Yves here. Please get a cup of coffee for this very important, carefully argued article. A long-standing reader and sometime contributor, albrt, describes an important set of behaviors that drive elite incompetence and malfeasance. albrt argues that many exhibit behaviors that he calls hypersociality. At risk of oversimplification, it consists of extreme sensitivity to and ability to act on social signals, combined with a high level of ambition and not much in the way of intellectual/problem solving inclinations. They get ahead by navigating well in organizations and building coalitions, and not by doing their jobs all that well, as in achieving tangible outcomes that would entail application of effort and might annoy some interest groups.
Needless to say, hypersociality promotes other organizational-competence-destroying behaviors, from not calling out lousy performance and project failures, to turning a blind eye to corruption and regulatory abuses.
Perhaps European readers will beg to differ, but I see Ursula von der Leyen as the personification of this pathology.
In a 2008 article in the Conference Board Review, your humble blogger commented on an element of this pathology….although I am not sure which way the causality goes, as in whether the insistence on optimism helped promote hypersociality, or vice versa:
In the business world, we’ve moved from hardheaded to feel-good management. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway observed recently: “For people in any position of authority the ability to say no is the most important skill there is. . . . No, you can’t have a pay rise. No, you can’t be promoted. No, you can’t travel club class. . . . An illogical love of Yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default position must be Yes. By contrast, No is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing.”
However, people who have hypersociality-level interpersonal skill levels and also very intelligent and an appetite for complexity are even more dangerous. They wind up in fields like private equity, where they use their high level of manipulation skills to loot on a massive scale, via steering investors into contracts that with high fees and give “the money” shockingly few rights, deploy complex leverage and tax structures to goose returns, and profit handsomely even when they drive the investee companies into bankruptcy.
By albrt. Originally published at his website
I don’t subscribe to Xitter but there are a few accounts I follow by manually checking in on them. Xitter personality @armchairw, aka Armchair Warlord, recently announced his semi-retirement from the platform (temporarily I hope). The Warlord has been one of the leading examples of an internet rando who produced better and more accurate content than any overpaid minion of the lamestream media in the United States or Western Europe.1 As a tribute, I thought I would bestir myself to finish a post I began several weeks earlier inspired by one of his Xweets.
The absolute rout of Labour in the May 7th local elections in Britain after it swept into power with a huge majority in the last round made me realize something that I’ve perhaps only circled around before.
This is a pattern. Let’s return to the Davos Regime.⬇️
We’ve actually seen this for years now in the West, electoral cycle after electoral cycle. Party A takes a certain paraliberal policy course – let’s call it the Universal Davos Policy – that heavily favors special interests and globalism, and which is wildly unpopular with citizens because it necessarily entails continued degradation of Western standards of living (via self-destructive economics from war and/or green policy) and cultural cohesion (via mass migration and official woke nihilism).Party B then campaigns against this state of affairs, scores a massive win in a protest vote, and continues the Universal Davos Policy unchanged, sneering all the while at anyone who suggests they should actually fulfill the campaign promises that got them into power. Party A then takes advantage of voters’ short memories to get back into power on another landslide protest vote, or in more fractured political systems Party C wins the protest vote… and they continue the Universal Davos Policy unchanged.
So far the Warlord is just stating facts about the uniparty dynamic that currently prevails in most Western democracies. The next part of the Warlord’s post is what got me thinking in a slightly novel direction.
A note here on how exactly the Davos Regime works – it’s entirely upstream of policymaking. Davos controls the mechanisms of political opinion-making through control of academia and media and thus shapes the Overton Window of respectable political discourse to benefit a class of elite transnational oligarchs. Sometimes they use sturdier levers on the politicians who hold formal power – donor pressure, blackmail, even direct and presumably very credible threats to life and limb. They have a regular convention at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; ergo why I’ve taken to calling them the Davos Regime.
It is worth noting that the Davos Regime is very powerful but actually fairly stupid, because it has inherited the arrogance, incuriosity and inward-looking parochialism of the Western hyper-elite. Thus we see repeated fiascos when Davos has to interact with powers that have more serious political systems, like Iran, Russia, and China.But it is good – terrifyingly good – at not just bending Western politicians to its will but in fact molding them like clay from their first political principles onwards.
That, my friends, is who rules us.
The interesting thing about this description is that it so closely resembles descriptions of the Bilderbergers, the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, the Whore of Babylon, the Freemasons, or any of the other shadowy cabals that have been postulated to control Western governments for centuries. Use of words like “they” (who?) and “control” (how?) imply a structural hierarchy, but it always turns out to be impossible to identify anyone issuing specific orders, or a mechanism for those orders to be implemented consistently. This makes it easy to dismiss all such descriptions as conspiracy theories cooked up by yarn-diagramming losers.
I do not say this to devalue the Warlord’s observations. What strikes me is the uniformity of the shadowy cabal observations over decades and even centuries. For a long time now people have been saying that Western governments are controlled by a secretive entity for the simple reason that our elites and sub-elites really do appear to coordinate their actions to an extraordinary degree.
So how to explain the observed fact that elites move in a lockstep, class-conscious fashion that is completely alien to the experience of dull normals in a nominally individualistic society, and is also completely alien to the individualistic models of the world put forward by the very same elites?
Perhaps more important at this historical moment, why are the concerted actions of elites so extraordinarily dishonest, stupid, and destructive that they undermine the very institutions from which the elites would otherwise appear to benefit?
The Hypersociality Hypothesis
The Warlord’s post reminded me of a blog post by Zvi Mowshowitz from early 2021.I’ve thought about that blog post often since then. By early 2021 it had become obvious that the people in charge of COVID policy in the United States were doing and saying patently dishonest and idiotic things.2 Mowshowitz had developed an internet following by the simple expedient of saying things about COVID that were not patently dishonest or idiotic. He wrote a post to explain why he could never be appointed as a COVID czar to fix the things that were wrong with the U.S. government’s approach to COVID.
I quoted Mowshowitz in a 2023 post at Naked Capitalism:
The government is like any other moral maze. If you want to succeed, you modify yourself to be someone who instinctively plays the political game of success, seeks power and forms an implicit coalition with others who seek power. You implicitly reward power seekers and those with power, and punish those without power and who do not seek power, without thinking about it. If you didn’t, the others in the game would notice you thinking about it, or worse notice you failing to act on it, and punish you accordingly.
You instinctively know that you must continuously demonstrate your commitment to power seeking, and to rewarding your allies and being with the program, or else you won’t be a reliable person who can be trusted to do what is required. You must avoid motive ambiguity, and make it clear that you are not going to sacrifice considerations of power to improve physical world outcomes or otherwise do the ‘right thing,’ or to assert the true answer to a question simply because it is true.
Mowshowitz used the example of Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC at the time, suggesting a null hypothesis that she “is a utility maximizer, has the utility function of F(p+r) where p=power and r=being right, and chooses to produce along the production possibilities frontier, making tradeoffs where she can be less right to gain power, so she can in other places sacrifice some power to say more things that are right.”
In my model, that’s not how someone in her position thinks at all. She has no coherent utility function. She doesn’t have one because, to the extent she ever did have one, it was trained out of her long ago, by people who were rewarding lack of utility functions and punishing those who had coherent utility functions with terms for useful things. The systems and people around her kept rewarding instinctive actions and systems, and punishing intentional actions and goals.
Thus, she does what seems like the thing to do at the time rather than thinking about things in terms of trade-offs. Sometimes that does a reasonable job mimicking trade-offs and making reasonable decisions, sometimes it doesn’t.
