The Hegelian Dialectic in action - two recent cases.

 The Hegelian Dialectic is a nifty little theory posited by Friedrich Hegel, summing up how people can be tricked into supporting societal changes that eventually result in their own willing enslavement. It's one of the oldest political tricks in the book, and the reason it's one of the oldest is that it's so goddamned effective. It taps into the natural prospensity for human emotionality over rationality, stupidity and reflex over informed opinions, and the inability of people to think long-term when it comes to cause and effect - or even in the short term.

Yes, yes, I know that the Dialectic originally required that the antithesis arise naturally instead of being manufactured (which was a Marxist introduction, Dialectic Materialism et al), but for our intents and purposes we'll take the Hegelian Dialectic as it's commonly used to refer to political manipulation through memes.

Essentially, it boils down to these three steps:

1. Problem (thesis). The government manufactures a problem, or exploits one that already exists.
2. Reaction (antithesis). The people demand that the government help solve the problem, and are willing to give up their rights and freedoms in exchange.
3. Solution (synthesis). The government offers a solution that that was planned all along.

To illustrate, let's take a hypothetical example (for now). An El Presidente of a banana republic wants to get rid of those nasty resistance fighters hiding out in the jungles. The fighters are partly dependent upon the goodwill of the local natives for their provisioning and intelligence, and taking those away would severely cripple them. At the same time, it would also be nice to have a tighter leash on the jungle natives, since El Presidente's eyes and ears find it a little harder to pry into the affairs of the natives for want of the trees.

So El Presidente manufactures a problem. Maybe a couple of the natives' daughters go missing and their corpses are found dangerously close to the rebels' camps. Maybe the natives' cassava and bean crops are mysteriously set afire. Maybe there was a misunderstanding between a native and a rebel regarding three pints of palm toddy and the use of a donkey, and El Presidente's infiltrators blow the incident out of proportion. Whatever the case, a problem crops up.

Now the jungle natives aren't so clear about what's going on. These rebels who've always helped them reciprocally are for some reason beginning to turn on them, or so it seems. Maybe some cooler heads on both sides can prevail, but the more emotionally charged the issue, the less likely a peaceful resolution can be found - and once things start turning mob-shaped, there's no hope left. As Terry Pratchett once pointed out: "To get the IQ of a mob, take the IQ of its stupidest member and divide by the number of people in it."

All right, so you now have the natives up in arms against those pesky freedom fighters. That's when El Presidente comes driving into the jungle in the safety of his his armoured car and starts speaking to the natives. He tells them that if they give him his support, he will "do all he can" to "pacify" the rebels and "make them behave with respect and decorum". For the added safety of the local tribes, if they would be so nice as to make a clearing in the jungle for him, he'll station troops there to "protect" them, and if they're lucky, they'll get to benefit from the piped water the camp will have.

So it can be seen that if El Presidente had gone in alone and tried to force himself and his military camp on the natives, they'd have resisted him and he'd have to force them into complying. By using the Hegelian Dialectic of problem-reaction-solution, he was able to both cut off support to the rebels, build his own military camp, and get the support of the natives who don't know that the camp is as much to monitor, and if necessary, suppress them as much as the rebels.

Now that we have some understanding of what the Hegelian Dialectic is all about, let's try and apply it to some recent real-world examples, namely, the New Delhi rape case (a successful one) and the Sandy Hook shooting case (a not-so successful one). First, we'll examine the Delhi Rape case - I'll assume that you're in the know with regards to what's been put out in the mainstream media, so I won't go over it once more.

All I have to ask is: why here? Why now? Why this particular instance? In a country with so many issues, with so many children dying of simple malnutrition, why the sudden fixation on a single case out of so many, and just because of her sex?

Nevertheless, we have a convenient problem just lying around waiting to be picked up, and that is just what happened.

An Indian on the ground noted over at AVFM:

"This is not accidental knee jerk reaction.A Delhi protester killed a police constable.To organize protests,you have to pay minimum Rs 500 per day.The campaign is costly."

