So after over six years of wishing I still had you all to talk to, I’ve decided to do something about it. Social media is exhausting, threatening, annoying and time-consuming, but interesting people are necessary and fun. Writing in an absolute vacuum is not fun and what I am writing is probably now unintelligible because I am so in my own head. So here’s my plan and it’s open for discussion.
For those who don’t know, I am writing a series of books all at once. It is kind of like being pregnant with a dozen babies at once but only being able to birth them at a rate of one every year or two. I’d give a lot to be able to speed up the process and get at least the first quartet finished and out there in months, not years. I also think I’d better start getting feedback before I hit publish on some of this.
In order to move at a reasonable speed, I need more time writing. Since my writing is (ahem) only appreciated by an exclusive audience, it doesn’t exactly pay the rent. Neither does it pay for such luxuries as decent book covers, translations, audio etc. If you’d like to help me deliver these books faster and in better form it would be very appreciated.
How I’d like to accomplish the above is by bringing back the Binding Chaos community and giving it a place to grow. I know a lot of you are very frustrated because you like the ideas but you have no one to talk to about them. A lot of you also would like to clarify some points or provide feedback and your emails and messages go unanswered far too often (sorry!).
So I am going to use a lot of the tools that Patreon now has (Discord, Discourse, WordPress limited access) and create a Patreon community where we can experiment with more open, two-way communication, where people can get involved at the level they choose but without the trolls and imaginative death threats of social media. Kind of like an epistemic community! Here it is, check it out.
I’m excited, I hope you’re excited and we can build something that really works for all of us.
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
This book is an expansion of the thought above, written in Binding Chaos in 2013. In 2013, so many things seemed simple and self-evident. In 2020, the goal seems as clear as ever, but the road seems much longer and many things have to be examined in detail that were glossed over a decade ago. Like our journey, this book is more complicated than the book written almost a decade ago. It will take longer to read and longer still to debate, but like Spain’s 15-M movement used to say, we are moving slowly because we are travelling a long way.
When our quest for justice falls apart we, like Inigo Montoya, need to go back to the beginning. This book is the beginning. It is part of a series that will cover the structure of our institutions, but before we can discuss our institutions, we need to discuss who we are. This series begins by examining the nature of self, life, will, reality and power. The rest of the series looks at the societal institutions which have grown up around nations, economy, law, governance, architecture and technology. These books are all a further examination of the problems identified in Binding Chaos in 2013.
By the time we reach the end of this series, we will hopefully be back on the road to building a better world, armed with a better understanding of where and how we were derailed. I hope it is some help to each of you on your own paths.
Comments are open for those who just want to say hi or comment on this book or series, but I am not around here much so it is not a good place for promotion or lengthy discussions of things, people and projects unrelated to the work here. I have no idea who or what is being promoted in the comments, so don’t do that. Maybe start a subreddit or whatever it is people do now for wider discussion? If people use the comments to promote other people and projects I have to shut them because I don’t have time to moderate – also this is not the place for that. If you want to start a place for a wider discussion of this book plus other things, feel free to link it below.
I am publishing the full post here this month in honour of Spring (where I am at the moment). You can read all the posts and join the discussions with the Binding Chaos community here! This post is more easily understood if you are familiar with the concepts in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, but let me know if you were able to understand the ideas contextually.
The focus that moved from the conscious to the self has moved again, to the body. The obsession which moved from preparation for the afterlife to unmitigated enjoyment of life has moved again, to prolonging life. – Me, in Abstracting Divinity
The move in focus described above is soon to play a very significant part in our current power shifts. We can see the beginnings of a new power structure forming. Let’s watch.
First, we should review what an endogroup is. From The Creation of Me, Them and Us:
There are six components to every endogroup
An identity which enables exclusive membership.
An idealized source of collective reality, residing in a person or ideology.
An existential threat from external forces.
An exceptional myth justifying unequal entitlement.
A negative image, made up of people identified as opposite the ideal.
Reflectors which may exist separately from the negative image in groups of more than two.
So where is this new power structure emerging from the new obsession with bodies? Let’s look first for a new endo-identity.
