Guardian said:
Laura said:
Well, what really worries me about such plans is the incredible opportunity for pathological types to infiltrate and take the whole movement off track.
Of course they will, they always do. The civil rights movement, the environmental movement, Women's rights, Gay rights, anti-war, new age, etc., etc. There's not a single subculture that had the potential to even bring about a tiny amount of change which has not been infiltrated and corrupted.
We've past the point of no return, war's over, bad guys won... osit.
God that's bleak. Not saying you're wrong mind :P
An obvious point of danger in SSAF (and is it just me or does that acronym seem to push a whole bunch of weird para-military buttons?) is that since everyone will have 'training' in identifying and neutralizing psychopaths, is that such a thing in practice is actually extraordinarily difficult to do ... but their training could lead to overconfidence, such that in short order they become fully ponerized without even realizing it ... and indeed will likely continue to believe that they are completely immune from the problem long after they have begun to have Big Problems.
Now at the same time, L. himself in PP describes the need for an institution that will actively work to identify and neutralize ponerogenic influences within society. Such a group cannot operate if it becomes ponerized itself of course, so keeping itself clean would be priority one. It strikes me that in many ways this forum has been doing exactly that for quite some time, and has likely contributed a great deal more than is recognized to the rise of awareness of psychopathy within the general population (since everyone's influence extends to their friends' friends' friends, at least according to the researchers interviewed in
I Am Fishead ... if they're right everyone's influence can reach halfway to everyone in the world). Sustained efforts over the past decade have been bearing fruit recently but as Alana said,
And now we have Dutton promoting in all media outlets that having psychopathic traits is actually good for you, we can learn a lot from them! As soon as people start to become aware of an aspect of our reality, so does the muddying of the waters begins.
Pretty much. And let's not forget to normalization/cute-ifying of vampires over the past decade or two, as well ... characters such as Dexter ... it seems there's a pervasive effort to make psychopathy normal, sexy, desirable ... to make it an ideal. It's like they know they're going to get outed, that it's inevitable now, and they're desperately trying to program the populace such that when it happens, lots of them either shrug and say, "OK, so we're all psychopath cattle ... oh well, what else is new?", or are all, "Cooool how can I become like you?" I'm sure there will be a pill for that.
Thing is, at it stands, the forum is absolutely brilliant for sharing and analyzing information and from this building a clearer collective understanding of the truth, which is its whole purpose after all and that's great. What the forum can't do so well is serve as a parallel society in the bricks-and-mortar world, which is what SSAF seems to want to become ... in essence to operationalize at least some of the theoretical and conceptual tools that have been under development here. Alternatively, SSAF wants to give the
appearance of doing this but is a trap from the beginning ... meant to lure the semi-aware into survivalist compounds where they can be cultified.
But I dunno, the website's kind of half-done, the text is fairly poorly written (and badly edited and typeset), it all seems very hasty. You'd expect a slick corporate trap to be, well, slick and corporate. This website is none of that, just a bunch of manifestos, mission statements, and essays thrown up when they have the time by people who spend most of their time writing memos and power-point slides. Which actually makes me think that they might be legit. Maybe someone from the forum should contact them and ask them more directly what they're all about? If they're legit they won't be averse to honest critique, and will in fact be thrilled at the prospect of collaboration.
One final thing I want to mention about this ... one of the reasons this caught my interest was that recently I was chatting with a friend, a neuroscience PhD, who had participated a couple of years ago in a remote viewing program another of her supervisor's students was running for her thesis. For the final session they were asked to view themselves 50 years in the future. She described to me a world in which society had bifurcated into two parallel bodies: one based on the old ways, of individualism and self-service, and another based on altruism and community-service. People could move between the two ... you had to choose which you belonged to. The old society was clearly sick and dying but many people clung on because they couldn't make the mental leap to understanding how the new society worked. The new society worked on a principle of non-coercion: citizens had certain duties they were expected to fulfill, and if they did would be taken care of, but they did not HAVE to fulfill them. If they decided they were done with it they could walk away at any time ... but this was rare, because life in the new society was much, much more pleasant than in the old.
The overall picture she painted to me sounded remarkably like what SSAF (or maybe something similar) could evolve into, given time.
