Volume VI:
Empires of Mass Abstraction
Maxim: “Avoid political discussions when everyone’s society cannot receive a guaranteed benefit.”
The Highlights of Abstract Mirroring Volume VI:
- Reminder: Belief acceptance + Context=Harmony.
- Micropower: In a debate or small group setting, micropower describes the inter-personal dynamic of using coercion and self-justification to resist rational arguments. At that point in a debate, if you aren't with them, you're against them. Conversely, a person becomes a peasant of, I mean, a subject of Mirroring and a would-be Empire builder of ideology.
- Authority: is the legitimate exercise of power without active
justification because it is reasonably accepted and exercises power
rationally. However, when a subject with a legitimate, rational complaint rejects their duty to obey and performs an open act of noncompliance, the subject questions the legitimacy of the authority, prompting a potential coercive reaction to preserve that which cannot be justified without threatening legitimacy with the other subjects.
- Raw Power: While power is the perception of an ability to command others to act, speak, or do neither, Raw Power specifically requires force to achieve compliance regardless of all objections. It is irrational because a potentially valid response is not allowed as it is simply deemed to be disobedient. Ex. demanding the deference of political opinion from unknown persons regardless of their views, shouting others down (volume), clapping at people to cover over a lack of words, physically intimidating others, using selective and biased media coverage, preventing typed responses, etc.
- Decision Fog: Based on Plato's Cave and the imperfection of the senses, and Yoda's Den of Evil, a mirror for Luke Skywalker's self-discovery of the Force, and the idea of self-selecting ones' failures or successes. It's the real-time flaws of information processing when exercising power. It may lead to confusion, misinformation, perceiving rational opinions as misinformation, or leading to untimely decision-making (too slow or fast).
- Legitimate Resistance: is the ability to resist a command using rational, valid means that cannot go unanswered by a claimant authority. The failure of an aware authority to rationally counter an objection or to ignore it altogether may lead that authority to use Raw Power to enforce compliance of a potentially unjust order.
- Illegitimate Resistance: means disobeying rational orders or the law without using a valid complaint pursued through the established system in context. For ex.: breaking into a public building and rioting to disrupt an electoral vote count, destroying police stations and injuring officers to prevent enforcement of the law without pursuing valid complaints through the system, spray painting priceless art to make a political point, or forcing Supreme Court confirmation hearings to suspend because of loud protests.
- Schlamperei: A German word for untidiness and sloppiness, often used for government authories. For our purposes, it is used to separate a valid complainant and their object of ire: an institution’s inefficient and lazy exercise of authority. Valid complaints are treated with a cold shoulder, pushed through slow bureaucratic processes, or if relentlessly pursued, punished using Raw Power.
- Fossil Fallacy (Collective Identity Fallacy): A justification by old, established collectives (Frozen-in-Carbonite institutions) that possess authority and use identity or duration fallacies to justify further commands while dismissing rational challenges. Ex. “We cannot allow the undermining of this important, respected institution because we are this important, respected institution.” As with pragmatism's "fossils," they may cease to be useful and act more like museum pieces to be seen and not touched (or confronted).
- Micropower Microaggressions (MMAs):
An unsolvable complaint about a microaggression and one that empowers
the complainant in dis-proportionally combative ways relative to the significance of what actually happened. Seemingly small and even innocent interactions act as proxies for broader unsolvable issues (Macrofaults) like race or gender discrimination in America.
- Identity
Safety in a Space (ISiS): A type of ad hominem fallacy. This involves constructing an environment where another
person's power, deemed a threat to a perceived identity, is limited merely because of who they are in
order to preserve an irrational sense of safety, or one based on
superficial assumptions. Ex. Rejecting those with
an unfamiliar fashion style because of their looks rather than the content of their opinions, or assuming a
white male is a threat without rationally considering any of their views about a controversial matter.
- Safespace Parlors:
A friendly debate environment or Parlor, as opposed to an emotional support space, where debate authority is reserved only for a specific
class of people because of that group’s supposed emotional sensitivity
to truths. For the invading group to use power in that context could de-legitimize the authority of the group constructing the Parlor. Its proponents often use words like “We’ve heard enough from
that group” to cordon themselves off from dispute, especially from truths, and in order to prevent both real and imagined aggression. Ex. "Because rioters stormed the capital on January 6th in Washington, an open Trump supporter is a threat to my personal safety if they disagree with me in New York City after I confront them about their outfit in a public restaurant."
- Old Bois/Girlz Clubs (Originalist) vs. Revisionist Safespaces: Originalist Safespace Parlors occur when traditional groups irrationally limit the participation of a perceived outside class (“others”). Revisionists are newer parlors created to limit participation by perceived originalist groups in order to re-balance or achieve some level of corrective "social justice" in a way that cannot be proven or guarantee the intended result.
- Council of Mirrors: A voluntary institution of individuals pursuing greater value out of micro-politics and the accurate use of abstractions. By exercising conversational mirroring, our subjects experience no coercive authority or Raw Power as we choose to practice belief acceptance in context, and leave the conversation with our subjects believing in harmony. As a successful, truly pragmatic institution and a model for others, we achieve greater efficiency, a more rational output, and gain greater agreement from our subjects.
- Ronklainian Propaganda Tools:
Chief of Staff Ronald Klain’s tools to convince stupid “Uncles” at a
holiday gathering among family. It is opposite advice to what a mirror
would give and an exercise in identifying boorish sources of abstraction
in an interpersonal, micropower setting
(unpersuasive dinner table politics lectured to “idiots”).
- Exhibit A: Mar-a-lago-an Rebels: Populist demagoguery + Reacting to elite and institutional indifference= Relentless attackers who use glittering generalities and conspiracies to change the existing political order. Ex. "The Big Steal Doom Pit," "Antisemitism and Racism," and "Fort Mar-a-Lago."
- Exhibit B: Chenyist First Order: Elitist moralizing + Control of Powerful Institutions= top down Neo-Puritan resistance to the concerns of the "ignorant" masses. Ex. "Constitional Threats are ONLY When We Say They're Threats," "Neo-Puritan Warmongering," and "I'll See You in Hell'Ism."
- Exhibit C: The Sandersista Resistance: Populist demagoguery + Radical ideologies emphasizing severe coercion and re-distributive giveaways = wanting to radically reshape society by reshaping or destroying unfriendly corporations and institutions, and proactively limiting the ability of opponents to respond by cancelling them. Ex. "Don't You Dare Call Us Privileged Hypocrites!," "Safety for Me, But F Thee!," and "Existential Threats! Not Conspiracy-Smearacies."
- Exhibit D: Darkside Brandonists: Absentee Elitist Condescension + Gaslighting ones' radical and moderate flanks= Altering society as little as possible and demanding credit for doing it because the other party is intractable about something they don't believe and won't do it anyways. So, everyone should be thanked for the least results possible! Pray Darkside Brandonists don't alter it any further! Ex. "The Gaslight is a Beacon for Tired, Huddled, Drug Lords," "Student Loan Forgiveness Bait and Switch," and "All Our Foreign Policy Weaknesses are Actually All Our Strengths. Shut up!"
Table of Contents
I. Introduction: Unlearn What You Have Learned
Part I: Authority:
A Fully Armed and Operational Battle-station.
II. Bow to the First Order!
III. Micropower and The Ethics of Accepting Authority
IV. Fogs and Caves
V. Schlamperei: Frozen-in-Carbonite Institutions
Part II: Compliance:
Star Systems Slipping Through Tight Grips
VI.The Conformity Paradox
VII.Legitimate Resistance and Failing to Accept “Irrational” Authority
VIII. Micropower Microaggressions (MMAs)
IX. Safespace Parlors and Identity Safety in a Space (ISiS)
X.An Intermission: A Counsel of Mirrors
Part III: Applications:
Demonstrating the Capabilities of this (Battle) Station
XI. Macropower Method Studies
XIII. Ronklainian Propaganda Tools
XIV. Glossary:
You Are Protocol Droid Are You Not?
Political Mirroring:
Volume VI: Empires of Mass Abstraction
I. Introduction: Unlearn What You Have Learned
Obi-Wan (A Jedi): Your new empire?
Anakin: Don't make me kill you."
"Revenge of the Sith," 2005
There are still two dominant American political parties, both alike in ignobility, yet still standing astride the great political debates of the past six years. The important disputes they mangled and the damage they wrought has yet to subside. And here we perch in the year of our political lords, 2022, with neither Sith nor Jedi permanently ascendant. Yet, our nation still faces a multitude of unresolved potential hellscapes those rivalries may well have spawned. On the precipice of disaster, empires of the impractical mind are being created by these self-serving factions, urging their followers to exacerbate the woes of the unaligned people of our nation, while threatening to send us all into the heart of the Maelstrom.
In unfair Washington, where we lay our scene, the history of the country since 2016 from whence we began this Mirroring journey has not been kind. A nightmare reflective of our current morass provided the impetus for this volume. This might seem like a written lament to the common reader, as power and politics are often undesirable subjects when compared to happier ones like music, food, or celebrity inconsequentiality. Yet, this is still a hopeful field guide, a serious directive to escape the political tractor-beams from those partisan death-stars prowling around the helpless star systems of Facebook and Twitter.
Much like a dream where a galactic empire oppresses its people into silence, one could easily imagine a fraught person sitting alone in their car, in 2022, masked, goggled, and gloved, scared about a virus that could not reach them in their present, solo circumstance. Not ready to let go of the pandemic, neither the protective cocoon
that their car provides nor their three vaccination shots are enough to allay their emotional roller-coaster. Neither the mainstream news media nor the un-elected health bureaucrats, despite their flaws in covering science, the virus, or its origins,
had ever indicated that it was possible for the virus to reach into a closed automobile in
summertime with no one to cast it there. For this obedient, terrified victim, the certainty of not being told otherwise was not enough to change their behavior nor to stop giving away their precious autonomy or to engage in further absurdities.
If a tree falls in a forest, who gave it the order to fall down? For a scared, obedient person self-victimized by mere health advisement, who is to say they aren't justified in what they've been lead to believe if they've never given it a second thought or if they rarely question the authority of those with similar political inclinations? Other questions flowed from this actuality, ones based on my development as the Mirror Master and my understanding of how the speech from important “scientific-sounding" individuals could command this perplexing duty to obey. How during the waning days of COVID-19 could the pull of an abstraction, “Science,” the power and reach of government represented by health institutions, and above all the fear of death to the point of panic push people, irrational or otherwise, to give unprecedented power away despite widely available, contrary evidence?
Despite the skeptical efforts of many, we’re still caught in quite a pickle as result of this power giveaway, its acidic protectors, and the vinegary implications that go beyond a society jarred up because of COVID, MAGAism, Bidenomics, or recent foreign policy disasters. To many Americans, it often seems as if we’ve swerved beyond the simple, mostly abstract, yet acceptable social contract under which we’ve been accustomed to living. Have these common abstractions of our politics morphed into something salty and unpalatable?
Sadly, it's not unwise to think that is the case. We can't often reach even a modest peace within our individual lives based on the gloomy and numbing hypothetical futures imposed upon us. Whether our politics of mass
abstraction, our broad ideals shot up from our heads into a disconnected galaxy ruled by the Washingtonian national center, is the cause of the political parties dividing us or the parties are the cause
of the dividing doesn’t really matter.
It’s our job as Mirrors to identify the boundaries of what all types of
Americans believe before this ferment unbottles us all.
In whatever type of political system we have in America, confrontation among competing, mostly fixed interests is common, yet often unhelpful and unproductive especially if it is irrationally conceived and executed. However, to show you that I am not some wilting flower or that I meekly slip away from the salient issues, I would remind you that I've waded into many of the controversies of our time and challenged the fossil thinking of the two party mania.
Through case studies, I scorched the absurdities of extreme COVID policies, developed a whole system of criminal justice based on the now-defunct Mueller investigation, dissected each presidential impeachment, and discussed the sequester debate of federal funds during the Obama administration. With its basis in the philosophy of Pragmatism, Mirrorism is not some inactive pessimism, nor does it ignore the reality of the current controversies. Instead, Mirroring has an assumption that people have the potential to be nasty, brutish, and short-lived, but they also possess the potential to use intellectual and physical tools to progress.
Before proceeding then with power or fixating ourselves too much on COVID-19, we should refresh ourselves with the past volumes and outline the purpose for this current adventure. The first set of volumes of Mirroring
(I in 2017 and II in 2018) involved creating a solid foundation, the concrete basis for
Mirroring, one that rests on the philosophy of Pragmatism with a smidgen of
Kantean ethics. Thus, Mirroring is about the process of having our subjects see their own political
reflection from others in order to achieve harmony while self-selected mirrors leave aside the strife and actually do something to develop solutions.
Volumes III, IV, and V (2019-2021) were major undertakings, a kind of superstructure as I built the boundaries of Mirroring. In Volume III, Justice is defined as a Truth, an abstract, universally True belief. And as a True belief, it is an endless pursuit as Justice is righting a wrong that is never really righted. In that sense, Justice can be irrational and delusional as it becomes mostly about the pursuit and the changing guidelines as to when and how a righted wrong will be resolved (ex. social justice).
In Volume IV, Harmony is separated from Peace, as it's not simply the status quo, but the belief that others share belief acceptance, which as a totality is an impossible achievement in the real world. Yet, it is desirable by all and used especially in politics in order to win support and gain power. Harmony, more than simply not fighting or arguing, is often incorrectly seen as peace, as the world is to be righted and the disagreements are dissolved to form a unified, Utopic society.
However, that view of peace as harmony is in of itself is inadequate because peace involves the compromises that ideology should not permit, meaning harmony is impossible because a status quo is not the solution to all political disagreements as the result of a total victory for a side over another. Instead, it is those existing in relative harmony, seeing the world on a similar wave length when it comes to political ideology that are the desired end game for disputes. Where ideology is concerned, barring a change of mind and the obliteration of ideological missionaries from the opposing side, peace is a chimera for harmony as our subject's purest wishes can't be fulfilled until there is total agreement and conversion of all opponents.
Finally, in the epic galaxy-building of Volume V, Mirroring is described as an exercise in using and identifying speech, conduct, or a lack of communication. Speech is used by our subjects to pursue Truth and to punish False, to pursue endless Justice and to end Evil. Using the Mirroring Diagram, a Mirror can determine the course of speech in a political debate and assess the value in continuing to spectate, leave, or fight.