I said at the time this seemed like “a plausible mechanism for transforming purportedly smart people at least part way into idiots.” But wait a minute, isn’t the CDC mostly a scientific organization full of nerds? Who ever heard of nerds with high instinctive levels of social awareness? I know people who work for the federal government and don’t act the way Mowshowitz portrays them. At least not always, or not always instinctively or skillfully.
Mowshowitz’s post is satisfyingly bitter and cynical, but after thinking it over for a few years,3 it’s simply not consistent with my experience. Most of the people in these institutions aren’t achieving great power and they did not take the job because they thought they would achieve great power. They would probably like a promotion, but they’re more likely to sign up for a masters degree from an online program than to invent a secret signaling system. A couple of recent posts from Aurelien and Nel Bonilla give thicker and more accurate descriptions of life in a bureaucratic institution.4 Still, I think Mowshowitz was onto something. It just doesn’t apply to everybody.
Today I hope to take another step toward understanding why our elites appear to be so transparently dishonest and stupid by proposing something I will tentatively call the “Hypersociality Hypothesis.” This Hypothesis was developed by saying “hmmm” after I mentally connected the Warlord’s post with Mowshowitz’s post, and then by working it out as you see it on this blog. No AI models were molested in the formation of this Hypothesis.
The Hypersociality Hypothesis assumes that social skills and tendencies of the type Mowshowitz described are unevenly distributed in all human groups (including groups like the CDC that are highly bureaucratic and composed mostly of nerds), and that all human groups of more than two or three dozen people have individuals with the following constellation of traits:
- Exceptional ability to send and receive social cues instinctively. People who have high levels of this ability tend to recognize and value the same trait in others, and often form cliques. This tendency is recognizable at every level from late primary school onward, and it reminds most people of their secondary education experience (aka high school in the United States). It continues and becomes more sophisticated after high school. Positioning within the clique matters more to adherents than truth or any nerdy definition of goodness such as alleviating human suffering. The ideas and conventions adopted by Hypersocial cliques reflect this.
- Above average intelligence but little interest in complex or abstract analysis.Relative intelligence will vary by groups, but for most bureaucratic jobs “above average” means a little more intelligence than necessary to complete an ordinary college curriculum. Extraordinary subtlety or analytical ability are definitely not required, and in fact filtering out complexity may be as important as perceptivity. What I’m trying to capture here is a trait formerly known in the popular idiom as “An Eye for the Main Chance.” Donald Trump is an excellent example of this trait, although not necessarily of the other two Hypersociality traits. For our purpose today the “main chance” is defined by whatever it takes to be accepted as important and powerful by other Hypersocial people: money but also other means of dominance within the clique.
- Exceptional willingness to conform to patterns of behavior dictated by social cues. As Musa al-Gharbi has pointed out, the ability to conform to accepted opinions may now be the primary filtering objective of the university system that is credited with forming the basis for quasi-elite PMC status in the United States. This willingness exists in many people, but compliance is not Hypersociality without the other components.
These three characteristics define Hypersocial people. Together they give Hypersocial individuals self-confidence and comfort in their institutional settings. They follow a path similar to what Mowshowitz described, instinctively prioritizing social signals over rational thought, and punishing people who don’t do the same with shunning and cancellation. They exist even within nerdy groups such as CDC scientists—at least a few of them skated through advanced degree programs based on social skills, willingness to conform, and an Eye for the Main Chance. But they are rarely a majority, and they are not necessarily top leaders.
These initial observations about Hypersocial people may not seem particularly controversial. We all experienced high school cliques whether we went to rural farm schools or nerdy science magnet schools. What I’m proposing is that adult reality is like the beginning of the movie Heathers, except the explosions and other resulting bad things are much bigger. On the other hand, if we follow this analogy to its logical conclusion is Donald Trump Christian Slater? And does that make Marjorie Taylor Greene Winona Ryder? OK, nevermind. Movie analogies might not be the best way to do social science, even for those of us who only aspire to be organic intellectuals. Let’s get back to the Hypothesis.
What is novel, at least to me, is the idea that Hypersocial cliques are more than just an annoyance. I’m suggesting they are important enough to explain a lot of the uniformity and irrationality of elite behavior in modern Western institutions. Not everybody is Hypersocial, but all groups contain Hypersocial members. Thus Hypersocial cliques form a vertical structure within institutions, connecting the top leadership with the base level employees. At the same time the cliques within institutions connect between institutions, probably more effectively now than they did in the days when such communication was mostly limited to physical meetings and conferences.
Returning to Bonilla, the Hypothesis may appear at first glance to be contrary to her description of deep and detailed bureaucratic planning, but I don’t think it is. Bureaucrats have more agency and coherence than an infinite band of monkeys with typewriters, but not by such a large margin as one might hope. The organic adaptation that Bonilla describes within these organizations is certainly real, but it is not well explained by literal interpretation of work product. Very few of the documents produced by a bureaucracy give clear orders that are consistent with ultimate results, and ultimate results are only vaguely consistent with (some of) the documents produced. A lot of words are compiled within bureaucratic institutions, but there is also plenty of mystery as to how we end up with the results that we get.
As Bonilla says
The entire point of institutionalized planning in complex systems is that no one needs to be “in charge” in the sense of a single, commanding mind. The institutions themselves—through their procedures, their career paths, their funding streams, and their ideological assumptions over the decades or even centuries—produce coherence without a central planner.
I think “coherence” overstates the case, but certainly bureaucratic institutions create work product, and then the people who have agency extending outside the institution act in ways that can be compared to the earlier work product. But I think there is another force at work setting boundaries for both the internally facing work product and the externally facing actions. That force is the Hypersocial clique in every institution, which is also connected to similar cliques in other institutions.
I’m also suggesting that Hypersocial cliques can achieve levels of solidarity and coordination that seem impossible to ordinary people. Hypersociality can appear to function almost as a superpower. Hypersocial cliques have an almost magical ability to define and enforce the limits of acceptable behavior, discourse, and goals without needing to be directed by anyone or to disseminate explicit instructions. This seeming impossibility amounts to invisibility, which in turn allows criticisms of oligarchic control to be dismissed as conspiracy theories.
When I say institutions, I don’t just mean government bureaucracies. Universities and journalistic institutions are particularly important examples of institutions that produce discourse as a primary product. I am suggesting that discourse is largely controlled by invisible cliques within the institutions. indeed, these institutions seem to have become more of a destination for Hypersocial types in the past few decades/ They are less nerdy than in the days of my youth, and more obsessed with personal issues of image, identity, and status of the sort that matters to Hypersocial cliques.
Equally important, Hypersocial cliques are not limited to lamestream institutions. Peter Turchin discusses counter-elites. Their institutions have corresponding Hypersocial cliques with their own sets of signals. The Hypothesis seems to fit with Musa al-Gharbi’s description of how wokeness-mongers have operated within symbolic capitalist institutions. It equally fits with how anti-wokeness-mongers operate within institutions that purport to oppose wokeness. A detailed study of how lamestream signals interlock with counter-signals would be fascinating, but is more than I can provide today. But I would guess that the signals are more legible to the Hypersocial clique across the aisle than to non-Hypersocial people on the same team.
Finally, members of the Hypersocial clique are not necessarily the ones who have the formal power to make promotion decisions or who advance fastest within the institution. They are the ones who internalize unstated criteria, and they are the ones who cancel the people who fail to meet the unstated criteria before any formal promotion decision is made. In fact, formalizing a criterion such as wokeness by writing it into policy and job descriptions makes it contestable and probably coincides with the peak of a signal cycle. This may be due in part to Hypersocial cliques losing interest—signals lose their power within the Hypersocial clique when they become legible to dull normals.
I definitely don’t want to suggest that I have everything figured out. At this stage what I’m describing is like institutional dark matter, the mass, location, and behavior of which can only be inferred from observations that are otherwise difficult to explain.
