“Get everybody to write their thought examination,” decreed Mao (Zedong), “and write three times, five times, again and again … Tell everyone to spill out every single thing they have ever harbored that is not so good for the Party.”
From “Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and Struggle Sessions
How totalitarianism obliterates free thought”
By Dmitry Fadeyev, about the Cultural Revolution in Communist China, 1966-76
Picture the terror of a public thought examination. Scores of university students, the zealous future of the country, united in a different kind of patriotism, all wearing drab khaki in blue or grey hues. They shout in unison as the deviant is paraded before them in the campus square. The placards have big characters on them that are incomprehensible to most literate people. These protection wards keep away the bad thoughts that could jeopardize the idyllic future that must be in store for them all. It’s not the content of signs that should bother us horrified spectators should we stumble into such mob rule, it’s the feeling behind them, the confidence that holding them gives their waver, a revolutionary, feverous youth never to waiver in their desire for their perfect world. At least until they have the sense to grow up, but that won’t be before, during, or immediately after this brutal struggle session.
And the pitiful person in the spotlight, accused of perpetrating everything wrong with the country to the point of treason, has little hope of escaping unscathed. Their crime: a wrong look, wrong think, and wrong speak, all spoken under duress. Sure, what they muttered during their brutal public humiliation doesn't meet the standards of a true confession: that it's voluntary and made by a competent person who genuinely knows they've committed a wrong. So, what mercy can they expect when the justice after the confession is the same as before it? By its very nature, any such struggle session is an insidious, public tell-all and the victim should expect nothing less from these sudden, vicious enemies.
“Confession” wasn’t always a bad word provided it took place in the right context and when there was a genuine commitment to protect the confessing person after their admission. To be legitimate, the sinner must know they committed some kind of immoral action and after freely speaking of their sins, they could expect the relief to come from their confessor and from their conscience. After all, there is often a sense of relief from confessing, though this university victim clearly won’t be feeling that way after submitting in public.
For thousands of years, across faiths, when trust is given to the priest, shaman, or therapist, the confessed person felt the burden of some amount of moral error lifted from their being. Ideally, their inner secrets aren’t spilled out in front of roaring crowds nor splattered over live TV by unethical pseudo-psychologists who never met them for a formal session. What’s the point of trusting someone if they feel comfortable violating professional standards to judge their non-patient in front of strangers? Instead of this impersonal and immoral form of counseling, trust and power are given to a person who at best wants to save their soul and further the confessed person’s contrition. Often, the supplicant believes the act is helpful, that absolution has cleansed the immoral act.
The good faith between the confessor and their sheep should be mutual or the seeds of alienation are sowed rather quickly. The person confessing believes that admitting their faults will allow them to be absolved of their sins, or if their faults are so grievous and criminal, they’d be allowed some small comfort before receiving the punishment whether on earth or within the pearly gates of the afterlife. With genuine contrition, the sinner examines their conscience and through detail and numbering, list their faults to the other.
Shame and guilt are only factors if a person has a sense of morality and because other people also view the acts as wrong. Therefore, confession is a social construct, it relies on an aware sinner with their own agency, that is the ability to understand what they've done and to make the choice to confess. It also requires a trustworthy, trained confessor, a person of solid character who is worthy to receive the confession and is empowered to pass judgment in good faith. The interaction takes more than one person as only skilled confessors can extract the contrition necessary to make the whole act valid.
Unfortunately, society is not always made of good-natured confessors nor is humanity, born perhaps with original sin or the burden of survival and evolution, truly and universally made of the right moral quality to administer such weighty tasks without serious counterbalancing. The community need not absolve the guilty in the same way as a trusted confessor and in fact, they may shun them, cursing them as the lepers of old with marks of shame, making them anomie, that is, isolated to suffer and separated from the norms of society. Realistically, it seems apparent that mankind is rather complicated, as prone to the pettiness and avariciousness that leads to such irrational suffering as much as its propensity for contrition and self-sacrifice.
What then makes a good confessor, better yet, a saint who suffers for their flock regardless of their sins and when the push of human nature is against doing the right thing? What about when it’s tough or when furthering truths is mildly disconcerting to someone that’s emotionally fragile because of disagreeable politics? And what does such a saint do when 99% of persons believe something irrational and just 1% would make the logical and ethical choice that would better the rest? That leads us to the topic of Volume VIII for it's the Struggle Session, the mob rule, and the imposition of stigma that we must now scrutinize.
The Struggle Session, at least of the public thought examination type above, is a role reversal where the mob becomes the confessor, and the mass of humanity is weighed against the skeptical dissenter. The confession is at least a public harranguing to admit their violations under a torrent of shouts and angry finger pointing. At worst, it's nightmarish, physical torture to receive a confession, much like a suspected terrorist being waterboarded to find that missing evidence of their plotting. At that point, the trust is broken, terror fills the victim, and irrationality rules the day in the form of a torch-bearing, pitchfork wielding mob. Unfortunately for many throughout history, it’s not as fictional as one might hope and why we’re fixated on the struggle session, the public shaming over incorrect thinking and actions.
Afterall, it's not a myopic obsession with the anti-Israel college mobs nor the torch-bearing neo-Confederates at Charlottesville in 2017. Not with the Black Lives Matters "mostly peaceful protesters" killing 24 and inflicting over a billion dollars in damages in 2020, nor the terrible January 6th Riot killing one unarmed MAGA rioter and injuring a number of officers. Our discussion is about what’s most likely to impact you, the reader. You see, the impact is with the everyday interaction where the seeds of far worse struggle sessions are sown. It’s these fruits of the poisonous tree that caused American politics to sour to the point that made 2024 almost unbearable, a year of struggle to many Americans. It’s this poison that caused Americans to be petty, to delete close friends and relatives if they dared to confess their political opinions because of the mere thought that they voted for somebody different than what’s demanded of them.
America in 2024 is dour about the issue of confession and accountability for the actions of important politicians and the average Joes, Jills, and Pats populating this great nation. Not resting its baren loins, the country saw the four time indictment of a former President, also the victim of two assassination attempts, the 14 million primary votes of a sitting, geriatric President cast aside in an ouster by party elites because of his long-hidden infirmity, and the rapid selection of a mediocre vice-president as his replacement in an election that she decisively lost to a person yet to be a convicted felon (since the sentencing still has not been made). It’s all still raw and who knows how quickly America will, if ever, recover its sense of normalcy amidst the hatred, condescension, and angst from both sides. The whiplash of the 2024 election and the aftermath of the results may prove too much for many people and many have already admitted that their apocalyptic mindset is far past that point of conciliation.
So, to use a most hated phrase, let’s not just “be mindful” about the language concerning the election and instead, use this Volume as a recovery guide, a means to exit the malaise of the COVID-19 Era and the violence, war, and disharmony of the single Biden term. No one here is asking for any less rational vigilance with the Second Trump Administration, nor should we paper over the past 4 years of disasters. We just need a temperature more suited to ensuring a better progress than where the spectacular failure of the Democrats in nearly all demographics in 2024 couldn’t ensure.
And there’s no use denying that the messaging on both sides went way over the top. On the one hand, the militant use of (false) historical comparisons about one candidate being a fascist, the next Hitler, does not endear one side to the possibility of living through that bleak future. On the other hand, hordes of invading terrorists pushing into a country with a collapsed national economy, one overseen by billionaire, socialist taskmasters in government doesn’t seem so appealing either.
So, this Volume is an untangling of the hostile language and mentality that has been scrambled by our politicians, thinkers, and media especially after this year. It’s a deep dive into the social consequences of believing the wrong political things or at least when others try to punish their opponents because they believe their enemies are acting them out to imperil everyone. It’s acknowledging the individual burdens of politics on the mind and on our place in a complicated society, and a release of all the possible rational hostages taken by those crying about political events that hardly impact them directly. Most of all, this work is one of recovery and survival regardless of the national turmoil after Election 2024. Hope is important, recovery uncertain, but both are entirely possible if one chooses to do so.
With the serious but not actually oppressive issues America faces today, Maoist China is a most interesting comparison as it full of despair, hopelessness, and stigma, kind of parallel to today, but it was much worse back then. Throughout the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Chairman Mao Zedong desired to have university students-his Red Guards-and anti-traditionalists rise up oftentimes against his own party officials, identify deviant traitors to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and bring a “people’s justice” to them in a hailstorm of invective and violence in raucous public rallies. It's estimated that the death toll from this decade-long blood bath was up to 1.5 million.
According to his Red Guard fanatics and reported in the book The World Turned Upside Down, "anyone who isn't the offspring of a worker, peasant, or revolutionary cadre is going to be called in for a talk with us, and they'll have to shrink before us" (Jisheng, 106). Among the idealist college students before the crackdown, there was the notion that the next generation would correct the failures of the past if they could just clear out the baggage of tradition, which meant humiliating, beating, torturing, and killing people to purge out suspected class traitors. If the youth were indoctrinated early enough, they’d have the ideological tools necessary to toe the correct CCP line from the bottom up. It was up to the intellectual college students to purge Chinese society of the stubborn, the unchanged, and the traditional.
The Cultural Revolution was tragic in many ways and even current Chinese official records describe the mistakes. I identify some of the tactics that were violently successful in oppressing people in China in the 1960s and are occasionally cited by revolutionary college students here in America ever since Mao's "Little Red Book" was published in 1946 yet popularized during the days of the 1960-70s Counterculture, the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, and Black Lives Matter. Those acolytes of Mao who still found use in his Revolution despite the history see the value in obliterating opponents from a bottom-up, groundswell way, basically destroying anyone that disagrees. While turning over justice and the future to any mob is abhorrent to republic-minded citizens of America, the bottom up, one-person at a time approach to change need not be rejected out of hand. We can learn many things from this approach about our irrational subjects.
Moving past the history, our Mirroring version of the Struggle Session has two suffering parties as both the victim is put on trial and the agent may have to endure the injustice as a spectator if they don’t want to become the victim themselves. For us agents, it means being aware of the ongoing purge of dissent in our conversations because of the emotions involved and because of the shared meaning of the offense between the offended and the offender. Thus, the Struggle Session Calculus is what we use to determine how much stigma comes from a person or mirror disputing a subject. The positive feelings of the subject from the interaction and the negative impact on the mirror are what we’re concerned with, and it calculates whether the greater good is having happier subjects and suffering agents, or whether a brisque departure from the conversation is better for the community and for the mirror personally.
Whether fighting with MAGA parents who push their kids in the middle of an argument they can't win and the offender gets blamed for making them cry at the sight of a Joe Biden tee-shirt (an Emotional Support Child) or engaging in a political argument with a Prideflag-displaying Kamala Harris supporter (a Stigmatic Infantile Totem) over their support object, the forms and reasons for stigma are legion. There simply isn't enough time to list and explain all forms of stigma, so we'll use another calculus in order to determine how much displeasure the subject feels about a person disagreeing with them. The greater their displeasure, the more the subject wishes harm on the other person over political issues even if those bad thoughts don't become violent action. If their super intelligent kid cries over a picture or their mighty object, the Pride Flag is thought to be under attack, then why not strike out in a violent rage and make that bully pay?!?
Because stigma is a two-sided street between the "oppressor" and the potential victim, the latter often suppresses their own agency, holding back opinions, avoiding certain places or interactions, and is isolated from greater potential, rational contributions. Afterall, a fundamental aspect of Mirroring philosophy is "who the person is" doesn't matter so much as their movement towards rational thinking and less engagement in emotional, irrational, unproductive, and violent rhetoric. So, the only stigma acceptable to a true, self-selecting mirror is of a person who is so deluded and irrational that they can't ever be productively approached. That person can't ever reach the final steps to end their addiction: to acknowledge the wrongs they committed, to seek the justice and forgiveness in relationships where irrational actions and emotions ruled the day, and finally to be a self-awakened individual who seeks to spread the positive Mirroring message to others as a rational service to the world.
So, to quote the band, Foo Fighters, the masters of describing the relief of confessing to yourself, that you've been played by the politics of today, that others are gaslighting and lying to you, and that to be your best, you need to fight back. That's just what we'll be doing in this Volume, and I promise, it will be the best of me so you can resist our subjects with the best of you:
"I've got another confession, my friend
I'm no fool
I'm getting tired of starting again
Somewhere new
Were you born to resist or be abused?
I swear I'll never give in, I refuse
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best
The best of you?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best
The best of you?
Has someone taken your faith
It's real, the pain you feel
Your trust, you must confess
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best
The best of you?"
"The Best of You," 2005
II. Hedonism and Harmony
“How nicely the bitch (a female dog), sensuality, knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “On Chastity.”
Id-Pp=SuS=Intensity of the Subject’s Harmony or Disharmony minus the Pain of the Mirror= Struggle Session’s net effect.
From the 4th century on, Tertullian and Evagrius Ponticus developed an ever-leaner list of deadly sins, ones that would cast the mortal’s soul into Purgatory, at least in the Latin and Greek Christian traditions. To discuss enjoying life meant going beyond what was socially acceptable and the concept of pleasure equaling damnation still lingers. It often has a negative connotation as an image is conjured of carnal lust, where a degenerate fornicates without abandon, the glutton enjoys more than what the community says they deserve, and the envious covets the products and persons around them that they haven't yet gotten. There’s also a communal reaction against such pleasure as it’s seen as selfish and unvirtuous. The person is too concerned with themselves and what they want: sex, money, fancy sneakers, or something owned by someone else. The greater good of the community can go to Hell.