There is also the construction of Parlays and Parlors. A Parlay is a way to describe the content of the political debate and to assess whether that content is rational or whether it borders on emotionality, irrationality, while potentially opening the debater to stigma for acting as an opposition. A Parlor is the construction of a beneficial environment for the discussion that inhibits or prevents a rational response. If used as intended, a Parlor restricts how, when, and where people can speak and a Parlay is used to determine what content is allowable in that context. These are key concepts when understanding power, the object of this Sixth Volume, and with that wonderful reminder of the past years, enough to prepare for the force meditation required to face down the Dark Side.
Therefore, my intention with this work is to finally bring about the reckoning with political science that with justice, speech, and truth we have merely been dancing around the periphery with while waiting for our great introduction. It is finally time to stitch together the power dynamic found in a mirrored conversation beyond the truth or falsity of the arguments (II), the content of the arguments (IV), or the speech and environment in which they take place (V). And at this great way-point, it has finally come time to incorporate the implied, but not express purpose of this blog “The Politics of Mass Abstraction:” to explore the influence of abstract words and beliefs on our real life decisions. Throughout my journey, I have consistently sought to smite the vague and abstract language used in political discourse to empower others, whether they are COVID-era memes, the abuse of history to tear down unrelated modern persons, or supporting never-ending prosecutions until the verdict is the desired one.
Therefore, we will reckon with a concept known as Micropower in order to trace the impact of big ideas on the would-be victors of the everyday interaction. Micropower is seeking advantage and dominance in a small-time conversation, using big abstractions like "preserving our democracy from existential threats" or "exposing the Big Steal" to impose the duty to obey on others around them, and most importantly using irrational speech or action to squash opposition. I've arrived at this juncture intent on exploring how the concept of authority and the imposition of obedience can reach its long arm from Washington, Brussels, Beijing, or Moscow into a coffee table debate in a small, rural American town. In that sense, micropower is everything in an interpersonal setting that is irrational and verbal or active short of a Darth Vader force choke, an act of violence that never warrants mirroring or a rational response if you can manage to get it out.
If the big ideas are teleported into our every day acts, we must look to the long term possession of authority and the inability of the small person to contend with its might. Like the National Institute of Health and its chief representative, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an institution is a long-standing collective who rightly or wrongly possesses authority and who are difficult to disobey because of tradition, social conventions, laws/constitutions, and beliefs (as in religion and science). Oftentimes, they are staffed by bureaucrats, that is, those persons acting on the authority conferred to that collective by society. Since humans and not droids are the bureaucrats staffing these institutions, and much like a corporation as a collective entity of people able to have free speech after Citizens United (2010), they are not faceless automatons either, merely stamping documents, collecting their salaries, and moving slow to run out the clock on a sinister day full of screwing over their employers, the public, while not adequately serving those they were hired to serve. Instead, they have the same potential merits and vices as other changeable, small groups of people like a family or a group of friends.
And we are not here to condemn or condone any institutional bureaucracy either. In order to detect
new abstract empires of the mind, however, we do need to understand their potential to distort the boundaries of what is
acceptable whether as a national directive or on the small time level (mircopower) in a conversation where people follow the dictates from people they've never met, yet they feel deputized to enforce those rules locally even amongst their neighbors or among strangers (as in enforcing mask wearing outside while walking a dog).
That brings us to a key point of Volume VI: the Safe Space Parlor (SSP). To ensure maximized power, regardless of the outputs from exercising that power, our subjects often
seek to formalize and retain existing power (Originalist Safe Space Parlors). Or,
if they are outsiders looking in, they might desire to seize power from other groups because of real or perceived injustices, making
them feel entitled to take without needing to explain what they would do
differently with that power (Revisionist Safe Space Parlors). Safe Space Parlors are not a critique of those safe spaces designed to create a sense of community and happiness with other like-minded
peoples. Instead, it is a critique of using safe spaces solely as a protective cover for bad arguments, illogic, and to create a barrier to better results.
When those SSPs are
vested with the full powers of government, or with religious, racial, or economic might, they
are institutions, but of the variety that resists challenges and are self-propelled to
quash any serious threats to their legitimacy.
These are "Frozen-in-Carbonite Institutions," which have lost some part of their pragmatic
cause for existence, namely to address real-world problems for their members or
constituents. Whether they use the
ridiculous propaganda techniques put forth by Ron Klain, the Biden
Administration Chief of Staff, to invade your holidays with politics or they take advantage of powerful political abstractions like the empowering motivation provided by Mar-a-logan populism (MAGAism) or contra-posed to them the Chenyist resistance, the tricks of the trade are essential to be understood if we're ever going to have a better, more productive future with our American style of politics. That is unless politics is for you like being a life-time sports fan and you're so far down the dark path that there's no coming back with anything I might write.
So, Volume VI sets the bar as high as Donald Trump, Liz Cheney, or Joe Biden do for the other with political results. The high ground, once seized by an Obi Wan Kenobi cannot be ceded to some irrational, fictional upstart, like Anakin Skywalker, our symbol here for hatred and passion ruling politics. To bring order to the American galaxy, we need help, a resistance to unreason, and a rebellion against the tyranny of those willing to squash a valid counterargument. If you aren't frightened yet by the depth of this work so far, you will be. You will be.
Part I:
Authority: A Fully Armed and Operational Battle Station
II. Bow to the First Order!
Give you one more night, one more night to get this
We've had a million, million nights just like this
So let's get down, let's get down to business”
Behold ye subjects of Mirroring! Let's get down to this business of authority and fully arming it to the teeth. Power is not some emperor shooting lightning out of his hands or seeing the future and manipulating people across a galaxy. For humans, it's also not always an animalistic test of brute strength, where some beta wolf is forced to submit to the bigger, stronger alpha. Nor is it always a mighty army winning bloodless battles and parading their foes back home in triumph.
If one were to look at the course of world history, which most of our subjects have little ability to assess beyond the thinking level of a toddler, power is more mundane than most would realize especially with the celebrity causes and bright slogans force-pushed into their faces or that cause some to do insane things to support them. And it's not always about Genghis Khan conquering Asia and Eastern Europe, Hernando Cortes destroying the brutal Aztec Empire with help from their angry, victimized native neighbors, or Niccolo Machiavelli trying and failing to unify the warring states of Renaissance Italy.
Initiating a power dynamic may be a test of physical intimidation or strength. Or, because we are thinking creatures, guile may convince physically stronger opponents to think twice about confrontation. That brings us to something fundamental about the action in a power dynamic: it is non-magical, real belief from real people that empowers others. It is conscious choice or a subconscious rote behavior when following the forces behind an order, whether its fully perceived or not. It is a conversational dominance established in a political conversation and the dominance of a Debate Monster over others and their willingness to crush opponents.
Power is most often processed through a dynamic between people over controlling others, over geography, or over their objects like natural resources, relics, or non-essential property. By understanding the casual actions or inaction of persons who do not rebel or act out against society because of what they understand or by passive participation, we can decide whether the small, everyday dynamics are conducive to beneficial action or if they offer a horrid waste of time.
It is through our connection to other humans and to an abstract concept of society that we maintain a fragile balance between our small lives and the big world out there. This power dynamic is active on the individual level, yet it's also the belief in compliance without consciously doing anything about it. We obey the traffic signs by interpreting the visuals after having experienced what it commands us to do. Or, we might resist our emotional urges to force-choke fender benderers in a fit of road rage not because Darth Vader is omnipresent, but because these real behaviors are cultural and social, inculcated through symbolic interaction, and because they provide a little more stability that lessens the stress and struggle of real life.
Yet, power and authority, like peace and harmony, are different concepts in Mirroring. Power is the ability of a person to command someone else to act or not. It is summarized as the duty to obey (imposed by an authority) plus an act of compliance (submitting to the authority). Authority is not necessarily passive power, instead it’s the ability to command others to obey without needing to actively enforce it. Though with certain forms of authority, like requiring registration for a draft for military service for men aged 18 and up, it often requires an affirmative action on behalf of the subject to show compliance. In a sense, authority is built on power, as is the case when the Selective Service not only provides the US government the ability to force just men to sign up for service, but also for those men to pontentially give their lives for their country (an abstraction).
Thus, authority is also more like a continued justification for commands and something that confers legitimacy or the right to issue those commands. This is often based on the real-time acceptance and general understanding of physical artifacts like constitutions or nurtured beliefs found in customs like the bow to show respect and deference. The assumption is that an authority is acting mostly rationally in using its power if there is no legitimate or noticeable challenge. Because a piece of paper, a Constitution, grants tax powers to people calling themselves a "Congress" and allows them to have those revenues brought far away for any use that those lawmakers deem necessary and proper, some may grumble, but most pay. Authority vested in a distant group of people has a massive impact as an act of power on that individual, a complaince to that authority's ability to command, whether they're happy about it or not.
Therefore, power obviously only matters if people are involved. After all, the Constitution is just a bunch of written words that are meaningless if no one is there to read and understand them. What then is the difference between the three types of power listed: power, Raw Power, and Micropower (see section III), and how do they connect to authority? Well, while power is the simple ability to compel human action or inaction regardless of the legitimacy or morality of that command, Raw Power is specifically irrational, illegitimate, and requires coercion to differentiate it from simple power. It is best summarized as an illegitimate duty to obey, where the subject specifically does not share belief acceptance with the person making the command, plus an act of noncompliance that takes place in a context, which means a similar time and a connection between the places where the command is rejected, and where both commander and commanded are aware of the order and what it means to reject it.
An authority as mentioned above is when there is the ability to command this duty without having to justify itself. Therefore, Raw Power specifically and necessarily overrides legitimate authority because there is a challenge that the authority is aware of and can't override without using coercion. Unlike a legitimate authority, Raw Power must be exercisable and active, even if it is the use of mockery or a silencing of the complainer, regardless of the source for making that command, because others could lose their confidence in the commands of the challenged authority.
And unbeknownst to most of the uninitiated is the odd factor of the power of objects over people beyond simply meeting the basic needs of food, water, safety, and shelter. One of the most important parts of Mirroring thus far is that conference of belief and power on objects, be they a protest sign, a patriotic flag, or a religious object. While a totem is an anything used to simplify and symbolize belief, and to be used in the place of a rational argument, a Micropower Totem is any non-human thing given powers to command humans to obey other humans, from mundane objects of power like stoplights, to more supernatural things like sacred animals, religious relics like crosses, menorahs, small statues, black rocks, or even artwork being granted command and control over a neighborhood full of protective believers.
Imagine a mural of a fallen local notable painted on a building coding the people who pass by to genuflect or raise their fist because of some shared meaning with something they did before they died an unnaturally early death. Because of the enforcement of the community around it, the mural commands the duty to obey as a proxy. The watching people around it are a kind of police who enforce that duty and punish violators by harassing or intimidating them if they walk past without proper respect for it as one would respect a real person.
Objects themselves have little empowering them unless it's discovered or demonstrated by people. One could not perceive an object to be powerful until provided with experience to understand it that way. A gun might be a weapon that we understand today that projects power, and it certainly can be violently used to force compliance like the apes forcing human slaves to obey in "Planet of The Apes." However, unless it's in working order and until the object controller and the subject understand what it can do, there is no power dynamic existing merely because of the object and thus it is not a Micropower Totem. The object isn't understood as a threat (irrational) to an individual, nor is it a device of Raw Power as it's not actively used to intimidate people since they can't understand the meaning of what the gun is to supposed to signify (bodily harm or death).
Anything non-human requires humans to confer power upon on them until we can claim a common civilization with the non-sentient things of this planet or aliens like the Jawas, Ewoks, the natives of Naboo, or sentient droids from galaxies far away. Here at home, a pile of sticks could randomly fall into a formation, but it doesn't have meaning until some human points out its religious nature through symbolic interactionism, takes command of the object, and uses a group's beliefs to command them to do things like to offer grain they harvested with their labor, provide corvee services (labor instead of paying taxes through goods or money), or even to give their blood or bodies for sacrifice.
War-ready armies and their weapons or hidden national archivists and their missing archival stacks are not always the upfront authoritative image before the public. Yet, its their tools (weapons and documents), simple objects that can be found in everyday life and can confer power based on the people using them. They can be used to wage war and cause death and destruction of enemies or lead to the death of the weapon bearers themselves. Or, they can be jealously protected and the absence of which can be used to threaten a Former President (Trump) with being unable to hold further office even though they're objects from his administration.
So, even symbolic action by humans counts as potential commands to obey. As per Volume III and V, a raised fist could be a powerful symbol to a couple eating dinner in 2020 in many American cities. They can comply with the symbolic gesture and raise their fist, or if they fail to perform as ordered, they may have knowingly or unknowingly indicated their resistance to the meaning behind the action: to signify solidarity with Black Lives Matter and against their understanding of the abstractions of racism, police brutality, and white privilege. The gesture or even a protester placard with the symbol on it provides "fuel" for the would-be dominator. To inaccurately perceive its meaning or if they fail to comply with a return salute shows a rejection of the duty to obey, a symbol of resistance to the protester's micropower, and a source of potential escalation (See Volume IV and the Peace-Hate Conflict Scale).
One thing is certain: there is no easy way to always determine how or why power is conferred on people or their objects. We know why armies have this potent and threatening image because humans have always and will continue to use violence to compel others as masses of armed people is well-understood among people everywhere. The greater mystery is why authority granted over preserving top secret documents is so potent a duty to obey that a bookworm could potentially and at the very least decide who is to be the next president despite being appointed and not elected themselves. At the very worst, the possession of this authority could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters over an unprecedented dispute over executive privilege for once not being extended to predecessors to keep the peace. The powers of the Chief Executive to declassify whatever they want, and the ability of bureaucrats to work with other branches of bureaucrats to ensure what for them is a politically desirable outcome for those using such unprecedented powers (barring Trump from running again and disenfranchising voters who would make that choice to nominate, then hire or not in legitimate elections). But, the type of decisions made by the individual archival bureaucrat are our next task and for that we must turn to Micropower, if they could put down their dusty books and be called to account by the public long enough to get some messages snail mailed to them.
III. Micropower and The Ethics of Accepting Authority
We need to reckon with how people actually experience power rather than for the moment dwelling on the abstractions or the objects guiding them. In Volume VI, Micropower is our tool. It is a derivative of power, but it has the feature of being unbounded by facts and rationality. It is the supremacy coming from the ability to compel others on an individual, conversational level (as micro means small) where minor issues of pride, ambition, respect, or other intangibles are relevant as one is more intimately interacting with foes instead of sneering at or sobbing along with John Boehner over Speaker Nancy Pelosi's retirement hundreds of miles away.