Who is funding these protestors? The poster suspected western NGOs pushing their agenda, which is certainly a possibility, but without concrete evidence, it's all speculation.

Conspiracy theory? Not that far, perhaps, but there are definitely players who would be interested in enacting new laws to control the populace/push idealogies, and the money has to come from somewhere. I've been looking at the news stories (which have begun to die down as the Problem begins to outlive its usefulness) and I don't think there was any mention of any grassroots funding for these protests, that individuals came and donated their money to hold them. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But it can be seen that the crux of the Hegelian Dialectic's effectiveness lies within the response by the target populace. If the response is not appropriate, then the ploy falls apart. You want your howling masses, your roaring mobs demanding justice or more freebies or that the group next door needs to be culled. You don't want people sitting in circles looking at studies and statistics and asking just how well each proposed solution will measure up when it comes to solving the problem, and you definitely don't want them questioning the costs.

Hence, three important points come up when those orchestrating the dialectic take steps to ensure that the proper reaction is produced:

1. You want your problem to be intrisically emotionally charged. That's not to say problems involving men have not been used before, but due to the wonders of male disposability, women and children produce a far greater emotional kick to society than men do. Add to that a naturally emotionally charged crime such as rape, murder or sexual assault as opposed to something more detached like burglary. If the problem in question is not emotionally charged, such as the prevalence of drugs or burglary, frame the problem such that it is ("what if it were your house that was burgled/child taking drugs?") and aim to provoke an emotional response.
    
2. You want to gear your propoganda machine into overdrive; influence your target populace as much as possible.
   
   "it has been full 15 days these types of views are written in every local and national papers of India.There are atleast 7-10 articles in every newspaper in every language (tamil,marathi,telugu,hindi,malayam,bengali,punjabi etc etc). Since india has highest number of newspapers in world,i expect a total of 25000 articles have been published on this topic in last 15 days alone.It is overkill."
   
   You want to stir the pot, heat it until boiling. Play up the emotional parts, and downplay or outright ignore the inconvenient parts (like the male victim, or that he was the initial target of the aggressors until the female victim, to her great credit, tried to intervene and save him). Fudge the facts if you need to and lie by omission; no one will care once the ball starts rolling. In fact, encourage all sorts of rumours and half-truths, so long as they spread fear and irrationality. Notice how the articles paint the case: women are in danger. Women should be afraid. The problem is not framed in terms of perpetrator and victim, of individual upon individual, but of men and women. Protestors are not just howling about the rapists, which as individuals should be punished, but about "the patriarchal system" and "men", wallowing in their self-selected victimhood and doing the unfortunate female victim a disservice by trying to grab a slice of the victimhood pie.
   
   You want to spread irrational fear and rage. All your talking heads, all your monkeys sitting at word processors must be mobilised. Constantly bombard the target populace with the idea that the problem is overwhelming and all-pervasive, and get the animalistic reaction you so desire.
    
3. You want to shame all calm, rational thinkers and potential detractors of your solution as evil. This feeds back into point two - if there is no one to contradict the message of your problem, then your propoganda becomes so much more effective as people rush to join the herd for fear of being ostracised. Remember that the bigger the mob, the stupider it becomes. So in the case of the Delhi Rape case, label anyone who even questions the new proposed laws as misogynists and rape apologists - that is enough to shame most blue-pill people into shutting up. Say "how dare you, you have no compassion for the victim!" without even bothering to read what others have written. When shaming fails, physically attack questioners to silence them into submission.

Not that I'm saying that the female victim wasn't one, that this thing isn't horrific or that the perpetrators shouldn't be punished when found duly guilty in a court of law. However, I fully expect that if I made this quick analysis more public than it already is, I'm sure that someone would accuse me of these sentiments - hence proving point number three.

So what is the end result of this exercise of the Dialectic?

"it will happen in just 15 days now.First congress ruled states will form a commission and law will be passed.Most of it will be copied from west verbatim.Then our beloved hard working parliament will pass law in next session without discussion by “voice vote”.No majority needed."

