“It may be no exaggeration to say that stupidity has killed more people than all the diseases known to medicine and psychiatry.
“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”
~Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
“There’s probably a lot of rich people who are pretty dumb and then get really lucky and do really well in business. And there might be some rich people who are pretty smart but I wonder now if being this level of rich and having all these influential people if it makes you dumber.
“The reason why I think it makes makes you dumber is for exactly the effect that I mentioned before, that you’re always talking to people who are like ChatGPT, who are sycophantic. And I feel like that makes you stupider because you’re not getting any hardcore resistance. You’re not getting any friction.
“More and more your ideas are getting taken up as having insights, which reinforces the idea that you’re really smart, which removes the filter on your thoughts. You just say any old stupid thing and people are just like, “Yeah, that’s really interesting. There’s an interesting insight there.”
“So, you just become dumber and dumber and dumber because nothing you say is getting any friction or resistance to the point where all of the sudden you just become basically an idiot with money.”
~The Philosophy of Jeffrey Epstein, 55 minute mark,
Pill Pod Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast
The highest echelons of the upper class are the most disconnected and isolated. Their entire social reality is siloed and forms an echo chamber that repeats back to them their own biases and prejudices. They are told what they want to hear by yes men, flatterers, fluffers, subordinates, employees, servants, and beneficiaries. And they hear their views repeated by pundits, public intellectuals, talking heads, lobbyists, politicians, etc. So, they fall into confirmation bias and smart idiot effect. All they really know is how to maintain plutocracy and manipulate the system. Think of Jeffrey Epstein having stated that real work is only for the ‘goyim’ (i.e., the inferior).*
The economic, cultural, and ruling elite are alienated and estranged from the lived experience of most of humanity, from reality and basic knowledge on the ground. Robert Anton Wilson argued this is why the people controlling society and creating the rules are so dumb and incompetent, leading to failure and decline.** In a dominance hierarchy, each person avoids telling any inconvenient and uncomfortable truth to superiors and authority figures, so as to keep their job and keep out of trouble. Level after level, after the message finally gets to the top, it’s been filtered and shaped to fit the social norms, cultural expectations, conventional ideology, dominant paradigm, master narrative, and ruling system.
This is why the emperor can be made to walk around naked believing he is clothed in the finest garment. In the story, the child points out the truth and makes it public knowledge. But in our society of near total information control, that rarely happens. The child would never be heard, would never be platformed, would never make it into the MSM or national politics. This is why Epstein, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, falsely believe they’re genius-level masters of the universe. The whole system serves them. They’ve come to believe their own lies. The best con succeeds by the con man first conning himself.
Alienation works differently for the permanent underclass. They are propagandized and indoctrinated, disinformed and made ignorant. But what the dirty masses aren’t is disconnected from the real world problems and consequences. And neither are they as stunted in terms of cognitive empathy, as research shows that the poor have the greatest ability to accurately read the minds and predict the behavior of others. The awareness of the subjugated, though, is distorted by the system of social control they’re trapped in. For most of them, they only know what the elite allow them to know.
The middle class, however, might have the most interesting position. In being better educated and more well read, they’re not as ignorant and disinformed as those below them but more so than those above. Simultaneously, they’re not as clueless and obtuse as the elite, if to a far greater extent than the masses. So, though in one sense they’re less worse off than both the dominators and the dominated, their middling position means they neither have the advantages found at the polar ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. The middle is a muddle. They lack the perspective from the top and the bottom. This is why it’s most dangerous when the middle class allies with the ruling class.
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Notes:
*In a 2009 email to Roger Schank, Jeffrey Epstein explained that, “This is the way the jew make money… and made a fortune in the past ten years, selling short the shipping futures, let the goyim deal in the real world.” As a Zionist and Jewish supremacist, he really did want a Jewish cabal that conspires to control the world. But his attitude is identical to the non-Jewish oligarchs and plutocrats who have seized the US government. Consider Elon Musk and Peter Thiel with their grandiose vision of a Butterfly Revolution that will lead to techno-feudalism. They fantasy about balkanizing civilization into big tech fiefdoms that are ruled separately by each of them as lords and masters over their respective serfdoms.
