Splitting the two primary considerations into “aesthetic experience” and “fuel for performance”, or “taste” and “nutrition” for short, I want to capture the idea that points for enjoying the taste are conditional on nutrition whereas you get points for nutrition whether it tastes good or not, but if it doesn’t taste good you aren’t getting optimal value from your food.
Value from food = Nutrition (rated 1 to 5) + min(Taste (rated 1 to 5), Nutrition)
Here’s another blog post that’s just a long comment on someone else’s blog post because I’m a Serious Writer attacking the world’s most important problems like the house is on fire. But I kid, like all black women who write for the NYT, sometimes I need to take a break from my emotional labor, by which I mean all of the time.
You’d probably have an easier time reading this entertaining book review in its entirety and then reading my long comment, but if not here’s the main bit:
When the author bares his soul like this it doesn’t exactly require cracking open the Lacan to point out that this mirrors Yud’s experience being raised in the “Modern Orthodox” Jewish tradition, which he describes as having “broke my core emotional trust in the sanity of the people around me”, and upon reaching adulthood and concluding he had been lied to, he immediately set himself upon the goal of wiping clean the slate of current unacceptable reality by creating a god-AI to bring about the Singularity. He expected to succeed within the decade because he’s so much smarter than youthe antagonists previous researchers that he automatically wins.
This idea that “the smartest guy wins automatically” is omnipresent (eg – just hit the evil queen with a cruise missile. Oh, you didn’t establish cruise missiles exist in the story? Well why wouldn’t they, they exist IRL, and the protagonist invented one, because he’s that much smarter than the evil queen, she can’t predict what he’ll do, so she loses). This is of course linked to concerns about AI risk, which posits an entity so much smarter than the combined efforts of humanity that it “wins” by default in the sense of achieving goals you didn’t even know it had and couldn’t possibly thwart if you could even conceive of them, which you can’t. AI and gods are implicitly conflated in the story when you recognize some of the terminology and theological debates as ripped from LessWrong comment sections of yesteryear, which makes the idea of Hell vs the also described Good afterlives an allegory for misaligned vs aligned AI. Through this lens, the implication that it is morally justified or at least extremely understandable and sympathetic to threaten to blow up the universe to destroy AI-hell becomes, as I said, concerning, especially when he’s actually advocating the US Air Force nuke the fabs if necessary, after due efforts at diplomacy (we do a little gains from trade, I guess).
There’s a great deal to say, but not much that is profitable. If the FBI were taking notes in order to prevent violent crime (that’s a joke), we’d point them to their own crime stats. If Yudkowski were reading with a spirit of sincere inquiry, I’d convert him to Christianity with the minimal facts argument and we could all live happily in that Good AI in the Sky.
I suspect Yudkowski has inherited his ancestors’ pronounced verbal tilt (and arrogance). His beliefs make perfect sense given a surface-level understanding of the hard topics he mixes together–theology, computer science, and presumably anything vaguely associated with high IQ–which I assume he believes he understands best on account of demonstrating the best verbal fluency while talking about them. However, I assume he also knows at some level that he doesn’t understand all that well, because he’s attempted a couple of real projects and would have encountered the universal reality that doing things is a lot harder than talking about them.
Having created a serviceable mental model for this person, I’ll note that the apocalypse cult is not necessarily important to it. We all agree the apocalypse is nigh in some form or another (my preferred flavor is a nasty mix of catabolic collapse and racial preferences in centralized provisioning), and this includes normies, Q-tards…almost every demographic is looking to the century ahead with subconscious existential dread. This dread is then expressed in the language our minds are already equipped with. For some that means UFOs, for others the rapture, for Yudkowski it’s the possible existence of an higher IQ than his own.
