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Halloween Jack posted:This is so unbelievably silly. What's silly about it? The Final Fantasy 7 house is an example of Narrativism occurring more or less in a political vacuum. If Narrativism can occur in a completely apolitical context then the behavior itself is not political in nature.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:36
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BOOSness Hammocks posted:There’s always a bedrock of people ready to go fascist and hang others from lampposts, but there have to be causal explanations for why they sometimes sit and stew in the living room and sometimes put on helmets and march around. The nazis out in the streets now we’re pretty much the same people ten years ago. There is of course some truth to this, but on the other hand there is a sizable portion of the American populace that has been converted and militarized over the last 20 or so years by Rightwing media. We can point to 9/11, Fox News, AM talk radio, internet community (as a concept), the Great Recession, intensifying wealth inequality, or all of these, but everyone knows a few people who were largely apolitical that have become goose-steppers in that time period. I don't buy the "they were always Nazis" argument, especially given that many of these people are very young.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:41
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Halloween Jack posted:This is so unbelievably silly. cult behavior can arise from really silly reasons but that doesn't make a leader's collecting of thralls frivolous
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Oct 23, 2018 16:41
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Part of it has to do with how you define “politics.”. Like that can specifically mean how formal powers are divided in governing a nation and how people in democracies vote, but politics itself as an object of study starts with how a household is ordered (according to the Greeks). The impulses that people have about what kind of social order is allowed and who belongs and what kinds of questions or activities are permitted are themselves political, no matter whether or how they are expressed by leaders or laws or institutions. And whatever we’re saying about the kind of person who’s eager to go nazi, nazis only become a threat when “regular” conservatives go along with it out of self-interestedness or the belief that they can take advantage of what’s happening (or that they can only survive by latching into it). imo material conditions dictate those formative moments and there’s not a way around it. There weren’t fascists taking control in the 70s even though the authoritarians were absolutely losing their poo poo over black kids being in their schools and women having jobs, and sorting themselves into the Republican Party in the process. The whole 80s-90s culture war never went “hot” as it were the way things are boiling over now, outside of some militia groups robbing banks and running drugs. Something’s different, and I don’t see how it can be tied up in the psychology of white boomers who were here the whole time.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:44
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And historically there have been cults that formed around every drat thing one think of. Is a video game weirder than sexy geometry? They all promise to let one know who one is and ones place in the universe.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:51
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1. Even when a fully trained PhD academic starts littering their article with neologisms or newly coined buzzwords it usually feels unearned and annoying. 2. It's not a good sign when somebody's developed theory doesn't seem to engage at all with any existing body of research, or only engages with such research in a superficial and opportunistic manner. If you were writing a thesis on this topic one of the first things you'd be asked to conduct would be a literature review in which, after identifying the scope and topic of your research, you would describe what the current scholarly trends in the field are and locate your own ideas within the context of other researchers. You'd have to give a bit of context for your work and explain how your own thinking relates to the theories and research of others. Serious scholarship is heavily focused on plugging your own ideas into a larger framework of research, and of locating yourself within long running arguments and debates that often span decades. Its not a purely solitary endeavor where you cloister yourself away, do a lot of thinking and research in isolation (or with your internet friends) and then come down from the mountain top to share your visions. You really gotta put in the work of actually linking your thoughts with what other people have said because 1) it lets you know when you've just accidentally invented a cruder version of an existing theory and 2) it hopefully forces you to constantly test your ideas and actually introduces some amount of rigour into your work.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:54
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Unzip and Attack posted:There is of course some truth to this, but on the other hand there is a sizable portion of the American populace that has been converted and militarized over the last 20 or so years by Rightwing media. We can point to 9/11, Fox News, AM talk radio, internet community (as a concept), the Great Recession, intensifying wealth inequality, or all of these, but everyone knows a few people who were largely apolitical that have become goose-steppers in that time period. I don't buy the "they were always Nazis" argument, especially given that many of these people are very young. It’s definitely not an either/or, but why were those racist kids spending so much time on 4Chan after 2008? Their narrative is that the culture changes too fast and demands that they be less racist than they are comfortable being, but there are boomer shitheads in my family still mad about the end of segregation and who believe white supremacy is a founding ideal of the United States who never contemplated shooting up a mall or bombing city hall and just lived their lives as middle-class drones. I never even knew what shits they were until Trump let them know it was ok to be that way. So I kind of feel like if the young nazis of today were distracted by building careers and paying for houses, they would never have moved into the “active nazi” category. But you’re right that it’s very much an open circle and people gravitate to what radicalizes them as they get a taste for being radicalized. I definitely think that social media and algorithms are extremely powerful and dangerous to us in ways we don’t understand, and that future generations will look at us playing with them so carelessly in the same way we look at radium water or those x-ray shoe-fitting stations.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:56
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BOOSness Hammocks posted:Something’s different, and I don’t see how it can be tied up in the psychology of white boomers who were here the whole time. The larger story is breaking down. People are opting to participate in other stories.
