is deprived of his leadership and prevented from exercising all his powers, he becomes apathetic, even down to such matters as food and drink. This is in the human character. A similar observation may be made with regard to beasts of prey. They do not cohabit when they are in human captivity. The group that has lost control of its own affairs thus continues to weaken and to disintegrate until it perishes. Duration belongs to God alone.

Slave-like jobs (most operations roles in chains, so not at the HQ), such as working as a cashier, bank teller, warehouse worker, and so on are not amenable to independent personalities. A butcher in older times had much more latitude and creativity insofar as their relations to other people and suppliers, decoration and advertisement of their own shop, and were all things concerned, independent prospectors.

As a general rule, women tend toward comfort and stability while men tend toward variance and frontier pushing. Women seem to be afraid to do things they don’t have much experience with. Men have more variance at birth. And there’s a certain attitude that men have where one just keeps fighting and crushing things until emotionally your heart turns into a lump of coal, not unlike the male initiation rituals of old, and this is not something women could do because it would destroy them. There was a debate video where Trump is telling Kamala that Biden hates her, and she was about to cry.

I think this biologically is true, right? Evolution is driven by greater innovation in internal states. I think of the invention of seals with tongues to shuck mollusks. Sexual reproduction gives males greater variance, when there are more successful males that variance propagates to the females’ descendants. Compare this to asexual reproduction or random mutation. But because ideas can now serve as a basis for internal state change, the aforementioned type is less important.

Aren’t they just words?

When you copy the words someone else uses or react to them, you give credence to their version of reality. You build up their reputation without them doing anything for you.

Different versions of reality and opinion are of the utmost importance because versions of the future are not necessarily compatible. By staking an opinion, people state their wishes for the future.

You can use tact when you implicitly recognize it may be beneficial to ally with someone. However, I mainly aim to recognize ability for logistical competence is the source of power in the modern world. Even if someone gives me tact, I will accept it graciously, but I need to build connections of more technical ability at this stage in life, so I seek out software developers, carpenters, automotive manufacturers, and so on.

Even if I built an organization, I would not want to promote sycophants as enforcers. They would probably destroy the organization. The enforcers should be those of technical ability who recognize hierarchy, and they have to prove themself to be capable enough up to a significant level before moving to people management. Otherwise, people will just cargo cult the basics of technology, much like there are many “writers and substackers” in San Francisco now that those who gained competence and power were originaly deep writers such as Paul Graham.

One issue is that I think as an organization grows large, the selection methods become game-able and people put more effort into imitating it rather than having the thought processes necessary for independent action. People who are below the level of a leader in an organization may also conspire to keep good people away so that they can have their position. And people of quality rarely want to work under someone else.

When society is full of people competing to create abstract power bases, society splinters into a bunch of small gangs full of violence. That’s why it’s important to not index on things like perceived respect or access to women, and to engage in socially beneficial norms such as monogamy. If you were a strong man you would build a world, then by passive processes of diffusion you might accumulate more people around you. Then you could tell a guy: come here, work for me, here’s a job, here’s your wife. (of course if she agrees)

Propagating Harmful Memes

Things that are propagated in society such as Christianity’s nonviolence and forgiveness doctrines or gender equality are meant to pacify the population into being weak so that the rulers can maintain the power base. Spreading norms such as degeneracy, binge alcohol drinking, tattoos, and drug abuse weaken the possibility of challengers from the populace, even if there would be a net benefit overall.

Example: imagine you are in a room with a tiger. The tiger says it won’t eat you. How do you feel? Two methods for safety: non-existence of the other’s capabilities (say if it was a house-cat) or have equivalent capabilities (have your own tiger). It is the existence of capabilities themselves that are threatening combined with a social willingness to use it (that is, you feel not of the same group).

Local elites in a small town do this, as I found out in small town Georgia when I heard stories of political leaders blocking businesses coming in because that would give their population power and money.

I believe there are two ways to keep power: you can try to weaken everyone else that’s not your group, or you can make everyone strong so each can advocate for their own interests, not infringe upon others, and keep a balance of power.

Those who have gone into a position of power but are in many ways know they did so out of deception and hence they are paradoxically strong and weak at the same time will pursue the former strategy. The strong would do the latter as a strategy to overcome the weak, but I don’t think they would necessarily strengthen the “outside” for the sake of it.

