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Sept. 30, 2021 - Davis Aurini
47:42
Clust B Capture-Collapse Theory

How institutions are captured, subverted, and destroyed by abusive actors. A narration of my recent medium article, which can be found here: https://medium.com/@leomjaurini/cluster-b-capture-collapse-theory-5ffabf8f47fe My Website: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aurini Support my work: http://www.staresattheworld.com/donate/

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Cluster B Capture Collapse Theory, how institutions are captured, subverted, and destroyed by abusive actors.
Please visit my medium article for all of the links, which are not provided, in this audio version.
I'd like to present a phenomenon I see occurring across multiple institutions in our present social milieu.
You can guess the broad strokes from the title.
It involves cluster Bs, psychopaths, narcissists, histrionics, and borderlines, capturing various institutions and then driving them to collapse.
Add in some nuance, and by the end I hope to have provided an explanation of the what and why of our present apocalypse.
Too strong of a word?
Apocalypse is just the Greek word for the great revealing.
Take a look around you, as the Todd goes out, and you'll find out who's not wearing pants.
My hope is that this analysis will bolster your hearts.
We still have a dark winter ahead of us, but the revelation that our leaders are corrupt and incompetent is ultimately for the good.
They have been playing their games covertly for years, leading to the growing subculture of people questioning the narrative.
These days, it's growing increasingly overt, and the cracks in the edifice are starting to show.
To quote my colleague Quintus Curtivius, This should make you happy.
The great leveling is happening.
It means that any man who can prove his mettle can make something of himself.
You only need character, a soul, and an undying hatred of moral corruption.
You don't need money, luxury goods, or multiple passports.
End quote.
There has, of course, been a lot of cross-pollination which helped lead me to these ideas.
I'll be providing links to noteworthy examples throughout this piece.
For now, let's begin by discussing what exactly a Cluster B personality disorder actually is.
The Cluster B, a Predator in a Skin Suit It needs to be emphasized that a personality disorder is not the same thing as a mental disorder.
The former is a distinct subset of the latter.
Mental disorders cover a wide variety of mental ailments, generalized depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, oppositional defiant disorder.
We all suffer periods of poor mental health, and while these may occasionally cause the sufferer to act out in an antisocial manner, they're curable ailments which are deserving of sympathy.
When we discuss personality disorders, we are not talking about your friend who is going through a rough breakup or who's snapping at people because they're overworked.
Personality disorders are a subset of innate and maladaptive patterns of cognition.
Cluster A includes the eccentric disorders, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal.
People diagnosed with these are no more dangerous than anybody else, though they may have trouble with normal human interactions.
For instance, think of the character Dale Dribble from King of the Hill.
A paranoid, obviously.
For schizotypal, I can think of no better example than the artist David Firth.
I have no idea if he's been diagnosed as such, but his artwork has a distinctly schizotypal flavor to it.
As for schizoid, think of the weaponized autism of 4chan.
It's not actually autism.
Or Nikola Tesla.
What you should note is that all of these individuals cogitate in distinctly erratic manners from the general population, but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily wrong in what they see, or that they want to be fixed.
The cluster A's might be maladaptive in a generalized sense, but they also seem to fill an evolutionary niche.
They're humanity's mad geniuses, or prophets and shamans, helping the neurotypicals break out of a toxic heuristic.
Cluster Cs are the anxious or fearful disorders.
They include avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive.
While their behavior is pervasive and maladaptive, unlike the cluster A's, they will generally seek out treatment.
These disorders are often instilled by an abusive childhood, and while they harm the sufferer, they don't generally lead to antisocial or abusive actions.
Cluster C's are very deserving of sympathy, and therapy can often prove effective.
Finally, we have the cluster B's.
They are the narcissist, the psychopath, the histrionic, and the borderline.
In the past, I've compared them to broken versions of the four classical humors.
The narcissist is a broken sanguine.
Instead of being cheerful and gregarious, if insincere, he instead spins endless lies and recruits a cult following to believe them.
The psychopath is a broken choleric.
Instead of being ordered and exacting, if a bit bossy, he's instead an endless manipulator.
The histrionic is a broken phlematic.
