The late Joe Sobran produced the metaphor of the insect hive to describe the group behavior of the Left. It was a useful way of describing the spontaneous cooperation that has always been a feature of the Left. It is the dominant feature. Progressives will suddenly flock to an issue, all chanting the same lines and howling the same protests, as if they are a trained army of lunatics unleashed on the rest of society. It is a behavior that looks coordinated, but it is spontaneous and instinctive.
The most recent example of this was the reaction to the Dylann Roof shooting at the black church. All of sudden, as if commanded by a super villain from a secret lair, the Left began chanting in unison about the Confederate battle flag. Even the sober minded had to wonder if this was not a planned effort. Within a few hours we went from indifference to Confederate symbols to roving bands of lunatics toppling over statues and digging of Confederate graves.
Imagine the sort of person, who, upon hearing about a shooting, immediately thinks it is time to topple over a statue in their local park. What sort of person sees their coreligionists howling and then begins howling uncontrollably? Imagine what it is like to have no agency, in terms of how you react to public events. Presumably, there is something stimulating these people. Perhaps the swarm behavior releases endorphins, freeing the adherent from the torment of reality for a while.
It is an important question. A generation ago, progressives were programmed to swarm over economic issues. Socialism still provided the general framework of their imagined utopia, so they regularly launched into assaults on business, claiming to defend the interests of the working class. Yet, when socialism collapsed, progressives quickly shifted from socialist utopianism to sexual and racial utopianism. The same people who used to put Darwin fish on their Subaru, now howl about racism.
Sobran was correct to point out that progressives have the same reaction to perceived threats as bees when they fear a threat. The resulting attacks are not indiscriminate, but they are excessive. The progressive has a binary view of the world, where those inside are allies and those outside are enemies. In this regard, progressivism functions like cult, where the focus of the adherents is always on a devil. The difference is their devil is a shapeshifter, taking on new forms to fit every occasion.
It is tempting to assume that a pattern must have some causal agent, some intelligent force behind it. It is the nature of man to confuse cause and purpose. In fact, this is why efforts to oppose the war on the culture have always failed. The defenders assumed an intelligible purpose behind the actions of the Left so they invested their time in defeating those arguments. In reality, the cause of progressive rage was always a biological response to what the group has determined to be a threat to the hive.
Another way the Left functions like a hive is how individual members react to being cut off, even temporarily, from the hive. A lefty in a room full of people it perceives as hostile will become very passive. Reverse the roles and put a normal person in a room full of progressives and they will attack him relentlessly. It is why far left TV shows have a narrow, but loyal following. It is how the isolated Progressive can connect with the other members of the hive. These TV shows are the televangelists of the Left
This is probably why the Left has become obsessed with purging dissent. Social media now supplements the pheromones used to synchronize behavior. Twitter and Facebook are becoming neural pathways for the hive, so that far flung members can pick up cues from other members. “Trending on Twitter” is becoming a way for progressives to know what they are supposed to like and, more important, what they are supposed to hate. Right wingers on social media scramble the signal.
Even though observed patterns may not have a central control mechanism, they must have a cause. In the case of progressives, it is clearly something biological. Even those who manage to leave the cult, never really lose the hive mindedness. Like reformed smokers, they usually direct this instinct to criticizing their former hive mates. You never see a former progressive activist, living a quiet life alone somewhere. When Lefty leaves the hive, it is to serve another queen.
Most likely, this behavior traces back to the dawn of man. A deep, emotional commitment to the group would have evolutionary advantages. Status within the group would be higher for those who were most ferocious in defending the group. Well into the agricultural age, the leader of a people was often the best warrior. Perhaps this small group instinct manifests in an organized society, as social fanaticism. In all times and all places, the reformer imagines himself protecting the weak from the strong.
Fanaticism has its utility. The Greeks figured this out when observing that warriors were most ferocious when fighting on their own land. When advancing into foreign lands, they became more conservative. A focused, controllable fanatic is useful in war. Similarly, organized religions can never have a shortage of those willing to risk it all to spread the good word. More than a few zealots ended up in the cannibal’s pot, but there were always more zealots ready to convert the cannibal.
This innate hive-like behavior of some elements of society has obviously not been a detriment to progress. The thing is though, there has always been a transcendent set of limiting principles, operating like a leash on the fanatic. Christianity, for all its faults, puts hard limits on what people can do to one another. When that is removed, the zealots are free to attack perceived enemies without restraint. Like Africanized honeybees, utopian socialists have slaughtered millions they saw as threats.