**In an essay published elsewhere, I discuss empathy in terms of sociopolitical conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO) (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan). I argue that it’s because of a lack of cognitive empathy, including of their own mind, that they lack self-awareness and hence self-control. [Self-awareness is a subset of social awareness, as the child must first learn to model the minds of others before they can do the same for themselves.] Then they project their inner sense of chaos and disorder outward onto the world. So, in feeling out of control, they seek to control others and all of society. But as they’re unconscious chaos agents, they wreck everything they touch with problems, failures, and crises proliferating.
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Wilson uses the eye in the pyramid as a symbol of the dysfunction of hierarchies. Every level except the top is blind, but the eye can see only one way. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Celine’s Second Law
from Wikipedia
“Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.”[2]
Wilson rephrases this himself many times as “communication occurs only between equals”. Celine calls this law “a simple statement of the obvious” and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one’s job). In essence, it is usually more in the interests of any worker to tell his boss what he wants to hear, not what is true.[3]
In any hierarchy, every level below the highest carries a subtle burden to see the world in the way their superiors expect it to be seen and to provide feedback to their superiors that their superiors want to hear. In the end, any hierarchical organization supports what its leaders already think is true more than it challenges them to think differently. The levels below the leaders are more interested in keeping their jobs than telling the truth.
Wilson, in Prometheus Rising, uses the example of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Hoover saw communist infiltrators and spies everywhere, and he told his agents to hunt them down. Therefore, FBI agents began seeing and interpreting everything they could as parts of the communist conspiracy. Some even went as far as framing people as communists, making largely baseless arrests and doing everything they could to satisfy Hoover’s need to find and drive out the communist conspiracy. The problem is, such a conspiracy was greatly exaggerated. Hoover thought it was monolithic and pervasive, and any agent who dared point out the lack of evidence to Hoover would be at best denied promotions, and at worst labeled a communist himself and lose his job. Any agent who knew the truth would be very careful to hide the fact.
Meanwhile, the FBI was largely ignoring the problem of organized crime (the Mafia), because Hoover insisted that organized crime did not exist on the national scale. Not only does the leader of the hierarchy see what he wants to see, but he also does not see what he does not want to see. Agents who pursued the issue of organized crime were sometimes marginalized within the organization or hounded into retirement.
In the end, Celine states, any hierarchy acts more to conceal the truth from its leaders than it serves to find the truth.
The People Making “The Rules” are Dumber Than You
by Kevin Carson
The people who regulate what you do, in most cases, know less about what you’re doing than you do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s nominally a “public” or “private” organization, or how smart the people running it are as individuals. No matter how smart the people in charge are, they are systematically stupid in their organizational roles, because of the dynamics of information flow in hierarchies (as described by Robert Anton Wilson, for example).
Organizations are pyramids, and the people at the tops of the pyramids tend to communicate much more effectively with each other than they do with those at the bottoms of their own respective pyramids. That means that most organizations are riddled with “best practices” based almost entirely on feedback about how well they worked from people at the tops of the other pyramids. And those latter people have almost no valid knowledge of how the policies actually worked in their own organizations.
Remember the story of the Emperor’s new clothes? Large organizations are designed to insulate naked emperors from unpleasant feedback. That set of clothes must look good, because the emperors at the other organizations all have a set just like it, and they can’t stop talking about how great they look!
The state, by promoting centralization and hierarchy and insulating bureaucratic organizations from the competitive consequences of their inefficiency, causes such irrationality to predominate in our society. We’re living in the world of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”
The Illuminatus Trilogy
by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea
It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people’s brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation’s capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.
It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell’s 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a “radio” built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, “Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?” This little voice the Freudians call “the superego,” which Freud himself vividly characterized as “the ego’s harsh master.” With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as “a set of conditioned verbal habits.” This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of “conditioned verbal habits”). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—that is, from the biogram.
No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.
Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram— what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less “real.” They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, “a tool, a machine, a robot.”
Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.