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Oct 23, 2018 16:56
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Helsing posted:1. Even when a fully trained PhD academic starts littering their article with neologisms or newly coined buzzwords it usually feels unearned and annoying. I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was 14. I was raised in a backwards doomsday cult and my life has primarily been preoccupied with trying to overcome that. Beyond basic arithmetic and reading my actual education didn't start until I entered High School, prior to that I had been educated by the cult. I am literally a disabled schizophrenic who lives in Portland on less than $1,000 a month from my social security check, I never really had the option to go to college. Also when I started this project the first drafts were literally written on a library computer because I was living in a homeless shelter at the time. Like I am doing the goddmned best job of this I can with basically no resources whatsoever and a huge pile of obstacles in front of me, you'll forgive me if I have no idea how to even go about reviewing literature that I've never once had access to in my life. Prester Jane has issued a correction as of 17:03 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 17:00
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BrandorKP posted:And historically there have been cults that formed around every drat thing one think of. BOOSness Hammocks posted:It’s definitely not an either/or, but why were those racist kids spending so much time on 4Chan after 2008? Their narrative is that the culture changes too fast and demands that they be less racist than they are comfortable being, but there are boomer shitheads in my family still mad about the end of segregation and who believe white supremacy is a founding ideal of the United States who never contemplated shooting up a mall or bombing city hall and just lived their lives as middle-class drones. I never even knew what shits they were until Trump let them know it was ok to be that way.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:01
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Final Fantasy House house was pwnage though
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Oct 23, 2018 17:01
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is now a good time to beg the question of the pneumatology inherent to arrive at something like the Final Fantasy House or is this just something that'll spiral out into a questioning of otakukin in general because there's something flawed when one's belief that they are the reincarnation of an idea, especially an idea that was created after their own creation
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Oct 23, 2018 17:10
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For fun replace "framework" with "narrative" in Helsing's post about academia.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:16
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BOOSness Hammocks posted:It’s definitely not an either/or, but why were those racist kids spending so much time on 4Chan after 2008? Their narrative is that the culture changes too fast and demands that they be less racist than they are comfortable being, but there are boomer shitheads in my family still mad about the end of segregation and who believe white supremacy is a founding ideal of the United States who never contemplated shooting up a mall or bombing city hall and just lived their lives as middle-class drones. I never even knew what shits they were until Trump let them know it was ok to be that way. I think a lot of derives from your first paragraph and the sense that since about that time white dominance felt itself threatened in a way it hadn't been since probably the civil rights era, which was especially aggravated by years of racially-laced fearmongering since 9/11 and anticipated economic stability falling out from beneath their feet. Also, PJ: I get why you'd get a bit miffed at Helsing's suggestion, which admittedly didn't make any allowances for the fact that you're not in academia or indeed even the most economically secure position personally. However, I'd like to recommend you at least consider Willie Tomg's related suggestion that you run all this by someone who does have the chops and qualifications to hopefully give you some constructive advice as to where to take it next. It's fine if you don't want to do this, and want to just keep the discussion as your informally-derived theory of things you've worked out on your own! But you've clearly given it a ton of thought and are taking at least a the preliminary steps towards formalizing your thoughts into something more concrete, and among other things, speaking with someone with the sort of training in question will (presuming they're not an non-receptive dick of course) help point you towards how to become acquainted with the relevant literature to move your work along. Being a historian I'm not in so closely a related field that I can tell you specifically what that will be myself, other than to predict it will require a lot of reading. Captain_Maclaine has issued a correction as of 17:27 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 17:17