The key insight of Sobran was that the hive-like behavior of the American Left was not caused by socialism or radical ideology. The relationship reversed. The hive-like behavior was a constant, a part of the American biology. When the socialist paradise collapsed, the Left switched to sexual and racial utopianism. That means when the current rage heads burn what is left of society, only to not arrive at the promised land, they will find some new fantasy to embrace. The Hive is eternal.
I tend to believe that the Hive response reflects their favored position with the media and other instruments of discourse and if conservatives were in a similar position they’d behave similarly.
These people have a story they want to tell and the media and academia are in a symbiotic relationship with them in that public displays can be characterized as news thus justifying publicity and public displays give activists what they want in terms of message delivery. For the Left, a protest avoided is a message undelivered. For conservatives, public displays are rarely covered as news events so the sense of loss at avoiding a public display opportunity is lowered given that the event’s message won’t be distributed anyway.
What’s to be done about the hive, is there a framework for a sustainable solution?
If it’s a final solution, I would fear that my son or daughter would go through a phase of youthful indiscretion and get gassed for being associated with the hive.
How about any bees that reach the age of 35 get relocated?
Late in the day to comment, but I’m surprised that nobody has directly addressed the parallels to ‘crowd psychology’ or ‘mob psychology’. It seems obvious to me that we are witnessing virtual mob action. None of the information below is new or original to me.
As with everything involving psychology, the subsidiary subject of mob/crowd psychology is over-intellectualized and politicized consistent with the neurotic hang-ups of its (mostly) leftist theoreticians. For a treatment full of the usual obfuscations and contradictions see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology.
But the actual commie/collectivist practitioners of years past such as Lenin and Trotsky preferred Gustave Le Bon as a guide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
Their unchanging method was/is to take power using sudden mob action to weaken and (hopefully) overthrow the existing order. They did this by creating and maintaining subversive organizations so as to be able to channelize any mob however formed, constant propaganda from those subversive organizations to cultivate favorable (i.e. unstable) conditions for mob action and finally by using (or staging) a precipitating event to create the mob once the time is judged to be auspicious. Then the would-be leaders come out of their semi-hiding to (they hope) direct the mob towards their own objectives. The mob itself is just an expendable means to their ends: ‘Too bad about those cossacks, but the revolution must go on and the cadre must be protected, comrade.’
The politicization of the Parkland shooting is just the latest instance of how this works here and now. The subversive organizations are locked and loaded, so to speak, the MSM being one of them now.
The differences between the commies of 100 years ago and now is a lack of discipline by their would-be leaders today*, that the internet enables the subversive organizing to be done at a distance (creates the hive) and that the stinging is done via virtual mob action, (mostly) instead of street level mob action.
BTW, this might explain why The Cloud was/is so terrified by the Tea Party. It’s their own game being played back at them spontaneously. We ought to look at and learn this lesson.
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* Today’s commies have *no idea* what real repression looks like. By analogy to Lenin, Stalin, et al, Michael Moore would have spent a few years counting polar bears above the Arctic Circle, living in a drafty double-wide, instead of being a millionaire with several houses who needs to miss a lot of meals.
The “Babylon Berlin” series currently on Netflix (1929 Berlin), shows this attempted manipulation of the crowds being attempted from a few different directions, even as the powers-that-be appear to be standing aside and just letting it all happen, for the most part. We all know where that went.
I am watching that series now myself 🙂
” trained army of lunatics”. Mark Levin has a colorful metaphor: a herd of clapping seals.
Fukk that hebe.
I’ve always referred to this crowd as liberal left-wingers but guess the new terminology is “Progressive’s”- so be it.
They seem to share some traits with the Middle Eastern jihadist. The media provides a never-ending stream of propaganda and they self radicalize despite not belonging to any particular group or organization.
Perfectly understandable since a lot of them share the same level of low intelligence as their middle eastern brethern.
The puzzling part is speaking to Europeans with high levels of education. The hate President Trump all based entirely on liberal media.
It seems acadamia no matter where in the world marches to the beat of a certain drummer. Despite never living here in the USA they all tow the party line.
“A lefty in a room full of people it perceives as hostile will become very passive. Reverse the roles and put a normal person in a room full of Progressives and they will attack him relentlessly.”
That is literally the definition of cowardice, at least here in the West. It is also behavior many of us Vets who spent time in the Middle East have observed from Muslim men.
No, it isn’t “literally the definition of cowardice”. You have completely missed the point of this post.
Totally agree with Drake.
Spot on observation of Muslims, and of how values differ, ours meaning different things to almond thinkers- our notions seem crazy to them, as well.
