Obedience to Authority: An Exploration, Part VI
On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News: Deservedness and Death in a Post Modernist Bully Culture
Continued from Obedience to Authority: An Exploration, Part V
On Deservedness and Death
Once classified as such, the underserving can be disposed of 1) passively and unconsciously because of an overt and hypocritical societal ethic that all are equal, or 2) openly and even triumphantly, for anyone openly classed as undeserving and unequal. The ethical mask, if extant such as in Western culture of the last 1500 years or so, is easily seen through today in how our society passively ‘lets’ the economic undeserving die of exposure on the street, or more actively and covertly by supplying them with illicit drugs, or through imprisonment, war, starvation, being disappeared in various ways, or, maybe even with supplying malnourishing and toxic foods. In ancient Rome, with an openly undeserving class, that included death by entertainment. In Mayan culture, death by sacrifice to the gods. In a recent contemporary example that happened close to my childhood home. Robert Picton, a local pig farmer, confessed to removing 49 women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Over about twenty years he took indigenous women who were addicts and prostitutes to his farm where he killed them and feed them to his pigs. The police ignored the local women who ‘complained’ to the police that women were disappearing. Why? These people were in the most undeserving ‘class’ in my civilised Canadian society and therefore the police, had ‘better’ things to do than look for these women or investigate why they were disappearing.
In an agricultural society, which has a clear power-wealth split between the haves and the have-nots, the baseline relationship between the deserving and the underserving ceases to be one of voluntary reciprocity between equals across all levels of society.
The presence of equal reciprocity becomes limited to those inside the have and have-not groups themselves, with an almost unassailable divide between the haves and the have-nots. In the end, if you are in an out-group, within either camp, you can easily become disposable by the dominant in-group for having the wrong political belief or skin colour, for being a witch, a Jew, a Christian, a white male, uninjected or whatever. The cabal elite will fly in private jets, and want mere meat eating tourists to stop their travel.
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The psychological and/or emotional existence of the schism between deserving and undeserving is perhaps the activating principle that triggers the obedience to authority toxoplasmosis-like parasite, aka the genetic predisposition. When the right stresses are in place, this schism overtly undermines people as equals. Some will be more equal than others, and the more equal will be extolled or even idolised with near endless encomiums, structures, prestige and, importantly, power or the perception of power and authority. Our celebrity and celebration-of-wealth-society, for example, where we look to a movie star or billionaire for his or her ‘powerful’ opinion on politics, food, relationships, population density, climate, whatever.
Add some additional stress in the correct way, either deliberately or with ignorance, as in a certain death by unseen contagion or climate change, and the deserving members of the society, within both camps, becomes ready to let die or advocate or actively kill the undeserving when the underserving have become, with the guidance of a trusted authority, a mass of faceless non-individuals who threaten the deserving with a collective stench or the smell of death. For example, today’s great resetters claim that the earth is in danger, and that the useless (undeserving) meat eaters are the cause of that threat and need to be eliminated. The uninjected were likewise classified as undeserving, often explicitly, through both legacy and alternative media outlets and broadcasts.
It is easy to see that this aligns with the constellation of mass formation. We have seen this many times in recent human history, especially in pro-war or anti-communist and anti-capitalist propaganda campaigns with extreme dehumanising caricaturisations and blatant misrepresentations.
Bully Culture in the Genes and in our Pants
Deservedness empowers the authoritarian bully-voice that demands obedience. Un-deservedness manifests as acquiescence to the bully, and in turn, the undeserving often will bully their downstream undeserving group or groups. In the time of covid, for example, government edicts, bullying and obedience to authority got most people to inject an experimental, hastily developed, and incompletely/improperly tested injection with unknown ingredients and adverse reactions. Subsequently many of the injectees in turn openly bullied the remaining uninjected as an undeserving class. The Stanford Prison experiment and Solzhenitsyn’s description of the Gulag prison, as well as covidian injection frenzy and violent woke demonstrations, display this dynamic.
