/32/ - Psychopolitics

>>1413

Why?

I see this happening on every board. I would bet that many here take on a different manner of speaking when on different boards, in a way far outstripping the requirements of the subject matter or of healthy board culture. You can't even say anything on several of the top boards on this site without the automated responses and memes their mechanistic identities are built out of spitting out predictable responses.

It's not like that here, but that doesn't mean the tendency isn't latent.

If you can explain to me why the thread is bad, though, I'd be happy to learn and for it to be deleted.

Anon, I read your post very soon after you made it, and was tempted to give you a short answer similar to that of >>1413, but decided to think it over and respond properly.
Firstly, thank you for going to the trouble of referring to me directly and asking for "permission" instead of just going ahead without concern for the rules. I am glad that you are one of the users who cares about following the guidelines.

You start by stating that we would benefit from "manipulating" and "subverting" groups, but you did not specify which groups, or what you mean by "we", or why we should do so. These are very important factors to take into account when engaging in such practices as subversion and manipulation. You also state that we can see a tendency towards linguistic and ideological conformity in nearly all the boards. I disagree, as I believe that this occurs in some measure or other in all boards, including this one. On our case, at least, this is not a spontaneous occurrence.

I don't know if you own a board, but if you do, and it isn't about porn, video-games or a /pol/ alternative, you surely know how hard it is to get people to post there initially. Users make posts because they want to engage in discussion and have their ideas heard, none of which happens in a slow or empty board. Thus, the board owner must create the illusion of traffic in order to generate actual traffic. This is achieved with samefagging. Samefagging on a mostly empty board also works to "set the tone" of the discussions, i.e. the language, themes and opinions posted.
I did not create this board because I am particularly knowledgeable about psychopolitics, I did it because I wanted to be, and for that I needed to generate stimulating discussion and attract an intelligent, cultured user base who is willing to transmit that knowledge. I seem to have achieved that. But how? We go back to samefagging. My initial posts followed three guidelines: they were carefully written (meaning that I thought long and hard before posting), they were nice. and they incited discussion. By "nice" I mean that I never said something negative about someone else's opinion, and by "inciting discussion" I mean that I always asked them to elaborate on a topic, or asked questions about their conclusions. By following these guidelines and making the majority of the posts on the board, I created the tone to which the new posters would feel compelled to conform. As the samefagging on my part slowed down and eventually stopped, the users themselves continued to follow these behavioral guidelines. Naturally, this wasn't just a matter of molding people's behavior, it was about attracting the right people. So look at the board now: I would say most, if not all of the users are intelligent individuals who post intelligently and polite individuals who post politely.

As for the breaking of the rules, it is possible you misunderstood their meaning. They are not restrictions on what to post, but restriction on how to post. As long as it is related to the board topics, you can post it. If it isn't related to the board topics, you can post it somewhere else.

Notice how even this post follows the guidelines that I mentioned. This is a form of manipulation, and a very effective one because I only tell the truth. I don't say the users are intelligent and polite because I want to fall on your good graces, but because you are genuinely intelligent and polite. By pointing this out publicly I am making use of another technique: I am setting a positive standard to which the users are compelled to strive for. The very fact that I am writing about the strategic psychological effects of my actions has the a purpose: to increase awareness of the users and your trust towards me. Look at the sticky image and the banner: even they have subliminal messages. You can believe me when I tell you that I'm not the only one here engaged in experimental manipulation. Notice how I use the term "believe me" after making a revelation and talking about trust

We might be holding the clipboards, but in the end we are still lab rats

>>1415
It sounds like what you're talking about in the OP is linguistics and register; ways of communicating. Most communities have some shared characteristics in these categories. This is a sort of interesting conversation but not overtly psychopolitical, maybe if you developed that line of thinking more into how language affects our perceptions and social activity you can make cultivate that into an interesting hypothesis. If you look in the catalogue there may be some threads about semiotics that may appeal to you.

I don't think this board is necessarily meant to be a place of subversion but more an observational grounds where we can discuss that kind of thing happening elsewhere. My take.

>>1418

Firstly, there seems to have been a miscommunication about the meaning of 'manipulating'. Looking back at the OP, I see that it might not have been clear that I was talking about self-observation and active responses to it. Despite '/32/' being the subject in the title, and the tendencies of groups and observation of them being the subject matter of the post. 'Manipulating' therefore is just an attempt to make the proposal sound interesting, because I find it to be so.

It also seemed clear to me that those doing this would be 'the active users of this board', or 'those interested' from that group. I.e. we would describe and observe the tendencies of groups over time, that might otherwise be unconscious but active on this board (in ourselves), and see if there were any useful ways to apply this consciousness to our own discourse.