Something is happening to the word age. Age is a word that has had the same definition for a very long time. It shares an origin with the word era. It is a measure of time. The verb, to age, was to achieve an ideal or completed state, like cheese or wine. The origin of the word old meant to be grown, or tall and big. Old was a state of superiority.
As we have discussed, the state of being old has become a negative image designation. Aging is now to be feared instead of celebrated, not just by women. So if old is the new negative image, is youth the new endo-ideal? Only in endoreality.
Despite being a measurable, immutable attribute, age is also a marker of endogroup status. Where endo-identity exists, migratory endo-ideals also exist. Migratory endo-ideals are endo-ideals who do not fit the original definition of the word used as an endo-identity. They change the definition so that they not only fit the endo-identity, but they are the most special members. Because these people are already endo-ideals, they have the authority to change the definition of a word already in use to define a group of people. First they change the definition to include them, then they add adjectives to cast the original as the negative image.
Since youth is now an endo-identity, the definition of youth is being changed to include migratory endo-ideals. In this case, those are the endo-ideals from the previous power structure, which were elders. Elder endo-idealism has had a revolutionary event and elders are increasingly, the negative image. As in all revolutions, If the last shall be first, the almost last have a new fight to be last.The previous endo-ideals must reverse direction and attempt to claim status as their previous negative image.
The first sign of this was in the sliding definition of youth used by the millennial generation. A very unsubstantiated myth was built up around maturity being complete at the age of 25. Even if maturity was a defined state, brain development is not a stable attribute. People may lose their ability to exercise conscious will when they age and under a variety of other circumstances. This strength or weakness is not a measure of youth. But anyway. First 25, then 30 year olds were considered too young to be adults.
Lately we have a new definition of age. In 1969, the first paper appeared which used the term ‘biological aging’ in the place of senescence. This usage has dramatically increased with the rise of epigenetics in the last decade. Dr. Andrea Britta Maier, co-director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore, says biological age is “the accumulation of damage we can measure in our body.” That definition already has a word and the word is senescence. Senescence, which shares an origin with senility, is the process of deterioration and loss of function in living organisms. Cellular senescence is the loss of a cell’s ability to divide. Senescence is a great word and, if conveying meaning were the goal, there is a lot that could be expressed by using this word to explain body deterioration. But senescence is not one number. It is definitely not a number that corresponds neatly to chronology in human lives.
Biological age is not a thing. The definition of age is a measure of time and it has nothing to do with biology. You can increase bone density, lower cholesterol and delay cellular senescence, but you can’t stop or change age. Age is not biological; it is chronological. Whenever you see people completely ignore the definition of a word, and just start insisting it means something it clearly doesn’t, you have endoreality. Where you have endoreality, you have endogroups.
But there’s more. The new definition isn’t a definition. If you ask what it means you will get subjective waffle and an ever-changing list of ‘markers’, created by endo-ideals. You will also get many other supposed ‘types of age’. In other words, you will get an endoreality definition. This new endoreality is heavily supported by a recent flurry of academic and scientific papers, so it is authoritative endoreality. Very quickly, the new term ‘biological age’ is being replaced by ‘real age’ and the term ‘age’ is being replaced by ‘chronological age’. Those who fit the universal definition of youth are now a sub-category of their own category. This step in endogroup formation was described in the Something Larger chapter of The Creation of Me, Them and Us.
Which brings us to the newendo-ideals.
In The Creation of Me, Them and Us, the five primary types of exceptional myth were identified as:
The new endo-ideals are primarily those already sitting on top of all the current power structures. They are ticking all the above boxes for their exceptional myth. There is Superiority. It is an undeniable fact that there are now people in their 50s and even 60s who look better, healthier and as though they will live longer than people in their 20s. The 70sand 80s do not look bad at all either. It is doubtful that has ever been the case before unless the young person was suffering a terminal illness.
The vast majority of the people commonly held up as examples of this superiority are women, but they are not given credit for achievement. Instead, they are denigrated for not aging gracefully (the new act ladylike) and full credit is given to their supposed surgeons, even when the results are clearly far beyond anything possible with surgery. Surgeons and anti-aging CEOs are given the credit for these women’s achievement. This adds to the superiority exceptional myth of wealth-scientific-industrial-male endo-idealism. Endo-ideal men such as Bryan Johnson, 46, who would not look particularly good for someone 20 years older than his age, are directly credited with great achievement in anti-aging. The aforementioned authoritative subjective waffle about age is used to insist that people deny the evidence of their own eyes and define him as youthful.