This describes very well that we live in a bully culture, which we see in most of our social structures: all levels of school, language, work and, more often than we want to admit, the family.
Obedience to authority and being anxious are also connected to our; 1) fear of death and; 2) a schismatic state of unconsciously striving to see ourselves as deserving and/or equal while unconsciously denying our feeling of being undeserving. This idea may be able to be tested by measuring the size of this psychological schism in covidians and their ‘evil’ antithesis. That these fears are a huge source of anxiety and maladaptive behaviours is a cornerstone within the healing modalities of depth psychology, Twelve Step and other spiritual/psychological programs and therapies.
On Peterson’s ‘Absolute Wrongness’ of the Post-Modernists Settling to Power as the Be All and End All
Jordan Peterson frequently descries as ‘absolutely wrong’ the post modernists as having reduced all human interaction to that of a power relationship. He cites as evidence of that that the social stability of western civilisation for the last 1500 years or so can not exist with power as the fundamental precept. He points out that in primates power-based structures often result in an unstable community with the power chimp eventually getting torn to pieces. The ‘best’ leader chimp is the one who has the ability to create harmony in a way that a pure power-driven leader is often incapable of creating even if achieving true alpha chimp status.
Peterson suggests that in place of power a more accurate, or perhaps truthful, foundation at the base of human social structure is the hierarchy of competence. Peterson concedes that competence is often less than what it can be, and argues that western civilisation has made huge strides towards embodying that ideal. He cites the fruits of that success being the general level of social stability and the distribution of wealth and the elevation of human comfort by various measures, such as the absolute reduced rates of poverty, longevity of human life and the survival rates of children.
In practice and in history social stability is more an ideal of what we think we want to see, than is actually seen. I question his gloss that actually lived western civilisation has been as stable in actuality as it has been within the ‘stability’ of the ideas referred to in our sacred books of Christianity and philosophy. The ideal that ‘all are created equal under God’ hasn’t stopped frequent and bloody and horrific ‘enforcement’ of that ideal by one power structure over another, and that that has been typically comprised of the haves over the have-nots. Furthermore the oppressors, who puffed themselves up to being the most deserving, have used that ideal and their self perception of competence as rationalisations for blood. Even the stable enlightenment ideal that two plus two equals four has been unable to stop the bloodshed of the undeserving and, occasionally of the deserving in retaliation by the undeserving. Clearly the dream of ‘peace’ and social stability that the rationalists of that ‘scientific’ enlightenment thought would come with their enlightened narrative has not happened. The last century was not without blood. Likely it was the bloodiest in all of human history.
Regarding the relative improvement of overall wealth, and the other benefits Peterson lists, I suspect that it has been less a deliberate and guided activity generated at the largesse associated with the voluntary reciprocity of people of equal competence, than it has been a combination of an accidental spillover of the explosion of wealth and people actively fighting to receive some of that spilled over wealth. For example, starting in the 1970s there has been a very active campaign to impoverish the workers of the world to enrich the rich.
Proof of that is easily seen in the steady increase in the concentration of wealth in the wealthiest and the successful removal of a middle class in North America and other parts of the ‘developed’ world. It is also easily seen in the steady pillaging by economic decree or military interference of many third world countries by the actions of the hegemon elite. What we are seeing today with the great reset is really an end-grab for the rest of the world’s wealth by the haves from the have-nots. “You will own nothing and be happy” is their slogan. It arrives from their perception of deservedness and power.
Does this mean that hierarchies of competency don’t exist at all? No. They do exist as a subset beneath the overarching split between the haves and the have nots, as well as within the two groups. At a fundamental level, it is the competence of the workers, the engineers and the business managers that have allowed for the creation of the wealth we have seen in the last few hundred years. However, with the infiltration within society of a woke-like disconnected economic/business ideology the commercial world has been invaded by profit maximising MBAs and accountants who have been destroying the moral and economic foundations of society by fiddling with the books. Much of that fiddling has been done with the profit-maximising justification for the removal of the too costly competent engineers and labourers who make society work.
