The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

He is equating intelligence with ones ability to mute the signal to the cerebral cortex sent by the Amygdala. As he acknowledges,the Amygdala is a tool that humanity relies upon for survival. It sends flight of fight signals in order to maintain our safety, even in a business setting where there may be no physical danger present. Further, it acts as an internal moral compass, reacting to behavior through the concept of emotion.

By linking a positive reward, through the use of socially approved labels (e.g. "high emotional intelligence"), he is attempting to employ peer pressure to promote more Amygdala suppression. But this not the trait of a more intelligent being, as he tries to sell the audience, these are sociopathic traits, where the individual does not process their actions through the brain's emotional filters and therefore discounts the "gut check" on our behavior.

The guys wants his audience to turn into automatons, afraid to employ humanity's normal physiology in fear of negative social pressure.

This is not how I understand this guy in this Google Talk.

He does not equate intelligence with muting feelings. Rather he correlates emotional intelligence with intelligently modulating emotions. As noted in his inverted U graph, both those who are too reactive and those who are too dulled lose out to those who can modulate emotion with cerebral intelligence. There is such a correlation, but it is not monotonic. One can be too quick to alarm, or too zoned out.

Nor do I find him to be selling sociopathy. Such can not be sold, and such involves not the intelligent modulation of emotions but rather the absence of conscience.

reggie - your posts contain sharp warnings of the complex duplicity of our Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex (MIIC). You and I have quibbled over whether you were condemning this duplicity or over whether a particular incident (such as this guy's speech) evidenced such duplicity.

That quibbling is perhaps an unfortunate distraction. I will readily grant that enormous effort, funding and scheming, for many, many decades has gone into monitoring and manipulating the masses. I will readily grant that the MIIC has conceived, funded and played a major and essential role in the development of many of the "wonders of modern technology" which we take for granted these days, and that they have and continue to do so for nefarious purposes.

I will further grant that even if Daniel Goleman above wasn't advocating we be lulled into being mind-numbed-robots, emotionless sheeple, still others have advocated this, using just such techniques as you describe, such as linking such neutered behavior with socially approved labels (e.g. "high emotional intelligence.") I share your outrage to such B.S.

But I do not fear these weapons of mass information and media control, just as those before me do not fear swords, guns or jet fighter planes. They are all two edged swords. I too can swing this sword of information, computers and networked intelligence.

As I noted in another response to you a few minutes ago, I find myself wondering who "reggie" is. You have been quite clear, coherent and consistent in your postings here, but I have formed no sense yet of the person behind those postings.

[bart]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

...
But I do not fear these weapons of mass information and media control, just as those before me do not fear swords, guns or jet fighter planes. They are all two edged swords. I too can swing this sword of information, computers and networked intelligence.

...

Bingo... what one knows about with decent certainty is seldom able to affect one negatively.


I put together an informal list of many of the various tools of the manipulator, politician or slime ball a while back:
http://www.nowandfutures.com/spew_tools.html

[ggirod]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

I put together an informal list of many of the various tools of the manipulator, politician or slime ball a while back:

A Great Resource, Thank You!!!!!!!!!!

[reggie]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

This is not how I understand this guy in this Google Talk.

He does not equate intelligence with muting feelings. Rather he correlates emotional intelligence with intelligently modulating emotions.

Since when is "modulating" humanity's basic survival mechansim intelligent? I totally disagree with this framing, and believe that this framing is deliberately designed to persuade the audience that this sort of modulation is necessary to 'fit-in'. But what Goleman is really doing here is de-arming the public's basic threat response mechanism.

Entire labs are setup with pretend-work environments in order to research and study these techniques and the language that's used to persuade the workforce. The semantics here are carefully chosen to be deceptive without detection.

As noted in his inverted U graph, both those who are too reactive and those who are too dulled lose out to those who can modulate emotion with cerebral intelligence. There is such a correlation, but it is not monotonic. One can be too quick to alarm, or too zoned out.

