Tag Archives: psychology

Gaslighting

gaslight

I’d like to revisit and expand here on a point I made two weeks ago at the end of Pathology and Pathogen. The very last part of Andrew Joyce’s article I quoted was:

Critics of Jews are equally concerned with developing an understanding not only of Jewish power and influence, but also of the pathology of Whites that has facilitated Jewish power and influence as well as the current disaster of displacement-level immigration and multiculturalism. The emphasis is on the identification of multiple sources and origins of the current societal malaise, and on evidence-based intellectual and scientific investigation of all aspects of the interactions between Jews and non-Jews in all locations and throughout historical time. This activity can in no way be seen as the seeking of simplistic answers.

This, as I said, is the problem. It is an acknowledgement that there is a problem and at the same time it is a misconstrual of the nature and source of the problem.

As Joyce’s own description alludes, in the interactions between jews and non-jews in all locations and throughout historical time the sole common element is … the jews. Yet he also take pains to avoid this simple point – to emphasize that he, and other critics of jews seek “multiple sources and origins” which “can in no way be seen as the seeking of simplistic answers”.

But the answer is simple. No pathogen, no pathology. Or to put it slightly less simply, the impact of jewish pathologization and manipulation is so enormous that it’s difficult to imagine what problems would remain if they were removed.

At any rate, as the earlier portion of Joyce’s article made clear, and as I can attest to myself, an objective critic of jews can dig into as many details and develop as complex an understanding of jews as they like. But from the beginning jews will pathologize them and their effort as “anti-semitism” – as a congenital mental disease which has nothing to do with the jews. My argument is that the simple answer to such single-minded hostility is, first of all, to recognize it as such. Second, to recognize that whatever appeal objectivity has to Whites, however inborn it may be, it is in this case part of the problem.

In the face of jewish aggression, Whites have historically capitulated and are now prostrate exactly because we have internalized the fundamental thrust of the jewish critique. Whites have blamed ourselves and our societies for not being tolerant or accomodating enough. The political term for this misguided belief is “liberalism”. The simple answer is to steel ourselves and advise our collective to be less prone to tolerance and accomodation, to resist the urge to blame ourselves and our collective, and instead to recognize manipulative alien collectives, first and foremost the jews, as an endless source of threats and pathology from which we individuals who are aware of the situation have a responsibility to defend ourselves and our collective.

I must emphasize now, again, that I credit Joyce with at least connecting his own discussion of “white pathology” to the jews and jewish power. This connection is obvious and simple to make. Yet it is missing from the diagnosis provided by many other pundits who like to use terms like “white pathology”. This is especially glaring for those pundits who insist on using terms like “white suicide” to push the suicide meme, as I discussed in Fear and Genocide. Pundits like the jew Lawrence Auster and the jewhadi Fjordman come immediately to mind.

I’m also thinking of pundits like Ricardo Duchesne and Jared Taylor, who more or less pretend the jews don’t exist or are “white”, and in either case the jews don’t play a significant role in anything they have to say about “white pathology” or “white suicide”. Duchesne and Taylor were among the handful of writers Kevin MacDonald asked to address the issue in late 2013, in Recently in The Occidental Quarterly: Special Sections on White Pathology.

MacDonald has written about it himself. In an article from October of 2014, Psychopathology and Racial Self-Hate among Whites, he begins:

A prominent feature of the Frankfurt School was the ideology that ethnocentrism among Whites (but not Jews) was a psychopathology. This weapon was taken up by the organized Jewish community which claimed that pro-White and anti-Jewish attitudes were literally public health problems and popularized phrases like “virulent anti-Semitism,” analogizing anti-Jewish attitudes to the spread of a virus.

This campaign has been incredibly successful among Whites. Whites who have internalized this pathogen naturally suppress such attitudes, and they do so despite their universality, and despite the reality that ethnic self-interest is eminently rational from an evolutionary perspective. And even despite the fact that many of those promoting this pathogen are proudly ethnocentric themselves.

