Bugman, Fear and Dangerous Crossroads

A response to a fellow academic heretic part 3

The following is a continuation of my exchange with Good Citizen of The Good Citizen Substack.

1. Original Letter: New Religions at a Dangerous Crossroads

2. My first response: Limited Perceptions and Dangerous Crossroads

3. My second response: Science, Truth, and Dangerous Crossroads

4. Good Citizen’s latest response: A Fear of Blind Spots

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Hello Good Citizen,

Thank you for your kind words about my carpet bombing sortie on the fantasy that we have a good grasp of how things really are. I do hope some delusions have been totally destroyed.

Bugman

Bugman: …the average ‘normie’ corporate slave consumer, infatuated with all the latest trinkets and gadgets, incapable of skepticism or critical thinking, passively accepting what they’re told and then passing it off as truth. Possessing great tendency to conform, submit, obey… There is one other attribute of the Bugman that has made healthy conversations nearly impossible in our age: self-assured certainty.

AI rendition of a bugman

I’d say there is a little bugman¹ in each of us but it’s certainly on a spectrum. My guess is that most who are engaged with us on Substack demonstrate a good deal of skepticism, critical thinking and active curiosity - so sitting at the least-amount-of-bugman on the Bugman Scale for Slave Consumer Personality Disorder (BS-SCPD). I’m not sure the self-assured certainty is a personality variable unique to the bugman, as this is something even the most actively curious critical thinker can manifest (although probably with more data and analysis to back up such self-assuredness).

As you mention, the bugman is probably not engaging his right hemisphere as much as he should, thus missing some big-picture cues while focused on the abstract, decontextualised ‘thing’ the Corporation has placed in front of him. As I’ve intimated previously, this is the ‘path of least resistance’ (neurologically speaking) requiring little effort and much comfort (and/or dopamine). Each passive acceptance of whatever is placed before us leads us down the garden path, so to speak. That garden path is probably more curated for the passive than they realise. If you don’t mind I’ll rehash some things I’ve spoken about in earlier posts as they are very relevant to our current conversation…

The bugman will accept those things that make him feel included, part of the tribe, a ‘good citizen’, a savvy and ‘in the know’ person, and within the window of current cultural thinking. The Overton Window (or the Window of Discourse) describes the scope of acceptable ideas the majority of the population will accept at any given time.

Now here’s the think about the Overton Window - governments or corporations can use an understanding of the window to push thinking in a certain direction (down the garden path). It can be used to pull consumers toward a bias for a certain thing, but more often it is used by political entities to swing a populations thinking toward a certain ideology. We can see in the West - the radical movement of the window from the middle ground between freedom and government control to a totalitarian style of governance. What were extreme control positions (dispelled as conspiracy theories) some months ago are now in the middle of the Overton window as policy. Just having this model as a cognitive tool gives us much needed clarity about what opinions are where on the spectrum, who’s pushing what opinions, and how this is shifting the window (We might also glean some tactics about how to pull the window back up toward the realms of greater freedom).

Here’s what the window looks like:

There can also be a narrowing of the field of awareness (correlating to a narrowing Overton window) which, as we know, is playing right into the bias of the left hemisphere. Such narrowing either blinds someone to other possibilities on the spectrum of what’s possible or alienates those possibilities as extreme and dangerous. And this is disturbing given what Noam Chomsky² has said…

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. (Chomsky, 1998)

And isn’t this the modus operandi of the bugman? To live in a very narrow band of conversations, seemingly hotly debated, but nevertheless extremely constrained from the broader picture. This is the narrow window of opinion and debate that is carrying you along a continuum to absolute governmental control, like a train carriage without windows (you don’t see beyond the narrow perspective being fed to you) taking you to a surprise location!

The window of discourse is becoming increasingly manipulated, and easily so, primarily because the majority see the world through a small screen at the end of their arm. The very tools that have been promoted as tools of liberation are enslaving us to the toolmasters! Which brings me to a paper by Daniel Broudy and Makoto Arakaki, Who Wants to Be a Slave? The Technocratic Covergence of Humans and Data (I’d mentioned this one in the past but I’ll re-introduce it here).

The paper in question offers an important perspective of how the technocratic elites wield control over the people through mass media and the development, distribution and implementation of new technologies. The goal being the establishment of a global technocracy.

“We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.”

