Pseudo-realities, Power and Language Games

[MoleSmokes]

I was away reading "New Discourses" by James Lindsay and when I came back that 50:50 thread was maxed-out. Funny, because it reminded me of the Pseudo-Realities, Power and Language Games thing. These extracts exceed the character limit so will run over more than one post.

(Oh, and I have bolded the word "power" from time to time, when I got an eerie echo of the Ghost of 50:50).

“The Nature of Pseudo-realities”

“Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies, which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal people.

Normal people do not accept pseudo-reality and interpret reality more or less accurately, granting the usual biases and limitations of human perspective. Their common heuristic is called common sense, though much more refined forms exist in the uncorrupted sciences. In reality, both of these are handmaidens of power, but in pseudo-realities, this is inverted. In pseudo-reality, common sense is denigrated as bias or some kind of false consciousness, and science is replaced by a scientism that is a tool of power itself. For all his faults and the faults of his philosophy (which enable much ideological pseudo-reality), Michel Foucault warned us about this abuse quite cogently, especially under the labels “biopower” and “biopolitics.” These accusations of bias and false consciousness are, of course, projections of the ideological pseudo-realist, who, by sheer force of rhetoric, transforms limitations on power into applications of power and thus his own applications of power into liberation from it. Foucault, for any insight he provided, is also guilty of this charge.

It must be observed that people who accept pseudo-realities as though they are “real” are no longer normal people. They perceive pseudo-reality in place of reality, and the more thoroughly they take on this delusional position, the more functional psychopathy they necessarily exhibit and thus the less normal they become. Importantly, normal people consistently and consequentially fail to realize this about their reprogrammed neighbors. Perceiving them as normal people when they are not, normal people will reliably misunderstand the motivations of ideological pseudo-realists - power and the universal installation of their own ideology so that everyone lives in a pseudo-reality that enables their pathologies—usually until it is far too late.

As a result of this failure of perspective, many particularly epistemically and morally open normal people will reinterpret the claims of pseudo-reality into something that is plausible in reality under the usual logic and morals that guide our thinking, and this reinterpretation will work to the benefit of the pseudo-realists who have ensnared them. This sort of person, who stands between the real world and the pseudo-real are useful idiots to the ideology, and their role is to generate copious amounts of epistemic and ethical camouflage for the pseudo-realists.

This phenomenon is key to the success, spread, and acceptance of pseudo-realities because without it very few people outside of small psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually unwell people would accept a pseudo-reality as if it is a superior characterization of the genuine article. Clearly, the more plausible the account of pseudo-reality on offer, the stronger this effect will be, and the more power the ideologues who believe in it will be able to accrue.

Pseudo-realities may have any degree of plausibility in their distorted descriptions of reality, and thus may recruit different numbers of adherents. They are often said to be accessible only by applying a “theoretical lens,” awakening a specialized “consciousness,” or by means of some pathological form of faith. Whether by “lens,” “consciousness,” or “faith,” these intellectual constructs exist to make the pseudo-reality seem more plausible, to drag people into participating in it against their will, and to distinguish those who “can see,” “are awake,” or “believe” from those who cannot or, as it always eventually goes, will not. That is, they are the pretext to tell people who inhabit reality instead of pseudo-reality that they’re not looking at “reality” correctly, which means as pseudo-reality. This will typically be characterized as a kind of willful ignorance of the pseudo-reality, which will subsequently be described paradoxically as unconsciously maintained. Notice that this puts the burden of epistemic and moral responsibility on the person inhabiting reality, not the person positing its replacement with an absurd pseudo-reality. This is a key functional manipulation of pseudo-realists that must be understood. The ability to recognize this phenomenon when it occurs and to resist it is, at scale, the life and death of civilizations.

Adoption of a pseudo-reality tends to hinge upon a lack of ability or will to question, doubt, and reject them and their fundamental presuppositions and premises of the pseudo-reality. Therefore, the “logical” and “moral” systems that operate within the pseudo-reality will always seek to manufacture this failure wherever they can, and successful pseudo-realist attacks will evolve these features like a social virus until their effectiveness is very high. This deficiency is often the direct result of mental illness, usually paranoia, schizoidia, anxiety, or psychopathy, however, so maintaining and manufacturing these states in themselves and normal people is strongly incentivized by the false “logic” and false “morality” of the ideological pseudo-reality. That is, the methods and means applied in service to a pseudo-reality will create and manipulate psychological weaknesses in people to get them to carry water for a destructive lie. The nicer, more tolerant, and more charitable a community is, supposing it lacks the capacity to spot these counterfeits early on, the more susceptible its members will tend to be to these manipulations.”