Instead of being a stable supporting element, though sometimes a little too nice, she subtly starts fights between those around her, always the eye of the storm.
The borderline is a broken melancholic.
Rather than being the private and gentle artist, who sometimes takes herself too seriously, she's the eternal victim who demands endless affect, positive, negative, it doesn't matter.
It's impossible to overstate how dangerous these people are.
In his book People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil, psychologist M. Scott Peck relates how he went from atheist to Catholic as a response to his study of cluster Bs.
The depth of evil he observed required a supernatural explanation.
I myself began studying these people in depth over a decade ago after suffering physical, sexual, and legal abuse at the hands of a borderline, and was likewise influenced in the direction of religion.
While there's no scientific definition of the human soul, in most people there exists a spark which seeks out the good, the beautiful, and the true, even if they don't go about it in the right manner.
With cluster B's, this seems to be wholly absent.
Their behavior matches that of a sentient piece of clockwork which is devoted to the ugly, the profane, and the cruel.
But nonetheless, it is a piece of clockwork made out of the pieces of a human psyche.
So we can make some useful statements about these people whether or not they actually qualify for the label of human.
Let us consider the argument that the four types are just different versions of the same thing.
And considering cluster A and C, this seems to make sense.
Those two clusters seem to involve a core type manifesting in different manners.
So it would make sense that we'd see this in cluster B as well.
And if my theory about their correlation to the four humors is correct, then the only true differences are relative in nature.
The narcissist is more extroverted than the histrionic, and the psychopath is more process-focused than the borderline.
But these differences only matter based upon the social milieu they find themselves in.
The kid who's considered introverted by the drama club might be the charismatic leader of the chess club.
Fundamentally, there is a single cogitative mechanism underlying all of them.
And if they're all the same, then let's consider how each one manifests in a cogitative disorder.
The narcissist is typically viewed as having high self-regard.
But this is more than the arrogance of a regular person who might behave with an annoying sense of entitlement.
The narcissist feels that they have a right to everything on the earth, attention, money, sex.
And while they may have to engage in social manipulations to achieve these ends, they're not actually obligated to exchange value for value in any deeper sense.
The psychopath endlessly manipulates, apparently for their own gain.
If they're stupid, they'll become a robber and a rapist.
If they're smart, they'll become a CEO who bankrupts the company just because he can.
But unlike your normal person who can often be manipulative for the sake of achieving their own ends, the psychopath manipulates for the sake of manipulating.
The histrionic gossips, spreads rumors designed to frustrate and insult those around her while laying the blame at the feet of somebody else.
She creates storms of instability and harm.
While the borderline demands endless attention, acting like a sex goddess at times and constructing persecution narratives at others, all for the sake of affect, any affect.
She is entitled to your attention no matter that it's 3 a.m. and you have work tomorrow.
Cluster bees use normal human tools for achieving ends, but in a deeply pathological manner which fails to achieve any ends that would make sense to a normal person.
This incidentally is why they're considered personality disorders, because ultimately their actions are maladaptive, self-destructive.
While normal human evil is a maladaptive pursuit of something good through illicit means, the cluster be pursues destruction through illicit means.
This is why they often go unnoticed.
Why would a man who has everything embezzle from his own company?
Why would a devoted mother murder her own children?
Why would a famous rock star lie about what sort of car he drives?
If they're a cluster B, they do it because they can.
The difference between a psychopath and a manipulative jerk is that the manipulative jerk will trick you so that he wins.
The psychopath will keep playing psycho chess games even after he's won, and ultimately this will be his undoing.
These people succeed when regular people fail to believe that evil exists.
But eventually, their actions force this realization.
And with the scales falling from their eyes, they see them for what they are, and all of their clever tricks stop working.
Cluster B cults and recruitment Most cluster bees seem to be lone wolf operators, individuals who pop into your life and do everything they can to wreck it before finally being ejected and forced to move on to a new target.
But there are times when they pack together, forming cults or taking over existing institutions, and it's worth considering how this occurs.
I forewarn that this portion of my essay is going to be somewhat speculative.
By its very nature, a cluster B cult is going to be occult.
