There are two strains of thought on this side of the great divide with regards to the behavior of the people in charge. One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.
By any reasonable standard, the deep state side has the easier claim. Spend a week following the main regime media organs and a pattern emerges. On a Monday, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other legacy operations will be running with the same theme. The next day, all of the next tier media operations are running with the Monday theme. By the end of the week, the media narrative has become conventional wisdom, maybe even holy writ.
For example, the midterms are coming up and the uniparty is a little worried that the rubes may be catching on, so they have the media doing their fear, uncertainty and doubt act to wrap up the summer. Here is the Post claiming the red wave nonsense is fading fast. Totally by coincidence, the Times has a similar story. They say it is abortion that is killing Republican chances. Here and here are supporting sources for the same claims made by the big media sites.
The effect of what certainly looks like an orchestrated campaign is supposed to be a collapse of opposition to the regime. Alongside these posts about the dimming Republican hopes in the election are stories about how Glorious Leader has magically made student debt go away. NBC claims that almost half of Latino debt will be wiped away by Glorious Leader. A debt jubilee that targets an important uniparty demographic just when Republican hopes are fading. What a coincidence!
Whether any of this is true is hard to know. It really does not matter if it is true because by next week it will be gospel. Just look at the Russian collusion hoax. Regime media still carries on as if it is obvious that Trump was in league with Putin, who used his super powers to rig the election. He did not rig the 2020 election, which was the cleanest in human history. Only election deniers think otherwise. He rigged the 2016 election, which only QAnon thinks is real.
The point is, spend any time consuming the main media organs of the regime and it certainly looks like it is all coordinated. Add to it the known fact that the activist we call journalist have been caught coordinating their work. Ezra Klein operated a secret group of four hundred far-left activists working in the media. The point was to coordinate their activism across many platforms. This is the sort of thing that supports the deep state idea, but also the claims about its nature.
The thing is though, there is little evidence that spooks from the wilderness of mirrors are behind these operations. When people hear the phrase “deep state” they think of men in stuffed chairs discussing how best to hide the alien space craft that just landed in the desert. The deep state rigged the food pyramid so normal men are filled with soy and therefore easy to manipulate. The deep state is not paranoid weirdos working in the media, sharing the hive mind.
That is the argument against the deep state and for the hive mind. That really is the nut of the emergent behavior argument. Fill a room with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil and very weird things will emerge. The people who work in the media believe completely in the deep state argument. They just think it is run by guys name Prescott and Pemberton. They are raising a secret invisible Hitler army to implement the final final solution.
The further you go up the system, the cultural and ideological diversity thins to the point where it becomes a hive mind. In the media, you cannot survive unless you support the latest things. The selection pressure is for compliance. A process operates across the high ground of the empire. Walk into the C-suites of a large company and it is power skirts, soy faces and a unified commitment to the latest thing. Woke capital emerged from within capital. It was not imposed on it.
The appearance of coordination is the result of a shared set of beliefs by the people who run the important bits of the empire. If tomorrow they suddenly converted to Islam, their women would be wearing head coverings and the men sporting beards. They would carry on as if they had been Islamic since forever. Anyone asking about the sudden conversion to Islam would be called a blasphemer. The New York Times style guide would be relabeled the sharia style guide.
We got a real world test of this claim in February. Russian tanks crossed into the Donbas and instantly every talk head on television was sporting a Ukraine lapel pin and chanting “Keev” like they had a novel form of Tourette’s. It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight. In a way, this is what happened. Everyone was suddenly imitating the others in the hive. It was not a conscious act. There was no discussion or dissent from the program. It was the latest thing.
Just consider what is happening with the Covid vaccine. When Trump announced the program, the hive condemned it as orange poison. Trump exits and suddenly the hive claims the vaccine the universal elixir. They literally spent two years forcing people to take the shot. Now that it is clear it was a fraud from the start and is causing serious health problems, they are pivoted back to blaming Trump. The hive now believes the vaccine debacle was caused by the Trump conspiracy.
When you see these people swinging wildly from one invented reality to the next, it is hard to see the hand of Pemberton and Prescott. Instead, it looks like a murmuring of starlings, rushing in and out of the trees. What controls them is the undefinable, but omnipresent hive mind. They believe the same things, so they react the same way to events, even events they create. The Covid mania makes much more sense when you think of it as a manifestation of a shared reality.
Of course, both sides of this debate can be right. Our ruling class is largely controlled by a shared reality, a new secular religion, but elements inside the hive scheme to manipulate events to their advantage. Here we have Google blithely admitting to running a psychological warfare campaign on the people of Europe. Clearly, the people inside Google excogitating this scheme know what they are doing. On the other hand, they think this is perfectly normal. It is their nature.
This is why it is probably not good to go all in on the deep state or the emergent behavior explanation for what we are seeing. Both are correct to a point but fail to explain the whole. Instead, it is best to think of the people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people. The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.
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Every religious cult has a leader. It isn’t just a hive. The members form the hive but someone or some small group provided the overall belief structure and direction.
[…] Natural Excogitating […]
While I subscribe much more to the hive mind ideology so articulately explained here, however, sometimes I think there is a hive mind working behind the scenes also influencing the people in charge of most of the world’s wealth to make decisions that affect the world in very negative ways to further influence their acquisition of wealth. No conspiracy is needed, say for example the destruction of the family as it existed in western civilization traditionally. I don’t think some group of evil men sat down in their stuffed chairs and decided to destroy family values, but the fact that… Read more »
Pemberton and Prescott are both named Karen.
This is what happens when you let cunt in charge.
Sorry, but there is a much cleaner and more likely explanation for all that we see about us, all the chaos, the evil, the utter abandonment and rejection of everything that is good and acceptance of utterly abominable ideas and practices. One that has its roots in ancient times. It is as simple as the tableau enacted between Eve and the Nachash in The Garden. She believed the lie that she could be as a god, whereas she had been created a physical being by her Creator; she was not satisfied to be made in His Image, but desired something… Read more »
The hive mind has been fragmenting for a very, very long time. We saw this in the last election. The majority of Donks hate Biden and Kammeltoe, and the inner party literally had to impose them on the outer party. It makes sense when you look at the ages of their leaders. They’re out of touch geriatrics with no real contact with the real world. The deep state can no longer cover for the failing hive mind, or execute its orders contradict each other almost daily now. They are going to start turning on each other soon. Only the radical… Read more »
I think the murmuring is the method of control, lead the top and they all follow. However the flock always flies in the direction of the stated goals of the WEF . why do they always fly in the direction of ruining the west and us in particular? If it were natural , they would fly in our direction at least once in a while because probability demands that it would . Even by mistake the would be right once in in while like a clock is stopped clock is right twice a day. But they never ever do. I… Read more »
The key difference I see in the following of the edicts of the WEF between US and Europe lies in the banks. Outs directly own and control the Fed. In Europe the Central Bank is purely a political tool. In Europe they are heading toward a CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currency, that system leaves no room for the Banker Rentier Class of Dimon et al to cream their 3 % off the top of the entire economy . It beggers belief but Citibank and JPMorgan may save us from total ruin: Europe is fucked beyond redemption.