It
is the individual power dynamic, found between small groups of people
in-person or online, and it is often where Raw Power is used to subject
others to deference, humiliation, or physical and emotion pain. It
could
involve rational causes for the imposition of power and also require
subservience to a law code, with carefully, widely-interpreted, and
accepted
views of those written words. Because the consequences of the interaction are more personal and serious, individuals put increased weight and emotional connection to coming out on top of these confrontations. They value winning above finding some
greater societal benefit or altruism, which are anti-macropower as they use power in a way that gains legitimacy for the authority through rational discourse and action. That is why it was recommended as far back as Volume I to avoid open political warfare with family, coworkers, and friends because of the high stakes. Do disregard the attempt at micropower by Ron Klain as he tries to have you propagandize to your family over the Thanksgiving Turkey. But more on that in the Applications section.
With Ron Klain put on ice until later in this volume, note instead that micropower is actionable in the real world and not some simple, idealistic, Socratic dialogue. The person exercising it wants to achieve dominance over others, and not just to compel legal, ethical, or moral decision-making from them. Instead of leading to a marginally useful result, micropower is used to make others subject to a commander’s will, to make them into another cog in or victim of their ideological Empire. It is the suppressive speech used to shout down or intimidate someone short of following through with the violence of punching a so-called Nazi (or PAN) after hearing what is believed to be a racist speech, true or not. Raw Power is the force used to violently react to hate speech to force silence (by punching them) or for example as a brutal crackdown on public protests in China against the coercion of being starved to death in service to insane health policies (Secondary Raw Power used to suppress legitimate resistance, the protests, against Primary Raw Power, the Zero Covid policies).
Micropower is not a mass action like that of armies, mobs, or royal processions. Instead, it's the irrational decision-making of the individuals giving or taking the commands in. It is those in the dilemma of the moment, in the thick of the micropower dynamic, who for example have their orders to jump the trenches in WWI and head the attack across the no-man's land because they are being punished for disobeying mundane, but unjust orders. To let the soldiers disobey the order to attack would ruin the army and possibly the war, but the impetus for the command was unjust. Or, it's the unarmed election protester who peacefully walked down to the capital building on January 6th, 2021 and was carried away by the shoving and let in the door by terrified police, thinking even then not of the absurdity of overthrowing the government as they walked around taking selfies with no weapons, but that they could somehow end a constitutionally proscribed electoral count by stalling it for a little bit. Or, it's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at King Charles III's coronation deciding whether it's in their own self-interest as royals to blow up the British monarchy after the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II with another dreadful Netflix series full of hearsay and whining (See Volume V and the discussion of them and Morgan Traps, named after their enemy Piers Morgan).
It is the individual, irrational decision-making and understanding of the power dynamic that matters with micropower. The individualized, but irrational decision-making aspect makes it a derivative of power (the umbrella concept) and different from the solely using the coercive aspect (Raw Power), which in our examples, come from the military officers who shot the stragglers who refused to attack, or the capitol police who killed the one person on that day, an unarmed rioter Ashli Babbit, or afterwards, the Raw Power used by the FBI to hound the others into long prison sentences beyond the usual trespassing charges for the crime they actually committed. Or, from the royal family responding with Raw Power rather than addressing the questionable allegations, then cutting off the privileges of "Megxit" even further. So, micropower requires illegitimate and irrational commands or an illegitimate and irrational rejection of those commands.
A critic might say that in those cases above, there is not some all-knowing, perfect judge watching and ticking off the violations of the law, itself a description of the powers however rational in its nature. Nor is that entity checking for illegitimacy or irrationality of each command and response, evaluating the dynamic and assessing real-time punishments that are fair for either people in authority or the subject. We'll leave the divine judgement to each person's religious/spiritual beliefs. To address this real-world problem of no omniscient judge of power and authority, however, we need to explore the ethics of Mirror Power which is possible only with humans.
At the start of a mirroring power ethics discussion, we need to establish a few guiding principles. First, no command is legitimate if any reasonable person could see it as causing physical harm or death (de-contextualization). If you aren't in the conversation because you're incapacitated or dead, you can't mirror and you can't improve the rationality of everyday debates, therefore, any command in this context is illegitimate. Second, no order is legitimate if it takes away natural rights like the freedoms of speech, movement, and belief that any reasonable person would accept as both given at birth and as inalienable (not able to be separated from them ever) for all. There are limits of course, but the easiest way to dismiss the easiest cases of limitation of these rights is to apply Kant and the categorical imperative. We
wouldn't accept a society where everyone is enslaved, nor would we
accept a society where everyone is a sex predator or is able to post child
pornography just because they have a basic freedom of speech and movement. So, obvious and practical limits apply at least on the easiest tests.
Third, no mirror is responsible for commands or orders they are unaware of because of an inability to communicate in a language, or to be unable to see, hear, or otherwise perceive as an order. Like in Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, we can't expect humans to see an order from a Vogon destructor fleet ordering the demolition of the earth and everyone on it to build a hyper-spatial expressway just because the orders were posted a mere 4 light years away, 50 years ago, at the local planning office in Alpha Centauri. However, if the order is part of an authority you have contact with, unlike earthlings and the Vogons with the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council, it's up to you to do due diligence about your responsibilities as a member of that society and for that authority to not become a crusted over institution that risks disobedient subjects because of its inefficient communication with them or the weak reach of your power, which if imposed suddenly is an arbitrary and potentially illegitimate authority.
Finally, mirrors must be able to self-select to be one, a status that is always changing and is never absolute or permanent. Therefore, being a mirror can never be oppressive to others for that would lead to less harmony and more conflict were we to force our rational beliefs on others. Our only duties to obey from this philosophy are those imposed by the mirroring maxim (to lessen irrational political conversations) and to increase rational outputs one conversation at a time. Therefore, self-selecting to becoming a mirror or morphing into a debate monster who trolls other debaters and wrecks any rational potential means that any person can be a subject of other mirrors because of their personal failure of understanding and active failure of using these concepts.
If not existing in a reasonably free society like the USA, so a place like North Korea or Iran, the ability for mirrors to work effectively is dramatically lessened, but so too are the lessened ethical requirements for us to respond to the State like honesty or violence in self-defense of those four guiding principles above. If a mirror happens to self-select and emerge in a repressive society, the are the ones in the context and not Immanuel Kant. Even marginally more rational and sensible figures can self-select in these closed societies, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, who see the rational flaws in their government and institutions, even if not abandoning the failed philosophy that allowed it. As Gorbachev never abandoned communism, he still wormed his way through the Warsaw Pact system as a rational virus, giving it cold from which it would not recover.
Ethics therefore requires self-selection, something that only each individual can do for themselves. To start, we should be aware of the existentialist philosophers in 20th century France and how they would interpret the processing of the power dynamic using the concepts of freedom and "Being," or that existence precedes thought. Basically, powerful people, their actions, or the objects they use in commission of that power only matter because people understand the meaning behind them as a free individual. In that strict sense of freely pursued experiences, of "Being," Mirrors agree. For pragmatists, their "essence," or rational thought, matters only because of the experience of those tools, rather, to obey them as they seemed to have worked throughout history or to trifle against them at their own risk if they don't seem to be effective any longer.
Living for living's sake, as the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir would desire, is great from a subjective standpoint as it provides for many adventures as individuals constantly try to experience the best in life and strive to remain authentic. But for pragmatists and mirrors, it's not the best way to organize society with consistency, or to achieve more rational outcomes, especially when concerning power, because legitimate, rational orders might inhibit the emotional satisfaction that comes from being authentically "free" and the result could be less beneficial to society when looking for better results.
Instead of the ethically difficult concept of total freedom, experience tells most people how to act because of what works, like the ability of someone under Stalinist repression being free to make the choices needed for self-preservation, like lying to the KGB to save a life, because they should not have to rigidly conform to a maxim that leads to self-harm (like Socrates dying for reason), nor a rigid Kantean categorical imperative where lying is always unethical. Some people in the Soviet dilemma example may escape the KGB by telling the truth, but only because they, in the context of the situation, either read it differently, perhaps they knew a guard or a higher up that could shield them, or simply because some lucky, unforeseen circumstance allowed them to go free and tell the truth about what they were hiding.
Without more information and added moral context in the midst of the application of Stalinist micropower by the Soviet agent, in the rigid Kantean ethical system, a person would have to tell the truth, follow the irrational duty to obey (micropower) under his categorical imperative because an order that forces self-harm is illegitimate, but since society should not be comprised of everyone lying, the victim would not have wiggle room, unless they skillfully omitted information without directly lying about the order to tell the truth.
Yet, according to many interpretations of Kant, any action to resolve an ethical dilemma must create a binding rule that all must do. Thus, one could develop a solution something close to lying by omission, a white lie, as something that all people should be able to do in the midst of an ethical dilemma. Would we want a society comprised of everyone using white lies because they believe they are justified in withholding information from everyone else for their own good? Rather would we want a society where everyone's intent must be assumed to be well-meaning because they are using white lies when they justified doing so? That places a ridiculous amount of power in the hands of the subject to decide when to white lie or not, it places a monumental amount of confidence in the goodness of the white liars, and it also would call into question the accuracy of information in this hypothetical abstract world because one would have to always assume that people were lying so it would be hard to know what to believe.
What is more likely is that a truth teller to the KGB, in being obedient, will forfeit their life unless one modified the category of what constitutes a lie and made the person in the dilemma aware that most would also lie in that specific context. Because Mirroring is pragmatic, the abstractions built like an ethical imperative must have use for the people actually in them instead of perfect abstractions dictating to people how they must act regardless of the context they're actually living through. Therefore, unlike Socrates irrationally and ironically killing himself for reason, or this hypothetical person telling the truth to the KGB, mirrors leave the decision to how all people would act in that dilemma if and only if the context is as fully explained for subsequent deciders as humanly possible and additionally, the circumstances of the choice for the others are as close to identical as humanly possible. Simple and rigid categories of abstraction should not lord over our decisions or our experiences, nor should total freedom allow us to disregard humanity's collective knowledge it experienced over tens of thousands of years when deciding complicated real world dilemmas.
IV. Fogs and Caves
Yoda was a fictional trainer who spoke few words and allowed his trainees to figure out their place in the Jedi Order for themselves often with a bit of mockery and snickering at their expense. Such was the case when overconfident Luke Skywalker, the savoir apparent and destroyer of the first Death Star, began his training as a Jedi warrior. Stepping in a magical Den of Evil, unprepared for self-discoveries of his own potential failures, he performed dismally. Disregarding advice, plunging forward to confront an enemy before he was ready, he came upon his own reflection, his own face in the severed head of his ghostly enemy and his own potential path to the dark side laying there even if he was unaware of it yet.
For Luke, a dark path to power lay before him if he only followed his emotions, acted irrationally, and did not prepare himself for the confrontation ahead of him. This fictional example is incredibly useful for us beyond the obvious similarities of mirrors and seeing a negative reflection back during a cautionary training exercise. In terms of power, it is informative because decisions have to be made with the intellectual resources available at the time. We can't use the Force and see into the future to determine what to do. And as humans, we can't control or understand all of the factors surrounding a decision, nor could we know that in our life tests we'd fail again and again. Afterall, when Luke had his second test against Darth Vader, which he failed at the cost of his hand and after realizing the heavy burden of knowing the enemy he was supposed to destroy was his father, he proved that he had not learned the lessons of hastiness and relying on ones' emotions to defeat an evil power.
Oftentimes, it seems as if the walls are closing around ones' self when making difficult decisions that affect others. The lack of information, the worries, the missing considerations are reasonable expectations for any human given authority. And as we saw with micropower, power itself only works if people are there to command or be commanded, and the dynamic of power itself is processed on the individual level. And such decisions are probably pretty easy routines if you're sitting in the Politburo of the People's Republic of China and your vote to give Chairman Xi Jianping an endless term in power is already a "Shi."
Perhaps, you're a retiring Republican geriatric or every single Democrat and you're expected to vote "yes" right before Christmas on an 800+ page $1.7 billion Omnibus spending bill to keep the government and Ukraine funded even though you haven't read any of the bill yet. Everyone might assume just because you're a Democrat that you're supposed to spend a lot of taxpayer money without accountability unless it's cutting military spending in every area other than by supporting Ukraine. In most cases, decision-making in politics is easy, procedural, normalized, and without fear of a lack of knowledge or the consequences of ones' actions if the political forces using the mainstream media are strong enough to prevent blow back. Chinese Communists, IDGAF outgoing, establishment Republicans, and all Democrats are good examples of this clear skies mindset.
Yet, since we want better deciders both in our conversations and up to the level of a world leader, how then do we sort through the random, unknown, or otherwise ill-defined factors that might affect both an authority and the subject forced to submit to it? For us, the concept used would be Mirror Fog, our equivalent of the fog of war. And as no person is omniscient nor is any user of artificial intelligence (i.e. the internet) capable of commanding all information prior to a political decision, we must assume there is information that is missing, that people aren't intelligent enough to connect things together, or that they're unaware it exists to use it. Like the fog of war or Luke in the Den of Evil, Decision Fog includes missing and/or faulty information that affects the utility (usefulness) of a decision to act or not. When an authority faces severe Fog, which is where mirroring subjects often are left in abandon, their judgment has a greater potential for unjust, irrational, and coercive action.
Environmental or time
elements may also obscure information from mirrors or subjects. Mirrors and
subjects have no control over these elements or if they believe they do, they've become potential subjects. Then, they often will construct a
Parlor to prevent others from questioning their actions as irrational actors try to limit the conversation (Parlay)
and the environment for debate (the Parlor). If the factors were present
and understood, they could alter decision-making, but that choice may be handled
either rationally or irrationally. There is no way to retroactively and
fully account for the missing information, however, if the missing information
could be decision-changing for most rational deciders, it can be said to be “a
fog” and a supernatural act of intervention in the rational debate process.
Taking a step back from Luke's emotionalism and from a general discussion of deciding based on missing information, we need to turn to an important foundation from Plato's work: a dark Cave. It is a Parlor that
leads to a mis-perception of a Power Dynamic, though unlike Plato's Cave it is not process of reaching a higher level of understanding beyond the information provided by the senses. A failure of rationality and
the imposition of an irrational power dynamic is not reaching the higher level desired by Plato, his master Socrates, nor his wayward apprentice Aristotle. Each sought a rational society where either the senses were used to decipher mysteries and root out untruths (Aristotle) or an idealized, truthful society where the senses may inhibit the abilities of Philosopher Kings to justly rule over their Republic (Plato). Using a rigorous process of debate to sort out untruths is our main purpose as mirrors though we differ to the extent we'll take our abstract principles (Socrates). What's most important to us about these Genius Dead Philosophers is the discovery of what causes a decision failure, whether it's due to uncontrollable
events that the senses weren't used well enough to detect (or as using a scientific method would allow), ignorant user error out because of the failure of the senses in the context of deciding, or whether willing ignorance or ideology blinded the person to the better choice.