(Part 1)

"Pseudo-realities and Power"

The ultimate purpose of creating a pseudo-reality is power, which the constructed pseudo-reality grants in many ways. Though these means are many, we should name a few.

First, the pseudo-reality is always constructed such that it structurally advantages those who accept it over those who do not, frequently by overt double standards and through moral-linguistic traps. Double standards in this regard will always favor those who accept pseudo-reality as reality and will always disfavor those who seek the truth. An ideological pseudo-reality must displace reality in a sufficient population to grant itself power to succeed in its goals. Linguistic traps will often employ strategic double meanings of words, often by strategic redefinition (creating a motte and bailey), will beg the question in ways that forces people to participate in the pseudo-reality to respond (often by Aufhebung-style, i.e., Hegelian, dialectical traps), or will begin with an assumption of guilt and demand proof of innocence such that denial or resistance is taken as proof of guilt of some moral crime against the moral system that serves the pseudo-reality (a kafkatrap). Demands will be made with sufficient vagueness such that they can never be said to have been met and such that responsibility for failure will always be the fault of the enemies of the ideology who “misunderstood” them and thus implemented them incorrectly.

Second, the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more obviously false it is. Despite the fact that obviousness of the pseudo-real distortion concentrates its demoralizing power, pseudo-reality is only pseudo-real when the distortion is not immediately and wholly transparent and also when it is sufficiently widely socially accepted to become a socially constructed pseudo-truth. Whether or not the distortion is apparent, however, the situation it creates is most demoralizing for those who see through it because making the distortions of a pseudo-reality apparent to those who do not already see them is always exceptionally tedious and will be vigorously resisted not only by adherents but by useful idiots.

Thus, third, by trading off normal people’s assumptions that seemingly serious people care about what is true, they successfully force normal people to verify aspects of the pseudo-reality even in the act of denying it by getting the normal person to meet the ideologue part way. This is the relevance of pseudo-reality being pseudo-real, with greater plausibility strengthening the effect. That is, many normal people will fail to realize the pseudo-reality is false because they cannot see outside of the frame of normality that they charitably extend to all people, whether normal or not.

This dynamic bears a brief elaboration. Normal people do not tend to recognize that a broken logic and twisted morality is being used to prop up an ideological vision - a pseudo-reality - and that the mental states of the people within it (or held hostage by it) are not normal. Some among them, particularly the very but not exceptionally smart, thus skillfully reinterpret the absurd and dangerous claims of the pseudo-realist ideologues into something reasonable and sensible when, in fact, they are not reasonable or sensible. This, in turn, renders the pseudo-reality more palatable than it actually is and further disguises the distortions and underlying will to power presented by the ideological pseudo-realists. All of these features, and others, advantage the ideologue who, like some modern-day Zarathustra, speaks a pseudo-reality into existence, and all of these confer power upon that ideologue while stealing it from every participant in their social fiction, willing or not.”

"Pseudo-realities as Language Games"

As implied by Pieper, as can be seen even in the title of his essay from which we’re taking the term “pseudo-reality” (“Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power”) these constructions tend to arise out of abuses of language that enable abuses of power. These manipulations are therefore attractive to people with strong inclinations to control other people or to take power, particularly when they are of moderately high intelligence, relatively well-off, and linguistically savvy (while, perhaps, lacking in other more concretely valuable skills). That is, pseudo-realities are constructed by linguistically capable manipulators who wish to control other people, and it’s reasonable to assume that a sufficiently convincing (and convicting) pseudo-reality will then draw in more such people who are able to develop the pseudo-world and its fictions and then convince people it maps meaningfully onto reality in a way that it does not. The process by which they do this might most accurately be called discourse engineering, with the exact same connotation that we usually attach to the bigger project it facilitates, social engineering. Some specific types of these language games, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein, were mentioned briefly above.

These behaviors, even when done by the sincere person who has confused reality for a pseudo-reality, should all be seen as manipulations and abuses, though it’s always important to recognize that intention of each participating individual matters in the moral ramifications that follow from this fact. Pseudo-real world-builders tend to manipulate people upon their vulnerabilities, which is a well-known fact of cult recruitment. Thus, they are most effective on people who have an underlying baseline of psychological, emotional, or spiritual illness, particularly of the kinds that relate poorly to the real world and the rough-and-tumble social realities within it. As noted, these are also often manufactured to purpose and target the psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually susceptible, along with the naive, the angry, and the aggrieved. It is in such minds where pseudo-realist manipulations are most effective and can generate a sizable sympathizer base among otherwise normal people, some of whom will be induced into the psychopathologies that underlie the whole project. This is the real alchemy of the pseudo-realist ideological project: turning normal, mostly healthy people into psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually broken water-carriers who can no longer cope adequately with the features of reality and thus must prefer the pseudo-reality that was built to receive them—and, more importantly, to make strategic use of them.”