These men are the Leaders of the new power structure. The Leaders are already male, white, industrial, billionaires which makes them exceptional under all the still powerful current endo-idealisms. They are depicted as altruistic and saving the world. Their Destiny is epic: Don’t Die. Their Creation is virtuous: deathless existence. Their Persecution and existential threat is from the doubters and death itself. Remember how an endogroup requires an existential threat? According to Bryan Johnson, “Death is now our only foe.” He and other leaders have a particularly culty group of supporters and a wider group of interested observers who are serving as reflectors.
So who will be the negative image? As in all things endoreality, it is not the obvious choice. If you are interested in exploring that aspect, let me know!
Updates:
The new edition of The Creation of Me, Them and Us is up on the Discord. It will be posted on all the distributor sites as soon as all the different book cover formats are complete and the book has been approved by the distributors.
Illustrations, index and covers are being completed for Abstracting Divinity and it will be posted on the Discord as soon as it is presentable.
I am working on Shaping Reality and Free Will and Seductive Coercion and getting really excited about both. Free Will and Seductive Coercion will probably be out first.
Thank you all so much for your patience. I hope you have an amazing April!
While a capitalist who invests in anything that produces income is entitled to a return on investment, women who produced the entire work force have received none. – Me
I was looking recently at what I wrote years ago in Binding Chaos and on my blog about women’s unpaid labour. Politically, almost nothing has improved in the over a decade since Binding Chaos was published and many things have worsened. Socially, the fallout from this lack of action is profound and it will be felt politically from this point forward. In reviewing all the groups I worked with so long ago, it is the movements around unpaid women’s labour that have increasingly expanded and grown in influence. I have talkeda bit here about this unrecognized, unpaid labour and the social repercussions of women walking out of slavery. This month let’s look at motherhood, specifically baby production. Or, as many politicians are terming it, a strike that will lead to human extinction.
The message seems obvious. Under the trade economy, people are commodity and women are the means of production of that commodity. The trade economy treats children as a product. It does not incentivize creating society. If women do not feel safe, if parents do not feel safe, if people do not feel safe, they will not reproduce. That has always been the case.
The root of society, the first dependence, is created when a woman gives birth to a child. The nature of society depends on how it is built out from that core, whether all share in responsibility for the first and all other dependencies or whether the strongest are pulled away to isolate caregivers and commodify dependency. – Also Me
This is a contagious strike with extreme social repercussions and it is causing and will cause many power shifts involving immigration, labour, aging, housing, communities, health and much much more. There are many different variants in different parts of the world. The smallest unit of society is having a revolution and the impacts will go far beyond the shifting borders of state wars we are used to.
I have been avoiding the US political circus for several reasons. It’s so inescapable and never ending it’s nice to pretend it doesn’t exist for a minute, but probably the biggest reason I’m avoiding it is I don’t know where to even begin.
Let’s start with endosocialism 101. There is so much more going on, but I wanted to establish this first. There are obviously moderate people everywhere, but as we all know, both political sides in the US (and the world) have been getting more extreme and more divided every year, while looking increasingly similar.
The right, especially under Trump, uses every endogroup strategy to entrench a devoted following. The right incorporates the endo-ideals at every level of US transcendental endo-idealism. It represents the wealthy, corporations, the biggest religion in the US (Christianity), WASP identity, however that is interpreted in 2024, and men. It also now represents those without post-secondary education, a majority in the US and, unusually, also an ideal state.
On the right, there are industrialist, waged, wealthy, non-academic, white, Christian, nationalist, heterosexual men as the endo-ideals, reflected by any who support them.
The right has a cohesive endo-ideal. All of those categories support each other and have for centuries. Further, many people who do not fit every category will still support that endo-ideal. Fitting even one of these categories may inspire a person to move to the side that defends their endo-ideal status in that one category. And sometimes, people who do not fit any of these categories will support them. Sometimes, a person will choose to remain as a full negative image rather than support another negative image in power.
