The Liminalist # 226: The Psychology of the Rulers & the Ruled (with Larry Kummer)

Conversation with Larry Kummer on the changing political landscape in the US, the failure of democracy & the end of the Republic

Part One: Elite to Rabble Relations (0 – 27 mins)

Who was Fabius Maximus, the Fabian Society, American expansionism, military reform movement, big burn-out, false authorities, screwing up & moving up, falling institutions, distinguishing incompetence from malevolence, how the elite view us, fear propaganda, an audience of peons, climate change policy gridlock, World War One business, problems & solutions, the psychology of the ruling elite, ends and means, the danger of factions, the test of being a rabble, consumer democracy.

Part Two: Thrift Store Politics (27 – 53 mins)

Participatory democracy, thrift store politics, Lincoln-Douglas debates, Rome’s twilight years, democracy & autocracy, what the founders intended, premature solutions, the time for action, the limits of theory, interactive problem solving, the difficulty of agreement, defining the problem, transition from Republic to empire, trauma-roots of the problem, victimology, periods of collective trauma, hang-nails for the rich.

Part Three: (53 mins – 1 hr 17 mins)

Child sexual trauma, effects of education, liberal indoctrination, a social engineering experiment, the creation or liberation of a gender self, man and woman as social constructs, third wave feminism in the 1970s, Hobbes’ definition of human beings, children as lab rats, inducing nausea, the problem of inertia,

Part Four: A Paper Bullet of the Mind (1 hr 17 mins – end)

What the elite are thinking, Trump and Nero, a paper bullet of the mind, a post-republic govt, a populist president, hollow politics, agent of polarization, the elite’s greatest fear, Hillary’s imaginary presidency, UFO disclosure, two elite factions, left & right, rats & cats in harmony, a commonality of elites.

Fabius Maximus (Larry’s site)

Songs: “Pirates” by Entertainment for the Braindead; “Rear View Mirror” by Emerald Park; “cha lectro cha cha” by Martinibomb; “Changes” by Short Hand.

30 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 226: The Psychology of the Rulers & the Ruled (with Larry Kummer)”

  1. Always Interesting to hear you hash it out with Academics. Hilarious when you nudge them into topics of high weirdness. All that American political talk and no mention of Bernie and the new left that’s emerged in the last 5 years felt like a vacuum though. Was also surprised to hear Trump characterized as being feckless as a president. The judge appointments alone have been devastating and last at least a generation. The trillion dollar hand out to the upper class a travesty. The deregulation of protections a nightmare. The demonization of immigrants and border camps abhorrent. I digress but you get the point. What I see as negatives some one see as positives. What it’s not is nothing.

    Reply
      • i was still chewing on that word feckless & then you took it out of my mouth!

        odd to think I have pro and anti-Trumpers among my readers- a true motley democracy!

        Reply
    • Sam H, there is a distinction between immigrants and invaders that you glide over: consent of the citizenry. Legal immigrants are immigrants, ‘illegal immigrants’ are invaders.

      Trump speaks well of immigrants, and wants more of them. He has bashed some invaders, for other crimes such as gang violence, drink driving, rape, murder and terrorism. Which seems quite reasonable. However, he has failed to strongly criticize invaders and invasion as such.

      If he had done so, in simple terms that almost all US citizens would agree with (and also the citizens of every other nation), he would risk having his words thrown back at him by critics of US imperialism. You can’t very well make a moral claim for your own country’s sovereignty and borders and freedom from unwanted incursion if you do not respect other countries’ similar claims. Equally, one who sides with invaders against his own fellow Americans, could never be a serious advocate for a peaceful, non imperial foreign policy.

      Across the spectrum of acceptable opinion, from Ocasio-Cortez to Trump, no-one says all borders should be respected, all nations free from unwanted colonization. There is a consensus that everyone in the club must be free to fudge this issue, and that anyone who doesn’t fudge, and is a consistent supporter of national sovereignty, and live and let live international relations, such as David Duke and Syrian Girl, are stupid, crazy, evil. Or as Hillary would say, deplorable, or you, abhorrent.

      I think you’re wrong.