I would say 'the medium is the message', but that doesn't quite capture it. instead: the form of communication and the surrounding tendencies (chan culture, and how individual board cultures develop) are themselves a determinant of what can be conveyed. I haven't seen that limitation addressed here properly.

Thus asking for a thread were rules were deliberately not put at the forefront. A kind of free space where we post what we individually find to be relevant to psychopolitics or how we filter what we are interested in to fit the board's sense of psychopolitics, so as to cultivate consciousness of that process of filtering and convergence.


>They are not restrictions on what to post, but restriction on how to post.

See above.

In addition to rules though, I was referring to the more subtle formation of group norms. These would pick up pace and coherency, in a way less under your control and less responsive to your initial input, if the board grew. So I wanted to start the process of observation and 'manipulation' (i.e. conscious action) early. Asking for leniency was to do with things like not rejecting content here that might otherwise be called 'off topic', because that rejection causes people to self-filter and this thread was meant to be about adjusting, removing or manipulating certain filters.

>Notice how (etc.)

I didn't doubt that there was such intention. The board has been obviously created with a particular and precise intent, as the rules document shows. The Form (in the meaning outlined above) is clearly crafted.

I don't see how that is in opposition to more self-consciousness arising explicitly in the group. Particularly with regards to tendencies of culture and language that will inevitably pick up pace over time.

I don't see a thread about that. I don't understand the opposition to there being one or the dismissive attitude. Perhaps it's because what I wrote came across as some kind of adversarial challenge? People predictably don't like being challenged or having their ways of doing things questioned, and find some pretext upon which to attack the messenger. Go to any board on this site and test this out. I think you'll see it's true.

Finally:

>>and was tempted to give you a short answer similar to that of >>1413

I personally wouldn't call saying that polite. So I'll have to disagree with your evaluation of your own post.


>1421

I don't think you have a choice about what I'm talking about occurring here. The tendencies of the human psychology are themselves the subversion, always in effect. They are in motion whether we like it or not, and if we do not talk about how they are operating upon us, then the foundation of our own analysis of how they effect others are crippled from the get go.

And I do think this is psycopolitical: I think ways of speaking in groups... the sayable, in any given context... are one of the primary fields upon which psychopolitical plays are made. There is always some combination of the sayable, and that which is left silent. What is emphasised by individuals about themselves, and what's left to whither and be suppressed. We do it automatically, and our thoughts are changed in the process. We tend to over-become the groups we identify with to the point of caricature, particularly when we've chosen involvement with them and are speaking directly to them. All the possible and possibly relevant ways of seeing something that we as individuals have, and all the factors relevant, inevitably get whittled down into a brittle and thin outline of the attentional and communicative habits of the particular group/context.

Or perhaps I'm over-estimating how much is actually going on in most people's minds and attention? Perhaps not enough for them to notice this. To see how much of themselves they have to leave behind to be heard and identified with by almost any limited human group. It still happens, even if they don't notice that much and have to leave less behind than those who do notice.

>>1423
Well, I suppose this was all just a case of miscommunication, specifically misreading of the OP by me.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by "going off topic", because everything you proposed so far sounds completely on-topic for the board, and to be honest, pretty interesting.

>Or perhaps I'm over-estimating how much is actually going on in most people's minds and attention?
Doubt it.

Well, don't let my misguided rambling put you off any further. If you want to start a new thread for this with a different title and op and delete this one, let me know. If you don't, that's fine too.

The OP was too unclear, but perhaps people should also have asked for more instead of jumping on what they assumed it was. Micscomm. Not a problem. Moving on:

>Or perhaps I'm over-estimating how much is actually going on in most people's minds and attention?
>Doubt it.

I've been thinking about this. I suspect that i it is both. And it's not talked about nearly as much as it is important.

One thing I think that's hard to quantify and is central to psyhopolitics is a kind of core belief in the realities around. Maybe it corresponds with the Big 5's agreeableness to a small degree. But there are many who are low on that scale who don't lack this belief. And it doesn't correspond too much to rationalistic skepticism either, which often comes from people who believe very much in some particular take on the world.

It's a kind of tendency towards comfort in the limits of discourse, the games the society is currently playing. And you're right that there is A LOT people filter out to settle into this comfort. But there's also a rare quality of utter incredulity that drives certain people out of those limits. Perhaps they have a bit more to filter, perhaps it's a different disposition towards what could potentially be filtered.

Going on sheer intuition, it has some relation to the aristocratic scorn you see in certain British people (rejecting stuff as 'nonsense' and a kind of ubiquitous sense of common people and their self-believing talk as ridiculous). But that's only a weight on the scale, again. not a correspondence.

And you get some small measure of this in quite a lot of people. But most end up not going that far or settling in some slightly-more-out there group or combination of groups. The political malcontents, the searchers, the 'spiritual', the cunning.

