MTs, cro magnons, pragmatism, attitudes toward formal legal systems vs. informal unprincipled justice (great stuff, very disorganized)

Another conversation with Owl, where the topics are a bit too mixed up to be worth the time necessary for me to untangle them.

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Uh oh, I just woke up seconds ago.

No worries
My body has risen, the brain has yet to follow

Will need 10 minutes on my end.

Despite that, i’ve been thinking about somehing i’ve noticed the past week
no rush, take your time
Wherein individuals who are formidable systems thinkers employ the same techniques to analyze game-theoretic situations and reach disasterous conclusions
So, for example, individual investors who saw what was happening with the economy and decided now wasa great time to play the stock market
everything was surely going to go down, so makes sense to call it!
overlooking that this was a scenario in which poewrful forces had the will and the capability to counteract short-term trends
another example is those who claim the demise of the EU is imminent, and have been for ten years now
Sure, in the long-run, very hard to argue. In the short/medium term, lots and lots of powerful forces working to sustain it
On a very big-picture level, these sorts of competitive games become part of the system, but on the level of short-term politics/economics/whatever, they tend to be e defining factor, dominating the expected consequences of economies, elections…”stuff” just happening in a vacuum
I suppose on the other end of the spectrum we see an animism of sorts, in which every occurrence has a malevolent force as the driving impetus. This is the stereotypical “conspiracy kook”,
the problem with the former is that it comprises an ineffective theoretic model for imagining future outcomes. It fails to allow for the existence of unknown unknowns. The problem with the latter is that it tries to encompass all knowns and unknowns, even if they happen to be contradictory. Since it claims both N and NP depending on how the tale is told, it thus foretells all outcomes and cannot be falsified

So if I may sum up, “That which systemically cannot continue will not…except when it serves the competitive interests of powerful actors, in which case it will be propped up until this causes the entire system to collapse and they cash out.”

Very much so

Systems thinkers tend to turn games with intelligent opponents into games with unintelligent opponents.

[Ed: This is using the game theory definition of “intelligence”, see here.]

Then we’d expect them to make these sorts of mistakes (e.g. the stock market, politics) when they’ve mistaken a competitive game for an intellectual puzzle to be solved.

Right. It’s an improper framing of the problem based on incorrect epistemological assumptions

I.e. “Other minds do not exist in this game.”
Or at all, as the case may be.
On the other hand, I suspect a big part of the attraction to evil is the sense that agreeable people are P-zombies whereas effective human predators are more intellectual.

at higher levels of social strata, you’d have to be

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrainsEvilBrawnGood
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainsActHeroesReact

This is probably the most important TV trope for moral philosophy.

very true, now that i think about it

Ding, coffee’s done!
Man, I must be getting old if I’m looking back fondly on Family Guy.
Okay, we can square this circle easily, in my estimation, by making a couple of choice substitutions.
In the popular mind…
Realism = Negativity = Evil
Optimism = Good.

the subtlety of “be wise as serpent and innocent as doves” has never really been the american way

Unfortunately, if you take the American way to its conclusion you get “Evil = Thanos = good”.

Eh, maybe
I’m skeptical of the degree to which marvel crap is really any kind of insight into the american psyche

Americans are characterized by high extraversion and religiousness.

agreed

This reminds me of something I forgot to write down yesterday.
How the cro magnon conformity drive works, versus the MT justice drive.
Cro magnons and MTs will always be at odds due to their polar opposite attitudes toward “the rules”.
Cro magnons have the attitude that unspoken rules are the real rules. To wit, “the unexamined common understanding is sacred”. They consider formal, written rules to be immutable, but also merely weapons for attacking people.
They actually view attempts to write down common sense as the sign of an evil person, which isn’t always a bad heuristic (e.g. the trolley problem) but it makes them effectively incapable of writing good laws or setting wise legal precedents.
Their strong preference is for justice to be carried out *informally* and away from authoritative oversight, which is why they get such a will-to-power kick out of fictions like “prison justice” and authorities making exceptions by “looking the other way”.
I would guess these attitudes toward justice would be adaptive in their natural habitat, the Eternal High School.
In high school the students have no input into the written rules at all. Hence they are “immutable”.
They are, however, intensely interested in perceiving unspoken social conventions.
These conventions are sacred to the cro magnon to the point of taboo.
Therefore, cro magnon is a fundamentally secular creature who cannot distinguish normativity from morality, or norms from moral behavior.