Actual terrorism is more of an animal behavior than a rational one, driven by personality features rather than rational considerations. Generally speaking, shooters and bombers have serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and psychopathy combined with inadvisable prescriptions for SSRIs. So the likelihood of this LessWrong community producing someone like that is much lower than one like Antifa, which actively selects for those personality types. More likely we’ll see an Antifa person fail a poorly conceived bombing at…I don’t even know where leftists think things come from…and then the LessWrong community will jump to their keyboards to debate about it for a billion words. Then one of them will collate it into an e-book somehow advocating for polyamory as the solution.
What I am interested in is Geniuses i.e. intelligence. From Age 12 I studied it. I wrote a paper about it in high school for my a.i. project. So moral character and fortitude is nice and all but I have this already, I does not take much. but intelligence is different, The high IQ are super rare. A real Uberman is much higher than Nietzsche’s 145 level set for him. But The Genius, It is like they have a supercomputer in their heads that can understand in the simplest terms what we consider astronomically complicated. It is because they can see things in such simple terms that to them as Einstien said they can explain it to a child.
Don’t be so quick to dismiss moral character and fortitude. Paul Cooijmans said there are three ways to be stupid: low intelligence, low conscientiousness, and low associative horizon. I believe low moral courage is a fourth, and further that it becomes the dominant factor in determining stupidity or non-stupidity as the other three traits increase.
The reason I became interested in defining moral courage was the need to discriminate between sincere truth-seekers and intentional time wasters, because the latter constitute the majority of the high-IQ population. Wasting time is a vice that recommends itself particularly to highly intelligent people for many reasons, just as wasting money conspicuously is a vice that recommends itself particularly to stupid people of all four persuasions (low intelligence, low conscientiousness, etc.). This tendency can be very frustrating to someone, like me, who is compulsively obsessed with seeking out problems of great importance and making significant progress on them. It’s an addiction that drives everything I do. If I have sex, it’s because I’m trying to gain insight into sex so I can understand social problems related to sex.
To someone like me, the world is on fire and we need to act immediately and intelligently. There are big fires that need ditches dug around them, small fires in strategically important places, and sources of fire that need to be dropped into the ocean from helicopters. At first it feels like a relief to find other intelligent people because you think you’ve found someone who can help solve these problems. But you learn quickly that, for various reasons, intelligent people would prefer not to solve important problems. I could list 100 potential reasons why they would prefer to let problems go unsolved, but the most important one is they don’t feel it’s their JOB. They use their intelligence and creativity to invent clever distractions meant to be plausibly mistaken for meaningful work. It’s like if you discovered most of your physically strongest firefighters were shoveling dirt from one hole into another and then back again, instead of digging the fire break they were supposed to.
Why are they okay with the fire raging? Don’t even bother asking them, they’ll spend their God-given cleverness weaving the most fantastical theories you’ve ever heard that, indeed, everyone should be transferring dirt back and forth between two holes. They’ll explain this theory in extraordinary detail, this explanation itself being designed to waste time. They’ll try to convince you that all other firefighting operations must cease in service of the two-hole method. The only thing it’s worth asking this sort of man is if people should blame him and his department for the outcome. “Is it YOUR JOB to control this fire, sir? No, I don’t want to know about the politics of city budgets, I’m just asking whether you think the outcome should come up in your performance review at the throne of judgment. Do you bear at least the smallest fragment of partial responsibility for the outcome? Will you feel even a little tinge of conscience when you fail, like maybe you should have done something different?”
That’s why I’ve traced the problem back to moral courage. It’s a type-2 error, a sin of omission, and deep down they know it’s a crime to waste their God-given talents. You can look into it yourself to double-check my work (I’d appreciate it, believe it or not), or you can just take my word for it as a third-rate genius. It’s certainly a good enough model to identify the cleverly stupid, because where you find cowardice you will find ingenious distractions like smoke coming off a fire. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter why they’re weak as long as you can identify these people and not waste your own time trying to convince them YOU FIREMAN, FIRE BAD. We can line them up and shoot them after the fire, if there’s an “after” at all, for impersonating emergency services workers during a crisis.
Anyway, that’s why moral fortitude is important, Mr. Cat. You think it’s abundant, but it’s scarce. And when you’re surrounded by intelligence and genius, it’s the thing you miss the most.