      Reply
      • Interesting to hear your take. We are very far apart on this. Not sure of the point of a back and forth other than to draw lines in the sand and fill out our political profiles in this space. My idea of invaders are not Central Americans waking across the boarder but hedge funds and big Capitol gentrifying and displacing populations (as one example). Illegal immigrants didn’t destroy The Bay Area, Big Tech did. I’m emotionally a believer in open boarders, but that is not a hill I would die on. I have done little critical reading on the concept, so with out putting in the real time to form a serious opinion I characterize it as an emotional position (believing in open boarders). I’m a multiculturalist, anti colonialist and anti imperialist. I see immigrant populations legal or illegal as a zero threat, I believe the sum total of the illegal immigrant population benefits American society. Anecdotal stories of violence and gangs are over blown and exaggerated. When we think of scale a drop in the bucket compared to state and big money structural violence that is perpetual and ubiquitous.

        Fortunately these kinds of political subjects are not often relevant to topics Jasun explores and thus gives us the opportunity to learn from each other on subjects we are exploring and contemplating that don’t fall into right or left political ideology.

        Reply
        • Politics is how a people manages its collective affairs and deals collectively with others. Individuals and cultures being somehow mind manipulated to go along with policies adverse to their best interests is THE central theme here.

          Reply
  2. Your guest was proposing that Trump’s administration has been defanged by the establishment apparatus. My point is love or hate the things he’s done the laundry list is pretty big. So I question that characterization.

    Reply
  3. The whole idea of the coincidentia oppistorum (coincidence of opposite states) is very relevant to how we should conceive the way and manner elites rule the non-elites around them. More or less, you can learn a lot about yourself through suffering; you learn both what hurts and why, and what feels good and why. Imagine this process iterating through evolutionary time and see the aggrandizer as the epitome which arises out of the sea of social asymmetry, discovering, sharing, and propagating the sorts of techniques that work to manipulate others.

    These techniques more or less amount to the manipulation of what people are afraid of (what causes suffering) and what people do to distract themselves from their fears
    (idealizations). That is: dissociation and idealization are the two ‘poles’ that exists within every individual that works to regulate what is and isn’t ‘metabolizable’ for knowing. Elites maintain this focus on the ideal – or the idol – by regularly subjecting us to terrors that stimulate us towards returning to the attractor-which-regulates-us. This attractor is the god, idol, spirit, or group consciousness, that elites are fundamentally identified and connected with.

    Dissociation and Idealization (which always occur together; just like a turn of the wheel moves towards something and away from something else) basically separates one one part of yourself from another part of yourself; the part that is too uncomfortable or stressful to know is ‘blanked’ from awareness, whereas the more comfortable knowing is the one that is accepted by the interlocutors you usually interact with – hence, an “internal symmetry sink” which organizes your mental states. Elites manipulate the polarity of self-other social interactions so that the other produces signs that regulate the self’s implicit self-organization processes – that is, what the self feels in its body. Since each self is encompassed by an other, every self regulates other selves and all selves are embedded in the same mutual co-regulation. To become acquainted with the rules-of-how this all works can give you a great deal of power over other selves so long as you have a boat-load of other selves conspiring with you at the same time. Together, you can all produce the signs that force the others around you to conform to the ideal you want them to conform to.

    All in all, people are routinely ‘splitt’ in this way day after day, moment after moment, purely through the regulatory dynamics of their brains and its genetic predisposition, based in basic geometrodynamics, to correlate its functions to the state of other human selves. Humans are emergent, which means are mental processes are derived from the social processes we routinely engage in.

    Just as extreme states of hot feel cold, or extreme states of cold feel hot, the human being in its most extreme state of ego-inflation believes itself to be ‘beyond good and evil’, and therefore, it stands to reason that the rigidity and hard-headedness that characterizes both the extreme right and the extreme left expresses exactly the same sort of values. For example, the neoconservatives who go to Bohemian grove and the radical leftists at LSE both seem to have the same sexual tastes that stem from a similar metaphysical nihilism that makes the arbitrary wishes of the self the ultimate authority. Between the two, the only real difference is that the latter seemingly enjoys overt deception (although moderately educated people aren’t deceived), whereas the former is eagerly seeking to change public mores through a pretentious ‘radicalism’. On the face of it, the evangelical wing seems to be against these values; but yet they in fact widely cultivate these desires in secrecy.

    The far right ‘fascists’ in turn have a lot in common with the evangelicals except the former are secular, atheistic, or pagan; but the two are more alike than different in the way that they are both very willing to leverage the apparatus of government to force their agenda on society. They don’t ask and don’t care much for the processes of democracy.

