Category Archives: society

The Americans lie, and the Russians don’t bluff

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I was thinking how the Americans don’t seem to understand anyone and have incredibly strange assumptions in communication, and I think I’m starting to understand the “root cause” of their problem.

You see, America is a land of liars; or, more precisely, a land of snake oil salesmen, where everybody is selling something, starting with themselves, and the implicit assumption they have in every interaction is that everybody else is the same. Those snake oil salesmen invented all sorts of theories to be used when marketing your snake oil to people – body language, alpha/beta male divisions, positive thinking, and so on. It all seems to describe some reality, but it works only in America, where everybody is playing the same game of selling snake oil to others, and being wary of others selling snake oil to them. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that others don’t use the same “language” in communication. For instance, they keep wearing some fake smile and being artificially friendly in communication, but that’s because they are taught that such approach is disarming and it improves your chances of selling your snake oil to others. They don’t smile because they like you or because they are happy, they smile because they are taught this approach in some “how to sell whatever stupid bullshit to customers” course. They are also taught to emulate being confident, to stand tall, look you straight in the eyes and never show that they are lying when they are lying, which is always.

It is for this reason that they assume that, when someone like Putin talks, it is safe to ignore everything he’s saying because it must all be false (the way one should ignore everything an American is saying because it’s all lies), and if he appears confident and straightforward, it must be a bluff because that’s how Americans were all taught to lie.

Their problem is that others aren’t playing the same game.

When a normal person is slouched or just has a blank empty look, it doesn’t mean they lack self-confidence, or that they are lying, or aren’t sure of themselves. They just didn’t go through an acting course for liars and poseurs. The actual meaning of the slouched, absent-minded posture might be that an engineer is thinking about a tensor-representation of multiple forces influencing a body orbiting a magnetar, or that one is just mentally tired because he had many things to do today and is just chilling and recharging his energy. You basically can’t conclude anything from an irrelevant thing such as body posture, which is why people outside America hardly ever bother with such bullshit, and instead listen to each other. For instance, if someone tells you to piss off because you’re annoying him, that’s probably exactly what he’s thinking. Also, if he says he likes your attitude and invites you to have a drink with him, the odds are that’s exactly what he’s thinking. It reminds me of one of those jokes about men and women, where a woman says “I have a headache” and it means “I don’t want to fuck you or talk to you because you were polite to the neighbour whose wife was gossiping me behind my back and I’m not going to even tell you what the problem is because if you don’t know why I’m mad, it just means you’re not paying attention to me which means you don’t really care about me so fuck you”. When a man says “I have a headache”, he means “I have a headache”. Well, the Americans think like women. The Russians think like men. When a Russian says “I’m annoyed at you because you are exiting disarmament treaties and amassing weapon systems at our borders; you should stop”, that’s exactly what he means, and the implication is that if you don’t stop, he’ll have to do something about it. When a Russian says “we did something about it, and developed modern weapons, so you better stop fucking with us or else”, this is exactly what he means, and the implication of “else” is that he’s going to use those new weapons to destroy the immediate threat, and then stop to see if you understood the message. The Russians don’t bluff, because they don’t have a national game where bluffing is the main move. They don’t play poker. They play chess. They are also very straightforward people. If they like you, they smile and take you home to cook you dinner, they get drunk with you and tell stupid jokes. If they don’t like you, they tell you to go to hell, and if you don’t, they’ll gladly show you the way.

This misunderstanding of language between people who are all bluff, and people who are all substance, is extremely dangerous, when the Americans don’t listen to the Russians because of their faulty assumptions.