Gallant briefed Gen. Kurilla on the launch of the IDF exercise, which is focusing on multi-front war due to the growing trend of Israel’s enemies sometimes trying to challenge it on multiple fronts all at once, including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.
Kurilla is the American here, Gallant is the Israeli.
That’s a pretty big diplomatic channel, historically. These aren’t black and white shutdowns, so it’s somewhat symbolic rather than really cutting ties. On the other hand, even if it’s not legally binding saying you want a divorce is still a bad sign for the relationship.
It’s like I keep telling people about this green energy stuff, the reason you never hear about nuclear or hydro is they would WORK. The deindustrialization forced by these policies is THE POINT.
I can’t tell you how tiresome it is to hear conservatives go back to the trough to complain about how liberal plans aren’t going to produce the claimed outcomes. They know. Everybody knows but you, dear conservative.
You can’t con an honest man, but you can con a conservative every time.
This bodes ill for the war machine. There are a million reasons why southern whites are essential to the armed forces, but the most important is cultural. Every military institution is designed for Yankee officers and Confederate grunts, and flushing that culture down the drain means you lose all that social capital. This is also, incidentally, why Republicans can’t ever win again. Texas is de facto a blue state now.
However, the US continues to operate as if the world has not undergone a dramatic shift and refuses to rein in its allies.
Among leader-y types, there’s nothing more bourgeois than this. “Put a leash on your bitch or I’ll do it for you.” If you even have to tell a man that, he’s already dead meat. You can always repurpose the bitch, but there’s no use for a weak man.
Deposit losses topped $470 billion in the first quarter of 2023, according to the FDIC
Supposedly we’re on a fractional reserve system, where this would cost the banks an enormous amount of investing power. But I don’t anticipate regulators showing up and saying they have to pull trillions out of the market over something so trivial as being unable to cover the losses.
Americans face ‘unprecedented’ food insecurity A new study has found that growing numbers of people are going hungry as government benefits are reduced and grocery prices soar https://www.rt.com/news/577236-us-food-insecurity-rises/
The newly released survey by Propel, maker of a phone application that helps users manage their so-called “food stamp” benefits, found that a record-high 44% of respondents reported skipping meals in the past month, a 7% increase from the rate in April. The results show that food insecurity among users of the app was at “unprecedented levels” for the second straight month.
Traditionally, starving the peasants is actually a great way to recruit cannon fodder. You want to eat? Submit to military discipline. But thinking about it a bit more, I don’t think we have the social infrastructure anymore to turn dysfunctional people into infantry. The Army is constantly whining about how they can’t use people who have never done a push-up. You actually could (e.g. split basic training into a 10-week fast track, 20-week average track, and variable-length remedial track), it’s just they don’t remember how to use anything other than bright-eyed, literate, patriotic, etc. lower middle class white boys (and they’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out from scratch).
TFW your president is so old and feeble that it’s international news when he falls. This story reads like the previous shift nurse’s chart at an assisted living facility. “Joe had a fall today. Some bruising on his knee.”
Staging a protest directly outside of a person’s home usually gets the message across, but it shows poor psychological profiling in this case. Expecting Netanyahu to “get the message if he knows what’s good for him” is not a good plan. Tbh, it feels like design by committee.
BRICS may be looking forward to the Ukraine war being over. I’d actually advise them to keep it going to keep the world war relatively under control. If by some impossible treaty we stopped fighting by proxy in Ukraine, we’d be obliged to start shit somewhere else. If Ukraine goes on, Russia can slowly exsanguinate the West in a controlled geographic space where, being brutally honest, nobody cares what happens to the people there. It’s a very simple situation with a game theory we can all predict, and the endgame is amenable to everyone. Tens of millions of whites will gradually die of diseases and things, eventually the Western populations will collectively give up, lie down, and wait for death, and the Jews will never have to change their behavior.