Related Postulates
- The Hypersocial clique is not the same thing as the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), nor is it the same as the elites who sign PMC paychecks. The Hypothesis is that people are filling Hypersocial roles in all groups. If a hospital has thirty janitorial staff, then somebody on the janitorial staff is filling a Hypersocial role by perceiving and enforcing norms. That person differs in many ways from a Hypersocial member of the elite, but Hypersocial individuals exist all the way up and down the line. Confidence and comfort with the social milieu is part of being Hypersocial, so I would expect Hypersocial people to have longer tenures in their institutional roles than revolving door elites. Those who gain power through interaction with Hypersocial cliques will tend to be at least somewhat Hypersocial, but I think truly elite individuals have separate mechanisms for manipulating Hypersocial cliques. Plutocrats who own the means of production are not necessarily Hypersocial at all. In fact, most of them these days seem to be on the autism spectrum, or at least claim to be. By definition Hypersocial cliques will tend to serve plutocrats because the collective Eye for the Main Chance notices that the plutocrats have the money, but I don’t think the relationship always functions in a straightforward way.
- Hypersociality may be even more powerful in a population of nerds with relatively low levels of the Hypersociality triad, such as the CDC (or a university thirty years ago). Conversely, high concentrations of Hypersocial people may appear more chaotic than other types of institutions. Members of Congress are likely much more Hypersocial than the people who voted for them, but when you get them all in a room together, then their Hypersociality powers operate at a less obvious level. If you watch closely you will notice that they all signal to each other and recognize each other as potential members of the clique, they all keep serving the interests of the oligarchs, but to some extent they lose the miraculous appearance of appearing to be controlled by an invisible force, like a school of small fish effortlessly changing direction at the same time.
- The power of Hypersocial cliques depends on the nature of the institutions in a society. Western institutions today seem to be optimized for control by Hypersocial cliques, for better or for worse. Our communication systems also seem to be optimized to allow Hypersocial people to use their signaling systems at large scales. In twenty-first century America, and I suspect throughout most of the West, the interlocking web of Hypersocial cliques has evolved to become an invisible command and control system that operates without a historically high level of Gestapo officers and surveillance mechanisms (so far). When elites want more Gestapo and surveillance, it will probably be because they are not satisfied with their ability to manipulate Hypersocial cliques.
So how do Hypersocial people control other people, the majority of any institution, who do not share their Hypersocial characteristics? First of all, mystery is a core element of Hypersociality. Many (most?) people who are not truly in the clique are uncertain about whether whether the clique exists, where they stand with the clique, or whether they might be accepted in the clique if they do and say the right things. If you do not have the ability to perceive the signals instinctively, you may never perceive that you are definitively not in the clique. Keeping us in that state of uncertainty has always been a major means of Hypersocial influence going back to high school.
Another useful heuristic is the Overton Window, mentioned by the Warlord. The Overton Window is a metaphor created by Libertarian political operatives to describe the relative viability of political ideas. Ideas are situated on a linear scale. Ideas that are considered viable are visible through the window, while unacceptable ideas are outside the boundaries of it. The original libertarian version showed a range of ideas from “free” to “unfree.” Most people nowadays think of the linear scale as ranging from the mythical left to the mythical right.
There is little empirical research on the Overton Window concept, but to the extent Overton Windows exist it is likely they differ between different communities and institutions. The Overton window also seems to apply to particular ideas rather than reflecting a broad shift between clusters of ideas associated with the endpoints of a two-dimensional spectrum. For example, gay marriage is a pretty specific idea. When I was a kid, you couldn’t talk about homosexuality at all except as a joke or an insult. By 1999 you could talk about it, but hardly anybody thought gay marriage was realistic.Then in 1999 the Vermont Supreme Court mandated that everybody was entitled to some form of marriage-like status, and then everything changed at a whirlwind pace with very little political upheaval. Now gay marriage is conventional wisdom in most of America, and opponents are generally perceived as outside the Overton Window.
Other traditionally left-coded groups did not achieve comparable progress during that same twenty-five years. African Americans made a lot of progress in the 1950s and 60s, but more recently they stood still or went backwards in terms of affirmative action, voting rights, and the ability to avoid getting shot or choked to death by police.Hispanic immigrants also had it rough. The legal system governing immigration has been completely broken for a long time, and has been abused by presidents of both parties to suppress working class wages by keeping millions of people in a precarious status, while using immigrants as a punching bag whenever it is politically convenient. It does not appear the Overton Windows for different groups were in sync from 2000 to the present.
The point here is that the Overton Window is a useful metaphor, even though it has not been rigorously developed as a theory or a model. It helps you feel like you understand why some ideas can’t be talked about, some ideas can be talked about but not achieved, and some ideas can actually be achieved. The Hypersociality Hypothesis, at least at this stage, is a similarly vague first step toward what feels like an explanation.
If there is such a thing as an Overton Window, Hypersocial cliques have a lot of influence over it. Most people are not going to challenge the discourse boundaries set by a Hypersocial clique any more than they would have challenged the captain of the football team to a fight in high school. And the Hypersocial clique is largely invisible, so you can’t really challenge it to a fight anyway. The primary way to challenge it from below is to be weird and refuse to follow norms. That is admirable in its own way, but may not have much correlation with achieving the greatest good for the greatest number in a society. Mechanisms apparently exist for manipulating Hypersocial cliques from above, but I don’t claim to have figured them out yet.
Other Systems
As I said, Western institutions seem to have been optimized for control by and through Hypersocial cliques. In government, the most prevalent system of Hypersocial control is commonly called “democracy.” The means of control are mostly invisible. A portion of the population gets to choose between candidates that were selected by party institutions and their Hypersocial cliques. Once the selected candidates get into office, their scope of action is limited by Hypersocial cliques within the institutions they nominally control. Nothing much changes regardless of who we vote for, as the Warlord pointed out.
The Warlord also noted that “more serious political systems, like Iran, Russia, and China” behave differently. If the Hypothesis is correct, then Hypersocial cliques exist in Iran, Russia, and China, so those societies must have found methods to counterbalance the power of Hypersocial cliques to allow room for processes driven by rational thought. We in the West may consider the methods employed in these countries uncongenial, but Iran, Russia, and China currently appear to have an advantage due to allowing more rational thought to be applied to government policy.
It is worth remembering that America and the West once had counterbalancing systems. The purpose of the PMC was thought to be rationalization of decision-making and management. The core mission of nerd institutions such as traditional universities, the expert non-profit sector, and the CDC was to prevent bad decisions from being made by uninformed individuals or by the madness of crowds. Instead, PMC institutions became more infested with Hypersocial signaling than prior versions. American journalism when reporters were working class was pretty good. American journalism by the PMC is pretty bad.
The Hypersociality Hypothesis helps explain how Western institutions became so thoroughly debased that Mowshowitz can credibly allege they are run by people who are “rewarding lack of utility functions and punishing those who had coherent utility functions.” Whether that type of degeneration is an iron law of institutions is a question for another day—if so, Iran, Russia, and China can expect similar developments sooner or later.
So What?
I am proposing that a minority of people have exceptional abilities that allow them to exert control within and between institutions without receiving explicit instructions or conveying explicit instructions downward. This is not a model yet, and perhaps it is not even a hypothesis because it will be difficult to test. But even if the Hypersociality Hypothesis is nothing more than a simplified metaphorical description like the Overton Window, it may have value if it can help people with puny brains like mine comprehend what is going on in the world. If I can understand what is going on, then maybe I can do something other than give up and drink myself into an early grave.