Of course, it’s not that the Americans have patent rights on idiocy; humans in general tend to assume things that are completely unwarranted, and then they get shocked when shit happens; for instance, kids bully the weird kid who just wants to be left alone, and since he doesn’t appear to do anything, they do it more, until he comes to school with a gun and outright murders them. It’s weird that they think that this is for some reason a pathological reaction – it’s not. It’s a perfectly reasonable reaction – someone annoys you, you tell him to stop. He laughs at you and annoys you more. You tell him to stop more forcefully, because he obviously didn’t get it the first time. He laughs at you and continues to annoy you. Then you try to notify authorities, but they wave you off because they don’t give a fuck. You understand that your life is being made miserable by intentional sadistic action by someone who doesn’t respond to your clearly stated wishes, the authorities don’t care, and you see no way you can remove yourself from the situation, so your options are to continue living in hell or to destroy the enemy. So you destroy the enemy, and its a very rational response to the problem, and the fact that people are too stupid to understand that and interpret such reactions as “wrong” and “psychotic” only means that they are the psychotic ones, because they are too fucked up to understand how things work. If you’re a sadist who derives joy from turning someone’s life into hell, and you refuse to stop when told so, that person has every right to kill you. The fact that you assume to be invulnerable and everybody reacts with shock when the obvious thing happens, only means that you are all idiots.

If you fuck with the Russians, they will initially be shocked. Then they will be angry and they will try to explain to you that what you did annoyed them, and that you should stop. If you don’t, they will try to use more direct language because you obviously didn’t understand. If you still continue to annoy them, they will decide that you’re a bad person and they will try to remove themselves from your company and go elsewhere. If you try to prevent this and continue to annoy them and sabotage their interactions with others, they will get really angry and threaten you with violence if you don’t leave them alone. If that doesn’t work, they will kill you.

The American problem is very similar to that of a bully who assumes to be invulnerable and his reaction to “leave me alone” is laughter and escalation of violence, because someone telling you something with words “obviously” means they can’t do anything about it. When they actually do something about it, you react with shock, because you’re all idiots.

The price of being a bitch

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Dr. Jordan Peterson, the famous Canadian clinical psychologist with perfectly normal opinions about basic things, that somehow manage to be controversial in this profoundly psychotic civilization, found himself in an unenviable position when some politcorrect state body threatened to revoke his clinical license unless he submits to what can only be called brainwashing and reprogramming to the “correct” leftist schedule.

My reaction to this was that he had that coming.

You see, one of the things that profoundly annoyed me about him is that he always recommends that, when you find yourself opposed to the majority, you have to assume that they are right and you are wrong. Basically, he assumes that the majority will always be “normal” by default, and any deviation from “normal” is probably for the worse. So, yeah; he’s having a taste of his own medicine now. The vast majority of psychologists, including the ones who are in the position to approve or revoke his license, are leftist idiots. The entire field is a cesspool of Marxist and postmodernist idiocy, but he would like to have his doctorate and a license to practice. So, he’s now in a position where he either has to practice his own doctrine and bend over to the majority, or understand that his doctrine was wrong.

I was once in a position where cca. 30 people were trying to tell me that I was obviously and stubbornly wrong because I stated that 2+3*5=17. I remained perfectly firm in my position regardless of their opinion, for one simple reason – I was much better at mathematics than any of them, and I knew about the priority of operations. They even pulled out several cheap calculators that calculate 25 as the result, and this, too, didn’t change my mind one least bit. The situation, however, was a major cornerstone in my thinking, because I realised that any number of people can have the same opinion because they are the same kind of stupid, and an individual can be smarter than all of them put together, because their mental capacities don’t add. If neither of the members of a group possess certain knowledge, the group doesn’t magically come to possess it regardless of its size. Also, the IQ of a group can never exceed the IQ of the smartest individual in the group, and arguably can’t even reach it, because if consensus is required, the result will gravitate towards the median. You can be right and any number of your opponents can be wrong, if you’re making correct conclusions, and they are all deluded in the same way. This realisation permanently changed something inside me, like feeling a pressure or a weight lift; I understood then that I subconsciously felt strain every time I deviated from commonly accepted “truths”, and this was the point where I profoundly and irrevocably stopped caring. This didn’t make me start accepting all kinds of idiotic beliefs that are not backed by evidence or experience of any kind, though; if anything, I became more careful, because I was left in a position where I couldn’t rely on anybody else to correct me, so I had to catch all of my mistakes myself.

I wonder whether Peterson will have the courage to do the same, and have a 2+3*5 moment. I somehow doubt it; he doesn’t look like someone who has that kind of courage.