People of the lie do not thrive in sunlight, and while we have documented cases of cluster B cults, the recent exposure of the Navixim cult, for example, not sure how to pronounce that, the documentation is mostly limited to first-hand accounts coming from people who've been heavily manipulated and abused, and may not have noticed which manipulation techniques were being applied to them.
We don't have something like a sales training manual, which explicitly lays out the process for detailed scrutiny.
And further complicating matters is that we likely have a sampling bias towards cults which engage in some sort of sexual deviancy.
Rape triggers our apprehension and disgust, and is thus more likely to be prosecuted than a cult which relies entirely upon mental abuse.
Cluster bees don't seem to be as appetitive as your typical brute, forcing himself upon his prom date in a drunken lust.
Cluster bees primarily use sex instrumentally.
So keep that in mind.
While sex is a particularly useful tool for destabilizing an innocent person, it is not the only tool.
As stated, Cluster B's typically only seek out victims.
They don't usually rise above the level of abusive spouse, manipulative liar, or serial killer.
But every so often they begin to flock.
As far as I can tell, they're motivated by something like boredom.
Bored of merely toying with one victim, they seek to network with other manipulators.
To sharpen their skills, to have somebody to show off to, ambition?
I can't properly explain what their ends are with this behavior, but nonetheless, it seems to happen.
Cluster B recruitment seems to happen most often in a college setting.
A good location to find bright, young, vulnerable minds.
They use the same sort of subtle hints and queries which homosexuals used in previous eras to find one another.
Only instead of sexual interest, the question they're asking is: do you want to manipulate somebody with me and delight in crushing their soul?
The artist Miles W. Mathis presented an odd story from his college days, where an upperclassman from another school approached him and his friends and invited them to a house party at the next town over.
Notable is how he initially suspected the other students of the other student of having a homosexual interest in him, only to immediately dismiss the notion upon a closer examination of his body language.
He wanted something, but what?
So he attended the party, was plied with beautiful women, and provided with a king-size bed to sleep in.
Thankfully, he says, none of the women followed him upstairs, even though normally that's the goal of college partying.
There was something off about the entire evening, and he was thankful to never hear from the student again.
I shared that story with a friend of mine, and it triggered a memory from his own college days.
One day he was approached by an older male student, who also showed an odd interest in him, which he initially mistook for being sexual.
Like Mathis, he was quickly convinced otherwise, and the student and the student's girlfriend wound up treating my friend to a dinner at an expensive restaurant and then started asking him if he were interested in mind control.
My friend asserted that he didn't believe such a thing to be possible, that human volition could not be subverted.
The strange student offered to show him an example of how he could mind control the waitress, but my friend was unimpressed with the proposal and declined.
Like Mathis, he never heard from the strange student again.
Cluster B Superpowers The Cluster B my friend ran into is hardly an anomaly.
These people tend to think very highly of themselves and their ability to mind control other people, or to influence real-world events through magic.
I once had encounters with a Wiccan coven who were convinced of this.
In retrospect, though I never met the leader, the behaviors of their followers made it a near certainty that they were a Cluster B cult.
In popular culture, they have a reputation for being manipulative geniuses, such as Hannibal Lecter.
And then there are the cases of some like Jeffrey Dahmer, who were reportedly transforming into monsters, into a monster during his assaults.
In reality, these superpowers are utterly banal manipulation tactics, which are ultimately destructive.
They're a double-edged blade without a handle, which winds up harming both user and victim.
As a brief aside, none of this is to state that the supernatural doesn't exist, it most certainly does, but it works along similar lines.
It doesn't grant superpowers to witches or psychopaths.
They merely cheat others out of things that are rightfully theirs.
God is in control of reality, not the devil.
The devil has to play by his rules, even when he's trying to bend them.
To illustrate why, let's start out by discussing the light side of manipulation tactics.
Despite the pejorative connotations, there's nothing inherently evil about manipulation or rhetoric.
So long as it's founded upon a solid basis of facts and reason, manipulation is nothing more than using tactics and strategies in your communication which are effective at convincing your audience.
Whether we're talking about sales, flirtation, or philosophical debate, the skilled locateur will use their speaking skills to draw out information from the target, what their interests, opinions, and desires are, and then present their thesis in a manner which simultaneously satisfies the target while also entertaining them.