Extracts from “Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism”
James Lindsay, Dec 25 2020

newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/

"The Nature of Pseudo-Reality"

(END)

I think I have seen this happen on a small scale among an extended group of (now former) friends/acquaintances who became very 'woke'.

I can't help thinking of Donald Davidson's coherence theory within epistemology. If I remember rightly, rather than a variation of knowledge = justified true belief with some privileged foundational beliefs, it held that we can be considered to know things that cohere with our existing belief system since coherence represents reality in some way. This seemed worryingly open to the development of spiralling and self maintaining echo chambers, so I rejected it at the time. Unfortunately, I now suspect it was a fairly accurate description of many people's interactions with the world.

I wonder if a lot of 'knowledge' in most people's internal working representation of reality is independent of objective reality, and depends more on cultural factors, especially as society develops, becomes more specialised and relies on taking a lot of things on faith. It seems to me that on one hand there is a need to question everything to align as closely as possible with reality and avoid pseudo realities. On the other, questioning too much could catapult someone straight into a pseudo reality. It feels a bit like an epistemic tightrope.

It also seems to me like totalitarianism seeks the creation of an epistemic proletariat, deprived of the means to produce or verify reality and existing to prop up the power/delusions of the pseudo reality's ruling class. So I suppose the question arises: how do we best throw off those shackles?

My vet kept refering to my dog as they

We were in there to get her spayed ffs.

An example of someone desperatly trying to maintain a psudo reality despite all evidence to the contary.

I think I'd be changing my vet to someone who doesn't have vision problems. Also maybe the vet in question should have their double vision checked out.

My brother - a highly qualified hospital doctor - enjoyed mansplaining to me about PEOPLE going through the menopause.

That's a great post, OP, and gives much food for thought. Thank you 👍

Absolutely spot on.

This is my world and family. I recognised what was happening very early. I genuinely think that the fact i studied foucault (though can remember precisely nothing of it), propaganda and the presentation of the world through media and history isn't a coincidence as to why i saw straight through it all. I have always been driven by the journalist concept of always searching for the truth however unpalatable as a principle in life for seeking change and a better future.

History tells us though that pseudo realities are always time limited because the oppression and suppressed unresolved issued that they cause always come to the surface eventually. They are untenable permanently because of the amount of effort required to maintain them against the forces of reality. It always breaks. And reveals the unholy mess underneath that was ignored and hidden in order to enable the lie. There are always losers who are left to pick up the pieces of others manipulation. The ones who really are the most vulnerable in society. The slight of hand that is required to conceal their presence and reality is the most disgusting thing about pseudo realities.

It will burn out eventually but how long and the extend of the damage is the question. This is why journalism exists. To seek out and limit the scope and extent of pseudo realities by holding power to account. The only way that trans militancy has taken off now, is due to the current weakness of journalism and the rise of fake media.

Again this is something of a cycle. When i studied media we touched on technology change and how the invention of mass printing allowed the spread disinformation and played a significant role in destabilising established politics at the time. It also passed power to the hands of those who previously didn't have it. Some used it for good. Others for ill. There waa a battle for control of media and a battle for holding power to account - it exposed rampant corruption, abuses of power and opportunists who exploited the instability and lack of regulation / lack of social control via shared consensus. Conditions which lead to the French Revolution and American Independence agmonst other events. We are currently in such a period again.

I have no doubt whatsoever ever Tinsel and other transwidows will read this nodding along sadly.

It is all about power.

Thanks for this. Now I know why I feel like I'm going crazy when trying to understand trans ideology.

Threads like this are why I love Mumsnet - so many thoughtful intelligent women sharing their knowledge and helping make sense of this fucking nightmare.

Thanks so much for posting this extract. It's a terrifying read but also a comforting one. I grew up in an abusive home. My father was a petty tyrant; maudlin or violent when drunk; an adulterer, and sexually abusive towards his children. It took me until I was 30 to finally confront the reality of my family life. And the psychological toll has been immense.

As a child, any attempt to criticise my father was met with, 'That's your father you're talking about. Show some respect.' But I always knew, no matter how crazy I felt, that something was wrong. My mother was a useful idiot and my exposure of the truth of our family life was strongly resisted. It was a deeply lonely situation to be the only voice speaking up.