Utilitarian philosophers from the 18th and 19th centuries, like Jeremy Bentham, believed they could find objective, universal truths in their calculations. Yet, their rational minds were conflicted by the issue of individual selfish desires, the pleasure part of Hedonism, and the impact that those yearnings could have on society. So, they struggled for a greater good and while being rational, they tried to find a way to calculate the impact of pleasure on social action. According to Andrew Moore (2019), Hedonism is often conflated with motivational egoism, in that our selfish desires push us because they are in our own individual self-interest. While philosophers certainly can debate if this individual motivation truly is what pushes us towards pleasure, for Mirroring, Harmony is more inclusive and incorporates individual decision-making and the complex contexts within which mirroring takes place.
We need something useful for 2024, so the Struggle Session Calculus is an alteration Bentham’s formula, whereby the duration, intensity, purity, certainty, proximity, richness, and extent of harmony, or in Bentham’s terminology pleasure or pain, are observed and understood by mirrors to debate, mirror, or leave a conversation if unfruitful. His calculus does not, however, signify an objective reality that can apply to all people. Instead, it signifies a way of identifying the feelings of our subjects and it provides a gut check for the mirror themself as the pain may not be worth the harmony garnered.
Unlike Bentham’s would-be objective calculus, Struggle Sessions (SS) are complex, subjective determinations by the mirroring agent based on more than pleasure or pain. Instead, the mirror must weigh the Harmony gained by mirroring the subject versus the negative effect on themselves of staying in the conversation and the possible stigma resulting from failing to agree or disagree with the desired speech/conduct of the group. So, in plain terms, the "pleasure" is the rough foundation for our "Harmony," the more comprehensive vision of unity and happiness our subjects feel among others, and "pain" is the negative emotional and physical effects of a Struggle Session (SS), the interaction of agents, subjects, and potential victims, often resulting in stigma.
The purpose of a SS is to leave the subjects with as much Harmony or in Bentham’s parlance “pleasure” while minimizing the displeasure of the mirroring agent. The Struggle Session calculus is easy to use and is the intensity of the Subject’s Harmony minus the Pain of the Mirror equals Struggle Session’s net effect. The agent determines the intensity of the subject's feelings, whether they're enjoying themselves at the expense of others or whether their rage is building to a trainwreck level. The agent then determines their own emotional stability, whether they're being punished with a long lecture justifying Luigi Mangione's 2024 murder of a healthcare CEO (Brian Thompson) because the healthcare industry as a whole is broken. If the pain of the agent is less than the harmony derived from listening to such an illogical argument, then it might benefit them to stay and endure it.
However, if the subject is so irrational so as to justify further violence, well, mirroring strictly avoids it and anything that can bring physical harm to others during or as a result of the political discussion. The SS calculus is equally dependent on the pain that an agent feels so if it's offensive to listen to or read such screeds, then leave so you aren't targeted for supporting rich people and stalked in the streets for also "oppressing the sick." The mirror should exit in a way that brings about the least amount of blowback for not accepting the justification of murder using logical fallacies. Don't think we're done with that Luigi devil as he'll reappear later with Mirror Misers and those dastardly individuals jumping through hoops to justify their beliefs.
So, applying the SS Calculus, an illogical subject derives immense pleasure from seeing a CEO/father gunned down in the street because someone else was denied healthcare coverage and because there's a focus on a good looking "freedom fighter" (Luigi Mangione) and not enough focus on dead children and school shooting victims. The agent sees the pleasure that their subject feels over this murder, but as the conversation escalates into further class-warfare and warped gun control mindlessness, the mirror comes up with an excuse and leaves.
The net effect is that the subject got to vent, they can assume that by listening, letting them lust over an attractive murderer, and by the mirror not rejecting their fallacies, the agent was in harmony with them. And upon leaving the conversation, the agent who was already concerned and aware of the healthcare industry's failures can then go and continue their research that can lead to beneficial change for health care insurance, at minimum writing a letter to a sympathetic congressperson to create legislation or joining/organizing an interest group to combat the dollars spent by the big insurance industry. Already aware of these mass shootings, they can also shift the focus to schools, adding layers of protection to public settings, advocating for gun control, while not cheapening the life of anyone even if they happen to be a CEO of a reviled, but still necessary industry.
The goal of Mirroring is to leave every irrational, political conversation with as little damage to the participants as possible. Whether the context of the discussion favors something irrational, and the subject can see the light and find the righteous, rational path going forward, or whether that person is too far gone into the bubble remains to be seen by the agent. Therefore, the struggle is a push to find the maximum Harmony while limiting any negative effects. It's also literally a struggle for a rationally minded agent to suffer through the illogic of these type debates.
However, Harmony itself comes not from the ethereal, heavenly, and mysterious places of the universe, but the social-emotional feelings of pleasure, created by the brain and the body, that stimulate the individual if they're happy or push them to rage if they're being disputed. The effect of the denial of desires means conflict with a subject’s emotions and the belief that ideas are shared. This is unsettling to a subject who has invested so much emotion and their core identity into an argument. This form of pleasure isn’t sex or some greater euphoria, but a firm belief that others would react similarly to the subject and almost exactly as expected.
From Volume IV (2020), the Harmony Havens are the inner most bubble of Identity Safety where all of the ideological, physical, and social boxes are checked. This is the ultimate form of letting one's guard down, where there is near total trust that the beliefs of peers are identical. It's where the most agreement is to be found, where the members feel the most pleasure in sync with each other when an evil, "False" person suffers and seems defeated.
And it all seems performative, as the subjects and victims are playing roles they believe society wants them to play. Act utilitarianism is the notion from Bentham that one could measure the amount of pain or pleasure resulting from a certain action. A pragmatist Mirror would have trouble accepting a universal, objective terminology that could be used across people that universally signifies the action’s actual, calculable pain or pleasure. However, they would be able to accept that those terms befitting pain/pleasure could be changed to suit the people involved as the pragmatist adapts and if need be, discards fossil terms and beliefs that grow past their usefulness. Mirrors would see the action and the result as part of a subjective interaction between individuals. Because there is no mind-warping, because we can’t jump into the other person’s head, we can only derive knowledge of the pain or pleasure from speech, action, or the body language of the person experiencing the pain/pleasure.
We might accept the fact that the response from our subjects is phenomenal, rather than those feelings are confined to the reality and senses of the individual experiencing them. We accept this in part. There is no way for the mirrors to pluck out the emotional response, to quantify those feelings, and then in a totally rational way, decide what’s best for those involved because of the mind-warping fallacy. There is an inevitable and occasionally catastrophic amount of error in a mirror judging such interactions. However, the marginal benefit of using mirroring to decide the Harmony resulting from an irrational interaction and the departure of the mirror from the conversation if it’s unproductive is vastly superior to engaging in irrationality or suffering stigma as a blowback from disputing our subjects.
Mirroring is also a superior way of looking at pleasure and pain because it doesn’t require an atomistic explanation of what those emotions are. All that matters is that people believe they or others are experiencing them in a context. We can’t be held responsible for mirroring emotions because we can’t accurately detect them in the rational sort of way a psychologist or therapist might. It's not as if even the professionals can permanently hook a fully functional individual up to a brain scan and map their emotions, pleasures, and displeasures every moment of every day.
Mirrors are not professionals, better or worse, nor idiots or geniuses all. We have to work with the tools each of us are granted because after all, we self-select and realize for ourselves how much time is wasted and how much better society can be if it's just a little more rational. With no cookie-cutter mirror agent, our recourse is to either try to wade past the painful roadblocks because of autonomy in hopes that something better will result or to leave the conversation because the emotional line has been crossed such that the mirror believes they can no longer make progress.
Though not quantifiable in Mirroring, the elements of Bentham’s calculus are still instructive as they essentially describe the impact of a context on the mirror and the subjects. The duration involves the amount of time the subject experiences Harmony or worsening feelings to the point of a state of war. It's also the time spent in the conversation, the longer and more irrational the less pleasure it provides for the agent. The purpose is for the mirror to avoid the conversation without drawing attention to their disapproval of the irrational methods. The duration of mirroring should be as short as necessary so as to avoid stigma for being one of the opposition or to be snookered into believing the nonsense.
The intensity refers to the amount or the extent of Harmony the mirror perceives coming from the subject at the same time as minimizing the displeasure all parties feel. The purpose is maximum Harmony. Because the SS Calculus is the net effect, both Harmony and Mirror Displeasure need to be analyzed using our modification of Bentham’s seven elements. Intensity can also be judged on its absence. Like with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters demanding speech in the form of raising a fist in solidarity against "the oppression of the white man," failing to show the required intensity can also lead to displeasure and stigma.
The inner most core of Identity Safety in Mirroring is the purity test. All outer rings of the bubble have been met: physical attributes like race and gender, speech attributes like social media posts or physical ideology (physical expressions of belief), and finally the core comprised of acceptable, known relationships and the harmonious behavior of those in the bubble, all are acceptable. It’s in this innermost circle that Harmony is at its greatest as there is almost no doubt about the purity of the individuals.
For some context, in the traditional Hindu caste system in India, those betraying the purity test and switching ideologies are basically non-people. Using a Portuguese word, the caste system is actually an ordering of society based on two Hindu concepts: varna and jati. Varna is a social ranking system that orders individuals at birth into stratified groups like priests, military/rulers, or workmen. The jati is a more nuanced grouping like a tribe that one is also born into that further clarifies the individual’s position in traditional Indian Hindu society. This grouping is important for us because of the caste's immutability. It’s almost impossible to move between castes without dying and being reborn because that would imply that reincarnation isn’t the only answer to change one's destiny. In order to move up in reincarnation levels to the end game of enlightenment, a detachment from the physical and from desires, and the attainment of pure Harmony, an individual must maintain the purity of their caste and perform and sustain the order of the universe.
Though Mirroring is not a religion, and Hinduism is an important and old religion that deserves respect regardless of anything we do here, Mirroring concerns itself not with the purity of anyone other than what would concern our subjects and with the desired purity of logical arguments and rational thinking. So, if they're made happier because the people around them are pure enough, then that is our concern, not with our own narrow-minded judgement of them. This level of purity is exactly the point Mirroring tries to get across.
A quick note on purity with someone that will appear again and again: MSNBC's Joy Reid irrationally ascribes a motive to the impurity of those who dared to vote differently than her. Because the outcome is so serious to her and because the desired level of purity of white women is not acceptable, they deserve to be alienated on account of race (racism?) and if publicly announcing their support for Trump, they’re stigmatized. This shows the depth of her irrational displeasure and her spiteful calls for stigma for people based on identity is what we'll explore in other sections. So, table Ms. Reid for now because I've got a lot more to say about her in reference to irrational debaters and political stigma.
Certainty is clearly important in politics. An opposing impulse of certainty is denialism, certainly a factor when a Mirror Miser is around since they won't devote any extra brainpower to something true that's simply not possible in their world. Trump’s denialism in 2020 is a good example of the certainty turning into denialism. He was convinced that phantom votes appeared in the wee hours of the night and that his enemies stole the election from him. His pleasure was snatched away, and that defeat was made worse because the victory seemed within his grasp. When someone is certain of something, oftentimes, they can't broker any other options, but conspiracies built upon those lies (that the 2020 Election was stolen). The greater the certainty backing up the pleasure (of an election victory) especially when doubling or tripling down on that outcome in a political knife fight like America had never seen before, the greater the fall into denialism, and angry/irrational conduct. That tomfoolery led to the January 6th Riot and the extremely vigorous persecution of his movement (which may have caused the boomerang and his powerful resurgence in 2024).
There was also the certainty among Kamala Harris supporters in 2024 that they were going to win in a landslide despite the polling bias in favor of Democrats, the historically high poll numbers for Trump which perfectly translated into the popular vote win if they were a balanced polling agency like Atlas Intel or a neutral polling aggregate like RealClearPolitics. Then there was the willful ignorance of Biden's unpopularity and the attempt to both distance and cradle him at the same time, while Kamala possessed a notorious inability to explain why she was running after so many years in politics.
All those explanations are valid, but among the worst actors of certainty to the point of delusion was “Historian” Allan Lichtman. He was so historically certain that he mortgaged his credibility on his “keys,” subjectively determined abstractions that he used to characterize the trends in the electorate that were supposed to be more accurate than polling aggregates like RealClearPolitics, which had a near perfect record in this election, or his enemy Nate Silver at 538, which also failed to predict the correct outcome but used data instead of just abstractions. The grief was apparent on his face as he livecast on election night. It wasn't just because the person many Democrats spent the election labeling as the "American Hitler" won, but because they had invested so much in the belief that he could never win, and that Kamala was likeable to the American public when she wasn't.
They invested so heavily in the "democracy is on the line narrative," then when democracy was actually exercised, they chalked the outcome up to Trump's deception, racism despite every demographic but black women increasing support for him, and other excuses after the fact. They also cynically and derisively attacked the public for caring about pesky issues like their pocketbooks and not being lied to instead of issues important to Democrats like increasing abortions and providing services for the undocumented. The public was lukewarm about abortion as a driving cause to vote and they never backed the Democrats on providing for immigrants while inflation hit the people hard living here legally. That Lichtman's subjective keys couldn't even pick up the major issues in the election when they were glaring at him and Kamala supporters shows the depth of his delusion and the power that certainty carries for the irrational. Certainty also carries with it a bit of delusion, which in politics can lead to devastating miscalculations. More on delusion and its two forms, micro and macrodeludes later.
Closeness to the pleasure or as Bentham calls it “propinquity” is essentially the ability to derive satisfaction from it. In a conversation, a Debate Monster might derive immense satisfaction from humiliating a debate opponent in close quarters and so dominating the discussion by force of will. On the internet, a troll might derive simple satisfaction from gumming up a chat board with inflammatory and irrational posts.