Will the new laws really protect Indian women? Maybe, maybe not. I can only note the official UN statistics which claim that 1.8 per 100,000 women are raped in India (as opposed to 63 per 100,000 in Sweden, arguably one of the most misandric nations on the planet). But what will the laws give the Indian government? Observe the lack of due process for legislation, observe the crumbling of the democratic process in the interests of "protecting the people". No doubt the state will have more powers to intrude upon the lives of people now.

And once El Presidente has enough power over the natives, he doesn't need to play nice with them any more. Once people have given up enough freedom and rights, the state doesn't need to bother with the illusion of security any more.

To quote Cappy Cap: "Pimp Daddy G doesn't beat you - yet."

The Delhi Rape case was an example of a near, if not outright perfect execution of the Hegelian Dialectic. Problem, reaction, solution. Now, let's look at a not-so-successful example of an attempt to exercise the Dialectic, primarily because the desired reaction was not so forthcoming.

I'm sure the Sandy Hook school shooting is still fresh in the minds of many - a tragedy, yes, but let's disengage from that aspect of the incident and look at the results of the shooting. Problem - the shooting. The hoped-for reaction, no doubt, was that American citizens would buckle over and accept gun control. Oh, it certainly tried - the propoganda was amped up to eleven with the whole new coverage, Obama crying crocodile tears on TV and the whole "demand a plan" hypocritical crap. The mainstream media kept on hammering it over and over and over again, pointing out "what about the childrenzzz?" ad nauseum.

What happened in the end? Sure, there were a bunch of folks who turned in their guns amidst all the gun control legislation being drawn up (and no doubt a couple of crooks who used to"no questions asked" policy to rid themselves of dirty weapons) but by and large, the result was a massive surge in sales of guns and ammunition, as well as plenty of rekindled interest in learning how to safely utilise and live with firearms.

The Hegelian Diacletic had failed, at least in this regard.

So, a couple of reasons why I think Sandy Hook wasn't as successful as New Delhi:

1. The problem used was insufficiently polarising. It's harder to ask people to keep a cool head in a rape case, deal with accused via due process and remember that the purpose of a court is not just to mete punishment out to the guilty, but also protect those who may be falsely accused (or else vigilante justice would be sufficient). On the other hand, with Sandy Hook the argument could be made that the presence of guns might have saved those children, providing a grassroots counterpoint to the propoganda push.
    
2. Innate distrust of government by the American people ingrained into their culture. I don't think I have to explain this any further. Unlike a bunch of asian cultures (like the Chinese, for example), Americans don't have this reverence for public officials - if anything, a good number of them are aware that the government isn't all rainbows and flowers, and if you're a liberterian, are as much for getting Mr. G out of your life as much as possible. People are aware that Mr. G doesn't always have their best interests in mind.
    
3. The availability of alternative media, especially the internet. For obvious reasons, the internet penetration rate in the good old US of A is much higher than that of India, and much more open even to the lower classes. Official media have a much looser grasp than in India, and people have access to more information and differing viewpoints.

What this produced, in the end, is the inability of those running the propoganda train to control the discourse over the Sandy Hook issue. Instead of few-to-many media (traditional), many-to-many media (internet) came into the running in the Sandy Hook case, and people were disinclined to believe what of the former there was.

The importance of the reaction step has already been examined, and so this leads us to the conclusion: if one can control the discourse, then one can control the reaction (antithesis) and hence the solution (synthesis). Therefore, it is imperative that the entirety of the discourse must be controlled as much as possible - from something as simple as the definition of the words used to the selective reporting of facts to produce a single, stupid, violent mob begging for the appropriate solution, instead of two stupid, violent mobs going after each other on which solution is best or a single, well reasoned protest for a third, better solution.

I'm not denying that the Hegelian Dialactic is still effective, and will continue to be so as long as there are stupid, emotional and short-sighted people around. But the second opening of the media (as opposed to the printing press so long ago) will see some dampening of its effects, until the point where states manage to control it for a significant percentage of the population.

Runaway brides in Singapore.