On the other hand, if hostilities shifted to Georgia or something no one knows what would happen. It might be too many novel variables for the psychopaths to keep in their working memory at once, and somebody might launch a nuke by a simple mistake. Ukraine is the path of least resistance that minimizes embarrassment for people who care about embarrassment more than literally anything in heaven or on earth. However! I worry because it involves boredom, long-term self-interest, and no ambitious competitions between elite conspiracies. You don’t win the psychopath Olympics by being risk-averse. You win by practicing brinksmanship as recklessly as anyone on earth and then one of the risk-takers wins the risk lottery.
So every time things settle into a holding pattern with a clear future, the psychos will engage in competitive stupidity to keep the future as chaotic and unpredictable as possible. If anyone can predict what will happen tomorrow, that’s an environment where non-psychopaths can compete and reproduce. It makes the psychos feel like they’re dying. They prefer it when life feels like a series of disconnected vignettes that would overstimulate anyone else.
It’ll be interesting to see how that goes. Collaboration is very hard. I don’t think this group will be much help with the Taiwan thing, but a decade from now who knows.
The basic problem with negotiations is that the US can’t be trusted with a counterfeit one dollar bill. You have to show an ounce of self-control every now and then to build credibility.
MKUltra? Sometimes you have a kid on your hands and nothing better to do with them. Stir in some Satanic bad actors and you’ve got this story.
Israeli ministers’ travel plans reflect changing diplomacy – analysis If 20 years ago, the primary destination for Israeli ministers were in America and Western Europe, today, they fly as frequently to capitals in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-744554
If you needed proof that we’ve entered the multipolar NWO…
Israeli committee to examine medical system’s role in Yemenite Children Affair During the first years after the establishment of the State of Israel, hundreds of infants of new olim disappeared. https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/article-744577
The children in the Yemenite thing were just killed, similar to the way Ethiopian Jewish immigrants were involuntarily sterilized. It was a eugenics thing.
I think that’s new. Graham will have to be more careful about traveling now. The other Congresspeople will see that inconvenience and get more reserved about their public statements, because they aren’t interested in personal consequences. Plus, I think everybody knows Lindsey Graham is hated enough that arresting and extraditing him during, say, a trip to Turkey or something would not actually be a casus belli. (Probably wishful thinking on my part, but imagine going to war with Russia to save Lindsey Graham.)
Happening at the same time as Russia is bombing the Northern rebels and the US is building a base to support them. You’re looking at military activity by Russian, US, Syrian, Israeli, and Iranian militaries all in the same small place, plus whatever the hell ethnic refuse the rebels are. There’s no way this ends well.
Putin confirms strike on Ukrainian military intelligence HQ Kiev’s continuing attacks on Russian soil are aimed at provoking a “mirror response” from Moscow, the president has said https://www.rt.com/russia/577138-putin-moscow-drones/
My feeling is this satisfies the king’s obligation to publicly avenge himself. That means Putin is currently king of the world, unless the US can whip something up they hadn’t been able to previously. This is a very dangerous moment.
You’ll recall that it was this mental model of kings being obligated to punish dissenters that set me off on this news headlines thing. It’s a very deep chimpanzee instinct, and my theory is that it drives our understanding of who is currently “in charge” via Law of Pragnanz. Am I afraid of criticizing X? Then X is in charge. This instinct is the foundation of the historical Gestalt shift we’re witnessing from X to Y. And Gestalt shifts drive preference cascades. So what I’m asserting is that something like a tectonic shift has occurred and world events are now playing out like water running downhill to find its new, natural resting place.
tl;dr- Authority is obligated to respond because it is DEFINED by the common expectation of the response.
Russian forces intercept two British Storm Shadow missiles The ministry also said it had intercepted shorter-range US-built HIMARS-launched and HARM missiles, and shot down 12 drones in the last 24 hours. https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-744345
I still don’t expect nukes but if it’s going to happen this is the most likely time. Remember, the second-most likely time is when Israel’s situation is so desperate that even the idiot Orthodox people know it, and at that point I expect the West’s capacity to launch a nuclear holocaust will be ineffectual (hopefully). Basically the wiser heads are considering it right now when it’s the last chance to hang on to the #1 spot, then later they’ll try the Samson option when all the negative consequences come home to roost.