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I think I need to clarify what the underlying cause of Narrativism- the subconscious adoption of specific ways of processing information about the world. This adoption process ("Narrative Induction") is caused by being exposed to communications (either written or verbal, although verbal is much much much stronger) that rely on "Bypass Logic" to reach its conclusion. Once enough exposure has occurred then the mind will begin to adopt the three specific heuristics that comprise Bypass logic. Once these characteristics are adopted sufficiently, then the budding there to this world you will begin to conform rapidly to the 4-tiered structure of the Grand Narrative. Once they have adopted that structure into their underline worldview, then shortly after that they will begin to formulate their Inner Narrative. At this point the brand new Narrativist is "low-compaction"; meaning that they are at the very bottom of the radicalization process and their "Enemy" does not yet represent a constant psychological threat that must be addressed in some way. The next thing the brand new Narrativist will do is look for other Narrativists to start forming social groups with, and if they are successful in this then there will inevitably be compaction cycles that will drive the radicalization process. If a new Narrativist is not able to join a Narativist group and participate in compaction cycles, they will remain a mostly harmless kook. You can watch this entire basic process play out in the excellent documentary "The Brainwashing of my Dad". In that documentary you have a perfectly normal person who starts listening to right-wing radio during long commutes to work. Hours and hours and hours of this exposure to right-wing radio caused him to become a Narrativist. Thankfully this individual was never able to join a Narrativist group, and as a result remained low-compaction. This made it possible for his family to pull him out of narrative ISM by basically cutting off his access to right-wing media. Once he stopped having bypass logic be constantly reinforced- he drifted out of being a Narrativist and more or less returned to being the person he had been prior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3TeTxgNVo Prester Jane has issued a correction as of 17:33 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 17:25
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Cadaver_Maclaine posted:I think a lot of derives from your first paragraph and the sense that since about that time white dominance felt itself threatened in a way it hadn't been since probably the civil rights era, which was especially aggravated by years of racially-laced fearmongering since 9/11 and anticipated economic stability falling out from beneath their feet. In my opinion the straw that broke the camel's back was that week in 2014 where you had both the oberg Rafael decision as well as Confederate flags being taken down in response to the Charleston shooting. These events were extremely large blasts of "Narrative Dysphoria" to both the religious cluster and the racist cluster, and compaction cycle / very visible radicalization started to occur shortly after those events. It was essentially shooting a Roman candleat a pile of wood soaked in kerosene- as decade's of right-wing media had created a huge number of relatively low-compaction Narrativists within our country. Prester Jane has issued a correction as of 17:34 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 17:30
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Cadaver_Maclaine posted:I think a lot of derives from your first paragraph and the sense that since about that time white dominance felt itself threatened in a way it hadn't been since probably the civil rights era, which was especially aggravated by years of racially-laced fearmongering since 9/11 and anticipated economic stability falling out from beneath their feet. The end of whiteness had been chugging along pretty incrementally and predictably though, at least in the rainbow capitalism "yay a black president!" sense. I'm not prepared to cede the "you made us do this by demanding we tell you our pronouns!" argument to the nazis, as it really seems like the death of future prospects under capitalism in crisis made them jump that way. Not that white male teens aren't hugely racist and reactionary, but all the pieces were there in the 90s and had been there since Reagan mobilized white rage against the welfare state. That's a really good point about islamophobia and the clash of cultures stuff post-9/11, though. I wonder if we could chart the rise of discourse invoking "the west" as an identity or ideal 2001-present. I bet there would be a big jump as the years wore on.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:33
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That new, C-SPAM Prester Jane thread smell (it smells like new car).  I'm sure there's something about this that belongs in this thread: https://twitter.com/GrayzoneProject/status/1054602024287911936 staticman has issued a correction as of 18:23 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 18:21
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Prester Jane posted:I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was 14. I was raised in a backwards doomsday cult and my life has primarily been preoccupied with trying to overcome that. Beyond basic arithmetic and reading my actual education didn't start until I entered High School, prior to that I had been educated by the cult. I am literally a disabled schizophrenic who lives in Portland on less than $1,000 a month from my social security check, I never really had the option to go to college. This is why I'm telling you to email universities though. Academics generally don't mind helping with this kind of thing even when the people doing the asking aren't tuition paying students. They will skim databases and give you poo poo for free. Some of them will be dicks about it but some of them won't. They will help you with the heavy lifting on this; you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:34