    On the far left, the LGBTQ+ (and ever expanding) movement uses political correctness and in-your-face shame tactics to force their social agenda on the society around them, more or less prohibiting any deep philosophical or scientific reflection or conversation about the values that they’re trying to promote through the simple tactic of YELLING. Yelling, and being over-aroused, and being aggressive, is normalized so much that the tactic becomes concealed by its banality; banality is the target of all effective conditioning.

    The extreme left and right, or said otherwise, the cliché left and right, both behave in ways that religiously conform to the archetypal group consciousness of the people they seek to influence; this is hardly coincidence given the strong occultic basis of these two groups in ancient paganism and earlier in group myths: its precisely the same methods the elite have always used through religion and mythological consciousness, now run through the

    The elite trap people like spiders-spinning-webs by the rhetoric they spread, but above all, by the way and manner they spread it: by yelling, raising their voices, demonizing dissenters, exaggerating differences or ignoring differences that matter; in short, they engage in shrillness; they win or succeed by OVERWHELMING you into submission. They make you look weak before others, and others, experiencing or identifying with your state of weakness simply by observing you, dissociate that state and converge to the ideal being projected by the wily rhetorician.

    How can you escape the talons of this sort of bird of prey?

    Based on the above conversation, there is no difference between the so-called “deep state” and Donald Trump; the difference is artificial and unreal. Trump and Biden are two versions of the same inner reality. Conversely, someone like Bernie Sanders is genuinely outside the fold and probably very unappealing to the banks, corporations and entities that organize society. Elizabeth Warren, conversely, strikes me as a deceiver; the reputation she’s cultivated over the years of being ‘progressive’ makes her an effective antidote to what Bernie Sanders represents; hence her recent accusations against Bernie have had the ultimate – and quite predictable – effect of splitting the progressive movement into those with more feminists identifications (inclined to being on Warrens side) and those with more socially and economically liberal identifications (inclined to being on Bernies side).

    The elite engage in longitudinal psyche-ops of just this nature; creating a persona for the sake of ‘using them’ against a future threat. It’s quite genius and incredibly complex!

    Reply
    • In other words, having Warren accuse Bernie of saying that “a woman can’t be president” FORCES – as a law of nature – the split in people who’ve cultivated a more feminist identity from those who cultivated a more socioeconomic progressive identity. Both parties likely have both identities, but not in equal proportion. A women with greater interests in feminism and women’s movements, for instance, would be split by Warrens accusation against Bernie to identify with the former against the latter. Someone with greater political or social interests would respond in the reverse.

      Consider how effectively people can be controlled when attachment is the glue-that-binds-us. If what I say about Warren is true, than the cultivation of her reputation over the years as a progressive has been specifically for situations like this: where a genuine threat to the status quo can be neutralized by splitting the camp that through democratic processes can change the system. If democracy is to be effectively controlled, its figureheads – politicians – have to be engineered.

      Reply
  4. I was stunned by Mr. Krummer’s lack of understanding of middle class society.
    NO, the natural woman is NOT as feral as the natural guy.
    YES, sexual trauma is continuing apace.
    YES, children are being indoctrinated into absurd behaviors (gender manipulation).
    This guy has no clue about the “natural” state of women…or…humanity for that matter. He does express an elitist view. Frustrating to listen to him.
    I feel your pain in trying to get an honest, humane dialogue.

    Reply
    • The elite are in general metaphysical ‘masculinists’.

      A book I bought, titled, “Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men’s House”, has revealed to me just how incredibly wide spread, as well fundamentally archetypal, elitist philosophies are. They appear to be the same the world over. The epigraph quotes the anthropologist Donald F. Tuzin, who writes “Women are the bane of a peaceful society, and as long as men never compromise their masculine unity, they will hold the secret to a paradisiacal world devoid of women and full of life’s pleasures.” The book is all about a specific New Guinea secret society that is built around a “second birth” – one from masculinity as opposed to femininity – which is about “undoing” the dynamics of the natural world, with females being the enforcers of these values; thus, pedophilia, homosexuality, and other antinomian reversals of natural inclinations are cultivated in these settings.