Now, the whole literal lie, literal nonsense, of gender ideology brings back so much of my childhood. I recognise the patterns of abuse and the destructive power of its narrative. I am permanently frightened and angry, but I am sure of the truth. I work in a woke environment; the waters are rising, but I will leave rather than let myself be swept up in that tide. My personal psychological integrity has been hard-won over decades. I can't afford to compromise my sanity by nodding along with an insane ideology.

Have only read the 2st post so far but this stood out to me:

Notice that this puts the burden of epistemic and moral responsibility on the person inhabiting reality, not the person positing its replacement with an absurd pseudo-reality. This is a key functional manipulation of pseudo-realists that must be understood. The ability to recognize this phenomenon when it occurs and to resist it is, at scale, the life and death of civilizations.

Terrifying

It's very comforting to see this expressed so clearly:

'Second, the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more obviously false it is'

Thanks for posting that.

The enforced compliance with strict linguistic rules is what keeps a pseudoreality bubble from being popped.

What you're allowed to say. What you're not allowed to say. How what you say renders you good or evil. How much resistance you put up to abiding by the rules of a pseudoreality determining how hard you must be crushed.

Those who see themselves as neutral arbitrators of a debate (Lindsay calls them useful idiots) have in fact already adopted a position of purposefully constraining the truth.

The sentences:
"Unicorns are... real creatures" and
"Unicorns are ...a subcategory of horses and we must argue to differentiate the needs of the two categories, against our opponents who believe horses should be inclusive of unicorns"
are not two equal and opposing sides of an open debate.

They both presuppose the premise that unicorns are real and force both parties into an apparently serious discussion about the entitlement to rights or denial of rights to Unicorns.

Prohibiting all speech that denies the existence of Unicorns forces any permitted discussion straight into the realm of pseudoreality before it's even begun.

It's not neutral in the slightest.

Characterising those who say "this is ridiculous, I won't even begin to pretend that this horse with an ice cream cone strapped to its head is anything other than what it is" as hateful, shifts everybody 'good' into the pretence and places everyone firmly stood in reality as evil.

That's pretty much where we all are right now.

There are very few forums remaining where a person can truthfully and bluntly discuss any man being a man without sanctions.
Discussion on a theoretical level only is allowed. Not at a practical level, about the reality in front of your nose, the man you are engaging in a conversation with. Only at a generalised hypothetical level. And even then, the conversation is constrained with rules about permissable words and forbidden statements. The permissable words are pseudoreal distortions and euphemisms. The forbidden statements are blunt, verifiable fact. Because the truth is 'unkind'.

Preposterous claims are positioned as unassailable. The worst thing a person can do is to say, no, you are not that. I refute your claim. I deny it. You are wrong.

I suspect most people have no idea how deeply we're already mired in a world that is making it evil or criminal to simply tell the truth and refuse to play along.

This type of behaviour is authoritarian and is what happens in cults.

It needs to be stressed over and over again.

Thats why Orwell and Arendt are also very good reading too.

You are not going crazy. Its abuse.

Basically anything historical on the destruction of reality and the rise of authoritarianism of all kinds (be it on the left or right).

I suspect most people have no idea how deeply we're already mired in a world that is making it evil or criminal to simply tell the truth and refuse to play along.

No, they don't.

Although more people are realising it, on a daily basis.

It's no coincidence that the drive to reduce censorship is happening at the same time as people are realising what they can't speak about.

My question would be how can we speed up the process?

Great post ^red*.

Datun what I think is worth saying is that whilst I do have concerns about the government free speech tzar stuff, they destruction of the ability to speak the truth is the subject of Orwell's literary work he was an ardent supporter of democratic socialism. Likewise about Ardent.

Ardent wrote about the 'banality of evil':

The banality of evil
Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept of the banality of evil. Her thesis is that Eichmann was actually not a fanatic or a sociopath, but instead an extremely average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself, was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society". Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, or even that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional.

The risk of totalitarianism is not a left/right issue. Nor should it ever be seen as that.

I was raised in a cult. There were all kinds of pseudo realities like believing the end of the world was just around the corner to believing that everyone who wasn't part of the faith was wicked, controlled by Satan and would never be genuinely good to you.

I was lucky to have left the cult behind and by being able to distance myself as far from it as possible, my mental health really improved and it's been nice to inhabit reality since then.

Nowadays I feel like I'm stuck in a cult all over again, but this time with no escape because it is everywhere. Mantras being chanted and indoctrination wherever you go. It's like a strange possession has gripped all the institutions that you could once upon a time trust to maintain some grounding in reality.

