The Hypersociality Hypothesis

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

_______

1

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.

2

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.

3

Sorry, that’s just how long it takes for my tiny brain to think things over. I reserve the right to think some more.

4

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.

5

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.