      My belief, or work, claims that this is a universal archetypal understanding that emerges as a function of developmental trauma. Developmental trauma in turn is a function of changes in ecological dynamics that affect day to day socioeconomic routines.

      Satanism – which is defined, as its Hebrew meaning suggests (“adversary”) as an opposition to the ways of the natural world – is therefore synonymous with elitism. This would imply that there wherever a culture with an entrenched elite exists, so too will there be this philosophy which associates “acknowledging natures patterns” with femininity, and defying or opposing natures dynamics with masculinity; the self, or ego, would therefore be a treated as a metaphysically ‘superordinate’ property to the natural world, while the natural world (and females) will be seen as a tyrant that makes the self – males – unhappy.

      Reply
      • Secrecy would also be the way of elites, and therefore, masculinity; whereas publicity and openness is the way of masses, and the femininity.

        Dichotomies such as this really do seem to be fundamental to the reasoning processes that leads to the emergence – that is, the stabilizing – of elitism.

        Reply
        • by equating nature-defiance and secret elitism with masculinity, and natural observance and egalitarianism with femininity, aren’t you, or the author of this thesis, thereby asserting, either that masculinity is inherently toxic, or that the satanic defiance of nature is an inherent, necessary, and healthy part of all nature-systems?

          Reply
          • Absolutely not. What about my past statements would make you think that I believe what they believe? Their beliefs are perversions of an archetypal reality that arises as a function of the organism-environment inference chains that ecological situations create.

            First, the natural world is archetypal, which means it is regular and lawlike. As Plato obsessed over, there are indeed ‘natural kinds’, but they are emergent, not primordial (only symmetry/love is primordial).

            Male and female are accurate categories that capture the point-counterpoint, or “contrapuntal” score of the natural world. Organisms are miniature reflections of the Universe, as the ancient doctrine puts it. Organisms are embodiments of the ‘point-counterpoint’ relationship within the universe as the organism and its environment. In human beings, the organism reaches the ultimate level of representational and semiotic complexity, in recognizing that the natural world is the “holy-spirit” of an entity or being that is simultaneously embodied and transcendental. The Christian trinity embodies these three experiential forms: temporal (son); eternal (father), and being-with (holy-spirit).

            Masculinity is at root simply the power of being ‘transcendental’; reflection ‘transcends’ embodied experience (i.e. abstracts from it); the self ‘transcends’ the knowledge of the other (i.e. we are all knowers of our own experience). The universe ‘transcends’ us in the sense that we are fully embodied within it and localized, whereas the universe is inherently transpersonal and non-local.

            All humans contain masculinity and femininity, but our biological gender – via hormones – enculturates us into a different mode of sensing and thinking about our being-in-the-world so that one or the other becomes predominant. We embody, in other words, the eternal reality of the universe – or Gods – transcendental and imminent nature.

            Elites do not like combining or uniting transcendental perception with imminent experience; they loathe it, because to live by it means to use the transcendental truth of love with reference to the way that truth is encoded within the temporal contingencies of the world we experience. Combining the two means knowing that “God is One”; male and female are not separate or opposed, but complementary and unified.

            The idea that nature calls the shots basically means that the patterns of the real determine what the mind should find truthful or false; if I look at you in a certain way, my facial expression will induce a state change in you. If you feel something and write something from the feeling state you’re feeling, that will be communicated. The ‘confusion within us’ is conveyed through the medium so that the message becomes garbled by the medium. We are each held captive by this fact- that the real, ecology, dynamics, cause and effect, takes precedent to our personal whimsies and idealizations.

            Question is: do you care? Elites don’t care. They are drunk on feeling powerful and invulnerable and only suffering breaks the illusion of self-sufficiency. People who care are for the Other; and so a society that is moving towards a more feminine understanding is inevitably a step-forward. Is masculinity – or arbitrariness, and self-obsession, sneaking in and causing trouble? Of course. But long-term the archetypal effects will yield real fruit. The female is the carrier of the truth of what we are more so than the male – that is, females because of their maternal biology – more easily feel, and are affected, whereas men tend to be more abstract, autistic, and slow in recognizing the truth of the constraints other peoples feelings create for how we should respond to things.

  5. Just to expand on my point, or theory, Jason. I believe there is an ancient human tradition – with real ontological effects – that is also based on real ontological descriptors, where the ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements are respectively the: transcendental, and the imminent parts of our experience of reality. I believe most humans at most periods in our evolutionary history have organized their semiotic relationship with reality in these terms.