I am currently reading “The Darkening Age” by Catherine Nixey about how Christianity was imposed Ancient Rome.

I see some very scary parallels, targeting of those with least power in society first women, children and slaves, attacking academics, burning books, persecution of philosophers and medics who didn’t fall into line. Later there were raids on homes to destroy any items within which might contradict the new religion, other beliefs or lack of belief was not tolerated. Rational thought was not tolerated, no debate and ask no questions were the rules.

Hannah Arendt is next on my reading list!

I'm not at all academic and I have read both opening posts a couple of times. There is so much there that is recognisable.

Demands will be made with sufficient vagueness such that they can never be said to have been met and such that responsibility for failure will always be the fault of the enemies of the ideology who “misunderstood” them and thus implemented them incorrectly.

Like be kind - it doesn't get more vague than that. 'Rights' that are always unspecified. 'Healthcare' etc.

Second, the very assertion of pseudo-reality demoralizes all who are pressed into engaging with it by the mere fact of being something false that must be treated as true. We should never underestimate how psychologically weakening and damaging it is to be forced to treat as true something that is not true, with the effect strengthening the more obviously false it is.

See the number of women whose mental health has genuinely been profoundly affected by this.

Despite the fact that obviousness of the pseudo-real distortion concentrates its demoralizing power, pseudo-reality is only pseudo-real when the distortion is not immediately and wholly transparent and also when it is sufficiently widely socially accepted to become a socially constructed pseudo-truth.

Everyone knows what the truth is, but are denied the words, the right, and the space to say it. Which yes, of course, exposes the power behind it. See a recent episode where the question was asked if a person would waive their power, and not only did they not waive it, they subsequently leveraged it to create Swiss cheese. And everyone knows it.

Whether or not the distortion is apparent, however, the situation it creates is most demoralizing for those who see through it because making the distortions of a pseudo-reality apparent to those who do not already see them is always exceptionally tedious and will be vigorously resisted not only by adherents but by useful idiots.

Amen to that.

This dynamic bears a brief elaboration. Normal people do not tend to recognize that a broken logic and twisted morality is being used to prop up an ideological vision - a pseudo-reality - and that the mental states of the people within it (or held hostage by it) are not normal. Some among them, particularly the very but not exceptionally smart, thus skillfully reinterpret the absurd and dangerous claims of the pseudo-realist ideologues into something reasonable and sensible when, in fact, they are not reasonable or sensible.

Amen to that as well. You didn't used to be able to move for this kind of commenter. Interestingly, they are becoming much less common. Apart from the diehards that no one reads anyway.

It's interesting how many people have been persuaded to think a certain way, and embrace this particular pseudo reality. When, if you actually put them on the spot, eg on here, their 'persuasive rhetoric' fails. Sometimes quite spectacularly.

I believe the guidelines on here are more strict than those on Twitter. So you would think that this site would be less of a threat. But it isn't. It's constantly targeted.

I wonder if that's because the people on it, largely women, are a massive cross-section and not necessarily politically motivated,

Maybe there is a feeling that on Twitter you are preaching to the choir.

Whereas here, yes you have some choristers, but there is also the entire rest of the congregation, plus people walking past outside wondering what's going on.

Are we still allowed to talk about cults? There s so much control going on I am really confused about what we can say about who what where why and when. I don’t know whether new lurkers or posters can always decode what is really being said behind the coy and obscure language . However those here are shining examples of how to ge5 the merge across . Thank you

Get the message across of course. Scrambling words does not help either!

I see some very scary parallels, targeting of those with least power in society first women, children and slaves, attacking academics, burning books, persecution of philosophers and medics who didn’t fall into line.

Authoritarism always follows this same pattern.

Its a fail safe way to spot.

Excellent and terrifying.

I'm not academic so may be off target, but is it worth listing some pseudo realities? Listing them may make the situation more concrete for people like me.
The one created by the nazis would be an excellent example. Various cults. Brexit would be another I think- there is and was a compelling case for leaving Europe, but the pseudo reality drawn up by Nigel Farage and his chums was not it. As well of course as the domestic pseudo realities created in many dysfunctional homes. My pseudo reality was my mother's fragility, and the importance of not upsetting her.

^^Pseudo realities, big and small.

The issue of power is resonating everywhere.

It's become apparent that once you see it, or, more specifically challenge it, it's blinding.

Maya Forstater is amplifying the message.

mobile.twitter.com/MForstater/status/1361658749170180099