I can’t help returning to the mental image of Anthony Fremont hearing someone tell him “No”, and being unable to do anything about it for the first time in his life.
I can’t tell you how to do your job Mr. France-man, but you might consider that if you cause a panic with all these articles you’re writing a check that your people will be obliged to cover.
This is a better plan than trying to assassinate every Russian and Chinese person one-by-one, but the strategy of trying to starve out BRICS is not a good one when Western economies are themselves in freefall. As I mentioned before, if you want an advanced economy in 2030, you need to have started by breeding people like me a few generations ago. Anyway, psychopaths continue to fail to impress with their long-term planning skills, that being part of the syndrome and all.
Driver of U-Haul that rammed White House gate is not a U.S. citizen, prosecutors say https://archive.ph/HNVHI
Notable, but I couldn’t say for sure why. Could be partisan harassment, could be one of those committees where they write the official story (like the 9/11 one).
The funny thing is these missionaries were probably huge supporters of Israel and Judaism yesterday. Then they ran headfirst into reality. Anyway, this is why the secular Jews get real nervous about the optics of these religious Jews. If you’ve never seen the polls on cross-religious sentiment, no one loves any other religion more than Evangelicals love Judaism, and no one hates any other religion more than Jews hate Evangelicals.
A reminder that it’s not just me saying it:
Fiona Hill has declared that the war in Ukraine marks the passing of Pax Americana. In an explosive speech delivered two weeks ago in Estonia, the foreign affairs specialist warned that there had been a “mutiny” against US dominance that would force a reset in global relations. “In 2023, we hear a resounding no to US domination,” Hill said, “and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon”.
The former presidential advisor to Donald Trump stated that Russia had “cleverly exploited deep-seated international resistance” to American leadership, using the war in Ukraine as a means to drive a wedge between the West and “the Rest”. Hill went on to deny that there was a proxy war between Russia and the West but, rather, the “reverse — a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the ‘Rest against the United States’” https://archive.ph/R2iR7
Because when you’re trying to maintain absolute global supremacy you can’t just focus on one front. Not a good strategy, but then these people are idiots.
China rejecting contact with US military – Pentagon Washington says it’s received no response from Beijing to a request for a meeting between the countries’ defense chiefs https://www.rt.com/news/577001-us-china-military-ratner/
This is just one example of a larger trend of big diplomatic communication channels breaking down.
The fun thing about “tactical” nukes is the idea that you can call them that and somehow get away with the optics of using them. It’s a strange meme that way and I don’t think people really buy it.
Here’s another editorial that explains what I’ve been explaining so you don’t have to take my word for it:
…when it comes to their respective records on issues of interest to Jewish voters, Trump and DeSantis are less distinct.
Each has sought to cultivate Jewish support by focusing on Israel and erasing church-state separations that, Orthodox Jewish leaders argue, inhibit religious freedoms. And both have attracted white nationalist supporters while leaning into the culture wars.
Just to explain quick, the “tension” is when the US falls apart Israel will be much weaker than Iran and effectively at their mercy. So the Israeli strategists are probably saying “We need to do this ASAP.”
This will be fun. Presumably the US requires several reminders per day that preemptive nuclear strikes would have to be on US soil (not Ukraine). “Please remind Mr. Sullivan that number 56 here is pointed directly at his family home and such statements are not as abstract as he appears to believe.”
The interviewer is a very smart guy who doesn’t understand computers, and the interviewee is a very smart guy who understands AI pretty well. I could nitpick but won’t. If you’re worried about this or that thing re: AI, give it a listen.
I could write about it myself but tbh trying to teach autism to schizophrenics is really, really fucking tedious because they want to misunderstand. It gives them a feeling of euphoria every time they return to the delusions, so it’s like trying to get through to a pothead.