Status symbols

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I was thinking about utility and futility of status symbols recently, in relation to the Andrew Tate controversy, so let me share my thoughts here.

First of all, status symbols are useful when you interact with new people, because you want them to properly identify your social position, in order to avoid the slow and impractical process of introduction, and in order to get to the point where they react to you appropriately. For instance, if you don’t dress appropriately for your social status when you try to buy something expensive, you might find yourself in an awqward position where they don’t believe that you have the money to buy what you want to buy, and if they don’t take you seriously it might require excessive effort on your behalf to convince them. Dressing appropriately is not as essential as behaving appropriately, but it helps. Status symbols are, in those cases, the equivalent of a uniform for a doctor, fireman or a policeman; if you don’t have a uniform, you might be as qualified for your job as ever, but people might not believe you without some convincing, and an appropriate uniform makes this tiresome step unnecessary. Note that this step is only necessary in the environment where people meet you for the first time. If everybody knows you’re a doctor or a policeman, for instance if you live in a small town, the uniform is nowhere near as important, which might be why people pay more attention (and money) to status symbols when they live in big cities. If people don’t know you, the kind of car you drive, as well as your suit and watch, are something that tells people something about your level of social success and standing. Certainly, there are people who fake this by wasting all the money they don’t have on status symbols, and they can “hack” the first impression, but it will only get them so far, and if they make a poor impression later on, it will all backfire on them heavily. So, status symbols are useful, but also “hackable”, and thus not reliable.

The second point is that status symbols can backfire if you don’t know what you’re doing. For instance, if you live in a small town, where everybody knows you, wasting money on status symbols doesn’t add anything to the impression you’re making, because everybody already knows what you do and what kind of money you’re making, so if you behave wastefully, they won’t think you’re wealthy, they’ll think you’re an idiot. Also, status symbols put pressure on your environment to try to match you, and this might financially strain them, so they will subconsciously blame you for putting such pressure on them, which won’t make them like you very much. You basically motivate people to alienate you and think poorly of you, because that’s a less expensive way of dealing with the pressure you are exerting.

The third point is that in a small environment, where people know you, they will judge your social status by the most expensive thing you own, for instance your house. Spending money on an expensive car or a watch doesn’t do anything after that point, because everybody already knows you’re rich because you own a big house. Also, if you don’t own a big house, but you own an expensive trinket, they will think you’re an idiot, so that is counterproductive. In a big city, however, that might work, but as people get to know you, it will backfire later. It is always better to surprise people positively as they get to know you better, because otherwise the positive first impression will backfire on you. A normal car parked in front an expensive house in a good neighbourhood makes a much better impression than a fancy car parked in front of a shitty house in a cheap neighbourhood, because if your primary status symbol is less impressive than secondary and tertiary ones (cars, clothes and trinkets), you will leave a very poor impression, because such behaviour is usually associated with people of low class. People of high class, however, usually have their priorities straight and they feel comfortable with their status, and so don’t spend excessively on trinkets.

Also, status symbols are not necessary if you are famous. For instance, if someone is a famous musician, actor, politician or something, everybody who recognizes you will already know your social standing, and spending excessive money on status symbols will do nothing for your public recognition; it might, however, leave an impression of gaudiness and wastefulness, so acting appropriately means that you have to present yourself according to social norms for decency. For instance, if Bill Gates goes somewhere dressed cheaply, and people recognize who he is, they won’t suddenly conclude that he’s poor. If anything, they might like him more because they won’t feel he’s signalling his enormous wealth in ways that make them feel like losers, thus making it a preferential choice for them to isolate and reject him.