For Mirrors, closeness needs only be the proximity to the source of the satisfaction: an intimate, close quarters confrontation in a restaurant with a stranger, a shouting match at arms length between protesters and counter-protesters on the street, or even staring at a computer screen and watching an eruption on a post. Witnessing a national event like the defeat of Trump in 2020 led to joy, crying, and fireworks in the street among a portion of 52% of the country, aka Biden's voters. They could also be sitting at home, sitting on the internet conversing with their internet bubble on social media, or amidst a crowd of Biden supporters celebrating the AP’s long-awaited declaration that the long race and their personal nightmare was over. All that matters is that they internalize the Harmony (pleasure or displeasure) as being within their grasp.
Like a great Dionysian festival, once pleasure is in grasp, there’s always the demand for more. In politics especially our Mirroring Politics from Volume VI, power is the aphrodisiac, the motivator to end opposition as much as possible, to stop the buzzkill, and get more pleasure. Oftentimes, this leads to the opposition paradox that’s rarely overcome and that I wrote about in previous volumes.
In America, many presidents overstep their mandate, the afterglow of the Inauguration and its bump, often pushing far past the willingness of the public to accept their policies. For Bill Clinton, it was healthcare. For Barack Obama, it was also healthcare though he was at least successful in passing something (Affordable Care Act). For Trump it was the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey if he had any goodwill at all from the hostile bureaucracy and mostly negative media. For Biden, it was the Build Back Better Plan, the January 6th prosecutions, and the COVID mandates that largely demolished the goodwill he had scraped together after the turmoil of 2020. These national examples suggest a limit to what others will allow in terms of a power dynamic; how much pleasure one ideological grouping is allowed to have.
That leads us to the last element of the Struggle Session Calculus: extent. Seen nationally, this could show how large the voting margin of victory was. Biden defeated Trump by not just a few votes but by eight million giving him unimaginable democratic power even though his actual solid win occurred in the electoral college because of a slight margin of 40,000 votes spread across the swing states. So, the extent of the political pleasure for Democrats is the popular vote enabling them to pursue “FDR-like,” or historic levels of change. However, the defeated minority might point to the narrow margin of victory in the electoral college where it actually counted to justify opposition to radical change from the Biden Administration.
Likewise in 2024, Trump could point to historical wins in the popular vote for a Republican and a greater electoral win than Biden in 2020, capturing the Senate. Democrats could say the popular vote was much less than Biden’s and Republicans hold the narrowest of leads in the House of Representatives. The Trump people will argue this is a mandate because of the size of their victory. The smiles on their faces and the bold, if that's the right word, cabinet picks indicate just how much they believe they were victorious. And Democrats, saddened and maybe slightly chastened, will look at their loss and must decide as a party if they received the message the public delivered or if they'll continue to NeverTrump and #Resistance for four more years. Much of those are rational calculations, but many are mixed up in the euphoria of winning or the despondency of seeing "Adolf Trump Hitler" winning big time despite all of their dollars and efforts.
III. Initiation: Identity Safety and Community Harmony
"Mrs. Livingston: And then Pinocchio came out of his plastic bubble and touched the filthy little whore next door and died. The End!"
"Bubble Boy," 2001.
Picture the best and brightest of their generation, many of them slave owners, gathering outside the lodge and entering together. Through a series of handshakes, hand symbols, and passwords, these secret members perform a modest ritual by pre-modern standards. They’re the freemasons, important to history, but not as important as the conspiracy theorists would have us believe.
There's something interesting and intense about secret groups like the freemasons even if their actual members are just humans with some strange symbolic practices. The core of bringing them up is the idea of initiation ritual, the process of joining a select group even if they're not slitting palms and combining their blood with a vow of loyalty. Across the world, most initiation rituals are associated with the coming of age right around the time before puberty like with the Quinceañero and Quinceañera for youth. Across cultures, males are separated from women, receiving knowledge about sex from the outside world, while women lean on other women especially in their immediate family to learn.
Initiation rituals can also highlight virtuous qualities like bravery and honor like the “counting coup.” This display was when a Plains Indian touched an enemy without being harmed or killed. The more counts of touching on the enemy, the more honor. Completing this ritual allows the initiation of the person into the warrior elite especially after the horse increased their mobility on the battlefield. What of our subject's warrior elite? How does one join the club, help lead the charge of the Struggle Session to root out traitorous interlopers, and avoid the stigma that the enemies deserve before being symbolically slain?
For us, a Safespace community is more select than a heterogenous community, which is the reality of society that most people have to contend with. The Safespace community is any group of people that have common identity characteristics but have the requirement that protects members even when something false would deflate the unity of the group if it were proven to them. They have a chimera of Harmony which is really peace. They act in concert with each other and share enough physical characteristics to appear uniform to outsiders. They're of similar beliefs and can generally finish each other's sentences when it comes to important issues of the day.
The Initial Ritual is both dangerous and determinative for mirrors as they may suffer stigma and be punished for not agreeing with their subjects. Mirrors are like amateur anthropologists in that we observe the culture of our subjects and attempt to influence them only when we can have a rational benefit. Once you become a self-aware mirror, you become an incorporated member of the Mirroring community, an exclusive, constantly self-correcting community.
However, agents do not observe our subjects in stasis, that is, they aren’t frozen actors or objects of the past. Instead, we must decide in the situation itself (context). In Volume VI, a Safespace Parlor is the abstract environment, part of the context, that is meant to be most conducive to harmony and restrictive of those with a different, non-conforming view or ideology. They often take one of two forms: originalist and revisionist. Both limit opposition, but the former considers itself the protectors of tradition, the existing correct and moral belief while the latter wants to scrap perceived barriers both abstract and real. Revisionists often use language like marginalized, forgotten, oppressed, or victimized. Medium concentric circle is defined by outward characteristics that determine eligibility or rejection by those setting up the Parlor. They can deny entry if the person has a “I’m with Her” Kamala Harris sticker or a MAGA hat. These obvious characteristics are obvious stigmatizers.
Before we get the layers of a Safespace community and the initiation rituals let's first discuss persona non grata, that is those people that are facially unacceptable for entrance and who have become non-people. According to Louie Villalobos, his whole identity is wrapped up in the outcome of the 2024 Election and his safety and those of like-minded individuals are also threatened by the election of Trump. He wrote "this, my friends, is about the core beliefs we all hold near and dear to our identity." Note, his inclusion refers to friends who share the core beliefs "we all" hold dear. You're not included in the "friends" and "we" if you don't share his dearly held beliefs.
He continues by listing his core beliefs: "This is about what each side believes people can do in their own lives. This is about who can exist and where they’re allowed to exist. This is about what our children will be taught in schools. This is about whether or not a woman and her doctor have control of their health care decisions.....” As if taking a cue from my Lies from the Table Cloth narratives or LiFT from Volume IV (2020) and from Identity Safety in a Space or ISiS from Volume VI (2022), Villalobos states clearly that he can’t even be in the same space as those that disagree with him, a tell-tale sign that he's not only irrational, but an irreconcilable subject for mirroring. He can’t be persuaded and if for some odd reason you really wanted to be over his house to sup with such a miserable, irrational fanatic, you had better keep your election views quiet and secret from his trawling eyes.
For him, the space he's sharing with others requires the purity test so important to the Struggle Session calculus and to his own pleasure and happiness, although it's unlikely he has many serious, ideological opponents as close friends and family who'd be invited anyways. He wrote “Why would I sit at the same table and pass the stuffing around with those voters on Thanksgiving? I’m not even judging or dismissing people who voted for that." Of course he is, he's just deluded about his own rhetoric since he has little concept of how the other side thinks. Dismissing his own ignorance, to him "it makes sense to me that people who have no connection to that community would follow the Trumpian scare tactics and vote for that.” This is ironic because he has about as much connection to the MAGA voter as they do to his community, or rather than a community it should be called a safety bubble where unwelcome people and political views are ruthlessly kept away probably because his fragile ego and intellectual abilities can't handle actual contrary opinions.
He clearly lacks an understanding of his enemy Safety Community and based on the results of the election he's so distraught over, perhaps his own identity group isn't as broad in extent as he imagines it to be. He seems to be macrodeluded, that is, he's lying to himself about the big issues when he argues that his views represent the whole group (Mexican-American). Even though he clearly doesn't understand, he continues to insist he does by writing “It honestly does [make sense to him]. It’s easy to dismiss members of a community you don’t know. Now, it makes no sense that people from that community would vote for it, but everybody had a decision to make." This is illustrative of ISiS. Though he’s completely unaware that he dismisses members of a community he doesn’t know or understand (Trump voters), he believes his identity as a Mexican American is threatened because of voters, which is a core of his Identity Safety that he will not allow to be violated.
Trump voters aren’t allowed in his safe space parlor, his besieged, liberal home. This is despite his attempt to change the label of his Holiday dinner table to one for Mexican American ideologues of similar ilk, or even to purge his social media of traitors, as “X” (formerly Twitter) is the home of Elon Musk’s version of free speech, thus not an acceptable Parlor for him any longer. He chose to use Bluey instead because that version of speech is protective of his obviously very sensitive and irrational layers of identity.
So, Mr. Villalobos is the perfect example of the role of politics and protecting identity safety, of not allowing contrary individuals to sit at the same dinner table (ISiS), and the call for stigma after an unpleasant outcome in Election 2024. Reintroducing the Safespace Identity Bubble, he has excluded more people in the country than agree with him. By keeping Thanksgiving MAGA free, he's irrationally protecting the outermost circle of his safety by declaring enemies of 49.9% of the population to 48.4% on his side. By limiting his holiday to his most important interest group, he's further closing his second circle to his ethnic group based on his perception of what it means to be an authentic Mexican-American.
Finally, by swiping away any of that ethnic group who dared vote for Trump, he's declaring his betrayal at the inauthentic Mexican-Americans as they violate the most important inner circle of Identity Safety. Because they don't understand the depths of their betrayal, he can't suffer to invite Mexican-American Trump supporters to dine with him because of their traitorous and self-defeating election decisions. Thus, the innermost circle is where an interloper can run into the greatest trouble. This is the smallest, Innermost Circle of Speech Boundaries Enforcement. It’s the actual content of the speech or conduct that matters to someone like Villalobos, whereas a sensed characteristic is clearer in terms of its message. This innermost circle imposes a duty to obey on the members of the conversation, the deeper going into the Parlor the greater the potential for stigma. One should recall that a Parlay is the approved content of a speech and in this inner circle, speech must be the most harmonious and border on identical content.
Areas of Initiation into a Safespace Identity Bubble:
Outer Core, Past the Enemy Gauntlet: Large Outer circle representing Agreeable Speech Environment (a Parlor designed to ease enforcement and prevent noncompliance)
Explanation: Easiest to initiate is the large outer layer and also the least individualized as the person is subsumed into the group based on the most basic qualities in order to join. It’s like racing past an obvious common enemy hitting you with sticks like the Iroquois tribes used to with their captives. Like-minded individuals can’t always control the space where a debate is to take place, though they may try to prevent entry by seizing microphones, locking doors, shouting down opponents, and allowing the most obvious allies to enter the first safety circle.
Keys to Initiation:
Heroism: Public defense of a group or ideas taken to represent a group in the face of enemies. Could be in public as part of a protest where views are obscured in favor of common chants or songs and where arguments are largely not important. It could also be with trite comments or likes/dislikes on Facebook , Twitter/X, or other social media. Standing up for someone against a disadvantaged ally who has some remote ideological similarity earns the hero enough plaudits to enter the first layer of safety.
Alliances: This level is where allies can be found because they share even the most tangential agreement. For example: Right to Life: Republicans, Reproductive Rights: Democrats.
2nd Core: Welcomed into the Tribe: Medium Secondary Inner Circle of Shared Heroism:
Explanation: An act of compliance through ideology, physical, or identity characteristics. Ideology is associated with these obvious characteristics, or the person must clearly demonstrate that they do not share the stereotypical views if they want access to an obviously different group. So, white liberal males must go out of their way to show their allegiance in ways that transcend their obvious characteristics like joining "Men for Kamala" to be accepted into the same village as minority, women Democrats. Or, for Republicans, it could be an environmental liberal like RFK Jr. or tech titan Elon Musk joining the Trump side and stumping for him, despite betraying the vast majority of their previous views to support him.
Keys to Initiation:
Stereotypical Physical Characteristics: Race, gender, ethnicity, and other obvious physical characteristics that most in society assume mean membership in this group.
Ingenuity: Stating an acceptable ideological position in a different though not new way.
Extraordinarily Normative Display: The individual is expected to submit to the wishes of the group in ways that go beyond whatever might be holding back their membership. They must make normative displays, or acts of total submission/agreement, to show loyalty to the group especially if they lack a common factor of identity like race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, etc. The more submissive, the more their actions show they've surrendered their agency to the group, the more they're likely to be accepted.
Barriers: Obvious political speech in opposition to the Safespace Bubble. Guilt by association, group shaming/blaming based on stereotypes. For example: being spotted at a Trump rally, donating to Kamala Harris, receiving the backing of George Soros or Elon Musk.