 From The Real Singapore:

"To everyone else outside of their relationship, Janice, 23, and Ken, 25, appeared to be the perfect fairytale couple. Secondary school sweethearts, their relationship outlasted the trials and tribulations of National Service and getting their degrees. They were an item for a whopping nine years before Ken proposed in early 2012 after they found out that their BTO flat would be ready soon,  and Janice accepted.

So it came as a huge shock to all their friends and family when five days before their wedding at a five-star local hotel in September 2012, Janice called it all off and took a flight to Thailand to “escape” her fiancé and disappointed guests."

 The reason?

 “You could  put it like this – the third party was HDB. I feel like I was forced to decide to get married early because if I waited until I was, say, 30 and ready to settle down, to wait another three to four years to get a BTO flat would leave me no time to start a family. Everyone told me that Ken and I had to hurry up and apply for a flat together and then quickly get married once the flat application was successful,” said Janice, who just started work as an accountant last year.

“It wasn’t important to them that I still don’t know what I want with life, and I don’t know yet whether I want to spend the rest of it with Ken. It seems selfish, but it’s my life, and it’s more selfish to get married to Ken and later change my mind – divorce would be ten times more painful.”

 Solipism at its finest. I, I, I, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine.

 The rationalisation hamster is strong in this one.

"Janice may have called off her wedding, but the real price she had to pay was in the months after – getting the cold shoulder from Ken, having to pay off large debts, and an overwhelming shame at having “let my family down” caused her to have a nervous breakdown. Read about her struggle and Ken’s side of the story in Runaway Brides Part 2: The Aftermath."

Struggle. Struggle.

Kristoph Gavin, you may be a sick motherfucker, but you also have a sick crazy laugh.

PFAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD THIS SLAPS ME ON THE KNEE

Ahem. Excuse me. And yet...for all the independence, for all the equality, for all the desire to be strong and discover oneself...

She still insists on painting herself as a victim. Society still insists on painting her as a helpless little leaf, blown about by the horrible winds of life, an object to be acted upon, a thing without agency or desire or accountability.

In a time of supposed egalitarianism, why do we let women get away with behaving like children? Can you even imagine a MAN doing that to his bride and still expect to be pitied for being "pressured" into marriage?

To quote Mrs. Judgybitch:

"This is the idea that makes me reject feminism and so many other liberal theories:  that negative social consequences are prima facie evidence that a choice has been constrained by some nefarious plot designed to undermine a victimized group of helpless beings who lack agency or will or spirit and who can thus never be held responsible for their own decisions.  It’s patronizing, infantilizing and deeply, profoundly insulting.

It’s really an amazing feat, when you consider it from afar.  Feminism, which purports to promote the interests of women has managed to claim the moral high ground by postulating a theory that reduces women to helpless victims with no capacity to make decisions or face consequences.  We are basically children, at the mercy of forces we do not ourselves possess, cannot resist and are helpless to overcome." 

This isn't a woman, it's an overgrown infant in an adult's body. Who has rights but no responsibilities? A child. If people act like children, then yes - I will treat them like children, their physical maturity notwithstanding.

As Aurini said, actions have consequences - guys, you know the game in this day and age, and if you want to play it you're more than welcome to do so and get burned. Lady, if you're not sure you want to marry this guy, fucking tell him like an adult instead of feeding your damned hamster. But hey, society has declared that any woman can break any contract or agreement with a man at her desire; I'm mildly surprised that she's not demanding cash and prizes to boot.

And Singaporean women - you wonder why a growing number of local guys are looking for PRC or Indons or Thais, even without any knowledge of the manosphere?

Little wonder I'm an MGTOW. I can't even bring myself to feel anger or hatred for this woman, even if I wanted to. Pity with a dash of contempt, sure.

It's your life, sure. You can do what you want with your life. No one has the right to force you to live a certain way. Just don't expect to be sympathised with when the consequences come bearing down upon you and start making demands.

Any Singaporean cat food companies I can invest in?

Oh, Cappy Cap...

Thou art so amusing, yet so truthful.

Pessimistic, or realist?