As DLS noted above, brilliantly, their hive signals are their form of ‘common sense’.
Whites really, truly, are something new and different in the world.
The older strains strive mightily to change it back.
Leftists/Progs/collectivists operate outside such concepts as honor, pride, cowardice, etc. Those are individual traits and they are not individuals; they are cells within a larger amorphous organism. People like you two — who continually mischaracterize the left — are why the left keeps on going.
I am not seeing the either/or in this argument. Looks like two angles of the same thing to me.
You are right, there are two thoughts in the original comment, and I am only commenting on one of the items (“cowardice”). Always a mistake to try and interpret another culture through the lens of your own culture.
Like trying to interpret the culture of our Left through the culture of our Right (what there is of it, any more).
Exactly like that 🙂 . Good point.
It seems that Bicameralism never really went away in humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology), and that the Hive is really the portion of humanity still genetically prone to that condition and are not really fully consciousness.
Jaynes hypothesizes that these bicameral humans have no conscious introspection to allow them to disobey appropriately constructed external directives, which are translated into a compelling internal hallucinatory drive. Applying this as a lens neatly explains the apparent uptake of ideas simultaneously, the relentless nature of these people, irrelevance of consequences and the profound lack of conception that their positions change even 180 degrees from one day to the next. Also the lack of interest in testing against the real world, as the only measure of truth, as in schizophrenia, is internal hallucination strength as realness.
For these individuals there is no past evidence or future consequence, only the ever present now which directs their own internal command voices. The trick to control these groups is to know how to program this proto-conscious substrate within what we consider normal language.
This is what propaganda through social and broadcast media has achieved so well for those who have latched onto this trick, intentionally or not.
Guess you missed this part: “The hypothesis is generally not considered of practical importance”
says the people who managed to thought control 15% of the population through directed manipulation.
Nothing to see here. Just move on.
((That would mean the Sumerians weren’t completely destroyed by the “Angel with Swords of Fire” (vapor trails of the meteor strikes that pulverized Mesopotamia).
Their terrible children, the surviving Habiru, simply kept on using the instinctive ticks that had served in the ancient world.
They learned Narrative in fashioning an explanation for the wrath of the gods; their instinct for revision apparently reawakens much of the old wiring.))
El baboso gave us the secret for understanding “bicameralism”, and/or the oppositional binary split that occurs in all societies. Jayne and myself made the mistake of thinking it was related to the front-to-back Neanderthalic structure of occipital storage communicated through the anterior corpus. We moderns, the children of change, use the corpus callosum, and usually in an aphasic (nonverbal) sense, what we call intuition.
El baboso’s contribution was in identifying the frontal cortex as a GUI.
The secret is that there are not one, but TWO, primary processing coordination centers, or GUIs- the frontal cortex, and the insula/amyglyda almond, Heartiste’s “hamster hindbrain”.
Observing speech, which itself has not one, but TWO primary functions, tells us which center is dominant.
Speech can be somewhat emotionally neutral, or emotionally loaded, providing an instant gut-punch of reaction and opinion.
The first form is informative, frontal dominant, its function is to inform.
The second, almond dominant, is emotive- its funtion is organization.
Emotion, signalling loyalty, affinity, and position, is how we have organized our primate groups and hierarchies since before we could speak, or reason. Mammalian instinct, signal systems millions of years old.
This binary breakdown, variously described as guilt/shame, right/left, trad/rad, male/female, etc., reflects which of the two GUIs is dominant, affecting both perception and reaction- which affects aggregate (group) function.
Reconciliation probably isn’t possible. War may be inevitable.
War is indeed the only option. You just need to look at history to see the conflict points with this part of the population.
Europe (among others) has had many instances of spontaneous sect/rebellions through the ages based on utopian doctrines/movements which somehow acts as a compelling voice for these people. It usually resulted in the deaths of many and then respite until their numbers become enough to cause trouble again.
Its just another one of those, but the ideas are rapidly transmitted, more widely intentionally molded and stronger than you would get through local prophets and written pamphlets. Seems the big conscious vs non-conscious conflict is just round the corner.
Fascinating conversation. Just throwing it out there, because I have no real knowledge of the subject, just observations—do people fall easily into the insula/amyglyda “almond” part of their brains for guidance, because they believe their own frontal-dominant informational self is not up to the task of competing or keeping up with the peer group they find themselves in?
My take is that people of lower IQ or social skills fall more easily into a tribal/emotional mental framework when they feel that they are intellectually or socially “out of their league”. It is their safe space when they can’t keep up. I used to watch Obama do this all of the time, which is why I have a somewhat low opinion of his own sense of self-worth or intelligence—why he always came off, subliminally, to me at least, as a silly but angry man.