The Hypothesis as stated up to this point does not explain everything. For example, how does an important Hypersocial signal get selected? How did Hypersocial cliques in Western governments decide that unconditional support for Israel and denial of Isreal’s genocidal crimes was a mandatory norm? I don’t know the answer to that, but it seems pretty clear it is not based on the crude racialist explanation that Hypersocial cliques are mostly made up of Jewish people. There just aren’t enough Jewish people in the organizations and they don’t have uniformly great social skills. Malcolm Kyeyune has suggested veneration of Israel is based on a post-war religious analogy he calls “Nuremberg Christianity.” I don’t think it needs to be based on anything so substantial.
My Hypothesis is that all social groups contain Hypersocial people, and they use words, fads, and other signals to demonstrate their loyalty to the clique. Whether the signal is capable of conveying a unique message to other members of the clique while mystifying non-members matters more than the content of the signal. Such signals may have very little to do with logic, pre-existing group loyalties, enduring faith, or objective reality outside the power dynamics of the clique. At some point unconditional support for Israel and denial of Israel’s genocidal tendencies got coded as a thing insiders must do—I don’t know how. But once the coding happened, as Mowshowitz said, all wanna-be members of the clique must follow the code instantly and instinctively. The purpose is not to demonstrate how much they love Israel, but to demonstrate that they can be relied upon to put their commitment to the clique above everything else.5
It must be acknowledged that unconditional loyalty to Israel is becoming slightly less popular among outsiders. When that happens a signal can actually become even more powerful as a boundary marker of insider status, at least for a while. I think that’s where we are now, but support for Israel may have peaked as a Hypersocial signal. We are already starting to see variations along the lines of “I support Israel almost unconditionally but I don’t quite agree with the particular way Netanyahu is managing things.” If I am correct, when the Hypersocial clique collectively perceives that support for Israel is no longer consistent with pursuing The Main Chance, then the clique will move on to something else with astonishing speed and unanimity. Noticing that the clique has moved on will be strongly discouraged, and whatever they move on to will not necessarily be better.
So, is there anything we can do to mitigate Hypersocial control of our institutions? On a local scale, any group activity that does not primarily consist of gossiping, celebrity worship, jockeying for social position, and promoting lifestyle consumerism probably acts as a counterbalance to the influence of Hypersocial cliques. Bowling leagues, for example. It was probably a mistake to replace all in-person social activities with internet social-media.
It does seem possible that if Hypersocial cliques exist at the heart of institutions then they could be identified, studied, and perhaps even put to good use. I’m not optimistic because the social sciences are no longer about trying to understand how society actually works (with very few exceptions such as Nel Bonilla). Eventually I will get around to publishing the second half of the Ralph Linton story. It’s turning into a parable of how the humanities and social sciences became useless by combining too much truth with too little wisdom, or something like that. I’m trying to figure out an ending where Christian Slater doesn’t blow up the entire university system, but I’m not having much luck.
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Despite its association with Sarah Palin, who was pretty lame during her brief time in the limelight, the term “lamestream media” is brilliant and needs to be rehabilitated. I intend to refer to all large organizations in the United States and western Europe purporting to do journalism by offering a professional managerial class (or show-business) level paycheck in return for churning out content. This includes not only for-profit media purportedly aimed at the notional left-right-center, but also National Kroc Radio in the United States and other non-profits funded by rich people. If this applies to you, well, sorry. This post attempts to explain at least part of the reason why Western institutions suck so much, including so-called journalism.
Opinions differ as to which particular things about U.S. COVID policy were dishonest and idiotic. That is not the subject of today’s post, but it seems obvious to me that many official statements and actions during 2021-23 were idiotic by any standard and were based on obvious lies. Whether you believe COVID was spread by talking in enclosed rooms or by chemtrails, it was definitively known no later than March 2020 that COVID was not primarily spread by droplets on surfaces and could not be controlled by handwashing. Nevertheless, the powers that be (including CDC scientists) just kept lying about it. Knowingly and intentionally. For years.
Sorry, that’s just how long it takes for my tiny brain to think things over. I reserve the right to think some more.
I have been reading Aurelien’s blog since its inception, but hat tip to Policy Tensor for pointing out Nel Bonilla recently. She deserves a wider audience.
I do not mean to suggest that Mowshowitz agrees with my views about Israel—I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. But I think I’m fairly applying his 2021 decision-making model as modified by my Hypothesis.
Activist and entertainer Wavy Gravy [birth name Hugh Romney] had a saying: “As i told my mirror this morning, it’s all done with people.” Fully unpacking this takes a while. Or, as the Monty Pythons put it, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” I write not in a flippant mood, but an admiring one – the triumph and the tragedy of us talking apes is not just about how clever we are, but how right and wrong ideas spread among us – Josh Billings put it as “It ain’t so much about what we don’t know, as what we know that ain’t so.”
Great quotes! The Wavy Gravy, especially.
I agree: we are apes with complex and symbolic language. And it’s not bad to be an ape! But it’s bad is to forget what you are…
Maybe another interesting example of something shifting from great to terrible and how fast everyone just followed the change was the unmasking after Covid was declared over. Hypersocials were the first to recognize the message change and went from “You are a selfish person for refusing to mask” to “You are mentally unwell for still masking” in a couple of days. I was astonished at the speed I saw it happening.
And that brings me to a characteristic of Hypersocials, their need to belong to the group overrules any other moral or ethical qualm.
I suspect this community skews…call it hyposocial so I’m not unique here, but I remember every stage of this vividly. In November 2019 I had open on my second monitor at work a tracker (Johns Hopkins I believe?) of Covid cases globally and was repeatedly told by coworkers (who ought to have known better than I) it’d be nothing whatever in the states, for all of 4 months before we were sent home. I remember being told repeatedly that Operation Warp Speed was doomed to failure (nearly 100% Democrat workplace). I then remember the administration changing and hearing the same people with that opinion demanding everyone in their social range get vaccinated as soon as humanly possible. I remember those same people protesting loudly that a vaccination in no way meant you could take off your mask, and all of a month later they would never be seen with a mask again.
Do I sound bitter about this? Because I am. You can’t even told-you-so this type of person. They’re not hypocrites really, they don’t have the object permanence to understand what they’ve done.
Exactly. Bravo.
Now it so happens that you and I may disagree about this or that policy from that time but that’s OK. You really nailed it, that godawful behavior we witnessed during the pandemic. From authorities who said and did nonsense and other loud citizens changing on whims and never being rational for too long…
How not to be bitter ?
I thought about including that famous Peanuts comic strip of Linus writing to the Great Pumpkin, but it wasn’t directly on point and the searchable archive of Peanuts that existed a few years ago seems to have disappeared. I am trying to carry on in the philosophical tradition of Linus.
Hyposocial here, correct. I still mask in closed/crowded spaces. I failed to join the Russophobic hysteria. It’s often bizarre to watch how others behave. It is also scary how easily I would be burnt at the stake by a mob once upon a time.
This talk of the Overton Window reminded me of something that I read a long time ago-
‘In an interview, (former Zelensky adviser Alexey) Arestovich quoted US textbooks on information warfare. “Do you know how information and psychological combat works? The first page of the US textbook on information and psychological warfare, the first chapter, says – I quote: the main task of information and psychological operations is to take over the agenda. That’s it, after that you can just relax and do nothing.”’
And isn’t that what is happening? Ever since Occupy Wall Street was crushed, you cannot discuss class. Black Lives matter became a useful distraction until it went away. The same with the MeToo movement until it criticized Old Joe Biden and then it kinda died. Years ago, Gloria Steinem worked with the CIA when she talked about feminist issues but not class issues. That is partly why third wave feminism is all about supporting women like Hillary Clinton but not poor or black women. The agenda has been taken over so that as long as the issue of class never arises, people can obsess over over any issue thay want such as personal pronouns or safe spaces or whatever.