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Willie Tomg posted:This is why I'm telling you to email universities though. Academics generally don't mind helping with this kind of thing even when the people doing the asking aren't tuition paying students. They will skim databases and give you poo poo for free. Some of them will be dicks about it but some of them won't. They will help you with the heavy lifting on this; you don't need to reinvent the wheel. I do want to thank you for your kind suggestion, I do intend to put something together and try emailing local University professors who might be interested. It's going to take me some time to be able to do that though, there's a lot of anxiety behind me taking that particular course of action that I'll have to address before I can do it.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:38
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There is a lot of scholarly expectations from the OP in the thread explaining why I say "TRUMPO!"
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Oct 23, 2018 19:06
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Willie Tomg posted:This is why I'm telling you to email universities though. Academics generally don't mind helping with this kind of thing even when the people doing the asking aren't tuition paying students. They will skim databases and give you poo poo for free. Some of them will be dicks about it but some of them won't. They will help you with the heavy lifting on this; you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Seconding this once more. We love it when people take an interest because it sigh ocrumsprug posted:There is a lot of scholarly expectations from the OP in the thread explaining why I say "TRUMPO!" ed balls
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Oct 23, 2018 19:08
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staticman posted:That new, C-SPAM Prester Jane thread smell (it smells like new car). I've got quite a lot to say about this article, let me go piece by piece. quote:This month, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, Cop Block and journalists like Rachel Blevins. Now let me first specify that I regard most large corporations as being dominated by "Integrator Cooperators". The differences between a Structuralist and an Integrator are well beyond the scope of this post; but the enabling of Narrativism in order to preserve the status quo is very much a feature of Cooperator behavior. (That is to say that although A Structuralist Cooperator has significant differences with an Integrator Cooperator, both will enable Narrativism in order to preserve their personal status quo. In this case Facebook is appeasing far right Narrativists by cooperating with an agenda to remove sources of Narrative Dysphoria from their platform. I believe this is a direct result of right-wing narrative efforts to whip up outrage against Facebook and therefore threaten their status quo- resulting in Facebook's capitulation and the advancement of the right wing Narrativist agenda. This is part of the interaction between Narrativists and Cooperators that occurs over and over in history- Cooperators who have their status quo threatened by Narrativists capitulate to/enable the Narrativist movement that is threatening them. Narrativism can therefor overcome a culture no matter how many losses it receives so long as it controls the dominant social narratives of that culture. As a result Narrativists are obsessed heavily with controlling the social messages in entertainment and media and mostly ignore traditional/logistical concerns. (e.g. Jordan Peterson's obsession with Disney movies). Once a Narrativist group becomes some sort of credible threat to a cooperating group, the Narrativists gain tremendously outsized leverage over the Cooperators*. *See for example Disney's recent firing of James Gunn- Disney perceived a credible threat to their status quo and as a result capitulated to an attack brought on exclusively by Narrativists. quote:Jamie Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre. Just lol that this is literally a part of a rebranded version of the project for a New American Century. 12 years ago the project for a New American Century was focus of various conspiracy theories- at the time Alex Jones must have spent at least 10 to 15 minutes a day talking about the project for a New American Century. quote:By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue, this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives. It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be tracking. The systematic purging of sources of narrative dysphoria (to right wing Narrativists) is well underway, and it's being enabled by the Cooperators who control the DNC and large corporations. quote:A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, found that the ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counterterror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the American national security apparatus.” Narrativists don't care about facts, they care about getting someone who is perceived as having credibility to repeat their talking points. Once they have achieved that they will go about implementing the agenda of suppressing sources of narrative dysphoria in any way they can. quote:In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook. I have been arguing for some time that corporate and political actors are figuring out how to use social media in order to weaponize and spread Narrativism. In this particular example we have right wing Narrativists applying pressure to a Cooperator organization- and that Cooperator organization is capitulating in order to prevent disruptions to their status quo.