    Trauma – which I believe can only be the real, ecologically driven cause of this process, a cause which I push back into the middle parts of the Pleistocene – has separated human beings from their ontologically original attractor. This attractor is the source of the very many versions of the belief that humans have two “selves” – a higher ‘divine’ self and a lower “social self”. In all probability, the divine self is an emergent property of the hominization process where earlier hominids evolved into human beings (homo sapiens). The process of becoming human was in itself a biophysical and semiotic, or ‘biosemiotic’ result of a complex dialectic between organism and its environment.

    Your conversation with Hunter Muse captures the techniques used by metaphysical individualists (which is synonymous with my use of the term metaphysical ‘masculinist’) to distance the relationship between the ‘divine self’ (the ontological attractor of being human) and the ordinary, egoic self. To experience ‘conscience’ is to experience the structural input of this divine self, since conscience is an effect of the symmetry dynamics that our organism drives us towards recognizing; conversely, the ordinary personality is attracted by an ‘idealization’ – a self-regulating, self-protective ideal-value that has evolved between human beings and their material environments. This ‘idol’ is emergent from the divine self; or said differently, every infant is shaped through trauma processes to adapt dialectically so that their bodies and selves (same thing) synchronize with the structural ideals of the social agents around them. In order to reduce experiences of shame, they must experience – or identify with – whatever the environment, that is – the other – takes pride in. All of this process evolves within the general framework of social asymmetry, and so the aggrandizer ’emerges’ from a social trauma process where one part because of circumstance evolves into the ‘elite’, while the others take on, through the meddling influences of conspiring elites, a more ignorant relationship to the world around them.

    What seems to be happening with elites is that they are focused on the structure of the world around them, with the ‘other’ – being feminine – being that which must be reduced and degraded. Basically, since men are more dissociative than females, the former can be more aggressive; and being more aggressive amounts to an advantage of being more ‘stable’. Thus, females are vulnerable, and the feeling of vulnerability, in being a testament to our earthly transience, is unacceptable to the egotistical mind. So all instances of vulnerability is contemptible; females (relative to males), children (relative to adults), socially disenfranchised (relative to the ingroup) etc, are instances of “destroying vulnerability” -or said otherwise, destroying that real truth which encroaches upon the value of the idol (ideal value) which regulates our human physiology. The rites that elites practice, then, seem to be about enacting their desire to separate the masculine principle (reflection, potential), from the feminine principle (embodiment, actuality). The actualities which make events within the mind what they are – these need to be denied and destroyed; symbolic instantiation of this through ritual seems to be the way they do it.

    What should be noted here is the confused nature of this relationship to reality. They simultaneously endorse a transcendental attitude, as in transcendental meditation, but for the purpose of living squarely within the imminent. There is no dialectical back and forth communication between reflection and imminent experience, but rather, utilizing the “philosophers stone” (love/peace) for the purpose of pursuing ones own goals within imminence, irrespective of the events which cause the state changes within them. More or less, this amounts to a radical denial of psychodynamic realities within intersubjective situations; its a denial of “I feel this because of that”, and there’s no realistic understanding of the non-linear nature of how selves are connected, or how our actions reverberate in many complicated ways.

    For this reason do popular “illuminati” writers like Mike Hockney describe all Abrahamic and Dharmic religions as a ‘nuisance’ to a happy world. Their world is a world where people do not acknowledge any ideal way of being in the world. Everything is ‘love’, and so anything and everything is therefore ‘the will of God’, because if its happening, it must be fate or destiny. In this way does sadomasochism occur: instead of the stress of opposing the powerful and demanding awareness of the circular nature of our actions, the powerless transform the abuse meted out upon them into a source of power; hence, to be abused is, in this worldview, just a perspective: only the weak complain about their abuse; to take abuse means that you can one day be an abuser. It’s seen as a learning process. The ideal person is a person who can endure suffering and so, as Nietzsche wrote, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. It’s a religion of power.

    So all that awful stuff that you catalogue in your conversations with guests ultimately works out of this basic reality. It has an ancient history, as Hayden’s work gives testimony to; and what we see today seems to be no more than the effervescence of what occurs in secrecy. This secret reality is the world of metaphysical reasoning that humans would ordinarily be driven towards if there weren’t elites conspiring in the background, modifying the material environments we interact with and subjecting us to a common chorus of what is real.