How then does one limit the amount of fog if one has authority and wants a more responsible, ethical, and just exercise of it? One would recall from Volume IV there is a process Mirrors can use called Counter-insurgent Conversation Strategies (CCS). Not only is it useful to choose what to do in an awkward, irrational debate, it's also useful to identify power dynamics in the debate, and for those using Micropower. CCS emphasize increased information collection and that is really the key to better use of authority and power. Rather than dismissing criticisms out of hand because of who makes them, a lack of empathy for opponents because of little common values or experiences, or because of laziness, or even malice, information provides more ability to decide.
A critic might sneer and say that having more information, especially if it's poor or false, is a hindrance and that a trained instinct alone can provide enough impetus to decide. Certainly it's true that too much information places a greater burden to sort through and it slows down the decision-making of which facts are useful or if they're false ends. Yet, the critics are wrong to dismiss increased information just because it might potentially be misinformation.
Use the tools concerning the false chase from Volume II. Mirrors should be widely read and have the ability to know obvious falsehoods, like Biden chasing a ball in the park instead of chasing votes, and they should also not reject information merely because of the source of it. To deny potentially valid information simply without cause just because one is suspicious of it as a source invites more decision fog. Processing the potentially bad information might waste time, yet a decision made by an authority could be more damaging as it could lead to an unintended result, of subjects questioning it, or it could even threaten its legitimacy if reckless ignorance prevented a full consultation of the evidence.
Finally, let us turn from the idealism of Plato to the opposite end of the rational spectrum to Machiavelli and his manual for princes to eject foreign invaders (the French, Spanish, and Germans) and unite Italy. Mirroring does not subscribe to the idea that rulers must not concern themselves with justifications of their actions. Under Machiavelli's program, if a ruler finds his irrational actions to be in the best interest of preserving his rule, and his rule is deemed to be the best avenue for reunification, then torture, murder, or any number of heinous actions could be undertaken by the ruler so long as they are successful in their end game, meaning the ends justify the means.
One could imagine Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Ida Amin, Vladimir Putin, and any number of other dictators using this justification to keep power even though their genocidal programs are vastly different than the smart, but tough guy mentality that Machiavelli had in mind for princes, especially ones that weren't as ruthless, ultimately unsuccessful, and murdered like Cesare Borgia in 1507. In one sense Machiavelli is correct: leaders need to smarten up, dispel the fog clouding their minds and be prepared for difficult decisions as every one of them need not use mass slaughter or assassination in order to shore up their authority and implement their program. Plato recorded his master's philosophy down and though exiled from Athens by the forces of Athenian democracy, he never was forced to die for his ideals. Machiavelli experienced failure and used that knowledge to write his Renaissance manual to forge a unified Italian peninsula, something that Sun Tzu, one thousand years prior in Warring States China might have be proud to read when seeking heaven's mandate and unity of his divided people. And fictionally, Luke Skywalker got his correction not after exiting the evil cave, nor after losing his hand, but after he realized he could turn his father against his real enemy, the Emperor, and removing both of the emotional clouds on his and Vader's decision-making. Dispel the fog, exit the cave of self-protected ignorance, and use as much information as you can manage before making decisions of power!
XIV. Schlamperei: Frozen in Carbonite Institutions
Darth Vader: Well, Calrissian, did he survive?
Lando: Yes, he's alive, and in perfect hibernation.
Darth Vader: He's all yours, bounty hunter."
Having read histories of a wide variety as Mirror Master, one term popped up from The Balkans by Misha Glenny that was particularly striking regarding the final years Austro-Hungarian Empire: Schlamperei. The word roughly translates into sloppy, lazy, and inefficient in terms of bureaucratic efficiency and governance. Before and during WWI, the Empire was a mess of insurgent nationalist groups in Bohemia, Serbia, Hungary, and the amongst mixed populations in between. To administer this multi-ethnic empire and to preserve the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungry, the Empire had to essentially freeze its bureaucratic state and hold on for its dear life as confrontation with Serbia and Serbia's ally Russia loomed large. Rather than reforming in order win over its populations, the State became notorious for inefficient action and ignoring its problems, with its bureaucrats rubber stamping documents, duplicating offices and services, emphasizing parade, pomp, and waste over any practical or useful administration, especially of the minority communities.
Austria-Hungary is not America in 2022, however, what struck me for our purposes was the image of a heavily medaled, fossil general, with the multiple redundancies of his administration and their largess being his priority over doing anything militarily of use. The results of this lazy, Schamplen mindset, also explains the wanton bloodshed suffered by the Empire and especially its subject peoples during WWI, when it's lack of strategies or administration cost them greatly and lead to its disintegration. It's also a useful image because of Mirrorism's connection to pragmatism and its own analogy of ideas, ideologies, authorities, and institutions leaving the realm of practical use behind and becoming fossils, seen and admired and left apart to being of use in the real world.
Like a doddering imperial system coasting to its demise, we need to look at the connection between fossil abstractions and fossil institutions that rest on passive authority and sleep through the mounting complaints against them. Institutions are a collective of people who have longstanding authority, command the duty to obey, yet are not guaranteed rational actors in possession of that authority. Mirrors and pragmatists would view institutions of any kind as suspicious as they are staffed by real people, possessing both rational and irrational capabilities. They also act under varying degrees of efficiency. Oftentimes, the success of an institution is proportional to its ability to use mostly passive authority with minimal challenges from its subjects. Conversely, a failing institution is one where its authority requires more active, Raw Power to coerce subjects into the acceptance of its commands.
Since we're being watchful, a major tool of institutions is the use of the Fossil Fallacy (Collective Identity Fallacy). It is the justification by old, established collectives that possess authority and use the prestige, identity, or duration fallacies to justify further commands while dismissing rational challenges. Thus, a Schlampen Institution is one that is lazy, inefficient, or with distorted priorities like a mid-level insurance company responding to a expensive, but valid claim by sending the customer through hours of phone calls and redirections. Their bad business practices might be annoying and inefficient, but since they must respond to customers at some point or risk losing them to competitors, they usually offer some kind of help.
Banks can be similar to insurance companies whether it's a specific local branch slowly processing customer deposits, being incompetent or subtly discriminatory with the processing of loans, or dismissive when offering discretionary services. One might think that the bottom line drives these banks to be ruthless in cutting out dead weight and providing better customer service. Actually, money often leads institutions to want to stabilize, make more if able, but preserve the bottom line and protect the main deposits keeping it afloat. One pesky borrower failing to make an on-time payment because of a bank system error and seeking redress is not as much of a threat as failing to adequately service a large corporate loan that is essential to keep the bank afloat.
Even though we're in a digital age, banks, lenders, lawyers work only as fast as the slowest parts of their system like fixed-mindset clerks working like it's the 1970s, with their landline phones, slow paperwork transfers, or snail mail. Though the transaction is easy, transfer money online between two big banks that are across the street from each other and see if the funds are available in under a week. Even at peek efficiency, those past models are inadequate to provide the best services available. To buy a
home might take months as lawyers need to access public institutions
like an assessor's office, which are often backed up, paper-based, and
staffed by civil service employees who work on very rigid schedules. The government is even worse for efficiency because elected officials are responsible to the public, but civil service members are connected indirectly to them and if members of a public union, well-protected from charges of inefficiency or ineptness. The point is that lazy institutions sap time and resources that not everyone can afford to give up.
Government entities make up most of the extreme, negative class or the Frozen-in-Carbonite Institution, named for when a frozen Han Solo becomes Jabba the Hutt's prized display piece. Authority is used by these government institutions to roll over the aggrieved person
instead of addressing the issue. Conversely, though the complainant may
have a legitimate cause for rejecting this authority, if they merely
complain about the inefficiency or injustice, they are using microfaults
as they will not act against the problem institution or its faulty
decisions either in the political conversation or ever after. After all, Mirrors
seek to maximize rational outputs, not to maximize institutions merely
to justify their existence or to insulate them from questions, or from
improvement merely because they exist or because of the duration of
their existence.
Therefore, when enforcing laws or regulations, Institutional Raw Power (IRP) is used. Should a lowly subject or customer dispute or debate a judgement against them or the unfair exercise of power, IRP provides a protective shell, where the nameless members circle the wagons and deny the complainant merely because they challenge institutional authority rather than because of their faulty content. IRP is the rejection of legitimate resistance simply to keep an authority and its power unchallenged on a point of disagreement or as an institution to insulate itself from being questioned. It requires that a person accept a potentially false belief or a sloppy execution of authority (schlampen) simply because it refuses to allow the presentation of any contrary evidence before a decision can be made about a belief’s validity.
One only need to take a stroll to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and watch the lunch break system. Though the line could be out the door, the workers still must take their breaks at the assigned times while strolling back to work doesn't necessarily mean they're quick to handle the longer lines or lessen the wait time. In that case, the service is about simply doing the task for the proscribed time and not making it more efficient, more useful to the people there even though they are the taxpayers. Though not all DMV offices are fossils, the state-determined structure of many of them is not updated, quick, or conducive to providing stellar customer service that is owed to their taxpaying employers.
Yet, the DMV has immense power to stop a person from driving by using law enforcement to detect violations, by preventing one from getting a job that requires a drivers license, from allowing that person to travel to other places that require licenses to be able to do things like to drink alcohol, or to travel to other countries. If they can't conduct the business with the powerful government entity, their options are limited and so is the redress since a complaint is unlikely to lead to the restructuring or the abolition and re-creation of the institution so it's better. Because it's a distant government entity, most state DMV's put the burden on the taxpayer to prove their compliance with institutional rules (like licensing and registering automobiles) instead of the service provided cheaply, optimally, and so the DMV justifies to its boss, the taxpayer, why it's doing what it's doing.
With the effect that using Raw Power has on an authority, we finally come to the concept of an Empire of Mass Abstraction (EMA), which sends ideologies into the minds of its subjects as they clutch their precious objects and grant them magical powers. The faithful are the ones to hang "Science" posters around their rooms to worship the National Institute of Health while the trust drops as the COVID contradictions pile up. Or they might proudly support the Pentagon as they lead a highly respected military and spend billions on new weapons systems of questionable value while not being able to care for thousands of veterans after they're broken in war service for the nation. So, an EMA is any justification for the use of Raw Power by an institution or any authority, usually in the form of a circular argument or an identity argument from authority. Because of who they are or what they represent, their commands cannot be contradicted. An authority is by definition the ability to have others obey without needing to justify its commands, so an EMA is the irrational justification derived from an authority to force compliance regardless of protests and apprehensions from its unsubmissive subjects.
For example, because a doctor like Anthony Fauci claims authority because of medical knowledge and those powers vested in the executive branch bureaucracies by law, his pronouncements and advisories carry weight to all corners of political society, whether to close economies or to crush (or save) public education. As a significant figure in the COVID-era Empire, he even has political power. Though un-elected himself, through mere health advisories and interviews with friendly media, he is able to undermine those that are elected, who had been directly granted power by the voters, and yet were unable to overcome the rigid bureaucracies scared in permanent place by fear over the virus.
His Empire is one of both ideology (believing he represents "Science vs. Misinformation") and a Frozen-in-Carbonite Institution that is zealously protective of its prerogatives and aggressive at stamping out challenges even from Senator Rand Paul, an elected official. Thus, the Empire struck back against any
challengers to Dr. Fauci, and instead streamed his ideas into the heads of millions of
Americans, who promptly enforced his non-binding guidelines and reported
on the failure of their neighbors to wear masks, to have more than the recommended members
of a family around the holiday table, or by failing to get a
vaccination shot before trying to enter a New York City restaurant after saying it prevented the spread before saying it didn't.
In
major ways, the COVID Empire claimed more power than
the constitutional government throughout much of 2020 and 2021. If one disagreed
with the pronouncements from Washington's COVID Empire back then, like stating that the vaccine does not stop the spread of the virus or that the pandemic was not just of the unvaccinated, one need only check Twitter or Facebook and
see if the Empire and "Science" believers of that era provided a neat little warning on such a skeptical social
media post or if that once "false claim" led to the banning of a profile. At minimum, those "additional context" posts were a government and institutional hijacking of free speech
in the name of quashing resistance to their COVID Empire especially since it was eventually acknowledged in the most passive, aggravating, and dismissive way in 2022 that the vaccines never stopped the spread of the virus nor were only unvaccinated persons getting and spreading the virus. Because the
speech was not as commanded, it was labeled false or misleading information, deemed disobedient to the NIH and CDC, a challenge to their legitimacy over health policy, and either slapped with the label on social media, used to warn the user, or taken down by the social media enforcers of the COVID Empire like Facebook and Twitter.
Therefore, as the COVID Empire of the NIH and CDC shows, an Empire of Mass Abstraction refers to the abstract and self-reinforcing parts of a political belief system that persist regardless of the evidence or the sub-beliefs that make it up. Supporters counter and reject unacceptable beliefs by using irrational force, or Raw Power, by stomping out resistance to masks or vaccinations and like an empire would, resist the questioning of its existence. How these irrational beliefs or the long arm of coercion reaches the individual was the purpose of Micropower. Now, we need to delve into how resistance to that authority is the key feature of an active power dynamic if we are to understand how to identify them in conversations and to maximize rational outputs.
Part II: Compliance:
Star Systems Slipping Through Tight Grips
XV. The Conformity Paradox: Legitimate Resistance and Failing to Accept “Irrational” Authority
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what its like
To be mistreated, to be defeated
Behind blue eyes
An no one know how to say
That they're sorry and don't worry
I'm not telling lies"
Compliance is a state of peace, a status quo where there is not harmony even though to an authority it might seem that way. Yet, bubbling under their rule may be the seeds of resistance for causes they may or may not comprehend. Social forces in conflict are not idealized, historically-driven entities acting uniformly for specific causes like in Marxist economics. It is not reality where people can suddenly and perfectly comprehend such social forces, possessed through complex soviet committees to gain a total awareness of the plight of proletarian classes and a major plan descending from historical heaven guiding those in a heroic worker revolt to remake society perfectly according to everyone's needs.