The truly competent business managers have been replaced by MBA ideologues who are wonderfully competent at repeating the delusional ‘science’ of a business expert narrative while making the next quarter look profitable to the benefit of the haves at the expense of labourers and society in general.
And, as Peterson himself has observed, the equivalent has happened, perhaps even predated woke business/economic book fiddling practices, within the ‘hallowed’ schools of learning. Educational competency has been destroyed by the community having embraced competently espoused woke ideology. The success of that educational ‘competency’ has reached the grade schools who have been removing requirements for basic math and reading skills as the deleterious acquiescence to white male patriarchy. Often they have been replaced by woke genderless and/or fluid sexual ideology.
Why has the ostensible good of competency been replaced by, or degenerated into, ideology disconnected from reality? This is an interesting question, and likely goes back to a combination of lobster-like hierarchy behaviour and a confusion about the difference between genuine competence and power. Peterson argues that the truly competent human has the power of engagement that creates meaning and a meaningful life. I agree. And yet, even as the power-based alpha chimp can sometimes rise to the top, the incompetent power-base humans can likewise rise to the top. The confusion between true competence and tyrannical power, as Peterson calls it, has been furthered by the conflation of power with wealth, and with the conflation of wealth with intelligence and more perniciously, with compassionate intelligence or wisdom. The current socio-economic corporate business structure, for example, tends to reward sociopathic behaviours. See ‘'The Corporation’, a look at the psychopathology of corporations.
Competency and Stability versus Ideologically Denying Reality
I would argue that human community, especially an agricultural one, is comprised of a moving dynamic between the stabilising effects of voluntary reciprocity as equals and the destabilising effects of denying the biological reality of our drive to hierarchy while building edifices and godlike adulation for the haves. For example, Hindu society is reasonably stable and does not pretend that hierarchy does not exist or needs to be extirpated as a philosophical and/or spiritual evil.
Obedience to authority is a natural outgrowth of these three frictional energies, summarised here: 1) the philosophical or spiritual belief and effort for voluntary reciprocity predicated on equality; 2) the biological drive for hierarchical structure that perceives and acts on the perception of inequality; and 3) the inherent biological desire or need to be socially connected and/or integrated within the communities of which we are a part. In other words, obedience to authority arises from 1) the human desire to embody the spiritual and/or philosophical idea that in mind body and spirit all humans are spiritually equal, and; 2) our biological need to know or strive to know or change our ranked place of deservedness within our groups and; 3) our biological need for trust and social connection with the others of our various communities. These characteristics of what comprise social stability tend to herd us in the direction of mutual agreeableness, the precursor to obedience to the energy of the group within which we find ourselves and that we perceive supports us. And this energy or dynamic will tend to support obedience to authority within the group.
I have heard argued and have considered that the presence of an Ultimate creation-energy-something, God or Other, beyond human egoistic or intellectual capacities to comprehend, may temper the extremes that this energy-triad creates. For example, we are living in a time when the presence of God has been largely discounted and or dismissed and, with that, the mind and/or the ego steps in to become a very poor substitute.
With that the claim is made that the killing of millions by Marxists or fascists was made easier. I won’t argue against that, and yet history shows that a common belief in God did not stop such things as the French 100 years war, the Spanish Inquisition, or the Albigensian or other crusades against the wrong-Christian, etc. The requirement, an egoic requirement, perhaps, needed everyone to have the right belief in their ‘right’ God as decreed by the haves who were in the position of truth and power. In these examples the authoritarian camps of deserving did their best to remove the undeserving. In the case of the French religious civil war, the camps were nearly equally divided and so instead of it being a relatively easily accomplished clean sweep, it became an extended war. Note: Jim Henson used dinosaur puppets to astutely commented that WAR arises from We Are Right.
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