- John Culkin

Electronic media technology so seamlessly and completely immerses the population that its influence on the mind of the masses is largely imperceptible - like the air we breathe. Conscious awareness of the enormous reliance on today’s digital world is often not realised until we don’t have a WiFi connection, or worse, we don’t have power. Like suffocating, we are suddenly awakened to the reality and importance of oxygen!

One of the illusions of the technology revolution is the appearance of individual sovereignty and individual power, when it’s that very sovereignty and power that these tools erode through the management of elite power-brokers.

But how could we (or at least the bugman) be so manipulated? Our reality has been shaped by the message coming through the technology (a message that is primarily about commerce, reducing the human to just a consumer in a commercial world) and the bugman is not in an objective position to realise what’s going on. Like a fish in water, it’s unlikely to notice the water until it’s pulled out of it. Or to offer a more science fiction analogy (albeit completely overused by now) - like Neo in the Matrix, he couldn’t see “behind the curtain” until he took the red pill.

The algorithms created by the technocrats are compelling for the bugman - with keen insight into our psychology, our fears, our desires - all crafted for every demographic you can imagine. For authoritarian technocrats…

algorithms conditioning the masses that the neoliberal global order, managed by the technocracy, is not just advantageous but necessary. The implied message is sufficiently clear: resistance to social change engineered and enforced by these new tools is futile.

- Broudy & Arakaki (2020)

For the most part we have been reduced to producers and consumers in a society that is increasingly becoming nothing more than an economic system - perfectly OK for the left hemisphere way of being in the world, it’s just about utility right? We have been conditioned as a society that “time is money” and the pursuit of money/things (with an illusion of security) is the principle purpose of life (defining us as homo economicus).

Elon Musk talks about us having to merge with technology if we want to “add value to the economy” - a totally left hemisphere way of thinking! We are, as individuals, no longer valued as autonomous and sovereign but rather just another data point, and if we are to “add value” we should become a cyborg. Musk was particularly concerned that if we didn’t merge with the machine we would become slaves to emerging artificial intelligence, but I don’t believe this to be a reason to de-humanize ourselves and may have been just a ploy to advance his own dreams of transhumanism.

The frightening thing about “algorithms conditioning the masses” is the very real change it can make in Mr Bugman’s brain. Underpinned by genetics and sculptured by our environment, our neural architecture defines our reality - reality is a construct as far as our wetware is concerned. This is why it’s so important to be constructing a perception of reality with both hemispheres of the brain with the right hemisphere the master of the left. Not, as seems to be happening, the left hemisphere being the dominant ‘reality constructor’ based on manipulated input from those who control the narrative. If you control the environment (including the digital world), you can essentially be the chief architect of many brains within that environment.

I don’t mean to suggest you can change core attributes of a personality necessarily, although totalitarian regimes have demonstrated this in the past. But I do suggest that you can change perceptions of the world that encourage a certain bias, allegiances, hatreds and loves, on a mass scale, that would not normally be the case for any one individual. The more the bugman the better!

Effective control of the environment means controlling the narrative through the media, government, corporations. It’s controlling what we see and hear in the streets and in the virtual world through carefully curated content, censoring some and amplifying others. You know this, of course, and see it happening on an unprecedented scale, and it’s what the bugman is immersed in. His way of perceiving and conceptualising the world is shaped, on a neural level, by the consistent and persistent environment in which he lives (what he exposes himself to). The longer the propagandists can keep the bugman suspended in their unreality, the more likely it will become his default “reality”. Simply because there will be enough, and strong enough, neural synaptic connections in a brains neural architecture to make the “reality” real to the bugman - by default. His default neural activity accepts the new “reality”, has eliminated previously felt inconsistencies or incongruences, and now flows easily and effortlessly in harmony with the world that has been created for it. In lay terms he has been brainwashed.

Such a transformation in ones neural architecture has, in past tyrannies, caused well-meaning people to become avid segregationists, bigots, haters and even murderers, without an ounce of guilty conscience - but rather pride in their pure motives and upstanding behavior (I’ll get onto moralising in a minute).

All of that to agree with your last letter my Good Citizen – “Given this paradigm of global-social engineering, it seems rational to have a healthy fear of engineered blind spots”– and that there is a bit of bugman in all of us that’s susceptible to the social engineers and yes we should be afraid of the blind spots, especially the engineered ones - But this is a healthy fear that makes us conscious and alert.