3rd Core: At the Council Fire of Chiefs, the Smallest, Innermost Circle of Speech Boundaries Enforcement
Explanation: All boxes must be checked including the speech and conduct of the individual, beyond simply parroting other people as if faking it. There is a severe duty to obey the Parlay, or the approved content and oppose violators. Not only are the basics long confirmed so as to be without question, the race, ethnicity, gender, or other physical characteristics are beyond reproach, but the actual content and conduct of speech, the Parlay, though illogical or fallacious, the same opinions can be found with all loyal members. Because this is the most trusted part of identity, betrayal means lost purity, extreme displeasure on the hedonism scale, and it's the costliest when coming from someone within the inner circle.
Keys to Initiation:
Hedonistic Requirements Met: Purity, Certainty, Extent etc: This is where Mr. Villalabos and Ms. Reid are policing the hardest and where the most pleasure and displeasure can be found. This is where the content matters the most, where the Parlay, the actual words and conduct must be consistent with those of the subject. Therefore, no untouchables will be allowed into this inner caste. Only this group can receive the pleasure of Enlightenment.
Loyalty: This layer is only for the most trusted peers. While there may be a hierarchy in terms of importance and who is allowed to speak, who has authority, most of the people agree anyways. Any serious disagreement is a threat to the Parlay, to the uniformity of ideological content, and it jeopardizes the Parlor that was set up to protect the council of subjects and especially their identity safety. Were a Mexican-American, Democratic-leaning man make it this far after earning the trust of the other layers only to disclose that he voted for Trump in 2024, well, the eruption of Villalobos at the treason would be apocalyptic.
Barriers: Mistrust: This layer has the most effect preventing entry. Any one of the hedonistic labels can be a barrier to entry for those outsiders. This is, after all, the citadel of ideology, where only the most trusted persons may enter. Though previously matching in ideology about 90% of the time, though both are white and come from power and money, Liz Cheney would not be allowed entry into Trump's inner bubble.
To further analyze these layers, let’s use one example from the “5 Key Takeaways” and further the example of the happiness or despair after Election 2024. Shortly after and much like Villalobos, Joy Reid claimed in the aftermath of Election 2024 that because a majority of white women (53%) voted for Donald Trump, in larger numbers than 4 years ago, and that Trump won an electoral landslide and the popular vote for Republicans for the first time since 2004, black women (race and gender), the primary identity circle that Reid uses as her gatekeeper for social contact have been betrayed. Reid stated that “white women should keep any invites “among their own friends……“I think Black women are now on the ‘save Black women,’ ‘prioritize Black men’ and ‘prioritize Black communities, Black businesses’ and ... you know, the Black spaces,” Reid said. “But ‘save America,’ ‘save the Democratic Party’ – yeah, I don’t think that’s happening.” White women shouldn’t expect black women to show up to protests nor should black women be expected to get past their reservations about their white counterparts any time soon. Her resounding vote for the first woman president of color matches only with black women who supported Kamala Harris 89% to 10%.
She is arguing for her own threatened identity safety and that all others can't be trusted, which is the excluding circles the first, outer layer. No one that's white and male is being let into her village on Christmas. And if you happen to make it past the village mote and get inside her estate, you better be a woman. Should you be blessed enough to be born a woman, at least that she can tell, then if you think you're getting out of the public stockades for some ritual shaming and rotten vegetable throwing because 47% of you didn't do enough to get Kamala Harris elected, then you must dreaming. You're probably a white woman and though you're represented by a statistic instead of having your own agency and passionately believing in the Democrats' message just as much as Reid, well that's not good enough. Though you might align with Reid in every way but skin color, you're not invited to sit at her (delusional and racist) council fire. You're just lucky to be hanging outside her mansion, to be pointed out by Reid and blamed for the failures, and well, ladies, just take your lumps if you aren't racist.
Her extreme rhetoric, even if it’s not what she actually follows in practice nor based on her weak viewership, is very representative of public opinion, but it's influential enough to convince an audience of her irrational opinions and more influential than this blog is yet. This is despite her demands of segregation of the races, for if black women don’t separate from white women, who only share the gender identity, then how much more betrayal should her abstract group expect from that 53% of just the general electorate in 2024, which had a turnout rate of 63.68% out of the total 244,666,890 eligible voters in the country. White Women made up about 40% of the total so 146,800,134 potential viewers of her MSNBC show are collaborationists with fascists and are essentially dead to her.
So, it just might be an emotional melt down, not a serious threat, and influential to a dismally small, fanatic TV audience, however, Reid is willing to write off in some way ALL white women from collaboration because a slight majority of one race and gender group chose differently than her. Holding to her own self-imposed imperative she’d also have to write off the 47% (of white Kamala supporters) who agreed with her. How's that for you? A fiercely defended castle, rife with racism and condescension. If you're expected to get initiated in the Joy Reid Council to rule America, you had better be black, female, and have vigorously supported Kamala Harris or you can kiss your chances goodbye of having any say.
IV. Stigma for Dummies
“We were told that we needed to use violence to destroy a class, spiritually and physically. That was justification enough for torturing someone. They weren’t considered human anymore. If they were the enemy, they deserved to be strangled to death, and they deserved to be tortured. This was the education we received… the Cultural Revolution brought out the worst in people and the worst in the political system.”
Xi Qinsheng, former Red Guard.
Stigma Calculus:
-I x Pp= Std=Intensity of the Subject’s displeasure/pain over a political issue (negative value) times the pleasure/happiness of the ideological opponent or Mirror= Desired Severity of the stigma.
Stigma is about pain and suffering, like it or not. It's about taking the abstractions in our minds and savaging others because the real people out there don't meet idealistic our expectations. It need not be the horrors of the Kristallnacht of Nazi Germany or the Chinese Cultural Revolution where the world was turned upside down and the neighbor turns you in to an oppressive force before you do it first. For all the heartache and broken lives, the McCarthy Era of the 1950s here in the in the US pales in comparison to actual violent, unjust, and violent mass paranoia. And what we have in America now is nowhere near the turmoil of any of those eras, nor even the 1950s where suspected communists were ejected from their jobs and some were shunned, blacklisted, or even pushed to suicide. McCarthyism is not parallel to other mass stigmatizing movements, but the Trump/Biden Era isn't even remotely close to that anti-communist fervor of the past. Not even the COVID snitch lines, the reporting of unmasked dog walkers, the purging of unvaccinated essential workers, nor the jailing of protesters who breathed the same air as the Capitol on January 6th approach the sometimes-unjust treatment of suspected Soviet spies.
Why bring up stigma and compare it to the struggle session of China then? Why do violent mass movements matter for us? Well, we need to understand the subject's impulse, to dominate in a conversation, to control the conversation and to punish others for wrong political views. Therefore, stigma is quite simple as it's deriving pleasure from other people's pain over political disagreements. It’s a defensive safety bubble around the subject and the negative reaction to any threat that both the subject and the victims understand. In psychology, validation is what people use to gain approval from others. With stigma, de-validation is used to rob others of agency, especially their ability to dispute their own victimization and to prevent them from using shields against potentially valid arguments.
The most prominent historical groups denied respect and stigmatized are witches, ex-prisoners, racial minorities, those with visible disabilities, LGBTQ+ persons, and drug users. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, the mentally insane were removed from society because they were viewed as deviants, that is not acceptable members of society. Philosophers like Michael Foucault argued that the asylums meant to hold them were ways of containing these “not normal” individuals in ways that protected society from their deviance rather than trying to cure their “madness.” Rather than being considered "mad" or any one of the many bad things that society considers wrong, label avoidance is used in Mirroring by all people to avoid the shame associated with the stigmatic abstraction.
Even seemingly minor physical traits can be used. Ernst Goffman studied tattoos and the idea of shame or pride in context, meaning some traits that may be considered wrong or shameful have the opposite meaning depending on the community involved (Doelzal, et al, 2022). In Polynesian cultures, tattoos are a source of pride in the community as each new one is a sign that some test has been met. However, in some corporate contexts in America at least in previous eras, tattoos were often hidden unless they were on the face, hands, or some other visible part of the body.
So, stigma involves the internalization of the stereotype by the victim, which we call a Parlor Trait. It's beyond the limited sociological definition that oftentimes is focused on race, gender, or economic factors that might be evidence in the way a person dresses or talks. A Parlor Trait is anything physical that's detected by subjects and the irrational construction derived from what the subject believes about those physical traits. It can be skin color, noticeable gender, sloppy dress, but also the places and the environment usually related to guilt by association.
One doesn't find themselves in the middle of the January 6th Riot unless you're a believer (or an FBI informant egging on the crowd, lol). If they didn’t understand that possessing the Parlor Trait could lead to stigma or personal harm, via label avoidance, then they might be unabashed in displaying that trait, be nonplussed by others pointing it out in a negative way or not realize that the trait exists at all. Few January 6th rioters went to jail loud and proud for 5-10 years for sitting at Nancy Pelosi's desk or after being chauffeured around by Capitol police to trinket hunt.
However, some of those rioters (rightfully) suffered stigma whether they liked it or not. Less righteously, some Washington, DC establishments have even decided to use their restaurants and bars to deny services to stigmatized Trump supporters during his inauguration because the Airbnb owners believe MAGA supporters take away freedom, dignity, and because of January 6th and other Trump actions seek to destroy democracy. Though it may be against the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and an act of illegal discrimination, these owners are willing to tank their businesses over political beliefs and embarrass MAGA supporters with either rejection, slower service, price gauging, or petty inconveniences just to spite the "fascist enablers."
Stigma is fundamentally a social interaction, a dialogue, while some sociologists like Dolezl and Hutchinson (2022) contrast it with shame, which is an emotional term that can be provoked by stigma. To other sociologists, stigma is seen as a dialectic between those with the power to stigmatize and those discontented, stigmatized who often fight back (Friedman, 2022). According to Bromwich (2020), respect is a moral concept that involves acknowledging the autonomy of other people. To them, stigma is processed first as a universal, which is represented by them as national or international powers that "divide, rule, and scapegoat." Mirrors might agree with that lens except for the abstract world of oppressor and oppressed, which may not be true or relevant in the context where our craft is practiced. However, particular is the second level of this lens, which like a police force, is the means for scapegoating strategies to be implemented.
Finally, there is the individual level where microaggressions and internalized stigma exist. Volumes V and VI were devoted to the micro and macropower microaggressions, so feel free to check back on the empowering or disempowering of people in a context. For this Volume's sake, stigma is the enforcement mechanism of a power dynamic, the means by which a person can punish a person they know or have contact with, or grasp at power by punishing people with stigma over grand ideas like "making America great again" or making "Black Lives Matter."
There are also physical objects that can represent stigma. The dunce cap has a long history. In the 13th century, John Duns Scotus used it as a reverse brain funnel to shame those lacking knowledge. Some American schools used it to shame students as late as the 1950s. Most tragically, in 1960s Maoist China, intellectuals, “traditionalists,” and anti-Cultural Revolutionary persons were hauled on stage wearing them and some were killed by the mob. Even today during the lockdowns, a Maine lawyer even sued over being forced to wear a COVID mask as a dunce-like mark of shame.
Therefore, dunce stigma is the use of physical objects, which we call totems, like a dunce cap to represent shame to both the victim and the subjects. One need not be Hester Prynne from the Scarlet Letter and be accused of adultery by a puritanical society to be given a physical mark of shame, an "A" badge for her to wear to show the community her sinful crime. In the modern era, this stigmatic form is a state of war where a group with power and a victim both perceive the stigma and physical objects (dunce cap, scarlet letter, MAGA hats, pride flags etc.) with shared symbolic meaning are applied to the victim. There is a negative public characterization that is used to punish them while at the same time the humiliation over the symbolic object is internalized by the victim for with no meaning, the dunce cap, the MAGA hat, or the pride flag are run-of-the-mill fashion.
Organized resistance to stigma happens as dignity denial groups reach a critical mass where their oppression is too great. Mirroring is one example of a resistance movement, but it’s not ideological and it has no political party. Mirroring does not subscribe to the view that the masses of America or the world fit into world-historical movements, an undifferentiated mass of workers, oppressed people, and racial and ethnic minorities seeking unity but for the divide and conquer strategies of some menacing elite.
We also don't assume that it is a conscious choice of leaders to act so malevolently. Objecting to stigma even if it’s not on you can lead to stigma on you for speaking up. This is a good time to refresh the Silence Coefficient, where it’s the price you pay for staying silent or choosing to speak. Choosing to object to unfair treatment places the objector on the side of the victim and since there’s little justice in the struggle session, that person is more likely to be stigmatized in return.
According to Allison (2023), self-presentation is the alteration of a person’s public image in order to protect their sense of agency and if you choose to remain silent in the face of threats, that has by definition altered your image. Basically, stigma prevents the human ability to self-present, to present our identity the way we want it. A criminal “is not assessed simply as someone who has committed a crime but as someone whose whole nature is defined by that activity.” This is exactly the view of Mirroring as well. According to Allison (2023), Stigma is both communication AND the vulnerability of the person to acts related to the stigma. The second feature is the one involving the individual’s self-presentation and their identity. Allison sees self-presentation as a moral issue, denying it as immoral.
In Mirroring, this is a fundamental part even if our mission isn't the immorality of stigma, but the pursuit of more rational ends. We almost certainly will have to witness or undergo immoral stigma, so to accept Allison's explanation, we'd aid and abet the oppressors if we stood by and didn't stop the stigma rather than be the observers with better, more rational goals in mind outside of that interaction.
If subjects, mirrors, and victims are unintelligible to each other, there is little need for stigma because there is a signal failure. The symbols and abstractions aren’t shared so any stigma isn’t understood by the cast of characters involved. There may be expectations attached to the social roles in a conversation, following the power dynamic found in Volume VII, but that’s a factor that Mirrors must assess. Mirrors must also be aware that their self-selection is not a shield from acting irrationally themselves. Their craft is inconstant and depends on their skills to detect argumentation flaws. These volumes are training to better be able to ply their craft. However, when the interaction is mutually intelligible, stigma is possible, so explore this using Goffman's format.