I totally disagree with the assumption that self-analysis of ones own internal emotional responses results in one "loosing out" on anything. We're not talking about external behavior here, that's a different discussion. Goleman wants his audience to discount those emotional inputs from the Amygdala. Again, he's is muting our own defense systems.

Nor do I find him to be selling sociopathy. Such can not be sold, and such involves not the intelligent modulation of emotions but rather the absence of conscience.

Well, he's a salesman selling a story to a bunch of eager Google employees who all want to be the next billionaire and have all been trained that the only way to get there is to be sociopath. Ultimately, it's the audience's choice. But he sure makes that choice sound appealing.

reggie - your posts contain sharp warnings of the complex duplicity of our Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex (MIIC). You and I have quibbled over whether you were condemning this duplicity or over whether a particular incident (such as this guy's speech) evidenced such duplicity.

I'm not sure I would characterize my posts as sharp warnings, I'd rather frame them as presenting what is largely being suppressed. Of course, the narratives that are generally suppressed are done so because they tend to be alarming to the general public, and creating alarm is not conducive to deception. Hence, if one has the goal of being transparent, I think some will be alarmed by what that transparency uncovers. I do my best just to be a messenger for a rare perspective.

But I do not fear these weapons of mass information and media control, just as those before me do not fear swords, guns or jet fighter planes. They are all two edged swords. I too can swing this sword of information, computers and networked intelligence.

The public will make decisions that protect the public if they have ALL the information. So, there is nothing to fear if ALL the information is disseminated. Hence, I'm trying to disseminate hard-to-uncover information, which I think diminishes societal risk and thereby reduces fear in the long run.

As I noted in another response to you a few minutes ago, I find myself wondering who "reggie" is. You have been quite clear, coherent and consistent in your postings here, but I have formed no sense yet of the person behind those postings.

Tried to address in other thread. Just a person who tries to "think".

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Tried to address [who's "reggie"] in other thread. Just a person who tries to "think".

Well, in that other (ATM) thread, you wrote of yourself:

As far as Reggie, reggie is nothing more than one person who has spent far too much time reading obscure material.

I hope this doesn't come as some great surprise to you, reggie, but I still don't exactly feel like I know who you are ;).

I get a sense of paranoia from you about information/compute/network systems. I don't share that paranoia, perhaps because of my considerable expertise, talent and experience in just those areas.

Good luck, reggie. I doubt that our discussions here are destined to provide great insights or good reading for others, for our respective viewpoints differ in apparently unproductive ways.

Take care.

[reggie]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

I get a sense of paranoia from you about information/compute/network systems. I don't share that paranoia, perhaps because of my considerable expertise, talent and experience in just those areas.

I hope that you realize that I your framing of my posts as "paranoia" could be seen as offensive. And I also hope that you understand that your own claim to "expertise" in these areas could actually be interpreted as an overconfidence in ones own understanding. Further, as Ellul has done in the quote from Technological Society that I posted in the other thread that you refer to, I could argue that one with this sort of "expertise" is really just one who has been conditioned to accept a limited vision of technology, where these limits are secured by ones own internal cognitive dissonance systems.

Most importantly, it is the view that I have provided here that is consistent with the strategic thinking being published by MIC think tanks in DC, it is just that the tech worker, responsible for building these systems, is shielded from this view and instead given a glossy view promulgated by "leaders" within the industry. If more tech workers actually read the written thoughts that is behind, and one level above, the VC community, they may take a very different view than the "it's all so cool" perception that's being sold.

[Shakespear]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

I for one do NOT think that you sound paranoid as is being suggested. You analysis of the subject is very educational and thought provoking which I would think anyone with a desire to reflect on what is being said would see what you are trying to say.

To say that the techno "weaponry" being worked on is a double edge sword suggesting that it can be used against those that design/build them is a bit simplistic (to say it mildly). The key problem is that the "weapons" being designed/built are meaningless to +90% of the population against whom they are deployed or being used.

Lets try to ask the average person on the street if they know what is the definition of "frame" (in NLP sense) or "dialectic".