Fear

We all realise that the most obvious ploy coming from the technocrats narrowing/moving window of ‘reality’ project is fear. As you mentioned “we used to have what Frank Furedi calls ‘systems of mediation’ for fear.” And I agree with you that the “corrupted expert class [has] become [the] new ‘systems of mediation’ for fear … post-humanist technocratic desire to play god certainly seems to believe it necessary to have this power to induce fear and manipulate the masses with its spell.” Absolutely!

But how have we let them get away with it? I don’t mean how have we let them use their tools, I mean how have we let them into the inner sanctum of our souls to stir up panic?

Let’s turn to the subject of morality - since we seem to be living in an increasingly demoralised society?

Since you brought up Furedi, let’s stop by his place and see what he has to offer:

One of the least understood features of the culture of fear is the significant influence of moral uncertainties on society’s reaction to threats. (Frank Furedi, How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century.)

Furedi explains that the moral order of a society are the deep structures of moral life from which we make sense of our circumstances. These deep structures involve current and historical, practical and metaphysical, personal and corporate frameworks that make up the lens through which we understand our experiences. I understand from my knowledge of Marxist subversion of the West that a demoralisation program has been undermining such moral orders of our societies for a hundred years.

The left hemisphere may know the ‘what’ of a moral order in society but not understand the ‘why’ - which is why the left hemisphere on its own can easily change or throw out elements of a moral structure in society as long as it still grasps the ‘what’ of the individual separate elements with total disregard to the ‘why’ of the whole moral structure. For example when the left-hemispheric biased Western society decides to chuck out God (because metaphysical ‘things’ are incomprehensible to the left and God get’s in the way of bureaucratic utilitarian programs), there forms a large fracture in the moral order of a society and indeed within the individuals of that society. This God vacuum is quickly filled by a substitute - today it’s ‘The Science’ - that is concrete, measurable, controllable³ (probably the most important aspect for the left hemisphere) and can provide a sense of security.

When there is moral confusion, because we have undermined our moral order, it’s like opening a door to fear, or rather missing the door altogether!

An absence of a consensus on moral issues has profound consequences for the way that communities interpret the threats they face and how they respond to them. This is one of the most important drivers of the culture of fear. (Frank Furedi)

In the absence of a “master-narrative that endows the unknown and the threat it poses” (Furedi) we are left in a weakened and confused state when framing and addressing serious threats. In the West the master-narrative used to be what the Bible taught about God⁴. There are a lot of references⁵ to not being afraid and not fearing - this is obviously a big theme in the bible and God wants believers to proactively resist fear and trust in his master-narrative of protection and salvation. When narratives of fear pop up, as they inevitably do, or actual life-threatening situations, there is a foundational default to which the believer falls back on - “fear not”. And the master-narrative provides not only the ‘what’ you must do, but the ‘why’, couched in a big picture only fully appreciated by the right hemisphere.

The curators of fear in our current age know that morality is the big red button to push when inducing panic and this comes across in the moralistic language used to incite outrage, disgust and fear. For example framing the unvaccinated as morally corrupt, selfish and mortally dangerous individuals. The unvaccinated have become a moralised threat to be corrected by the new morality of the Covidian religion. Give it a bit of time and those without a digital ID will also be categorised as morally corrupt and a threat to the new moral order. Initially the moral grounds of accusation is mere fantasy, but given enough air time, repeated enough times, made explicit (even if in an abstracted, decontextualised way, as the left hemisphere is apt at doing), it becomes part of the new moral fabric holding society together.

The moralising of threats like COVID today leave no room for skeptics - if you do not follow the public health ‘advice’ to the letter you are morally irresponsible. The sceptic is the purveyor of evil, not the “devil’s advocate⁶”, just the devil himself. Sceptics on the wisdom of the mRNA ‘vaccines’ become “anti-science”, or “science deniers”. Similarly sceptics of the global warming narrative are characterised as climate change deniers who support catastrophic global destruction. In other words, genocidal maniacs who are active participants in a total genocide (fortunately we have built some covid camps to house such criminals in the future).

