The Involution of the Liberal Mind

The left is treating a Netflix drama like it’s real life, marking a turning point in mass liberal psychosis.

Leslie Lee

Some years ago I was provided a fascinating psychological experience in the form of a young graduate student in the English literature program, whom I encountered because they (you heard me) was (God that’s grammatically awkward) married to a colleague. She (I’m not doing this anymore) specialized in the study of propaganda, by which of course she meant everything her backwards conservative parents in Nowhere, Nebrahoma believed, and not anything she believed. One evening, after enthusiastically explaining the symbolism of the inverted pentagram tattooed on her shoulder, she informed me with invincible confidence that not only was gender an arbitrary social construction, but that even the idea of biological sex was nothing more than convention. Her reasoning, which I presume she’d gleaned from a seminar on radically liberatory queer theory, was that testosterone levels fluctuated during the day, so ‘males’ changed their degree of ‘maleness’ all the time, and how can something that’s constantly changing be used as the basis for a hard binary distinction?

“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”

“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”

The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.

It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.

Paul Jackson

There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.

It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.

The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity. After watching the show, Two-Tier Keir Starmer took it as an excuse to denounce the influence of Andrew Tate and other male influencers:

Online, he said, they were finding a new kind of role model – one that too often did not have their best interests at heart. “These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain. They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, that strength means never showing emotion, and that the world, including women, is against them.”

Here you can see an address to Parliament given by a frog-faced scold with the improbably Dickensian name of Anneliese Midge demanding that the show be screened in schools around the country to educate children about the urgent problem of boys listening to men telling them they should stand up for themselves being turned into mass murderers by the manosphere. The show is feeding calls to ban teenagers from social media and ban phones from schools. None of the leftlings worked up into a frenzy by this fictional creation seem to understand that it is an entirely fictional creation. Now, sure, you can argue that this is all just typical regime cynicism, and you’re probably most right about that ... but in Starmer’s response to Midge, he has a Freudian moment and refers to the show as a documentary. It’s much easier to lie when you believe your own lies, as any clinical narcissist will tell you.

What makes Adolescence particularly insidious is that the lie it tells is a patchwork of partial truths. There is, in fact, a problem with knife crime in Britain; social media is, in fact, having a catastrophic impact on the mental health of many of its users.

The stabbings, however, are not being committed by 13-year-old white boys, but overwhelmingly by the replacement migrants the British establishment has imported from Jamaica, Africa, and Pakistan. The stabbings also have absolutely nothing to do with social media, but are the result of an imported population characterized by high time-preference and low IQ, enabled by the permissive atmosphere created by the British state’s lenient treatment of its favoured client group’s shenanigans, and egged on by its relentless demonization of the native white population, which implicitly gives those client groups license to assault white people (and, for that matter, one another) at will.

The boy Netflix tells you is doing the stabbing vs the boys actually doing the stabbing.

Obviously the underlying causes of British knife crime are not something the liberal establishment wants to discuss, because the liberal establishment is the underlying cause of that problem. It’s much easier for them to displace the epidemic onto the most powerless demographic in the West: pre-pubescent white boys.

As to social media, it has fried a great number of brains, but it is mostly not the brains of young men that are being cooked, but rather those of young women. The mental health of young women fell off a cliff after they were introduced en masse to social media. However, as with the actual origin of knife crime, this is also not something the liberal establishment wants to discuss, because emotionally unstable young women are a core part of the electoral coalition propping up that liberal establishment (the other part being the aforementioned migrants). Indeed, the explosion in psychiatric disorders amongst young women has been accompanied by their political radicalization to such a close degree that the two phenomena are essentially indistinguishable.

Source

The political radicalization of young men, in contrast, is a lagging indicator which seems to be occurring largely as a frustrated response to the wild-eyed madness that has been induced in the girls they would like to date, but can’t, because they’re insane now. Insofar as social media plays a role in the political awakening of young men – and it does play a significant role – it is mainly that it has enabled young men to get together, compare notes, and realize that they aren’t crazy for seeing the things they see, because other guys see them too. If anything, social media has contributed to making young men less crazy, because it’s the only environment in which they can partially escape the longhouse and its maddened den mothers.

The regime’s ideal situation is that young women remain radicalized in favour of the regime, non-white client groups remain free to terrorize the helots and keep them in line, and young white men remain cowed and complacent. From the regime’s perspective, young white men becoming radicalized on social media is an existential threat. There is no social force which can topple a government more rapidly. Thus, when an entirely made-up miniseries about fictional characters offers them the ability to displace the structurally necessary crimes of one client group and the enabling psychiatric pathologies of another client group onto the outgroup they most urgently need to keep oppressed, their minds seize on it without troubling themselves in the slightest about the trifling detail that none of it is true.