Sounds like most people you’ll ever meet

Yes. I suspect it’s even more true of genpop Asians, so it’s likely a result of selection pressure for high GFP without high IQ and high openness.
Fundamentally, they believe all that is good comes from within (this is the low-IQ form of Luciferianism). Hence, “Good Feels Good” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodFeelsGood. Or more to the point, trust your instincts.
Contrast this with the Christian assertion that “all that is good comes from God” and “evil is natural”.
I think this link between pragmatism and evil is what reminded me of this line of thought.
My view on the subject of morality and pragmatism these days is more or less Catholic.
They probably have the more nuanced view due to their emphasis on good works (versus the sola fide Protestantism).
To do good works requires pragmatism, pragmatism requires acting according to the laws of nature to obtain an end, and this could be accused of “doing evil that good may result”. Since Protestants don’t place any value on doing the right thing (preferring to hold the right opinions uber alles), they just purity spiral their way out of the paradox. But Catholics actually have to think about it.
Insofar as I understand it, the Catholic position is like so:
Man has two natures, a higher and a lower. The higher is good and supernatural and the lower is evil and natural (i.e. normal). Actions according to the lower nature are predetermined by strict physical causality. Actions according to the higher nature have a miraculous causality, whether by a “God of the gaps” mechanism or something else.
I really do think that these questions are related to the absolute decay of civilization.
Where idealism is the life drive and pragmatism is the death drive.

[Ed: referring to my theory of libido decoupling here.]

There appears to be a certain sort of economic and social situation that causes people to neglect one drive or the other, form teams, and fight to the death.
Notably, this divide appears to be accelerating between the Jewish factions.
Man, I am getting old.
Thinking back now on when I was a kid, at the end of the school year I would ceremonially burn everything in my school folders in our fire pit.
I’d better start writing this autobiographical shit down soon or I’ll just be a walking distraction in a decade.

lol i did that a few times myself

How’s your disagreeableness score?

pretty high

I imagine a correlation between these things. 🙂

There would have to be 😆

No more distractions! I have to finish my Cro magnon/MT thoughts today at least.
The people must have their made-up bullshit.
Actually, I only have two more thoughts re: croms.

“They consider formal, written rules to be immutable, but also merely weapons for attacking people.”
This manifests in sayings like “throwing the book” at someone, or the glee of using the rules to get one over on someone. Contrast with the complete lack of glee in a well-run system of rules working correctly to deliver justice (“They should just let me take him out back, namsayin?”).
They also feel no responsibility to maintain the system as such, because they can’t imagine it not being there.
This belief that “the unexamined is sacred” is what puts cro magnons forever and always at the mercy of propagandists.
They fundamentally believe, mistakenly, that their deeply held values are immutable, but they are actually quite amenable to the influences of radio, television, liturgy, comedy, ritual, spectacle, fiction, and repetition.
The line they draw for practical purposes is completely arbitrary, which leaves them completely open to anyone willing to invest in artistic productions that work on a slightly deeper level than they’re willing to articulate.
Thus the failure mode of cro magnon society: to be a moral authority is the highest possible status, and therefore the thing a cro magnon craves above all else (ref: Kmac on moral tribes), and it’s the role they’re most temperamentally incapable of performing.

The position they’re adapted for is that of a police sergeant out on patrol, enforcing social norms, bending the rules, and protecting the blue line. A good lawyer makes a bad cop, and a good cop makes a bad lawyer.

That brings us to the MT attitude toward rules.
That reminds me, “law” needs to go in mental athletics.

FOCUS

AAAA
I was looking at my sleep data as you said that :3.

MTs are very perceptive of social norms due to their M-back, so they are at least as sensitive to them as cro magnons (whose perceptiveness is more due to their idiot savant-level obsession with unspoken conventions). However, due to their T-front they are unable to *act* on this understanding because social norms are unprincipled, logically incoherent, and often mutually incompatible.

[Ed: Studied ignorance is one way of navigating a dialectic in practice. Possibly because it’s easier to balance concerns when you aren’t thinking too hard about it, which maintains the holistic/decontextualized reference frame. See also https://www.bitchute.com/video/UFXfkWaP7iIV/ beginning at 1:33:00 and put baking soda in your water to expand your associative horizon! Acerbic personality phenotypes BTFO.]

They also have a strong vengeance/justice drive, similar to MMs.
You can probably see at this point why they tend not to get along with cro magnons.
Since their understanding of social convention is analytical and a bit sociopathic (also like MMs), MTs also understand that formal rules are not immutable.
Therefore, they are the most temperamentally suited of all the types to writing new laws and setting legal precedents. The trouble, of course, is that getting in a position to do this requires networking skills, which means the rule-writing roles tend to be filled by MMs and Jews.
The rare exception to this tendency occurs in those societies that can be reasonably described as well-ordered and law-abiding, in which case you can get someone like Isaac Newton in charge of national banking or Henry Ford in an executive role.
This is not an unmitigated good, as I mentioned in blaming neanderthals for Enlightenment hubris.