So, basically, the status symbols are sometimes useful, for instance when you need to present yourself to new people in such a way that the first impression you make is useful for them to assess your social standing correctly. For instance, I told my son that he has to present himself more formally, because people would otherwise underestimate him, because he’s young; he is a competent young professional and needs to present a public persona that conveys a correct impression. If he dresses like a broke loser, people will tend to treat him as such, and that’s neither pleasant nor useful. That doesn’t mean he has to overspend on clothes and trinkets, but a nice shirt  and a clean looking watch can already do most of the work. However, status symbols very quickly reach a point where people feel as if you’re rubbing it in, and exerting pressure on them to act wastefully, which is basically why Andrew Tate pissed me off; he actively tries to set a standard of wasteful behaviour, to which I react with “how about ‘no‘”, and he achieves the exact opposite of his intentions, despite the fact that I actually like him quite a bit. There is obviously a line of propriety regarding status symbols; you need to look like you belong there, but you also need to avoid presenting in such a blatantly ostentatious way as to intentionally make other people feel bad, because that tends to end badly, and especially so when ostentatiousness is combined with arrogance and haughtiness.

The endless spiral

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I must admit that this Andrew Tate person (or at least his public persona) pissed me off more than I expected, but probably for reasons other than one might expect. For instance, I agree with most of what he’s saying. I don’t like his flamboyant behaviour, or the way he doesn’t seem to really connect with women, but that’s not what pissed me off.

What pissed me off is that he tries to teach people never to be content with anything, never to settle for “good enough”, never to transcend base greed, never to stop trying to acquire status by flaunting status symbols, never to stop and think and understand that appearance of power and appearance of freedom do not magically produce the real thing, when acquired. I kept having an argument with a simulated Tate in my head, and it bothered me that I couldn’t answer some of his boisterous arguments in an immediate and satisfactory way. “Where’s your Bugatti?”, for instance, is something I can’t answer with a satisfactory sound bite. I don’t have enough money to be able to afford such an object, and then decide against it because I’m being reasonable, or because I don’t really want it. It is true, however, that when I acquired a significant amount of money, I stopped caring about “status symbols” to a very large degree, which is something I understand; when I was financially threatened, I felt the need to maintain a defensive posture that would prevent the “sharks” from smelling my blood in the water, so to speak, so I kept the appearance of having money when I was deeply in debt and everything felt very fragile. I would buy the most expensive car I could possibly manage, in order to maintain the appearance of wealth and security, in order to discourage attacks by my enemies. I don’t know if any of it worked, but that was my reasoning. It was all based on instinct, the way a cat puffs itself up to appear bigger when scared, and acting on such instinct probably only depleted my scarce resources, but in hindsight I don’t see how those resources could have been used for something constructive; the situation was too profoundly bad for constructive measures at that point, and I correctly felt that I need to just buy time, survive while maintaining a defensive posture, until the situation that was presently outside of my control improves. One would expect that, later, when I not only got out of debt, but started making quite a bit of money, I would start preening like that Tate peacock, but that didn’t happen. What I noticed is that I was buying the stuff that I would normally need, but I could do it properly now. If I needed a laptop, I could just buy a proper one that meets my needs, not something second-hand from ebay, or something barely adequate because it’s cheap. If I needed clothes, I could just walk into a store and buy whatever I needed. I pay the bills immediately, not postpone it until the latest possible moment. I buy the fuel when I need it, not when I can afford it. If I feel like going somewhere for a day, I just do; I don’t have to wait until I have enough money for fuel. If I need a computer, I buy really good components, not the cheapest ones that barely work for me. So, money is good, and poverty is shit. However, what I noticed is that this peaked quite quickly; basically, for the most part, I still buy the same kind of stuff that I previously used, but I can easily afford it now. Before, I had to buy a seven year old car, and even then it was a stretch. Now I can just go to a car salon and buy something, but I still drive cars of exactly the same type and class I did before; it’s just that I buy them new now, and I can easily afford it. I once thought that, if I could buy a new BMW M5, that I would immediately do it, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I bought normal cars, and when I found a good deal on them. I wondered why that was, and one possible answer was that I don’t have enough money to buy such a thing and not reduce the amount of money I have significantly, and that certainly is one factor, but that would not have stopped me in the bad years, when I felt financially vulnerable and threatened; I’d spend everything I had on such a status symbol, and go into debt as much as possible; the self-preservation preening instinct was just too strong to allow for reasonable action. When I look at Tate, it seems that for some people this never goes away even when they become wealthy, they develop an insatiable greed in their years of poverty, a greed that can never be sated, a hole that can never be filled. That didn’t happen to me; I reacted with defensive instincts when I was in real trouble, but once I replaced all the things that wore out or broke during the bad years, I basically got to a point where I relaxed and calmed down, capped my expenses at a reasonable, slightly above average level, and started saving money.