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

And I also hope that you understand that your own claim to "expertise" in these areas could actually be interpreted as an overconfidence in ones own understanding.

Exactly. That's why I bragged as I did, that you and others might clearly see my bias and discount it as you see proper.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

The key problem is that the "weapons" being designed/built are meaningless to +90% of the population against whom they are deployed or being used.

Lets try to ask the average person on the street if they know what is the definition of "frame" (in NLP sense) or "dialectic".

Yes, for sure the average person on the street does not know the details or technical terms of the apparatus being built against them.

By two edged sword, I mean that, just as you and I are now using an (originally DARPA funded) TCP/IP based Internet to communicate and share information (even though most of us cannot unpack an IP header by hand), similarly other technologies built by and for the military and intelligence agencies can be used for good purposes by average people as well.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a December 2008 New York Times article The global political awakening, and again last week in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations CFR Meeting Zbigniew Brzezinski Fears The Global Awakening spoke with some concern of a global political awakening that is making it quite a bit more difficult for world powers (such as the United States) to accomplish the objectives he recommends.

There is indeed such a global awakening, and the Internet is an essential technology for this awakening. It is all quite complex, and "victory" (freedom and well being for most people) is far from assured. But the elite oligarchs are seeing more grave challenges to their agenda than ever before, even as evidenced on this and similar threads here.

[Rajiv]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Also see Kathy McMahon's - Why Sociopaths Win & Why, No, You Don’t Want to Be One of Them

She starts out with Leonard Cohen

and follows up with

“I’m sure you have the answer, you and Ron Paul and all the other pot-smoking libertarian do-gooders have it all figured out. But what I’m saying is, no confidence means end of the confidence game. That’s what Lehman showed. Every single player in finance suddenly had to face the fundamental problem—this whole ******* economy is built on fraud and lies and garbage. So when Lehman collapsed, every single player panicked, going, ‘If Lehman was nothing but a Ponzi scheme—and I know what I’m running is a Ponzi scheme—holy shit, that means everyone else is running a Ponzi scheme too! Run for the exits!’ No one trusted anyone else, everyone pulled out, and the entire global economy collapsed just like that. And that meant your parents, my parents, every teacher, every fireman, every person in the country going into retirement, every price on every asset—wiped out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sociopathy lately, after reading the article I quoted above. Here’s more:

…let’s throw the book at every firm and every executive that our people can make a case against. Because you know, gosh, it’s all about rule of law and blind justice, just like Che says.’ OK, so now this means indicting just about every serious player in finance, so they take down Goldman Sachs, they take down Citigroup, JP Morgan, BofA… and they also serve all the big funds who are at least as guilty, if not more. So they shut down Pimco, Blackrock, Citadel… maybe they indict Geithner and Summers, haul in some of Bush’s crooks… right? …OK, now guess what you’ve just done? You’ve just caused the markets to completely tank. Remember what happened after the Lehman collapse? Remember how popular that made every politician in Washington? Still wondering why they coughed up a trillion bucks? They were scared for their lives; that’s why they voted for that bailout. You’d have done the same goddamn thing. But if we go after everyone guilty of fraud and theft, the market crash this country would see would make 2008 look like Sesame Street. Open that can of worms labeled ‘Fraud’ and the whole ******* economy collapses. You may as well prosecute people for masturbating. No one will know where the fraud investigation stops and who will be charged next—everyone will try to cash out, and the markets will tank to zero. And guess what happens when the markets tank to zero? Every ******* American with a retirement plan, or an investment portfolio, or a 401k—every state pension plan in the country, every teacher’s pension fund, every fireman’s pension—every last one of them will be wiped out. That’s what the Lehman collapse taught us.”