But the campaign has been very effective: No one wants to publicly express attitudes that mark one as a psychiatric case.

So far, so good. He even identified jews as the pathogen, or at least as the source of a pathogenic campaign. But then he seems to balk and backpedal, showing some signs that he too has internalized a bit of the pathogen he just described:

Given the rationality and the evolutionary imperative of ethnic interests, there is the opposite suggestion — that at least some of the Whites who express such attitudes are suffering from a psychopathology. After all, the great majority of humanity is, to varying degrees, ethnocentric. and proud of it. What’s wrong with Whites?

This isn’t the opposite suggestion. It’s the same suggestion: There’s something inherently and unfixably wrong with Whites, and it is not caused by the jews. That’s the suggestion. The main example MacDonald focuses on is Pastor Renita Marie, who in response to the jewsmedia propaganda about Ferguson, wrote an article for the jewsmedia expressing guilt about her Whiteness. MacDonald describes her as a “genuine liberal”, a term he says was used by the Frankfurt School. He then explains how the Frankfurt school pseudo-science was wrong, that they “create an upside-down world where ethnocentric Whites had parents who didn’t love them”. But the woman had an ethnocentric upbringing and still turned out to be a race traitor. Therefore, MacDonald seemed to be presenting this as a case of “white pathlogy”, minus the jews. As he puts it:

Rev. Marie has dropped out of the White race and has become a crusader against it. Of course, that means a good career and lots of praise from elites in the contemporary environment. But it’s pretty clear that her motivation is far deeper than merely taking advantage of all the opportunities available these days from hating Whites. A genuine race traitor. Noel Ignatiev would be proud.

But it isn’t at all clear that Marie’s motivation runs any deeper than the jewish pathogenic factors MacDonald himself describes. Instead it seems, as I previously discussed in the case of Joyce, that MacDonald simply doesn’t wish to accept that it is that simple.

Another indication is that MacDonald links Noel Ignatiev’s name to a search of his website. The first hit is an article of his from 2009 titled Promoting genocide of whites? Noel Ignatiev and the culture of Western suicide. He notes that:

the effort by a professor, Noel Ignatiev, and his journal, Race Traitor, to promote the “cultural and psychological genocide of whites.”

Amazingly, MacDonald refuses to take this seriously and argues instead that Ignatiev’s use of the word genocide and his anti-White arguments and activism are just so much hyperbole and nonsense. MacDonald describes how he sees Ignatiev and his allies:

Their hatred assumes a surface legitimacy because the hated “whites” are just a “social construct.” It’s not really about killing people, so where’s the beef? The “genocide” of whites is not about homicide or suicide; it’s only about getting white people to stop thinking that they are white.

Our interpretation is that Ignatiev’s views are nothing more than ethnic competition. As a leftist Jew, he is part of a long tradition that has opposed white interests and identity — the culture of critique that has become the culture of Western suicide.

The culture of critique is a jewish construct, not a White construct. Jews deliberately attempting to induce Whites to stop thinking of themselves as White is genocide, not suicide. This should be obvious to someone who is actually explaining the role played by the jews.

So I have to say – never mind what’s wrong with Whites, or what’s wrong with Duchesne and Taylor – what’s wrong with Joyce and MacDonald? Physicians, heal thyselves!

When I first discussed “white pathology” (in Pathology and Pathogen), I acknowledged that many Whites are clearly behaving pathologically. My point was that the pathogen, the jews, explains this. Furthermore, jewish psychological influence is visible even in Whites who are conscious of race and the jews, even in those who attempt to explain jewish psychological influence, like Joyce and, as I’ve just described, MacDonald.

The most negative response I’ve gotten was, “We know already what is wrong with the Jews … we should now ask ourselves what is wrong with us”. This is precisely the suggestion Joyce and MacDonald have made and that I’ve taken issue with.

I consider it a problem that even White men as knowledgable about the jews and jewish power as MacDonald and Joyce are can, for fear of appearing simple-minded, come across instead as overeager to buy into the less plausible idea of a congenital “white pathology”, independent of the jews. An idea which is primarily promoted by jews themselves and others who seem most interested to ignore or at least downplay the role of jews.

