Hive minds

The Z-man explains a situation that I've observed for many years, but which previously I would have been hard pressed to explain or even accept and believe. I think many on the "right", or even those who call themselves on the right even as their positions have shifted to the left, are in that same boat.

Vox Day and even Heartiste have been beating this drum from other angles for some time, notably pointing out that rhetoric speaking people are completely immune to dialectic, and that it is literally impossible to change their mind about anything by proving that they're wrong factually. The only way to do so is to break them free of the emotional hold that their beliefs have on them. Whether by shaming, or outgrouping, or something else—nothing else will have any impact.

This presents quite the conundrum to members of the Church, of course. Shaming isn't exactly Christian behavior when it comes to convincing people to abandon the error of their ways. But if it's literally the only thing that works? On the other hand, in limited situations, even the elect of God have not been immune to it. Elijah certainly wasn't averse to shaming the Israelites for their support of the priests of Baal. Outgrouping has even more support in the scriptures; they are rife with instructions from the Lord that if people will not repent then they should not be considered part of the body of Christ.

Still, I regret to say that I'm not exactly offering solutions here, because I don't know what they are. I'm merely describing a problem that clearly exists.

Regardless, emergent behavior is a real thing and accepting it is key to understanding and predicting the behavior of the forces of darkness. [...] We have a real world example of it this week at the Olympics. This was supposed to be the Olympics where the glories of black girl magic broke through the toxic masculinity of white supremacist culture. Instead, Naomi Osaka was bounced by a nobody in the tennis competition. Then, Simone Biles led her team to a stunning second place finish in the first phase of the gymnastics competition. She topped it off by quitting on her team in the finals and they lost to the Russians.

Inside the hive, this was not expected. They had prepped their stories celebrating black girl magic and side pieces on diversity being the strength of the team. The jock sniffers were in the pumpkin patch waiting for the great pumpkin to arrive only to have reality turn up instead. Faced with disconfirmation, they did not throw down the paper straws from their soy lattes and question the power of black girl magic. Instead, they frantically scanned their hive looking for support in their belief.

Eventually, one of them came up with a way to fit this unexpected turn of events into the narrative of black girl magic. You see, Biles was not a petulant loser who quit on her team at the biggest moment. No, she is a hero for selflessly omitting herself from the competition so the team could carry on without her. Within minutes every sports reporter was blinking this signal to the other members of the hive. By the end of the day, this was the official narrative being told on every sports show.

The reductionist looks at this and assumes there must have been word from central command that instructed everyone to get on board with the new story. At the hollowed out volcano where the deep state operates, they had a meeting, and this new narrative was created and quickly e-mailed to all sports ninnies. It is an exaggeration, but that is how many on the right assume the media operates. They believe it is carefully choreographed performance operating along rational lines.

Instead, what is the norm, as in the case of the Olympics story, is something similar to what Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter observed in their study of the Seekers, a UFO cult in the 1950’s. Faced with the undeniable disconfirmatory evidence, individuals look to the rest for support in maintaining the belief. If there is strong enough social support, they find a way to rationalize the disconfirmation within the general framework of their beliefs.

This is the natural behavior of radical groups. They have strong social relationships within the group, because it is ultimately the point of the group. The members join as a form of self-abnegation. They swap their hated sense of self with the identity of the group, which is why they are fiercely loyal to the group. It is also why they treat criticism of the group as a physical attack. From their perspective, it is an attack on their person, because their person is fully integrated into the collective.

This is why left-wing groups are immune to reality. The fact-driven right-winger can spend his life presenting his evidence and the radicals will either ignore the disconfirmation or assimilate it into the ideology, like a snake digests its meal. There is no shot caller at the top directing it. The members are not conscious of it. Those silly sports reporters covering for the Simone Biles are not even aware of what they are doing, because they have lost all self-awareness.

This is why that left-wing person in your life acts different in isolation than they do when within their hive. Their on-line behavior, for example, is aggressive in defense of the hive, while in person they are often quite meek. On-line, they have the sense of being in the collective, so they act accordingly. In person, they are the soldier isolated from his unit, thinking of nothing but getting home. It is also why the radicals are the most intensely on-line. Social media has become their virtual hive.

Speaking of which, the CDC creates this with a straight face, mocking the NPCs by... using the NPC meme to refer to vaxx-takers. You can't make this stuff up.