Aphorisms, 11/11/2017

Montaigne invented the genre he called “Essays”, from “essayer”, to try. His essays are all over the place. So is his logic, or logic in general. And knowledge. And species. All over.

We are nothing, if we are not rich in mental possibilities.

“Essay”, the way Montaigne had it, was a new usage. “Pseudosopher” is outright a neologism (from Greek“pseudein”, deceive, cheat by lies). It’s more elegant than “fake philosopher”.

***

Differently from pseudosophers, real philosophers don’t need friends.

One way Camus resisted to the “Absurd” he perceived all too readily, all over, was by having plenty of various groups of friends. Nights with Sartre, when they were still friends, sometimes ended at 4am. After Camus published the “Revolted man” (mistranslated in English as “The Rebel”; “rebel” in French is “rebelle”), Camus discovered that his critique of fascism a la Stalin and (death) camps, Soviet style, exposed him to loathing from friends… who had never been truly friends, he observed, dejectedly.

Now, of course, friends are not necessary, to us philosophers: we have the Internet, where critter annihilation is one click away. 

More than ever, physics is rich in metaphor, and even methods, which enrich our global wisdom: we have progressed a lot in knowing the world for certain, since Montaigne

***  

Want Plutocratization? Start with Stupidification!

Foucault wanted to explore unusual mental states. So he tried (thus he pretends) drugs and “eroticism”. However, Nietzsche did it better: he climbed mountains, solo. The latter activity, full entanglement with nature, with bare hands, and bare mind, reveals what the human mind is fully capable of. Sex and drugs are just crutches for minds handicapped by the perspective of nature itself, and how to endure it.

Tellingly, even the pathetic Foucault was much more entangled with life than the pretend phantoms of “linguistic” and Anglo-Saxon pseudosophy.

Camille Paglia had total contempt for Foucault: he was a liar, she screamed (correctly). Foucault was in more way than one, a noble predecessor of the likes of Tariq Ramadan. Part and parcel of the general stupidification program. Not to say he said was stupid. Far from it.

***.

Oxford Preaches Abuse of Women:

Tariq Ramadan had prestigious teaching positions in more than half a dozen universities. He is adviser to the British government. He has been all over French TV for decades. He had two “don” position at Oxford (one in “Oriental Studies” the other in Islam).

Ramadan has been accused of violence against women, for many years. Never mind: he was proclaimed, again and again one of the planet’s top thinkers. Apparently, it requires top thinking to justify the stoning of women (as Ramadan does). As the weasel Ramada is, he long presented abuse and violences against women as a sort of provisional state..

Mr Ramadan, a well-known figure who has been affiliated with Oxford university since 2005, was seen “walking and laughing in the halls as if nothing had happened”, the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell reported. Even though more than 2,000 had signed a petition to have the propagandist of abuse removed, after it surfaced many women accused him explicitly of violence (some of these women are Jihadists). The rape evidence have long been in police labs, but Ramadan is sacred, after all, he is an islamist, so no judicial examination was started, even in France, especially in France.   

The term “Don” derives from the latin “Dominus” (Lord, used in the late empire starting around 300 CE to qualify the emperor). Because priests got called that way, what became universities in England used to be ecclesiastical.

For decades, Ramadan has gone around the world, being asked point blank, yet never condemning the stoning of women for behaviors which were already not criminal in the Roman Republic 2,100 years ago. Instead Ramadan has always called stoning “unimplementable”.

The only thing which can be implemented is Islam fanatics preaching in the top universities, to make us all stupid. When Darwin and Lyell were young, they had to go to Edinburgh to learn evolution theory (Lamarck’s theory). Evolution was not taught in England, because it contradicted the cult of God/Allah. In a similar vein, Ramadan was an adviser to the British government (one of several he so advise). How to rape women and get away with it?

***

Plutocratic Magazine The Economist fires another broadside “cover story” at Trump, loaded with boiled carrots:

The Economist is led by a 50 year old woman, Zanny Minton Beddoes, who was apparently given the task of keeping Trump Derangement Syndrome up and running (“America’s global influence has dwindled under Donald Trump… America hurt itself and the world by turning inward”). I replied:

Many facile viewpoints are in the silly, silly category. All what is, is not what meets the eye, or the ear.

1) Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty was monstrous: it proposed to override democracies. The excuse for it was that it was an alliance AGAINST China. Trump destroyed that anti-democratic plot. Even Clinton had turned against it. (And of course Sanders!)

2) Trump didn’t pull the US out of the Paris Climate Treaty: he just said he did. In truth it can’t happen before 2020. Meanwhile, last Saturday, the US government produced the most alarming climate warming alert ever, saying 2.1 Celsius rise was guaranteed by 2100. And the rise could be as much as 4.7 Celsius (= apocalypse: poles melting, 70 meter sea rise, world hypoxia). Obama posed as an enemy of coal and pipelines: he did both, massively, stealthily. Trump poses as the opposite. Pay attention to what he does. By letting his scientists predict that the climate situation is going actually to become hyper catastrophic, Trump is working deep on the climate skeptics…

3) Obama named as ambassadors his hyper wealthy friends. Trump fired them on day one, while Obama was still in the air carried by Air Force One (relabelled!) to visit in Palm Springs the billionaire he had named ambassador to Spain.

Machiavellism consists in doing what one is doing in such a way others feel it is the opposite. Trump surrounded himself with experienced generals. Obama surrounded himself with experienced gold diggers… While doing to the letter the exact program concocted by Goldman Sachs under Bush. When Obama left the presidency, inequality had never been higher in the history of the USA.   

Meanwhile the monopoly system set-up under Clinton-Bush-Obama starts to get noticed. Obama did, in the average, one “fund raiser” (= conspiring with the world’s wealthiest people, in exchange for money) per WEEK, during his 8 years of presidency. That’s around 420 fundraisers. One of the pillars of that corruption was Alwalid Bin Talal Al Saud, grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia, now under arrest, and the controller of Citigroup… It’s entirely possible that the can of wiggling worms is finally going to be open…

Obama was the best friend of global plutocratic monopolies. This era could come to an end, as enemies of Trump such as Al Talal are exposed. It could indeed happen that the arrangements behind the scenes to help those plutocrats made by Obama and his minders, come to the light. Is this what the Trump Derangement Syndrome organizers are afraid of?

Michael Jackson used to babysit Trump’s children (!): as this is increasingly known, the accusations of racism against Trump have become less prominent. Other facile accusations should also be discontinued.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/radical-queen-of-england-a-loan-shark-plutocratization-proceeds-disinformation-blossoms/

Trump Derangement Syndrome victims will find a racist angle, as maniacs  have answers to all. Trump kneeling to his friend’s greatness

***

Jacques Attali, Verified account @jattali #signesdufutur: il faudra bien,d’une façon ou une autre, mettre un terme à la divergence entre l’économie allemande et celles des autres pays européens, qui la financent par leurs importations de produits allemands https://twitter.com/atlantico_fr/status/928867343752626176 …[“One will have, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, to terminate the divergence between the German economy and that of other European countries, which finance this divergence by their imports of German products“, says Attali, correctly!]

Atlantico on Twitter: “Les 5 sages de l’économie allemande alertent sur “sa surchauffe” et mettent involontairement le doigt sur…

Patrice Ayme added: The US economy, with 3% GDP growth (second quarter in a row) is not “overheating”. What Berlin wants is supremacy. A prolongation of the present German economic & political supremacy. Germans should be reminded that’s uncomfortably close to a dreadful past, persistently engaged, ever since Prussia thought that, thanks to British financing, it could afford racism and exploitation of Jews, Poles and others. That mentality lasted from mid Eighteenth Century until May 8, 1945. What we observe now is a full resurgence thereof. Let’s cut the crap.  

Abuse is abuse, a form of sustainable violence. Sustainable violence can only be broken by wisdom triumphant, or greater violence, irresistible.  In any case abuse is the seed for a storm, mental, or otherwise.

November 11: Time to remember again what the Germans did in 1914, and 1939. The time for excuses is over. The time for explanations is needed.  To avoid the time of another replication.