 I don't watch TV anymore, nor do I bother reading the newspaper. As Aurini points out: "the media is bought and paid for". It's even more obvious here in Singapore, where under the law, if your media outlet (of any sort) grows large enough, the government is allowed to confiscate and nationalise it without recompense if need be. Think about that for just a moment, and wonder why one would even bother with the mass media these days.

The other day, I was having a small debate with my dad over the impending economic collapse of the western world. I pointed out all the stats: that Obamacare is cutting out not just workers, but hours worked per worker, that Social Security is taking massive losses and is a gigantic ponzi scheme destined to fail with a shrinking workforce, that the latest fiscal cliff deal does nothing at all to address the main problem of runaway spending, that gas and food prices are spiralling, that more and more US citizens are receiving some sort of handout, that citizens are fleeing from states like California by the truckload, and this can't last forever...

...And my dad said, "the US can't collapse".

I asked him why. He replied, "it just can't," and either didn't have anything left to say, or refused to say it. Either way it was clear that I'd short-circuited his mind, and that was the end of the conversation. Now, I'd like to think that my parents are pretty smart people for what they've managed to get by in their sixty-odd years of life, but like all of us, they have their blind spots. I know I myself like to live in my head a lot - it's frankly better than the outside world - but I try to compartmentalise and tell myself "okay, this is reality, and this is fluffy pink cloud land where I live when I'm alone in my box writing a novel or engaged in other creative pursuits, and never the 'twain shall meet." I'm sure I still have my blind spots and need people to point them out to me (that's the whole idea; you can't see your own blind spots by definition).

So I go to bed, and next morning he says, "you're too pessimistic, the newspapers say the economy is doing just fine."

"Oh, like the unemployment figures which were fudged?"

And then we get into an argument over how one shouldn't blindly accept official figures, what the figures are being put out for, and understand how they're arrived at before checking to see if they match up. Now would have been a good time for him to throw my arguments back in my face and challenge the stats I'd trotted out the previous night (and I feel I'd have been comfortable in meeting that challenge), but he didn't.

But considering the way Singapore and Malaysia have worked for the past half-century, as well as the time when my parents were growing up, I don't blame them. If I ever have children, maybe forty years down the road I'll be sitting at the dinner table with my son and having the exact same argument, only this time it'll be my own blind spots laid bare.

To my dad, I'm a pessimist. To myself, I'm merely being realistic and preparing as best as I can for what's to come.

Killing the beast.

 There are two kinds of money in the world: your own money, and other peoples' money.

Being able to spend other peoples' money is nice, but it also means that you are much more likely to run out of it.

Like VAWA did.

People are not sure if it'll stay dead or otherwise, but for now, I heave a collective sigh of relief with all you folks in the US of A.

I'm tending to lean towards the latter, though: government largesse is all about other peoples' money, and it's looking like the spigot's beginning to run dry. We can only hope.

I'm leaning towards the idea that the best way to kill the beast is to starve it.

The time machine (1960) - books

 

I think this says all that needs to be said, really. What else is there for me to add?

Happy new year, and self-improvement.

 
Happy new year, folks.

I was listening to Aurini (a reactionary, or alt-right if you will) the other day, on his various views on the MRM and MGTOW, and while I won't comment on the former I do think that his view on the latter is a tad lopsided. I won't deny that there are bound to be some MGTOWs who do nothing but whine about the system and sit in basements all day to play World of Warcraft because it's the easy way out for them, and yet even a guest on Lunatic Fringe Radio (episode 10) admitted that it's the only rational course of action left to men these days.

(Edit: I just watched through another of his videos. Seems like he makes the distinction between MGTOWs who eat cheetos and the "herd of bulls" as he puts it.)

Most people are strange political animals (at least, I'd like to believe that) and political labels are a generalisation at best. Personally, I buy into ideas from all four subsections of the red-pill world based on how much truth there is in there and the relevance and utility of the information to me. As evidenced from my post about my uncle, I'm receptive to some of the ideas the alt-right is putting out (and their warnings about the coming global SHTF), and yet am MGTOW by necessity. Both MGTOW and PUA point out realities about how people work, realities that've been smothered under the blanket of political correctness. The MRM is the most vocal in the frontlines of fighting the matrix.