Until recently, the left posed as the welcoming, reasonable, non-totalitarian alternative to the right. This was a good strategy because the only way to beat entrenched power is with either greater power or an exosocial alternative.
From The Creation of Me, Them and Us:
“When an endogroup meets exosocial people, the endogroup has everything to lose. A wall with a public park or wild habitat outside will encourage those trapped behind the wall to escape. A wall with enemies without will encourage those inside to stay inside and fortify the walls. The best defence of the endogroup is to push in any way possible for the exosocial people to form a group and build walls and borders. This is why the enemies of the European Union do everything in their power to encourage the strengthening of Fortress Europe, to push for walls, hard borders, controls, persecution and differentiation. The stronger the European Union becomes, the more vulnerable it is to the growth of nationalist movements within and enemies without. Its true strength is in its weakness, in the permeability and flexibility of its outer membrane and the strength of the personal membranes of the people within.”
So, the left did try briefly to at least appear to be the exosocial alternative to the identitarian right. But as I wrote in Binding Chaos a very long time ago, representative democracy is not designed for collaboration or discussion of ideas. In the US two-party system, it is a fight to expand two opposing endogroups.
I’m working on collating notes and organizing what is already written for Free Will and Seductive Coercion and Shaping Reality this month. I really wish they were both out as well, there is a lot that is topical in them both.
I wrote this to talk about Free Will and Seductive Coercion, and then realized that, even though I am in a great mood, this doesn’t sound like a merry merry happy happy newsletter. Let me explain. For me, being an optimist is watching the world fall apart because it needed to. That makes me happy because then the problems are obvious to everyone and we can rebuild. Sorry my little chats always turn so dark but I mean them in the most positive way!
I had two conversations this month that have made me think a lot about elders right now. One was with a woman who worked at a facility for elders in poverty. The horrors that were briefly exposed in elder care homes during covid areas bad or worse than ever but no longer talked about. She was saying that she planned to return to her childhood home in the Philippines when she retired because, even though she hadn’t been there all her adult life, she knew she would be taken care of properly. The other conversation was with a woman who works at a care home for dementia patients. We were talking about a lot of topics I explore further in Free Will and Seductive Coercion, regarding infantilization and its effects on brain usage, will power and self image. The latest development in her place of work is researchers experimenting with getting AI and robots to provide ‘care’ to ‘dementia’ patients. Dementia in quotes because that has become a very weaponized diagnosis. Notably, lack of human interaction is a key risk factor for the disease.
Where I grew up, elders were never alone. People dropped by their places constantly. People met at elder’s houses, since there were no coffee shops. Daily life also ensured daily visitors. My village was built on the cliff-hills of a T-bone, where an extremely steep creek canyon met an extremely steep river canyon. There was no indoor plumbing, and heating and cooking was with wood. Elders were guaranteed a visit every day by the boy who packed water up the hill for them and the boy who chopped wood, at the very least.
Most places I have lived around the world had the same sort of social construction, with elders at the centre. It was often deemed essential that they go to the market every day. Sometimes that meant someone had to drop by every morning and take them to the market. Sometimes it meant they just went to the market and met everyone there. Often they still had their own stalls at the market. In any case, they were a part of everyone’s daily life. Religious life also kept them busy and centred. I’m sure the habit of building churches and sacred sites on the top of hills did wonders for cardio.
In The Creation of Me, Them and Us, I talked about the contempt-shame symbiosis:
“Shame is inflicted through contempt. Contempt is an emotion directed downward, from the endo-ideal to reflectors and the negative image and from reflectors to the negative image. Contempt serves to increase the separation between the person experiencing it and the humiliated person or group. Shame is the inverse of contempt and is felt in response to an interaction upwards.”
The contempt-shame symbiosis casts someone as the negative image and the anger-fear symbiosis causes an energy transfer. It is contempt which causes shame which causes depression which causes memory loss, confusion, timidity and sometimes anger at the enforced sublation. Fear of the repercussions of their weakness and the lack of support increase all those symptoms. These are the same responses that children have when contempt is directed towards them. It is the same effect that has happened to those in poverty, those with poor health, women/immigrants/ethnicities in places they were not welcome, the negative image of every endo-idealism.
