Wetiko.

[beyond_godlike]

Most people just follow whoever sounds smart or trustworthy.
Liberals control the media; therefore, the masses will follow those liberals they see on tv.
Since liberal authors prevail, their criticisms of the current political system are all that most are exposed to. Upon reading any of these writings, they perceive genius in the authors and grant them authority. At this point, they reject everyone out of hand because they think they found the smartest person and are unable to distinguish between them and someone smarter.
All liberal leaders espouse their philosophies as manner of manipulation. None truly believe what they preach as the holes are too glaring for them to deny.

[crow]

The smartest person may be the one who knows the least.
My rabbit is better connected to reality than any human I ever met.
But people don't know what to do with statements like that, and so they judge them in whatever way takes their fancy.

I notice this:
There are many, who, upon hearing/reading something they do not recognize, delivered in a way they do not recognize, tend to ridicule it, at the very least. It's all downhill from there, out to the extreme fringes of abuse.

Whereas: one may not recognize something, but retain the ability to recognize that they do not recognize it, and therefore suspend judgement, pending further investigation. Unlike the others who, failing to recognize, are unable to recognize their own failure to recognize. This is wetiko.

Imagine a poorly-tuned radio receiver. The listener hears something, but it sounds like a hiss. Meaningless. He may hurl the radio at the wall, in frustration, or he may investigate the tuning capabilities of the radio.

I stand accused, often, of speaking in riddles. But they are not riddles to me. They are words arranged as clearly as I can manage. Yet it rarely occurs to the listener, that the out-of-tune state may be their responsibility to address, not mine.

I must be an extreme rarity. Hearing something I do not readily recognize, I am naturally drawn to investigate it.
This, I imagine, is how people learn new things. It is how I learn new things. This is my second day after first hearing the term Wetiko.
Whereas others are content to smugly inhabit a fantasy world in which they already know everything, and are thus incapable of learning anything, ever again. Wetiko. Divorced from reality. Static and dead. Without any way in.

Without any way out.

[fallot]

The essence of passive aggressiveness is attack with plausible deniability. For instance, using weasel words like "some people" or "there are many" and letting intended targets froth whilst remaining completely aloof. A retarded social game. Now I don't think you do any of this, but a way to tell the difference would be a bit of straight talking clarity instead of constant exposition of experience derived generalities. Not being crow sometimes I guess...

I don't want to be some kind of tone troll, but I would shun the way leftists tend to speak. What use is all of that posting in whatever forums if the only use is to confirm what you already believe about people. Wetiko is a cool concept, but I would steal it and use it for reactionaries. They are the outcast few who inspire fear and disgust in normals with their crimethink. Plus the imagery is pretty metal.

[NHA]

And as The Book Of Revelations predicted.
Babel. Nobody able to communicate with anybody else.
'no wot I mean?'

A lot of people seem to have problems communicating with conservatives, who tend to make excessive use of metaphor.

Liberals tend not to understand the logic of conservatism; they don't understand what form of morality makes conservative positions moral or what conservative family values have to do with the rest of conservative politics. The reason at bottom is that liberals do not understand the form of metaphorical thought that unifies and makes sense of the full range of conservative values.

http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html


In the case of this wendigo discussion: It's just layer upon layer of metaphor built up. The original wendigo legend itself can be viewed as a metaphor, and then someone lifted it into a spiritual/psychic context, and then again into a political/philosophical one. None of these domain shifts are structure preserving, so it's not hard to imagine people drawing very open ended, confused or wrong conclusions. 

For example in geometry: Projective space is a more general/abstract space than Euclidean space (euclidean space is a subset of it) but things like angles have no meaning in Projective space because of its structure/context. If it were a political metaphor/abstraction/generalization/whatever there would be nothing stopping someone from talking about angles in projective space to prove whatever they fancy.

Math is confusing enough even with its very precise terminology and strictly imposed structure. It's really no wonder, people have no clue what the fuck the other person is talking about, when using natural language, and improvising chains of abstractions with no obligation, or even chance, to verify their consistency.

[crow]

Liberal mindset.