We’ve been used to this disconnect between reality and the liberal imagination for some time – pregnant men, one race the human race, the hysteria over climate change and COVID, Trump as a Russian asset, and so on and so forth – but generally liberals have at least tried to give their lunacy a patina of epistemic plausibility by laundering their narratives through the propaganda media and the academic publication mill. Generating a moral panic on the basis of a fictional TV show feels like something new and very dark, a terminal rupture with reality, a deliberate plunge into an entirely virtual hall of hyperreal mirrors in which signifiers point endlessly at other signifiers without the signified being anywhere in sight.

“There is no Moon.”

When an Artificial Intelligence model is fed its own input as training data, the model will tend to degrade over time, losing detail with each iteration like a series of photocopies until the model collapses into a fuzz of noisy static.

Something similar, I think, is happening with liberals. They’ve become trapped in their own illusions, eating a media diet that consists entirely of their own propaganda, and then generating new propaganda that simply refers back to the old propaganda in an endless entropic Ouroboros. Meanwhile, the quality of the propaganda they generate is degrading rapidly: the deceptions in the news media or the academic literature get more transparent and less convincing with every iteration; the entertainment media gets less compelling, more poorly written, with worse special effects and less impressive acting; their literature devolves into hamfisted sermons mashed together with smut; their computer games feature worse stories, uglier characters, clumsy game mechanics, bugs, and degrading animation quality.

As the output of the Large Liberal Model decays, it becomes much less interesting to those not already held captive to it, who increasingly tune it out; and for those on its periphery, easier to escape as its ability to fascinate evaporates. Those trapped deep in the model sense the power of the model – and with it, their political power – evaporating, and respond with panic and rage, furiously prompting the model to generate ever more deranged outputs in an attempt to bully and shame apostates into providing the model with their lives’ limited attention loci. This is effective at more firmly locking down the minds of those already deep within the model’s embrace, but utterly ineffective at attracting new customers.

Eventually, the unstable construct of distortions and outright falsehoods that liberalism is based upon is destined to disappear into a shrieking howl of distorted static, and it will take the minds of its adherents with it. That is not necessarily a metaphor – the brains hooked into that model will essentially have their wiring undone, because this is just what happens when a neural network is forced to ingest an information diet consisting solely of incoherent contradictions. It will cause actual brain damage; indeed we already see this happening.

But before model collapse reaches the terminal phase, its drones can still do a lot of damage. This is essentially a mass psychotic break, in which a huge part of the population comes untethered from reality in a way that I’m not sure has ever quite happened before. We’ve always had the ability to spread bullshit within our cultures: infection of the mind by contagious nonsense parasites is the primary failure mode opened by the evolution of grammar, rendering the human mind uniquely vulnerable to memetic attack. Every avenue of information transfer is also an attack surface; this is why there is no such thing as a secure device on the Internet. There are many examples in history of mass hysterias leading to mass destruction and mass death. But we’ve never before had the media technologies that developed during the long twentieth century, which enable us to wall our minds off entirely from the real world, filtering every perception through the demonic portals of the black mirrors we surround ourselves with.

Erskine

The left was very quiet after Trump won the 2024 election. Some might say too quiet. Many predicted that there would be a wave of violence, and when that did not happen immediately, others claimed that the left was beaten, that the elites had switched sides, that the woke was being put away.

Personally, I think the election simply threw them into a state of temporary shock. Unwelcome reality intruded in a way that they could not ignore into their imaginary world, and they had to figure out how to incorporate this perturbation into their self-referential hallucination ... not by accepting the implications of the reality, of course, as this would shatter the model, but rather by warping the new data until it could be sufficiently fictionalized to maintain consistency.

We’ve seen them do this before: Hillary didn’t lose the 2016 election, Russia hacked it! But at least that time they had the decency to fake an intelligence report, rather than relying on a Netflix drama.

They seem to be coming out of their funk. Not, at least yet, by rioting. Instead, we’re seeing an epidemic of vandalism against Tesla vehicles, dealerships, and charging stations, as revenge against the evil Martian Fuhrer Elon Musk: in some cases, swastikas are keyed into the sides of peoples’ cars; in others, buildings are firebombed and shots are exchanged with responding police. At the same time, conservatives are getting SWATed, and InfoWars reporter James White was shot outside his home, which many are speculating was an assassination.

This is all uncoordinated stochastic terrorism: mentally unstable individuals popping off due to incitement by the screeching liberal hive mind. In their heads, they’re responding to an imaginary epidemic of racist attacks against minorities, or rape culture, or violence against trans ‘women’, or the controlled demolition of Our Bureaucracy ‘Democracy’, or (I suppose) the planet which is literally burning right now as we speak (can’t you feel the flames?) In practice, they’re just crazed, lost people, shadowboxing with the ghosts that torment their imaginations ... but doing very real damage along the way.

