You Killed One Hundred Million People (And You Liked It)

a short introduction to a temperamental theory of politics

Nov 11, 2021

You don’t care about my disembodied ideas. No one does. You care about me. Or at least about the complete experience of my finger words’ persona. If I didn’t call things fake and gay and go off on long tangents and be an insane person and have occasionally interesting ideas, you wouldn’t be reading.

And your relationship to me is nothing special. This is how you (and I) are toward everything. It’s not the factoids or arguments that are presented. It’s about how it’s done.

“Vibe” Trumps Facts

You want to read things from people with values and temperaments like you. And you actually ignore things from people with values and temperaments unlike you. The most important factor in determining what content you consume is the “vibe” the creator gives you.1

You consume content that gives off vibes you jive with and ignore content from vibes you don’t jive with. And the people, groups, or institutions who have vibes you don’t jive with were non credible to you long before any factoids were presented.

Humans today are as bigoted as we’ve always been. It’s just—at least in the “first world”—toward temperament and values instead of skin color. You don’t care how smart he is or what college he went to or what highfalutin position he held at some highfalutin previous company. All you care about is that he’s ~~black~~ conservative so you’re picking the ~~white guy~~ liberal instead.

Chicken or Egg?

What exactly makes one drawn to a specific person, product, group, or institution (henceforth referred to as a memeplex because I don’t know a better word) will be different for every individual drawn to it. Though, given that all memeplexes have many traits, there are usually “clusters”—maybe three maybe ten distinct “groups”—of audiences. For any given member, it’s generally only a few of the memeplex’s traits that you really enjoy, most of its traits that are neutral to you, and one or two traits you dislike but not nearly enough to make it’s net-awesomeness lower than the millions of other ones you could direct your emaciated attention span toward.

Look at every Youtube channel you subscribe to. Every blog you read. Every mutual you have on Twitter. It’s multiple traits that work together which attracted you to them. And more importantly multiple traits that you already valued long before you’d ever even encountered this person or channel (or probably before you’d even hit puberty). Any degree to which you are “grown” or “improved” by these people are growth and improvement of things which already existed in you. They simply articulate clearly that which was only an intuition; them a full blossoming of something which in you is only a seedling. Ultimately, the you-after-them and the you-before-them are only a difference in degree not kind.

4chan doesn’t make people trolls. Trolls are drawn to 4chan. Ivy league colleges make people high status. People who obsessed with status are drawn to ivy league colleges. Cities don’t make people progressives. People who are high in openness (love art, novelty, music, and ideals) and low in conscientiousness (don’t care much for family, tradition, consistency, nor routine)—people who are already temperamentally progressive—are drawn to cities.

The same can be said of CNN, Fox News, Cocacola, Call of Duty, Objectivism, The Daily Stormer, or every other memeplex you can think of.

These memeplex’s don’t “change” people. They simply help them master—or at least deeply cultivate—what they already always were.

Because outside of some direct and catastrophic personal trauma (eg your loved one was killed by an illegal immigrant or you were exposed to toxic environmental waste by Evil Corp, etc, something toward which your position could never be mistaken for a “dispassionate and objective review of the facts and data”):

No one ever truly “changes” their values and beliefs. Any degree to which it seems we do is actually that we were using our old memeplexes as the closest approximations we could find to what we intuitively always wanted and valued. Eventually we branch swing our way through various memeplexes to achieve integrity and congruence with what we actually always were. Meaning all “changes” in things like politics or beliefs are not lateral moves, but vertical ones—not across the political spectrum but down, deeper into ourselves and our own innate temperaments and values.

Temperament Is Truth

All this to say: Your temperament, which is mostly innate (or at least is almost completely fixed by the age at which you are capable of any kind of complex thought so might as well be innate) determines what you perceive as “the truth” far more than “facts and data”. Because your temperament determines where you direct your attention—which “vibe” you are attracted to. And given that the quantity of facts and data available for consumption is so stupefyingly vast that you will live your entire life without ever even knowing that 99% of it exists (let alone actually understanding it), your perception of truth is not only inherently but irredeemably biased by your temperament to the point that you are functionally blind.

And worse, all the people around you are blind in the exact same ways you are because that’s literally what you select for. And the bigger problem is that this is entirely reasonable! Remaining in a perpetual state of conflict and confusion is not only frustrating, it also makes it impossible to build anything.

But this “rational action” is also disastrous. Because when you and everyone you know all agree, it only makes you more certain that you have the answer. And when there is literally no dissent, “The Truth” becomes “obvious” to the point that you can’t imagine how anyone who isn’t ignorant, stupid, or evil could conclude anything else.

And when it’s “obvious” that The Truth is on your side, it inevitably becomes equally “obvious” that those who oppose you oppose The Truth. And while you might have some patience for their ignorance and stupidity at first when you can chalk it up to a lack of awareness or just not being the brightest tools in the shed, eventually, after you see enough of them not only fighting against “The Truth” but actively working to undermine it, you will have no choice but to “realize” they are evil. And if they are evil and you don’t actively work to destroy them, then you are evil. Which is impossible.

And so before you know it: Oopsies! You made the 20th century and killed three hundred million people.

And worse: You liked it and want to do it again.

Part two here.

I found this piece because someone called me a postrat the other day and I didn’t know what that was and this the top result when I was trying to figute it out. Good piece. Appreciate cows.