But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.
The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.
I call this the Snafu Principle.
Everything is Under Control
by Robert Anton Wilson w/ Miram Joan Hill
Another factor tending to multiply conspiracy theories beyond necessity lies in the fact that all intelligence agencies have two functions, viz.:
- Collection of accurate information.
- Planting and encouraging inaccurate information.
An intelligence agency, in other words, needs to know “what the hell is really going on” for the same reason a bank or a grocer or you and I need that kind of factual input. Hence, the huge budgets for item 1 above.
Intelligence agencies, however, also need to keep ahead of their competitors, the rival intelligence agencies of other and, hence, perfidious governments. They therefore engage in frenetic efforts of spreading misinformation, “disinformation” (a euphemism for the former), “cover stories,” “cover-ups,” etc. In order to deceive whoever currently functions as “the enemy,” these fantasies must have enough facts mixed into them, and enough general plausibility, that they will deceive many others not yet defined as “enemy.” Always, they must deceive persons of average intelligence and average education or they just don’t work. The best disinformation should also deceive persons of more-than-average wit and know-how, for a while at least.
In brief, modern secret-police work functions much like poker. All players try to send false signals at least part of the time, and ll players try to detect “the real truth” behind the false signals sent by the others.In a world where nations relate to each other in this manner, conspiracy models flourish like bacteria in a sewage system. As Henry Kissinger allegedly said, “Anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.” Indeed, any citizen in a world run like that who doesn’t have some “paranoid” suspicions must have suffered brain damage in childhood.
When the government engages in extensive (well-publicized) snooping and spying on the public, this paranoia escalates rapidly. Where there exists a secret police agency of any sort, in any nation, the people soon learn to suspect those who suspect them. Concretely, many Americans fear that any part of government, or even any organization not admittedly part of the government, may function as a front for the CIA, the FBI, the BATF, the National Security Agency, or groups even more esoteric and manipulative.
Thus, the more omnipresent the government’s “control,” the more suspicious and uneasy the people become. And the more people indicate a lack of faith of such government, the more such government will need to spy on them, to feel absolutely sure they have not become alienated enough to hatch rebellion or set off more homemade bombs of the Oklahoma City variety. The government will therefore increase its spying and snooping, and the people will become more “careful.” As a crude kind of survey, I have asked audiences in hundreds of lectures and seminars if any of them ever willingly tell the whole truth about anything to a government official. Nobody has ever held up their hand and claimed that degree of faith and tractability.
No man or woman in the United States today wants the Feds to know too much about what he or she is really doing. Since the government long ago passed the point of “anything not forbidden is compulsory” and now also wishes to enforce “anything not compulsory is forbidden,” we all suspect that we are technical criminals at least, although like Kafka’s hero we are never quite sure which statute or statutes we may have violated.
We thus arrive at a situation that in the Army is called Optimum Snafu. Those at the top are never told what might cause them to punish the informant, and those at the bottom keep their mouths shut about more and more of what they actually see, hear, smell, taste, or otherwise sense of the environment. In the long run, the top people in the pyramid are attempting to regulate things they know nothing about, based on reports that have been invented by liars and flatterers to prevent them from using their awful powers too destructively.
But if most people always lie a little in dealing with the State, the State must have a very weird and inaccurate picture of who the people are and what they really think and want. Laws will therefore direct themselves to a fictitious citizenry, not to the people we really are. Thus, the laws increasingly make no sense to the folk who have to endure them, and more hostility to government appears.
All these cycles make up a set of Strange Loops and Vicious Circles from which there presently appears no exit. Unless, as suggested before, the funding runs out or Divine Intervention occurs, conspiracy theories will flourish, both among the increasingly anxiety-ridden citizenry and among the politicos and bureaucrats who try to command them. And every voice that tries, or pretends, to tell the truth in this schizoid situation immediately comes under suspicion as another possible Deceiver and Manipulator whose yarn has to be looked at as critically as any PostModernist would look at the Declaration of Independence or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
We are all Deconstructionists now, whether we ever heard the word before or not.
Marmalade 