That’s one thing that annoyed me with Tate – he tries to provoke people into keeping up the endless spiral of greed and preening, into destroying themselves financially and making potentially dangerous financial moves in order to be able to afford a lifestyle of incredible wastefulness, because he convinced them that freedom and safety are only possible at the upper echelons of wealth. Considering how he and his brother are currently in a Romanian prison, under whatever fake charges America told the Romanians to invent, and his opulent and boisterous lifestyle not only didn’t prevent that, but arguably caused it, I could flip the question and ask him where his Bugatti is, now. This, however, doesn’t satisfy me, because the fact that I don’t actually have enough money to really do all the things I would want to is something I feel to be a valid argument against me, so let’s see how I would actually answer it if I wanted to be perfectly honest. I would answer that I am a slave, a prisoner and a cripple. I can’t fly, or teleport, or change shape of my body, or extend my mind as well as I would want to. I am confronted with my limitations whenever I try to do anything I have no talent for – I can’t read or compose music, for instance; I have only limited understanding of electronics, and always had issues with mathematics, because I am slightly dyslexic to the point where I make mistakes copying long sequences of numbers and symbols, and I make mistakes when solving long equations, even when I completely understand how they should be solved. Some things come to me with trivial ease, and for some my brain just doesn’t work and it feels like trying to push through a brick wall. So, I’m limited by my lack of ability, by my lack of talent, by fundamental immutable physical limitations of my body, by the characteristics of the world, by limited resources at my disposal, and so on. The most painful limitation is that God hides himself from my sight; I feel the presence, and I can be much more than I can see, but for the most part I have to try really hard not to think about it because it hurts like fucking hell. I can’t meditate because I immediately hit an artificial wall, that was put there because God apparently thinks I have to remain in the state of separation in order to do the things I have to do, so when I meditate and hit that wall I feel helpless frustration caused by the fact that it’s not up to me; I actually sometimes wish that it were because I fucked up, because then I could work on fixing it, I could repent, or work hard to repay whatever debt, or something. So, I am limited, and I hate it, but the point where I get incredibly pissed at the imagined “where’s your Bugatti?” question is that the damn fool asking it doesn’t understand the enormous extent of my problem. Sure, I can’t buy a 5M USD car, but honestly, I can buy a 200K USD car, and I still bought one that’s ten times cheaper, just because I knew that a more expensive car won’t solve my problem. I won’t get my abilities back. I will still hit a “presence, but no information” barrier when I meditate. It will still hurt like a motherfucker when I accidentally think about all the things I can’t reach. I will still feel damaged when I try something that’s outside of my talents. I will still feel vulnerable to attack. I don’t have a Bugatti because I’m not wealthy enough, but that’s beside the point; the reason why I don’t have an M5 is because I know it wouldn’t solve my problems. The illusion of power doesn’t interest me. The illusion of safety doesn’t interest me. I want the real thing, not illusions and trinkets. I mentioned my weak points and limitations, but this one is not one of them; you see, I am not prone to self-deception. I know what the problems are, and I know what doesn’t solve them, even if I don’t have the actual solution available. I don’t do stupid moves that have the purpose of creating pleasant illusions. If truth hurts, I would rather feel the pain. So, that seems to be the root of my irritation with Andrew Tate – I see the guy who’s taking the path of self-deception, and by some instinct this makes me do the opposite, and it hurts.

About pimps and hubris

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I recently got flooded by all kinds of videos by or about that Andrew Tate guy who is supposed to be controversial. I watched lots of it, mostly because I have an instinctive dislike for the guy and I wanted to get to the bottom of that, since my dislike obviously doesn’t have anything to do with the things he is actually saying, which are both true and so self-evident one really has to wonder about the nature of the world we live in if it’s controversial that 2+2=4, the sky is blue and rocks are hard.

Also, I don’t know whether I dislike the actual person or a persona he’s putting on for the sake of the audience; there are contradictions there, so I got interested enough in the guy to watch a lot of his stuff.