Industrialized culture’s contempt for elders started with newly isolated women. This contempt became overwhelming as soon as a woman gave birth. “Your mom” is both a joke and a synonym for imbecile. As soon as children start school now, they begin to exchange meaningful glances and snickers whenever a parent speaks, and this is normalized. By the time a person starts to age in earnest, one syllable words are shouted at them as though they were the toddlers. So many people seem to emerge from any interaction with an elder with a ‘funny story’ that depicts the elder as an idiot. This is regardless of their true state. If someone in their 20s is groggy, people laugh with them. If they are 60 or 80, the exact same mental drift is laughed at. This is shunning of the negative image. The social affirmation laughter granted the 20 year old becomes social exclusion laughter as they age.
When I was little, no one had dementia because we didn’t call it dementia. We just said. “Oh, she thought it was daytime.” or “He was remembering when he was young.” It wasn’t at all a shameful thing to be old enough that your mind wandered, and it didn’t trigger any loss of respect. But also, elders were extremely sharp and healthy compared to what they became if they had to go outside for a few months or years. If they stayed in the community, their minds wouldn’t really wander until they were close to death. As my friend working with dementia patients agreed, social treatment causes a significant part of the symptoms.
But let’s not pretend it is a wandering mind or even physical weakness that is causing the lack of respect here. Elders are largely not being helped in industrialized communities to live the way they wish. They are being sublated. In elder centred communities, the elder is still giving orders and having respectful conversations daily. In industrialized communities, adult offspring are often absent during all of their parents aging struggles, or they appear just to berate, humiliate and threaten them for their difficulties. Elders are socially isolated until someone suddenly appears with doctors and lawyers to assume executive function, not to clean the house and file the tax. The price of the help is sublation of will. A will that is not exercised will be lost as surely as a muscle.
Yes, industrialized culture fears and shuns elders as a result of their fear of death, but that’s not all. Elders in industrialized communities are treated with contempt because they are an industry product and consumer, not an industry worker. That is all it takes. First, that negative image was children, then women, then anyone with a health or financial challenge, then elders and now?
Well what do you think will happen when jobs are largely industrialized and everyone is a consumer-product with a sublated will, fed passive, infantilized, automated interactions with pre-made decisions? ‘Early onset dementia’ is a rapidly growing disease.
Our minds are being destroyed by algorithms from a very young age. Shame is brought by an inundation of bodies, lives and achievements that make our own feel worthless and a lack of real connection. Conscious will is weakened by every dopamine producing entertainment our brains are fed from birth forward. This will apparently not receive widespread acknowledgement or be addressed until it spreads past the population segments, like elders, that can be ostracized. We are now at the point where it has become an almost universal condition. The most significant target at the moment is those who are young enough to have been raised with technology, and particularly men. Having technology designed specifically to target your demographic is not always an advantage. With all the miles of text devoted to male crises, this point is usually omitted.
The problem with our future is not AI. It is that AI is being developed to mimic our existing social structures with zero examination of said structures. This is what I said in Binding Chaos regarding cryptocurrencies and social media – they just showed how broken the systems they were mimicking were. The problems pointed out in Binding Chaos, such as search engines which show you the world the algorithm decided you would like, are still with us. But now they are embedded in the DNA of an even more pervasive and unquestioned technology.
Some people still tell me they don’t get what my current writing has to do with my earlier work. Technology is automating a structure of civilization that has not been first examined. There has been zero analysis of what we are trying to create or why beyond simply replicating what exists. (Yes, zero. What has been produced does not qualify as analysis.) If we don’t understand the role and nature of will, we are not going to anticipate or recognize its destruction, or even understand why that matters.
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I wish you all a healthy self and a strong and focused conscious and will for 2024. Here’s to New Year’s resolutions!!
The original method of endogroup creation is through the anger-fear symbiosis, used for energy transference in defence of the endogroup. This is followed by the contempt-shame symbiosis, used for guilt transference in wider and more established endogroups.
This quote, from the revised release of The Creation of Me, Them and Us, made me think about the current state of social media. Very much off the top of my head, I think the evolution of social media has been as follows.
So. First we had a really exosoocial moment when people tentatively reached out to others. Then a lot of children had their personal membranes destroyed through humiliation, fear, lack of privacy etc. Those that survived tried to create their own personal endogroups and a generation of micro celebrities with a new type of dissociated marble-self. Now, the technology seems to be want to create a generation of information and connection nihilists but it is targeting the most information sharing generation ever. Huh.