I generally believe everyone who desires it should be able to have a sense of pride, self-respect, and accomplishment free from exploitation. This is characteristic of all independent and beautiful organisms in a way that parasites are not.

So raise people to your level. They will appreciate it. Making slaves of people only incurs their resentment over time. Egalitarianism is natural and stable.

Propagating Harmful Memes in Tech

Another meme spread to weaken people is “I want to build a company to do great things and help the world.” Tech people, who would have the most capability for political power and transformation, seem to be helplessly infected and disorganized, leading to their exploitation despite significant salaries. Going to a technology school, I encountered numerous instances of people repeating this without thought or meaning.

Everything that makes you stronger, more capable, alive, and powerful is good. Anything that is the opposite of that: sterilization after having a certain amount of kids, alcohol, news, music, mirrors (which promote narcissism), etc. is bad.

On differing degrees of opinion

There are varying degrees of belief as to creating a group:

• No difference of opinion leads to incapability of working together. Unless humans linked their minds together.
• Accepting some non-fundamental differences (as to what they are, each group can decide for itself) and having a good sense of the general direction
• Understanding serious differences between people but not engaging in them
• Accepting most differences (this is difficult except for the most tolerant of people)

And with regard to external groups there is variation too:

• No acceptance of different opinion (not plausible, fight the entire world)
• Understand differences in-depth, but still have a self-preference and way of being and retain possibility of limited action
• Accept differences, so long as they are non-threatening
• Accept any difference (you no longer exist)

There was a recent story of a Muslim terrorist attack against Hindus in the disputed region of Kashmir. Their ask of victims to say a certain chant is representative of the shibboleth story in the bible.

Living in others’ idea-worlds

I frequently meet bodies of ideas but not the minds. Certain people in society are the body and others are the mind. Sometimes the mind is in a different time and place and nobody knows who exactly originated it.

I see a decorated cafe in Bulgaria with English words and “Western” style clothing such as from H&M. I see certain idea-patterns. Ha-Ha! I see the mind you live in! You are but a distant vestige! You may once become reunited with your body. It is better than the dead Idea-World of Soviet Communism!

You send me a representative! I speak for myself！How can I feel happy if you match me with a hand? ? (note: this is why organizations have difficulty recruiting top people. They send average people to greet talented people.) The sad thing is many organizations don’t want independent thinkers. They want slaves.

Side note: in war it is not specific individuals, even specific leaders, or even a specific territory that is fought against. It is the battle between idea-worlds where humans are just the body of such. And ideas that are defeated should be quarantined like smallpox. That Bismarck’s and Hitler’s writings and the history of Prussia still exists today means latent ideas can once again come into being.

Example of the adoption of ideas

There was a recent blog post about why the “vibes shifted” regarding Trump and this was the only comment that was useful.

The last part is unclear to me, but the part about ideas diffusing downward is very much true. It was probably written by an American White due to the overusage of “humour words.” Older English writing by Charles Darwin would use it differently, like “What gives man his ability over animals? It is reason.”

It’s always interesting to watch narrative shifts in what we pretend is our intellectual class. It works a lot like adoption of new technology.

You have the stakeholders, the people who set the message, make a sea change in their rhetoric and tone. They don’t come right out and say it, because they don’t have to. The early adopters, the next tier in the opinion sections of the “respectable” outlets, didn’t get to their current positions without being able to instinctively understand what they are supposed to say. That’s not to say there isn’t some coordination, Journolist-style, but they know as soon as they see this shift to follow in step, again without making any explicit pronouncements.

Then you have the Outer Party hopefuls, like Cowen. This is an interesting jump. Cowen is smart enough to know the shift has occurred, and that he needs to fall in line. But he is neither powerful enough to simply let his words stand on their own, nor does he have the reputation of the weekly writers to speak in vagaries and have his message heard. So, like most at this step, he adds analysis, his own thoughts. But that’s a problem, because he doesn’t really understand why this is happening, only that it is. So the analysis ends up being a hopelessly-confused mish-mash of priors.

Fortunately for Cowen, this is catnip for the next two tiers, the mainstream thinkers and the people whom I don’t have a snappy name for but are like your grandparents who still have a landline but are thinking about getting a Jitterbug (smartphone) phone. The MR (Marginal Revolution) commentariat doesn’t need cogent analysis of the narrative shift, their job is not to think about it but simply to regurgitate it as needed. Their sociopolitical superiors have adopted, so they need to adopt, it’s as shrimple as that. Of course, they, as well as the last tier, still need to operate off their priors, so they end up with a bit of cognitive dissonance, but no one who isn’t a deplorable racist is going to notice anyway.