So far I’ve been reiterating and fleshing out of points and arguments I’ve already made. I’d like to add a new twist now, another way of seeing the relationship between Whites and jews that I think dovetails with this discussion. It also fits my previous suggestion that Whites need to confront the parasitic nature of that relationship, and not shy from taking the White side in it.

I first discussed Stockholm Syndrome in The Nature of Jewish Power – Part 3. It was trying to understand and explain the behavior of men like John Derbyshire (see John Derbyshire and The Suicide Thing), who is well aware of jewish power and the fear they induce, but who in spite of that, or rather because of it, minimizes the role of the jews and denounces braver and more honest men than himself who don’t, men like Kevin MacDonald.

Stockholm syndrome:

or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

At the time I quoted a portion of an article describing the Symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, which I’ll quote again here, because it can be seen as a metaphor for the broader mainstream media and political zeitgeist, well beyond Derbyshire and MacDonald:

Included in these traits are the prisoner’s belief (correct or incorrect, it doesn’t matter) that he or she cannot escape, which means that survival must occur within the rules set by the all-powerful captor; and the prisoner’s isolation from people not being held by the captors, which prohibits any outside view of the captors from infringing on the psychological processes that lead to Stockholm syndrome.

In the current zeitgeist the White “prisoners”, or hosts, dare not question their jew “captors”, the parasites, who quite literally dictate and diligently enforce the rules of “proper” discourse. This is popularly referred to as political correctness, though the term semitic correctness is more fitting.

The crux of capture-bonding is that the “prisoners” don’t see their “captors” as wrong-doers, but out of ignorance or pity come over time to sympathize and make excuses for them instead.

There is a related psychological phenomenon whose symptoms are just as much or more relevant to the relationship between Whites and jews, and specifically the discussion of “anti-semitism” and “white pathology”. It’s called gaslighting:

Gaslighting or gas-lighting[1] is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted/spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception and sanity.[2] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term owes its origin to the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, after which it was coined popularly.

Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.

The obvious analogy is that the jews and their psychoanalytic theories of “anti-semitism” are the mental abusers, the sociopathic liars who deny any wrongdoing, and Whites are the victims of their mental abuse, and exhibit “white pathology” as a result of it.

Another definition of the term explains in more detail:

Gaslighting – The practice of brainwashing or convincing a mentally healthy individual that they are going insane or that their understanding of reality is mistaken or false. The term “Gaslighting” is based on the 1944 MGM movie “Gaslight”.

Casting You as the Crazy One

In the classic suspense thriller, Gaslight, Paula (Ingrid Bergman) marries the villainous Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), not realizing that he is the one who murdered her aunt and is now searching for her missing jewels.

To cover up his treachery, he tries to persuade Paula that she is going mad, so he can search the attic for the jewels without her interference. He plants missing objects on her person in order to make her believe that she has no recollection of reality.

Essentially, it describes forms of manipulation which are designed to make the victim lose their grip on the truth or doubt their perception of reality.

Among the examples of what it looks like that fit the jews:

A person acts threateningly and then accuses you of abuse when you react in self-defense.

How it Feels

Gaslighting can be a terrifying experience. It can quickly put you on the defensive – trying to justify your own actions or behaviors – when you started out by challenging someone else’s questionable behavior.

A gaslighting perpetrator’s fabrications may be presented so convincingly and with such conviction you begin to question yourself and your own memories and judgment.

Among a list of points advising what NOT to do:

Don’t waste your time trying to convince someone who has already made up their mind about you that they should reconsider.

In other words, don’t bother arguing with jews or other true-believer anti-Whites.

Don’t blame yourself for what the other person is feeling or how they are behaving. Don’t look for ways to change yourself to try to fix another person. As the OOTF 3 C’s mantra says: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it and you can’t control it.” You are only responsible for your own words and actions.