Jaynes suggests, and it seems very plausible to me,that here is no conscious introspection or reasoning at all in a brain like this, and that the condition is much more like schizophrenia with an internal commanding dialogue that speaks through the person, but is not mediated by a rational mind. Peterson touches on it when he talks about meme robots.
It is a different form of consciousnessness which you cannot apply rational models to.
Hive behavior is an evolutionary adaption to environments in which food is abundant (think tropical jungle or vast fields of pollinating plants). Our present day affluence (and welfare policies) are the fuel that sustains and grows Progressivism. One practical way to roll this back is to change the environment. The hive mind is immune to discourse or persuasion when continued parasitism works just fine.
You should watch the nature program on how Japanese honey bees manage to kill giant hornets. That very well describes the exact behavior of progressives on anyone that disagrees with them; they swarm around the hornet en mass, and then raise their collective temperatures and literally cook the hornet to death. It never ends well for the hornet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44lc2q8cuL8
excellent video herr Horst! Astounding that those bees could raise their temps so close to their own limits. I wonder if they swap in new bees, occasionally? Maybe this technique would work with muslims?
Hoffer is more relevant than ever… But on the topic of pheromones/social media. Spot on. Locally, we’ve got all these closed Facebook groups for Town residents. Since Trump’s election these have been infiltrated by “resisters” and transformed from “hey, who’s a good plumber” to the bat signal for the batshit crazy. Technically these are moderated for items of local relevance, but every local issue is reframed as “social justice”. Non-Resident kids in the school system?..racism (b/c of Trump). Organizing for the genitalia hat marches, Parkland protest (because you know THE existential threat to our kids is guns).. Dare say that you think putting up a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign in front of your house is silly and you are accused of harboring Nate Forrest and Hitler under your bed. And here his the funny part. At least two of the ringleaders have legitimate mental illness of the medicated/prior inpatient type. Before the election they directed the swarm onto my poor spouse who made the badthink error of saying she wouldn’t vote for Trump or Hillary because she despised both.
Z Man;
The hive mentality is excellent description of Prog media (how Sobran mostly used it, I believe) : Field notes if you will. But the metaphor is a bit off for the current situation: After all, bees are pretty much theoretical libertarians – they’ll (mostly) leave you alone if you leave them alone.
Fire ants are probably a more apt comparison. They are vicious, predatory and expansionary. They’ll take over your yard if you let them and sting, maybe kill, any pet (or kid) of yours that wanders near one of their ever-spreading nests. This matters because the main point is what to do about them. Unlike bees, neither Progs. nor fire ants are content to leave us alone.
With fire ants, you have to poison the queen with an attractive and slow-acting bait. Then the workers you missed poisoning at first will eventually die off without replacement. With Progs., as you say, there is no reasoning them out of their religion. So ‘what’ (we already know that there’s no one, single ‘who’) is the analogous ‘queen’ of the Progs_?
I’d say it’s the institution that replicates them, namely the ed system, most particularly, Big U.
I agree with the fire ant analogy. Problem is – as you said: fire ants are predatory and expansionary. Both of these describe current day progressives – they’re definitely predatory thru the tax structure and in numerous other ways – even though they’ll tell you that they’re not. They’re also expansionary – as left wingers have always been. They expand by infesting and taking over previously established institutions and societies. They seem utterly incapable of building anything on their own.
But – what they also “are” – is non reproducing. As we can see in the current birth rates across Western nations – and in the willing importation of immigrants led by the left. The only way to keep the religion going – is to make sure there’s somebody around to practice it when you’re gone.
It’s pretty obvious that the lefties never spend much time thinking about the logical end point of their philosophy when it seems to inevitably lead to non-reproduction.
At least the Nazis seemed to have their shit together on this point. They were “nationalists” (more accurately pro-Aryan) – and they were definitely “pro-reproduction” – of Aryans. Now if you’re gonna have all the Aryans breeding like crazy – you need some place to put them – hence you’re gonna have to expand and get rid of the natives in the places you invade.
It’s not “nice” – but it at least makes some amount of logical sense – which current age “progressives” most definitely do NOT once you fully comprehend the full picture of what they seem to “believe” in.
At least the fire ants expand because they’re reproducing. The Nazi plan was reproduce – and expand. The current leftie progressive “plan” is what? Abort all our kids – or simply don’t have any – spend all of our time enjoying our nice little urban theme parks – import the replacements we’re not having – and try to convince everybody black is the same as brown is the same as white is the same as male is the same as female is the same as trigender??