It's strongly related to what I said in previous posts, and I'm trying to trace it or find some way to introduce it to the discourse of this board. Because we have people who have a more technical and unbelieving disposition towards discourse and its forms. But we don't have a clear concept of it. And this type of conception by its very nature flees from institutional and established discourse, including the kind that's related to psychopolitics. If anything, you'll see it more in the implicit character and tone of documents from certain authors or intell agencies or etc.

I want to also trace a very, very loose correspondence between it and the pscyhological form in conspiracy literature of 'how deep does the rabbit hole go'. Because that rabbit hole thing is based just upon the premise of their being a truth and that truth being hidden. You can still have credulous idiots thinking they're on the trail of it. But they still believe in this world. And mostly conspiracy literature ends up in plebeian conclusions.

What I'm talking about is a kind of fundamental scorn and distance from settling into the ways of speaking and patterns that present themselves throughout human society. A kind of disposition to rejection and scorn that somehow adds to the intelligence of those who have it in an immensely important way.

Take people who fall for /pol/ or NRx too hard, for example. They don't have it. They get leveraged their belief, towards some end or other. But there's some urge to belong and believe in that. To actually have your attention and talk get whittled down into the limits those boards present is comical. The world and ways of seeing things are so much bigger. The logical fallacies are glaringly obvious if you actually care to look. The pettiness of character is clear. So I think it's character and an opposite disposition to the one I'm interested in which drives people into those places.

...cont

...


I actually do know about an unpublished model used by intelligence agencies which has a psychological trait in it (well, 2 separate ones) that correspond strongly with what I'm talking about. But they haven't related it to this (at least not in their lower echelons, and not explicitly). And I can't go into it too much here. It's not needed for the discussion.

Basically, if we at /32/ can find a term for this, we can introduce a kind of psychological counterweight to the inevitable descent into rigidified ways of speaking, and self-caricature, that affects interest-based communities.

And I think also understand something about what it is that drives certain individuals above and over others. This isn't a trait that corresponds with social authority directly. Just with those limited few who work through social authority to completely game others.

I guess you could almost call it Satanic; inclined towards scorn, disbelief, and rejection. Inclined in character to a faith in the stupidity and limit of what you're in, and therefore inclined to find that which subverts its meaning or is above it.

I think it corresponds with psychopathy, in that psychopathy is willing to use any means to achieve its ends. That surely relates to viewing the world as 'fake' or counterfeit, somehow, and people's behaviors and beliefs as not worthy of the respect of non-manipulation. In fact, we know a number of recent studies that:

1) Willingness to commit anti-social actions strongly and positively corresponds with high social class
2) Psychopaths abound at the top

But I think it's distinct from brute psychopathy in that it's a disposition of seeing which is compatible with it, whereas psychopathy itself can just be brute will to get what you want by any means. Which can co-exist with things based in belief, like extreme narcissistic belief in self.

It could also have an association with Working Memory, in that being able to hold more in mind perhaps makes you less gullible to narrative-arrangements of facts. But I'm convinced this is more to do with character disposition than cognitive capacity.

I guess a take away:

-/pol/ is clearly more CREDULOUS than /32/.
-/32/ can be approached more CREDULOUSLY (psychopolitics as fact and the correct mode of viewing things) or less (it just as a means of those who don't believe and are inclined to manipulation of those who do).
-Scorn and light attachment to the means of discourse one is using to explore something are a way of preventing the credulity from hardening your thoughts. I think we even see this scorn in the 'meta-' type approach of some postmodernism and SJW leaders and people who initiate anon raids.

>>1426

Off-topic thing is just about how 'that's not we're about' is used to limit discourse throughout society. People cluster into little sectors, and limit themselves to fit them. The limits the 'sayable' and what people have accepted as relevant or what they're interested in impose.

I'm not saying this place does that worse than anywhere. Was just about trying to create a free space to deal with an inherent cognitive/character flaw people have and are endlessly manipulated by. That flaw being having their attention/discourse shaped by the sociality around, and thinking that somehow it's what they actually are.

This is especially bad in academia, and academia demonstrates what I'm saying: there's a kind of atmospheric fear of saying the unfashionable, and ridicule of those who do. People just fall into the bizarre way of speaking that's required in their discipline, and it forms them, and then they believe it's them.

On /pol/ and places, you see this endless tendency towards self-caricature, where people try to win discourse by framing it in the values and fashions of the group, until those fashions just control and wipe out balanced and expansive free cognition.

>>1436

See this post. 'Politics as magic'.

Kids who believe in magic reject this reality.

They know there's more. It's a kind of scorn for what's put in front of them in this new world they're in. People stop talking about that as they age, but maybe in some it develops into this core trait I'm talking about.