Perhaps this will all die down quickly, and Nothing Will Ever Happen again, just like it did during the COVID lockdowns and Floyd riots of 2020. Perhaps the authorities will succeed in arresting so many of them that it dissuades the rest. Perhaps, even, they’ll snap back to reality. Lol.

But perhaps not.

They’re eating their own effluent now: openly generating fictional narratives, which they admit are fictional, and responding to these as though they were true, without apparently realizing that this is what they’re doing. There are no atrocities you cannot convince people to commit once you can convince them of anything, and the liberal mind is now completely permeable to the media ecosystem that feeds it – completely captured by it, and completely impenetrable to any feedback from reality. That they can’t win is irrelevant: they tell themselves they can win, because the good guys always win, and they’re the good guys, just like the Avengers and the Jedi and the Griffendors, so they will win, even if winning is impossible. That it will be self-destructive is also irrelevant, for the same reason: those arrested or killed as they strike against the fascists in their midst will be made heroes and martyrs, just like Luigi Mangione and Obi Wan Kenobi, which will only encourage the rest.

We’re used to thinking of the left like this.

But as liberal model collapse takes liberal minds with it, we may be faced with something more like this.

I have no idea how to deal with that problem. You can’t have rational discussions with people who are locked out of reality, whose information diet is composed entirely of self-generated fictions, and who – like that pronouned grad student – will simply terminate any interaction that threatens their psychic parasite with toxic facts. You can’t convince them of things, because their psyche is completely walled off.

This is why psychiatric hospitals just throw psychotic patients in padded rooms, restrain them so they can’t injure themselves or others, chemically sedate them, and then gradually try to talk them back to something approaching sanity. That’s a long, labour-intensive process. What do you do when it’s tens of millions of people all across the Western world, all hooked together into one vast, all-encompassing, self-reinforcing, epistemically closed collective hallucination? There aren’t enough padded cells; there aren’t enough psychiatrists.

There’s no organization to infiltrate: this isn’t a terrorist network like the Weather Underground or an intelligence operation like the KGB, it’s all happening out in the open on TikTok and Reddit and cable news shows. There are no orders being given, not even much in the way of incitement in the legally actionable sense of specific instructions to do specific bad things to specific people. It’s all demonization and insinuation, fed into minds that have been completely pureed and agitated into a state of permanent frothing hysteria.

And yes, obviously, some of you are going to say, well we’ll just have to respond in kind. And I’m sure some of you have very respectable 200-yard groupings. Things could escalate very quickly from there. That’s how dirty wars start: not a nice clean civil war with clearly defined boundaries, uniforms, rules of engagement, chains of command, and so on – you know, like the famously orderly Spanish and American civil wars – but an absolute mess of random stabbings, assassinations, bombings, IEDs, FPV drone attacks, and mass shootings, perpetrated by atomized populations, thoroughly geographically intermixed but irreparably psychically sundered, neighbour against neighbour, sister against brother. Not even a war of religion or ideology, but something drastically worse – a war of divergent, mutually incompatible realities, which cannot be reconciled even at the level of basic facts about the world.

That’s what could happen in the US, where the left is watching everything they built over decades being dismantled in quick-time by a hostile new government that was elected to do precisely that, and are therefore being driven to an increasingly desperate rage as it’s all taken away just as they were on the cusp of total cultural victory. In the rest of the Western world, the left remains firmly in power locally, but their panic at what’s happening in Washington – and within their own restive populations – is no less, and the psychosis manifests in different ways: torturing their captive populations like abusive parents, threatening to escalate the pointless and unwinnable war with Russia into a general Armageddon that they’ll draft their problematic and unwilling young men to go fight.

Leave the psychos in power, and they’ll burn it all down; remove them from power, and they’ll burn it all down. Try to reason with them, and their psychosis drowns out every word you say; bite your tongue, and their paranoia invents things you never said.

I don’t really have any obvious, easy solutions to this. Even if things don’t devolve into mass violence, dealing with millions of people undergoing a permanent mass psychotic break cannot be anything but a total mess. All I can say is, stay alert, keep your head on a swivel, try to keep your wits about you, practice cognitive hygiene, and don’t go looking for trouble. No storm lasts forever; if nothing else, I doubt they’ll have the biological energy to keep it up for long ... the psychic parasite they’re enslaved to is draining their bodies dry, something we’ve also been seeing happen in real time. One way or another, we’re going to win this thing.

But things might get weird for a while.

Erskine

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