And printing all the money to fund this crap is just fine – we’ll just suspend all the rules of finance, math, and human society to keep this whole funny farm going?
Suicide cult doesn’t even begin to describe the stupidity of it all. At least most of the suicide cults I’ve known of had an end goal for the suicide – go up to meet God or the martians or whatever. The current day progressives can’t even seem to think that far ahead.
Reports of the death of the socialist paradise have been greatly exaggerated. It’s taking a brief nap and will come back with new vigor to set upon new prey grown in the rows of social media cages. It’s not even sporting. The bees are not clever but the beekeeper is, and he loves his work.
J+W;
Yeah, the bee-keeper. I was thinking along the same lines. It’s almost as though there is some supernatural adversary with an implacable hatred of mankind and whatever institutions help us to thrive.
Some thoughts:
This hive mind is certainly a primary default setting in the human character; but what would we call its opposite … Individualism?
Is this split a foundational structure in the LEFT – RIGHT working model we’ve used to make sense of political / ideological tensions these many decades?
(NOTE: I do think the actual operant distinction is now vertical, not R-L or “horizontal, though it’s convenient still to catagorize it thus to allow us to talk about the ongoing conflict.)
Can there be such a thing as a “conservative” or RIGHT-wing hive, or do the requirements of personal responsibility, recognition of an Objective External Reality and a belief in the rule of law preclude this absolutely?
If so, what does this mean for us politically and culturally?
Is the hive-future the inevitable future for Western man? Brings to mind Obama’s “Arc of History is long …” construct, with their end of social justice being this same, tiredbleak and tyrannical (for the masses) Western utopia.
Was the American project as originally established specifically constructed to “stand athwart” this eternal tendency in man to idealism, utopianism, delusion, and oppression — AKA the long march to social justice? (i.e., Did they know?)
If so, then the great battle we face is against this implacable human force should be the primary motivator and organizational principle of all us “traditionals”, originalists, people-of-the-right, (even conservatives), or just plain “normies.”
Not to fight then as appropriate to the threat is to invite our extermination ….
My vague familiarity with the Constitution, and the civics classes I took a long, long time ago, suggest that the Founding Fathers were quite familiar with the failings of humans, and sought to disperse power and ratchet up accountability as much as was reasonably possible. That we have utterly failed to hold up the Constitutional bargain is not their fault, but our own.
Certainly agree. They provided us the warning, and avenues for rectifying the problem, and the tools to get it done. However, we have yet to work together successfully on our side to counter their near-irresistable power. Absent organization, and an agreed-upon plan, we seem poised for extinction. Perhaps a dash of this hive behavior would do us well ….
Is is really wise to assume they were not at fault? The anti-Federalist dreaded the behemoth they saw germinating in Philadelphia. It took exactly seventy-two years for the Republic to change forms on a dime, to one nation, indivisible. Now pledge it after me, you fuckers: indivisible.
I think that they did the best they could in light of what they had just been through, and given the materials on hand. I don’t think they could have put into place the structures needed to keep human craziness in line.
There were some things that they just couldn’t foresee. And they probably did about the best anyone could have done establishing this nation from a cold start. It would have been nice if they could have stood up some sort of irrevocable enforcement mechanism to militate against the intractable vileness and self-interest resident in the human makeup — some thing like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 version, of course) except without the underlying socialist / progressive taint (poor attempt at humor).
Unfortunately, much of what was adaptive in our nature back in remote human history is problematic now, but is here with us still, and forever, much more so than polite company would like to admit.
Franklin’s warning to the woman on the Philadelphia street is instructive as to how they thought: “… if you can keep it.” They were placing some of the responsibility for future success on us …. and we have flubbed it badly.
ADDENDUM: Of course, en external controlling entity is exactly the device sought by the LEFT, and which they are in the process of successfully implementing — Govt, and culture (one thing?) controlled by them. Our template has been to rely on an inherent selflessness, sense of responsibility and individual self discipline in our citizenry. Yet we’ve not done well cultivating this in the last 70 years or so.
If the Founders are to be given full credit, I tend to think they were also the type of men to accept full blame. With the exception of Hamilton, what we have now is exactly what they didn’t want.
If you have the opportunity, could you say a little more about your exception for Hamilton?
Hamilton was for a stronger central government, less federalism.
Ahhh, yes. Thank you. I was a bit slow on the uptake there and was looking for something beyond that. I didn’t process well his last sentance re Hamilton. Early senior moment.