Apropos of your concluding Miles Davis section, you might bring complexity theory into the chat. Miles is well chosen here, since rich effects arise from his iconic minimalism. A complexity researcher might design simple rules and behaviors and observe what a simulation brews. I’ll crib from Melanie Mitchell, complexity docent extraordinaire, for a cheat sheet of unsettled principles:
We might throw chaos into the mix, i.e., apparently random phenomena that are deterministic yet exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions, with unpredictable consequences.
What you’re calling hypersociality I tend to see as an expression of underlying human motives evolved through natural selection. To name a few: sociability, dominance striving, status seeking, resource acquisition. Such desiring modes, let’s call them, are the ground of action. They’re subject to human variation and sensitive to context. Because they’re functionally semi-autonomous they can act agonistically or antagonistically. Strategies, habits, and paths appear, acting like basins of attraction. Before too long—decades, millennia, eons—here we are, bummed, befuddled, and bemused over the violence inherent in the system.
But that’s an expression of another desiring mode, eh?
Good piece. I think the elaboration I’d offer myself is that hypersociality isn’t just a feature of certain individuals, it is a feature that manifests by necessity at organizational scale. Elite theory teaches us that any scaled organization, or if you like society, is inevitably commanded by a minority rather than a majority; that the minority outflanks any majority by definition, that if the ruling minority is to be deposed it would be by a vanguard minority, perhaps but not always seizing the vim of the majority to its ends.
In this view hypersociality is an adaptive feature for the rapid construction of local elite manufacture, if you like. If you can effortlessly perform and reliably perceive the behaviors of the local elite you can yourself instantly be perceived as a reliable replicator of those behaviors, as “on side”. It’s a shortcut of a litmus test. Criminal gangs and mafias and groups of strange college students have to undergo initiation rituals of various sorts to demonstrate a like reliability and commitment – hypersocials can dispense with all that and basically smell one anothers’ asses like so many dogs.
The prophylactic to this is a society so powerfully formalized and ossified that there can be no elite entryism without intensely strict formal guardrails – for example, legacy be damned, you don’t go to Yale unless your SATs are above [x], you don’t achieve consideration for a government position without having passed some state exam, etc – something like the China model (I don’t pretend to be a China expert or intend to come off as a China booster, but this logic I’ve admired in its very, very long history and if nothing else they seem rather more serious than…whatever it is we have in government in the west). Unfortunately since before I was born, it seems like western societies have put themselves to work tearing down societal-institutional formalities and therefore paving the way for an unrestrained entryism…which I suppose has the benefit of being more aesthetically democratic, or something.
I hate to say it because I am by nature a lover of ritual, but the counter-argument to what you (and I) perceive as the lack of institutional formality in the West is the explosion of credentialism that has happened in the last 50 years, at least in the U.S. To be even considered for entry is at this point requires at least a master’s degree or a billion dollars – or maybe a million social-media followers, but so far we haven’t quite gotten to point where folks are considering Mr. Beast for president. After that, yes, the rules are mostly undefined and subject to if-you-know-you-know sorts of changes, but ifykyk only applies to the people who everybody knows have the right papers.
It’s a good point but in fact I don’t think the cancerous inflation of credentialism counters my point at all – rather it is a symptom thereof. As the prior credential declines in qualitative value, another is needed. The system has decayed from as you say one of institutional formality to credentialism-as-heuristic, and fwiw at least in los Estados even that is falling apart. Anecdata warning: I work in an (admittedly niche, but very much academy-adjacent PMC) field overwhelmingly staffed by MA+ graduates with only a BA myself, and since I started my career it’s become increasingly common hiring practice to rely on criteria quite apart from the formal credential that would’ve been expected a decade ago (I’ve been involved with a number of hires in this way). The higher credentials are becoming a bit of an endangered species in the younger part of the workforce because potential candidates hardly see the point in pursuing them. We still treat a BA as more or less a hard requirement, but in a less ossified field (still unambiguously academic/PMC) my unschooled but very bright brother achieved a reasonably prestigious position for a young man not long ago.
That’s not to say we’re part of the ruling class as such and I think the credential barrier is higher within the true elite rather than the orbiting academicish class – but the difference I think is that for the true elite, the credential barrier is really just an excuse to keep out the insufficiently-hypersocial-or-nepoproduct, whereas in my work the credential barrier was essentially elite mimicry and is already being discarded for lack of utility.
Thank you, very useful. Reminds me of the somewhat famous C. S. Lewis speech/text about the inner ring, abridged version here http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
Our existence is such a hard nut to crack – living at the crossroad of individuality, herd instincts, tangible reality and the grand mystery – so easy to get lost!
It might be worth thinking about how you would test your hypothesis. For example, you might use existing personality research psychological measures to test different aspects of sociality, e.g. Big 5 (OCEAN), or the sociability scale, need to belong scale etc. What might you expect to find? Do the group you seek to explain differ in scores from the general population or other groups? Even if you found a large statistically significant difference, would this add weight to the hypothesis? Might there be alternative explanations to your findings? To what extent would those findings be sufficient to explain the phenomenon?
However, you don’t seem to have engaged with much of the existing psychological research on these issues. Moreover, there are many sub-fields beyond personality research which deal with the issues you raise, from social psychology to evolutionary psychology (you do mention Turchin in passing) to the cultural evolution research. Sorry, I don’t want to discourage people from coming up with novel ideas, but as I also say to students you need to do a bit of a literature review first.
The Hypersociality Hypothesis is an interesting one but that’s all it is at the moment.
I wonder what the sociologists and anthropology people have to say. I suspect that Social Network Analysis might be interesting here but it is only something I have read about.
To add to your suggestions I’d also recommend having a look at Bob Altemeyer and others’ research on the “Authoritarian Personality”.
Note : not necessarily the best references but ones I have handy.
Altemeyer. Bob. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press
Burnell D. Right-wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Workplace Implications
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=honorstheses
yeah i agree with this. the article feels like something that theres already existing theory about and somewhat of a signal for a specific ingroup instead of in depth analysis. like its between psychology and just going “polticians are bad and coast on vibes not logic.”
further research needed imo, and while social dynamics are difficult to quantify, (and i likely am falling into the trap of my scientific pedagogy biasing me towards quantatative research) what would this theory mean practically. what actions can be taken based upon this theory. is the intent to change those in charge to a group of more “rational” beings? how would we define “rational”? (rational as opposed to hypersocial.) feels like a discussion that has been had for centuries and is just a part of the cycle of inept leadership. (i sound pessimistic here, perhaps i would be more optimistic if i researched political success stories, alas i am presently locked into my masters thesis in physics.) i also think hypersociality is one of those social mechanisms that can be leveraged for good or evil. i dont think its going away, so the question becomes, how can i use it to achieve my agenda?
sorry for being such a hater. the fact that i feel compelled to respond means a discussion has been started though, which is good. food for thoughts.
I am admittedly a dabbler. Even in my strongest field (anthropology) my familiarity with foundational texts is largely based on what was cheap at the used bookstore 40 years ago. They certainly weren’t teaching the foundational texts at any of the state schools I attended for undergrad.
My focus here is much more on the existence of an institutional organ rather than the psychology of participating individuals, but I’m always interested to hear of related work. In fact, I’m always surprised when nobody in the comments mentions a work that completely preempts my amateur efforts. It’s a shame there are so few experts making an effort at synthesis. I would love to not feel compelled to write this stuff.
WRT Journalism, access becomes paramount, more important than the story, compounded by monopolistic consolidation.