Friction with authority is handled mostly rationally, although disagreement is generally allowed with only the fringe excluded and/or stigmatized. And authority is mostly untested and coercion is used on the fringe, or others through infrequent errors because of decision fog. Rule breakers are seen as being justly punished. For example, aggravated DWI leading to a victim's death is something most people would agree warrants aggressive action by the state. Severe fines and jail time are probably near universal in acceptance. The same sort of agreement to punish rule breakers would occur for tax defrauders like Bernie Madoff, crypto thieves allegedly like Sam Bankman-Fried, the ones actually violent on January 6th, bad cops guilty of police brutality or murder, or Summer 2020 rioters who beat and burned their way through many cities. Except for the fringe, most would accept an authority punishing these groups for disrupting society in terrible ways.
Neither the exercise of authority nor the resistance to it is automatic nor automatically ethical or just. However, authorities may erode the confidence of their subjects regardless of the desired outcome when they fail to respond or use coercion when they command the unwilling. The system of power in Mirroring is explained not just by the acceptance of power, but the resistance to it, that is the actions or inactions that cause disharmony, get persons to resist the other’s power enough to step up against it. Resistance itself stems from what is subjectively viewed as illegitimate commands like for example, protesting in the streets if your relatives are in China, bolted in their rooms because of Zero COVID policies.
Disobedience is neither rational or irrational, always justified nor always unjustified, as one would expect any realist to argue. How then do we adjudicate when to obey or not to obey, or once others become irrational subjects, when they are unjustified or not in resistance? Legitimate Resistance is the ability to resist a command using rational, valid means. The person making the claim understands the power dynamic does not provide the ability for an authority to make the unjust command. The failure of an aware authority to rationally counter an objection or to ignore it altogether may lead that authority to use Raw Power to enforce compliance of a potentially unjust order. The subject is aware of the breach of faith by the authority and is not some fool who can be convinced to step aside because of some Jedi-mind trick.
On the other hand, illegitimate resistance means disobeying rational orders or the law without using a valid complaint pursued through the established system in context. For example, after abandoning their peaceful march to the capitol, one would be engaging in illegitimate resistance by breaking into a public building and rioting to disrupt an electoral vote count. It would also be wrong to destroy police stations and injure officers to prevent enforcement of the law without pursuing valid complaints through the existing system in order to speak out against police brutality. Nor is it legitimate in the name of spreading awareness of climate change to spray paint or glue ones' self to priceless art to make a point about how the earth is more priceless and why that art shouldn't be allowed to exist if a radical climate change plan isn't immediately adopted.
Finally, the Conformity Paradox refers to using increasingly repressive means in a mostly democratic society to enforce total compliance of rules. This idea was widely studied throughout history especially in the Federalist Papers. Like those relic sources of power and the democracy skeptics Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison argued, to force conformity requires one to demystify democracy as simply an explanation of a political system that gives the masses of people, or the perception of popular opinion, the power to govern through majority rule. The paradox is in full effect as the language or conduct (speech tests) of the majority becomes increasingly repressive when labeling the shrinking minority, who it views as ever more extreme, threatening, violent, thus worthy of the most severe punishments (losing job, doxing, etc.) the more the group refuses to submit.
The easy converts to the majority opinion usually occur at the beginning of the micropower imposition. Early, the majority plays nice as it not numerous enough to simply roll over opposition without using reasonable rhetoric and action. However, the most bitter opponents are those who suffer through the repression as their most wavering allies give in while they increasingly are placed in a corner they can't easily back out of because of the threat to their identity safety that conceding would bring about.
The effects of alienation of the individual due to the paradox can be more severe the longer their resistance continues with anomie, despair, and possibly tragedy for the isolated
remnants. For example, though voluntary mask wearing and vaccination in NY during the pandemic was about 90%, of that overwhelming majority some became mask police with the population's indifferent complicity and snitched on individuals or businesses who didn't fully comply. The smaller the number of mask resisters became, the more intense the supermajority became in trying to enforce total compliance.
When the state of NY stepped in on vaccinations, it required all New Yorkers to submit or lose the basic functions of being a citizen that unless it's being able to vote, did not previously require documentation or a drivers license to exercise. It limited the ability to move freely, keeping a public service job, going to a college campus in-person, going into restaurants, or enjoying shows or sporting events. This proportional coercion used for the resistant 10% is like piles of rocks being pressed onto Giles Corey by the scared Salem community in "The Crucible." Like vaccination resistance, Giles refuses to submit to the authority of the court and never entered a plea to the charges, which in his case meant admitting to being a witch whether he was innocent, then submit to unfair proceedings and be found guilty anyways, or admit guilt, which meant he would definitely die. Eventually, the torture killed Corey even though he did not yield.
If there are years when COVID is finally gone, we will get a more accurate picture of what the consequences of state mandates and vaccination resistance did in NY and across the country. The precedent of this action, even with its overwhelming support among NY voters, should not be forgotten if the state ever decides to take similar steps to crush resistance on some other matter. When government is granted a new authorities by its people, it's very difficult to pry it out of its cold, dead hands.
XVI. Micropower Microagressions (MMAs)
The JUSTICE Elements of a Micropower Microaggression =Mens rea or mindset (intent of the victim, not of the accused) + Conscious or Unconscious Aggression (Action of micro-insults, assaults, invalidation as interpreted by the victim) + Concurrent Context (of the victim, not the accused)
One of the most radical changes of thought introduced in human history is the concept of the microaggression. Why? It atomizes justice to the individual level and makes innocence and guilt dependent on the emotional interpretation of everyday interpersonal interactions. As humankind evolved from cave-dwellers to hunter gatherers to farmers and herders, warriors, royals, and priests, it constantly developed social rules both customary and legal. Relationships needed to be explained, written down, and solidified so that food could be grown, the gods could be placated, and the land could be protected from invaders who didn't want to work it, but wanted to seize it.
Even two hundred years ago, uppity men across the world settled points of honor with violence often through a duel. In contrast, white, middle and upper class women, especially in Victorian England, settled subtle slights with social ostracization and spreading petty rumors as that was the main power (social and cross-familial) available to them in an era with few protected women's rights and no voting. Nowhere in the world until the 1960s-70s did people broadly conceive of social justice as something to be interpreted, tried, and punished by individuals over insults, back-handed compliments, or slights from their micro-oppressors, if they could recognize the sources of their oppression from all of the bloodthirsty conquerors throughout history. Since it's pushing back against micro-oppressors, it's also a form of resistance to sociopolitical, interpersonal dynamics, but an odd one considering physical survival over emotional security was the main concern of every civilization of every race on every habitable continent until recently.
Thus, the microaggression is a truly revolutionary development. It inverts the concept of justice and security from one requiring evidence to prove the accused is guilty of something to one where the accused is required to answer for the aggression (crime) that has already been proven in the mind of the victim. Because the victim either notifies the violator directly to receive acknowledgement of the offense and a minimal apology is needed to prevent further escalation, or if they report the microaggression to a mutual authority like a boss or Human Resources, that act of resistance to the aggression by reporting it is always assumed to be unfair and difficult burden, if not a heroic one, on the victim. The assumption is that the "victim" lacks power as a member of an oppressed population while the accused must be perceived as a member of a racial, gender, or economic ruling class in order to be an aggressor in this ideological, Empire of Mass Abstraction. It stakes the concept of righting a wrong (justice), applying it to every day interactions between people, and applies social or legal consequences to a person's interpretation of that wrong action or speech.
Most importantly for this volume, it asserts a power dynamic and in the cases where the accusation is unproven, it is micropower on full display as a false or unproven imposition of the duty to obey is seen as a cause for legitimate resistance when it is not. Since criminal justice relies on guilty mindset, context, causation, and concurrence, and requires the burden of proof to be placed on the accuser, it requires actual evidence presented in a neutral or at least more objective setting, therefore, the inversion actually diminishes justice for the accused because there is no recourse and there is a move to subjectivity and unfairness.
And because the victims of the micropower microaggression must fit the abstraction of "historically marginalized groups," only certain classes can be victims of microaggressions regardless of the elements to prove the crime (wrong). Conversely, the perpetrators can't be a member of the marginalized group in question during the event. If both members can justify membership in marginalized groups, then the victim's perceived identity and group take precedence because again, it takes courage to be a victim and complain about the Microfault Microaggression. For example, if an Arab Muslim man makes a comment to a homosexual white man that the latter interprets as mildly homophobic, even though the race of the victim is white, the homosexual man's group identity takes precedence as he is the one perceiving the microaggression and not the Arab Muslim man, who can claim marginalization on account of his Arab ethnicity and his Islamic religion only if he perceives an aggression from the white homosexual man on his identity.
That is the radical, subjective, and frankly dangerous part about MMAs because being "guilty" of the microaggression can lead one to be punished in the form of stigma, job loss, lawsuits, or possibly federal hate crimes. Yet, since it always involves a power dynamic between would-be micro-oppressor and would-be marginalized micro-victim, it is a serious device and must be placed in the realm of criminal justice and political science. If our mirroring subjects use MMA's, we must be aware of the potential stigma blowing back from not acknowledging the threat to harmony this interaction could have on us.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves in identifying why this topic matters for Mirroring, let's break down the elements of the Microfault aggression in greater depth. The first element is Mens rea or mindset. Intent is critical to prove a crime because a prosecutor must show the accused knowingly intended to do the criminal act. In a microaggression, the perception of intent is assumed by the "victim" as the aggressor may be consciously or unconsciously performing the act, but it is required that victim view the accused's actions as an attack on them. If the aggressor is not interpreted as hostile by the victim, then guilty mindset isn't present.
The burden of proof for intent is not on those representing the "victim," but on the accused, as they must show they didn't mean to act in a way that was interpreted as hostile. The burden is often on them to recognize their errors, especially if those errors are largely the result of subjectively determining their intent based on their skin color or some other immutable characteristic (that can't be changed). For example, the same statement uttered by one black woman to another might not be a microaggression, but if a white male utters the same exact statement in a neutral-sounding way and what to them seems to be an innocuous statement, because of who they are (a white cis male, a member of the so-called dominant, oppressor class), they have shown intent to microaggress. Therefore, ad hominems (logical fallacies based on who the person is) can provide enough evidence to meet the burden of proof for intent if the "victim" believes it to be enough.
Let's deal next with the action element. This is perhaps the most problematic part because the act of the microaggression may not even be perceived by the accused as an act at all. Since whether it is an act or not is up to the victim, the accused might not have any idea of their facial expressions (subconsciously indicative of racist prejudice????), mundane words like "You deserved those honors," or opining about someone's culturally-derived fashion can be interpreted negatively and lead to punishment for them. Rather than it being easy and respectful to victims by acknowledging ones' flaws when one is not a marginalized class in order to make situations better, a kind of humiliating, public self-criticism only oppressor classes have to go through, in actuality, the ability to interpret someone's actions as unjust merely because of who they are and because the "victim" says so, while not allowing the accused a defend themselves is more unjust and terrifying for those who want more just actors and less actual racism or oppression in the world.
Because the microaggressor has power the so-called victim does not, most proponents of this view believe they should be given no opportunity to defend themselves or their actions. According to D.W. Sue (2007), denying the charges (like of being racist), purporting to be color-blind, denying the role of the identifying characteristic plays in the so-called victim's life regardless of the circumstances of the interaction, or failing to adequately account for only the perspective of the victim is evidence of further aggression and proof of the original aggressive intent behind the wrong. It's a very alarming and destructive prospect to police every conversation and for certain classes of people to feel the historical burden of humanity on their shoulders after making the mistake of smiling at the wrong person or failing to acknowledge personal faults in front of aggrieved persons.
A system that denies the ability for any defense of ones' self combined with an unalterable characteristic like race is obviously fallacious and terribly dangerous. Were a law to be passed forcing non-marginalized groups to submit to the microagression justice system described above, it would obviously run counter to the purpose of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution and the rights of the accused in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments, though those principles or other constitutional ones may not be a roadblock to advocates of this radical position.
The final element of the Justice Elements is Concurrent Context. Concurrence in a crime means the accused was available at the time, in the context of the event, able to commit the crime, and there is no alibi defense that makes their action impossible. Normally, for a criminal assault to take place the accused would have to be near the victim at the same time in order to do it. With a micropower microaggression, as with the elements of Mirroring criminal justice in Volume III, time and context (using the Time Infinity Stone) are flexible to aid a claim of redress. Therefore, because it's based on the victim's interpretation of the event, they can realize the aggression took place long after it happened or even if they weren't there directly, but the event triggered the negative emotional feelings. Again, all that matters is the interpretation of the event by the victim and not a correlation based on time, place, or context.
The POLITICAL Elements of Micropower Microagressions (MMA)=unproven use of Raw Power on a "victim" resulting in a rejection of the accused's legitimacy= Faults (micro or macro issues that are unsolvable in context) + Duty to obey the microaggressor (imposed by the accused due to the victim's race, gender, sexuality, or class or some other "historically marginalized group" characteristic) + Act of Disobediance from the micro-oppressed (assumption of Raw Power or micro-oppression by the accused at the expense of the victim, so the victim resists the dynamic)
Let's backtrack for a second and recall Micro and Macrofaults, which are a focus solely on the problem without any ability to resolve the fault in the midst of an interaction. They are anti-pragmatic because the problem
is fossilized, the wrong tools are used to address it, and the emotional
satisfaction of complaining outweighs the steps to solve it. Complaining
is not a rational weighing of solutions, it is the emotional reaction and ignorance of facts, abstractions,
or a method because of ignorance, ideology, or environmental factors leading to
being unaware that other options exist. Microfaults are small time problems like complaining how politicians aren't not fixing pot-holed streets then and there while Macrofaults are broad, universal problems like racism or poverty that can't be solved by complaining about them or policing one individual's questionably related actions in a conversation.
Yet, faults are the backbone of politics as power is given to those who make others believe they can fix them. They offer a never-ending problem that is a fuel source for the never ending pursuit of power. On a universal level, they become grievances, which politicians can use to get votes in democratic-republics or by misleading mobs or using force in other systems. In America, where that power is partly shared and redistributed with regular elections and irregular public opinion bases, micro and macrofaults are widely discussed and used to sway voters even though proposed solutions (if offered) are usually vague. In some cases, there is a critical mass for change versus these problems, an impetus to direct political forces to do something about them, but election winners like Joe Biden do not always translate their images as "not their opponent" into a strong policymakers or policy implementors.
So, let's dig into the Elements of Micropower Microaggressions. The key is the macro and microfault and their use to establish a power dynamic where the accused is labeled as using Raw Power while expecting the so-called victim to submit to the microaggression, which is assumed to be the duty to obey. The key aspect about the Macrofault is its unsolvability, which if the victims of the microaggression must be from "historically marginalized groups" and the accused must be micro-oppressors, then the duty to obey comes from all of history and because of those immutable characteristics that neither person in the dynamic can change. Using an alarming form of determinism, it's as if history has placed two immovable and unchangeable beings in conflict with each other and the one being with this history of oppression ascribed to their group characteristics, regardless of their personal background, must yield if the so-called oppressed thinks a transgression has taken place.
