Cities and Scammers:
How Political Tribes Deal With The Dark Triad Traits
Jordan Hall (2021), an influencer who I place in the centrist counterculture or Pew’s outsider left, says the following about the vulnerability of cultural movements. It speaks to why some temperaments thrive in and are attracted to city centers.
Where people gather, other people gather, which means there's a lot of energy, and when there's a lot of energy that doesn't know what's going on, there is a pretty good resource to be exploited, so it also gathers the vampires and parasites, and that’s kind of unavoidable….The more potent it is, the more that's going to happen…and unfortunately the parasites…are trading on the lack of clarity and producing a legible simulacra of the thing, so the the mass in the middle who can't perceive it as clearly as the artists [or the movement founders] aren't able to distinguish the real from the simulation, therefore they cannot effectively consistently choose to orient their energy and attention towards the thing that’s being produced by the artists [i.e., visionary movement founders] and are therefore relatively reasonably hoodwinked by the parasites….Artists, they’re not warriors. Their intrinsic orientation is towards doing everything they can to focus on this crazy thing and trying to bring it forth into the world with fidelity and clarity…for whatever reasons we still don't seem to have done a very good job of really thinking about how do you actually always bring warriors like with the artists….It's not at all surprising that it has also shown up as quite a shit show….Once you're not surprised by the natural development of these kinds of things…pick any scene, anytime, particularly if you really cared about it and you watched it kind of get jacked and corroded and hijacked and also producing tremendous things of beauty. (35:45)
This is why cities are exciting places to be, and also typically more dangerous than living in a small town where people mostly know each other’s reputation even when they don’t know each other personally. A disturbing and sad reality is that there are humans living freely in society who would torture a person for fun and give no thought to killing another person if gave them a personal benefit and they had a good chance of not getting caught. These people benefit from anonymity, and anonymity is available in the city. While gratefully there seem to be relatively few of these dark triad/tetrad psychological profiles (1-3%), it doesn't serve us to imagine that we are always safe from them. There are various strategies for dealing with these dangerous people.
Political Quadrants and the Dark Triad
Repeat of the Quadrants for Text-to-Audio
Democrats: We create safety by working hard and assigning the protection job to someone who can do it on a larger scale. Our job is to manage the family and day-to-day interests, be part of the school community, and what we can manage. We’re the reasonable middle ground between the lock-em-up Republicans and the overly lenient greens.
Republican: Unfortunately, there are some bad seeds out there who are predatory. There are others who are weak but refuse to do their part to cooperate with the protections available in a peaceful society. They become victimized. We do our best to offer a message of how to come over to the good side. The best we can do is protect ourselves from the worst of the repeat offenders by building prisons, armies, and gated or heavily policed communities.
Libertarian rural (populist): We are bound together by commitment to each other (nationalist), without subservience but in a reasoned deference to the needs of the group as a whole. In that way, we are stronger than those who would try to invade or harm those in our circle of trust.
Libertarian urban (dissident right): Democrats are simply giving away their own power so they will be protected by a group or strong leader, and ultimately that makes society vulnerable to tyranny. Have a passport ready and some property or business interests in other locations so you can split when one place gets too problematic. No point in trying to manage the crazy. Live and let live.
Greens: We think those criminals just had a bad upbringing and somehow we can save them all if we have enuf compassion. When Jordan Hall says “for whatever reasons we still don't seem to have done a very good job of really thinking about how do you actually always bring warriors like with the artists,” well, I know the reason. We artsy idealist types have hoped against all evidence that if we sing kum ba ya loud enuf all those psychopaths will just hold hands with us and feel the love and realize they don’t need to be like that anymore because they are among friends. Once in a while that happens. Most often it opens the door for us to be exploited.
References
Hall, J. (2021, December 15). Web3: Tech vs the human condition [Audio podcast]. In Rebel Wisdom, Ep. 177. https://rebelwisdom.podbean.com/e/web3-tech-vs-the-human-condition-jordan-hall/