Scientists, politicians, and corporations pushing a commercially favourable narrative in the public domain belies the underlying insecurity and inability to provide certainty of their ‘science’. They are ever on the defensive, guarding their dogma with religious zeal, never allowing the sceptic or critic to step up to the podium. The very spirit of exploration and experimentation of science has been undermined by a new moral code called “The Science” - a code hostile to free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Which, to bring our conversation back to your point about blind spots, makes it increasingly difficult for Mr Bugman to entertain any other thoughts than those of “The Science” moral code - every dissenter is a witch to be caught and burned for the salvation of humanity itself.

You said “We simply have to accept that we are all going to have some level of blind spots and be caught off guard, and for those reasons, we should be constantly vigilant of these traps and as you say always curious and ready to course correct.” I believe you are right here - continue to be curious, be the devil’s advocate for a moment (even with what you hold dear - just to test it), be conscious of your unconscious processes and be flexible enough to course correct. One thing we have going for us is our very large prefrontal cortex that has the capacity to consciously, and on-purpose, change our mind. literally we can purposefully rewire our neural architecture⁷ to automatically flow in a different pattern, a pattern less likely to be bugman and more likely to be an agile critical thinker who does not fall victim to predatory corporate wolves or become brainwashed by totalitarian propaganda. Awareness is everything - if you are consciously aware that you have blind spots (and some are being engineered for you), if you are consciously aware that you have a propensity to be bugman, if you are aware of societies (and your own) left brain bias, then you can do something about it. You can engage that large prefrontal cortex of yours and choose to change your mind, get educated, think more deeply about things, unplug from social media and plug into something higher than that (like God, or my Substack).

OK, I’m afraid I’m now just starting to rant. I’ll stop.

Thanks Good Citizen for the stimulating exchange. Let me know what thoughts come up for you - in any direction - I’m up for some tangents!

1. Are we allowed to say ‘bugman’ rather than ‘bugperson’? And what about the bugs? Are we being all-inclusive of all bugs or only the bugs that the dominant oppressor culture has instilled into our minds? It started, I believe, with the novel, “Of Bugs and Men” about the Great Oppression… or was it depression? Can’t remember. Anyway, some white guy started this oppression of bugs and every author (unless they are a bug) is guilty and needs to devote their penpersonship to the writing of such wrongs! I think I’m getting of the track here…

2. Before he went mad recently, wanting to rid the earth of unvaccinated vermin.

3. For the left hemisphere - the hemisphere of ‘grasping’ and toolmaking - the capacity to grasp something and to shape and manipulate it, define it, put it in a category and know ‘what’ it is, these are all important to the left hemisphere. Trying to understand the ‘why’ of a metaphysical God who cannot be grasped and manipulated, nor put in a categorical box, is an incomprehensible absurdity - not even worth investigation.

4. To be clear I’m talking about what God himself lays out in terms of a moral code in the bible, and not necessarily the ‘moral regulation’ of various manifestation of the church through the ages - some of which were no better than the current technocratic overlords, wielding their authority to impart fear and control over the masses. The meta-narrative also extends to the laws of the land that have been born out of the laws of God. Both can be abandoned and fear take the helm. Actually Furedi has a case-in-point:

In his discussion of the plague that ravaged Athens during the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Thycydides offered one of the earliest accounts of what happens when fear becomes uncoupled from a grammar of morality. Thucydides noted that as fear spread, ‘anxious citizens disregarded civic authority and violated laws and customs’ that were previously dutifully observed.’ What really worried Thucydides was not that people became too fearful but that they ceased to fear the authority of their own traditions… In years to come, this account of the decline of the custom of fearing gods in Athens served as a cautionary tale of what occurs when this emotion ceases to be guided by moral norms and traditions.

5. Google any number of lists - sorry, I mean use your preferred alternative search engine to find many lists of ‘fear nots’ from the bible.

6. Interesting history - here’s the Wikipedia entry:

The advocatus diaboli (Latin for Devil's advocate) is a former official position within the Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith: one who "argued against the canonization (sainthood) of a candidate in order to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization".

In common language, the phrase 'playing devil's advocate' describes a situation where someone, given a certain point of view, takes a position they do not necessarily agree with (or simply an alternative position from the accepted norm), for the sake of debate or to explore the thought further using valid reasoning that both disagrees with the subject at hand and proves their own point valid. Despite being medieval in origin, this idiomatic expression is one of the most popular present-day English idioms used to express the concept of arguing against something without actually being committed to the contrary view.

7. within reasonable limits - that’s a very big discussion for another time perhaps.