Good sales leads to satisfied customers.
Good flirtation to passionate romance.
Good argument to education.
But like any skill, it can be used for good or ill.
Thus, we associate the term manipulation not with the character of the talented diplomat, but rather the used car salesman, the pickup artist, and the shill, people who use their talents at loquation to trick you into buying a shoddy product.
But all of these characters, despite their disrepute, are nonetheless human.
The salesman just wants to make a buck.
The pickup artist wants to get laid.
And the shill wants paying followers for his ideology.
Caveat emptor and all that.
Nobody would describe a scam artist as having superpowers.
They're just lying to get ahead.
With cluster B's, it's the same thing.
Nothing but cheap lies and appeal to emotion, but they take these tactics to such an extreme degree that they become a difference in kind.
One tactic they use is the abuse of language.
During normal conversation, it is often necessary for us to define our terms.
For instance, if someone says, the truck is powerful, do they mean acceleration or towing capacity?
People who are trying to genuinely communicate with one another will often devote a large part of the conversation to defining precisely what the important words mean.
In the case of the flim flam man, they'll outright lie, or allow you to misinterpret what they're saying.
But cluster Bs, people of the lie, as Dr. Peck calls them, like to wage an all-out war on language itself, constantly introducing new words for old ideas or flipping the definition of common terms into the polar opposite of what most people think they mean.
A prominent example from recent history were the campaigns of political correctness.
Words such as retard and moron had precise scientific definitions.
They were used to communicate vital information about childhood development and the intellectual capacity of vulnerable groups within society.
Then, political correctness introduced new terms which failed to communicate the same degree of information.
E.g., differently abled doesn't tell you if it's a physical impairment or a mental impairment that the individual might need help with, while simultaneously labeling anybody who used the old term as a villain who wanted to harm those who lacked capacity.
While political correctness is no longer an active campaign, these tricks are still being pulled.
Fashionable redefinitions and relabelings of popular words with precise meanings only serves to confuse and abuse the population at large.
Use this new word that we just made up, or else you're stupid, ignorant, and maybe evil.
Constantly having to learn new terms for ideas or objects which haven't changed is a form of gaslighting.
Another way cluster bees will abuse language is by flipping the terms upside down.
Three examples of this would be the words liberation, empowerment, and racism.
To most people, the word liberation means the freedom to make your own choices in life.
Empowerment means having the support in place so that you're not forced into desperate choices.
And racism is just a particular form of bigotry focused upon race.
The neo-Marxist critical theory crowd means the exact opposite of these common definitions when they speak about these things.
For them, liberation means that you are liberated from all cultural oppression.
That is, you have no legal system ruling over you, no language, no philosophy of reason.
You have been liberated from all the social technologies which, according to a normal person, provide the agency you need to actually be liberated.
Empowerment likewise means the opposite.
An empowered woman isn't someone with the agency to choose from multiple career paths.
Rather, it's a woman who's beholden to affirmative action or a welfare system and who is forced to pay lip service to the party line or else lose their income.
As for racism, that's nothing more than power plus privilege.
It's the bigoted statement that, if you're white, you have both power and privilege, ergo, you are racist.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Another tactic cluster bees will use is the inducement of neuroses.
While the rhetorician will ask the question, what do you want?
Is there a way I can help satisfy your desires?
The cluster bee will instead chip away at your self-image, breaking your legs so they can sell you a crutch.
This is a major tactic used throughout the advertising world, one developed by Edward Bernays.
Unlike his uncle Sigmund Freud, who applied his knowledge of the human psyche to try and help people become stronger, Bernays used his knowledge to tear people down.
Each of us is prone to some universal concerns, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of being a bad parent, etc.
Building off of Freud's insights, Bernays found ways of inducing these fears subconsciously.
An image whose background elements are suggestive of a skull to induce existential dread.
Or carefully arranged NLP wording to emphasize abandonment.
This inducement of terror would then make the audience more receptive to the benefits promised by the product.
You're gonna die one day!
Better buy this candy cook bar to feel good.
On the surface, this might sound ridiculous, but it's a theory that stood the test of time.
The trick is doing it subtly.
Comedians frequently lampoon this toxic behavior.