[anal_rapist]

From this article I learned that people are egomaniacs. Is this a bad thing? It's how they motivate themselves to work hard and innovate. They do it for the ego points, like monkeys in cages pressing buttons for grapes.

[NHA]

It's a double edged sword.

On the one hand, it provides a strong drive to accomplish and out-do others. On the other, it prevents one from realizing their own shortcomings, and often results in shifting blame toward others.

[Humanicide]

It's a double edged sword.

On the one hand, it provides a strong drive to accomplish and out-do others. On the other, it prevents one from realizing their own shortcomings, and often results in shifting blame toward others.

Yes, quite. For all of their obliviousness, the left certainly is made up of motivated individuals who are overtly social and able to relate to people. The right needs to figure out how to translate these qualities into their philosophy and interweave it. If this happens, conservatives will have new life.

[prozak]

For all of their obliviousness, the left certainly is made up of motivated individuals who are overtly social and able to relate to people. The right needs to figure out how to translate these qualities into their philosophy and interweave it. If this happens, conservatives will have new life.

Being social is the opposite of being realistic, however.

[fallot]

That is certainly true. I would stress however that anti-socialness is not being realistic either. An intelligent asocialness is probably key.

[Humanicide]

For all of their obliviousness, the left certainly is made up of motivated individuals who are overtly social and able to relate to people. The right needs to figure out how to translate these qualities into their philosophy and interweave it. If this happens, conservatives will have new life.

Being social is the opposite of being realistic, however.

I both agree and do not. Fallot makes a good point. The right is never going to get anywhere by sitting in the corner with its arms crossed whining "BUT I'M THE CORRECT ONE". Social situations inherently need a bit of unrealistic thought/speech. However, the right doesn't have to go full retard. Simply presenting their solutions in a way that is both realistic yet appealing (it won't ever be appealing to everyone, but the right could stand to attract more energetic people) will help greatly.

Intelligence + asocial-ness really seems like a good formula.

[prozak]

The smartest person may be the one who knows the least.

The herd sees genius as "knowing things," meaning the memorization and recitation of facts and figures.

The problem is that often this information is not apropos to the actual underlying question in any situation, and is what Kant would call "hypothetical" information.

All the brains in the world are useless if directed at the wrong question. What our society considers genius specializes in misdirecting itself.

[Ratatosk]

Who is familiar with the term 'Wetiko'?
What does it mean to you?
Do you think you understand it, or do you understand it?

I confess, I was not familiar with the term until today. But I have been aware of the concept for many years.
You might say I am a Blade Runner, in the sense that I am able to instantly detect a lack of authenticity in humans.
A crow-sense, that enables a crow - who is unable to be anything but authentic - to detect a lack of authenticity in others.
Wetiko is the mind-virus that creates leftists out of former humans. While simultaneously causing such people to see themselves as what they mimic, but can never actually be: authentic, living humans.

Anybody who spends plenty of time with self begins to be able to identify the nature of self, in relation to self. America has a good tradition of this, I'd say. It was never for the masses who followed IMO. But then, those are "they who digest" instead of "those who bite".

I'd say there is a good ratio of digesters/biters here, above the statistical average.



On a second note, when did this site become about Leftists. Jeebuz X Christ. IDEA > local instance of idea.

[crow]

As far as I know, this site isn't about leftists. What made you think it was?
On the other hand, leftism seems to be the complete opposite of what this site seems to be about.
Although what this site seems, observably, to be about, is individual point-scoring, and so maybe, unwittingly, it actually has a lot of inherent leftism in it.

Who knows? It is what it is, at any given moment. One may swing from right to left, left to right, without being either one, in general. Personally, I find leftism to be the antithesis of life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. In fact, the antithesis of anything that gives life any actual meaning. While rightism seems somewhat more useful, it too places unconstructive restraints on people.

Rightism is, to me, a decent place to start, on the difficult road to balance. Because it gives humans a chance to stop, somewhere, on their relentless drift towards the left. That is why I lean to the right, whenever I can. It stops me from leaning right off the far left hand side of the map, and falling into the abyss.