And then you have the last stragglers, the people who got fired because they complained about the shooter missing. The sort of people who hear an inside joke at a party then repeat it later on to another group without a shred of comprehension of its meaning. The lab leak vs. natural origin debaters in 2024. I actually feel a little bad for these guys, being perpetually a day late and a dollar short. They are just trying to fit in. But I don’t make the rules.

Anyway, the reason you all end up sounding like idiots is that you don’t really know why Trump is popular. You can’t know, honestly, it’s not your fault. Nature or nurture, you have been brought up to reject the in-group. The notion of an instinctive leader is alien to you and the notion that people might band together under him for any common purpose makes you uneasy in ways you can’t readily describe. So when you see this phenomenon occur, it’s understandable that you might struggle to rationalize it.

Ultimately, you needn’t worry. They are going to get Trump. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. I am honestly surprised it took them 8+ years to get this close, but then the timing of it (after the POTATUS debate, but prior to his selecting a VP) couldn’t have been better, so maybe this was when they decided to see it through. And, for what I can only describe as divine intervention (uncomfortable as that makes you) they failed. For now, anyway. I doubt the next time will be as dramatic; they will probably just say he had a stroke. It won’t have the cathartic effect to you all that seeing him get Zaprudered in 4K UHD would have, but that can’t be helped. Failing that, just make Biden win again. Whatever.

Because here’s more good news: there’s no successor. Vance can be bought, likely already is, like Pence. No one, certainly no politician in Washington, is a natural leader like Trump. No one is a natural leader with billions of dollars to spend and the willingness to throw it all away to take on the machine. Trump Jr. is the heir to the fortune, but although he seems a good dude, he is not his father. Maybe someone comes out of the blue, I don’t know. But they have to overcome our overlords to do it, it’s a tall order.

You get one more Cabal president, four more years of immigration, it’s over. You won, the racists lost, you get your technoliberal utopia. Our democracy, if you can keep it. It will be fun while it lasts, but we’ll see what emerges on the other side.

Fertility decline and worlds

Related to fertility decline rather than IDEA-WORLDs, but in a sense if women select for men who can create worlds (unfortunately young people can’t do this easily due to the difficulty of accumulating surplus and technological development; it’s concentrated in the hands of a many older people), and most other men are stuck in repeater positions, then it’s only natural that society misgears. Stable and extremely boring, kind of mentally weak men. Or the opposite of that, with no stability later on. You can have both in a man, but it tends to be rarer these days.

If you have enough money to do things, you kind of pick up people over time and create a mini-world/mini economic zone. A company is sort of that way too.

People reproduce when they have enough: as for what counts as enough, the existence of communications and transportation technologies puts “enough” just out of reach yet still there. Nobody knows when to stop or when they’ve made it in life.

For me I think: a house in a walkable neighborhood in a temperate climate, like I had when I was young. Access to nature. Healthy food. Community. But the job market gets compressed too, so even though I have capability to do well I’m here writing this blog instead.

Everyone is trying to strive for something, compressing the top of the pyramid. Life has always been about a surplus of time, energy, health, and understanding. Highways, vegetable oils, the internet. These haven’t created surpluses.

Imitation or Independence?

Coral reefs are a beautiful structure made from many healthy, individual polyps. So do Cliff Swallows when they build their nests together. A civilized society can never exist from the top-down as enforcement or coercion from the state, but rather as the product of civilized individuals and families. A coral reef could never exist if each individual polyp was greedy and decided that it wanted the most resources. Colonies, a structure of animals coming together to pursue their survival, is no different from civilization.

Top-down methods of control are difficult to sustain in practice because the core naturally has less information than the edges. Top-down methods of control can only be enacted upon a base society where people have poor health and education, where the local state of subordinates is a strictly a subset of those in the lead.

I believe it is possible to sustain society. I believe I will soon have figured out the answers.

We covered a lot in this article:

• Imitation, language, and world creation
• Living inside others’ worlds
• What is a human? Internal state.
• Hierarchy versus Ability. Why both are needed.
• Refusing others’ idea worlds.
• The nature of repeating. Women and men.
• What is Tact?
• Harming others with poor ideas
• Groups and ideas
• Adoption of ideas as diffusing social trends
• Society. What is its most natural form?