This is a weighty interaction with world-changing implications at least for the so-called oppressed. Less so for pragmatists who see the stigma and the unjust seizure of power as far worse than any benefit gained by correcting (at best) or punishing (at worst) bad behavior. Even more, it grants power to the micro-oppressed, which is justified by ideological supporters since they suffered the emotional turmoil of the aggression on account of broad (and vague) historical actions of large classes of people which they may have experienced elsewhere as an individual, but not as a group since it's its impossible (see Volume IV Narratives). Though it is quite empowering to assume a victim status because of "historical oppression," proponents would argue this is necessary since it's a fight against their continued marginalization.
Next, there is the element of compliance, which is this micropower equation translated into act of disobediance. Because the so-called victim thinks they have been slighted on account of their marginality, they do not comply or tolerate the aggression. Were they simply to tolerate the microaggression knowingly, then it could be considered a microfault as they may complain about it afterwards, but take no useful steps to address the problem. That has been the most likely form of redress throughout history, basically complaining about others to people willing to lend an ear. But the Macrofault Microaggression is different. Rather than tolerate the act, by definition they must do something about it, but in a way that can't solve the macrofault since by definition they're unsolvable. They can get the aggressor fired from their job, an act of micropower, but they can't solve the broad issue of racism (macro) that supposedly caused that ex-employee to aggress (micro).
Finally, after this intense study, we need to recall from Volume I that there is an “Escape Hatch” for mirrors to get out! The Hatch is a justifying tool to not
acknowledge or dispute grand theories as true that will lead to ones’
stigmatization. Microaggression theory is only facially accepted by a mirror to escape
because to resist, to explain the severe issues with it as we have done here, may constitute a political act, a failure to obey its believers, which leads to disharmony, and a failure to submit to
an irrational formulation. Thus, resisting this theory might be worthy of retaliatory stigma from the
oppressed would-be oppressor of rational thinkers. Therefore, any instance where the mirror feels they might become accused of microaggressing because they believe they are logical, they need to elegantly escape in a way that does not draw notice from the would-be victim, one that forces the mirror to be compelled to speech or action as discussed previously in this volume, nor one where stigma is attached to their actions in staying, observing, or leaving.
XVII. Safespace Parlors
Gandalf: "I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound."
Gandalf: "You did not kill me. You will not kill him."
Théoden (Saruman's voice): "Rohan is mine!"
Gandalf: "Be gone!""
"The Two Towers"
Elements of Safespace Parlors= 3 concentric circles that reinforce the participants' beliefs=Large Outer circle representing Agreeable Speech Environment (a Parlor designed to ease enforcement and prevent noncompliance) + Medium Secondary Inner Circle of Shared Characteristics (act of compliance through ideology, physical, or identity characteristics) + Smallest, Innermost Circle of Speech Boundaries Enforcement (duty to obey the Parlay, or the approved content and oppose violators)
As
early as the first Volume, I laid
the foundation for a critique of the unbridled use of microaggressions and safe spaces to replace rational arguments. Safe spaces
(SPs) in of themselves are not something that should be totally rejected. The
key is sorting whether one is a "Parlor" or simply a place for emotional
support and respect, which is fine and maybe even healthy.
A Parlor by our definition is using the emotion behind ones' argument to
construct an environment that is beneficial to ones' own side, yet that irrationally
limits the ability of an opponent to present rational arguments. If you're going to argue, argue rationally and don't hide behind a group and have them filter your enemies out.
The key point of objection to safe-spaces as parlors is they steam roll arguments. A safe space designed for being with other people of like mind is not inherently wrong and in fact, it might be beneficial to maintaining the chimera of harmony. However, it is the Safespace Parlour (SSP) that is our target because of its effect on political debates. The typical Safe Space is most positively billed as an inclusive environment welcoming all persons regardless of race, religion, sexual, or gender identity, but one could argue that previous groups created spaces with their apposite identities based on who was dominant in the USA for most of history: white, Protestant, Christian, heterosexual, and male. To have spaces for underrepresented groups is great as an emotional support space, but it not as a rational solutions space.
Thus, the political elements of a Safespace Parlor preclude the emotional support benefit and are instead used to block off spaces from debate, like a college campus. And they act as a medium for micropower as the duty to obey is subject to potentially fallacious factors like race, gender, or sexual orientation, which may lead to illegitimacy for any commands issued within the space. The concentric identity circles, or large ones containing smaller ones, describe the layers or barriers that truths must penetrate of an identity and a safespace in order to reach inside the protective bubble, the core of the person's identity safety, but also the layers used to insulate against real or imagined discrimination. In one sense, they represent micropower commands to restrict arguments from certain types of people and in another sense they diminish the legitimacy of the person making the arguments the further into the center of the identity circle and the more restrictions that are put on who can make the commands.
At least two basic delineations of this type of Safespace Parlor exist: the originalist and the revisionist. An originalist parlor (OSPPs) is an environment meant to protect an existing group and to stack the debate so the newcomers aren't allowed to enter. Though they may be comprised of traditional power groups in that context like white males in the Republican party or black people in the NAACP, they can also be ideological groups with a long history like the Communist Party of the USA or CPUSA. Because membership requires the parlor officials to be approved based on long-standing, existing requirements (like race or ideology), most people that do not share the required characteristics know not to attempt to join.
The Revisionist Parlors (RSPPs) are different. They are relatively new and are designed to correct macrofaults like racism or homophobia, which are terrible of course, but can't be solved by victimized individuals roping off a rational discussion if they want solutions. Just as mirrors can't correct these bigoted beliefs by having an irrational conversation with bigots (See Volume I), so too is it ineffective to find a way to fix their terrible belief systems by retreating from engagement. To be clear, I'm not suggesting they invite bigots into their groups as that would be disastrous. I'm pointing out the fact that they aren't changing minds by secluding themselves, they're just gathering together for emotional support (which is fine), however, rational individuals should be perfectly comfortable challenging the opinions coming out of any closed information circle and they should also not have to fear stigma for questioning that parlor's output. Though they are revisionists because they seek to change existing power structures, they lack the ability to claim authority over those that hate them despite their correctionist views being the main point of their grouping. So, making a safespace and either including or excluding haters will not likely change the haters' minds.
Now for those circles! The outermost one is the approved border wall for the identity group where an ideological nation controls who enters, exits, and participates in the discourse of the country, I mean debate. Let me tell you a secret? Everybody isn't welcome! In fact, the outer circle represents a Parlor where the Twitter feed, the Facebook wall, the college auditorium doors, the microphone volume, the lighting, or the information table outdoors on a campus are controlled or taken away if the group speaking is not approved. The space is meant for the inhabitants, the citizens of that place and outsiders and their views are not especially welcomed even if they're supposed to be allowed to enter as per their inclusive flyers strewn all over the campus grounds.
If the flyers achieve the basic introduction, the secondary circle inside the border wall is meant to further filter out the groups most undeserving of a safe space. Though in the interest of constitutional principles of equal protection and appearing to welcome all, the Safe Space Revisionist Parlor flyer will say they welcome all IF they respect the marginalized groups on an equal level, presuming that non-marginalized groups have not done so ever in other spaces and in previous times. If the SPP is originalist, like a Men's Club (for mostly white people) or the Black Panthers, there will be little advertisement if the person has made it to this level of SPP because the group has existed and doesn't need to tell the public to join if they know already what it represents.
For Revisionist SPPs, unless one is an interloper there to spy on the inclusion or they're caught unwillingly in an interaction, they should have some shared characteristic with the majority of the group. Or, if allowed to enter anyways, they should probably act inclusionary to the marginalized groups and exclude views that might contradict the majority group the Parlor was constructed to protect. RSPPs are the “oppressed, marginalized, victimized” groups who were compliant before, but strike back at real or abstract opponent groups by insulating their bubble from real, but facially unrelated or abstract, or even invented orders to obey from the opponent groups.
If the SPP is meant to protect a certain gender or race, those who are not frauds will differ with those marginalized because they lack the identity characteristic and should either keep silent or have to perform an irrational form of mirroring, called broken windows mirroring, where in order to fit in with the group, they have to self-criticize how their immutable characteristic gives them an advantage and what they'll (illogically) do to remedy that. They were allowed to enter under the beneficence of the controlling group, therefore, they must smash the mirrors showing them their own hateful reflection to dispel the evil of their undesired characteristic and then to engage in self-hate. All of this broken windows mirroring is subject to the illegitimate authority of the Parlor police and is a terrifying spectacle for a rational person to witness.
Where does politics enter this discussion of Safe Spaces Parlors? We must be careful. A safe space is really an emotional protection bubble, the antithesis of an abstract, universal world of logical arguments that achieves more efficient ends and where a sole emotional focus is secondary to achieve better results. A SP rests on the concept of Identity Safety (IS), which was developed by psychologists to create an individual self-bubble where one “feels” safe to be themselves. It's as if society represses their inner selves, drives them to be anomie (separated) if they display it, and that society is assumed to be wrong to inhibit “authentic” identity and behavior if a person feels authentic in behaving that way.
Thus, politics determines who can set up the
IS and the physical safe space. According to thinkers like
Cia Verschelden, microaggressions like subtle racism are not conscious thought
necessarily, but the perception of others of “how” you say things. As we discussed previously, this
subjective perception itself is an inversion of the duty to obey and of
compliance. Yet, we have expanded Verschelden's concept to show how originalists can just as easily use the theory to continue to discriminate and leave out unwanted groups. Therefore, though thinkers like Verschedlen mean well in using these concepts to include marginalized groups, in reality, both types of safe spaces can be used to exclude members who fail to meet the 3 concentric identity circles of a Parlor. It's difficult to fight actual exclusion with exclusion packaged as inclusion.
To enter with the bubble of a non-member group is to
defy the duty to obey the parameters of the SP. The structure of
this specific Parlor limits the possibility for debate by removing
classes of opponents, insulating the participants from potential truths,
therefore pushing their thinking to irrational and less productive
avenues. It is also highly stigmatizing to oppose Safespace Parlors due
to the perception that a truth is a safety threat to the victim group’s
identity instead of being an unwanted, but useful objective truth. The act of disobeying
the emotional bubble because of the bubbler’s perception of the opponent’s
order is the offense. Not openly respecting the bubble even if the
actions were the inadvertent act of say, a white person accidentally studying
in a vaguely defined area of a library meant only for students of color by the people who believe its theirs.
This inadvertent act can lead to stigma, which comes from the assumption of
authority, and the ability to attack the unintentional aggressor for not open
and willing obedience to an unknown command. This interaction follows the
guidelines of Volume VI, wherein speech and conduct are empowered in a Parlor and how they
include or exclude others.
Finally, we complete our discussion with the concept of Identity Safety in a Space or ISiS, which combined with the Parlor Circles builds a safety bubble around the individual that can only emerge if both identity safety is secure and they meet the requirements to enter the Parlor. ISiS means using immutable characteristics (physical) plus ideology about it (abstractions) to determine authenticity and that empowers one to use cancellation, dehumanization, and imposition of the duty to obey in a conflict on others if they want to avoid stigma (the punishment).
If the SP is based on skin color and the identity bubble of the person in question is as a black person with a different outlook than 90% of other black people, how could one meet the the racial requirements and still
be denied entry or worse yet, be stigmatized for trying to enter? The answer is easy to some. Though a person has the same skin color, their ideology makes them inauthentic and unable to enter the parlor as equal members. Hence why black or Hispanic Republican representatives can't join the Congressional Black or Hispanic Caucuses that are ruled only by Democracts. It's also evident when black Republican candidates like Larry Elder or Herschel Walker are not really black because they inadequately fit into all three Identity circles created by Democrats to fit into the Safespace Parlor of the "Black community." Therefore, the identity circles require harmony on all three elements in order for both the individual to feel safe in their identity and also to fit in with the boundaries of the Parlor, which means an authentic black politician can only be a Democrat with the proper ideology.
XIX. Intermission: Counsel of Mirrors
"Luke :
But, I can help them. I feel the Force.
Obi-Wan : But, you cannot control it. This is a dangerous time for you. When
you will be tempted by the dark side of the force.
Yoda : Yes! Yes! To Obi Wan, you listen. The cave. Remember your failure with
the cave?
Luke : But I've learnt so much since then. Master Yoda, I promise to return and
finish what I've begun. You have my word."
"The Empire Strikes Back" 1980
What a wonderfully enlightening work so far! We come to the end of the second part of Volume VI and really, this is a kind of conclusion to the work above so that we might see how these concepts are applied in Part III. In order to wrap up the previous two sections, we must discuss our final topic about the origins for all mirroring volumes in Phase 3 (Phase 1 were Volumes 1-2, Phase 2 were 3-5). That topic is the Council of Mirrors, its makeup, self-selection, its authority, and its ability to enforce its decisions.
It is important to note first that Mirrors specifically place themselves in Parlors that are not safespaces for logic and reason, but safeplaces for the emotional volatile and potentially threatening. Our discomfort with irrationality is for the greater good and also not a condescending act, but one of compassion for those incapable of seeing truths. To not show compassion and to resist our subject’s emotions is to invite stigma and punishment. It is also not an act of political weakness, but of strength as awareness of sensitivity means a greater tactical ability to maneuver around perceived roadblocks to solutions and to angle the irrational into a cul-de-sac to be defeated at our leisure. Being neutral about irrational political content, while rationalizing the conduct of politics benefits all parties.
If it's not clear already, we're not omnipotent masters of the people around us and in fact, we're no different than anyone in terms of our humanity other than our self-selection to be rational and to get things done. Since there is no group of humans capable of adjudicating every argument’s rationality fairly and objectively, we are there to improve conversations in whatever small ways we can. And when power is involved, the temptation is great even for more trustworthy mirrors who have proven themselves. As existing institutions are derived from flawed human constructions, so too do Mirrors risk grouping themselves together thinking themselves the Platonic Philosopher Kings or the advanced revolutionary vanguard seeking to drag up the knuckle-draggers into a socialist utopia as a good communist would believe. By our own definition, we simply can't be those idealistic things.
