Psycho-Speciation and Red Pilling

There apparently exists something in history we might call "psycho-speciation." I can't have been the first to suggest the term.

I just googled it, and I see it is discussed by an old pal of mine, the psychohistorian Lloyd Demause. Before I redpilled a couple of decades ago, I was a true believer in his ideas, not all of which are wrong, just too reductionistic, polemical, and deterministic (among other fatal defects).

For example, he asks "What caused America?," which would be a fine question if he stopped there. But before pondering the question, he asks some additional questions that are just thinly veiled polemics in disguise:

What was it that changed a group of totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting and witch-hunting Englishmen into a nation of fiercely independent Yankees in but one century?

Is that an accurate description of our ancestors: totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting, and witch-hunting Englishmen? Or their descendants, for that matter? No, it is the simplistic view of a 20th century ideologue, similar in form to our contemporary progressive anachronistic anarchists who think they are morally superior to the wise and courageous men who made their privileged lives of permanent adolescent rebellion possible.

These latter folks bring to mind this tweet: "Their whole lives spent chasing status & privilege, and now denouncing 'privilege' to gain yet more privilege. If you give these people a moment's credibility, you're a fool."

In other words, there is no White Privilege like the privilege of pretending it exists in order to gain more of it.

Anyway, I don't want to get bogged down in Demause's theory of psycho-speciation. But just because he's wrong about the cause, it doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real. His fundamental error is in positing a vertical hierarchy while denying the source and ground of verticality, which is to say, God.

In short, Demause was a secular atheist, which undercuts his whole approach. He was completely sealed in ideology but couldn't see the bugs for the feature. Which is true of any psychological theory that pretends to contain the uncontainable, AKA man.

Let's be perfectly accurate here: main is containable, but only by God. To the extent that a man pretends to contain mankind in a theory about man, he has descended into ideology. Which is intrinsically pathological. One can of course do it, but it is always an error.

Imagine being, say, a 15th century explorer. There existed any number of maps of the Atlantic Ocean, but they were all obviously wrong, since no one had actually explored the area in such a way that an accurate map could be rendered.

Now, what if emotional security is more important to you than cartographical truth? Then you'll be motivated to cling to one of the erroneous maps, which represent a kind of pseudo-knowledge about the world. The map isn't real, but the rocks you ram into will be.

Back when I was in grad school -- we've been through this before, so I'll be brief -- one of the first classes was a historical survey of all the various theories of mind ranging from behaviorism at one end to existentialism at the other. In between there is psychoanalysis (with dozens of sometimes antithetical schools), Gestalt, humanistic, transpersonal, etc. Here's a list of just the Top 45. Pick one!

On what basis?

Oh, here's a fruity one: liberation psychology. It is

an approach that aims to actively understand the psychology of oppressed and impoverished communities by conceptually and practically addressing the oppressive sociopolitical structure in which they exist. The central concepts of liberation psychology include: conscientization; realismo-crítico; de-ideologized reality; a coherently social orientation; the preferential option for the oppressed majorities, and methodological eclecticism.

Or in other words, reams of pseudo-intellectual politicized bullshit that has nothing to do with human nature and its objective pathologies. Conveniently, the theory pretends to deny the existence of universals while privileging its own.

My guess is that this is the dominant paradigm if you are unlucky enough to attend graduate school these days. I got in just under the wire, and it is still a mystery to me how I passed the oral licensing exam in 1991, which included some achingly stupid politically correct questions which I abruptly dismissed as irrelevant to my totally unwoke metapsychology.

By the way, you may wonder how it was that I was still very much a Democrat at that time, and didn't redpill until 2000. How was I unaware of the cognitive dissonance? Just 30 years ahead of the curve, I guess. Today there are obviously millions of Democrats who don't yet understand that they are supporting a totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting, and witch-hunting political religion known as Cancel Culture.

Speaking of psycho-speciation, is red pilling itself a form it it? It could be. But there are plenty of crazy and unhinged conservatives. Unfortunately, just not enough of them.

Now, from a strictly infranatural, Darwinistic standpoint, speciation itself is quite problematic, not just horizontally but vertically, since nothing in the natural world is intrinsically any better or higher or more valuable than anything else. Which reminds me of a comment Voegelin makes in another book, which I will recast in terms of biology:

If a man says "a human being is just a contingent ensemble of selfish genes," he is a respected biologist; if a man says "I am just a contingent ensemble of selfish genes" and thereby consistently refuses to take responsibility for his actions, he is a psychiatric case.

Well, we didn't get far, and now I'm nearly out of time. We'll end with Voegelin's take on psycho-speciation, even though he doesn't call it that:

When a society gains a new insight into the true order of personal and social existence, and when it will abandon the larger society of which it is a part when it gains this insight, this constitutes an exodus. When such a higher insight is gained, the group that gains it will establish itself as a separate entity....

Whenever a new insight into order is gained, there is always the question whether to immigrate from the present order into a situation in which the new order can become socially dominant and relevant for the society that has gained the insight.

Which explains why the Dems are so frantic to import blue-pilled immigrants, and to force feed their existing plantation dwellers a daily diet of the blues.