    Reply
      • I’ve always found that movie to be utterly revelatory, although the Slavoj Zizek commentary doesn’t really jibe with me. Perhaps its the rhetoric of ‘female fantasy’.

        This talk of ‘fantasy’ is too Freudian for my liking. What are men denying but what I’ve mentioned elsewhere in my comments here – but the way females demand conscience, nurturance and equality in social relationships? Of course, male and female relationships are complementary, and so any “man-eating mother” becomes what she is via the force of intersubjective context and her own history (with its own internal models of others). I’m not saying that every female is a model of goodness, but only that the female sex is the part of us – as a species – which needs to be nurtured if humans are ever going to correct the problems and traumas we all embody in our passive and active behaviors. Every mother needs to be nurtured during her pregnancy where the fetus is forming; her stress levels matter for the structuring of the nervous system of the human being formed. After birth, her affective states need to be nurtured, her needs acknowledged, her feelings recognized and addressed. Her biology ramps up all those hormones that makes her exquisitely attuned to the needs of her infant – oxytocin and progesterone in particular. Not tending to the mother, and therefore, to the general realities of how hard it is to make a healthy human, creates the sorts of problems that exist for both genders.

        In todays society, I am dissatisfied with what seems to me to be a metaphysical value-system that more or less takes (relatively speaking) male values like competition, aggression, individualism, entrepreneurship, and obsession with winning to the female success, and the culture at large calls this ‘feminism’. This is not feminism; this is the prioritization of male values and projecting them on females; this is a further degradation of the actual female values that humanity needs to be cultivating, like nurturing the other, the body, and the environment. Ultimately it means doing what females are much better at: constraining the self for the wellbeing of the other (as coherent caregiving entails).

        My mom loves the TV show Grace and Frankie, and sometimes (especially lately because of my stomach troubles) I’ve been watching it with her, and you see the elitist philosophy on full display. There’s incredible sensitivity to issues that elites personally deal with: they grow old, and so ageism is a complaint their interested in addressing; a good number of them are homosexuals, and so homosexuality is a subject matter they’re very sensitive to. But the amount of degrading, deprecating humor directed at children – grace (Jane Fonda character) for instances hates children and her expression of it through out the show is all ‘shits and giggles’; her daughter shares the same feelings and she too has free licence to express her contempt. It’s all jokes. But could anything comparable be said about gays or old people without a moral raucous being raised? Comparatively speaking, it is far more socially harmful to degrade children then gays or old people, given the sorts of people that will exist in the future are a direct function of how we value them as children in our present.

        Another irritant is Kobe Bryants death. It is sad that he and his daughter died, but the man is being treated as demi-god. People talk again and again about his support of female issues, but again, it was the masculinist version of ‘feminine’ issues. Its taking females and wrapping them up as males who’ve been deprived of the ‘coolness’ of not caring the way men don’t care. He wanted her to be the same as himself – he more or less cultivated his daughter to become just as he was.

        Optimistically, I like to see this as a turning of the ratchet towards what’ll take to make men better, and so giving females more power will basically have that as an inevitable effect; and perhaps this transformation is simply an organic consequence of the already existent hyper-masculinistic society progressing bit by bit into a less chauvinistic, more egalitarian one, and giving females more power might be a stepping board towards further social progress. My instincts see this as probably evolving into the sort of society I’d like to see today: where the socially and economically under-privileged are taken care of and acknowledged; and the countless other human issues that emanate from this reality.

        But as you can see with that Eyes Wide Shut clip, these people are the acme of creepy. They are stone on the inside; and they believe they can coopt and control pretty much anything – as the ‘occult technology of power’, for instance, claims is an interest of the ruling (interesting book to read if you haven’t read it). But I also think some concepts, as I’ve shared with you before, are more unruly than other concepts. Ideas really are powers, as Peirce noted, truth, love, justice – these concepts transform the functioning of human brains and bodies.

        Reply
      • Dissociation is oftentimes defined by psychologists in two ways: as a general process of psychological organization; and as a pathological psychological disturbance.