So the tendency of MTs is to perceive social norms and then formalize these into written legal rules which then permit them to act. T-fronts have the curious property of freezing up whenever they’re acting without some sort of logical justification that goes at least two layers deeper than they need for the situation.
To understand this, it may help to use an engineering metaphor.
A typical maintenance person will fix a widget by hitting it with a hammer. If asked to justify this, he will say that’s what we’ve always done to fix it here, and it has always worked in the past, except for the times it didn’t and then some authority figures bought a new one (which is also “fixing” it).
Considering the constraints such a person typically works under (a screaming foreman and abysmal training) this is a serviceable attitude.
But an engineer will want to troubleshoot the problem several steps back. What’s the operating principle of the widget? If something was ruined by the quality of the plant water, what caused the plant water to be bad? Etc.
MTs are archetypal social engineers in this vein.
They understand that systems of social conventions are fundamentally *fragile*, not robust as the cro magnon assumes, and that even small actions must be justifiable to the nth degree because setting the precedent could have massive downstream effects full of unexpected negative externalities.
This property of T-front is why TTs tend to be found in systematized political ideologies like libertarianism, objectivism, and socialism.
Also because T-back lacks the crucial insight into human nature which are the M-back’s birthright.
Therefore they get caught up in political systems that are internally coherent and completely ignorant of actual human behavior.
They suffer from what I refer to as “the buy-in problem”.
As is so often the case, MT empathy for cro magnons produces the same effect as cro magnon viciousness: merciless applications of justice.
Cro magnon justice is fundamentally illegal, because they have a strong preference for keeping morality outside of the formal rules.
MTs correctly see this as parasitism on the formal system that cro magnons exist within and rely upon for an ordered society.
It’s like the type of rebelliousness often seen in high schoolers where the authority figure is subverted but also assumed to exist forever.
Given formal authority, MTs are extremely effective at balancing the concerns of informal social normativity and maintaining the legal edifice, and are thus the fount of Western civilization. They practice predation on cro magnons responsibly, eugenically thinning the herd but never hunting it to extinction.
On the other hand, if they are not given formal authority, as in high school where everyone is a “peer” according to the rules and equally a prisoner of the true moral authorities, then cro magnons will predate on them mercilessly.
They have no concept of responsible hunting since responsibility has always been imposed on them from above.
They’ve never had to evolve it.
It’s comparable to the inability of women to make good choices of mates, as explained by Bruce Charlton.
Or comparable to the inability of autistic people to be socially responsible.
These can be useful traits when expressed in their proper niche: the local cop making judgment calls on the street, the maintenance guy doing a hack job but getting the job done, the wife making the best of the marriage her parents chose, or the sperg telling people what they need to hear but don’t want to from the safety of sincere naivete.
Therefore the ideal job for an MT is a JAG, a financial auditor, a detective, or an IG.
They ought to be promoted to lieutenant as quickly as possible to get them out of the high school meatgrinder but never promoted to Colonel or above, where true pragmatism is required for advanced networking skills.
Likewise cro magnons ought to be promoted to their level of competence within the enlisted ranks and never forced into specialist roles, where they’d hunt and eat the CTs who actually keep the machines running.
Excuse me, TCs.
TCs and CCs can socialize well enough but they can’t work together closely.
This may be a good rule of thumb, actually. People with the same front can enjoy each other’s company and people with the same back can work together.
For example, the archetypal special forces soldier is an MC.
Bit of a sociopath, but smart, perceptive, pragmatic, and uninterested in higher things than football.
Being a SEAL is, after all, driven by the same basic desires as being the best football player.
But it requires an M-back tier of social awareness.
And focused ambition.
(I’ve finished my thoughts on MTs and cro magnons so I’m just wandering now.)
MTs and MCs can get along in a special forces context because they understand each other and can see the value in cooperation.
Similarly, TTs and TCs can work together in an engineering context but they can’t relax around each other because the TT will want to talk about books and the TC will want to drink light beer and watch football (dat C-front) and think about as little as possible (as discussed above, this is the expression of his highest values).
It would be too much time to disentangle this mess into several posts, I’m just going to put it up warts and all.
Anything you’d want left out?

Nah, looks good to me

Makes sense though, this sort of organization is in keeping with the original spirit of Edenism.

lol
#livetradition