They tried the Confederation first, which had a greater devolution of power to the individual states. The “re-do”, the Constitution, dialed back the powers of the states a bit, in favor of incrementally greater power to the central government. So they really “went for it”, back in the day, but found that a slightly less aggressive approach was necessary (or expedient) in the real world of that time, place, and culture.
This is another, under-remarked benefit of religion — it gives born Pharisees something to get ostentatiously pharisiacal about. Back when W. Bush was Hitler, I half-jokingly suggested bringing back flagellant processions – they could do penance for America’s sins in front of the cameras, which is all they really want anyway, and the rest of us could get on with our lives. I’m not joking anymore.
Sobran is great. Thanks for the link.
Alas, that we are atomized.
“This innate hive-like behavior of some elements of Western society has obviously not been a detriment to progress.”
You can’t possibly know that.
Exactly.
I think there’s a very good argument to be made that the hive like behavior has been an absolute detriment to progress. Are you trying to say that WW1 and WW2 were NOT a detriment? What else are these orgies of destruction except exhibitions of hive like suicidal behavior?
Where would be today if WW1 had not helped hugely to destroy adherence to Christianity – and WW2 hadn’t made Communism pre-eminent across a large portion of Europe – and given the lefties here in the US a god to worship? Communism – which is another retarded baby of WW1.
You don’t get a bunch of independent thinkers to march off together and blow the shit out of each other. Washington discovered this during the Revolution when the militiamen would just leave if they didn’t like the way the campaign was going.
A disqualification for writing for National Review is being interesting. Sobran was another great writer cashiered by NR.
Somehow I don’t think there is any kind of smoker to be used to calm this hive down…..
I think a little “willie pete” would settle this hive down.
If there was no one or no thing to hate then the left would cease to exist. It’s whole existence is built on the negative. I don’t argue with liberals (a complete waste of time) I just tell them to fuck off, preferably right to their face. Has worked for me for nearly 60 years.
YES.
Trying to argue with leftists becomes something that only ends up pissing YOU off. I finally learned my lesson a number of years ago – and now I carefully construct my arguments for making sure they’re maximally effective in pissing THEM off. Since lefties live on feelz – go for the jugular. Find the holes in their armor – and then insert words that will piss them off. This way you insert misery and pain into their lives – in the same way their control of the culture and of government is used constantly to insert pain into yours.
I have found this strategy to be very effective and also very satisfying. Watching a lefty walk away from a casual comment with the veins bulging out of his neck and his face ten shades of red – makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. It’s the bright spot in my day.
Excellent analysis. This also explains the progressive behavior in the deep state. No one had to tell Lois Lerner to single out tea party groups. The FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agency progressives all knew how to attack the Right, with no central coordination. Freed from any constraint to follow the constitution or laws by their “means justify the ends” beliefs, they picked up the hive signals and went to work. It was a massive conspiracy with no paper trail. Progressives believe the intuitive coordination is simply common sense, so they think we are nuts for seeing the conspiracy.
Pheromemes
When the Left went all crazy about “net neutrality”, I took to asking them what “net neutrality” actually is—a definition of the term. All I got back was “the end of the net/our culture/the world as we know it”. It was obviously not about the issue at hand, it was all about the coordinated and manipulated agitation.
“Yet, when socialism collapsed, Progressives quickly shifted from socialist utopianism to sexual and racial utopianism.“
The death of the Economic Left was a big blow to many people.
Don’t forget environmentalism which now shares all the same goals as socialism. I used to refer to environmentalism as ‘the last haven for socialism’.
I think the word for them is Watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside.
“Environmentalism” has been around for quite a while. The true hive behavior these days is being displayed by global warming truth squad. No matter how hard it gets beaten down thru scientific fact or thru daily reality – it just keeps turning on a dime and coming up with another excuse. The real problem now is that they’ve beaten their drum so loudly and for so long – that the belief in “global warming” – or “global climate change” pretty much infests culture, society,and even business from top to bottom.
I’ve leftism compared to a death cult a number of times – well if you follow the glueball warmists far enough down their rabbit hole you WILL find all sorts of people making the arguments that major portions of humanity need to be wiped out – in order to save humanity.
I believe this may be explained by r/K theory.
Once a cause has been identified (mentioned) it instantly becomes an amygdala stimulus for all lefties. Once the amygdala is triggered they must find a release valve. And hence they all wail at (nearly) the same time, over the same issue and demand the same “solution”.
On the right side this cannot happen. Righties are pretty resistant to amygdala stimulus. There thus is no need to wail and react at the same time.