Fun fact: I recently went to a stadium Gen-X rock concert at a major southern metropolitan venue. Before the show and during intermission, I chatted with a married couple of 49/50 year olds who were ex-journalists for the city newspaper. The woman works as a cashier at Wal-mart now and says she’s happier, despite the cut in pay and status. They quit their journalism careers because of the leftist hive mind. She used the word commies more than once and bemoaned the lack of open mindedness in the field. Funny, the wife was the most vocal about the leftist crap.… Read more »
No one now living is old enough to have made a difference by not fleeing/abandoning enemy territory. By the time I got into an Ivy League school over thirty years ago, it had been fully long-marched for fifty years already. The “Great Awokening” was in 1969. I’m *astounded* that any righty thinks it happened recently—and I enjoy insulting them about it, especially smug crypto-shitlib Sailer types, because it means they couldn’t get into a Good School™ where they’d have seen the future (present) clearly. There are things we can do, things we could always have done, but they’re not institutional… Read more »
That’s what I’m getting at.
I fully realize that some things are too far gone. The two ex-journalists I spoke of would probably have been ardent leftists had they been around in the 60s. Their conservative sensibilities probably reflect left leaning “moderate” positions from 25 years ago before “transgender”, gay marriage, 8 years of a black president, and unchecked immigration.
My ultimate point is that the knee jerk is for rightist thinking people is to quit, stop voting, give up, move out into the woods, yank their kids out of college, and only worsen the problem.
Memebro: BS. Back when we used to attend organized church regularly, I remember the women who sent their children to public school (we debt financed our sons’ Christian private schooling) claiming the little ones provided ‘salt and light’ to the unwashed masses when they bowed their blonde heads and prayed over lunch. Not one of them would ever admit they sacrificed their kids in order to virtue signal so they could continue to be a ‘working mom.’ My older son was already identified as a wrong-thinker in public high school, and we supported his adamant refusal to go to college… Read more »
I know a far left career woman who calls herself “childfree” and supports abortion up to birth.
Recently she seems to have snapped and has moved to the right wing. Homeless junkies shooting up heroin on the street, daily shootings by vibrants, and the constant reminder of her genetic inferiority caused by her Whiteness seems to have hastened the change.
Obviously she is a crazy, far left extremist and always will be. But even somebody like that is noticing. It’s just interesting. Women seem to be further right than men when they do move that way.
Maybe, but there again, I think the main institutions are beyond help. For example, does anyone really think Washington DC can be turned around? We have to create out own alternative structures and make sure the Bolsheviks never again infiltrate them.
A few thoughts on this…Very successful people are highly individualistic. That is why they have several confabs every year. They try to find common ground for their mutual benefit. That is why Trump was so hated. Not because he had millions of “Joe Six-packs” behind him. He represented a small but growing minority group of breakaway elites. He could not be controlled through bribery, as he was a member of the top end of the NYC commercial real estate market. His crimes were the same as every other major player in commercial real estate. Do you really think that the… Read more »
Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday boasted that the Israeli pressure campaign with Washington over the Iran nuclear deal has had a positive effect in Israel’s favor. In her series of articles about Jeffry Epstein, Whitney Webb wrote extensively about an interconnected group of people collaborating for their collective benefit. Part of the network includes the megagroup, a group of twenty fuzzy hat billionaires, including such as paul singer who collaborates with IDF unit 8200 to migrate technology to the “start up nation,” Les Wexner who provided Jeff with a mansion to generate blackmail information and Lauder who is head… Read more »
It’s called the Talmud and give it a read sometime, or read this excellent treatise on it by the Holy father Rev. J.B. Pranaitis. Very quickly the nature of our conflict becomes clear as well as the actions of the people in the little hats which seem only to harm whites. The following 120 years from its publication, the “Jewish Century” as yids like to say (to each other), only serves as confirmation of this author’s righteousness. I understand for those who move in upper strata social circles that anti-anti-semitism is a requirement for you to keep your 6 figure… Read more »
The book is called “The Talmud Unmasked” by the aforementioned priest.
A while ago I read a series of blog posts called The Gervais Theory, which was trying to model how a corporation works using characters from The Office as the archetypes. The author divided the company into three categories: losers, who are managed by the clueless, who are managed by the sociopaths. The losers do all the productive work as the proles, but they also tend to be cynical and dismissive of office politics and direct their energies into their outside friends and hobbies. The clueless are the low level managers who believe in the mission statements and enforce the… Read more »
Ploppy-
Those were eventually packaged into a short book titled The Gervais Principle that can be had cheaply.
The author wrote a companion book, Be Slightly Evil that is also worth a read.
I found this article confusing. There isn’t really a deep state but we should think of “people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people”? Sounds very deep-statish to me. Sorry, but there is a concerted and coordinated effort to destroy the global economy, push people into digital servitude, cut off our fuel and food supplies and push the Woke and PC garbage on to us at every opportunity. There is no way that the MSM, leaders of Western nations, heads of NGOs and “charitable” foundations are not in… Read more »
Are you saying KHR is a deep stater? Dang, he was one of my favorite players. His ’82 performance against France in the semifinal was legendary.
FFS, Matt, the signs were ALL there, and you fell for his charm! Bad haircut – check; authoritarian moustache – check; immensely popular with German hausfraus – check! As for the ’82 final, I’m sure I saw a younger Klaus Schwab in the crowd giving him instructions via an earpiece. 🙂
Point well made, but we are not in a war of semantics. This is the real deal and the root issue is . . . what are you going to do about it? Why waste mental energy debating the nature of an abstract moniker for the root of the problem? We should be expending our mental resources on how best to address the problem in the tangible realm. Yes, this is not something to be discussed in the open, but nothing stops you from working the problem solely within the confines of your cranium. And what you can do out… Read more »
“what are you going to do about it?”
Indeed!
You must choose between what you “believe” in and your 401k, your home ownership, your clubs, your friends, basically life as you’ve known it. Which is more valuable to you? We either all hang separately by a death of a thousand cuts (current situation) or we all hang together and defend what we believe 😉
Ancient chinee wisdom say: A man who cannot define his enemy does not know who is enemy is, and will therefore lose every fight.
TomA, how on earth can one “remove diseased cells” as you always state, if you do not know what a “disease” is?