Goffman’s Stigma Interaction Adapted to Mirror Form:
Humans:
- A: Person, a potential victim of stigma.
- S: Subject(s) of mirroring, engaged in perceived irrational speech/conduct and judgement.
- M: Mirror, observer of irrational speech/conduct.
Abstractions and Labeled Objects:
- Pt: Parlor Trait, as in distinguishable physical features (like race) or other detectable features of a person in an environment and in context.
- Pa: Parlay, as in the content of the speech, conduct, or the perceived possession of symbolic objects called totems (like a MAGA hat or Pride Flag) that represent speech in a context.
- MSt: Mirror Stigma, as in the negative effect and punishment of a Struggle Session on the Person, who internalizes and understands the stigma.
Struggle Session Stigma (The Interaction):
- A (Person) is taken to possess a Pt (Parlor Trait) and/or engage in Pa (Parlay) by a judging S (Subject).
- M (Mirror) is aware of S believing that A possesses Pt and/or engages in Pa.
- It follows from A possessing Pt and/or engaging in Pa that A deviates from the stereotypes available to S.
- S applies the Pt/Pa to A, the stereotype may lead to MSt (Mirror Stigma).
- M weighs challenging the S over the stereotype of A or mirroring the S if the M may be judged to possess the Pt and/or to engage in the Pa. Parlor Traits are significant because they impact the identity of the individuals in the speech environment.
Using that schematic, let's use Hunter Biden's case and pardon as a complex example of Mirroring Harmony. It has micro and macro implications. A poster on Facebook might look at the example of H. Biden and see a tragic, former drug addict whose difficult turn in life mirrors their own or that of some other close person. There might be empathy for what would normally be stigmatic items like drug use, abandoning children born out of wedlock, scamming money, getting paid for jobs at Burisma despite lacking qualifications beyond the prestige of being a Vice-President’s son, or having an affair with your deceased brother’s widow shortly after the funeral. Those are the most obvious stigmatic factors, but there are sociological characteristics that many Americans would see that might get them to withhold empathy or even wish further prosecution or harm on young Biden: being rich, cashing in on his name, seeming to avoid justice for crimes others at the lower end of society might have to pay for, having powerful friends, lawyers, and celebrities to cushion any blows resulting from political heat,
Ex. #1 Hunter Biden is Being Unjustly Stigmatized Interaction:
A: Hunter Biden and his family, potential victims of stigma.
S: Subject(s) of mirroring, engaged in perceived irrational speech/conduct. Those pursuing injustice against the potential victim.
M: Mirror, observer of irrational speech/conduct.
Abstractions and Labeled Objects:
Pt: Parlor Traits of drug use, criminal behavior, sexual addiction. Pt’s are distinguishable physical features (like race) or other detectable features of a person in an environment and in context. Drug use, criminal behavior, and lurid sex tales may be worthy of stigma, but only with certain people and in certain contexts.
Pa: Parlay as in the content of the speech, conduct, or the perceived possession of symbolic objects called totems that represent speech in a context. In this case, speech condemning H. Biden, using symbols like the hateporn videos of a troubled potential victim (H. Biden) from the “famous laptop” in order to humiliate him, mocking his newfound art career launched after ending his addiction, the child totem of his illegitimate, unacknowledged daughter used to batter him and his family politically, or seeking to question any speech related to his father, family, or past issues.
MSt: Mirror Stigma, H. Biden needs to be jailed, not pardoned by his powerful presidential dad, and the justice system needs to be bent towards not only ending his career, perhaps leading to addiction relapse, but also so his alleged and convicted crimes can take down his father, Joe Biden, etc. The stigma becomes a catchall for political opponents to ruin both Bidens and Democrats by extension.
Struggle Session Stigma:
A (H. Biden) is taken to possess a Pt (drug abuse, criminal behavior, sexual addiction, nepotistic benefits) and/or engage in Pa (being unfairly targeted and believing they did nothing wrong) by a judging S (Trump, Republicans, and J. Biden's political opponents).
M (Mirror) is aware of S believing that A possesses Pt and/or engages in Pa.
It follows from A possessing Pt or engaging in Pa that A deviates from the stereotypes available to S (an opposing party’s president’s son shouldn’t be allowed to get away with cheating, lying, and abusing drugs while being protected by the powerful on the other political side).
S applies the Pt to A, the stereotype may lead to MSt (Mirror Stigma, or H. Biden needs to be imprisoned, given greater punishment for avoiding justice, and the political ramifications may be sufficient to topple J. Biden and stigmatize him as well).
M weighs challenging the S over the stereotype of A or mirroring the S if the M may be judged to possess the Pt or engage in the Pa. (Mirrors should be careful to avoid an affirmative defense of the victim as especially irrational ones using logical fallacies like "Whataboutism" regarding Trump’s behavior are boomerang back on the agents.)
Ex. #2 Hunter Biden deserves the stigma being used against those exposing his crimes:
A: Hunter Biden's accusers, potential victims of stigma.
S: Subject(s) of mirroring, engaged in perceived irrational speech/conduct. Those pursuing injustice against the potential victims, H. Biden's accusers.
M: Mirror, observer of irrational speech/conduct.
Abstractions and Labeled Objects:
Pt: Parlor Traits of accepting drug use, criminal behavior, sexual addiction. Pt’s are distinguishable physical features (like race) or other detectable features of a person in an environment and in context. Drug use, criminal behavior, and sex may be worthy of stigma, but only with certain people and in certain contexts.
Pa: Parlay as in the content of the speech, conduct, or the perceived possession of symbolic objects called totems that represent speech in a context. Here are some elements of Parlay:
Speech condoning H. Biden, covering up direct evidence, censoring speech and press coverage
enablement is caring and support for a troubled man with a difficult past
claiming the jury verdict was not legitimate and was a miscarriage of justice while asking for respect for the Trump felony verdicts, conflating two different cases and multiple, different issues, explaining the denial of guilt by the Biden family is evidence of fatherly love, suggesting that accusers lack empathy for drug abusers and blaming the possible relapse death of Hunter that hasn't happened yet on the accusers because they're shining the spotlight on something they believe is wrong.
MSt: Mirror Stigma, Critics who point out the many immoral and illegal issues in this case have sinister motivations. They deserve to be censored for pointing out these issues especially during a critical time (the 2020 Election). They're harming people with drug issues and using a troubled man's problems to cover for the real felon, Trump, who his supporters unfairly defend to the death even though the stigmatizers are the ones pursuing him to the ends of the earth as the most stigmatized person on the planet. The stigma becomes a catchall for political opponents to defend both Bidens and Democrats by extension and to smother legitimate criticisms of their behavior
Struggle Session Stigma:
A (H. Biden's critics) are taken to engage in Pa (disliking drug abuse, child abandonment, sex with a brother's widow, social promotion beyond abilities unlike Trump who possess abilities) by a judging S (The Biden Family, Democrats, and most media in 2020).
M (Mirror) is aware of S believing that A engages in Pa.
It follows from A (H. Biden's criticis) engaging in Pa (trying to prove that H. Biden got light treatment in the courts, wasn't qualified for his job, had powerful people cover up his crimes, and shouldn't have been pardoned by his own father when Trump was attacked for pardoning his family memebers after they actually served jail time) that A deviates from the stereotypes available to S (Trump and supporters are the real felons. H. Biden deserves a pardon because of the troubles his father went through. Any questioning of this prosecution of H. Biden is just politics and his troubled life is no concern of anyone despite he being a public figure involved in his father's campaign and business dealings).
S applies the Pt to A, the stereotype may lead to MSt (Mirror Stigma, or anyone questioning H. Biden especially his business dealings despite his name being his main qualification, his involvement in Ukraine, his sex and drug parties, or his abandonment of his child with a stripper are all not relevant moral issues and those posing questions should be silenced, harassed, or mocked for troubling a former addict).
M weighs challenging the S over the stereotype of A or mirroring the S if the M may be judged to possess the Pt or engage in the Pa. (Mirrors should be careful to avoid an affirmative defense of the victim as especially irrational ones using logical fallacies like Whataboutism regarding Trump’s behavior.)
Wow, that was a lot to digest, but we need to further this stigma framework and discuss how to decide how to act in specific cases. So, it's on to ethics!
V. Struggle Session Ethics
“High Evolutionary: I visited your planet many years ago... Your people had wonderful spirit...The art and music, and literature were some of the finest in the Universe. Earth would be a fabulous place for it not for ignorance and bigotry...It inspired me to create Counter-Earth...All of the good and none of the bad.
Star-Lord: I don't need another speech by some impotent whack-job whose mother didn't love him rationalizing why he needs to conquer the Universe.
High Evolutionary: I'm not trying to conquer the Universe... I'm perfecting it."
“Guardians of The Galaxy: Vol. 3”
There is something both crazed and oddly appealing about the High Evolutionary as a villain. Mirrors want the skepticism and outrage of Star Lord, his heroic opponent, but desire to make things a little better and rational without the genocide. He wants a greater good, though on a more maniacal level than the utilitarians like Bentham and John Stuart Mills, but he lacks flexibility. His solutions for society are simple, his delusional scope is universal, and his actions mean carnage until he gets what he wants.
The High Evolutionary especially lacks the moral compass of Immanuel Kant, who demanded universal ethical rules (imperatives) that all would follow if one had to act, as few would want all animals twisted and abused, nor whole civilizations wiped out because they did not evolve enough. And the romantics are perhaps the furthest from the him as they would demand great acts and sacrifice of the rugged hero individual, like a Lord Byron or someone fictional like Starlord, and not the crude Doctor Frankenstein or his fictional counterpart as enemy of the Guardian of the Galaxy. If we want to better society, but we're not bloodthirsty scientists ready to sacrifice whole generations for the evolution, we need to know how to act in situations of right and wrong, and when actual problems develop in our lives and when a Struggle Session could lead to stigma.
The ethical considerations for stigma relate to its avoidance. A quick refresher concerning Mirroring Ethics: we make decisions of right and wrong in an individual context but using a maxim that we should “avoid political discussions when “everyone’s society” cannot receive a guaranteed benefit.” This means that when stigma is involved and there’s a dilemma whether or not to fight back, mirror, or depart, then there’s the potential for something unethical to occur. Using Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative as a guide, would all persons making the decision to avoid the stigma make the same choice when considering the balancing of harm with the harmony gained by the interaction? Basically, we’re trying to maximize harmony and minimize suffering, but if we adhere rigidly to the truth as Kant would like, we’d create a rule that would lead others to unnecessary harm.
In previous volumes, especially Volume VI, ethical dilemmas were focused on deciding whether to obey an authority in a difficult situation, like unjustly being ordered to charge a fortified trench in WWI or deciding whether to be honest and turn yourself in to the Soviet KGB for unwittingly participating in treason with a capitalist. Stigma is not so different as the person is forced to choose between their own beliefs and defending their agency, being stigmatized and hurt, or watching the injustice of a Struggle Session occur without interfering.
The difference with stigma ethics and other forms we've explored is that there is an uncontrollable element to it, much like with being blamed for grand historical evils that you had no direct part in, like being considered a colonialist oppressor merely because of white skin and "European type" looks. Since race, gender, and ethnicity are the most common causes for stigma, they're often the easiest dilemmas to solve provided the characteristic is something the person can't control. You can't change your race at birth, your ethnicity is in a lot of way determined by culture and social mores, however, some ethnicities have distinctive features like hair or eye color that may set them apart in certain contexts. Gender can also change, but the one you were born with can be judged and stigmatized as is.
When you express yourself in a way that leads to stigma, like changing gender, society uses its preconceived notions and judges. That expression (gender transition for example) becomes a Parlor Trait when subjects deem that physical change is worthy of shame and the agency of the potential victim is subsumed in the stereotype about them. The speech/conduct of the potential victim is the decision to express themselves through clothing, but the Parlor Trait is the subject judging that expression as not fitting the assigned AND doing something about it. As we're social creatures, judgement is common of course and not always wrong or unethical. It's what we've adapted to do as we've learned to live with more and more of our species. For it to be a Parlor Trait and stigmatic, the subject must do something irrational about it like use a slur, spread rumors, or make harmful physical contact with the victim.
Remember, the Parlor system isn’t meant to bring about justice, what we define as righting a wrong, either on the interpersonal or societal level. Being forced to internalize grand historical failures or suffering stigma and punishment for not acknowledging an inescapable factor that they possess, a terrible fallacy, isn't just either. A person beating a Trump supporter with a placard isn’t winning one small battle for justice against some “Neo-Nazi” cause, nor is heckling unknown immigrants because they might be undocumented.
What is needed to decide the ethics of a stigmatic dilemma are at least three factors: #1 the context within which the Struggle Session is taking and all factors leading up to the stigma #2. the nature of the Parlor Traits and any knowable, distinguishable features about the potential victim that can't be changed by them. #3 the nature and depth of the Parlay, the means of discussion, its content, missing information from any participation, and any conduct that was irrational and may have led to the stigma. So, let's highlight three short ethical examples using those core decision elements.
