wheremind

It only works if everyone does it, or if you're really well prepared and have irrefutable evidence of something. If you're the only one (or even part of a small group) calling them out you just get buried. You're basically a naive amateur working against someone who has spent their life focused on getting and exploiting power. It's literally what they live for.

Imagine a random guy wandering into an MMA cage and punching Connor Mcgregor in the face. Calling out sociopaths is the social version of doing that.

They're prepared, they'll have pawns that do all their dirty work, they'll have built up a network of obligations around themselves, they'll have taken control of whatever channels of information dissemination exist within the group and be actively shaping the narrative within the organisation. Standing up and pointing them out will get the whole apparatus focused on steamrolling you. It's nasty business.

Maybe it is better to try before walking away but there's a pretty big personal cost. I've done it and wasted huge amounts of time and energy and i have no idea whether it really made any difference in the end. I think there is an endless sea of problems and you only have a finite life and aren't responsible for everyone else's decisions. If everyone else is going to tolerate BS then who am I to try to change it? There are so many people, so many organisations that you could find a hill to die on every day of the week and probably make no difference to anything. I've come to the conclusion that I'm better off just dodging that stuff when it comes up and focusing on building up healthy, loving relationships among my community rather than trying to tilt against windmills in these hierarchical social organisations.

I think my motto is basically 'eh, fuck it, I'm off' when it comes to this stuff now. I think that's how you really beat it, don't play the game.

This is the basic problem of all social organisations, not just 'subcultures', whatever they are.

Any marginally successful group attracts sociopaths. The more power available to someone installing themselves at the centre of an elite clique that runs the organisation, the more attractive it is. No-one ever sees it fully until they get on the wrong end of one of these toxic power dynamics, there is so much subtle BS working against anyone trying to face this stuff down that it's almost pointless wasting your life trying.

The only answer to the problem I've ever thought up is to burn it to the ground and start again, not very helpful but what else can you do? apart from walking away and leaving them to it.

Also, this 'Geeks,fanatics etc.' narrative will be part of the arsenal deployed against anyone trying to expose a sociopath at the centre of one of these organisations. The levels of fuckery you come up against with this stuff are so unbelievably frustrating.

Do you know a source that collects together evidence for this and presents it in a way that's relatively easy to read through?

But those things were happening before the occupy stuff.

I'm not saying there was never any problem with racism or anything, or that it's been invented just to create a diversion. I'm saying that the movements that existed before occupy around racism, sexism etc. instead of being about working for womens/minority rights suddenly became imbued with "fuck white male patriarchy".

During/after occupy they suddenly took this populist left turn into stoking resentment and ingroup/outgroup identification along race and gender lines. Obviously that stuff was always there but it suddenly blew up into the mainstream narrative and pushed everyone into taking a side.

There was a point in the occupy thing where "the one percent" morphed into "white males" and the narrative flipped from criticising the financial/political system, which was totally indefensible, into this flame war where working class white guys who thought they were the ones getting a raw deal are suddenly being portrayed as the bad guys by people who are basically spokespeople for the elite class- celebrities, university professors, politicians etc.. and those working class guys are all so surprised and pissed off by that they go and vote for Trump as a big fuck you to the source of the perceived betrayal, that's my take on it anyway.

That is the part of it that smells like a diversion, and now everyone is so heavily invested on either side of the culture war that there's almost no hope of them meeting again, at least for a good while and it's pretty much business as usual for the elites who are completely out of the spotlight again.

Yeah, I agree about the street protests themselves were pretty dysfunctional, that wasn't really what I was talking about. The protests were really only the tip of the iceberg at the time. There seemed to be a much wider focus on the gaming of systems and regulatory capture (mostly) by a financial industry that pretty much seemed to be just a state protected tool for money farmers.

I know, I'm wondering whether anyone's looked into it in the context of the occupy wall street movement. The popular consciousness was so strongly diverted at the point it began to threaten elite interests that it's at least noteworthy, yet I've never really seen it talked about much.

It may just be an artifact of the rise of social media, although I'm not sure that the timelines really match up very well. I just want to see if anyone's really looked into it because I don't even know where to start with something like that, but it's been playing on my mind for a few months now.

Yes, it seems like classic divide and conquer strategy but I have no evidence for it. the idea has been kind of obsessing me a bit recently, I'd love to see someone that has actually looked into it and tried to compile a bit of data.

It seems like this came to a head around the time of the occupy wall street protests (is it 10 years ago now?). The public consciousness became aware of the way our political/financial systems were in a kind of symbiotic conspiracy to vacuum up productivity gains, there was huge pressure to do something about it despite the media's constant stream of 'nothing to see here'..... and then nothing happened. The popular culture of the west instead decended into this en masse flame war around gender, race, sexuality etc.

Seems like there was a huge opportunity that was foiled or just missed and this is possibly going to be the result of it.