Patrice Ayme’

Moral Displacement Syndrome

Abstract: Let me introduce you to Moral Displacement Syndrome. Moral Displacement Syndrome (MDS) is not just a general form of denial. Scapegoat Theory is only a particular case of MDS (Stanford employed philosopher-clown Girard, see below, who built an entire philosophy around Scapegoat Theory, see below; not by coincidence, places such as Stanford are full of MDS and Trump Derangement Syndrome…). One can guess the existence of the former, MDS, from the latter, the Scapegoat, by mimicking what is done in mathematics: generalizing from an example (Scapegoat Theory is older than civilization, obviously…)

Moral Displacement Syndrome replaces and displaces proper explanations, which don’t miss any relevant dimension, with simplistic, at best irrelevant red herrings. In a world where understanding is the foundation of morality, MDS is a grave sin.

Much moral posturing is actually obvious MDS, starting with all superstitious faiths.

MDS does not always arise from the sadistic, cruel, vicious, selfish instincts. A potent force behind MDS is economy of thought. For example, explaining everything with “God” (or “Dog”), and its few commandments, enables to feel full, with an empty mind.  

Thus there is an even more general theory which looms in the distance: Cognitive Displacement Syndrome (and MDS is a particular case).

***

Building Psychological Theories As One Builds Mathematics:

Any mathematical theory starts with a set of axioms. They are then animated by so-called “standard, second order logic”.

Axioms themselves are abstractions of properties distinguished out there: circles are perfectly round, circumference over diameter is pi, lines are perfectly straight, angles of a closed figure add to 180 degrees, etc.

However, one often can build powerful mathematics by taking out some axioms.

For example, the preceding axioms about circles, pi, straight lines, angles are, it turns out all more or less related if one relaxes those axioms. In other words, relaxing axioms make a theory less logically rigid, and then more general, and its logic become more complex.

***

Scapegoat Theory:

Normal Scapegoat Theory accuses somebody, or a category of people, to have morally failed, or to be the cause of something adverse. Thus scapegoats deserve of punishment, or the world will be much improved by eliminating them. (Either because “god” says it, or because that moral failure is viewed as a cause of an ongoing problem). In the West those scapegoat people are often those which the Bible/Qur’an recommends to kill (homosexuals, apostates, non-believers, adulterers, fashion criminals, etc.).

In reality, things of the mind always go meta big time: 

Metapsychological analysis should always have the last word, beyond the most basic psychological analysis. (Actually if is an idea implicit, but fundamental to justice.) Psychological analysis without meta-analysis is a carriage without a driver.

***

Moral Displacement Syndrome Is A Generalization Of Scapegoat Theory:

Simply remove the aggression in scapegoat theory. And then remove the scapegoat. What’s left? A moral or logical system of mind which is false, yet imbued with a feeling, or at least an exhibition of a feeling, of moral superiority.

Even after removing the scapegoat itself, those affected with the scapegoating mood will be still imbued with aggression. Aggression has to do with a cocktail of neurohormones and the hyper activity of attack organs (for want of a better term) in the brain (for example the amygdala which promotes fear and doing something about it, namely counter-attacking).

Removing an object of anger, does not remove the anger state. This is demonstrated neurologically, and this also why angry people tend to kick stuff, slam doors, clench teeth, indulge in road rage, and snap back at completely innocent third parties.

A vegan may face us, and insure us that she is not more aggressive than a cow (not knowing, as vegans do not, that cows are actually very aggressive, and will fight). So let’s remove the aggression. What’s left? The moral obsession. The obsessive moral contraption which occupies their otherwise blank minds.

Hawking himself stumbled on an aspect of the Moral Displacement Syndrome

***

Moral Displacement Syndrome Is Ubiquitous:

The obvious example is TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. Many would-be progressives, instead of worrying about how to implement progress, accuse Trump of everything they can possibly imagine, including being paid by Putin instead of thinking about how to foster progress.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a particular case of Moral Displacement Syndrome.  

MDS consists in attributing problems to the wrong cause. For example, after the launch of the First Crusade, in the Eleventh Century the Jews were accused of lots of evil they had nothing to with (or then in the most devious fashion, as privileges given to them under the Carolingians made them natural scapegoats for the true culprits; accusing the Jews enabled the feudal magnates who destroyed the Carolingian empire to escape suspicious).  