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Oct 23, 2018 19:43
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Prester Jane posted:I didn't even have a Social Security number until I was 14. I was raised in a backwards doomsday cult and my life has primarily been preoccupied with trying to overcome that. Beyond basic arithmetic and reading my actual education didn't start until I entered High School, prior to that I had been educated by the cult. I am literally a disabled schizophrenic who lives in Portland on less than $1,000 a month from my social security check, I never really had the option to go to college. If you are taking the effort to put yourself out there and solicit feedback for your ideas you're obviously ready to think about what others have written on this topic. Constructing your own entire original theory based purely on your own observation and research is a poor approach and frankly anyone who doesn't tell you that is doing you a disservice. You're presenting your ideas as a system of thought that can be used to make sense of the world so I thinks the standard I'm holding to you is perfectly fair. If you have access to a computer, the internet and a library and can write long analyses of articles or youtube videos then you're clearly capable of looking up other theories of group psychology, cognitive biases, politics, etc. and figuring out how your ideas relate to what others have said. It's not like you need to read everything ever written before forming your own opinions but if you want to be taken seriously you should demonstrate that you first took other people's ideas seriously. BrandorKP posted:For fun replace "framework" with "narrative" in Helsing's post about academia. This kind of illustrates my point. The fact academics (or anyone for that matter) use narratives and other heuristic devices to make sense of the world isn't controversial. What is supposed to make academic work distinctive is usually the fact that it's collaborative in nature - committees, peer review, conferences, etc.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:48
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I think it's easy to underestimate the difficulty of academic research to an outsider.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:52
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I think it's easy to underestimate the difficulty of academic research to an outsider. Particularly anyone who hasn't even had an undergrad's introduction to it.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:53
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Ok, that is fair enough. Let me try to think of a more constructive way to convey this advice.
