It’s funny that Ci’s insist that DISC cannot be true with pitch-perfect Ci fit-pitching – but that’s what Ci’s do when their compliance displays run up against defiance.Photo by: Isengardt
(Ci Blind? If you just had a rejection reaction – dismissal by scoff, grimace, wince, etc. – you just might be at war with reality.)
But they’ve really tuned in since I started telling them precisely why their lives are so miserable, their romances so unsatisfying and their nurseries so barren.
They’re all Ci, of course, and big-O Objectivism is a Ci Blindness cult: You are accepted – and acceptable – to them and to yourself – to the exact extent you deliver the expected Ic displays of compliance in response to the implacable Ci compliance displays of anyone above you in the hierarchy.
As we just saw with James Damore and Google, every compliance display is in fact simply a demand for either fear or fascination in response, so there is actually nothing of either mamalian empathy or abstract human conceptualization in play, nothing but those two purely-reptilian currencies.
In that respect, there is no such thing as an authentic big-O Objectivist: It’s all a Kabuki theater of Ayn Rand-imitation. They can’t officially know anything she didn’t know – which was a lot, starting with her own ugly Ci habits of mind – and they cannot permit themselves to say anything she wouldn’t say.
Which leaves them sputtering about me, as you might guess. I’ve told them several times how I’m putting them on tilt, yet they can’t stop themselves from tilting away anyway. Poor Yaron Brook hasn’t had a settled gut in more than two years, and I can only imagine what Pope Sneakoff is hearing from the donor base:
“You talked me into killing all of my children and you turned me into an hysterical, vituperative repulsion-bot?!”
That isn’t happening, of course. Ci Blindness is its own best protection against discovering the negative emotional, social and intellectual consequences of Ci Blindness, so while saner people will drift away from big-O Objectivism, the ones who need the crazy will just get crazier over time.
They yell at me in the favorite epithets of The Big O and her choir of castrati: “Subjectivist” and “social metaphysician” and “pragmatist” and who knows what. These are all just ad hominem attacks, of course, first because they are delivered as insults by people who are simply parroting insults, and second because even as insults the claims go undefended. They have no idea what they are rejecting because they don’t examine anything prior to rejecting it.
So what’s the point? They are making Ic displays of compliance to their own higher-ups in the big-O hierarchy by making Ci compliance demands of me. I’m just a token in that game, with all the currencies that matter flowing between the hectoring proselytizers and the priestly class.
But the punters don’t know that. They’ve been told that Ideal Men are masters of reality – except for, you know, people, who are almost all defective, anyway. Imagine a devout Ci coming up against me: I can’t be dominated in the first place, and I know exactly how to put Ci’s on tilt. Frustrated displays escalate and amplify, so I don’t deliberately push ordinary people into making themselves worse. But I don’t do much to stop them, either.
But, of course, after decades of assiduous practice, they are already excellent at making themselves into worse and worse people every single day. One frustrated compliance display after another will do that to you.
The funniest insult they sling at me? Determinism.
I proved free will as ontology, as human cultivation, in 2012. I proved it again, in parallel, as empathy strategies in 2014. And I demonstrated the emergence of those empathy strategies in human cultivation this summer. I invented egoism, and I can dismantle every anegoistic claim – especially determinism.
The people insulting me actually know nothing about my work, so it’s only coincidentally funny that they so often pick the pre-fab Randian epithet that is least applicable to me.
What’s funnier is the process of escalation and amplification we are describing: If big-O Objectivists are not Skinnerite deterministic causality-bots, why is it so easy to initiate this predictable process of escalation and amplification?
Do you see? It’s not sufficient to insist, absurdly, that the proof of big-O Objectivism is to be found in uniformly identical choices, displays and responses – which is the de facto epistemic claim of all Ci creeds: We are all perfectly correct because we are all exactly alike.
Instead, you must go once further and claim that incessantly replicating, escalating and amplifying pointless displays is the best possible defense of free will: Whenever you find yourself having a knee jerk reaction – whenever a shaft of light threatens your Ci Blindness, as above with abortion – have an even bigger knee jerk reaction. Repeat, replicate, escalate and amplify as needed – to quiet your inquiescent mind.
Looks a lot like obsessive-compulsive disorder, don’t it? It’s not, but that kind of obsessive shaling – habituated palliation of unmet emotional needs – runs all through the Ci world. The people who stick it out in big-O Objectivism all end up like Katie Halsey, Ellsworth Toohey’s best-botched victim in The Fountainhead – simultaneously bitchy and repressed.
So how is that not determinism?
Because it’s not. It’s just decades of bad habits layered onto a DISC predisposition that makes it easy to make bad habits worse: Ci. It’s funny that Ci’s insist that DISC cannot be true with pitch-perfect Ci fit-pitching – but that’s what Ci’s do when their compliance displays run up against defiance: It’s Sister Mary Elephants all the way down.
As before, as always, this is easy to fix over time with affectionate displays. In most cases that won’t happen. But if I’m wrong about you, I’m glad. You can learn all about what you’ve gotten wrong by studying me.
Even though they’re not actually addressing me at all – not reading me, not learning from me, not arguing with me, not even interacting with me in any way except as an interchangeable token in a sick Ci/Ic Kabuki display ritual – nevertheless I’m grateful to Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute:
I can’t think about their egregious errors without learning a ton.
But, of course, the biggest mistake they are making is in not learning from me.
And yet – one mind at a time – that’s a correctable nuisance.