I am really looking forward to getting to the next two books in the ontology quartet. The new editions of Binding Chaos and The Creation of Me, Them and Us plus Abstracting Divinity have all been complete for a while and just running through various bureaucracy hurdles with different distributors / markets / formats. These hurdles have been seemingly endless, but once they are done, they will be done for all the books and the next ones won’t have the same delays.
I have given up on trying to have concrete dates with other people involved, but the books are coming soon! … I really hope you like what I’ve done and hopefully it was worth the wait.
The next books will not take nearly as long to get out because this time I was going through and editing all three books, and working with new illustrators and cover designers and so on. There was a lot that I have never done properly, but now it’s done, and the next ones can just fall into the same pattern. These books are also loooonng and I’m hopeful that at least the other quartets will be shorter.
… at the last minute (literally yesterday) I decided to add afterwards to each book. That was after a discussion with some friends ..
As you all know, I am a really big believer in ideas that stand by themselves. The first material for Binding Chaos was published on a website without even my name attached. Then I attached a name, but nothing else. That has left other people free to create a narrative around who I am and why I wrote these books. As my friends pointed out, that leads to two narratives: one, which is libel against me and two, which is nothing at all, so why would people read these books? It also leaves my readers with no material to use to explain to others who I am or why I’ve written this. They suggested I should provide some context, so I’m trying to do that at the end of each book. I know it’s the fashion to embed personal material within a book, but I find it annoying to read personal details in a book about ideas. This way, people can just skip the afterword if they don’t want to read it.
This September I’ve been noticing a new layer to our ongoing saga of collapsing endo-idealisms.
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The parents of generation X were trapped in a vise between parent endo-idealism and child endo-idealism. They were the negative image of both their parents and their children and expected to spend their lives in service to both. The women of that generation were the negative image of the caregiver circle, as their mothers were before them. But they were also the new negative image of both the wealth and industrial circles as well. This negative image provided the invisible labour and was assigned all of the guilt for both the endo-ideals and the obedient reflectors.
They raised the entire population of the world, under ever increasingly impossible conditions, and were told every day, by their children, neighbours, teachers and governments, that they could be arrested or have their children taken away for failure, that expecting to ever receive gratitude or acknowledgement was ridiculous and that the best efforts humanly possible would still leave them guilty of causing their children endless trauma. They would be forever responsible if their child grew up to be a murderer, depressed or unsuccessful. If they raised a competent adult, they could expect that adult to either never see them again or put them in a ‘care home’ when they got old.
Finally, the women of that generation are belatedly rejecting these assigned roles and the younger generations are refusing to pick them up at all. That leaves all of these circles of power unable to function. This September, that appears to be increasingly apparent in schools. On Tiktok, teachers are posting that they have entire elementary classes unable to tie their shoes and first graders in diapers. They are begging parents to teach their children how to read and count and all the things they used to. Teachers are losing all their energy to the students, a clear sign that they have also lost the power struggle. They complain of contempt and disrespect from the students. They say the kids are reacting to school with apathy, a resistance to sublation.
This is what happens when the base unit of the building blocks of power start to crumble. If women are refusing to raise children to the requirements of schools, the whole system cannot continue as it was. Most people are still expecting things to go back to the previous ways after the pandemic, after the economy gets better, after something just around the corner, but if the children, teachers and parents are all refusing the role of negative image, the power structure cannot be recreated.
If life can be like a box of chocolates, surely self can be like a bag of marbles. Or a fragile spiderweb.
I was having a discussion about relationships this week that reminded me of something I wanted to talk about regarding the dissolution of endogroups. We’ve talked about the evidence that endogroups are weakening and shattering, but we haven’t talked much about what is forming in their stead.
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Shattering endogroups now looks like a proliferation of tiny bubbles. Many people now would be horrified if their entire social group saw the contents of their phone. Each app often contains a completely different social life and a completely different self. Even on the same app, many people run separate accounts with separate social lives and selves, including romantic connections. Instagram is famously set up to facilitate cheating. How this is accomplished is by allowing the modification of content, connections and activity so it appears different from different perspectives. In other words, people can display different and false versions of their interactive self to different audiences. In presenting these false and different versions of themselves to others, they create a shattered, fun house mirror to reflect their own image back to them.