Stefan Molyneux had a parent write in about her high schooler’s experience before and after Trump’s election.
The attack and ostracizing of him was pure bee hive protection.
The weeping and wailing in unison the day after his victory was just as hive minded.
https://i.redd.it/vmj5zidr3u3z.jpg
They are like minded until it blows up in their face.
The hive seekers are classic “r” selected rodents with short life spans, and low time preference, who are dominated by their emotions, especially fear. Their enemies are “k” selected survival oriented individualists with long time preferences, a devotion to reason and understanding reality.
Hence, attempting to reason with the hive mind is useless.
Yes and “commitment to the group” is K, it did not evolve into this hive like behavior. Other than that dead on.
I suspect this hive reaction is caused by most of its inhabitants being godless and having no answer for death. They are disturbed by it and have no vision how to combat it ( notice they have no utopian concepts regarding death) so when it is starkly thrust upon them on a large scale they get irrational, flaying their arms and legs in hopeless rage.
This country may be ripe for a revival.
They gave up God and reason (if they ever had it) so they are completely un-anchored.
They are just as god made them.
Seems like this predictable behavior against the hive. First establish that you are a bad person — in some forum — then start making favorable comments about how reasonable some hive member is. Light fuse and retire…
Fortune favors the bold Leftist. The hive mind is very evident every time there is a mass shooting or terrorist event. The villains are tailor made for problem, reaction, solution.
Sandy Hook-guns, gun control
Boston bombing-jihadis, we must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here
Los Angeles-misogynist, smash the patriarchy, gun control
Charleston-racist, iconoclasm, gun control
Pulse-homophobe, support for homosexuals, gun control
Dallas police-BLM, support police, gun control, another conversation about police and racism
San Bernardino-jihadis again
Umpqua-jihadis again
Las Vegas-guns again
Parkland-guns again
And so on. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The solution is organized and ready to go.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/01/take-two-weeks-truth-emerge-parkland-students-astroturfing/
The lightning fast and high level support and response from the left are very serendipitous if not organized. The progressives sure are lucky when it comes to mass murder. Somehow it’s always something they can exploit to advance their goals. The only event that varies slightly in the above list is the Dallas police shooting. Recognizing the pattern ushers in the whole “correlation does not equal causation” argument. So maybe it’s all purely coincidental hive mind, “never let a good crisis go to waste”, instinctively working in concert, organic rallying around the cause. They certainly have their points and agitprop infrastructure in place, though.
The recent two minutes hate against the NRA certainly looked co-ordinated and planned. The whole thing went off like a well-oiled machine, with the only glitches being the astonishingly incompetent behavior of the EBI ans Sheriff Israel, and the refusal of most American gun owners to be intimidated.
It’s pretty obvious to me that this whole campaign was already in place, right down to the twitter talking points, and was only waiting, vulture-like, for the next mass shooting. Ghoulish in the extreme, but that’s the Left for you.
I concur re: appearance of pre-established anti-NRA coordination at the Parkland shooting. Many yrs ago I attended a very liberal/relatively wealthy community high school with lots of well-spoken kids who were used to being “on stage” as it were, with poise to spare, just like the Stoneman Douglas kids. On a spring day c. 1960 a bunch of these charmers ran out of the classrooms and lowered the American flag in the school courtyard because they heard that convicted rapist Caryl Chessman had just been executed at San Quentin, I think it was. These leftist students got in “trouble” for doing this, but the one who got in the most trouble was the school principal. He was toast/gone by the next fall for daring to discipline this gang of Maoists!
Yeah, I remember Chessman. He was a kidnapper and armed robber who savagely sodomized a 17 year old girl. If ever anyone deserved the death penalty, it was Chessman, so of course he became a hero to the Left. Alan Alda, Lord help us, even played him in a movie.
He was white, by the way.
Too bad they couldn’t revive him and execute him again, repeatedly.
If the FBI and Sheriff Israel had not been astonishingly incompetent, the slaughter might not have
occurred, or at least might have been mitigated. One of the surviving heroes is suing the school district. Go figure.
We’ve been “lucky” in the sense that most of these incidents have highlighted the utter fecklessness of the leviathan state. So the edge of these preplanned responses is dulled as the facts roll out. Luck is not a strategy.
There seems to be more – much more – of this behavior on the left , but that may be just attributable to the fact that lefty talking points seem to get much more press in the current US social/political climate.
