missing police: conspiracy in Missing Persons

We read.

Douglas, Mary, and Steven Ney. 1998. Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences, The Aaron Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy. Berkeley : New York: University of California Press ; Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 978-0-520-20752-3

Douglas, Mary. 1996. Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: SAGE publications.

This deals with the changes in the ritualistic use of conspiracy theories since Missing Persons was published. My discussion assumes some understanding of grid-group cultural theory, which I use as an apt mapping of the worlding we do as selves among others. See the linkpost for all my post about Mary Douglas and grid-group rationalities or biases. This post follows on from Missing Institutions.

When I first read Douglas’ Thought Styles in the late 1990s I personally saw myself in the egalitarian quadrant, but as an anarchist felt even more removed from the hierarchic quadrant, and I had no understanding of the isolate quadrant at all. I identified my own green views as corresponding to the egalitarian grouping.

I found in this reflexivity a certain calmness or ataraxia. An easing of my political anxiety.

Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences is written only a couple of years later and uses the term enclavist more than egalitarian. It also regards this group as sectarian and given to conspiracy theories.

From page 102 of Missing Persons.

It also described ways of do-ing the group of the Enclavist, with what we might now call controlling or coercive behaviour associated with cult leaders, particularly those with narcissistic and/or psychopathic tendencies, as part of the general boundary riding of a group with otherwise weak organizations. However most studies of real life cults and their leaders, even if they began in the free-wheeling 70s, end up very structured and very bounded, and yes, often very paranoid.

I am not arguing that paranoia and conspiracy rituals are 'really a part' of a hierachic group’s behaviour instead of the enclavist or egalitarian group. I am arguing that it can belong to all of them, and relates more to issues of control, perception of control and risk, and their common calling in worlding people into behaviours (both in action and with inaction) such that all paranoia then set into motion by stories of conspiracy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conspiracies are always part of a potential for self-fulfilling paranoia, and this is not restricted to any grouping or grid. It is a technique available to all groups.

In the 80s all paranoid anti-vaxxer new-age types were not right wing, even in the weak sense of bourgeoise. The reason for this was the CIA were all out to get them becasue they wanted to be free.

There were right wing conspiracies in the 80s, there was one called the Gray Men conspiracy which is basically what comes out of Donald’s Trump narcissism mouth and all that pizzagate malarky, this was basically anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about how the United Nations will implement a world government and world heritage areas were for elite oligarchs (Jews) to retreat to (especially those remote areas with Hydro-power) once the nuclear war was launched to wipe out non-Jews. Their proponents were not egalitarian.

The X-files seems to be some sort of turning point.

Those various streams of paranoia seem to have combined into tsunami of cultural and cultic power which both creates common cause while isolates all believers from trusting anyone, including each other. It is insane.

The term “deep state” to described completely ordinary rent-seeking behaviour in bureaucracies is particularly worrying. “Deep state” basically means “get the Jew”. (The amount of unpoliced rent-seeking behaviour in any group/institution is directly proportional to the age of the group/institution, and in general, governments, the state, are the oldest group or institution, calling that natural tendency a ‘deep state’ is morally reprehensible.)

While the description of sects as paranoid rings true, the description of cults and enclavists as egalitarian does not. Especially where they are lead by narcissists or psychopaths who depend on dominance games that hierarchies supply for free, and who use paranoid-fueled prophecies to boundary-ride while denigrating those who are not loyal to the cult leader.

It was from reading Though Styles that I learned to view any cultural artifact or institution or style, like for example asceticism in design of objects, or puritainism in lifestyle, can shift in its use to decorate or portray certain values through time. Paranoia is one such object. Paranoia is a type of cup, signifying not love, but emotional laziness.

We have just witness this shift of association in the last 20-30 years. Conspiracy fueled by self-fulfilling paranoia has moved from the use of dissent groups, now to be used by the ordinary mass of people. And like the new technology of the radio in Europe after WW1 fostering fear and hatred, social media seems to activated erstwhile groups to choose to be deliberately stupid.

Perhaps this power to coalesce a pure emotinally lazy ressentiment is why it is able to drag in the fatalists and apathetics, as well as the emotional nihilist and trolls who do it for the lols.

One failing of the grid-group theory of biases/rationalities in relation to our perceptions of risk, is that no finer grain of biases, even nomotheically, is used to interrogate or give bounds or measures to the theory.

If a psychopath is in charge of a sect, can it ever be egalitarian? Indeed can it be any of the four biases/rationalities/cities? And what number of people do we need to have such that those biases/rationalities/cities can operate and society survive without cultic failure (death cult) killing or dispersing a group. What is the parasitic load we can carry, if we fail to police psychopaths and narcissists?

Has self-domestication increase to load without increasing the ability to police that load?

If a hunter-gather group self-fulfilingly paranoias its way to extinction, the world was big enough for that not to matter to Homo species as a whole. But as the world integrates, and history returns because of unpoliced narcissism and indulged psychopathy, what power does the common ground have to maintain tolerance and the noyaux of our good health in disagreeing with each other.

Crossposted on substack.com