34 Comments
Jan 5, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

I think I need to read this a second, third then fourth time. Wow. He packed a lot into this one.

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Jan 5, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Love your writing. Thanks.

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Damn. This one's amazing. But then, the vast majority of your pieces are. The Substack alt community is cutting right to the heart of the psychological phenomena behind this mass psychosis. I think this will wind up being the most compelling aspect that winds up turning people.

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brilliant, thank you for you insight

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Jan 5, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Run this by Dr Mattias Desmet. Mass hypnosis experts

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Mar 8, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Best quote ever: "Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides." -Andre Malraux

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"By the time the Federal Reserve was established in 1913, enough institutions were infected with self-justifying narcissism along with the parasitic Malthusian mind virus that Moloch's America was well underway." If we could sum up the briefest answer to the question "What is wrong with this world?" in one sentence, this would be it. Just replace the FRS with any financial congolmerate, and America with... well, just about anywhere. The biggest disease we suffer from today is not Covid, but the EGO (Embedded Growth Obligations). Nicely put, Eric Weinstein.

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My starting point for the analysis of all bureaucrats is a pithy little number from the French philosopher and essayist 'Alain' (Emile Chartier):

"Car enfin le trait le plus visible dans l’homme juste est de ne point vouloir du tout gouverner les autres, et de se gouverner seulement lui-même. Cela décide tout. Autant dire que les pires gouverneront."

"Because in the end, the most visible characteristic in the just man is to have no wish whatsoever to rule others, and to rule himself only. That settles everything. You might as well say THE WORST WILL RULE."

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"The worst will rule" has been my guiding principle for almost 3 decades. It has never steered me wrong.

The worst will rule because they are highly motivated by the prize; because they have an advantage in contests where lying and reneging is advantageous; and because the proles have no memory and can be misdirected again and again.

The fact that just men don't take the field - because they have no desire to rule others - is really a secondary thing: if morally upstanding people did enter contests for political power, they would get absolutely shellacked.

Everyone can pretend that their favourite political parasite is different: that's nonsense and cope.

To get to within rifle-scope range of candidacy for an electoral office of any note, the aspirant must know how the sausage is made. So either they think they can reform the system from within (nonsense - evidence of cognitive shortcomings), or they have become a scoundrel (as C.S. Lewis points out in "The Inner Ring" in the 1920s).

Govern yourselves accordingly.

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My birth family of origin was a microcosm of what is happening in the world. By breaking away from the family narcissists and their flying monkeys, I have learned a lot in the process and studied a lot in order to heal from the abuse. This is all so familiar.

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Nice piece and as with much of your work, I agree largely with it. Just to pick a small nit:

“For decades after the founding of the U.S., large corporations were difficult to charter. The founders were wary of unchecked accumulation of capital in ungovernable corporate structures.”

That difficulty reads to me as a bit of wariness and a bit of not wanting to let others into the club, so to speak. The founders themselves were not a monolith, easy example of diversity of opinion being Federalists vs Anti-Federalist, which I think ties into this overall slippery slope. As the article you cite says “We don’t really begin to see economic enterprises chartered as corporations until the 1790s”… in other words, directly after they trashed the Articles of Confederation and instituted the Constitution (1789). Not to say that there is a direct connection, it’s more indicative of the times. It’s interesting to me how most reviews of US history (especially in school) skip over the bulk of the 1780s and go right from the Revolution to the Constitution, with a few sentences dedicated to the unviability of the Articles. While it does appear to be true that most of the infrastructure development and expansion of the USA happens post-Constitution (whether you want to view that as a “good” is up for debate), it also seems possible that some of the idealism of the concept was already lost by this juncture, lasting barely over a decade with a major war taking place for much of the start.

The older I get and the more of history I review, the more cynical I get. While there were certainly some founders who were genuine in their desire for the “great experiment” known as the United States, there were others that appealed to these notions in lip service only and primarily wanted to mobilize the “native” population (indigenous and otherwise) against the British so they can simply keep a larger part of the pie for themselves.

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Great article. I had not seen the “I would love to die for the Astrazeneca vaccine” article before. Do you have a link to it? It almost seems too bizarre to be real… on the other hand, there is a lot of that going around.

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When nations rejects God, they get three things: Rulers who hate them: Psalms. 106:35-42, Laws that enslave them: Ezekiel 20:24-25, Rights taken from them: Isaiah. 5:20, 23, 24 " "Since the beginning of the Corona operation, many people began to realise that their governments have been taken over by very powerful and extremely evil forces, making political leaders worldwide move in unison to unleash unprecedented tyranny on their citizens.': The Hidden History of the Revived Roman Empire https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/the-hidden-history-of-the-revived They've told us the truth years in advance, but majority of people are conditioned to dismiss the truth as "crazy conspiracy theories" : The Olympics Rituals of 1992/2012 "Predicted" The Corona Operation https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/the-corona-end-game-addendum

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I can see why you might single out NPD as being particularly relevant to matricide, patricide and the incentives of technology because of the wonderful work to draw on from Lash and Alice Miller with the implications to totalitarian violence. I don't know if someone has ever worked out the functional reasons to maintain personality disorders. Certainly, we owe most as in like 80% of the administrative work to those with NPD or APD. A lot of development and discovery comes out of not neuro-psych typical people but the pattern of psychopathic and narcissistic dominance of genius seems less than that of institutional or power capture. It seems as long as they are fairly well treated we don't have the violent decompensations. I do need to push back quite a bit on the idea of the less violent female abuser. Patricide is a word and concept. Despite whatever your own guilts may or may not be. I am absolutely positive we simply do not record accurately how much female driven abuse there is and the cross talk with the burn it down decompensation(s). There are persistent problems in the measurement of such a common problem however. Mostly, I think because if you have a female abuser the male abuser is labeled problematic. Anyhow, there are other very problematic personalities. And organizations depend heavily on them. We have rising schizoids. And I suspect there are reasons we have these disorders as such a persistent part of humanity. So, Chesterton's fence applies until we work out the eugenic-historical pattern ideas you half propose here.

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Jan 5, 2022·edited Jan 5, 2022

A very nice essay blending several concepts.

We, the sheep, must look to the shepherd for security. Otherwise the wolves will get us. However, the shepherd not being a sheep has a gun. This he uses to kill wolves.

The smarter wolves realise that by instead of raiding for sheep they can offer to guard the sheep. This frees the shepherd to gather more wealth and comfort, for the modest price of a sheep or two: the most disposable or troublesome ones he was going to kill anyway.

And that's simply the way it is, and there is nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it.

Which isn't a problem, on a planetary scale. Western dominance is over. The coming centuries will see China and its sphere of power clash with islam and possibly pan-African nationalism.

Demography is destiny, after all.

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Corporations with the same rights as a person? A comment seen recently: "I'll believe that when Texas executes one of them."

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don't know what you're talking about, frankly. just saying.

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