Disagreeables and the Gated Institutional Narrative

January 22, 2018 12:17 AM

"The 'Adj.-Profession-Name' Formula, Disagreeables, & the 'No-Living-Heroes' thy" by polymath and managing director of Thiel Capital Eric Weinstein, 22 January 2018.

Consider adjectives:

Embattled
Controversial
Divisive
Reclusive
Provocative
Struggling
Right-Wing
Eccentric
Self-styled
Far-Left
Recovering
Disgraced
Self-Promoting
Free-thinking
Volatile
etc.

These adjectives are really reserved terms and the 'tells' of mainstream media letting you know who is off-narrative and who they have marked for reputation neutralization through FUD (Fear-Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns.

So what's wrong with calling a professor who is controversial, a "controversial professor" you may fairly ask? The problem is that mainstream media builds clientside architecture in your own mind that you don't notice. Proof? Check the graphic attached. Apparently in the entire history of the internet, this tweet is the first to ever use the phrase "controversial professor Paul Krugman" to describe Paul Krugman even though he is famous for being a controversial professor.

So...how can that be?

Let’s first dig a bit to look for positive framings of my colleague “controversial professor” Jordan B. Peterson. Consider these attachments [1, 2, 3, 4] for a man whose fame is largely due to being a noble inspirational heroic maverick.

Real humans don’t talk like this. My point here is that our minds are programmed to recognize the “Gated Institutional Narrative” or GIN and to take our emotional instructions from it. This is Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak: Adjective-Profession-Target.

Or so asserts self-styled Internet personality Eric Weinstein.

So who are the targets? Men and women who are off the charts on the Big-5 psychometric for disagreeability. These people are the pool from which our greatest Nobel Laureates & even heroes were once drawn. And right now the internet is having a bull market in disagreeability.

This brings us to one of my most controversial theories: Ever since Lindbergh’s attempt to keep the US out of WWII, our institutions have fought against us having ANY living heroes with self-minted credibility. This leaves a vacuum filled by acceptable institutional figures.

The lesson learned from Lindbergh appears to be that Mavericks are too dangerous to institutions...and in the case of Lindbergh that made some sense. But what about a John Lennon? Frances Kelsey? Charlie Chaplin? Paul Robeson? Frank Wilkinson? Katharine Hepburn?

Here’s the punchline: There are suddenly way way too many disagreeable individual voices to be found for people trying to escape from the constant cognitive abuse of our institutions, which want our co-dependence on them.

So something new *has* to happen.

Either:

A) The spell of the GIN breaks and we have lots of real self-minted heroes again.

B) Disagreeables like Jordan Peterson, Camille Paglia, Nassim Taleb, Douglas Murray, Claire Lehman, etc... all get taken out.

C) The institutions seat some of the disagreeables.

My prediction is that the Gated Institutional Narrative will fail. Exotic measures will be tried to get rid of the strong voices as was done to Jean Seberg. And then, at long bloody last, the institutions will seat the disagreeables. Here’s to Harvard Professor Nassim Taleb. [1, 2].

posted by wjfitzy (0 comments total)