Family Guy featured subliminal cigarette commercials, which were nothing more than an angry man yelling at the audience to smoke.
The aforementioned David Firth's short film, Health Reminder, included an ad from Big Pharma, which bluntly told the viewer, you are ill.
Real-world examples are as immediately obvious and often come with the helping of plausible deniability.
As with the last example, let's dig into recent history for an example.
Shortly after the 9-11 terror attacks, the George Bush regime instituted a color-coded advisory system to inform the public of the current terror level.
What exactly was the purpose of this?
What was accomplished by informing the public that America is on orange alert this week, or blue alert, another week?
It's not as if the general public can prepare for a terror attack the way one might prepare for a tropical storm.
The reason the advisory system was implemented was to induce fear in the public.
The government claimed it was providing a service to keep you informed.
While in reality, these warnings made people neurotic, thus preventing them from questioning the legality of the wars being started.
Again, this is subtly different from what a normal human does.
The adman says, Hey, buddy, you want the ladies to like you, don't you?
Why not buy my blue jeans?
The cluster B says, your dog's going to die.
Buy this suit to ward off death.
Finally, there's one more manipulation tactic that cluster bees use, known as splitting.
This one is particularly present in the borderlines, but all of them use it to one degree or another.
Splitting is when they categorize everything into black or white thinking.
Everything's all good, or it's all evil.
If you've encountered a borderline, it likely started off with them praising you as perfection manifest.
You were a hero.
You could do no wrong until the day you didn't do what they wanted.
At that point, you became a monster, an oppressor, an abuser.
You became the blackest of villains in their mind, justifying the worst of treatments.
This is a tactic we see throughout our democratic political system.
And unfortunately, I can't provide any destigmatized historical examples of it.
Even if I go back a century, either the split is a debate so old that nobody remembers it, the Scopes Monkey Trial, or it's still part of our national conversation decades after it should have become irrelevant, Time Magazine's 1938 Man of the Year.
So, please consider the following dispassionately, because the whole point of Cluster B splitting is to force you into choosing sides.
The most obvious example of this is the split of red team, blue team itself.
As if one party or the other is entirely composed of malicious demons.
Then you have climate change versus climate deniers, and most recently, pro-vax and anti-vaxxers.
These are ridiculous caricatures of complex positions.
Anybody who forces you to choose between two of these doesn't have your best interests at heart.
They're inducting you into a cluster B cult.
These are the superpowers that Cluster B's make claim to.
This is the mind control that the strange gentleman promised to show my friend.
They're shocking in their insanity and their pointlessness, but there's nothing extraordinary about them.
Quite the contrary, they utterly lack the divine spark that comes with Eureka, that sudden flash of insight which we all occasionally stumble upon, which winds up blessing the world and turning it into a better place.
The only thing unique about these lies is the sheer size and extent of them.
Why would anybody lie about something like that?
Why indeed?
It's because these people are insane, and we feel to see it because we give them the benefit of the doubt and thus imagine some sort of genuine motive behind actions whose only purpose are profanity and destruction.
A thief can play a manipulation game to distract a normal person and then steal his wallet.
But that doesn't make him smart.
It just makes him cunning.
The same thing goes for cluster Bs.
They're not smarter than other people.
They're just more willing to lie about anything and everything, and our good nature allows them to get away with it.
For a while.
Systematized Cluster B Inducement By this point, it should be obvious that merely associating with Cluster B's is bad for your mental health.
All of their tools involve inducing some sort of psychic harm in their target in order to get their way.
What's not so obvious is what form this mental illness takes.
Generally speaking, it results in the target exhibiting cluster B behavior themselves.
This is readily apparent in anybody who's had a close relationship with a cluster B, whether it was a parent-child relationship, a romantic partnership, or a supervisor at work.
Part of the healing process is rejecting those maladaptive behaviors which have been normalized over a period of years.
But for the purposes of this article, we'll be discussing the systematized inducement of cluster B behavior patterns, which occurs when cluster Bs get organized.
We'll be breaking these down by the four types of cluster Bs, though, of course, all of the cluster Bs overlap to some extent.
Our first example will be something that many of us are far too familiar with.
The cover-my-ass psychopath culture, which is evident in corporate new speak.