I wouldn’t discount hive like behavior coming out of the right either. A previous post mentioned ISIS and jihadis. When we were seeing all the head chopping over in the Levant – and as terrorist incidents over here were getting attributed to ISIS – there was quite a bit of hive-similar behavior coming out of people who would describe themselves as right wing. This usually involved demands for US nuking Syria and beliefs that somehow the ISIS blue water navy was laying in wait just outside the 200 mile territorial limit – for that opportune moment to launch an all out invasion of the US mainland.
Thanks, an excellent explanation of Proglodyte behavior.
I remember someone or some meme on Faceborg, good morning everyone, who are we supposed to hate today?
Extending your metaphor, is Hillary the Wasp Woman?
Still miss Joe Sobran, Taki today referred to him and his description of the New York Times as the Holocaust News. Always a good barb or deep insight.
That is a great description of lefty group behavior. They seem to be swarming more and more lately.
They also ignore and suppress information that’s inconvenient to them.
This story got buried in the media because it doesn’t fit the narrative. ISIS-Supporting Student Leaves Bomb In Utah School.
http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-promoting-student-who-left-bomb-utah-school-also-destroyed-american-flag-2660500
But notice the ‘representational image’ used in that IBT story is of a white male despite the fact that none of the reports that I’ve seen detail the racial background of the suspect.
That’s rather amazing. I don’t think we are far from the news using fake images and fake video. They coach people to be interviewed at protests. How long before the news is running stories about the state rounding up Nazi subversives and showing video that was produced on a movie lot? I think there is a Philip K. Dick story to this effect.
Look at Amazon Primes offering of Philip K. Dick anthology, Electric Dreams.
The episode, Kill all Others, comes to mind of where we are headed with these people
Man In The High Castle
We may already be there. Back when Obama was in office and there seemed to be serious talk about the US getting heavily involved in Syria – there were numerous stories popping up on the intarwebs about how the the latest “they gassed a baby!!” story to appear in the worldwide media – was a fake.
I remember seeing some of these “Fake!!” articles and they had pretty extensive documentation about how the stories were faked.
Given the high political stakes at the time – and the cloud people’s need to convince some hive behavior from the neocon dick licker gotta have another war types – it makes perfect sense that they’d go to great lengths to come up with a story sufficiently convincing to get the “OMG there’s a dead baby on the beach!!” types to buy into full scale US intervention in Syria.
They also use fake pictures. Look at the caption. “A teen was arrested Monday for making a homemade bomb and planting it at the Pine View High School, Utah. In this representational image, members of the riot police arrest a young man following clashes with demonstrators during a protest against police brutality, following the alleged rape of a black man in Paris, Feb. 23, 2017.”
Ho-ly shitakes. Representational image.
Look for a cascade of new fake Syrian gas baby pics coming soon. Paid NeoCon war-whore, Nikki Haley, is banging the drum again.
Great analogy of social media as pheromones. Fits perfectly.
Pheromemes …. ?
The new modern liberal.
https://kek.gg/i/rrXDg.jpg
““Trending in Twitter” is becoming a way for Progressives to know what they are suppose to like and, more important, what they are supposed to hate. Right wingers on social media scramble the signal.”
Brilliantly succinct. I’m totally stealing this.
Hopefully a test can be developed so that these types can be aborted early. Send the ones we have over to Africa, so they can improve the place — or die trying. I am good with either…
Spain released their military convicts from prison, and those guys conquered the New World.
Along these lines….if Leftism is a biologically-based condition, is there a cure for it (that does not destroy the host)? Is there a treatment program, one that demonstrates a reasonable degree of success?
Brain transplant.
There may be opportunists trying to gain control of the hive. That’s my current working theory: the hive is getting whipsawed as different entities attempt to take control of it. Since they can only influence the hive through the pheromone-like means you mention, the hive is especially agitated as different and sometimes conflicting waves of control propagate through it.
I think that you may very well be right and that these are spontaneous phenomena instead and that the Internet and social media have removed all the loss and distortion in transmission, leading to these very high amplitude events. But given history, I would bet that there is at least one charismatic psychopath out there trying to take control. There has always been a strong relationship between psychopathic leaders and the hive. Again, one of those things that evolved in agricultural societies as a defense mechanism but tends to spiral out of control with the invention of newspapers, telegraphs, and packet switching.
You’ve come up with a very good synthesis.
A new queen emerging…
“Bees, bees, bees!!!!!”
https://youtu.be/YbfoAKet8Vc
God, no!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EVCrmXW6-Pk#
The rabid defense of Obama and Hillary- both are queens.
And, “Africanized” bees indeed.
Not the bees! Not the beeeeeeees!!! (At this dark hour, we all need Nic Cage in our lives).