Research by Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s into infant attachment styles has lately exploded into a massive market for so-called attachment theory in adults. This so-called theory is embarrassingly trivial, even by the standards of psychology. It divides the entire world into four categories: anxious, avoidant, both or neither. Only neither is considered healthy. … What therapists like to call anxious and avoidant are just manifestations of these compartmentalizations.
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A healthy self consists of an expanding, Integrated, transparent and consistent network of connections and interactions. It is created like a spiderweb, where some people are kept at a distance and some move closer but the centre is unchanging. Instead of this, many people have created a self that looks like a bag of marbles. Each marble is a tiny, isolated object self. Any or all of the marbles can be intimate connections, but they all contain a different version of the self and they can all be thrown out at any time and replaced with new ones.
The topic of the month is from a discussion on the Discord which started with the following questions: How much are the endogroups weakening? Can we say that they are all weakening?
I’ve already given my opinion on that, so instead of a direct reply I have started a tool that will help us measure the creation, collapse or strength of endogroups. The following are key components of endogroups that we can look at to measure their strength and its direction over time for each endogroup. This is a first draft until I have time to develop something more complete.
The most important point to check is the law of endoreality:
All virtue, ownership, credit and victimhood are assigned to the endo-ideal and all vice, guilt and punishment are assigned to the negative image, by all committed members of the endogroup.
As I’ve explained before, the point of OpDeathEaters was to assign predatory guilt to the endo-ideals of every power structure at once. It would have been far easier to use inter-endogroup conflict to accuse one set at a time (like I did with OpGabon and earlier campaigns) but I wanted to see if we could start a conversation about the predatory nature of power structures to the point that people would start to look for this guilt every time they saw an endogroup power structure. At that point (2012-2015) this was a very difficult fight and extremely few people were even willing to consider unjustifiable guilt attached to a non-rival endo-ideal. I think we are now at the point where people expect to find this sort of guilt at the top and are even unsurprised to think of global power as organized crime. People are also rejecting victim blaming and endo-ideal justification or victimhood when it appears, as well. Guilt is no longer being automatically transferred. This indicates a drastic reduction in the committed endogroup members in the past decade, for most endogroups,
There are other endo-ideal powers we can look at, such as the right to define endoreality, which includes defining the topics which preoccupy the group. In the same 2012-2015 era I was fighting to remove the focus from men with guns and entertainment celebrities in the news and share some spotlight with the huge amount of humanity that were unheard. There are two things I have noticed recently.
Revolutionary event: One in which an endo-ideal becomes the negative image for a portion of their former obedient reflectors.
The times we live in are so interesting that when a revolutionary event happens, it is not even clear which revolution it is happening in. Everyone is sure but their opinions differ. It really depends on what social media bubble you live in, apparently.
In June, five people died. A lot of other people died too, but there were only five that people in media and on social media seemed completely obsessed with because those five were the targets of a feeding frenzy for multiple revolutionary events. For those who forget, or haven’t yet read Abstracting Divinity or The Creation of Me, Them and Us, a revolution is like the turning of an hourglass. Suddenly those on top are on the bottom and vice versa and the laws of endoreality which distribute virtue and vice, credit and guilt, are also reversed. On June 14th, several hundred people drowned in the Mediterranean. These deaths did not receive nearly as much commentary but those that did cover the tragedy were mostly sympathetic. That would not havebeen the case a decade ago. For a growing section of the population, the negative image and endo-ideals have been reversed.
But which endo-ideals?
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Some people thought the Titan showed the hubris of humanity in pitting itself against nature. They attribute guilt for the accident to the endo-ideals of industrial endo-idealism. Twitter appears convinced that the five deaths provided blood for the collapse of wealth endo-idealism (too many memes to link). … On TikTok, which has far more vocal women than any other platform, people are here for the collapse of industrial and wealth endo-idealism but also, very very much about the hubris of male endo-idealism. Every one of these viewpoints are justified by pointing out how many people are killed by industrialists/rich people/men and their hubris.
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
Heather Marsh 