That’s the first example that popped into my head.
“Delayed Reciprocation” and “Starting Resource Rich” (Resources such as money, man-power, time, materials, etc…) are fundamental to chatting your way up the chain.
People have to be willing to wait on payback for helping you up chain otherwise you spend your entire time getting “what’s owed and delivering it” instead of climbing up. (Verbal Contracts are absolutely real in this sort of environment so you need to keep track of honoring them in the right sequence.)
You also have to start inside of an environment where there are tons of resources at your disposal from the start, otherwise yourself and others are in the hunt too frequently to make long term reciprocal arrangements.
Keep working these ideas, albrt. But:
There has to be a però.
E. Not the E of Plutarch, the E of extroversion.
As a Myers Briggs ISTP, sometimes considered the virtuosi, I will point to introversion versus extroversion. The ISTP personality masters subjects and skills — not the making of Nice.
The hypersociality you point to contradicts the introvert’s adherence to self-determined standards. The hypersociality is the seeking of externally created agreements to adopt (without the introvert’s inner moral qualms).
Likewise, DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are socially created, watered down. Liberty, equality, and solidarity require inner strengths, some self-posession, to bring forth in the world.
And, again, skill:
Ursula von der Leyen’s great skill is availability to manage up and kick down. In my case, as the frosty ISTP, I once received a backhanded compliment from a junior editor: I was the only editor left whose job was to read and help create manuscripts. Everyone else spent their days generating spreadsheets and doing bullshit for the marketing department. I am the anti-Ursula, the skeptic of diehard bourgeois conformity.
And: Why did I keep thinking of Pete Buttigieg as I read? Like Peter Thiel, he does *not* want to think of his gayness as oppositional, demanding creativity and synthesis. He wants acceptance and access to membership in important clubs.
while she was providing me text therapy as a favor to my late wife, hot shrink lady over yonder hill offered one time that i was INTJ(i think…whatever Gandalf is,lol).
this comported with my own rummaging in the subject.
anyhoo…i have been an outcast/outsider my entire life, and…in order to survive junior high…developed and then used a method i have called “being Jane Goodall”, ever since.
i clam up and watch.
and the author is definitely on to something,lol.
this is just How People Are In Groups.
and the weirder invisible stuff we sorta detect, today…the norm-police, etc…seem like an evolution of what i observed in junior high.
they didnt know they were doing it then, either…and if i suggested such, it was like speaking klingon while peeing on the floor.
out here, i see examples in just about every cohesive group i encounter…ranchers drinking coffee at the feedstore(dont they work?!), churches(of course), the would be bougie set with their ritual language and secret orgies.
from the get-go, i found it all fake and vile…and knew from early on that i was far to honest a human to ever partake in such nonsense.
I’ll quibble a bit here. One doesn’t need extraordinary abilities if one is 100% devoted to specific goals, in this case inclusion and influence.
And as a counterpoint, one may have an extraordinary ability, but prefer to do other things. Any high school coach or music teacher has stories about kids who were ridiculous talented and apparently born with all the right instincts and yet had a yeah, this is fun I guess attitude and went on with their lives.
Thank you, albrt. A couple thoughts:
> My Hypothesis is that all social groups contain Hypersocial people, and they use words, fads, and other signals to demonstrate their loyalty to the clique.
: See Greenbeard. Turchin has an excellent formulation of Multi-level (or Group) Selection, that those who are more alike (less variance) being more likely to cooperate.
> However, people who have hypersociality-level interpersonal skill levels and also very intelligent and an appetite for complexity are even more dangerous. They wind up in fields like private equity, where they use their high level of manipulation skills to loot on a massive scale
: Snakes in Suits: In the entry stage, the psychopath uses highly developed social skills and charm to obtain employment in an organization.
‘Psychopath’ is a term for what DSM-IV describes with ‘frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain
personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex, or power) (Criterion A2).’ This condition is ‘301.7 Antisocial Personality Disorder’. This suggests there is a social skills factor that must be kept independent from aspects of hyper- vs anti- social.
This really comes home when it’s a meeting of the governing body of a hippy nature preserve, committed to consensus decision-making, which sounds great until it’s four in the morning and the dominant primate won’t close the question. Coalition formation ain’t beanbag.
My weekly ‘pirate’ upload has grown a rant in recent years, and just last week I touched on albrt’s theme in a smaller way. Not sure but I think I’m saying much the same thing but in a ruder, cruder fashion:
Caste is, I think, a good word. Hypersociality is indeed more than a job description (PMC), it’s an approach to life available only to a few.
Lots to think about there, but I also think the issue is broader. I think we all have noticed that there are groups of people who value conformity above positive results. I see many views these hypersocial (excellent term for them- so thank you for this) people hold as being loyalty tests. During Covid I watched both liberals and conservatives both hold mutually oppositional views to signal in-group loyalty, all of which were clearly nonsensical and in conflict with both reality observed by common people as well as observations in the clinical setting. We now have these same people supporting literal Nazis and genocide occurring right in our faces.
To flesh this out a bit more, I see hypersociality as a mechanism formed by the nexus of elite overproduction and the rise of the shake & bake PMC – but I think we have to talk about the makeup of elites/the PMC. The elites are children of former elites who rose to elite status through some level of practical competence (even if they were also sociopaths), and the PMC has shifted from being engineers/scientists who attained leadership/managerial positions based on demonstrated ability to consistently deliver physical outcomes, to MBA’s and attorneys (please note that I personally separate accountants from the rest of the business degrees- accountants have real and practical skills) who manage to near-instantly step into managerial roles once attaining their credential. I think these things are important, because when people attain leadership positions, they instinctively have to demonstrate their fitness for the role. In the past the PMC demonstrated this by mastering practical knowledge- as in maximizing the production of goods or infrastructure on budget and on time. When leadership roles shifted from being filled by people with practical backgrounds to MBAs, etc, these leaders began to demonstrate their fitness through “management” skills, which as far as I am concerned are mainly about manipulation/manipulative behavior- so this all flows from that. This has occurred because very few of these people have any mastery in practical skills that deliver physical outcomes. These people are bullshitting their way through their careers and it looks to me like hypersocial behavior (again, I love this term) is their means to (out)compete/eclipse the people who actually get results (such people make the bullshitters look bad, after all), because the people who get results do not have the time for the hypersocial stuff because they expend their time/resources on attaining the results- they get pushed out and their wages stagnate. This then has caused young people, who are looking at projected salaries when choosing a career, to pass practical career paths by in favor of the career paths with higher income potential, and now this forces them into the hypersocial game. It’s now a self-licking ice cream cone. The problem is that this is all destroying society, so it will continue until it this shitshow collapses.
I think this is all related- It is a powerful nexus of different factors and groups, and it bodes ill for all of us, including these hypersocial Dunning-Kruger poster children, but given their priors, acknowledging the problem will destroy their status and future professional prospects, so they will continue to demonstrate loyalty by not speaking about the cliff they are driving off.
I don’t think it’s just bad actors. The logic is structural. It’s no accident that managers and intermediaries are consistently paid more than the people who do productive material work (“essential workers”).
Material productivity scales linearly. Network effects scale exponentially. To get truly rich you must leverage the work of others. Relying solely on the value of what you yourself create is never a path to wealth; in the current downwardly mobile economy it’s often not even a path to financial security.
I believe the conventional economic argument for high CEO pay is that a small difference in CEO quality is magnified by the scale of the organization into a huge difference in profitability. Setting aside the problem of assessing performance, it is well worth paying a good CEO a fraction of that to get the benefit.