I thought back to the question Catherine Austin Fitts asked:

In the summer of 2000, I asked a group of 100 people at a conference of spiritually committed people who would push a red button if it would immediately stop all narcotics trafficking in their neighborhood, city, state and country. Out of 100 people, 99 said they would not push such red button. When surveyed, they said they did not want their mutual funds to go down if the U.S. financial system suddenly stopped attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion a year in global money laundering. They did not want their government checks jeopardized or their taxes raised because of resulting problems financing the federal government deficit.

We haven’t built a big enough prison system to handle it all. Unless you’re causing trouble, and even if you are, you are contributing to it. And if you are contributing to it, you are just as guilty as they are. That’s the story. And even if you don’t want it to all fall down, even if you love capitalism and wave your countries’ flag proudly, even if you are willing to bail out the banks by increasing your tax dollars, and handing over your kid’s inheritance and are willing to trade their capacity to live on this planet for another gallon of gas, it’s too late. Too late for a shiny new President to walk in and make it all better. Too late to punish the “rich bad men” who stole our wealth and polluted our planet.

And it’s your fault for letting it happen. And you’re naive if you think you can fix it.

But here’s what I really want to say, as a psychologist, to all of you: Sociopaths lack something 95% of us have: They lack a conscience. They lack the capacity to feel empathy, to feel guilt, to feel bad about doing bad. When you lack Vitamin E(mpathy), you hate people who have it. You walk around with an expensive suit and you have a black card to pay for an expensive dinner, and you buy and sell people and marry the hottest mates around, but it’s all for nothing. You can’t attach to other people, even though you know it is something you should want to do. You can only treat people as pawns in a chess game, because you can’t relate to people as anything other than suckers or fools to manipulate. You “fuck” your husband or wife, because you have no clue what “making love” would feel like. You cheat and lie because it helps you to get what you want. Money and material wealth, along with a sense of increased power, are your only true motivators.

But getting “powerful” is just too easy, you see? “Suckers” let you take it, and they seem happy to give it to you, get it? They’re such “idiots.” The “suckers” will sacrifice anything for what they love and value–things like their families and principles and their religion and their environment. They take out money from a weekly check to put toward retirement or toward a college education for their kids. To a sociopath, these things are truly alien. They couldn’t believe how easy it was to stop paying for the retirements of their workers, and make the workers pay for it, instead. It was unbelievably easy to convince the workers that they needed to lived on less, and put the money into the stock market for their retirement, for their kids’ college education. The corporations had to pinch themselves! The money they pay workers went right back into the hands of these very same corporations, as stocks. It was too good to be true! Now they could leverage even greater wealth with these same dollars! Like taking candy from a baby.

There is no point pitying the “suckers.” They hate the “suckers” for loving and valuing these things, for wanting to take care of themselves and their futures. For believing that if you worked hard, you could be rich or grow up to be president one day. They didn’t realize that the tough part is that first million. The next ten million are much easier to make. The suckers don’t “get it.” They still believe in the great and powerful Oz. But just along side the theft and rip-off is the disdain. They want to prove that nobody feels true compassion and caring. No one actually wants to be responsible, when they can make someone else do it. A sense of principles are for hypocrites and fools, and if you try to push some of them on the sociopath, they are taking everyone down with them–your parents, your teacher, the firefighters, all of it. Without Vitamin E, life is one big fraud, and the emptiness inside rings as clear as a bell when someone shakes it:

‘Hey, assholes, you’re supposed to be hypocrites, OK? You’re supposed to be two-faced free-market liars, not libertarian Quakers! You’re not supposed to believe in anything—your job is to get up in front of the public and lie about free markets and the rest. Period.’

That’s it, how ******* hard is it? Look, watch my face: Say one thing out of one side… and do the other out of the other side. Got that? Let everyone else whine and cry about, ‘Ooh, that’s not fair, ooh, that’s a bailout, that’s socialism, that’s corruption.’ That’s what losers do—they whine. …you whine all the time…

Yes, they say, “You aren’t adults. You aren’t mature enough to get it. There IS nothing to believe in. Principles and integrity are for babies or fools. The politicians are doing their job by lying and that’s how it is suppose to be. Corporations are there to rob you and your role is to shut up and take it. Even when you have to bail them out. Shut up and get out of our face. Let the scam continue, and stop whining about what’s fair, because nothing is.