I don’t know if you’ve ever been exposed to microbiology, but you can find lots of information on the internet if you do a search. What you will learn is that no two cells are identical, there is always some ambiguity. Yet, the antibodies still find a way to target disease cells and eliminate the threat. Which is why people recover from illness routinely. You may be suffering from analysis paralysis and remaining on the sidelines because you lack a perfect picture of what to do. There are infinite excuses for doing nothing, and they all lead to nothing, which… Read more »
Exactly. A few years back I almost died from a chest infection. The medics weren’t sure what it was (now don’t be shocked!): pneumonia, a very bad bronchitis or something more sinister. Lying there on what I thought might be my deathbed, I really didn’t give a damn. It hurt like hell and was on the point of killing me. Ditto with the Deep State. While we worry over semantics, they are hard at work.
“There isn’t really a deep state …” Most people are human cattle. We work, eat, defecate, and virtue signal in attempts to raise our our relative social status. Sometimes the reason we stampede will be internal: no evil mastermind behind it. One individual engages in a behavior and other emulate it in a chain reaction, often in the hope of raising their social status. Mass media has changed social network architecture and greatly facilitated propagation of social chain reactions. Some people noticed this (Bernays and those who learned from him) and learned how to create externally imposed human stampedes. Convincing… Read more »
I’ve always been a believer in the emergent behavior theory because I saw it all the time in academia. College campuses are near-perfect labs for doing freelance sociology. It’s not just political — you see these weird fads in dress and slang and whatnot emerge out of nowhere, and disappear just as fast, because everyone is living in dorms and one of the cool kids started doing X, so by the following weekend they were all doing X. Same way with the professors, obviously, but much worse. But what’s really hilarious is when one of them doesn’t get the memo… Read more »
It was the clapping seals of his audience that didn’t receive the overnight update. Colbert had was shocked and quickly schooled them on the new change.
That’s actually a hybrid of both the Deep State and emergent behavior. Comey became openly anti-Trump because his Deep State handlers told him to do so, in part to keep their leftwing NPC’s on board with the police state apparatus. Colbert swam easterly as emergent behavior, and encouraged his fellow fish to do the same, which of course they did.
The whole incident is a perfect illustration of how the Deep States uses, and, yes, sometimes engages in emergent behavior such as you described within the university faculty and administration.
Severian, what you are describing there is not emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is when the group engages in actions that cannot be explained by the characteristics of the individual constituent members. In your example, that is not the case: they are a community that lives, eats, and sleeps together, giving a clear channel of communication for ideas. It is easily explained as the conscious propagation of a characteristic that exists within one of its members, and the followers are copying a leader or the leaders. The leaders being whoever proposes the new idea or type of jeans or new way… Read more »
Both of these views have merit, and ultimately both are correct. There is a deep state which animates the hive mind. In the Bible it is called the Beast Kingdom. Seducing spirits and all that. It is correct to reject the view that this is just a group of men animating this evil, and that by exposing/defrocking/killing them etc. this will go away. If we destroyed everyone worldwide involved in this evil, it would return with a vengeance again within 40 years. This is the history of the world. The evil we face is far deeper and not as easily… Read more »
All those lapel pins had to come from somewhere.
Perhaps they have warehouses full of lapel pins ready to go for any eventuality. Every flag in the world, hammer and sickle, alien ant overlords, swastikas…
I know, let’s get all Jungian and suggest that both conscious and unconscious play a role. Unconscious is the hive mind in various archetypes operating together. Conscious is the cabal of deep-state movie villains.
But which witch is which?
Wokism and woke capital emerged for two reasons. 1). The overall culture of the country and the indoctrination camps called universities are turning out cookie cutter soy people. and 2). Capital itself, in a big enough pile, can’t fail right now. These people would cause it to fail in a “normal” environment. How many people remember “too big to fail?” excuses for the 2008 bailouts of the financial industry? You’ll soon hear that expression again next year. But it’s not just the financial sector. Cheap capital, artificially low interest rats, implied bailouts and subsidies for “essential” companies, merged oligarchy (see… Read more »
Chrysler was once too big to fail.
True. And that’s also why the 80’s Alzheimer’s patient in the White House had a checkered record at best, and is not some deity in clown makeup and a dog sh. t brown suit who should be worshiped.
But there’s also a lot of “nudging.” Most big capital funding, largely due to Larry Fink, requires ESG scoring for financing. If you’re a C-suite with millions of personal bonus money on the line based on getting the right corporate debt rollover, it’s pretty hard to say no to some NY banker offering 15 basis lower if you’ll hire the “hairy dude in a sundress” for some make-work position. Just take the ticket and you’ll be set. Sure, that will eventually cause huge problems, but that’s in the future, so it’ll be Other People’s Problem. You’ll have 8 figures in… Read more »
Is there perhaps a third “hybrid” group – one that believes a “small” (let’s say .01%) who are master manipulators and carry an undue influence, and know how to use that influence to manipulate the hive? This does not deny the existence of either a relatively small but influential group or the hive/emergent behavior. They may not pull levers in the sense that their will is mechanically implemented, but they know which buttons to push to get the hive going and have nearly exclusive access to said buttons.
Put otherwise, believing that there are generals does not preclude believing that there are privates. Just because every E-2 isn’t an O-8 doesn’t mean there are no O-8s. Good point, but I propose a third alternative. The odd thing here is the “managerial state” nature of most of the controlling faction: it’s networked cloud people for the most part, not a bunch of “fat cats in smokey rooms,” that drive almost all of the Current Year things and actually control the development and management of macro-level events (Ukraine, covid, etc). For example: nobody thinks Joe Biden is leading our national… Read more »
Regardless of what positions we take in the discussion, we can all agree that it’s not some transitory stage. The managerial revolution is permanent until it burns out all the resources of cybernetic systems it occupies. It won’t be “voted out”, voting can only serve as confirmation of victory over the Destroyer Hive and it doesn’t matter whether it is manipulated or not. As long as you can get away with it, you win. It seems that we have settled fully into the new system at least in the infosphere. Covid and Ukraine mass psychoses proved how easily it is… Read more »
You’ve got me wondering if the alternate sources provide some sort of pseudo confirmation bias (“Obviously Fox News wouldn’t lie about that because those independent fact checkers would call them out!”)
Confirmation bias exists on all sides, although expressed to different degrees. Fanatics, cheerleaders and contrarians display it to the most glaring degree. I had encountered an opinion from one young, univeristy-educated person that they believed in Ukrainian victories because they wanted then to be true and for Russia to lose. It wasn’t even about trusting the source and appeals to authority, but open an expression of sentiments as pre-condtion to accept the information. Wishful thinking at its finest, Polish form. Another person plainly stated that spreading lies and overestimating Ukrainian successes is a good thing because “we’re in a war”… Read more »
[…] ZMan looks at patterns. […]
“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly… Read more »
Wolin’s book on inverted totalitarianism is worth reading.
I would only caution that he needed a stronger editor and that he did buy into the red-blue paradigm.
