Homo sapiens’ insatiable appetite for lies

I’m coming to the belief that the neurotypical’s insatiable appetite for inconsequential lies is downstream from their worship of psychopathy, which is itself downstream from envy.

The envy can be seen most clearly when corporate executives compete to virtue signal how cool and casual they are. It’s not unusual for CEOs and vice presidents to appear on podcasts and YouTube streams to discuss the finer points of a Big Mac or which Netflix dramas are the most bingeworthy . The joke implicit in talking about fountain drinks at McDonald’s in the appreciative language of a sommelier is that the speaker and the audience are both so ineffably familiar with both high culture and low culture that they perceive no difference in value between the two. The enjoyment of devaluing high culture in this way, elsewhere known as devaluing narcissism, is the enjoyment not of desecration itself but of bringing the recognizably superior down to the recognizably inferior. This is simple envy.

The worship of psychopathy is one of the more frustrating aspects of human nature. I’ve given up on arguing with it, as it appears to be an unimpeachable article of faith that tribal and cultural leaders must be as psychopathic, impulsive, and shortsighted as possible. Therefore these traits are held up as the virtues which must be promoted. Everyone wants to be a social media influencer, but only the most psychologically deranged are chosen for this quintessential honor. This only makes sense in light of envy as a driving force, because tearing down the superior is a distinctly short-term decision. If the future is considered, an African tribe that breeds its worst grifters at the expense of its best warriors to prove a point is making an objectively bad decision. The only way it can be supported is if the future is assiduously ignored with ideological certainty.

Only truly broken minds can achieve the purity of thoughtlessness required to live this way 24/7. Thus, the only partially broken study such psychopaths as aspirational and elect the broken to act out follies which they could not themselves justify. Who would dare to grab a live wire, condemning thousands downstream to darkness? Only a man who truly has no concept of the cause and effect nature of reality. But the rest of us would watch the video on Liveleak, that modern altar to progress which puts Aztec pyramids to shame.

This brings us to the lies.

I said “inconsequential lies” before, and that’s not quite right. What I should have said was “inconsequential to the intended audience”. There are people who have an insatiable appetite for lies about nonexistent civilizations among the stars or in different timelines of the multiverse, lies with no consequence to them or anyone else, but they can’t be described as neurotypical. I’m also not talking about those lies which function as costly signals of loyalty, comparable to gang initiation rituals or branding in the Nxivm cult, such as those parents who castrate their own children in strict adherence to the lie that gender is socially constructed. As internet bigbrain Borzoi pointed out, the Ottomans used a similar system:

The Ottoman Empire had a culture of boys, actual children, called köçek who crossdressed and danced in sexually provocative ways and were sexually available. These boys, who were kept as dancers until they grew beards, engaged in belly dances with suggestive expressions and steps described as “coquetteish” to the rapture of male audiences. The scenes described bring to mind the sights one might see at any contemporary gay pride parade or a public library.

Most accounts of pederasty in the Ottoman Empire appear to come from the people who went to see it for themselves, such as Byron with the dancing boys. In the case of the köçek, they were banned by the Ottomans in the 19th century due to the jealous fights that would break out over the attentions for these boys, though one wonders if the increasingly British Orientalist attraction to this phenomenon and their lurid accounts played a role. They were “recruited” around the age of six or seven. How a child can be “recruited” to be a dancing boy is a rhetorical mystery. There seems to be little historical record of how this came about, though it is clear that as Ottoman power and harem culture solidified that dance “recruitment” evolved into ethnic-oriented guilds. It likely developed alongside the devshirme system whereby one child from every 40 non-Muslim households was taken to serve in some bureaucratic or military function of the Ottoman Empire.

It is difficult to see this as anything more than a flex to let the conquered non-Muslim people know the conquerors could turn their boys into a dancing monkey, a girl, and a prostitute and there was nothing they could do about it. Other roles reserved for non-Muslim boys could include the role of the tellak, the washers in the bath houses who could also double up as sex workers for the “clients”. Once the shock of the whole system wore off however, it was not uncommon for non-Muslim families to offer bribes so that their children would be picked to serve some function in the Ottoman system since it was the pathway to a better and more prestigious life, regardless of what it would entail. It was the ideology of the imperial state and the alternative was often being put-upon laborers, regardless if it meant giving over their own children as sexual playthings. There was no more shame; it had internalized itself. The temptation is strong to see parallels between that society and the one most of today.

https://theamericansun.com/2020/01/01/the-feasts-of-shame/

These people are playing a different game, and also can’t be described as neurotypical.

Therefore the most precise label would be “deleterious lies”, lies which appear inconsequential but have subversive consequences hidden just below the surface where they can be sensed well enough to be chosen, but not well enough that they aren’t plausibly deniable. But if we assumed incompetence rather than envy, we’d be left wondering why neurotypicals choose the inconsequential lie with perfect regularity, and why their tastes are perfectly vulgar with the insistent certainty of ideologues. If theory is meaningless, then surely a true theory serves as well as a false one? If all reasoning is motivated by hedonism, then surely fans wouldn’t demand changes that reliably ruin the media they love?

And the simple reason for this is selfishness. Weak people with untrained consciences don’t want what’s best, they want what’s better for them. It’s the simple unwillingness to accept the outcome of a match will grace and sportsmanship. If that means tearing the rules of the game to pieces until society returns to a vulgar existence where incompetents and liars have nearly the same chances of individual reproductive success as heroes and intellectuals, so be it! And if a less foolish tribe that didn’t valorize shortsightedness wipes out our tribe then, in the words of every Boomer, “that’s a problem our children will have to face.” Or to paraphrase Julius Caesar, if anyone in this village thinks he’s better than me then I’ll either cut him down to size or else burn this whole fucker down with everyone in it.

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to weakest as to strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’