…look at you… Can you pay the bill for this meal? Is there a libertarian on earth who can afford to buy a decent meal in Manhattan? And now, look at me: I’m a hypocrite. Hell yes I am! I lie every day of my life, I lie to myself in my sleep. Hell, I’m lying to you right now, in fact I don’t even know what the fuck I’m saying anymore because I’m so used to lying. And yet—who’s the guy with the black card? Who’s the one who’s going to pick up the check tonight? Guys with power, guys like me, we lie. You got that? ‘Lie’ as in ‘My Lai’ the massacre—as in, ‘My Lai you long time, me so free-markety.’ You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear, it doesn’t really matter what lie you feed them so long as it’s the lie that puts them in a trance. And then behind the scenes, you do the very opposite: You fix the game, you cover up this problem here with those funds there, you move shit around, you skim budgets and you subsidize the system, you cover up the bad shit and once in a while throw a has-been to the wolves to keep the public entertained—that’s the way the system works, and anyone who’s an adult understands that.

Like in a war, you shoot someone in the head in cold blood and you say “That’s war.” Nothing personal, dude. When you shoot the economy in the head, when you destroy every element of an economy, entire countries, and you take the entire world down with you, you show contempt for those who have the nerve to suggest that there is anything wrong with it.

It’s what adults do.

And the whining “babies,” the ones who’s parents and grandparents haven’t committed some “big crime” to allow them to enjoy the mega-wealth of status and privilege, the “suckers” who haven’t figured out how to make their first million yet, these are the ones you put into a trance, that you feed the ‘bread and circuses’ to. Only the grown-ups know this. The wise-guys. The insiders. Only the whiny babies cry when they put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger. To be a real adult is to be heartless, and to lie. Only a fool believes that there should be any honesty or devotion or empathy in the world. All others believe in cash.

Here’s my advice: Back away slowly when you hear this.

You can tell the sociopaths because they are so charming and convincing until they bare their teeth. Then they are terrifying and crushing to our spirits. They lull us into believing that we’re either going to be a part of the “action,” a real “grown up” or we’re setting ourselves up to be objects of ridicule. And they are great at ridicule in the form of “friendly advice:”
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Well Worth Reading!

[reggie]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Yes, for sure the average person on the street does not know the details or technical terms of the apparatus being built against them.

By two edged sword, I mean that, just as you and I are now using an (originally DARPA funded) TCP/IP based Internet to communicate and share information (even though most of us cannot unpack an IP header by hand), similarly other technologies built by and for the military and intelligence agencies can be used for good purposes by average people as well.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a December 2008 New York Times article The global political awakening, and again last week in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations CFR Meeting Zbigniew Brzezinski Fears The Global Awakening spoke with some concern of a global political awakening that is making it quite a bit more difficult for world powers (such as the United States) to accomplish the objectives he recommends.

There is indeed such a global awakening, and the Internet is an essential technology for this awakening. It is all quite complex, and "victory" (freedom and well being for most people) is far from assured. But the elite oligarchs are seeing more grave challenges to their agenda than ever before, even as evidenced on this and similar threads here.

All the tech is a double-edged sword, because a way has to be found to entice the public to use it. It's just applying dialectics to product design. For example, the iPhone is not a consumer mobile appliance that the MIC simply taps in to. Quite the contrary, the iPhone is a sophisticated mobile sensor array that was given to Apple in order to figure out how to deliver this array to the public in the form of a product that would be in high demand. Jobs and the media have done a wonderful job to this end.


As far as Z-big-niew, I just love Brzezinski, he's just so good at 'selling'. In his new book (and speeches of similar title), "Our Choice, Global Domination or Global Leadership", he targets the technocrats, bureaucrats and kleptocrats who form the upper echelons of power's day-to-day operations. I think we all understand his front-narrative, that basically the sheeple are waking-up and the ruling elite's front-operators should be pretty scared about maintaining its power position. In fact, its should be so scared that it should consider using high tech weapon systems against the public (although, this notion is buried deep within high-brow double-speak). Now, the question is, what's really going on here and why is Brzezinski putting this dialectic out there so publicly for the ruling-elites front-operators (and the public)?