Zman:
The hive mind from your description really makes me think of “the invisible hand” with regards to capitalism. My question to you is, in our current economic system, which i would not describe as capitalism, does the invisible hand exist?
Maybe at the fringes. The invisible hand people need to explain why we have two phone companies, one operating system, five bankers and so on before I can consider the invisible hand business. Hell, we are down to two beer companies. If the invisible hand exists, it appears to move toward oligopoly.
Or a deep state 😉
Wasn’t the praetorian guard during the times of Rome a form of Deep state?
Agreed. Capital is being centralized at a rapid pace, and that pace has quickened considerably since the Covidarity. Just look, for instance, at the restaurant industry. In my small city, Covid restrictions wiped out a number of independent local restaurants, yet the corporate chains experienced not the slightest upset. Their share of the local market increased substantially as a result. This phenomenon, I’m sure, was repeated all across AINO, and in most other sectors of the economy as well.
I was told during the Panic of 2009 that the large, top 5 corporation I was subcontracted to planned on substantially expanding market share, pounding the crap out of the little guys with threadbare operating capital. Then the founder died,and his kids had all graduated from Yale. After their improvements, that former titan is a ghost of what it was. Their bright ideas lost major national account after major national account. I didn’t see them change course, either. There is an energy corp based in Spain, a giant with 400,000 employees that does much biz in the EU. How in… Read more »
The Austrian school economists argue that the increasing volume of tax code and regulations are an enormous hinderance to small company competition. They argue that only the large mega corporations have the resources to hire the staff necessary to effectively navigate all the government red tape. So the argument goes.
It’s undoubtedly true. The Megas are always pro regulation. Watch what happens in the Marijuana legal States. Big Pharma is quietly pushing regulations “for the well-being of the stoners” of course and will be gobbling up the little guys within a decade.
In PA back in 2008 my local little bank was looking at expansion opportunities in Jersey when the next raft of Fed regulations on National Banks” came through they gave up their ambitions and became a State, not National bank.
Charles Mackay needs to return and add a chapter on “transgenders” to his 1841 classic work “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.
There are billions, possibly even trillions of dollars behind the current lunacy.
There is a book about this titled, The Transgender Industrial Complex.. Sadly, I forgot the author’s name.
Scott Howard is the authot.
Wild Geese: And like it or not, it is easily traceable to its roots in Weimar Germany.
What an odd coincidence that the same people drive the same culture.
The Soviet Union, prior to Stalin’s ascension, was also awash in various forms of sociocultural lunacy. AINO in 2022 looks rather like the USSR in 1922. No famine though. Not yet.
The name isn’t important. The question is, did you remember xim’s pronoums?
Aw, shucks. I thought xi was a xir this week.
This is incredibly helpful. The hive mind itself is the emergent system; the deep state is *a* hive mind. But what about our alien overlords? You know, Them. Since They will inevitably come up- They too, are a hive mind. That’s right, the JQ is a hive mind. Long ago, it *was* emergent; like any hive mind, it is organic, evolving along with the environment that it shapes, reacting as its environment shapes it. The flesh the day shapes as the day the flesh shapes. The Deep State is a hive mind, unique to a specific environment–one that it shapes.… Read more »
I think Z-man touches upon an element which often confuses the discussion. Most phenomena of an interesting nature is “multi-variant” and as such difficult for humans to talk about and understand. We are as a intellectual species kind of uni-variant in nature. When teaching stat’s way back when, I discovered this in discussing example problems in research. Two significant variables were stretching the discussion, three-way interactions were almost always misunderstood and defied reasonable discussion—with most people ignoring one of more of the variables to discuss a uni-variant cause and effect model, which was precisely the antithesis of the lesson plan.… Read more »
And is this not exactly what we do with medicine? No wonder the cure is worse than the cause.
Yep, that’s perhaps a better and more pertinent example. No one died from my failure in class to teach folk through made up examples. Many obviously did with doctors’ misunderstanding of the problems with Covid.
On the other hand, there were many top tier medical folks who “did” understand the problem. They were the early vanguard to call for resistance so someone was successful in their training. Or maybe better intellects discover this naturally.
Thanks, Compsci, that the Cabal or Conspiracy is itself a hive mind is what I found intriguing. An egregore, as Ali reminded me. (This relates to the oogily-boogily I’ve tried mentioning. The mechanism of its function. Would that I too were educated as the fierce minds here. Specifically, of the purgatorio and the damnatio, the Wheel of dharma and the hells within the greenhouse. The collective memory spaces structured as as radiant dna, embedded in wave plasmas rooted in magnetic basalts. The spirit layer both is generated by, and influences expression in, the living. The ‘gods’ of the genetic spectrum… Read more »
Edit: the river-muck of the hells
(re the recycling layer and composting layer, purgatorio and damnatio, Wheel and hells)
The biosphere is a thin as paint on a basketball in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The function of the Lord of Hell, as one would call it, is to drag back in, reclaim, and recycle every scrap of structure, due to the sparse material available.
The Wheel interacts with exo-atmospheric formation, creating the continuous rain of viruses, of fragmentary information strings on our heads.
We live in a boiling soup and think it’s a calm, cloudy day.
Hell’s bells, might as well tell ye.
The growing madness is most certainly a consequence of population and pollution, but more:
Hell is overfull.
The plasma runnels of the hells have never contained this many minds before.
This is the gasses in a dungpile building up, ready to blow and scatter the elements and nutrients back into the soil.
Normally, meteor strikes or a supervolcano would do it. But the explosion of sentient minds- thanks to white people- has accelerating the pressure beyond waiting for chance.
The Infection has become a pandemic, the festering wound is trying to burst.
p.s.s.- goddam right we have a plan.
further edit:
Wave plasmas are better described as ròoted tesla toroids constrained within ionosphere bounds, but I am tired, lazy, and exceedingly f**king stupid
Well, shoot, overlong- I neglected to add that opportunity exits within whichever identity tribe as long as one follows the rulesets of that tribe.
Different rulesets look for different temperaments, thus, identity.
And that identity can pay off quite handsomely, one can be honored or respected and quite a few, prosperous.
Irrespective of which train of thought, those atop the pinnacles in nearly all fields wear small hats. There are not many small hat wearers in existence. Why do you believe that condition persists through the generations?
Someone figured out that if you can get the antibodies to kill off each other, then the disease is left alone.