Exponential returns don’t only apply to CEOs. The worker who spends time on social bullshit has the potential to realize non-linear returns. The few productive occupations that scale benefit from network effects. Movie stars, musicians and inventors can benefit from exponential popularity of what they produce – because part of the value of their work is contributed by the network (audience labour etc.).
The ambitious worker is rational to pursue exponential rather than linear returns. The opportunity attracts plenty without ability and many bad actors. Those who deliver are worth the pay (marginal returns and all that), but we can’t figure out who they are because what they do is so hard to assess, and is obscured by layers of competitive obfuscation.
I mentioned intermediation. Intermediation often creates a power differential that can be used to extract rents. Network hubs, including in social networks, are intermediaries.
Returning to hypersocialization (shades of the Unabomber’s oversocialization), it seems likely that exclusion from the network has the reverse effect. You can’t afford not to play the game.
Since the value of network effects increase exponentially with scale, it seems likely that larger organizations would suffer more from a misallocation of effort from productivity to social games. Smaller organizations might be less affected – but are particularly vulnerable to predation by intermediaries, e.g. through regulatory capture.
This is all just my thinking. I have no particular relevant economic expertise.
P.S.: Greater scale and intensity of network connections facilitated by digital communication might also contribute to exponential returns and misallocation.
It is a bit like being in elementary school when the geography teacher asks, “Who can tell me, what’s interesting about Argentina?” A student learning about herself and Argentina maybe learns what she herself finds interesting about Argentina. But, the student who intuits quickly what the teacher finds interesting about Argentina, gets ahead. If the student doesn’t really care about Argentina at that moment, the latter is the more obvious learning opportunity — get it over with and please the teacher. And, that impulse feeds on human instincts to mimic mindlessly prestige behaviors.
Asabiyyah was my new favorite word until recently and in some respects your “hypersociality” is labeling its flipslide. Asabiyyah takes over as the success of the group in active intergroup competition becomes the font of individual benefit from membership. When it is important to win the game in a team sport, learning skill is important.
Once the external success of the group is an established fact and continuing intergroup competition is eliminated or ritualized (as in uniparty partisan politics), hyper-sociality in the form of successful ritual conformity — signaling a hyper-willingness to please the boss — takes over. Wearing the right team uniform correctly and fashionably dominates in terms of insuring individual prestige and “success”.
Thank you.
Thoughtful and thought provoking posts like this are a rarity anywhere, and a large part of why NC has been a daily stop for me, for decades.
I don’t see the need to create a new behavioral category. What the author describes as ‘hypersocial’ is perfectly consistent with ‘sociopathic’. It is a description of very-selfish people who lack empathy with others but are adept at reading and using social signals. People who are able and willing to use those social skills to manipulate others to their own ends. Some call them psychopath but I prefer sociopath because the damage they cause is social.
Thank you. As you might expect, I think we also need to consider the way in which organisations as a whole have developed over the last thirty or forty years. In general, the proportion of what you could call “operational” staff, who directly further the advertised interests of the organisation, has declined, sometimes sharply, whilst the proportion of administrative staff has increased enormously. And because the administrative staff generally lack the right knowledge and experience to actually contribute anything useful, they take refuge in norms-enforcing, target-setting and generally getting in the way. So police forces in most western countries now spend far more time on paperwork than they once did, and have to attend diversity training seminars and moronic management workshops. And once people realise that career rewards go to people who obey these dictates, they start to internalise them, and the more hypersocial realise that they can use them to manipulate others and advance their careers. Who cares if you catch criminals?
Universities are a good example. Fifty years ago, the (much smaller) staff was essentially divided into teachers, with some secretarial support, and administrators managing budgets and salaries, buying services and organising catering. Of course, there was vicious academic politics (when has there not been?) but it was largely directly personal or professional, often based on competition for jobs or status. These days, an entire structure of people who can’t teach and effectively contribute nothing has reached a dominant position, and is able to influence and even ruin the careers of those who do teach. In the old days, a consistently failing student would be thrown out. These days, there is an entire bureaucracy devoted to finding excuses, giving second and third chances, exploiting alleged psychological problems and strong-arming teachers into passing students who deserve to fail, thus penalising the others. On the other hand, students can find themselves out of the door very quickly if they offend against some vague norm of behaviour which has nothing to do with any academic ability. Such jobs–if that is what they are–are exactly the kind that attract hypersocial people, because, bluntly, they enable you to influence and control people who are a lot clever and more intelligent than you are, and to impose not just norms but ritual signalling behaviour on them as well. That’s power for you, and it requires no special intellectual skills or experience at all, just ambition and a manipulative mentality.
Am I the only one who thought of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an extreme/terminal example of this?
I wonder if this would be a similar phenomenon to adoption of gender or other sub-group norms. Something like sports and cars being typical masculine hobbies and interests. I’m not someone who is interested in these but they seem to be almost unifying within male groups, and the ability to talk about them is seen as a way to be “in” or relatable.
Thanks to all the commenters, and I really do mean all. The comments here are a big part of the reason why I still feel my meagre output is worth the effort.
There is nothing meagre about it, albrt! Thank you! I have been in one university or another since I was 17 years old and have experienced it as student (undergraduate and graduate), staff, faculty member (teaching and research) and administrator (it is too late to worry about what has made me do this). Hypersociality is a very useful explanation of my professional group. You and Aurelian hit several nails squarely on the head, driving them in with one perfect strike.
Hypersociality explains grant review panels at NIH and NSF, too. The “leaders” in a field are quite often hypersocial nerds who are very effective and maintaining the membership roles of their in-group. Most of the time, the last thing they are interested in is a proposal from outside the box until they have made the applicant “wait for his or her turn.” Many of my colleagues ran out of time in the line. This was a feature, not a bug.
But a distant form of hypersociality also explains how things were in my interstitial life as a heavy chemical worker who inhabited the labor gang most of the time. We had several straw bosses who were tolerated and useful for advice now and again, but they got by with doing very little labor, which everyone knew and understood. They were not detrimental, just irrelevant about 90% of the time and a minor cost of doing business in a union shop with some benefits. Some of them had earned their social status. It was not OK to expect a 60-year-old to climb into an acid dehydration column and remove, clean using (methyl ethyl ketone) by the 55-gallon drum, and then re-stack ceramic tile cylinders, big ones on the bottom, little ones in the middle, and small saddle-shaped tiles on the top. That’s why the young were hired. Oh, and my annual wage approached $60,000 in 2026 dollars, including overtime (time and a half) and holiday work (double time). I was rich, on a set schedule, before the Neoliberal Dispensation.
That seems like a good description of the sort of people who can enforce a consistent signal or message throughout an organization. But how does the signal originate? Sometimes I suspect there are less social people who via personal or institutional access get to insert their ideas into the message stream of the hypersocial clique, and maybe there’s a different skill to being able to do that. Or maybe it’s just dumb luck. Other times the hypersocial clique may just be mutating their existing set of signals to come up with a new one, either at random or following some method. The simplest method being, “just be more” of some existing position, like be “more woke”; or if your clique has an identified adversarial clique, be against the new thing which that clique is now signaling they are for (Bateson’s “schismogenesis” in action).
Some signals that the dominant cliques propagate are clearly to the material advantage of “real world” actors, for instance the support for Israel at all costs example. Others are only advantageous to those competing in symbolic arenas and don’t produce any benefit to any one in terms of tangible material realities (versus prestige/status symbolic markers). The first type one can see as more prone to insertion into the hypersocial mindscape by interested outsiders, while the second may be more self-generated or otherwise difficult to trace to an origin that is explainable.
They are just the rank and file “gatekeepers”.
Elite gatekeepers are great at monetizing their positional power, but rank and file ones just toe the line. They don’t always end up being that well off, but manage to stay in the middle to upper middle class by their loyalty, and tend to have a low risk/medium-to-high gain career (until a regime shift).