[reggie]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Also see Kathy McMahon's - Why Sociopaths Win & Why, No, You Don’t Want to Be One of Them

I strongly suggest putting Robert Hare's work at the top of anyone's list who decides to pursue this matter further. One has to be careful that we don't end up creating another demarcation line for bigotry. On the other hand, recognizing these traits in ourselves and others can be enormously beneficial.

Here's one of Hare's books on the topic:



This book will present examples of psychopaths/sociopaths that we've all met in the workplace. Unfortunately, Hare's suggestion when encountering one of these kinds of people is sobering. He tells us to leave that office, either by changing jobs or transferring to another location. In any event, I highly recommend this book, it will help you identify people with these personality traits and to protect yourself from them.

[Rajiv]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

This book will present examples of psychopaths/sociopaths that we've all met in the workplace. Unfortunately, Hare's suggestion when encountering one of these kinds of people is sobering. He tells us to leave that office, either by changing jobs or transferring to another location. In any event, I highly recommend this book, it will help you identify people with these personality traits and to protect yourself from them.

That is almost exactly what Kathy McMahon had to say.

Also a must read for people - Political Ponerology

PONEROLOGY: THE STUDY OF EVIL

“In the author’s opinion, Ponerology reveals itself to be a new branch of science born out of historical need and the most recent accomplishments of medicine and psychology. In light of objective naturalistic language, it studies the causal components and processes of the genesis of evil, regardless of the latter’s social scope. We may attempt to analyze these ponerogenic processes which have given rise to human injustice, armed with proper knowledge, particularly in the area of psychopathology. Again and again, as the reader will discover, in such a study, we meet with the effects of pathological factors whose carriers are people characterized by some degree of various psychological deviations or defects.” (Lobaczewski, 42)

With very few exceptions down the ages, discussions in moral philosophy - the study of right conduct - have failed to systematically investigate the origin, nature, and course of evil in a manner free from supernatural imaginings. Evil was often considered something to be endured rather than something that could be understood and eliminated by rational measures. And - as Lobaczewski demonstrates - the origin of evil actually lies outside the boundaries of the conventional worldview within which the earlier moral inquiries and literary explorations were conducted. Evil requires a truly modern and scientific approach to lay bare its secrets. This approach is called “ponerology”, the study of evil, from the Greek “poneros” = evil.

The original manuscript of this book went into the furnace minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland. The second copy, painfully reassembled by scientists working under impossible conditions of violence and repression, was sent via courier to the Vatican. Its receipt was never acknowledged - the manuscript and all valuable data lost. In 1984, the third and final copy was written from memory by the last survivor of the original researchers: Andrew Lobaczewski. Zbigniew Brzezinski blocked its publication.

After half a century of suppression, this book is finally available.

Political Ponerology is shocking in its clinically spare descriptions of the true nature of evil. It is poignant in its more literary passages revealing the immense suffering experienced by the researchers contaminated or destroyed by the disease they were studying.

Political Ponerology is a study of the founders and supporters of oppressive political regimes. Lobaczewski’s approach analyzes the common factors that lead to the propagation of man’s inhumanity to man. Morality and humanism cannot long withstand the predations of this evil. Knowledge of its nature – and its insidious effect on both individuals and groups - is the only antidote.

And thanks for the link.

[Rajiv]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Here is the documentary "I, Psychopath" linked from Hare's site

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: The alternate view: Confessions of a Wall Street Nihilist

Hare's suggestion when encountering one of these kinds of people is sobering. He tells us to leave that office, either by changing jobs or transferring to another location.

Leaving the employ of a sociopath is rather easy in my experience. Snakes do not like mongooses borrowing in their pit.