Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism...

Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

“The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... l-collapse

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

…Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians. […]

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. [Andrew M. Lobaczewski Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]

A normal person might say, "You wouldn't think."

YOU wouldn't, but THEY would.

And they just didn't care how it might affect anyone but themselves. But they thought it might work for themelves so they did it anyway. That's how a psychopath operates. "The medical definition is simple: A psychopath is a person who lacks empathy and conscience, the quality which guides us when we choose between good and evil, moral or not. Most of us are conditioned to do good things. Psychopaths are not." There is only one thing that puts their evil behavior in check - and that is the threat of violence. And that is why it is my prediction that this will turn violent before it is done. Violence is the only thing that a psychopath understands. You cannot reason with a psychopath except when that reasoning involves something the equivalent of, "if you don't stop doing this to me I will smash your fucking head in with a hammer." That gets their attention. If you emote, squirm, etc., that will not work because a psychopath has no empathy and actually enjoys torturing people. Only normal people who have endured the torture of psychopaths for years on end can come to that inevitable conclusion. You cannot reason with a psychopath, period.

Large corporations in the US have a lot of problems and need to keep a lot of secrets. Part of their vetting process for hiring involves how well a prospective employee can make problems go away and keep secrets. Demonstrated skill in actually solving problems is not what's required.

etc.

[Higgenbotham]

Nobody consents to QE or a million other things. Chomsky wrote a book called "Manufacturing Consent". The fact that it's not physical violence doesn't mean it's not violence. Just because they're not putting a boot on somebody's balls or rolling people around in barrels with nails driven through the sides doesn't mean it isn't violence. Probably more than half of the population is on some form of prescription for mental illness or medicating themselves with drugs or alcohol. The barbarism (politely referred to as bullying) starts in the schools, which is widespread and compulsory that most people be subjected to it. There is some kind of suicide reported from bullying in the public schools almost every week.

This will only get better is when people refuse to follow false media created images of leaders that don't exist in reality. When people decide that they will only follow local leaders that they personally know and trust and are vouched for by others in the local community then things will get better.

In my opinion, they were pretty arrogant because they knew they were better communists than even the Chinese or Russian communists. They had progressed from boots on balls, starvation, and gulags to being able to say there are no dead bodies, what's the big deal.

That quote refers to the pathological communists who run Wisconsin.

A lot of people have been fooled into thinking that the current pathocracy is better than the ones that existed in the past because there isn't much direct person to person violence or death. That's not the case. The realm of the torture and control has been moved from the physical to the mental. Not seeing direct physical torture being performed by the authorities gives plausible deniability (Where are the dead bodies?).

As Luke Kemp says, this is the most extensive Goliath (or pathocracy) in the 12,000 year history of pathocracies. Somewhere in this forum we have noted that this pattern can only be broken and humans can move to a higher stage of development when it is understood how to keep psychopaths out of positions of authority.

If the large and highly centralized governments in this industrial civilization were to collapse, followed by important decision-making being made at the town level, I believe there would be improvement in the quality of decisions being made. Probably not uniformly, but at a minimum in isolated pockets, and those pockets of good decision-making will be the areas that will prosper and become models for other places to follow as they try to regain their footing.

The problem is how to keep the psychopaths from controlling anything bigger than a village. At present, we only know how to do that at the village level.

[Higgenbotham]

The level of nastiness and vindictiveness seems to be ratcheting up a lot:

Trump vs Powell
Macron vs Candace Owens
Gabbard vs Obama

are the examples I can think of where I said, wow, this is different.

Abbott orders arrest of Democrats who fled Texas

“Texas House Democrats abandoned their duty to Texans,” Abbott said in a statement.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5 ... lee-state/