One might look at the idea of a Mirroring Council and its emphasis on a voluntary rationality, as a kind of Platonic Republic, where the most rational, educated individuals rule society in a kind of benevolent dictatorship. This form would utilize the “Noble Lie” as the common, uneducated folk would be incapable of understanding the Truth, thus Mirrors would be justified, even ethical in using power to achieve their desired ends. If vaccines were the most rational solution to a virus, the Council would feel justified in sticking shots in as many arms as needed. But to assume this about the Mirroring Council is to ignore that which preceded this in Volume VI. No institution, Mirror Councils included, is guaranteed possession of the Truth and therefore, their use of power through their authority is always suspect as well. No person or collective is guaranteed to make rational decisions.
Therefore, Plato’s Republic or the straw man,
I mean model, that I constructed to simplify and represent it is merely an
abstraction. There can be no collective
divorced of passions and emotions, acting purely in logical ways. Mirroring itself is self-selected, which
means failure and illogical thinking are a possibility. Self-selection that yields marginally more
logical thinking is preferred to more emotional debaters.
Though also abstract, what makes Mirror Councils different is their affirmation of mirroring principles, their acknowledgement of their flawed and inferior nature like any other human being, and their commitment to increase rational thought even at an atomic level of one conversation at a time. Mirrors are by their nature permanent forms of legitimate resistance, constantly checking all forms of authority as their exercise of power uses the rational test. Our safety bubble is only reflexively agitated by that which is provably false and by the fallacies used in the irrational war-zones we patrol. Since by definition we can never use coercion to force people to believe our ways, we can never form an authority that is illegitimate and irrational. Since we can never avoid responding to rational arguments with rationality, we can never be a mirrored subject nor can we accept fossil abstractions that lack a realistic purpose in the world we inhabit. And because we seek better ends, we can never use micropower for our own vanity's sake, to destroy our family members in a political debate, to humiliate a person walking into a safespace trap, or to close the minds of others so they retreat further into their own ideological corners.
So, please consider the application section and see a vicious breakdown of the most powerful political factions as well as the atomizing of Ron Klain's propaganda tools. My hope is that minds are opened not to pretty words, if I ever used them, or ideologically agreeable content to you, the reader, but that you have more tools to do great things. As stated at the beginning, this is a positive work even if the topic is dismal and depressing. I hope we all work harder together to bring about a more rational, ethical, and just society for 2023. Thank you!
Part III: Applications:
Demonstrating the Capabilities of This (Battle) Station
XIII. Macropower Method Studies:
"Come on, man!"
President Joe Biden.
This is a utility section, but very important when understanding the four dominant political factions. This is in no way a comprehensive analysis of their views nor should any sarcastic position suggest anything about my personal political views, which obviously are for Mirroring and independent of the two parties. I will strip away some of the idealism behind them, so if you are a bitter partisan without an ability to grasp sarcasm, you may want to skip this severe flaying and crawl back into your bubble since this won't have any use for you anyways. And don't just read how I attack your opponents either because that's pretty cowardly.
These four factions comprise all of the top leadership positions of the US and with the exception of the Cheneyists (after Liz Cheney, who lost her Republican primary election for Congress, or Mitt Romney, who lost his 2012 presidential bid), most have a large base with at-times rabid followers. They are considered purveyors of macropower because their ideas are galactic in scope and are the easiest to pick apart from rational, practical use in the common person's every day life.
Why these four factions? Well, they're important and represent large swaths of belief in America. Dark Brandonists are a group comprised of what they're not (aka Donald Trump, with only 74 million votes) and they aim to do as little as possible while campaigning or administering to keep both flanks of their party in line. Their followers are not especially committed to their guy, since he's a geriatric white man, but they are committed to snuffing out what they see as a demonic menace from MAGAism. In that sense and because they actually got 81 million votes, they have a potent following even if their enthusiasm is less. Pushing
them forward to the edge that Dark Bidenists never see coming are the
Sandersistas, who want radical change no matter the costs to American
society. As the majority of political ideologues in this country that chose to express themselves in the elections of a Democratic Republic, I chose the four most important to critically distill and to provide a view beyond their direct political platforms, their propaganda, or the platitudes in their speeches.
Exhibit A: Mar-a-lago-an Rebels: A group who appeals to populism by applying absurd glittering generalities (ex. get our country back) to address abstract, unproven conspiracies concerning the activities of a menacing government (ex. FBI “Russia witch-hunts”) or insidious institutions (ex. big-tech colluding to silence them). Since it's based on constant attack (like a doxxer), the plans for afterwards often lack detail and require trust in demagogues (like Donald Trump). Terribly offensive speech is often excused because its believers think it's for God's greater good.
The Big Steal Doom Pit: "Looking at the interests of the voters, which are mainly the economy, reproductive rights, and crime, I (Trump) think the only worthwhile issue to focus on and never let go of is the 2020 Election. Though it's not a crime to think out loud all the time, I still think crazy unconstitutional things like having a Vice President unilaterally overturn a vote count he had no power to overturn. It would have been the right move, not a p*ssy move. Because of peripheral issues like Twitter censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop that I somehow believe would have changed the election, I need to muck around with the Constitutional order further and in other unrelated ways as to how that specific election actually played out. Therefore, because of these unrelated issues, 2020 should be immediately overturned and I should be installed as President like the investiture of some regal figure and as my opponent Sleepy Joe is cast down low. Rather than letting it go, I need to demolish all potential inter-party opponents to ensure my party goes down in flames if I don't win and so the Democrats give a decrepit Joe Biden, who they stupidly won't dump either, a second shot to be a figurehead president at age 84. This seems just as smart of a strategy as my support for loyal, but un-electable candidates in the disappointing midterms in 2022 when, even though the electoral map was not in our favor, we had more political advantages and we tried as hard as possible to throw them away. If you liked what we did in 2020 or 2022, check us out again in 2 years for more "winning", unless it's stolen again!"
- Antisemitism and Hate: "I (Trump) believe we are not trying hard enough to throw away pro-Israel, Pro-Jewish American support. Even though Israelis are foreigners with complicated ties to our Jewish American constituency, we should discard any advantages we have with either group for risky, harebrained meetings. I even have a Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a close friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister. We had arguably the most pro-Israel administration in decades and we even started to win over Arab support for Israel to counter the Iranians (at the expense of the Palestinians). But why not make ourselves look antisemitic by inviting to Mar-a-Lago a black rapper in a public relations death spiral over his views on Jews and Hitler or Nick Fuentes, an Hispanic male, who seems to be important for nothing but his antisemitic views? If our public image on race and intolerance doesn't take enough beatings for stupid and senseless reasons, unless we actually are the terrible things we're accused of being by our relentless opponents who won't ever stop hunting us, how will we ever grow stronger, more tolerant, and get elected if we don't throw them more material to test our mettle? If we lose because we threw away the support of groups we had in our reach, then that election is stolen too."
- Fort Mar-a-Lago: "Though we are relentlessly pursued by our enemies and we return the favor by punishing anyone critical of us with extreme invective, we don't have all of the enemies we need to reach our full power. In that spirit, wouldn't it be a good idea, especially with the extremely biased January 6th hearings under way where we aren't even allowed counsel, rebuttal, or even friendly committee members, if we somehow got the Presidential Archives to partner with the FBI to persecute a former president for the first time ever over classified documents and so we can test executive privilege in the courts right before we throw away the 2022 or 2024 elections to the Democrats? Like a great samurai warrior, if you can't beat the best enemy warrior, you aren't top dog. And with the great enemies circling around looking to use the FBI to prosecute, why not take on the National Archives, the biggest mofo in government with their endless stacks of papers, mundane jobs, and underwhelming employees? There is nothing more prestigious than being potentially indicted for not properly handling documents that as Chief Executive I could have declassified with a transparent paper-trail at any moment during my term. And knowing that my bitter and spiteful enemy, Joe Biden, won't help me out and allow executive privilege for his predecessor in the interest of bringing the country together like he promised and never moved inch towards accomplishing, a privilege granted like most other presidents would have done, we decided to tempt fate anyways and questionably store the documents to bait our enemies into open law-fare and to politically die on a hill of documents. If the FBI isn't given a pretext to raid my base from the Archives, how will I discredit them as institution any further and show I'm being persecuted if they're not rummaging through my daughter Ivanka's boudoir? Even if it sets me back further, I will be victimized for the most absurd causes. Being a martyr will gain me support even if I go too far and I can't run for office after my antics finally give my hapless pursuers their much sought after victory, because if I can't run and therefore can't win in 2024, that election was also stolen."
- 2. Exhibit B: Chenyist First Order: A group who tries to construct an originalist safe space across the entire nation, one that is meant to protect the imperializing, militaristic, corporatist norms of the Old Guard neo-liberals and neo-cons from the abstract masses and to resist the devilish demagogues inciting them forward to destroy that "order." As neo-Puritans (like Mitt Romney) and warmongers (the Cheney Family), they wrap themselves in decrepit institutions and idealized beliefs, use sickening displays of entitlement, are blinded by their own moralizing, impose their holier-than-thou attitudes, and dismiss the concerns of the common folk especially their own voters if it even mildly contradicts their selfish interests packaged as morals.
- Constitutional Threats ONLY When We Say They're Threats "Even though the Constitution is interpreted by multiple parts of the national government, the states, and citizens as per its obvious written words, we believe that only we can select when and which of those parts from our piece of paper are interpreted correctly or not. When we support constitutionally unprecedented actions like a retro-active impeachment or the January 6th show, we mean to highlight a threat to our version of the Constitution, just how unprecedented we think the threat is even if it never materializes, or how some non-existent democracy is dying (we have a Democratic Republic) without allowing any voices disputing that interpretation. And if we don't ram our interpretation of the Constitution into the mouths of anyone stepping up to speak in our biased hearing and smear it all over the faces of the members of our own party while ignoring it when meeting with our opposing party allies, we can't be happy. You see, our bedrock principle is that in a pluralist society where many different groups have a stake, only we decide when those voices will be heard because the ignorant people of the country, especially those idiots in our home states that we ignore in favor of the elite living in Virginia around the D.C. area, should just shut up. We don't give a flying f*ck if our constituents disapprove of our approach as history, principle, and the Puritan Grand Inquisitor Liz Cheney are on our side. They're just living in flyover country, these ignorant rubes are just suckered by demagogues and disinformation, or what we know as anything that disagrees with us, and why should we give a f*ck what they believe? Our enemies are our country's abstract enemies and they are to be left out and destroyed because we know better than our servants how to protect society.
- Neo-Puritan Warmongering: "We're not sure if oppression-loving people know this, but we need to save Ukraine and we need to funnel money everywhere where we think our military should touch. We would have kept fighting in Afghanistan for 20 more years, but in the interest of protecting "democracy" here at home, we had to give that up to stop bigger threats. Nonchalantly, we probably would have been okay with bombing Iran if it made us feel like our security objectives were satisfied, but Ukraine and January 6th came along so those previous concerns went away and we're fine with that as long as we're focused like a laser on some new Axis of Evil. After-all, America is a shining city on a hill and frankly, if Vladimir Putin, the terrorists (whoever we define they are), or the insurrectionists of January 6th had their way, our country would be destroyed. If we don't identify these existential threats, like Trump and Putin, if we don't stop these threats coming from half the country or our own constituencies, or prevent their demagogues from running for any office down to dog-catcher, and unite the country by alienating all of those we lost in our own failed intra-party re-elections, then we can't be secure in protecting freedom in the wars we'll want to preemptively start (Iran, WWIII) or fan the flames on other continents (Ukraine or Northern Syria). Our country doesn't negotiate with terrorists, January 6th air breathers, or Russians and we won't hesitate to destroy them. If you ask us, China and not their rebellious island seems okay enough to ignore though.
- "I'll See You in Hell'ism":
"We may not look like it, since we're pasty white and crusty establishment Republicans who like to start wars against the Axis of Evil or just Evil anywhere, but you don't want to f*ck with us especially after we get our hands on the security state post-Patriot Act and our promises to eternally increase defense spending lures the bureaucracy in the Pentagon or we infiltrate the Justice Department, the FBI especially, into dragging out our enemies and executing their political futures. We'll tear anything down if it doesn't align with our originalist moral code, be it our lost Republican Party which is in throes of Russian domination and which gives us PTSD from the Cold War and our McCarthyist tendencies, to our states with popular governors and leaders who drove us out of office and from what is our party birthright, or by our slim majorities in Congress which we worked hard out of spite to stop us from having by donating to primary challengers so the Democrats could be elected. If you don't accept our preeminence, we'll smash that to bits too if we don't get our insufferable way. We'll ruin the priorities of future Republican majorities by being snarky and passing most of Biden's priorities that add trillions, go against what used to be our social values, and give our enemies the victory we want denied to our own party. If the nation dares to flirt with our internal Republican enemies, we'll go over to the Darkside and support the Democrats out of spite. If this action divides the country further and Biden passes laws, uses terrible executive orders, or trashes our co-party members thus undermining entire generations of Republican principles that we fought our entire lives to uphold in favor of progressive and Marxist ones, so be it. We will tear this whole mother f*cker down if one MAGA witch remains in our presence. As Neo-Puritans, our selective use of the Bible teaches us to have compassion for others and to be inclusive with other people's churches and not our whites only ones. Otherwise, we can never suffer a witch to live! Be gone Satan, Trump, and your MAGA evil!
- Exhibit C: The Sandersista Resistance:
An appeal to economic and woke populism using glittering generalities
(ex. stop the wealthiest of the 99% or Save the Planet) to address
abstract, unproven conspiracies concerning the activities of a menacing
corporate structure (ex. Gas price gauging), social classes (ex. white
privilege going unchecked), or insidious institutions (like the National
Rifle Association, NRA). Assuming they eternally possess the support of the
oppressed masses without ever having to justify their actions, they are epic doxxers. They call for censorship on
social media, are blinded from seeing leftist intolerance or violence as
they view it as acceptable.
- Don't You Dare Call Us Hypocrites: "As we fly around the world in first class to do the work to save the planet and fight off climate change, "how dare you!" (attributable to Gretta Thunberg). It is time for people to give a second thought to eating less meat, driving their cars less, investing in $40,000 Tesla cars with batteries built with lithium strip-mined in China while on public assistance to ease up on gas costs while sending less emissions into the air. Take the high speed rail we'll have up and running in our base state of California in 20-30 years like our communist friends in China put up in rapid time with an enslaved workforce. Stop eating cows since they're unnatural and haven't really been that essential to human life since they were one of the first domesticated animals by humans 10,000 years ago, actions that lead to civilization itself. But, do start eating bugs and insects since they're nutritious, numerous, and since doing so can provide a form of bug control so we can stop using pesticides altogether even though it and modern fertilizers provided starving people in Africa and India with more food. Let them eat bugs! While we're at expensive restaurants like the French Laundry at the height of COVID, unmasked, in big groups, spending thousands of dollars on select cuts of beef and drinking expensive California wines, or if we're in our hairstylist's place even though state laws closed them down, but to get a fresh trim because we're public figures and we have to look nice during a pandemic since we're on TV and you aren't, you better stay masked even on the sidewalk. We'll be watching how many people enter your home and when we get back unmasked from the huddled, non-socially distanced masses of a BLM peaceful protest we better not see you in a church, receiving a parking lot mass, or attending the funeral for a loved one unless they're in your immediate family bubble! So stop complaining about what we're doing as our intent is good and we need this opulent lifestyle if we're gonna save everyone's *sses."