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Oct 23, 2018 20:55
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Helsing posted:If you are taking the effort to put yourself out there and solicit feedback for your ideas you're obviously ready to think about what others have written on this topic. Constructing your own entire original theory based purely on your own observation and research is a poor approach and frankly anyone who doesn't tell you that is doing you a disservice. You're presenting your ideas as a system of thought that can be used to make sense of the world so I thinks the standard I'm holding to you is perfectly fair. This is literally the first time in my life I've ever had enough stability to be able to contemplate reading that literature. I'm not opposed to reading academic literature that covers simular topics, but it's exceedingly annoying when my lack of formal credentials is used constantly as a gatekeeper to insist that I shouldn't be talking about my ideas yet at all. And that's what it all to mately comes down to every time this particular objection is brought up about my work- it's always been used as a way to gate keep me from even trying to get my work out there in any form. If you have a suggestion for something you think I should read then point me to it, goons have been doing exactly that for years and although I don't always read everything that I get pointed to I do read quite a bit of it. If you see where my vocabulary terms clearly overlap with an existing concept and academic literature, then please also point me to that. Because thus far whenever I have found overlap my theories are much much much much much more elaborated than what presently exists. For example I believe that the "Deep Story" of Aroie Hochschild is basically covering the same conceptual territory as the grand narrative, however I would argue that the Grand Narrative is a substantially more refined and detailed exploration of that concept and what are Lee has done thus far.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:04
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Now maybe I am a touch sensitive about the topic, but my experience has been that is generally just away to dismiss me without having to engage with the actual content of my ideas. This is how the exact same conversation ended a few months ago in the Thunderdome thread:twodot posted:
Also: twodot posted:Yes, it turns out you are in a position where it is effectively impossible to convince anyone they should care about your made up vocabulary which you built using your non-existent training. This line of reasoning has been used against me a number of times, and as a result I'm a little quick on the trigger about the topic of why I don't have a formal education to backup my theories.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:31
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Now for some actual content: https://mobile.twitter.com/Ppolling...r%3D200%23pti27 https://mobile.twitter.com/SenSchum...D200%23lastpost https://mobile.twitter.com/shaun_je...D200%23lastpost
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Oct 23, 2018 21:41
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PJ, consider the word "collaborator" in place of cooperator, since it's commonly used already and carries the meaning you want.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:52
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So attacking George Soros has become sort of an outer narrative for "the Jewish agenda"- and there does seem to be a significant uptick in attacks on George Soros of late. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNkK_vLbZcQ This video is extremely proclick. Pat Robertson's solution to the migrant caravan is to use the military to force them into a concentration camp, "and then once you have them in a situation that seems humanitarian begin to arrest them". His main concern with the migrant Caravan is literally the "pr nightmare from beating on children and peasents" and he thinks a concentration camp is the best way to avoid that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqtbwhJz7Fs This video demonstrates the lack of conceptual boundaries that is a trademark of Narrativism- Khashoggi was in the payroll 9f Doris to write disparaging articles about KSA. This was being done because KSA is not playing nice with the Deep state, and that's why Khashoggi was being paid to attack both KSA and Putin. (That is just the first 60 seconds, it keeps going from there.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEly_DciEPc
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Oct 23, 2018 21:59
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This isn't an academic setting, PJ. You won't be graded on it. I understand your frustration. You finally have the wherewithal to put down into words a detailed analysis of your lived experiences and how that maps to world at large. We'd all do well to undertake such harrowing levels of introspection. I also understand why some would advise you to "do the research" before you re-invent the wheel and discover something someone else already discovered. I think, if that were the case, I'd rather see you build on top of that thing instead of rebuilding it from the ground up. It would be awesome if people could provide examples of publicly available literature that any of us could read to get our heads around similar ideas. I've read The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer for example and Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism which are both pretty entry level stuff that barks up the same tree. I was inspired to read them because of your previous thread in D&D. Yes, I made it to adulthood without reading Ur-Fascism; I was an engineering major in college. Heck, I even see bits of your theory in The Art of Memetics about how ideas spread. Lots of reading about memetics falls into "ideas are magick" territory, but this book is pretty solid. At least I remember it being solid. It's been more than five years since I read it. I remember it being more about how Marketing works.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:10