Example #1: The first issue is the role of trans and LGBTQ+ people in society. Some unjustly see all trans people as potential sex offenders if allowed in gender-divided bathrooms (the Parlor Trait is the gendered bathroom that is violated) or brutish, steroidal-like sports competitors against biological women (the physical appearance of transwomen is the Parlor Trait) while those in that community or their allies fear discrimination, transphobia, and hate over harmless persons who are targeted because they are different. Mirrors should approach this topic with caution. And from Volume V and the Pronoun Hoedown, little value can be gained by arguing with subjects about pronouns, but much stigma can. Until society comes up with a consensus on how to handle trans athletes in sports, Mirrors need to tread carefully. Both sides have set up struggle sessions of their own and intend to drag school children, concerned parents, and those already struggling through transitioning into a fight over sports and bathrooms.
In both cases of all inclusion or all exclusion, neither rule is one that all society should live by. We shouldn't create a rule whereby sports locker rooms that aren't individualized private changing and showering stations are shared by the voluntary participation of a person based on their self-selection. Basically, all boys transitioning into girls at whatever stage would be allowed in all locker rooms simply by declaring themselves so. Likewise, the opposite extreme rule may also be unacceptable as all trans persons should not be prohibited from participating in sports based on Title IX and existing rules based on equal protection.
Society doesn't know how to handle the paradox of elevating women's sports because of previous exclusion and a lack of funding of women's sports while including those persons who seek change their gender and continue their sports passion on those same teams. Because the issue is not settled, only engage in a discussion about this dilemma if the individuals grasp the maxim that all sportspersons must be allowed under a new rule created for that issue where they can participate and do things in the same way, in the exact same context in order for it to be ethical. The rule for deciding right and wrong must be ironclad, fight for following the rule as nearly as possible in all possible instances where a choice has to be made, yet also allow the exceptions where an individual may have to preserve their agency and have an out of the problem that preserves their dignity.
A muscular, recently transitioned female may not be an ethical competitor for a high school league sport like basketball, nor may a person who has transitioned at a young age be ethically excluded from male sports merely because they changed. If a rule is going to apply, it must apply as exactly as possible for a debater to justify it on rational terms, then it must apply as great as possible though it will be less accurate as a policy, then a law that has to be enforced. Before changing any of those three steps, rational debates and serious precautions must take place before creating a new rule and those rules must be followed until a more workable solution is found. That is the pragmatist way.
The discussion should focus on science, psychology, sports fairness, the law, data about current trans performers in sports, and notable samples. If the discussion can stay rational and not devolve into a hate fest, then the discussion should continue. However, if the participants scream and shout about sexual assault in restrooms or allowing unfair competition, if any participant insists through brute force that not agreeing with them is accepting discrimination and a hate crime just because of their emotions, then be cautious and leave if you believe the stigma would rebound on yourself. Remember, you may not be forced to make an argument you don't believe in nor should you suffer the threat of stigma any more than your own reputation and safety permits.
Example #2: The Hunter Biden case is also a dilemma because it covers stigma for criminal fraudsters, sex workers, adulterers, drug users, and the advantages of a privileged upbringing. The lens of this dilemma likely depends on your current political affiliation. Republicans would say that Trump is being persecuted for similar issues when he committed no crimes. Democrats would say that H. Biden's crimes pale in comparison to Trump's and that Trump and not Biden was in a position of power to inflict more harm and was standing for another election. This ethical dilemma is one of greater criminal stigma for one over another, which Democrats believe Trump fits, versus the injustice of imposing stigma by pursuing Trump's "crimes" while H. Biden gets a get out of jail free card and suffers little stigma in the media or among the elite.
The struggle sessions are taken literally to court. As one of the most photographed famous people, seeing Trump's unnecessary mugshot was a stigmatic trophy of war for Democrats while it acted as a rallying totem for the angered MAGA world. H. Biden's bizarre plea deal in court collapsed with the efforts of one questioning judge and a slim part of the press asking why he was to be exempt from the serious gun and taxes charges for good. To MAGA, his arraignment and conviction was a struggle session that brought immense pleasure because their laptop totem from 2020 was vindicated in its value.
So, when deciding the ethical dilemma, the “felon” status and supporting a “criminal” vs. “resisting an unjust deep state out for blood" are the underlying centers of disagreement. Should the irrational debaters decide that H. Biden is the greater criminal than Trump, then mirror the debate with the knowledge that for them, Trump is being persecuted in a witch hunt while Biden is not (hence the rare pardon) and that the media gaslit Biden's crimes while blowing up, fabricating, or lying about Trump's alleged ones. If a different group decides that every one of Trump's "crimes" are true and valid, that H. Biden is a red herring, then bear in mind that Biden indictments were partisan in nature and collapsing for various reasons. Therefore, his father, President Joe Biden, was right to pardon his son and clear away the stigma and unfairness.
In the next section, we'll build on the celebrated outlaw or in that part the violent murderer dilemma, with Mangione's murder of a healthcare CEO. With these ethical precepts in mind, we'll overlay unacceptable ideas like murder being justified for unrelated problems as well as the delusions required in order to support a society that would allow that violence.
Example #3: The final stigma dilemma is of Bodily Autonomy and the role of society especially laws in regard to what's in the public (health) interest. The issue relates to when society can compel people to live (not kill themselves), force them to take vaccines like for COVID-19, or when a choice to procreate preventing abortions (euphemistically lumped into the words “reproductive care”). This touches on every aspect of agency for mirrors and the idea of creating universal maxims that apply to all. It's also the most complicated set of issues combined as most Americans believe in individual freedoms, but also a society with a moral compass where people abide by rules.
The signs of potential for stigma for this example are as follows: #1 the physical Parlor Traits of bodily autonomy that are obvious are pregnant women, which for any person is a sign the person has a working female reproductive system. In terms of other visible traits, the very old, infirm, or sick someone who's been through chemotherapy, or others who might wish to die are possible characteristics. More easily discernable are the places that people visit like abortion clinics or pro-life family planning places. Entering these places suggests to enemy subjects that the person is seduced into getting an abortion at the clinic or talked into keeping the baby at a pro-life consultation. The presence of person in that context can lead to "baby killer" or "making a woman's body into a vessel for someone else" stigmas.
The outlines for the body autonomy debate have bled into vaccines particularly after the Biden Administration mandated it for all federal employees and contractors, and many states followed suit and required it for teachers, truckers, and other non-medical personnel. The struggle session can be anything: a scornful, shaming Facebook post about a person who was afraid to get the vaccine or a person sharing questionable materials about the safety of the vaccine. The irony is that both left and right have come to the body autonomy issue on different sides. One reason was the medical elite of the country burned much trust during COVID and especially over the efficacy of the vaccine to stop the spread. Biden and others famously said so and those resisting it were effectively killing others by not getting the shot.
So, the left wants bodily autonomy for all women even if they chose to have sex (voluntary display of agency) and the baby would be born healthy (choosing for the baby who could have agency if the mother wants). The right wants bodily autonomy because an unborn baby can't choose to live if the mother wants otherwise but refuses to get a mandated vaccine even though the government and the nation's top doctors (wrongly) told them that to refuse would kill others. So, any ethical discussion about autonomy will have to resolve who is right to choose based on the information they have and in which cases it is right to choose for others what to do. Basically, force the mother to carry the baby as a vessel is what most of the right wing believes is the ethical thing to do while the left wings find it ethical to inject unwilling deniers with as many shots as the government tells them to if that's what it takes to protect against deaths.
Part II: Ideological Hostage Taking and Recovery
VI. Emotional Support Children: Lessons In Political Semiotics
“[Dil keeps crying at four in the morning]
Stu Pickles: [exhausted] Oh, for the love of Pete. What do you want from us? What? What?
[Stu lays on the floor with Dil. An American flag is waving on the TV]
Didi Pickles: [looks in the Lipschitz book] Oh, there must be something in here we missed. Somewhere, somehow, something!
Stu Pickles: There must be. Let me see here!
[grabs the book from Didi and looks inside]
Stu Pickles: "Cats, colic, Creole baby food..." Oh yeah, here it is. "Crying. Although a baby's crying signifies a disruption in the infant-parent matrix, the good-enough parent pacifies the infant during this period of primary narcissism, foregoing their own needs, sublim-, sublimating, sublimating all their own needs too." “The Rugrats Movie,” 1998
An Emotional Support Child (ESC) is an example of a child used by a as a support totem. It's using children as a shield (totem or a symbolic object) to prevail in a political disagreement because of the negative effect of that issue on an ignorant child whose conditioned response is related to their emotional parent or guardian and after taking their parent’s emotional cues. Much like a baby crying when others start crying, any political stance that could make mommy, daddy, or some other relation cry and cause a baby to cry in response must be an evil stance and any person causing that is worthy of stigma.
This is a form of the glittering generality fallacy because it’s nearly impossible to argue against crying (ignorant) children without garnering significant stigma even though the parental subject is hell-bent on dragging their wards (kids) into a political fight the parent can’t handle on their own. To question what role a crying child has in a political debate would also challenge the child-rearing decisions of the parent, the political and moral future that parent paternalistically demands of their wards, which increases the potential stigma for the challenger. When kids are involved in politics, running away is the best suggestion!
The most famous child totem of the 21st century was Gretta Thunberg. She was extensively covered in other volumes for her speech and conduct, and she has since entered adulthood quite wealthy and famous even though evidence remains to be seen of her intellectual maturity. In 2019 at the UN, her activist parents pushed her on stage, disclosed her Aspergers syndrome and OCD to emphasize the terrified effect the political issue was having on her, and made her the child face of the climate change movement. Her crying and yelling "How dare you?" to world leaders is the epitome of logical fallacies (volume, begging the question, emotion over substance, etc.) and the cravenness of her parents are a macro example of this phenomenon as people over the world trust Greta over complex scientific issues merely because of her speech and because her parents needed someone young to shame and stigmatize world leaders without presenting a very effective, rational, and scientific message to convince others.
Her activities as a totem had widespread effects, which was the intent of her activist parents who if they're good at one thing, it's mass marketing through mass confusion. Numerous reports and studies indicate that because of their parents and teachers, rising numbers of youth are terrified about climate change, a nebulous and serious shift in the planet's climate. When adults like here with CBC confuse parents about fires in British Columbia being directly caused by climate change, the fire lead to hopelessness as a weather phenomenon and not a proven climate change induced one. How can you expect Hannah Fessler, 16, to not be able to deal with the issues "with a haze of wildfire smoke hanging in the backdrop?" Ignoring the direct causes of the fires, their role in average climate conditions in the province, or proving climate change's impact on that specific fire, CBC got Hannah to "express(ed) worry about people her age left to deal with problems created by previous generations. Her own feelings about the wildfires in B.C., the Northwest Territories and around the world are a jumble."
What do these ridiculous people at the CBC expect? If a 16 year old can barely process her world after wildfires affected the people around her, if they're not even explaining the connection to her about climate change in a rational way and just fanning her emotions and anxieties, how can they expect to convince skeptics about the science if their line of argument is that the resources and facilities to deal with the mental health crisis related to increasing climate anxiety will be overrun as the climate worsens? Because of a mental crisis they created by reporting so emotionally about issues they hardly connect, rational people are supposed to join the anxiety stampede, or pay for more mental health, or better yet, stop climate change immediately. Even they acknowledge no substantial change can take place for a decade or more, so I guess we're just supposed to be more worried between now and then.
Human totems, like Hannah, are dehumanized to emphasize the subject’s emotions while animals and plants are humanized giving the subject the power to interpret nature’s feelings. As essentially objects waved about to block arguments, totems are shields used to irrationally alter discourse. It’s not that children shouldn’t have feelings or try to understand what adults are going through, the key is that adults use children to block arguments against other adults, or to garner sympathy with like-minded adults over what they believe their children are thinking and doing.
As AP Reporter Held states after talking with psychologists in the aftermath of Election 2024, many children vibe after their parents, absorbing some beliefs and emotions as they watch them react to current events. Children are also more connected to the adult world than ever before because not only do they have after school, the playground, and play groups (in person), they also have unprecedented access to all types of information from the internet, phones, tablets, and social media. According to Pew Research Center, TikTok has huge numbers of youths receiving political news from it during the last Election and much of it is interesting, tailored to short sound bites, but especially to fast scrollable clips that often lack thorough explanation, context, or any sense of objectivity.
Because most do not have the maturity to process the vast amount of input and emotional stimulation coming from the modern information era, and during the most contentious and emotionally wrought modern election, one with more forms of coverage than ever before, many youths are already woefully unprepared to argue against their parents in a rational way. Most of the time, the children simply trust their parents too much to argue against them even if they have the intellectual ability to go beyond the trust they have for a responsible parent. And forget it if the parent is irresponsible and willing to throw their sobbing child in the middle of a political fight they can't win on their own.
Emotional reactions are often dual purpose if the child is reacting as the “mature” adult is also reacting, using their emotional totems as sign of their parent's political position, not the child's one. Basically, the parent's delusion is that the child is starting to or has already grasped the complexity of the political position as their parent does. It’s also taken as confirmation that the adult’s emotions are valid because of the supposed innocence of the child (as a totem) or wisdom if a senior who suddenly recognizes and recovers from senility and regains their agency. The child may have some grasp of the issue based on their age and maturity. However, it's the use of the child as an object instead of the actual child's views, unprompted and uncoached from the parent that signify a mature and rational argument, not the parent's references to them in an argument that matter to us.
The SiT (Stigmatic Totem) and the ESC are related. The SiT is the totem itself, it has the meaning ascribed to it by the subject, regardless of the truth or falseness of that content. So, a baby could cry at the picture of Donald Trump or a toddler could run screaming from a TV with Joe Biden because the parent thinks he’ll sniff her hair and the child has grown to fear him. If the SiT is the meaning behind the human being used as a prop, then the ESC is the emotion of the subject that the totem is supposed to bring out. A crying child is the totem, but the ESC is the emotion of the subject when that totem is in use.