The plutocratic order ruined Europe and the Americas in recent decades. Instead of accusing themselves, and the global plutocracy which enrich them, through the media they own, the plutocrats trotted out a number of culprits: the European Union, Donald Trump, etc…

Theresa May announced the death of everything: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere.” In other words, supporting the planet made you nothing. You are at moral fault by not supporting Europe, because you support nothing, so you are a nihilist, claims PM May.

***

Moral Displacement Theory Is All Over Officially Promoted Morality:

Vegetarianism, veganism, (many kinds of) Buddhism, and, of course, Abrahamism are examples of Moral Displacement. In Christo-Islamism, lack of submission (to “god”) is viewed as the cause of all moral ills. So doing, lack of submission, truly, to the Lord, king, dictator, duke, count, emperor, etc. is made into a moral fault, whereas it’s only a fault of a criminal sort, in a system which is itself criminal.

Not cultivating the propensity to obey infamy was made into a religious, moral fault. The cult of, and obedience to the chief was made into the ultimate morality, by pretending it was a divine command.

***

Fake Philosophy: René Girard’s Mimetic Madness:

I have to mention in passing, for (contemporary philosophy) specialists,  René Noël Théophile Girard, a Mr. Scapegoat of Biblical proportions. He was a great pillar of the Franco-American plutocratic order. Girard’s fundamental ideas were that desire is mimetic (i.e. all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture.

These ideas are, of course, stupid beyond belief. If Mr. Leopard if roaming the forest searching for the nice curves and lustrous fur of Ms. Leopard, it’s not by mimetism. And, if, instead he falls on Mr. Girard, or his ilk, and eats him alive, this conflict would not have been caused by mimetic desire.

I am not just criticizing as if I were a “chatbot”: all sorts of neurological studies and neuroimaging have proven that there is desire, and rewards, beyond mimetism.

Girard also thought that religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

This splendid stupidity, of course, made Girard a great support of the plutocratic system (lauding the Bible/Qur’an), and he spent years as a tremendous mandarin in Stanford, and was elected to the French academy. Girard was also awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic, butcher of Jews, Muslims and smart people, by the Spanish hereditary Pluto, H.M. King Juan Carlos, descendant of Louis XIV of France, butcher of Protestants.

***

Conclusion: There is lots of fakery out there. Even worse: a meta-morality is ubiquitous: a generalized tolerance for fakery. Tolerance for fakery is a meta-mood: let’s tolerate what should be obvious superchery. Tolerating obvious fakery, here, there, and soon everywhere, feeds cognitive nihilism. Surprise, surprise, this is how plutocracy rules over the minds of the insects, out there.

Patrice Ayme’

Advanced Machiavellian Insulting

“Machiavellian Intelligence” is a recent scientific concept. However, Machiavellian Intelligence has been practiced by various animals for at least 400 million years. What is Machiavellian Intelligence? Any form of intelligence which uses a Theory of Mind to predict, and sometimes, as we will see below, dictate, the behavior of others (this is my definition, which generalizes the usual one, which is confined to large social groups).

Any animal with a sufficiently advanced intelligence acts, relative to other animals, with a Theory of what the Mind of the other is. For short, philosophers call that a Theory of Mind.

Elaborated originally when studying primates, the “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” (Byrne and Whiten 1988, 1997) is that the large brains of humans grew over the millennia because of intense social competition for reproduction (now of course, food is even more important than reproduction… and survival, more than food… So limiting to a social group, and sex, is silly.)

However, considered in my much more general sense, Machiavellian intelligence has existed probably since the first fishes ambled on land, if not before (such fishes nowadays, such as Mudskippers spend some time threatening and fighting each other for their piece of mud… It is of such animals and their ilk, we are talking about today).

Insults Depend Upon A Theory of the Mind of the Other. Insults Can Be Noble, Let Alone Well Deserved. However, They Are First A Way To Change Minds, Often For the Worst

For example the mother crocodile which charges or, actually, any animal making a mock charge, uses a Theory of Mind (they know they may scare away the enemy, because the enemy will be afraid; thus they know something about the mind of the enemy, and they conceive of fear ).  

In human beings, Machiavellian Intelligence can reach heights unsuspected by traditional scholarship.