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Pope Guilty posted:PJ, consider the word "collaborator" in place of cooperator, since it's commonly used already and carries the meaning you want. I've considered doing that but I actually have a few specific reasons for not doing so- 1.) "Collaborators" carries too much negative baggage with it in the context of our present zeitgeist , 2.) Cooperators are a normal part of any human population and are actually pretty important to a functioning society*, and 3.) a Cooperator will attack anything that threatens their status quo if the disruption actually occurs**. *the problems only begin when Cooperators control most of a society's resources. **A threat of disruption can get a cooperator to compromise with you, an actual disruption will be met with active resistance. The real problem then is when you have a scenario wherein an entrenched group of Cooperators both control most of society's resources and are insulated from having their personal status quo disrupted by their own bad decisions. Once that situation is created it will inevitably result in a severe stratification of the control of resources within society, (e.g. income inequality)with the Cooperators taking as much for themselves as they feel they can get away without destabilizing the entire system that their status quo depends upon. This stratification of wealth will create the preconditions in society that will allow marriage of ism to begin to take root, and once it's taking route enough that narrative his can provide a credible threat to the status quo of Cooperators then you have a situation wherein "Cooperators become Collaborators". Prester Jane has issued a correction as of 22:27 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 22:11
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Aleph Null posted:I've read The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer for example and Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism which are both pretty entry level stuff that barks up the same tree. I was inspired to read them because of your previous thread in D&D. Yes, I made it to adulthood without reading Ur-Fascism; I was an engineering major in college. These are good works (though I haven't read Wilson's book), for all that Eco's work has become an in-joke for us these days. I'd add to the list Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics with the warning that while quite good, Hofstadter wrote it during the social history revolution of the 60s and his writing style in it is very much of that period ie: not the easiest for non-historians to get into.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:16
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Helsing posted:This kind of illustrates my point. The fact academics (or anyone for that matter) use narratives and other heuristic devices to make sense of the world isn't controversial. What is supposed to make academic work distinctive is usually the fact that it's collaborative in nature - committees, peer review, conferences, etc. Right it's just what brains do. And that second part is right also, but it's not peculiar to academia. Variations on that theme are present in bunch of different institutions to deal with it, boards, councils, journals, etc. Even what this thread is doing now is a good example. And I have found goons to be better at it, up until one gets to like program or department heads.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:22
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near as i can tell so far, The Authoritarians is basically what PJ is trying to write, almost entirely, but Willie Tomg has issued a correction as of 22:43 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 22:28
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Willie Tomg posted:near as i can tell so far, The Authoritarians is basically what PJ is trying to write, almost entirely, but with a greater emphasis on root psychology (which is general and broadly applicable) and less on the case by case particularization of rationalizations for that psychology (which change and skitter around like a drop of water on a hot griddle). You can get e-book versions for free here https://www.theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/ That's how I read it: on my tablet.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:38
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Willie Tomg posted:near as i can tell so far, The Authoritarians is basically what PJ is trying to write, almost entirely, but with a greater emphasis on root psychology (which is general and broadly applicable) and less on the case by case particularization of rationalizations for that psychology (which change and skitter around like a drop of water on a hot griddle). Originally this discussion was using the term "Authoritarians" because at first I was kind of trying to build on Altmeyer's work. Eventually there was a consensus reached that what I was describing was sufficiently different from Altmeyer's work to warrant a new term, and that's when a goon coined the term "Narrativist". I highly recommend reading the free version of "The Authoritarians" to anyone who is following in this thread and has not already done so. it is on the whole an accident introduction to the topic, even though both I and the academic world have some critiques of Altmeyer's work. In my view Altmeyer is definitely barking up the same tree I am, but he was severely hampered by being an outsider to this psychology as well as some significant structural problems with the way he ran his simulations. For example Narrativists only operate in a group once they have recognized each other and settled on some sort of collective innrr narrative, and Altmeyer's experiments all involved a bunch of strangers coming together in a public setting for a couple of hours. This simply was not enough time for any Narrativists in the group to recognize each other and build a collective inner narrative. As a result I tend to believe his "double highs" were not some sort of specific subtype of authoritarian- but rather regular Narrativists who also happened to have some level of a cluster B personality disorder/very low empathy.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:49
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Prester Jane posted:Originally this discussion was using the term "Authoritarians" because at first I was kind of trying to build on Altmeyer's work. Eventually there was a consensus reached that what I was describing was sufficiently different from Altmeyer's work to warrant a new term, and that's when a goon coined the term "Narrativist". This recent observation from his website talks about religious upbringings in a relevant way, how it primes Authoritarians to accept Narratives (not the phrase he uses) over facts and truth without any critical introspection or even thought. https://www.theauthoritarians.org/why-do-trumps-supporters-stand-by-him-no-matter-what/
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Oct 23, 2018 22:53
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