Emotion is part of life and it’s important. It gives us passion and drive to do things that strictly logic and reason might not allow. However, as an increasingly emotionalized society, when the political rage and divisiveness goes unchecked as in 2024, we need to put into check this most egregious abuse of emotions. It’s one thing to protect your child from danger, putting your life on the line. It’s another to use your own political boogeyman to scare your kids. The idea that some person is so incapable of arguing that they have to trot out their crying child, used like a leashed golden retriever, to make themselves feel better about a bad political decision is outrageous.
We must also address the blow back from disputing these leashed monsters. Arguing with children when their boiling, distraught parent has little compunction about using them as political pawns is obviously fraught. To discuss their emotional, shallow, cravenness in using their children for support could lead to stigma. That’s why “ESCAPE NOW” is coded in the ESC term because there’s no winning with a parent who’d do that. It’s not worth the parent’s rage since their wimpy, emotionally immature action is beyond illogical. It’s not as if you’re going to take out a political science quiz and give it to the child to see if they’re capable and that quiz result, if passing, would stomp out the two irrational layers of emotional child and parent.
Remember, age doesn’t preclude the ability to make a valid argument. If a toddler can comprehend an issue and give a reasonable opinion, you may choose to engage rationally. If an elderly Astheimers patient suddenly regains lucidity, by all means engage rationally. It’s important to note that while age is not a disqualifying factor when making an argument, using age as a truth buster, as a crutch, to block others is. Because a crying child grasps a political issue similar to their parent, then the other side is wrong to evoke such emotions with that child. That’s the irrational part right there.
So, imagine that the child totems aren't as intelligent and lack the secret baby world of the Rugrats. Those toddlers are able to solve complex adult problems, beat enemies with their goofiness and intelligence, and comprehend the adult world in a hilarious way. Though real children are often hilarious, perceptive, and bright, use the universal maxim test and decide if you want your country run by including ALL children in your discussions regardless of their capabilities or more rational people regardless of age.
VII. Hostage Taking and the Captivity Deduction
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." Liam Neeson, "Taken," 2008.
J.R.R. Tolkin describes the Eye of Sauron as the ultimate representation of vigilance and perception. As the villain in the Lord of the Rings series, Sauron is always watching, looking for his Ring of Power, and checking to see what the threats to his authority are plotting to do to him. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the hero, Frodo Baggins experiences what the power of the all-seeing eye can do just by looking into the elf Galadriel's magic mirror: "The dark as if a hole had been opened in the world of sight [...]. In the abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing." Borrowed from fiction, this concept of omnipresent vigilance is important to maintaining the identity safety of our subjects and to disciplining the members of the Safespace tribe.
Like the roving eye of Sauron or the search light of a maximum security prison, our subjects are also like prison guards, policing the population, administering beatings at their leisure, and looking for ideological escapees. Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” society and the monitoring of social media are the concepts we need when combined with the fiction of Sauron's Eye. He constructed the first panopticon prison, which was designed to control the maximum number of prisoners with the least number of guards. This exploits the effect of authority as someone might be watching and that could lead to punishment.
French Philosopher Michel Foucault went further than designing efficient prisons. For him, a panopticon is the socio-psychological abstract concept of the all-seeing eye causing a person to believe they’re being watched by an authority and that they should behave. Foucault described that this form of authority is related to social control and people obey such abstractions because they are conditioned to become members of society.
With a Mirroring Panopticon, symbolized by the Eye of Sauron, authoritative control means the monitoring of social media, public interactions, and all speech and content. This output from victims has the potential to be monitored by subjects and if disagreeable to them, used to police speech and conduct, justifying stigma for those that attempt to fight back. Panopticons are also force multipliers for irrational subjects trolling the public world for their next victims as well as causing potential victims to hold back their speech and conduct for fear of stigma.
One should assume that it will take just one subject to inflict punishment on an agent. This can have a silencing effect or what I called the Silence Coefficient, a kind of hostage situation where the free speech and conduct of people are hijacked by our intrusive subjects. The Silence Coefficient in previous volumes is the price of silence versus speaking up that a person must pay. In Volume VIII, it's the effect of hyper-alertness of our subjects on the speech and conduct of others. It's the suppression of ideas, the limiting of conversations that could be more rational, and it's the placement of the person subjected to monitoring into captive status.
Take the example of the Ontario town of Emo. The city mayor Harold McQuaker failed to fly a Pride Flag and adequately celebrate Pride Month. After a complaint was lodged by a Pride group, the mayor was convicted of violating the Ontario Human Rights code, the town was fined $10,000, and he and other town officials were forced into a re-education camp with completion dependent on having the acceptance of the accusers (Borderland Pride), who will only donate the extorted fine money back to the town library if the library holds a drag queen story hour. The mayor made the argument that no flags are flown so displaying a Pride Flag isn't necessary either, nor should the town be forced to celebrate something deemed important only by their provincial government.
Borderland Pride is the Mirroring Panopticon in this case. They're monitoring a town of 1,300 to make sure that the government officials express the proper opinions, celebrate Pride Month to the greatest extent, and coerce anyone by extracting $10,000 out of a needy town just to ensure that everyone complies with the correct speech and conduct. The hostage takers will only release the much-needed funds if further acts of submission are made, which after the drag queen story hour occurs, their pleasure over their victory will be dramatically increased.
It's important to note that Canadians don't have the same First Amendment speech rights as Americans, nor do government officials in the US possess infinite rights to speech in their capacity as elected officials. However, this elected mayor, his voters, and their taxes are effectively held hostage to the Panopticon. Until a Pride interest group is satisfied, with unknown number of members in the Emo community itself, the hostages will remained stigmatized and subject to further punishment.
Taking this insane example of a panopticon in mind, a schematic is needed to understand how a belief can merge into a struggle session, how that judgement can lead to stigma, and how the punishment is justified to believers. Once the Truth has been shipped by the believers and the conception of Justice is presented, meaning the wrong that is to be righted regardless of how, deludes clear out objections and pave the way for Struggle Session (the Mirror Court) as well as the desired stigma meant to be used to punish the victim. They are the antithesis of micro and macrofaults in that rather than focusing on a small or big problem without trying to solve them, the person is delusional because they ignore evidence that the problem is significant in their decision making.
Deludes are also hostage-taking because they drag the person back into the past, preventing them from seeing the truth. They're the blue pill to stay put in a seemingly comfortable world that has less shakeups and more stability than one under the red pill. They're the Jenga player who adds pieces to their ideological tower so it doesn't collapse. Therefore, a delude is a unit of self-deception, a thought or belief that sustains a false vision. They are the acts of cleaning the mirror, removing the splotches and imperfections so the reflected image remains clear. Note that by the time the person comes to the stage of watering down or eliminating contrary information, it’s extremely hard for them to reverse course and put the brakes on the pain they get from an adverse outcome or the pleasure they’d get from punishing (stigmatizing) the person(s) who caused them.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is the perfect example of someone under the spell of macrodelusions (big lies clouding their judgement). Despite widespread evidence available in early 2024, he noted the amazing abilities of Joe Biden during the 2024 Democrat primaries when they picked their nominee, and four months before Biden dropped out of the race because of age and infirmity. Boldly declaring that Biden was not at all too old or too incapable, he said "start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth, and 'F' you if you can't handle the truth: this version of Biden—intellectually, analytically—is the best Biden ever." Whether he was part of a group of enablers who forced Biden on Democrat primary voters, or he really believed that the President was capable of serving for four more years is irrelevant.
What matters is that Scarborough was deluded enough to overlook Biden's obvious frailties and flaws as far back as the first few months of office. One need only look at the damning report by the Wall Street Journal to see the depths to which Biden's issues were covered up by his family, closest aids, and many in the media. Whether Morning Joe fits this group or not, Mirrors need to be aware of the power of delusion to confirm as many beliefs as needed in order to support the underlying ideology. This stubbornness is precisely the problem that agents face as the truth is held hostage to people like Scarborough. How do we negotiate with people like this that refuse to see reason, scan society for disagreeable people, and seek to destroy opponents who come under their eye?
Well, in a hostage negotiation similar to the situation created by MSNBC and others about Biden's abilities, the negotiator must establish a rapport with the suspect and make the person feel they're empathetic to their cause without actually adopting it. Show them you understand that Biden was infirm, maybe even show some agreement with the policies that his autopilot administration passed. Tell them you don't support Trump either and that Kamala Harris was incredibly unpopular and waiting in the wings should Biden fail. Biden beat Trump once and he should've been gracefully exited from the race. And on and on your mirroring could go just to earn the confidence of your Biden-supporting subjects.
In most hostage negotiation situations, ones much smaller than an entire country being held hostage to four more years of an incapable Biden as president, once you’ve established a sense of trust, you can influence the individual(s) in order to bring about a realization of the need that what they’re doing isn’t appropriate. The six steps are to actively listen to the suspect (1), show them you understand where they're coming from without actually validating their act as acceptable (2), creating a rapport where the suspect believes you feel back what they feel (3), and once that trust is established, you can work with them (4) to bring about behavioral change (5), which will lead the suspect to give up the hostage and bring about resolution (6). Both subjects and mirrors can benefit from the FBI's approach as agents have to sit through these forms of arguments as captive audiences and suffer through the suppression of their more logical arguments.
Because we have a plethora of examples to choose for use throughout Volume VIII, we should look beyond Hunter Biden and Joy Reid. First, let’s starting by applying the case of Daniel Moneypenny’s killing of Jordan Neely on a NYC subway to what we’ve learned so far. This is not a re-adjudication of Moneypenny’s not guilty verdict and exoneration by a diverse Manhattan jury. Instead, it’s built from some reactions to the case and meant to highlight how deludes can obscure actual beliefs from real people after the case was decided.
Here's the logical pathway from belief, to justice, to the delusions crowding out contrary evidence, to the hostage taking effect of a Struggle Session, to the stigma desired to punish the victims over the conflict. I'll use just two examples to show the power of delusion, hostage taking, and stigma:
“Han Solo : Ch-Chewie! I can't see, pal. What's going on?
[Chewie barks]
Han Solo : Luke? Luke's crazy! He can't even take care of himself, much less rescue anybody.
[Chewie barks again].....
Han Solo : A Jedi Knight? Jeez, I'm out of it for a little while, everyone gets delusions of grandeur!”
“The Return of The Jedi,” 1983.
In Mirroring, the weak-willed, intellectually lazy Scrooge is anathema to the totally rational and good-intentioned dialogue found in the Socratic Method, which we view as idealistic and not in line with pragmatism. The Scrooge subject’s irrational presentation of ideology is what enables their resistance to rational thought and the careful elimination of falsehoods. Mental work will only go beyond the smallest amount of brainpower possible IF the information fits existing ideological assumptions.
The delusion is the blindness to the evidence of the problem whether because of a logical fallacy, like whom is conveying the message, they aren’t able to absorb or aren’t the proximity of the evidence, or they simply can’t unpack a large macro abstraction like “fascism” or “socialism” without demolishing the experiential, micro beliefs that act like support columns and hold up that larger belief. Basically, they refuse to pull out the last Jenga piece, if taking out any at all.
Mirror Misers (MnMs) are intellectually lazy and stubborn. They're easily decieved by friendly speakers and prown to take delusions literally, without question. In psychology, the miser is the common, human tendency to complete tasks in as effortless way possible, using the minimum amount of time to do mundane things. It's why people knowingly push from the top of the toothpaste tube, to not put the dishes away after a week of sitting in the drainer, to not shower before going out in public not because they can’t afford it or lack the time to do it, but because they simply don’t want to be bothered and don’t care what others might think about them.
There are plenty of differences between these items. Some are mere lazy habits that involve an unwillingness to sacrifice even a few moments of time to complete. Other reasons for resistance to change involve deeper emotional investments: past trauma in hospitals as a reason to not want to get routine care, concern over bills, social awkwardness or the perceived stigma from others knowing that the person is receiving medical care for something perceived negatively and stigmatized by society like AIDS or other STDs. They relate to the amount of time and brainpower devoted to activities in a day, some so trivial they seemingly don’t matter. The impact of an orderly house should ideally add more value to our lives than the same timespan being devoted to a 20 second Reel on Instagram. So, MnMs will hold to their narratives, they'll see opposition as Lies from The Tablecloth, falsehoods meant to tempt them from the easy path they already know.
The common thread is that people tend to follow the paths of least resistance and for Mirroring agents, this presents a significant challenge not only to harmonizing our subjects, but also to self-selecting to join the Council of Mirrors and provide the service to others. If people are held hostage to beliefs, there may come a time where the weight of the ideology or even a small part of it becomes appealing especially if the beliefs are the main ones they come into contact with.
Therefore, a Stockholm Reflection is based on Stockholm Syndrome, or the tendency of persons to empathize with victimizers. Beware, Mirrors! Don't assume that you're better than your subjects, that by putting them down because you're confident in our abilities to reason, that you're immune to conversion. Self-selection is how we're recruited for Mirroring, but de-selection is entirely possible once you're converted a by a handsome murderer like Luigi Mangione. So, a Stochholm Reflection is the alluring albeit irrational side of political argumentation where the emotional appeals, theatrics, historical cherry-pickings, or semi-true stories cause subjects or mirrors to bend towards their captors. The political reflection isn’t one’s own beliefs, but those of the other person imposed as their own. How do we even begin to shake a person lured into a belief system from their dreamy daze?