- Safety for me, but F Thee: "We just hired lots more guards, installed a big, beautiful new, high border wall that is the Robles-Royce of walls, and we have highly advanced technology carefully scrutinizing every potential illegal crosser to see if we have wall jumpers--at San Francisco Mayor London Breed's estate or over the barricade at the people's House (Congress) where unarmed insurrectionists might come again like in 2021 when we knew they were coming days ahead of time, refused the National Guard from the Orange Demon Man Drumpf, and we still weren't ready. Pfft we don't want to hear it! We think it's important to demilitarize, re-imagine and divest our police forces, and make them into unarmed social workers to prevent the police oppression that we believe may have killed billions of unarmed black people last year instead of the handful of them that we're know supposed to the names of and speak them out loud, which unironically to us means we can manageably count them. If we're gonna free up billions wasted on militarized policing like NYC did, we can spend the money on security for our public officials who called for the re-imagining and defunding of the police in the first place. Oh, this move finally disposes of the broken windows theory of policing, since we reject the idea that a repeat criminal has to start from somewhere since the January 6th insurrectionists suddenly and painfully tried to overthrow our democracy by stopping a vote count with fists and placards and going up against the great might of the American military, which is overfunded also, if you ask us. By shifting our priorities to the community and social services, we can allow our housing-challenged (homeless) people to live their best lives regardless of their mental illnesses or drug/alcohol problems and maybe add triple the number of safe injection sites. Since we are always socially conscious and never self-conscious because we have too many important, inclusive causes on our minds, many of our members most in need of protection like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were traumatized by January 6th when their offices were far away from the capital storming, but it was an emotional experience, and security shalt be granted for thee to stop all the mysterious Republican white male stalkers who want to date her and hate her at the same time. So, if you've ever supported an insurrectionist, though no one has yet been charged with that specific federal crime, you don't get to complain when we reshape your police forces and decimate their morale and see an increase in most crimes short of murder. If we're gonna survive this transition to a pro-criminal, cashless bail society where even violent criminals, like the "super perps" subway pushing victims in NYC, are released to be babysat by you weak, unarmed common people after your concealed-carry assault pistols and weapons of war knives are taken away, we need to make sure we leaders have vigilant, well-trained security guards for ourselves to pick up the slack after we demoralized or fired most of the police in our cities. Keep quiet about our city's crime problems unless you're a racist. Though we hate him as an incarnation of evil, Republican Senator John Kennedy isn't too far from the truth when he talks about how petty crimes like drug use and dealing shouldn't be punished if you support defunding the police like we do because you may need those druggies to help you when another unarmed insurrection starts. "Next time you're in trouble, call a crackhead!" he said. With the next traumatic January 6th looming over us everywhere we go, we couldn't agree more!
- Existential Threats! Not Conspiracy-Smearacies:
"Two words never get old when describing the most prescient issues of our day: existential threats and threats to democracy. In fact, we have come to believe that opposing us is itself an existential threat. If we're talking about getting in the way of our democratic-socialist priorities, where do we start with the threats? There's Vladimir Putin and his omnipresence even in paper and pen local elections out in the boonies, there's the Saudi Royal family and their unneeded oil because of the death of one journalist, Jamal Khasoggi, instead of the thousands dying at the hands of our Iranian enemies. There's Drumpf of course and the ultra mega super mig MAGA mega insurrectionists and the 74 million Republican voters from 2020 who we've got to reeducate in a camp of some kind. Don't forget those threats coming from people who don't support or vote to impeach, jail, and personally hand-cuff the aforementioned people? Threats come from demonic social polices as well that we can never suffer to see put in place: want a ban on abortion at least in the moments before a viable child is born and the mother is healthy? What are you the Taliban, that we gave up fighting, or some patriarchal oppressor from the fiction of the The Handmaid's Tale? What's next for democracy after Roe vs. Wade was overturned, that we never read nor any of the case law before or after, and the state policies on abortion remained or were strengthened as per their voters wishes? Pure democratic desolation since woman are 50%+ of the country and if they call themselves a woman, they must back our radical approach to abortion and gender theory. Next they'll come for other longstanding rights that have firm precedent and laws to back them up unlike Roe and its hodgepodge theory that even our best legal minds, like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, acknowledge was terribly argued. Next, will it be the LGBTQ+ or the interracial couples to fall to our irrational slippery slope and have their rights taken away in our democracy with these popular state laws? And don't forget we're firm progressives, socialists, and even Marxists when it comes to economics and the word "inflation," which according to TV talker Joy Reid is just a word introduced by Republicans to scare voters into looking into their pockets and seeing less money. Want lower gas prices by refining more oil and increasing domestic capacity? That's an existential threat posed by the price gauging oil companies that we haven't been able to unlink from simple supply-demand as per Economics 101 or prove their record profits come at the expense of keeping high supplies of it, yet having overly high prices to match. But it's gotta be true they're robbing from the consumers even though we want higher gas prices anyways to drive down demand, push green renewable energies, and quicken the transition to a carbon-free economy. Though we like the effect our policies are having on energy prices, we still believe the oil companies and other industries that raise prices as per inflation because of our energy policies are fleecing the poor people that we don't count ourselves part of since many of us went to Ivy League schools and live in luxury like Comrade Bernie Sanders. We won't hesitate to blame these existential threats. And if there is one way to stop threats to our democracy, it's to persecute our opponents until they die alone in jail. They are the ones we don't support applying prison reform to their cases. And though we don't much like to answer difficult questions or be challenged even by the people in our "democracy" that we're constantly fending off threats from, our radical faction's views are really there to protect the people, they're just too ignorant and backwards to know what's good for them.
- Exhibit D: Darkside Brandonists (DB): The Biden team has gleefully adopted the austere, impervious, and strong-man-like view of Dark(side) Brandon, an attempt to take a vulgar joke (F*ck Joe Biden->Let's Go Brandon!) and turn it to their advantage. DBs construct a type of originalist safe space in their campaigns or while in office in order to do as little as possible and to claim victory over a radical flank, while gaslighting would-be moderates into thanking them they didn’t do worse. A deceptive inversion of Clintonian Love Triangulation, where the opposite part of the spectrum is acknowledged as a worthy partner and the moderate voter is courted at the expense of ones' own radical flank. They are first-class Cat-like Tread Debate monsters who stay away from interviews, refuse to debate extremist opponents because of their so-called radical views that might attract voters, hide in basements, or beg the critical question from the press starting with “Come on man!" or simply saying something is "top of mind" without showing how it's a concern of theirs. Finally, they draw dark energy from who they are not and what those opponents wouldn't do anyways while waiting to win. For ex.: "My opponents were opposed to this, do you really think they would be more successful in doing this than us?”
Immigration Authority Gaslighting: "Even if it's true, you can't say the border is open because we don't intend to do anything to stop those coming over in record numbers since it's intolerant to say "don't come" in any stronger ways and because it tells the drug gangs the border is open, which they didn't know, and that they should continue to smuggle in people and drugs. If we want to leave the door open, why are you telling the bad guys to enter if they didn't know it? If you say the border is closed even if it is not, the drugs gangs will stop and the number of people might decrease somehow. The waves of migrants coming across the border may be increased even more by the end of Title 42, a COVID-era policy to use health reasons to send migrants back. And you should ignore that we fought in the courts for 2 years to end it, then we kept it for a time because the bad (Trump) judges said we had to and we saw a benefit in going along with it for a time, then it was ended recently by a good judge (not a Trump one). Yet, by pointing out that increase and the potential for worse when we'll happily see Title 42 finally go, you do the recruitment for the drug lords instead of us having an inconsistent or nonexistent policy and it being at fault for the impending humanitarian disaster and for their success as drug cartels. And though we don't intend to do anything with the broad border authority we already have, both parties are at fault for not fixing the broken immigration system we're hardly enforcing now and that our enemy party has been complaining about that we've also ignored. So be quiet about it unless you are racist because you don't want black and brown people brought into the country by drug lords that you told could enter using an open border that we say is really closed."
· Student Loan Forgiveness Bait and Switch: "Though we once said a president does not possess the authority to spend money Congress hasn't given them the authority to spend, and though we said COVID-19 is over as an emergency in other areas like the border Title 42 policy, we support forgiving the student loan debt because the pandemic isn't over, future pandemics for other viruses might occur at any point, and COVID-19's endless impact continues for areas where we want it to continue. We will sign an executive order (not a law passed by Congress) even if we were advised it's probably unconstitutional and set up a bait program before the midterm elections to draw out college age voters to swell our prospects. Even though our website crashed early and we got it streamlined to maximize our voter bait and that would have allowed millions of eager debtors to apply for this service, thus having the federal government and the taxpayer foot the bill for this giveaway we knew wouldn't potentially pan out anyways, we're going to put the onus squarely on the multiple courts who rejected it as unconstitutional (eek, like we knew it was earlier), continue litigating it so it looks like we're doing something to save it and so we're absolved by those angry applicants, and also blame our Republican opponents for not passing or supporting something they never advocated for in the first place. At least all of the debt voters have completed our switch in the 2022 midterms and we got off blame free!
· All Our Foreign Policy Weaknesses are Actually Our Strengths. Shut up!: "Questions should never be directed at our administration for the Afghanistan defeat and we dare anyone to show us they could pull off our hasty retreat that lead to a restored, authoritarian Taliban regime any better. We killed Ayaman al-Zawahiri, the isolated, sidelined second in command of Al-Qaeda, a much weakened group responsible for 9/11 and droned to oblivion during the sacred administration of Barrack Obama instead of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and Al Queda lacks in support compared to the Taliban or ISIS in Afghanistan. We got him with our "over the horizon capability" without our main base in that country that we gave as a freebie to the Chinese. The tens of thousands of dead Afghans since 2021 and the restored repression of women, much like America post-Roe, shows just how wise our actions were and how horrific our Supreme Court were in their actions. Even though we rejected almost all Trump administration policies (like Title 42), we felt it was best to keep to only the parts of the Doha Agreement with the Taliban that stopped us from attacking them while abandoning the restrictions on the Taliban that were repeatedly violated by them and that could've warranted a tough American response. However, because we picked only one bad Trump agreement and then kept the worst parts of that bad agreement and left behind the enforcement mechanisms to hold them accountable, like we left behind the whole country after 20 years of wasted blood and treasure, we converted our horrific defeat into a victory simply by stating it and then not talking about it because while the country is awash with our weapons, women are oppressed again, and thousands of our former interpreters and supporters are dead, we got out unlike every president since 2001 and the consequences of the way we did that defeat don't matter. So shut up and let's talk about Ukraine! You see, Afghanistan is our strength and it helped us when it comes to Ukraine rather than enabling Putin to see weakness and come to his choice faster. Anyone not authorizing a blank check for Ukraine, or even stating they'd support 99.99% of the blank check with only a little bit taken off for fiscal propriety, or they're a bit skeptical of starting American involvement in another endless war, or if they're for rejecting endless confrontation with nuclear Russia even if it means World War III, well, they're likely a fascist Putin supporter!
XI. Ronklainian Propaganda Tools
Ron Klainian Holiday Propaganda is based on an infamous poster sent out by the Biden Adminstration's Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, prior to Thanksgiving 2022. It attempts to use micropower over ones' relatives at a holiday dinner because of ideological directives.
This contravenes the warning from Volume I that relatives are the some of the worst
people to try to convince to change their political opinions because you can
neither perfectly separate yourself from biological relatives nor can you be as
certain that unless they’re total strangers, they don’t know more about you and
the way you'll react to the political debate. The cost is too high. Here is flyer meant to help mirrors identify the fallacies used in the White House's propaganda laugh fest!
XIV. Glossary:
You Are a Protocol Droid Are You Not?
Abstraction: the nonphysical
Assent: To agree to something.
Authority: The ability to command others to obey without needing to justify ones' commands
Categorical Imperative: In ethics, it is the rule created whereby all persons would act the same way in that circumstance.
Coercion: Using force or threats to persuade someone to obey
Concurrent Context: All persons, ideas, actions, and other factors take place at a similar time, place, and context.
Conformity Paradox: The larger a democratic majority becomes the more repressive it is on the dwindling minority that resists.
Context: the persons, places, and times of a debate.
Debate Monsters (Trolls): Persons who only argue to get an emotional response from others.
Decision Fog: The missing information or mis-perception of an situation when making a political decision.
Fallacy: a false idea or bad reasoning.
Glittering Generality: an appealing phrase that is hard to object to like "murder is bad."
Identity Safety in a Space (ISiS): the concept of a protective bubble around ones' perception of their identity that prevents rational arguments from entering.
Illegitimate Resistance: When obedience is rejected because of an irrational belief and is outside of legitimate channels.
Legitimate Resistance: When an authority fails to address a rational complaint.
Macrofaults: large abstract and complex problems that approached simplistically.
Mens Rea: mindset or the intent of the person in a situation.
Microfaults: Tiny social wrongs that are not solvable in a conversation.
Micropower: The inter-personal power dynamic that using irrational tactics and/or Raw power
Micropower Microaggressions (MMAs): Using small personal offenses as a proxy for coercive power over the accused because the issue behind the offense can't be solved in the interaction.
Micropower Totems: People using objects for power like a Bible or a constitution.
Mirrorism: Like a mirror, it's the reflection of emotional arguments back on the arguer.
Mirror Agents: the people mirroring irrational political discussions.
Parlay: the content of irrational speech or conduct.
Parlor: the environment of the political debate.
Power: the ability to commands others to obey.
Pragmatism: 19th century American Philosophy that sought truth through what works.
Safespace Parlors: Not simply emotional support places, but environments where opposition, rational or not, are not welcome.
Schlamperei: A German word used here to represent lazy and inefficient institutions.
Rationality: the use of reason and logic to discover truth.
Raw Power: Using coercion to stop legitimate complaints.
Reason: Justifying belief using facts.
Self-Selection: A rational choice to become a mirror because of an irrational debate
Totems: objects acting as symbols.
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