Cults and Genetically-Induced Hypnotic "Facebook Trances"
We live in an era of mass cult behavior—and we need to deprogram, fast!
…today, you can’t start a cult. Forty years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known. From the Communist Party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered. (Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014))
Peter Thiel and Blake Masters may well be right: there do seem to be fewer crazy cults — at least in person. But there is instead one big cult generating machine working to overthrow the world — Facebook. You and I both know that every cult leader living loves Facebook for identifying and then controlling people.
And this is by design, always by design. Facebook’s leadership was “attempting to encourage that ‘Facebook trace’ that kept people clicking through pages on the service,” writes David Kirkpatrick in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (2011).
Facebook was designed to be hypnotic so as to serve you ads. It was designed to radicalize you by serving you more and more dopamine. You can’t spell addiction without ad.
All cults are united in the One Big Thing — engagement as a form of exploitation and extraction. They demand attention, even, or perhaps especially, if it is negative attention. They start with liberation and end in subjugation, in much the same way all technology is presented so as to achieve mass adoption. (Tim Wu’s book, The Big Switch is particularly illustrative here.)
How is Facebook any different? Should you able to make money off of exploiting people? Should you sell alcohol to alcoholics or let gambling addicts into your casino? We have laws against this sort of thing for good reason.
In my view the problem stems from social networking being tied to advertising. We must delink social media from the advertising model — and fast.
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Our modern society is a lonely one. Roger Ailes once told me that Fox News owed its success to long legs, bold colors, and all the lonely people tuning in. As with Fox News, so, too, with Facebook.
Facebook’s success came in large measure from the mass unemployment that took place during the financial crisis. It was a place where the (f)unemployment, the underemployed, and the addicted could go and pretend that they were networking. For those of us who are more introverted it was a godsend.
But it was also a trap. I turned to my Facebook “friends” when I was lonely and found them lacking and not all that friendly. But I kept coming back — when I was going through a divorce, when I was sleep-addled, when I was experiencing that existential dread that all the gifted kids go through. Many a night in college I spent writing software or blogging and refreshing Facebook. And yes, that did tend to isolate me.
Could you blame me? This Facebook thing was pushed on me when I was but a teen — my prep school was one of the first on Facebook and I was one of the last to join. I have lived with the consequences ever since. As have so many of my generation. And so it should stop with our kids.
After all it’s the responsibility of adults to protect children. This is, I think, why the Illuminati exists.
“The society’s goals are to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and the abuses of state power. [Our intent] is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control without dominating them."
There are big forces moving against Facebook and some of them, I wager, are more powerful than Facebook itself. Best not to get in the way, even if the net effect is, as I suspect, conservatives get censored more often. Maybe we shouldn’t show our views for all to see? Maybe we shouldn’t virtue signal? Wasn’t the American Revolution plotted in quiet taverns after hours? Sometimes it’s best to be behind closed doors.
This sunsetting of Facebook is all well and good because Facebook has unleashed mass hypnosis to devastating—and profitable—effect. Where they trod other foreign academicians and later actors followed.
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Are some peoples more inclined to hypnosis than others? Do you dare ask that question? Aren’t we all the same? Not exactly.
The Scots-Irish a.ka. our rednecks, seem particularly vulnerable to hypnosis and its affects, which makes sense as James Braid, the forerunner of modern hypnosis was a Scotsman.
Arguably the greatest practitioner of hypnosis in the modern context is my friend Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame. Adams is a Scottish-American.
You might also include in that list of greatest hypnotists President Donald Trump, who is half Scottish, and who has been known to give a rally or two. (Trump’s mother, Mary Anne McLeod, hailed from the town of Lewis in the Hebrides and reportedly spoke Gaelic.)
Scott Adams has elsewhere explored Trump’s infatuation with Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale was a 33 degree Scottish Rite Freemason, along with the late Colin Powell. (Yes, really.)
How much of the power of positive thinking is real and how much is bunkum I leave to others to judge. I myself go back and forth on it, never quite glomming on to it but fearful to dismiss it entirely lest it get the better of me. A very good book on the case against is Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Religion As Pop Psychology From Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Robert (1980).
But be advised. Rednecks are weird, man, and I say this both as a fan and a very occasional fellow traveler. Anyone who has seen any member of their party speaking in tongues or attended a monster truck rally or gone mudding knows of what I speak. They do not have patience for the out group.
For those suitably interested, I highly recommend Senator James Webb’s 2004 book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.
(We’ll turn to the genetic oddity of the Scots-Irish in a later post, particularly as we explore the Sackler family and the role of the compromised FDA in its gleeful human experimentation on our redneck population. We will probe the reasons for some groups to be very skeptical of the medical establishment. I’m not quite ready to be canceled by Big Pharma just yet!)