“Oh WOW, so you’re saying AI will become conscious?” “I literally just said the exact opposite of that.” “That’s CRAZY, man.” *takes a hit*
We have an emperor on his throne with Darth Clown and the moon in syzygy behind him. His loincloth looks like dripping blood, symbolizing his castration. The throne is basically a pedestal. We get the sense the emperor is somewhat primitive and direct in his methods, and he’s not enjoying his reign.
More than anything I read this painting as a literalization of the king-as-scapegoat, where he’s being puppeteered by a much more socially intelligent power behind the throne, an entity that’s more in touch with the collective unconscious.
I’m tempted to refer to this clown figure as The Alchemist, but it’s probably more like halfway between the Overwatch Alchemist and Priest castes. Maybe this is the archetype of the melonhead back before they split into specialized subtypes. It sorta makes sense that melonheads would arise as facilitators of the scapegoating machine, in tandem with the invention of megalithic structures and large social groups.
Behind him is the titular “dread moon”, symbolizing the fact that all of this is driven by mass human lunacy, which he rides like a tiger. The whole thing reminds me of that Bloodborne “moon presence” image that MM really liked:
But I’m wondering if you guys see a distinction between what the Marine did and what Rittenhouse did. I got crap from both the redhead and brother the lesser for saying Rittenhouse was justified but not really a hero. Whereas I see this marine as a hero…though I really haven’t done any homework on the details.
-A filthy normie
There are lots of distinctions. I assume you mean those relevant to the distinction between “hero” and “not hero”.
You have an unclear idea of what heroism is. Like most conservatives, you require heroes to be victims of circumstance, which is one of the distinctions between Penny and Rittenhouse. This puts a much heavier emphasis on the man’s blamelessness than on doing the right thing, rising to the occasion, executing competently, selflessness, etc, and puts no emphasis at all on the heroic quality of intentionally putting oneself in a risky situation for the benefit of others. You can see this fixation on blamelessness in movies made for conservatives, where the hero is first antagonized by the bad guys for absolutely no reason and then receives moral carte blanche to act out a power fantasy.
If you examine the premise, that proactive (“unforced”) action is evil and reactive (“forced”) action is blameless, then we run into philosophical issues immediately. Aren’t all decisions a little bit of both? Is reflex really heroic? Was Han Solo in the wrong because he shot first? (That’s a joke, but the negative utilitarianism we’re discussing here is the exact reason George Lucas went back and changed it.) Most importantly, isn’t it self-evidently more heroic when the hero is proactive? Consider the case of a professional fireman who, 15 years into a career, dies to save a child from a burning house. Was he stupid for putting himself in burning buildings over and over? No, he was heroic for doing so.
Meanwhile, we should consider the case of a man who routinely goes into neighborhoods with, uh, “bad schools” with a baby carriage and dressed like he has money. When someone tries to rob him, he draws and shoots to protect himself and his baby. Is this heroic because he was just reacting to a bad situation? No, the man’s an idiot and the genepool would be better off if he were slower on the draw.
There are other distinguishing features, like the professionalization of violence (Marines specialize in violence, whereas Rittenhouse was an amateur). But these aren’t the real point of departure, and I pride myself on getting to the point. And then leaving the point a charred wasteland that says “AP was here.”
As for me, I try to place equal weight on sins of commission (things I shouldn’t have done but did) and sins of omission (things I should have done but didn’t). You’ll find that supported in the Bible now that you’re looking for it. The failure of conservatives is tolerance for sins of omission because they’re waiting around for legal permission from a government that’s trying to exterminate them. One might draw an analogy between that strategy and the guy with the baby stroller.
“You can see this fixation on blamelessness in movies made for conservatives, where the hero is first antagonized by the bad guys for absolutely no reason and then receives moral carte blanche to act out a power fantasy.”
isn’t this a universal setup? i think it’s a bully in the lefty movies. or an old white guy in a position of power that uses it with malice for no reason
-Another normie
It’s an element of the Hero’s Journey type of story, but no, it’s not universal. E.g. White savior narratives begin with the protagonist inserting herself into a situation. In that case you may still have a villain being pointlessly evil to a 3rd party but the protagonist could have just stayed out of it. A more conservative story where the hero is quite clearly the provocateur is Yojimbo, which is a fantastic movie that I’d recommend everyone watch.