In far too many companies today, the path to advancement is in learning the art of cheerfully lying through emails, passing off blame, and making sure the buck never stops with you, treating bad news as if it were something that everyone had been craving.
Good news, everyone!
The cafeteria has eliminated the dessert bar!
This will help us all achieve our fitness goals.
To be sure, not all corporations are like this.
Corporations are just legal fictions, after all, run by human beings and regulated by the state.
There are many fine companies out there who are led by visionaries with a passion for what they do.
Historically, we have Lamborghini, founded by Ferruccio Lamborghini in 1963, an Italian business magnate who loved automobiles.
Legend has it that he could tune the carburetors of his vehicles by ear.
Around that sort of passion, a corporate culture develops, a certain style, a flair, and those who share it will enjoy working there.
But when this leadership is replaced by Cluster B manipulators, the integrity evaporates.
Lip service is still paid to whatever values the company used to have, but in practice, it's become nothing but scheming mendacity.
And if you want to keep your job, you'd better adopt it too.
Play at being a psychopath for long enough, and eventually you'll become one yourself.
Next, let's consider the induction of narcissism, of creating a shell personality that you angrily demand that everyone believe in.
Back in 2016, an anonym on 4chan related a story about his time as a consultant and lobbyist for the cosmetics industry.
As he relates it, their marketing department had been hard at work redefining beauty as not an ideal to be studied by philosophers of aesthetics and realized by artists, nor a unity of form and function made manifest in athletes and practice by architects, but rather as a commodity one could purchase.
They made Brazil their test case.
Marketing departments will often test out a new product, ad campaign, or strategy on a limited market to see if it will succeed in the United States.
And it worked better than anyone could have predicted.
Not only did plastic surgery skyrocket, so did transsexualism.
It seemed that many men were now viewing female beauty not as something that could be earned by wooing a woman, but rather something they could purchase in the marketplace, and without being forced to engage in meaningful interaction with another person.
Of course, this story is apocryphal.
There's no way to verify it, as any of the published documents which might attest to it would be so immersed in plausible deniability and newspeak as to render them essentially meaningless.
But for anybody with even a passing understanding of marketing or narcissism, it's a simple fact that things like this occur all the time.
Perhaps the Brazil story is nothing but science fiction, but it's a science fiction story about real marketing technologies and how industry lobbies will apply them to populations as a whole.
For present purposes, let's take this story at face value and consider the many men who succumb to the marketing of beauty as consumer good.
The psychology of gender dysphoria is complicated and hotly contested.
There appear to be multiple causes, multiple types, and multiple treatments for those suffering it.
It does not suit our present purposes to take a stance on a politicized scientific matter.
Despite all the controversy, however, it is widely accepted that one type of gender dysphoria is otogynophilia.
That is, the sexual fetish for viewing one's own male body as that of a sexualized woman.
The way this disorder seems to come about is that it starts from the natural desire to be seen as sexually attractive.
What man hasn't admired their biceps in the mirror after a good workout?
But when it comes to raw visual seduction, men don't hold a candle to women, whom God and evolution designed to be painfully appealing.
The disorder begins when the man attempts to possess this appeal within himself, when he starts desiring not to watch strippers or date strippers, but to become the stripper.
It should then be no surprise that a marketing campaign which says, you can purchase feminine beauty, it's not an aspect integral to your help-meet woman, but simply an item which is on sale at Walmart, might push a nascent fetish into a full-blown mental disorder.
The man has now been induced into narcissism.
Rather than pursuing meaningful relationships, he's devoting his energies into manufacturing a facade, and he'll be choosing his friends based upon who supports this imago while lashing out with great hostility at those who don't.
Next, we have the borderline culture of the radical left, the culture of perpetual victimhood and aggression.
These borderline cults spread themselves in two different ways.
First, they recruit those who have been legitimately victimized, either by an abusive parent, spouse, or authority figure, and have thus learned cluster B behavior patterns.
The other source is people who belong to groups that have been historically victimized, but were never traumatized personally.
The borderline cult then traumatizes these individuals with stories from the past.
In practice, these two recruitment strategies go hand in hand.