Consider insults. The very principle of insulting depends upon having a Theory of Mind. Generally insults are viewed first as the mark of anger, the products of gross and primitive minds. But there is much more to it. Insults can be proffered to change the mind of the adversary in a very deep way.

I got severely insulted on the Internet in recent months. The perpetrators have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, according to which whoever did not agree with what they were injected with, is most evil. The plutocratically owned Main Stream Media (including “public” outfits for sale, such as NPR and PBS) decreed that all heretics, those who dared exert some choices regarding the Main Stream Media’s contempt for Trump and all his views, were racist, homophobic, anti-Muslim, Lesbian, Transexual hater, “Alt-Right”, “red”, combative and generally atrocious. One did not have to be a supporter of Trump to attract a frenzy of insults. Being a simple supporter of the Truth, in any way, was deemed enough for a deluge of insults.

I must confess that I supported the Truth really a lot, partly in the hope of studying the flow of insulters, and also studying what it was the insulters hope to achieve. The more I supported Truth, the more enraged the insulters got. TDS went exponential. I found that sad, as a simple human being with simple feelings, for people I used to consider friendly, or, at least, decent, yet, the more I got insulted, the more very interesting I found the entire exercise, as a philosopher trending towards ever more sophistication..

Even people whom I have known face to face, accused me to be a “racist”, an “antisemite”, or a “racist troll”. Several of these people  knew that my family is multiracial, from three continents. That my parents and closest family fought the Nazis in uniform or in the resistance, taking huge risks, that they were even hunted by Gestapo. Some even knew that some members of my family has been tight with Obama for more than four decades (and they adulate Obama, whom they never met, as if he was the new Golden Calf).

In spite of evidence to the contrary, and without supporting sophisticated reasoning for hurling such infamy, the insults kept coming, and were widely advertized in “social networks”. Someone important explained to me that the insulters were mostly posing to reassure their allies, and employers (in the “liberal” media) that there was no way they knew a monster such as me.

But then I discovered this:

Something insulters want, and all too often get, is for their preys to become according to their insults.

Facebook friend John Michael Gartland agreed: That’s just what I was thinking. Others I exposed the idea to had an “eureka moment”.

So insults flow from a Theory of Mind. “Fighting words” (a legal notion) are there to incite coming to blows. It is a form of mental manipulation. But what I revealed above is a more subtle form.

Say you know somebody who is not a racist, not a xenophobe, not a liar. Still, suppose that person is insulted, and called, publicly, a “racist”, “xenophobe”, “liar”, and other derogatory terms, relentlessly. What to do to get out of it if denials only excite the insulters to further abuse? Paradoxically, the natural reaction is to scoff and embrace the deplorable condition which is unjustly conferred, the natural reaction is to embrace it: that immediately drops the charges of bad faith, covering-up (cowering-up?), and lying.

Thus accepting what was meant as an insult as a quality one possesses, diminishes the neurological workload of the one who is insulted. Embracing the insult, accepting to be mentally conformed to the insult, is, literally energy saving. Thus a strong motivator. It reduces the adversary’s capacity to annoy… thus the pain. 

(A famous example of proudly adopting insults as one’s own cocky characteristic was given by Gauls and Romans. The Romans called the Celts “cocks”, because, the Romans alleged, Celts liked too much colorful clothing, a flamboyant attitude, a domineering stance, and were too proud, noisy, and aggressive. The Celto-Germans turned all around these Roman insults, into characteristics they were proud of, and adopted the name “Gallia”, the birds by that name… As their own definition!)

Also, having received already the punishment, of being condemned as what insults define one as, why not enjoy its fruits? And if it irritates so much the insulters, why not to strike back at them with what infuriates them so much?

Such is one of the infernal loops which foster conflicts: insults confer behavioral characteristics, as soon as the object of the insults lower neurological stress by accepting them as a truth to be proud of, or live with. Thus, confronted to insults, replying with just “esprit”, tack to tack, as Voltaire (and many others) used to, is not always the wisest behavior. Insults are how the creeps transfer their inferiority to ourselves. Let’s go higher, with superior ideas, to crush the insulters, as the roaches they are.

To the violence haters and insulters propose, impose and live by, we have an alternative: intelligent, honest debate, going boldly where they can’t want to. Nothing infuriates them more.

Patrice Ayme’