        There’s a continuum between normal dissociation and unhealthy and pathological dissociation. When I claim males are more dissociative than females, this is basically a neuroscience, developmental and psychological fact that stems from a) the poorly integrated nature of the two hemispheres in male brains (a smaller corpus collosum means less intercommunication between hemispheres) b) this leads, via the complexities of attachment formed by boys with their mothers and with their fathers, to a filtering out of their vulnerable experiences of self-with-other (formed with mother), and the amplification of their experiences of strength and competence (as formed with their mothers). Dissociation and idealization are basically psychological terms for the neuroscientific processes of filtering and amplification associated with certain brain regions like the pulvinar (in the ventral thalamus; and c) psychologically this means that men will tend to ignore facial expressions, tones of voice, and body language in others, and the way that affects their own bodily states, and in turn, what they identify with as they think and ruminate about things.

        Females have more integrated brains. They develop faster then boys too, and are less vulnerable and more resilient to interpersonal stressors in early life than males are. This surprises people because males are assumed to be tougher, but in early life this is actually the reverse: male infants and toddlers are way more sensitive and require more care because their biology doesn’t support affection as easily as female biology does.

        You can read Allan N Schore (all six of his books), Dan Siegel, Peter Fonagy, Ed Tronick and many other developmentalists for information on these matters. But Schore is probably the leading modern authority on human development, especially with reference to the formation of dissociative issues.

        Reply
        • Thank you for the citations. I ask this because in the accounts of survivors of ritual abuse that I have read, the dissociative qualities of girls and women seem to be particularly utilised for the purposes of ‘programming’.

          Reply
          • I would also add that dissociation in women may be qualitatively different to men, therefore a male oriented system of classification will not accurately diagnose it. After all if the ‘model’ of womanhood is already a dissociative fantasy then it will not correctly recognise full female integration, or even tolerate it.

          • So dissociative can have different meanings here. Dissociation in the sense I mean it has less to do with becoming possessed by a certain state of knowing (being ‘entranced’) and more to do with being distanced from a feeling of vulnerability-with-others (and also ones own observation of a state of self-experience). The issue seems to be ‘knowing what you feel’ and what it means. In most peoples experiences, men are basically ‘lying to themselves’ with their machismo, chauvinism, and pretense at not ‘needing others’. They idealize more than females do because of this.

            I have read more generally in my anthropological studies that what matters most for becoming a ‘vessel’ for possession is not so much sex, but being socially adapted, so that the more traumatized and “ill-adapted” you are to the social world around you, the more effective you are for being used for these purposes by others. Umberto Eco in Foucaults Pendulum includes this as an element in his story; same thing with Ari Asters two movies Hereditary and Midsommar.

            Humans have known for a long time that someone must be ‘sacrificed’ for the sake of the whole group. Hegel emphasized this in his philosophy with his master-slave relationship, and “only one can live”. In the pagan ideologies that preceded his writings, specific humans were literally bred for these purposes. It is by no means a recent phenomenon, but goes back thousands upon thousands of years into prehistory.

            As to your second point, there are of course differences in psychological processes in females verses males which ultimately boils down to the biological differences between us. I have noted that females appear to be better at integrating than males – at least with reference to this sort of intense ritual traumatic abuse. This may also have to do with the corpus callosum and the way information flows more easily between female hemispheres.

            Of course, this is a generalization, and there are males who can integrate and who have thicker callosums than the average male, and the same thing for females but in the reverse. Social relationships and history plays a big part here; for instance, how strongly do you identify with the western idealized ‘male’? If not very strongly, then integration is likely to be easier. If you’re particularly educated and intellectually inclined, then that would also seem to add to your capacity to regulate your affects. But ABOVE ALL THIS lies ones capacity to love and accept love, and therefore, to embrace vulnerability and dependence. The harder it is for a person to acknowledge their dependence on the other, the slower the integration process will inevitably be.

            The brain, or physics, or the way matter moves in the world, doesn’t really acknowledge boundaries as strongly the way human beings have become entrained into believing.

  6. Great convo.
    You do seem to be working on slightly different levels, Larry on the Political , Jasun on the parapolitical , or at times Larry would go para and Jasun would attempt to go meta, where Larry seemed reluctant to tread.

    If i had to guess i would say this guy is a left over cold war spook now operating from outside the tent with some other ex cohorts to try and address the existential threats now being posed to America by capitalisms excesses and the vainglory of its untrammelled elites of all stripes. No ?

    Reply

Leave a Comment