“The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CIrYV1Bt1Y
https://www.unz.com/wwebb/leslie-wexners-inner-demon/
Please allow me to offer a third explanation of what the Deep State is. I prefer to use the disease analogy. Our society can be modeled as similar in concept to a human body; lots of complexity and order bundled up and striving to stay vertical for as long as possible, and maybe prosper and have some fun along the way. Occasionally, injury or disease afflicts the body, and ancestral robustness is the first line of defense. And it works most of the time. But some types of injury or disease can be a game changer, and losing robustness is… Read more »
“One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.” I think you have not yet grokked the notion of deep state. It is not about a small group of people pulling the levers of power — “emininces grise” if you will. The notion of deep state… Read more »
AA: “Probably yet closer is the occult idea of an “egregore” — something that develops a consciousness of its own and a concomitant desire to survive.” That sounds very similar to what I’m talking about below here: A meta-darwinism wherein phenotypes of personalities begin to cluster with one another socially, and eventually come to act as one, in, at first shunning, and then, later, as the phenotype condenses and congeals and hardens into an outright distinct psychological tribe, actively seeking to harm [socially, financially, violently] the foreign [unlike] personality types. When I’m in blue turf, I sense it everywhere now.… Read more »
The late great Joe Sobran clearly examined in a series of articles on the Hive mind and how it works. Everyone do yourself some good and read them, all pretty quick reads.
http://www.sobran.com/hive/
We stand on the shoulders of giants
upvoted for referencing Joe Sobran.
You nailed it. This is an extension of basic biology, or even evolution. A living organism’s sole (or at least primary) purpose is to make at least one survivor for the next generation. Natural Selection is an implacable bitch: you either survive, or you don’t. Simple as that. There are many variations on the theme: survival of the family or tribe. Social Darwinism. Applied to governments, corporations, or other large entities, I’m not sure what the technical term is. But the fundamental rule remains: These organizations (nearly) always have as prime motive to at minimum survive and (usually) to protect… Read more »
Still a little fuzzy on the various meanings of “Deep State” myself. In my mind, it is a reference to the semi-permanent bureaucracy that inhabits government, academia, media and industry. The “elites” would be those sitting atop such bureaucracy with the ability to influence its direction. Thus, the “Deep State” is comprised in large part, and depends in large part, on hive mind characteristics of the constituents. Seems like the Deep State v. Hive Mind is the two guys groping an elephant in the dark and describing the part they see. In this sense, we don’t really have a DS/HM… Read more »
It boils down to whether what is admittedly emergent behavior is coordinated by a control group, which we call “The Deep State.” This seems undeniable. The propaganda organs are used to enforce The Current Thing and academia and the corporate world, and you have to include organized religion in the latter now, follow suit. The Ruling Class Cult’s deeply held religious faith has to be reinforced constantly, and when it decides to tinker with the creed/Current Thing, that also starts with propaganda and extends to the larger society, not as a correction or sudden revelation but as something immutable. For… Read more »
In re: transgenderism getting ahead of the zeitgeist: It’s much, much worse than you think. They may have “rushed it”, but there’s no stopping it. Have a neighbor who is a very senior engineer at a national engineering firm. She supervises (or did supervise) dozens of engineers, with hire/fire authority, so not just window dressing; has done it for more than a decade. (wicked smart) Management solicited questions from her managerial level for a an online Q&A session that were supposed to be 100% anonymous. She submitted a question regarding how women should feel if supervised by a transgender “woman”.… Read more »
In any group, it helps to have a way of separating the true believers from those who aren’t so sure.
Requiring people to affirm an obvious absurdity— that guy in the dress is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body— is a good way to do that.
The content of the mandatory belief doesn’t matter, except that it be absurd. The absurder, the better.
Dalrymple’s formulation that humiliation at will is the true exhibit of power:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/124952-political-correctness-is-communist-propaganda-writ-small-in-my-study
That was basically what the great Professor Asch’s test did. In most cases, the subjects of the experiment were too terrified of being seen as outsiders to affirm the blatantly obvious fact that one of the lines on the cards was indeed shorter than the rest.
Whom the gods wish to destroy first they make mad
Yeah, well, I’m waiting for the “destroy” part to kick in. 🙁
Jeez she can’t be that smart if she thought an HR Q&A online session was going to be 100% anonymous. Who falls for that?
Event the squadies know you don’t advance a criticism of the brass when invited to do so in “strictest confidence” by the other officers.
Have you ever met an engineer or real scientist?
Smart, but, my god. The better they are at engineering, the more “on the spectrum” they are.
James Watson (DNA/Nobel prize winner) a good example … bankrupted because he publicly spoke about awkward realities about IQ.
It’s why physicists like Feynman or Von Neuman were so incredible. They straddled both worlds.
Sure I work in a very technical engineering field. Even the most autistic person in the dept knows HR “anonymous” Q&A are not going to be on the up and up.
Waaay back when, my major professor in grad school was asked a question in his measurement class regarding IQ. He was asked basically if it was true that one person or race was really superior to the other intellectually. It was a legitimate question in such a class, but fraught with danger in response. Today of course, such a question is a death sentence if the “wrong” answer given. In those days, who knows—but he was not taking the bait. Without a moment’s hesitation, he responded with an allegory: “We are all born with “cars” in life. Some of us… Read more »
There is no such thing as off the record.
Uh, there hasn’t been such a thing as an, “anonymous,” internal corporate survey since they moved those online in the ’90s.
One should always approach those as a loyalty test rather than a good faith effort by the controllers to solict input from subordinates.
Totally agree that corporations are almost totally Woke from the Director level through VP and all the way up to the C-suite.
It is a bizarre situation. Yet, these geniuses fail to understand why they struggle to hire people, retain them, or meet their production deadlines.
That’s horrible and edifying, ProZNoV. Still, this gets to the heart of the Deep State/emergent behavior distinction. I don’t disagree at all with your description of how widespread and deep this madness is, and no doubt the directed emergent behavior has exploded. I expect, though, this has caused a great enough riff between the deeply faithful and the agnostic/unfaithful that it is counter-productive to control, so it will be reeled back out of necessity since it makes total manipulation difficult. As others have pointed out before, the Cultural Revolution only came to a stop after the Chinese put down the… Read more »
“Regardless, geez, what a story. It is amazing that there remain any vestiges of trust even now, as demonstrated by your neighbor’s misguided belief in anonymity.” For most people, they can’t let go of trust because the alternative is not something their mind can deal with. It’s partially why some people will not fight even when death is obviously looking them in the face while being fed lies. IE its only a shower, no need to worry, coming from the guy who greets you off the cattle car. Most beliefs held by average people are not from actually seeing them… Read more »
Jack Dobson: We already there via most public schools, but most parents are oblivious. The think voting in the school board election actually makes a difference, regardless of the admissions officers and instructors at ‘schools of education’ or who writes the textbooks.
This very much under appreciated.
Those few publishers who control the root education material in the form of official text books control the ideas and realities implanted early on that most people never revisit later in life.
Spot on about the textbook publishers.
The thing to bear in mind about the NoVa parent uprising is that they would have been perfectly fine with it if the rubes in the Turkey Neck of Virginia had been the targets rather than themselves.