Gatekeepers have constitutents, who you call the “real world actors”. Fundamentally the gatekeeper class understand that their power broadly relies on keeping those constituents happy, but they don’t always follow their constituents wishes to the T. The constituents (the media calls them the “donor class” but their power isn’t solely based on direct donations) refer to that problem the “principal-agent problem.”
In the old days the gatekeepers operated more slowly and by a formalized code, but in the “network era”, it just emerges from signaling, mutual understanding of incentives and “competition”. The original post calls that “hypersocialty” but that just comes from the increased speed and the “open competition dynamics” of the current era. It’s Elizbeth Holmes’ “fake it till you make it” strategy in the gatekeeper market. Long term survivors in such a hypersocial market tend to be tough battle tested veterans in this sort of competition.
Most of the donor class don’t directly come up with the global policies (they’re too busy consuming, conquering, ordering their own fiefdoms around or dealing with their family inheritance dramas). Instead, they benefit from the social symbiosis with the gatekeeper class. Similar to how well-to-do people broadly benefit from cops that enforce general order in society, without getting enmeshed in policing policy (cops being the most primeval/physical version of a “gatekeeper”, with the well-to-do in society broadly being their “constitutents”).
The “thought-leaders” or “policy entrepreneurs” of the gatekeeper class drive most of the bad ideas that become en vogue and then de rigeur. Like other entrepreneuers they have to get traction from the donor class, who serve as the funders of their growth. It’s not that different from most fashion cycles. When wide leg pants become popular again with Gen Z, skinny pants become millenial cringe. It feels like it changes on a dime to those who aren’t enmeshed in pants styles.
That’s my understanding of the roles in system in the most neutral terms I can think of.
I’ve never heard anyone call it Xitter. By now that I’ve seen it, I’m pretty sure the “X” is pronounced “sh” and I’m going to say it that way from now on.
Yep, but with a slight lisp as in Pinyin mandarin.
“You can think of it as a ‘smiling hiss’: stretch your lips into a smile and exhale softly while your tongue arches up.”
https://prepedu.com/en/blog/how-to-pronounce-x-in-chinese
Was this the linus letter you were looking for?
https://au.pinterest.com/pin/19703317103054208/
For those interested in some background on the pre-conditioning and selection of world leaders by the Davos crowd, you might want to read “World Economic Forum: The Global Shadow Elite” by Ernest Wolff. It tracks Klaus Schwab from his encouragement by Kissinger to form the WEF through Schwab’s creation of the Young Global Leaders as an indoctrination tool and deep state recruitment network.
Is this what we used to call cronyism? Something closely related, anyway, I think.
A very interesting argument.
It’s a form of power that at its core is personality power over other individuals, that then translates into a wider power in society, that can be leveraged for personal gain.
I think the development of this power develops from an early age. The baby of the family in moderately functional families, smaller than older siblings and parents, has to rely on cuteness and convincing others to get what they want. Then there is the abused child who learns how to get what they want through connivance and fake charm.
Power through charm. Being able to detect what’s important to another person, whether it’s being entertained or being made to feel important or loved or whatever, and then being able to deliver just the right dose. To have that person eating out of your hand, looking up to you, being led by you. Heady stuff to some.
And what better place to hone these skills than the playground, where there is generally minimal adult oversight and unbridled laissez-faire kid on kid interactions. In a group of girls, there is generally one who stands out as the glue who holds the group together, the one with the most interpersonal skills. Sometimes they also have a mean streak. In boys the one who has very good interpersonal skills and is either a bit of a bully or outstanding at sports can anchor a group. It’s said that Trump was a bully at school, while being a keen observer of the weaknesses and foibles of other boys, using weaknesses to mock and control.
So here you have kids who by their actions show that they relish power over others, with years of practice at manipulation and gaining influence by personality and guile, honed in the most unforgiving environment, the playground. They have also learned how to leverage the fads most likely to increase their popularity. And then they become workers at a large organisation, commercial or academic or charitable or ngo, and start putting these skills into use.
We had a new manager once who brought no discernible skills to the team. He didn’t present well nor was he articulate. If he talked to you he mumbled at a low pitch and trailed off so you weren’t exactly sure what he was saying. If you disagreed with him he was liable to walk over and tower over you as a tactic of intimidation, being well over six feet tall and very overweight.
His office was almost always empty. Maybe he’d show up before 8 am and after 5 pm.At the time the latest management fad was “management by walking around” and one wag in the team commented that said manager just didn’t realise it meant “walking around here”.
Turned out this guy was out schmoozing, lunching, being seen at executive meetings and the like. He was quickly promoted to the executive over other managers who actually had skills, experience and common sense. He then proved the Peter principle as well, which was amusing since that was his name.
This is not a working theory as there are detailed plans executed for decades by elites chosen to execute the plans.
I subscribe to the organization of capitalist western society described by Brian Berletic who has shown that corporations run think tanks that create policy papers that are given to politicians supported by corporate lobby money in our “elections” to implement that policy.
His classic examples are the Rand Corp paper “Path to Persia” 2009 that describes all the steps taken to beat Iran into submission over the decades and “Extending Russia” 2019 that describes the Russia war and all the steps followed by the politicians to execute that war over decades.
Berletic is much simpler to understand and has concrete examples that show how it works through academia, media and politicians.
Michael Lewis has an explanation for that in The Premonition. Until 1976 the CDC was run by scientists promoted through the ranks. In 1976 the threat of swine flu caused two problems: the predicted epidemic didn’t occur, and the swine-flu vaccine and its roll-out were botched. The Ford administration had gone all-in on the possibility of an epidemic, and got burned by the outcome. One of the reactions to the embarrassment was to bind the CDC more closely to the executive branch by making the CDC head a political appointee. (This is from memory; I may have gotten details wrong.)
This pretty much aligns with how I see this: hypersocial types acting in their own interest create a hive mind. You end up with a kind of autonomous organism with no central control.
Another factor that doesn’t help is that sociopaths usually win from non-sociopaths, because they are better manipulators. And corrupt amoral people win from non-corrupt moral people because they have access to more money. This explains why we usually end up with bad leaders: exactly the type of people that you don’t want in leadership positions.
Organizations select for those adept at navigating organizations. That is not inherently negative. One may know everything about everything but, without the ability to communicate or persuade, be effectively useless. In an ideal organization, sociability and expertise, to the likely extent that they correlate somewhat inversely, combine to generate the most social value. But peak America, from roughly the end of World War II through the implosion of the Great Society, provided a buffer of affluence and stability that reduced external pressure (from rioters, revolutionaries, the hoi polloi in general) on the American government to generate social value. As regular voters went about their tolerable lives, government deferred by default to moneyed interests that always live and breathe policy matters. Without pressure to deliver social value or independent thinking (not when ALEC will even draft legislation for nominal legislators), government became an organization that selected for sociability only, without consideration for expertise. Thus the hypersocial operators of albrt’s hypothesis, evidenced by the success of networking experts and policy lightweights like Biden, Buttigieg, Harris and Obama. At the same time, China’s government, to ensure its own survival after decades of Mao’s genocidal incompetence, prioritized expertise over hypersociability. Decades of peak capitalism in the West produced the aforementioned luminaries and, of course, Ursula von der Leyen. Perhaps as a corollary to albrt’s hypothesis, the more real power that members are expected to wield, the more organizations select for expertise over hypersociability. With regards to Iran, Russia and China — and organizations in general — the hypersociability vs. expertise of leadership is a lagging indicator of stability. In layman’s terms, society runs not through Elders of Zion or Illuminati dynamics, but something more akin to the Mandate of Heaven.