It’s also important to realize that being a passive victim of circumstance in the Hero’s Journey represents the idea that young boys are expected to be submissive and reactive and do what they’re told, whereas grown, adult men are expected to be proactive and seek their own goals, and the weight of these expectations comes on rather suddenly without warning or expectation. So there’s an awkward transition phase and a lot of modern men come out of it confused by the idea that they’re supposed to pursue what they want wholeheartedly but they have no idea what they want or how to find out what it is. The bildungsroman story explores this idea of coming of age without an explicit coming of age ritual. Ender’s Game is a great example. The direct explanation of how to navigate this transition is self-help literature like Brian Tracy’s “Maximum Achievement”, which is an excellent book with unfortunate branding.
Ender is also an excellent example of a hero figure who could have just stayed home and done nothing because pacifism vs. proactive action is a prominent theme of the book. It’s also a good representation of my assertion that “fights aren’t won in the ring, they’re won in the previous six months of training”. That’s another form of being proactive.
Societies have always had this idea of super-adults (authorities) who were even more “grown up” than the other adults, i.e. responsible for proactive action and preparation, but people usually just see it as a dominance/submission thing. But dominance and submission are secondary considerations. The basic idea is that there are people who are responsible for society’s outcomes whether they did anything to cause them or not–these are the people we say “should have done something”. For example, if a bridge collapses there are authorities we point to and say “You should have done something before this happened.” The social dynamic here is expressed at length in Jocko Willink’s book “Extreme Ownership”.
These “adults among adults” are considered responsible for making (and enforcing!) the rules everyone else plays by, and are held to be successes or failures based only on the outcomes (the ends, not the means). It’s exactly analogous to the father of a household being responsible for his family. If someone stronger swoops into his house and destroys his family, he is a failure even though he’s a blameless victim of circumstance. This is why people with great responsibility MUST seek and acquire great power. If you fail to carry out the responsibility for lack of capability, you’re still a failure.
The dominance and submission aspect follows from the need to enforce rules and boundaries. Women and children focus on that part because it’s the part they can see (having not gone through the coming of age transition), and also because it’s sexy and exciting.
The peasants have to be dominated because they don’t know what’s good for them. It’s not their JOB to know. If they took power, they’d burn the place down in a drunken revelry and then the next morning look around for people to blame. Aristocrats know it doesn’t MATTER who’s to blame, it’s still burned down. The outcome is the same, which is what aristocrats are judged by. In fact, aristocrats know they’re to blame EVEN IF THE PEASANTS KILLED THEM FIRST. Why? Because the outcome is the same. The aristocrats should have been more powerful, set better rules, and dominated the peasants more effectively to avoid that outcome. If you’re a dad and your six-year-old kid shoots you dead, whose fault is that? Yours.
This is why elites generally have their own coming-of-age rituals and have always been big into occult and Nietzschean stuff that ends up sounding an awful lot like Tony Robbins. To produce “adults among adults” you have to really hammer the point home that “you’re a grown-ass man, people expect you to remake society in your image, and they’d better be happy in it or they’ll kill your ass”. You can see how it could be somewhat traumatic to go from suckling at the breast to a job more thankless than being a dad. It’s like you’re the country’s dad, except you kinda hate them and they kinda hate you. It can work, sometimes, and when it does it’s a wonderful thing.
Oh, and the best part of this job is you have to know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to humans, and there’s nothing humans lie about more prolifically than humans. You’d think they were professional liars being paid to spread lies. So you have to figure it out painstakingly by empirical testing and observation or, if you’re lucky, find that one-in-a-million mentor or book that tells you how shit works without any of the nice-sounding lies and pretensions.
Aeoli Pera 