Recently, he got arrested in Romania on what looks like fabricated charges, which appears only to have increased both his fame and the amount of his stuff in my YouTube feed, so I had enough material to articulate my opinion, so here it is.

He is a pashavi, which is what yoga and tantra would call a “physical” type of a human, who is for all intents and purposes a body only, and perceives only the physical world. I heard that Gnostics also have some classification, into physical, intellectual and spiritual types, but Gnosticism is not my thing so I am not too familiar with its nuances – in any case, you can probably understand what I’m trying to say. The guy thinks he figured out the rules, he’s winning the game, and all men want to be him, and all women want to fuck him. That part is actually funny; what I find annoying is the “if you have it, flaunt it” attitude (money, houses, cars), which I perceive as crass, rude and oozing hubris. The reason why I think that is obvious from what happened to him – someone in the top echelons of politics or intelligence agencies simply pressured the Romanians to put him in jail, and this suddenly put him in a position where all the things he was so proud of were suddenly of very little use. Basically, I find it very annoying when someone who is basically a slave flaunts “status symbols”. Conversely, one of the most impressive status symbols I’ve seen is the fact that Mahavatar Babaji from Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi” is described as being dressed in a simple piece of cloth and owning only that cloth and a staff. Why is that impressive, you’ll ask? It’s impressive because he can materialise a huge palace or any other object if it’s needed to give some student a lesson, he travels by teleportation and can basically do whatever he wants. The minimalist appearance is in fact the ultimate statement of power; basically, compared to him, an expensive car is merely compensation for not being to move quickly on your own, so you need an expensive wheelchair. An aeroplane is just evidence you can’t fly on your own. A house is a thing weak beings use since they are otherwise harmed by so many things. When someone flaunts signs of human weakness and limitation as status symbols, it strikes me as a sign of idiocy. Having the best, jewel-encrusted wheelchair still makes you a cripple. Just have your normal wheelchair, it’s actually less pathetic.

What kind of status symbols make sense? Something that has something to do with your accomplishments – for instance, the protagonist of Carl Sagan’s book “Contact” wearing improvised jewellery made from throwaway synthetic rubies she made when designing MASERs for amplifying radio signals from the Arecibo telescope. The other example is Tim Cook wearing an Apple Watch, or Mate Rimac driving a “Nevera” to his wedding, or Richard Feynman drawing Feynman diagrams on his van, or the guy who designed the Mars rover having a “my second vehicle is a Mars rover” bumper sticker. What did that Tate dude do to make his money? He’s pimping out cam whores. Literally, he whored out his girlfriends to entertain perverts on the Internet for money for him. I would understand if Elon Musk or Mate Rimac wanted to flaunt their accomplishments; at least Rimac acquired Bugatti the right way. Just buying one because you can afford the cost is a second-rate accomplishment. Driving one because you own the company would be another matter entirely. That, BTW, is also the reason why I feel contempt for all those Arab petroleum billionaires who flaunt their wealth around, and their only virtue is being born at the place where the black stuff squirts from the sand, and somebody is prepared to pay huge money for it, and they don’t think it’s ethical to just take it from you and have you enslaved, although they easily could.

What do I consider to be proper status symbols? The things that can never be taken away from you. The things that show pride in your personal accomplishments – a doctorate in physics, a Nobel prize, a technological artefact that improved the world and made you rich, a medal of honour, a scar you earned by doing something virtuous, a monument commemorating your heroic death, praise from the people you helped. Pimping out your girlfriends and buying a Bugatti to show off your great success? Go fuck yourself. You know whom I admire? I’ll tell you a story. A Russian fighter-bomber pilot, a squadron commander, got shot down in Syria fighting ISIS. His wingman was ordered to return to base immediately because of enemy fire from the ground. He disregarded the order and stayed in the air, providing air support to his commander, under enemy fire, until he saw that his commander died taking out himself and the surrounding terrorists with a hand grenade rather than be taken alive, and he himself ran out of fuel and actually had to return to base. No Bugatti, no 300M dollars, no yacht, no private jet, no whores.