For now let’s keep it personal rather than populational.
I carry the genes for hypnosis, according to an academic paper. Here’s how Genomelink discusses it.
Hypnosis is a technique to induce the subject into a hypnotic state. Recently, hypnotherapy is used clinically for such diverse applications like resolving trauma, improving sleep, and treating anxiety. Hypnotizability (how easily hypnotized you are) is partially a function of your genetics. Specifically, scientists found that the subjective score of "need of dependence" of test subjects under hypnosis was correlated with genetic variation in the dopamine agonist COMT gene. Those with the G allele were more in "need of dependence" than those with the A allele, and hence more easily hypnotized.
Or, if you prefer, here’s the preeminent science journal Nature talking about the subject in 2013.
People with genes that make it tough for them to engage socially with others seem to be better than average at hypnotizing themselves. A study published today in Psychoneuroendocrinology concludes that such individuals are particularly good at becoming absorbed in their own internal world, and might also be more susceptible to other distortions of reality.
Psychologist Richard Bryant of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and his colleagues tested the hypnotizability of volunteers with different forms of the receptor for oxytocin, a hormone that increases trust and social bonding. (Oxytocin's association with emotional attachment also earned it the nickname of 'love hormone'.) Those with gene variants linked to social detachment and autism were found to be most susceptible to hypnosis. [Emphasis mine.]
Could this Nature discussion be a forerunner of “weaponized autism”? Or General Michael Flynn’s “digital soldiers”?
How powerful an army would a hypnotized army be? Quite powerful when you consider that there are at least 27 million Scots-Irish.
It gets more disturbing. The Nature article continues:
The researchers used a questionnaire to test the participants’ ability to become absorbed in internal and imagined experiences, and tested them for variants of the oxytocin-receptor gene at two places in the gene sequence — rs53576 and rs2254298 — that that increase the risk of social detachment and autism. Participants with these variants scored highest for hypnotizability and absorption.
[Researcher] Bryant suggests that as well as being more hypnotizable, such individuals might “be influenced to have a range of experiences that more reality-based people cannot”. For example, this capacity might help to explain why some people respond better to placebos, or are more likely to accept paranormal or religious experiences.
“At this point we do not know anything about genetic bases of suggestibility per se,” says Bryant. “The current finding does provide some direction for exploring this.”
Aleksandr Kogan of the University of Cambridge, UK, who works on the genetics of social psychology, says that the results fit well with what is known about the oxytocin-receptor gene, particularly for variants at site rs53576. Among white people, these influence an individual’s sensitivity to social cues, he says. “That this would reflect a difference in internal experiences makes sense.”
Aleksandr Kogan?! Where have I heard that name before?
Kogan began working for Cambridge Analytica in June 2014 and to mine private Facebook user data. Kogan received grants from the Russian government to research “stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks,” according to The Guardian.
Why?
And were the Russians alone in funding this sort of research? It seems hard to believe.
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The feud between Facebook and Apple is detailed in elaborate detail here.
I myself tripped over this long standing cold war when Tim Miller, my erstwhile friend, was hired by Facebook to attack Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook. You can read about that whole imbroglio in the New York Times. That anti-Apple initiative was approved by none other than Sheryl Sandberg though her subordinate (and one-time boyfriend) Eliot Schrage took the fall.
Why does Sheryl always seem to avoid getting in trouble?
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You can tell a lot about a company by how much it values its customers’ well being.
One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster. (Walter Isaacson, “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs,” Harvard Business Review, April 2012.)
Think about that. Apple may well be the only productivity cult and its consciously modeled that way, too.
Facebook, by contrast, is stealing from people their most precious of resources — attention and time.
So then is Facebook then killing people? President Joe Biden says they are when it comes to covid. Maybe Facebook is killing people in all kinds of ways.
My 2020 was particularly rough. Locked down and lonely, I turned inward and online. I had thought I might take my life the year before and fearing the worse, I broke off from all things that were making my life worse — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. Well, they were killing my productivity and they weren’t totally secure. They were being used for bad things, as the Wall Street Journal Facebook series makes clear, but were they bad for me? Were they killing me?
And what does this mean for free will anyway?
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I’ve begun something of a study of cults, partly because I want to be a better entrepreneur.
“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults,” wrote Thiel and Masters. “The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fantastically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fantastically right about something those outside it have missed.”
Both startups and cult are ultimately about selection. One group selects sheep; the other, free men and women, who make arguments and criticize one another. They hire very selectively because they realize that once someone is on the ship it’s hard to kick them off.
I run a pretty fun right-thinking documentary group. Message me if you’d like to be a part of it. We have a great list of them.