Trumpton, I wonder if this is more of a “chicken and egg” thing. My experience/readings have been that publishers are enslaved to State and Local school curriculum boards wrt what is included in their text books—like less George Washington and more Martin Luther King. They’d put in flat earth theory if the local school board wanted it and they were large enough to make it worthwhile. At higher levels, I heard they do interact with faculty as to what will “sell” in their manuscripts. Just about every faculty member I’ve known has had *one* book it them. After which, they… Read more »
Having read Frank Dikotters book about the cultural revolution in China, I agree with you on this:
Only a firm crackdown by the military will ever end this endless purity spiral.
Current cultural and military trends don’t leave me feeling very optimistic about his happing soon.
Good evidence that we are ruled by a cult intending very bad things.
Shocking, though, that its grasp and reach is so far.
Good lord, that was a lightning fast response in a critical field. As if there were no thought to the consequences.
It’s like at this point, concerning those who are impressionable enough to go trans, the advice would be “Can’t you just stick to being gay or lesbian? Try doing that for a time before you make the leap of claiming you’re the wrong sex”
One would prefer a person maintain reality, but if one’s going to be insane, couldn’t you choose a little insanity over full insanity?
The new formulation:
“Better erased than based.”
Nice! For newer folks, “based” is the opposite of “debased”.
Positive, healthy, family-friendly.
Speaking for myself, I noticed the media ran interference for the Ruling Caste decades before I ever heard the term ‘deep state’ being bandied about. When the FedGuv murdered 70+ American citizens at Waco on live TV and the zombie slaves clapped like trained seals it became inescapably clear that ‘the media’ serves as the software installation system for the hapless American peasantry, who need to be constantly told what their opinions are lest they stray into placid productivity and stable communities based on tacky Christian morality. Nobody called it ‘the deep state’ back then, and nobody I knew IRL… Read more »
Mostly agreed. Whether Waco was a turning point or the point where the existence of the Deep State became undeniable is my only question, and it seems very unclear.
Waco is just what made it clear to me. The Kennedy assassination should have made it obvious long before, but the America of 1963 was made up of mostly white, mostly Christian people who probably could not grasp the existence of that level of evil, quite apart from its existence in their very midst.
Maybe it’s overstated in the media, but isn’t that essentially what Trump tried to do with his executive order regarding Schedule F employees?
If so, it was far too little and too late, like his realization about the need for patriotic education. That was something that needed to be implemented in the early 80s to stem the tide of what we are seeing now.
Waco was a coming-out party.
“Ambush in Waco,” the NBC propaganda movie, was filmed either simultaneously with (said the press) or in anticipation of the actual events. The ending is oddly unlike the rest of it, incoherently patched together from the movie-cliché expectations of stupid cops. The credited writer’s belated “apology” doesn’t add up:
https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/righting-waco-confessions-of-a-hollywood-propagandist/
He doesn’t even get the network right.
Waco™, the full-spectrum media event, was the announcement by the [cabal of whatever size or character] that they were ready to kill us all and wallpaper the world with in-your-face unbelievable lies about it.
It was always referred to in England as ‘The Establishment’.
Everybody understood that it meant pols, bbc, the great and the good.
You are either in the club ‘old boy’ or you are not.
Back in the 1970s, 1980s when dissidents mostly were informed by various “newsletters,” Dad (and I, out of boredom) learned of some of the skullduggery. They were labelled various ways, depending upon the venue: the Eastern Establishment, the CFR or Trilateral Commission (both of those, by the way, are by no means secretive and have existed for decades, and some but perhaps not all of their product is available for public inspection.), internationalists, and so forth. Any or all with the ever-popular optional Jewish [Banker]] conspiracy. I’m not saying it’s all right, but for us dissidents, it should come as… Read more »
“I’m not saying it’s all right, but for us dissidents, it should come as no shock that there probably has always been a secret cabal who controls much behind the scenes.” I think it’s been the same crew since Nimrod and Semiramis. All that stuff about the Enlightenment and the Founders and good ol’ Jonny Appleseed is just so much applesauce to fool the drones into playing along and doing the heavy lifting without too much fuss or static. Realizing this makes it easier to come to terms mentally with the destruction around us. The distress arises from imagining we… Read more »
Of course there is a deep state. OF COURSE THERE IS! Take feminism. Pushed by Rockefeller foundation under guise of equality for the rubes. Real reason: double the work force and increase taxes, lower wages,destabilize families, and put kids in government brainwashing schools earlier. This model applies to everything from blacks, borders, porn, schools, covid, wars . .you name it! They’re all rackets made to destroy people and extract wealth. “The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse… Read more »
Came across both of these back in the early 2010’s because mine eyes were opened in 2008 😉
You might enjoy them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite
And
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Excellent post Stephen. You and trumpton have eloquently laid out the reality of the situation. I mean you both just nailed it.
Thank you, that comment was magisterial.
“ Maybe I am just a stupid ignoramus who doesn’t have enough education to grasp the nuances; maybe my mind is too feeble to swim in the headwaters of this cataract of subtleties; maybe I am a fool who is only proclaiming his stupidity in the public square.”
Or maybe you’re the “child” who tells the Emperor he “has no clothes?” As they say, some things are so ridiculous as to only be believed by an “intellectual”.
It beggers belief that anybody denies the existence of the Deep State
Bernays started his 1928 “Propaganda” with:
CHAPTER I
ORGANIZING CHAOS
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society consti-
tute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country.
What the fuck is that if not the Deep State?
Get the freebie here.
https://www.docdroid.net/uIvqryK/bernays-propaganda-pdf
The old economics take – or the take of the old economists – was that it didn’t matter if people don’t really act like utility-maximizing economic agents. You could get useful predictions about things if you pretended it was true, so you might as well pretend it was true. If, for example, you believe trees are trying to get their leaves in the place where they can get the most sun, it doesn’t matter at all that your belief is wrong. Trees, lacking self-awareness, aren’t trying to do anything at all, but so what? You can still predict where the… Read more »
More than once in his essays, C.S. Lewis pointed out the tremendous pressure many (most?) people feel to be part of the “inner circle”, part of the elite, in whatever world they find themselves. The unspoken requirements for membership in the elite inner circle invariably includes believing the right things and affirming the proper dogmas. So yeah: all that’s necessary in a situation like that, is for someone to alert the hive mind as to what the latest mandatory beliefs are, and *their innate urge for acceptance and conformity takes care of the rest* So inquiries about the Deep State… Read more »
Z: “The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.” TRB: “Always in the background, and taken for granted, is the mutual unspoken agreement to despise the Dirt People, who will never be a part of the in-crowd. A stance of unspoken-but-taken-for-granted superiority is one of the perks of counting yourself among the elite.” I’m at the point now where, psychologically speaking, when out amongst the chi-chi crowd, I can feel the Passive Aggressives noticing me, and glancing at me, and their… Read more »
It is a spiritual war, and it has always raged. Today, with the technological advances such as instant, world wide communication, the the ways in which these tools can be used to almost effortlessly disseminate the schemes and impulses of sociopaths directly in the the aching voids of the spiritually adrift multitudes, weaponizing them to serve their cruel ends, has attained a level and ubiquity never before seen. Nihilistic cultic practices such as those of Sabbatean Frankism have certainly had their play in the past; but their studied, civilization-spanning thrust to a commanding position is daunting, and its current sway… Read more »
The real Bill: A good illustration of your point is the modern fashion industry. Somehow, all the designers will suddenly embrace a new trend simultaneously – no matter how outlandish or impractical – and within weeks all the models and actresses are sporting this latest thing. Then it filters down through mass merchandising and into children’s clothing, time compressed via cheap overseas manufacturing. I remember the first time I saw a girl in junior high (now called middle school) wearing high waisted, wide-legged jeans. I thought they were the ugliest things I had ever seen (this was when the rest… Read more »
it’s why a decent pair of men’s jeans runs $30, but no self-respecting woman would be caught dead in a pair less than $90.