I know a lot of what I've been saying of late could be construed as whining, and probably is. Still, I suppose getting things off my chest is one step on the path of moving forward, and there is the need to point matters out to others, which is why I came up with my MGTOW piece.

But being a MGTOW doesn't necessarily mean letting yourself go and turning into Jabba the Hutt, surrounded by cheese stains and porn magazines. It just means that any self-improvement you do, you do it on your own terms, at your own wishes, and not for anyone else; as Hobbes once said to Calvin: "It counts as fun if you do it of your own free will." Making the decision to go MGTOW didn't mean I stopped my gym routine; I still remember my fat bastard days and love having all the extra energy and stamina to do whatever I want. To be honest, not being a fat bastard is a secondary benefit to all the extra energy.

Well, what can I do with all this energy? Off the top of my head, in my life, I've learnt the skills required to:

*Design a separation column to split up crude oil into its fractions.
*Make a general approximation as to how to best extract a product from a biotransformation. (Distilling ethanol, for a very simple example.)
*Build a computer from parts.
*Fix and replace, if not build, a bicycle chain, brakes and tyre. (Bicycles will be much more important in this part of the world when SHTF. Both because the gas pumps might run dry, and because bicycles are much better suited to the local jungle tracks than automobiles are. Just ask the Japanese - they made it down both coasts of Malaya in record time.)
*Load, fire and maintain a tripod-mounted machine gun. (From my conscript days.)
*Cook a passable meal via boiling or stir-frying. (Soup's next. And not from a can.)
*Scale and gut a fish, and all about identifying fresh fish. (You live on an island, you don't eat seafood, something's wrong with you.)
*Roughly sew back on buttons and patch up clothes. (This, admittedly, is still in progress.)
*Understand some basic tenets of agriculture. (Thanks to my grandmother's tales and a childhood fascination with green beans.)
*Write a novel.

Now, if everything collapses there might not be enough to go around for people to build an actual distillation tower to make crude into gas and diesel and tar, but I'm sure there'll be plenty of people around with their bicycles and going "what do?" when the tyres get bent out of shape, since one can't take it to the shop and get it fixed. Either that, or maybe I can cook up a still out of some glassware lying around and see what I can do - what I get out of distilling spirits might not be as good as proper medicinal alcohol, but it'll sure beat the hell out of boiling wine. The point is that all of these are marketable skills; I feel fairly comfortable not being a "useless eater" if it all starts going to pot, and will have a skill I can hand in for barter - be it fixing up a community's only remaining computer or mending a bike with scavenged parts.

Make a list. If it all came crashing down tomorrow, what skills would you be able to offer your loved ones, your community? What can you bring to the table?

Being an MGTOW doesn't mean you have to be a degenerate or reject completely some tenets of traditional masculinity. Unlike the Old Deal, what I believe the difference is that you need is to be discerning as to who gets to benefit from it. As I rediscover in baby steps the masculinity that was beaten out of me, what I learned as a MGTOW helps me decide who, man or woman, is effectively deserving of the benefits of my masculinity, and to what extent. Once, this was freely given to all women as a matter of course; now it's a huge, fine-pored filter to sift out all the undeserving. I will do it on my terms and at my will, not because I "should" or "society expects me to" or "it's polite".

Look back at the sinking of the Concordia and the outrage that the men weren't willing to automatically value their lives as beneath that of a woman's. Who were the women whom the men did help? Wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, so on and so forth - women who meant something to the men who shielded them in their time of need. The rest went and choked on the bitter taste of the "ekualitee" they so claimed to desire.

Whom would I share the benefits of my masculinity with? My mother, my father. My friends. I am not so sure about my siblings. But the point here is that as an MGTOW, I get to call the shots. I will not be shamed into laying myself down for anyone whom I do not feel obligated to. After all, it was not me who broke the Old Deal, and the New Deal may not be so palatable to some.

To which I say, fuck off.