Note that the abuser in question doesn't have to belong to the demographic which the leftist cult is explicitly attacking.
For instance, a terrible mother could drive her daughter into radical man-hating feminism.
It's the behavior patterns which matter, not the logic of the abuse or who should be blamed.
Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that similar cults exist on the fringe right.
The movie American History X provides an excellent depiction of how exploitative and destructive these cults can be.
But they don't gain access to the same social capital as do revolutionary movements from the left in today's society, so their destructive potential is currently limited.
The major distinction between a borderline cult and a civil rights movement is that the cult can never stop.
Like the borderline, it demands constant attention and affirmation.
Those who demanded civil rights, whether the movement for black rights in the 60s or gun rights today, are more than happy to go home and stop protesting once those rights have been achieved.
The borderline cult can never stop.
And so we see the increasing demands of the LGBT movement.
Equal rights, marriage, adoption, hate speech laws, mandatory puberty blockers for all children?
These movements become self-destructive for the individual members as well as for the causes themselves.
And much like individual borderlines, the only treatment is to ignore them.
For a detailed discussion of what it's like being in one of these, I strongly recommend Benjamin A. Boyce's conversation with Josh Slocum, the latter of whom, to the best of my knowledge, coined the term cluster B capture and inspired me to write this essay.
Finally, we have the cult of histrionics.
And while you, gentle listener, have likely had some brushes with all of the rest, it's a near certainty that you've been induced into one of these cults quite heavily.
And congratulations if you've resisted and broken free of the siren call.
Because the histrionic cult is manufactured by participation in social media.
The histrionic is the person that loves starting arguments, especially if they're between other people.
They enjoy shoving cats and dogs into a small room and seeing them fight.
Their standard tactic is the whispered half-truth.
Did you know that your brother is angry at you?
So that everyone in their social circle is tearing one another apart.
Back in 2005, Randall Monroe published an XKCD comic titled Duty Calls.
Are you coming to bed, honey?
Not yet.
Someone is wrong on the internet.
This was long before the rise of social media, and it takes a light-hearted jab at our propensity to argue over pointless topics with strangers we will never meet.
But the friendly arguments of yesteryear are nothing compared to the blood sport which exists today.
As I wrote back in 2019, platforms like Twitter and Facebook are specifically designed to prevent the sort of meaningful arguments we once had on internet forums and instead replace them with short, venomous, hate-filled statements.
No discourse, only yelling matches.
Turn everyone into a spiteful monster who requires the Twitter Safety Council and Facebook fact checkers to tell them what they're allowed to say.
The result of all of this is that rates of cluster Bs within society are skyrocketing.
The estimates vary due to the difficulty of definitions and diagnostics.
But overall, we're looking at a five to tenfold increase.
Instead of one out of a hundred people being a cluster B, it's easily as high as one in ten these days, if not higher.
Frank Herbert and the Double-Edged Sword of Power I was recently linked to a 1965 podcast by Frank Herbert, in which he discussed the origins of his Dune series, a series which, as others have noted, seems increasingly relevant in our present day.
While there are multiple themes throughout the novel, of particular note are his thoughts on psychological weapons.
The problem with psychological weapons, he says, is that they're a double-edged blade with no handle.
Any psychological weapon sufficiently capable of destroying the enemy will also destroy the wielder.
To deploy them is to destroy yourself.
And this is exactly what we're seeing with the cluster B behaviors exhibited by so many of our institutions.
Yes, they're harming all of us, but they're also harming those within the organizations.
In an article back in 2012, my late friend A4 related a story similar to the cosmetics Brazilian tale posted above.
A4 was speaking with a cousin of his who also worked in marketing.
Their conversation went like this.
So many of these clients and campaigns, whether they are for a product or for obscurity, are long-term things, I asked her.
Yes, she said, in some cases, for decades, at which I raised my eyebrows.
Okay, there is an 88% chance that you, as an adult single male in the Western world, have shaved pubes, she said.
Okay, got me there.
When you were a young man in the 70s, did you shave your pubes? She asked.
Fuck no.
So your starting to shave your pubes coincided with the advent of VHS cassettes and easy access to porn, and porn stars with shaved pubes.
I guess, yeah.