Well, what better person is there than Marie Kando and her decluttering method. Mirrors are pragmatists at heart and they're the declutterers of the political and philosophical world. In place of Marie Kando's KonMari Method of decluttering and organizing homes by ridding them of any items that don’t “spark joy,” agents seek to declutter our rhetoric, to sweep away stigma, and throw out the fossilized concepts that are no longer useful. The way we do this is through Mirroring and by being knowledgeable about what constitutes an irrational argument using all volumes of mirroring. The BelCH method (Belief acceptance + Context = Harmony) or the Mirroring Maxim is the overarching tool we have to decide if the context of the conversation sparks joy (Harmony) in our subjects or if the ideas are more ideological junk that will weigh the agent down.
The task of cleaning out our rhetoric is difficult. After all, the BelCH method if not properly operated is just like burping in the face of a subject. It can be rude and dirty. Any utilitarian would tell you that you need to break some eggs in order to make an omelet, basically some sacrifices must be made to have more rational politics, to achieve the greater good. We don't want scrambled eggs however, so the process of sacrificing some time and effort should not lead to stigmatized agents, too many unhappy subjects, and more chaos in a scrambled political world.
And don't break the mirror just to get a better political reflection! Many cultures see mirror breaking as bad luck and many see the mirror as an entry point into the soul, a means by which to self-assess and find value. If one can't look at themselves in the mirror, their mental health is said to be in trouble because of their guilt so much that they might smash it rather than suffer the sad image being shot back at them. In Mirroring, shards are the violent, shattering of parts or all of a mirror. It's the act of disputing something they can't process and reflecting back on them an unacceptable image and hostile emotions.
For our subjects, to shatter a subject's worldview is akin to wishing them bad luck, denying their legitimacy, and stealing their agency. These Scrooges invested many mental resources in their beliefs, as one should expect with any mental miser, and most can’t process the world after being seriously challenged or losing. The response is often quick and angry, followed by the other stages of grief, but often without acceptance and a move to withdraw from the interaction to salvage their worldview. Rather than succumbing to the visions presented to them by the Christmas Ghosts, these Scrooges will more likely try to re-piece the mirror with as many shards as they can pick up so they can look at themselves again.
Therefore, Shards are tools that we use to understand our subjects, to occasionally sway our subjects if the BelCH method doesn't caution us to restraint, but shards can also be dangerous if we find ourselves in the path of the breakage. They’re truth bombs, swings of the hammer on the “invincible” subject’s mirror. They’re the antithesis of deludes because rather than papering over faulty beliefs they stab at their hearts, either shattering the spell or shaking off some of its potency or releasing the creature hidden inside yearning to come out and harm you before they reassemble their psyche behind a reconstructed glass castle. Will that creature be a rage beast and lunge for the hero agent or without the least bit of paternalism implied, will they be that thankful gender-neutral damsel, finally unlocked from their prison tower? Sweep up the shards of the mirror quickly before it's re-pieced, don't BelCH at your subjects, talk to the changed person and budding agent, and convince them not to be seduced to the dark side with their Stockholm reflection!
IX. Conclusion: 8 Step Program of Self-Selection, Recovery, and Mirroring Intervention
“I'll paint it on the walls
'Cause I'm the one at fault
I'll never fight again
And this is how it ends
I don't know what's worth fighting for or why I have to scream
But now I have some clarity to show you what I mean
I don't know how I got this way, I'll never be alright
So I'm breaking the habit
I'm breaking the habit
I'm breaking the habit tonight.”
“Breaking the Habit” Linkin Park, 2003
If you've gotten anything out of this detailed Volume, one hopes it's that our ideas have consequences for people. The Politics of Mass Abstraction Maxim is "You can't hurt an idea, but you can hurt people in the process." The hurt is stigma, the painful emotions translating into physical hurt and violence. How then do we help others recover from stigma and help ourselves and others avoid it in the first place? Let's end Volume VIII with a message of hope after the bitter politics of 2024 and let's start a recovery program to purge out the fallacies, gain control of ones' rational agency, and make society just a little better.
One final concept needs to be introduced. Context plays an important role in deciding when a trait or idea is worthy of stigma. Harkening back to the origins of the concept in Volume I (2017), Family Friendly Stigma is when a family member or friend violates the Identity Safety bubble of a subject by expressing unacceptable political opinions that elicit a harshly emotional response, they’re worthy of family stigma. Family and friends were listed as the most perilous persons to share political opinions with because the cost of alienating your family and friends is often greater than any other relation in society. As we saw with media personalities like Joy Reid or Louie Villalobos, some want family ties to be completely cut off, their relatives banished from the holiday dinner table, and made persona non grata for good because of who they supported in the election.
With those fanatical examples of FF-Ma there's also one bright spot. Blog writer Sasha Stone, a 2016 Hillary Clinton supporter who fought with her Bernie supporting sister, her Trump-supporting brother, all while she avoided her own father's funeral because of the infighting over politics. They screamed and yelled a lot at each other, which is indicative of an irrational debate as volume and emotion are more important than a rational conveying of facts strung together using reason. After disputes in 2020 and eight years later, Stone has mostly patched up her relations with her relatives. Though some have come to accept her ideological shift right-ward, she stays largely silent about politics to avoid more strife (the Silence Coefficient in action), and many family members are simply too exhausted to continue the battles. This is the acceptance that we'll discuss later on in the recovery program. The petty, irrational squabbles are simply not worth the time, energy, and emotional trauma to continue them.
Her choice to leave the debates wasn't the same sort of departure that an agent might choose. A mirror doesn't choose to leave a discussion because the rational arguments are too great, nor should one knowingly start an unwinnable debate with family members in the first place. She obviously regrets focusing on the political abstractions made about people she never met when her father was on his death bed. Though it's a hopeful story even if people seem more exhausted than convinced they can coexist ideologically, her case exemplifies why it's so dangerous to have political discussions with family members or even worse, demand the type of purity required for maximum harmony (and pleasure).
Burning family ties because of connections to abstract political figures is obviously problematic and says much more about the person willing to be so deluded and irrational about their beliefs that pruning the family tree is better than suffering the biological inevitability. One need only think back to a time where being a homosexual, married to a person of a different race, or being a radical would burn the family bridge. With the Election 2024 FF-Ma types, one need only to look to fiction for inspiration as poor Sirius Black was snipped from the illustrious Black family tree for going against his parents' wishes and consorting with muggles (non-magic) and half-bloods (mixed magic and non-magic). Really, purging family ties over abstractions that aren't serious issues like abuse, rape, or murder, is a bit like stealing the agency of the victims as their beliefs are stolen by the subject to sever the biological link.
Here's a solution to just such a problem. As Mirrors are pragmatists in practice, we need a process to absorb the irrational arguments and time-wasting, self-select, and then bring about the political renewal that I believe the country hungers after. Here's the process:
8 Step Program of Rational Self-Selection and Recovery
Honesty and integrity instead of "your Truth": Have the honesty to admit you may be wrong, that your emotions are not wrong, but may be getting in the way of having something better for yourself. Subjects believe their "Truth" (always true regardless of contrary evidence) belongs to everyone even if delusions cloud the facts and prevent reason. If honesty means admitting you have a problem, it also means others might be the problem especially if their selfish needs are often getting in the way of yours. They might be standing in the way of purifying politics to get better results for everyone. Try to step back and see where others are coming from. Don't surround yourself with the politically like-minded nor should you establish a Safespace bubble from uncomfortable thoughts. If you can't tell the truth, you can't self-select to have a more rational society. If we can't be more honest, we'll get more political lies and gaslighting like that of 2024 for many years to come.
Courage: There is courage in standing up for the truth even when it's only 1% popular, which is speech and conduct that's thankfully protected by the 1st Amendment in the USA. Speaking truth to power is fashionable, but it might also take some inner fortitude to tell the larger crowd of the disempowered they're wrong or they don't understand. Mirroring might ask no person to act or think in a way that brings on themselves stigma or physical harm, but improving society takes hard work and requires sacrifice. Stand up for the truth in a way that convinces others, not in ways that make you the bully, the troll, or the bad guy/girl. You need not be Socrates and choose suicide for your beliefs because the ignorant masses don't understand you. Preserve your mind, stand up for those when you can, and help everyone inch forward at whatever pace is needed.
Hope: Rather than wallowing in the emotions of a problem or continuing to complain, the Mirror seeks to move beyond the problem to find a solution. If delusions cause us to keep believing even if the evidence is there that it's not true, then shards of truth are our way out to build a light of our own. In the darkest times, we need hope to preserve reason. Whether surviving a genocide, enduring a prison sentence after being wrongfully convicted, or being a target because of your beliefs, life is challenging and plenty of people are barely making it through the tough days. However, Mirroring offers a way out as it might not be a faith, offer some eternal reward, nor take from other people to give to its members, but it does offer more meaning to our everyday interactions. Hope means we clean up our own actions first and then work methodically to make that change possible for others. Open the windows and let the light of reason and logic into your lives!
Perserverance: To persevere means to continue on knowing that it will be difficult. You can't become an astronaut or a doctor on a day-by-day kind of basis or with small-mindedness. With hope in mind, you also can't wallow in despair, give up, shift priorities daily, or cave in to the demands of others on your time and resources. With regards to perseverance and Mirrorism, consider Jim Collins' Stockdale Paradox, named after Vietnam War POW James Stockdale. Under horrific conditions and as the highest-ranking US officer captured by North Vietnam, future Vice-Admiral and Ross Perot's VP running mate, James Stockdale had to suffer the worst torture for eight years yet still provide leadership and hope to his fellow captives. The paradox is the balancing of realism and optimism so that you have just enough hope to get through the worst conditions while realizing that small steps may be needed in order to get through the day and for you to methodically work towards your goals (more rational political discussions). Mirrors must have hope that despite the treachery, lies, and despair of 2024, they can persist and purify politics one step at a time.
Willingness: Refers to the self-selection of an individual Mirror to better themselves, the poor political conversation, and other people by more rational means. Self-selection represents the desire to change, which is the foundation for any plan of recovery. The darkness of your past experiences is no longer tolerable or doable. Maybe you've heard too much ranting about political conspiracies that once held some appeal. Maybe you're sick and tired of seeing your family split apart because of the presidential elections like Sasha Stone was. Whether it's a sudden epiphany, a slow "drip drip drip" evolution, or exhaustion over years of rhetorical combat, you've decided that you've had enough and want politics to be something different than 2016, 2020, or 2024 provided. There's no better time than now to reevaluate where your political views have gotten you and to consider a more objective change!
Responsibility: The only duty to obey that Mirrorism demands is to reason and rationality and not to another person, government, or a spiritual concept. We seek rational outcomes and that means we have to be responsible when the people around might want to be petty, want to post snarky memes, or ruthlessly shed the close people around them because of abstract ideas they might not even understand. We come to the aid of others even if they may not realize our help is forthcoming. By absorbing the Harmony of others, our great sacrifice for reason, it's not to show the Mirroring agent is superior, smarter, or better in any way. We have opted for this path and should expect little reward other than a more rational society. It's our responsibility to use our powers to help others join this path, not to convert them, use them for our own gain, or to enslave them to a greater will.
Discipline: Mirrors are pragmatists and this belief system requires discipline and strategy. It's not engaging on every front at every level. It's about playing smart, discovering the Truths (Vol. II), the Justice or Injustice (Vol.III) that make our subjects tick. It's using the Counterinsurgent Conversation Strategies (Volume V) to pick your fights, it's using the Struggle Session Calculus to detect hurtful rhetoric and conduct and adjust. It means sometimes taking a loss in order to fight again another day. Logic itself is discipline. It brings order to the universe so should you work to master it so you can command it in a rational debate. It's also reading broadly to sharpen your mind so you can anticipate what others might think and do better than they believe they know. Finally, it's about rejecting the temptation to mew and cry with the crowd. It's about shoving away the allure of the conspiracy theory or the instant gratification of posting a snide meme since you didn't take the time to formulate your own political opinion. Stay on track and push forward. You've got this!
Service: The task of self-selection does not take away the hopeful impulse to convince others of the viability of rational argument. Thus, service is meant to satisfy the yearning desire for a better world and to actively convert others susceptible to our message. No one is asking for personal self-sacrifice or for anyone to become a saint. We're just asking for mental work and some sacrifice of time that would likely be wasted anyways by the old timer who talks your ear off about some hare brained political belief. The service we render is small. We ask to understand our subjects and make them a little happier until they themselves come to a change. Most importantly, we ask for self-service to purify our own minds with more rational thinking.
Please have a hopeful and rational year of Mirroring in 2025. Go forth and multiply!!!!
Glossary
Abstraction: the nonphysical
Assent: To agree to something.
Context: the persons, places, and times of a debate.
Fallacy: a false idea.
LiFT (historical): narratives about history than can't easily be changed.
Macrofaults: large abstract and complex problems that approached simplistically.
Microfaults: Tiny social wrongs that are not solvable in a conversation.
Mirrorism: Like a mirror, it's the reflection of emotional arguments back on the arguer.
Mirror Agents: the people mirroring irrational political discussions.
Pragmatism: 19th century American Philosophy that sought truth through what works.
Prop totems: objects used to convey arguments so that no argument can be given in response.
Rationality: the use of reason and logic to discover truth.
Reason: Justifying belief using facts.
Self-Selection: A rational choice to become a mirror because of an irrational debate
Totems: objects acting as symbols.
Totemic Purgogasm: the almost orgasmic release resulting from destroying symbolic objects.
Utility: the choice between mirroring or arguing to gain a societal benefit
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