Deep state isn’t a small group of people. It’s the huge permanent state bureaucracy and gov contracted private managers, who take care of the day-to-day operations of the country, with easy benefits, lucrative retirements (by middle-class standards) and an almost impenetrable set of rules preventing them from being fired. Wokeism is the religion used to enforce conformity from top to bottom, so that nobody rocks the boat too much. On top of all that are the international billionaires who use the most sociopathic members of the deep state (politically nominated heads of agencies and departments) to push whatever agendas they… Read more »
“Whoever is able to mass-fire and replace the whole hierarchy of the state bureaucracy wins.”
This probably cannot be done. It will have to implode from within, and eventually will. There may be a lot of suffering until that day arrives.
I have seen it happen in Eastern Europe a few times after elections. It also happens every time after a successful color revolution. Usually preceded by the existence of at least some parallel structures.
In the US, it would be seen as “totalitarian” and “like the third world” etc., but it absolutely must be done. You’re right though, that it would be extremely difficult under normal or semi-normal circumstances.
Instead of mass replacement of the bureaucracy, the more permanent fix should be mass incarceration and confiscation of everything those people have. I’d be open to worse for the worst of them too. They have a lot to answer for over the last 50 or so years.
That is even more unrealistic.
Replacing the bureaucracy/deep state IS possible and realistic. It has been done many times in other countries and quite rapidly.
“mass incarceration and confiscation of everything” can only be done in a revolution or military coup. Both are very unlikely in the US and if they somehow happened, they would probably done by the wrong side (commies)
I understand the hive mind thing for the lower levels once the instructions have been issued. Makes sense for the NPCs to behave in this way. But you can’t run a complete NPC organized society this way. Humans are not starlings, or fish. They do not work that way. flocking is brief and not something that runs for decades in a single direction. Even the most mental cults throughout history have a hierarchy with leaders and inner circles of elect that hand out stuff for the minions to implement. If its a religion, then religions have this aspect in spades.… Read more »
One thing I would add is that if you look at the christian heresy wars in the middle ages, the way to crush a religious movement , as the vatican well understood, was to identify and attack the leaders and elect, round them up and preferably execute them in public. This caused a drift off for the most part of its adherents looking to glom onto another cult, often went back to the old establishment and the remaining maniacs could be purged later, or died off. The ones that survived were those used and funded as a power balance by… Read more »
Well said trumpton.
I’m just waiting for the math to take effect. It’s increasingly looking like it will and within the next thirty years. This causes me grief though, because I’m now paying much closer attention to how involuntary integrated my life and that of those I care about is into the system that is doomed. I’m trying to take precautions but I have a sinking feeling it won’t matter one bit…
However we have this blog that provides us with joy… What a turn of phrase this is: “It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight.” 100% on the nose.
Thirty years is being generous; we have half that, at best.
I actually went to HR a few years ago and asked them to reduce the amount of my paycheck going towards my 401K. Retirement seems out of reach at this point.
I’ve often considered this. I’ve saved my whole career for retirement and made a lot of sacrifices to do so. I’m no longer convinced that was smart.
Maniac: I’ve been urging my husband to use his 401k money for years. He’s finally doing so. While he claims we’d have a lot more money if he’d left it in stocks for longer than he did, he now agrees that it’s constantly losing value due to inflation. He also agrees it will eventually prove too tempting a target to the global corporatist governments, although he does not believe this is imminent. Either way, we’re swallowing the painful tax penalty now in the hopes of getting ourselves best situated (physically and financially) to ride out the difficult years we see… Read more »
Yeah, it’s time to cross off as many of those “bucket list” items while you still can.
AsIi’m in europe I’ve got
heating
animal protein
electricity supply
indoor plumbing
no nuclear fallout
I hope to get at least 3 during the winter.
Maniac: I was fortunate enough to do many of the traditional ‘bucket list’ things while young (international travel and living, scuba and skiing) although alas, I doubt I’ll ever make it to Alaska or take a cruise down the Fjords.
My priorities now are getting as far away from diversity as I can, living amongst natural beauty rather than in a cookie-cutter suburb, and being primarily self reliant.
I’ve thought about that but my work has a pretty generous match so I’d feel like I was walking away from money. I don’t know what they do in places like Argentina, but I sincerely doubt that people would put their money into tax deferred accounts so that bankers can buy chips at the market casino. Ah well…
“While he claims we’d have a lot more money if he’d left it in stocks for longer than he did, he now agrees that it’s constantly losing value due to inflation. He also agrees it will eventually prove too tempting a target to the global corporatist governments, although he does not believe this is imminent.” I’m not certain what is meant by “imminent” here, but the first time the opportunity presents the money will be seized purportedly for your own protection. I suspect the 87k new armed IRS agents will spend an inordinate amount of time monitoring 401k and IRA… Read more »
Jack: Our thinking is totally synchronous here. Those are the same arguments I’ve used on my husband for years. His change in thinking really began with the 2021 Texas deep freeze, and concomitant supply chain issues and increasing inflation cemented the shift. Problem was we had bought raw land and the intricacies of trying to get a driveway put in or a well and septic dug were rather daunting from hundreds of miles away. That land is shortly to be put on the market since we recently purchased the same size acreage about 10 miles north with higher elevation, and… Read more »
Generally support the “emergent” thesis. Too many decades in the midst of Cloud managerial class of the F-500 world. Until you’ve been in the middle of it, you can’t fully appreciate how fast “signaling” moves through these places. A week after the St. George of Fentanyl shit, get pulled into an exec committee meeting, where after our division President confessed her “white privilege”, we were going to go on a small group “listening” tour to help ease the pain of the diverse employees. Just one example. Meanwhile I’m getting 1:1 questions from staff I’ve known a long time along the… Read more »
The executives aren’t stupid. They ‘admit’ their white privilege because otherwise they would have to discuss why all that diversity doesn’t do as well as whitey. The only three answers are racism, culture, and genetics, and guess which two explanations would get you fired? I’ve also noticed these executives don’t have the F’U money one would expect. One of my uncles, high level executive who made obscene amounts of money yearly, had to rescind his promise to help one of my other uncles with a measily 5 thousand dollars because otherwise he would not be able to make payments for… Read more »
Yep. Seems most everyone gets sucked in and becomes a wage slave. Few make earnings beyond subsistence. Now we can argue just what “true” subsistence is, but it seems a moving target and matches whatever your salary is currently. 😉
I am told that perhaps the latest generations are not falling for this ploy. Let’s hope so. Regardless of their perceived status, they’ll be happier in the long run.