Well, guess who started that campaign by getting the porn companies and financially supporting them if their models were hairless, minimal pubes, ideally all over?
A campaign that has now been running for 30 years.
Generations are growing up now who start depillating their pubes as soon as the first hair growth starts.
Also, a few companies can sell razors and creams and shit at a rate 100 times higher than back in the day when men shaved their faces and that was it.
So far just another story of marketing manipulation, Bernay style, with the funny quirk that it's nearly driven the pubic louse to extinction, aside from one crazy woman in Norway who's trying to save it.
But the real reason he related this conversation was this.
Sometime later she left, and her parting shot was this.
You know what should frighten you?
Not that we have a hundred years of practice at manipulating consent, but the fact that the manipulators themselves are at least as susceptible to their own products as Joe Public.
There's a 92% chance that I, as an adult single female in the Western world, have shaved puges.
Nobody is in control anymore, I asked.
Oh no, there are shifts of people taking turns at the wheel.
The problem is we're driving in the dark in unknown territory with the lights out and tinted windows.
We only care about what's going on inside the bus.
Every single tool that Cluster B cults impose upon all of us also gets reflected back at them.
Some people are worrying about 5G cell phones, and not without reason.
As Michael Crichton pointed out 20 years ago, we have no idea if cell phones are safe.
We never actually tested them.
The technology was too tempting, and we didn't want to hear no.
Like the careers of Jurassic Park, we never asked if we should do something, only if we could.
But if 5G cell phones are harmful to us, if they're neutering our gonads or frying our brains, they're also harmful to Joe Biden's cabinet and Klaus Schwab's aides.
And even if the cell phones themselves are safe, the content isn't.
All of their aides, all of their children, are equally subjected to all the toxic systems they've introduced.
Bill Gates didn't allow his children to use smartphones until the age of 14.
But that doesn't change the nature of the technology.
He should have listened to Ted Kaczynski.
If the use of a new item or technology is initially optional, it does not necessarily remain optional because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology.
Yes, they're poisoning our water supply, but they drink out of the same aquifer.
Cluster B Capture Collapse Theory Summarized There's an old saying that fascism starts in the home.
That is, it's the people who've been psychologically abused by their parents who go on to support abusive governments, whether we're talking about fascists, communists, or the current techno-Marxists who are making a bid for power.
Cults, fascism, cluster B, it's all the same thing.
When a cluster B manages to take control of an institution, they start replicating themselves like a virus which has penetrated a cell.
The mission statement is forgotten.
It's now nothing but manipulation, inducement of neuroses, and abuse.
Soon, nobody will be left in the organization who is not a cluster B, or who's affected so much cluster B behavior as to become indistinguishable from a real person.
These organizations then go out into the world, poisoning everything they can get their hands on.
But at the same time, as they're poisoning us, they're also poisoning themselves.
Dr. Evil can't rule the world if the whole place is radioactive.
But before he even gets to that point, he's going to have surrounded himself with men and women who are just as evil as he is, and the prime target of their backstabbing is going to be him.
And so the captured organization collapses, inevitably so.
That cluster B behaviors are so maladaptive, that they're outright evil, points towards the existence of good.
That only those who create win-win relationships of fairness and decency truly have the chance of succeeding in this world.
The inducement of neuroses points towards the existence of something called mental health.
These cluster Bs can only destroy.
It's up to people like us to build.
This is the silver lining to the dark storm clouds that are rolling in.
Many of us fear the dark turn the world is taking, the growing surveillance, the Chinese-style social credit that our leaders are trying to introduce, the very real threat of desperate economic times.
I will make no bones of the fact that we have a dark winter approaching us.
But no matter how bad things get, this too shall pass.
The architects of this controlled demolition lack creative vision.
They lack goodness.
Their system is fundamentally unworkable.
And eventually their lives will be met with the physical pain of objective reality saying no to their schemes.
They will not create a horror of a thousand-year techno-reich.
But nonetheless, the hour grows late, and the sooner all of us stand up to these abuses of power, the better off we'll all be.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, but to get there, we'll have to earn it.
Stay strong and stand with courageous dignity.
These monsters fear the light.
They only have power so long as you stay hiding in the dark.
Carpe futurum, teni traditum.
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