Name: The protean self
ISBN: 9780465064212

What Hacker News says

PaulHouleMar 2018

I read that article too and when I read it I thought "this is the first time I've seen somebody write this"

My basis for that judgement came from reading a lot about Bannon and my own experiences w/ the "alt-right" and "alt-left". (ex. a "gamergate person" is to me a person who will never let you have the last word in an argument, no matter what they believe about boys and their toys; sometimes they get arrested because they just can't stop arguing with a cop)

I grew in Manchester, NH which was home to the Manchester Union Leader which was a leading conservative publication in the 1980s. I regularly saw editorials by conservatives who were interested in emulating the strategies of the communist theorist Antonio Gramsci.

You should see the Robert Jay Lifton book:

https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...

that both left-wing and right-wing activists have that "postmodern personality disorder" that Chris Lasch warned you about.

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trod1234Apr 2025

No worries. Take your time there is no rush. I check back on my past posts every so often, and in fairness this is dark material so by necessity you should pace and ground yourself such that the material doesn't leave you staring into the abyss with the the abyss staring back.

> Your mention of hollywood ... are you of the opinion that taking your portrayal for granted that this is the consious action by specific actors, or these processes are often and usually headless.

Both.

With respect to knowledge of the mechanics and fundamental structures, there is a universal incentive by any entrenched power hierarchy using these techniques to limit and suppress that knowledge. The absence of knowledge in such cases deprives people the defense against something they have been conditioned to see as impossible, and makes those people dependent and easily manipulated, so there is broad incentive headlessly.

There are also groups bent along ideological lines to destroy Capitalism and its related parts at a individual core identity level, and to foment disunity.

Aspects of identity targeted includes the nuclear family, and other elements of western cultural identity, as well as religion. This is broadly done through destructive interference which mirrors the process of how you go about intentionally forgetting something, its also how surrogates work where something important is replaced with a surrogate which is lesser than what was replaced (circularly, and iteratively).

Communism, and its Socialist cousins (i.e. globalist/neo-fabian) have been working towards these things for quite awhile, and they both inevitably fail when they no longer have a suitable host (Mises, Socialism 1930-1950s covers the components that lead to socio-economic collapse in such systems).

The main elements you asked for are common to all torture. They are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove.

Most of the discoveries credited to Mao involved the structure of trauma loops where you turn the psyche back on itself in clever ways, which I and many others reduce/refer to as "structure and clustering".

On the issue of schools and phones, Narcosynthesis and Exposure occur through the phone via Social Media Apps, and Associative Priming. The Octalysis Framework in game design uses quite a lot of this material, though its been reconstructed seemingly following a separation of objectionable concerns (as developed and made popular by the Stasi, 60s-90s). An example of priming would be the audio trigger upon a headshot in a game like BF1942, where you hear a cha-ching, and get a dopamine rush after conditioning each time you hear it, along with visual cues like changes in leaderboard/animations. Withdrawal too on the opposite side.

The teachers at school also utilize pedagogy based in torture. Strategies like the Hot Potato, Lying to Children, and Burning the Bridges are used at varying stages to isolate, and create/induce struggle sessions, with PTSD being common. These strategies take advantage of the natural psychology and aspects of social standing found in bureaucracies.

In favor of destroying faith/religion, aspects of sentimental moralism, nihilism, Gnosticism, and other now refuted ideologies have often been promoted in the class without naming them as such indirectly, also in media (PIXAR did this, so do others[2], Disney and Netflix included [3]). This seems to be coming from the NEA/Administrative on the school side, and Hollywood groups, and not individuals generally.

Religion is a particular important target because those with strong faith-based beliefs resist torture better. Its a strong argument for any religion.

Lying to Children has been in use since at least the late 1970s, probably well before going back to the 60s but I can't be sure. It didn't become recognized by that name until the early 90s.

With rationalism in Western society following the greeks, you boil down to first true principles, and then build back up and with that comes an intuition that allows you to model and predict which basically follows Descartes Method with a lot of useful tooling. Lying to Children takes the opposite approach. You are given flawed constructs, taught what you need to know at the time but which is brittle and doesn't reflect reality or provide use/value, then as you progress towards mastery (gnosis), you must unlearn and relearn detailed parts which are incredibly frustrating and have a conditioning effect.

Burning the Bridges is a strategy where the student is made to believe its their fault when a failure is orchestrated through structure. The teachers may not be aware of these names or the gimmick involved, they still nonetheless use it. This is used in Physics and Economics coursework most prominently in Weed-out courses. The former has often used a undisclosed method for getting significant digits and exams with causally dependent questions.The latter ambiguous language without a deterministic unique property on exam questions (i.e. you have two answers and must choose the more right one without sufficient information). The first incident is usually K12, Algebra -> Geometry -> Trigonometry, the gimmick is a change in pass criteria in conjunction with the Lying to Children structure. (I still can't get over the fact that the people involved actually call it this openly).

With regards to the cult/society process being self-sustaining I'd disagree, but only because that opinion is based in a longer time horizon than I imagine you were looking at. As an engineer I'm trained to look at the entire lifecycle.

Totalism and the antithesis ideology of the protean self are aspects that are covered in depth by Robert Lifton, some of which I disagree with. With total control which is what the former ideologies go towards, the flexibility and adaptibility vanish. This goes to darwin's fitness and puts you at risk of civilization collapse anytime you face an out-of-context problem, like Columbus and the Native Peoples. This is mainly based in what I've read with regards to history and the factors of poor and successful civilizations (Wealth of Nations, Wealth and Poverty of Nations as two starting points).

Societal collapse often comes as the result of when total control prevents adaptibility in the face of an existential crisis, with very little in the historical record.

I've included a few more links below that you may find useful. My initial response ended up being rejected so I've trimmed this down quite a bit.

[1] https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press... (pdf link on the left side about halfway down)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnXs30BHtFA

[3] Aladdin is filled with subliminals. Netflix and Disney both often have obligatory LGBTQ roles. I'm all for acceptance but the interactions often follow destructive interference patterns intended to normalize or destructively interfere.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1QYYOuQGEp0

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PaulHouleSep 2022

... right wing criticism of postmodernism has gotten popular since the 1980s when the right discovered Antonio Gramsci.

It's never been coherent because postmodernism is basically a characteristic of the culture and not an intellectual movement. (Although various intellectual movements claim the term) In short, modernist ideologies, particularly Marxism, became untenable post-1970 or so. The right wing has been a beneficiary because now it's hard to convince people that you can get ahead rationally planning anything and you might as well just be Lassez-Faire. This is just one of the of the cautionary tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

but you can see it in two great anti-architecture books that advocate for (alternatively) traditional downtowns and strip-mall construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas

Robert Jay Lifton described two examples of postmodern personality types in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...

one of those was environmental activists, the other was fundamentalist Christians, which represent a particularly stark example of turning their back on rationality. Fundamentalists believe they've got the right to pick some book and decide it is absolutely true; their original sin is that they stole a book from Jewish people and added a few mor chapters. Nothing stops Muslims or Mormons from adding more books, or for anyone who wants to drop out of rational discourse with other people from inserting any axioms or postulates they want into their own closed system.

It's true that the "woke" are just as interested in creating their own reality like Shirley McClaine as the postmodern right (witness the poor man's dialecticalism of How to be an anti-racist) but postmodernism is the ocean we swim in woke or not. It's depressing because when I asked a philosopher what comes after postmodernism the answer was "post-humanism".

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