People who have spent time in very large companies are much more open to the emergent behavior approach. Things just sort of happen and no one can identify the origin. That is because in a human system, ideas merge with currents in the system and appear to take on a life of their own. I have been in many meetings where people decide to do the obviously stupid thing as if they are victims of a drugging. The wave of affirmation sweeps the room once the boss, maybe, comes down in favor of the crackpot idea. A month later, everyone… Read more »
I work [well, now contract, thank God] at a v large such company. Emergent behavior was a thing 38 years ago when I worked for said company. Now, it truly is a religion, ridiculously easy to discern for those with eyes to see and ears to listen. Lately, we’re back on the mask, and [most] all hands are fine with it, even though the rest of the county and state have moved on to newer idiocies.
The hive is alive and well, my previous post notwithstanding
I saw Georgetown was requiring masks in their classes yesterday and was stunned. I thought all that insanity had been memory holed. They are also requiring students to be maxed out on their booster shots. Did this company ask you for proof of vaccination?
Nope, as a contractor, I was able to refuse to take the needles. I’m what ya call a “essential employee,” meaning I actually show up to work five days a week, plandemic or no, performing at least marginally valuable work; thus they were afraid to push it.
Lost my innocence early in my career after I developed a good idea. Strategy, details, operational plan – whole thing was beloved by the whole chain up to the SVP. I’m a goddamned genius, man, solver of problems. Let’s present this to the C-suite!
C-suite guy was like, “Meh.” Senior executives were all like, “Yeah, it’s kind of a stupid idea. Let’s move on.” Took four minutes. Tough lesson to learn.
I had a similar experience, but the opposite. I got frustrated with being stonewalled so I tried the opposite approach as I was frustrated. I recommended against the obviously right answer and that seemed to convince the bosses to take a second look. I later learned from others that this was a known tactic in the company. The bosses needed to believe they were the idea men. That is when I first heard the line, “First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.” My boss was a third rate man who got promoted twice before doing something so… Read more »
The bosses needed to believe they were the idea men.
The most valuable career advice ever.
I’ve only survived because I like what I do and have evolved into a “fixer/consigliere” role for the last couple of decades. Which gives me a lot more latitude, but also effectively caps progress beyond a certain (albeit well paid) point. It also requires C-level officers that know they need someone around to discreetly tell them they are wrong.
I have fallen into a similar role, but from the outside and not terribly well paid. I often find myself like the Wolf character in Pulp Fiction. People do something stupid that has an obvious remedy, but it has to be said by someone from outside the circle that created the problem. It pays the bills and I do not have to repeat things that are obvious false, so it could be worse.
So emergent behavior is peer pressure facilitated globally by technology
You could not have phrased
Any better, my dear chum:
You nailed it – ‘fo sho!
Whitney: Almost perfect. May I suggest the addition of “with direct intent backed by enormous funding”?
In a sense what you call the “deep state” or perhaps more accurately, the system, depends upon emergent behavior. Our schools and culture train and select for it. Like the school of fish that jerks this way and that to tossing a stone into a pond. But who is tossing the stones?
I ran sales & marketing for a large software company. This meant the social media team reported to me during the passing of Saint Floyd. It took an aggressive and persistent backbone on my part (with support from my non-American CEO) to stop them from making the usual pandering apologetics and promises. I score high is disagreeableness so it probably made this resistance and insistence on my part a bit easier. I can imagine a more agreeable person would have just given them free reign to align and keep up with emerging behavior. If I were to hazard to guess,… Read more »
Can’t help but wonder whether the hyper-socialization of reality has something to do with it. When you can communicate with anyone you want online, even people you have no idea of anything about them other than political leanings, it creates an incredibly distorted image of the person. Our host also mentioned that in one of his recent subscribestar posts. Where before someone would encounter a soy-faced lib and avoid them, simply based on aesthetics and mannerisms alone, now these same people can foster an online image of intellectual, propped up by strong money powers. The hypersocialization has, paradoxically, made relationships… Read more »
Excellent insight.
Everyone knows the constant online “connection” is a net terrible for the individual, but no one knows how to stop it.
Z man: I admit you are smarter than me on these things but you spent an entire article talking about semantics.
“It is NOT deep state. It IS hive mind”
But the effect on Joe 6 pack is still the same so what difference does it make what you call it?
I am assuming you distinguished between hive mind and deep state as 2 different diagnoses because each would require a different treatment plan?
Hive mind requires good psyops to win. If it were fully deep state you’d need a lot of rope….or helicopters.
Isn’t it likely that there’s more than one “hive” and more than one “hive mind”? Isn’t it also likely that these multiple hive minds have very much different viewpoints on various issues? A member of a particular hive doesn’t consider his beliefs to be part of a hive mind but instead an actual part of his culture, shared with others of his hive, or his culture. Only someone outside that culture would call it a hive mind. It’s a matter of perspective.
Yes, he is smarter than you and me. But one of the rhetorical go-to bits around here is the false dichotomy. Which is fine as a construction if it gets you closer to reality. Unfortunately this morning’s false dichotomy is a misfire, as seems to have been realized by the end of the piece. But even Z’s spiritual ancestor James Brown flubbed a note once in a while. Putting that aside, strategies of rhetorical avoidance (“deep state” “coastal elite” “Hollywood”) are way past their sell-by date. My sense is that this is understood by millions of normal people. Did you… Read more »
I recall Rush pointing the hive mind stuff years ago when he’d have a soundbite of various media talking heads chanting the exact same words or catch phrase – it really was and is remarkable. The GWB “gravitas” was a good one. They’re further so insulated in their hive, they have no idea how stupid it all sounds – but I guess that’s one of the hallmarks of a cult.
I used to love when he’d play those sound clips
I note that [hive] colony collapse disorder is a phenomena biologists have fretted about these past years. One wonders if some of the cracks in the hive we’ve witnessed of late is the political analog, a hierarchy top heavy with credentialed worker bees which cannot support itself.
Art imitates Nature, one hopes.
“Of course, both sides of this debate can be right”
Yeah. Most likely