In other words, don’t go searching for “white pathology” when the effort jews make to create it is staring you right in the face. If you do, then you are responsible for that.

I’ll emphasize again right here that I’m drawing an analogy. It’s not a perfect fit. For one thing, gaslighting ordinarily describes a relationship between two individuals, whereas the analog I’m making is for the relationship between Whites and jews collectively, even though within those collectives there are a broad spectrum of individual motives and attitudes.

I do think however that the analogy is useful because it fits the most relevant and important aspect of the relationship between Whites and jews, the relatively conscious and lopsided relationship between White and jew elites.

Another description from a blog called Narcissists Suck:

Gaslighting occurs when a person you trust to tell you the truth about reality, is, in fact, bending reality with lies. When this happens consistently over a period of time it causes you to question your sanity.

This is important. For whatever reason one participant in the gaslighting relationship trusts the other. They do not expect and cannot accept that the other could lie to them. The other participant, in contrast, is deliberately manipulating and exploiting that trust.

Driving the victim insane may not be their main intent, as it is described elsewhere, but can instead be seen as a long-term result of the primary ingredient, the unrequited love, the one-sided abuse and deceit.

If you find yourself often questioning your own sanity you need to suspect you are being gaslighted. In the absence of any who will support what you are seeing, hearing, and knowing, please give yourself permission to believe yourself. Gaslighting is a deliberate and evil tactic. So when you’ve determined that someone is doing this to you, it is past time to remove yourself from this person’s sphere of influence.

I found a description connecting narcissism, gaslighting and Stockholm Syndrome. Once again, there are some obvious parallels to the relationship between elite Whites and jews – in particular the description of narcissists fits the jews.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disease (DSM) – 5 2013 Changes:

Narcissistic Victim Syndrome (NVS)

Is the result of the damages that occur to a person who is closely connected or involved with or works with a Narcissist. A narcissist is someone who needs total control and believes the world revolves around them and them only. The narcissist craves constant praise, admiration, honor and respect, even when they do not deserve it. They will use any means within which to obtain this constant control including the following: intimidation, abuse (physical, sexual, emotional and more), isolation, deprivation, financial/economic control and anything else that they can use to keep the victim under their thumb and control. One of their best tools is Gaslighting or the denigrating of the victim so they believe they are crazy and that only the Narcissist is capable of taking care of them or being with them. The narcissist is also always right and the perfect person, thus they could never possibly be wrong. This lends well with the theory of Gaslighting as the Narcissist will have the victim believe that they are too weak, or crazy, or delusional and more. They will actually cause the victim to distrust their own selves and ability to think for themselves. Narcissists are about total and complete submission of control to them. They do not recognize any boundaries or borders between them and others. They are the border control

Some of the signs and symptoms of NVS include:

A victim of NVS can exhibit Stockholm syndrome or cult-like behavior joining up with the aggressor. They will defend and protect the narcissist for fear of not being loved or part of their inner circle. The victim’s self-esteem is so torn down by the Gaslighting and other crazy making behaviors of the Narcissist that it is just easier for them to follow along. They often are so emotionally beaten down they do not realize what is even happening to them, just that they are angry or sad all the time, and feel like they have no persona or sense of self.

They will/can show signs of Cognitive Dissonance, which basically means that they know that the situation they are in is no good, but they continue to stay it, using false rational. Yet, they are angry, scared, confused, lost and do not know where to turn to. They fear things that never happened or even exist but because the Narcissist says they did, the Victim is programmed to believe it is so. [calls to mind “RAMPANT ANTI-SEMITISM!” and “THE HOLOCAUST!” -T] Their ability to think clearly has been disrupted and taken over by the Narcissist.

There’s much more I could say about this analogy, but as with what I had to say about parasitism, the main point is that it is not only more explanative than some vague “white pathology”, but prescriptive as well.

When You Love Your Abuser: Stockholm Syndrome and Trauma Bonds, for example, offers some further advice:

the only way to escape this dangerous dependency upon a psychopath is to remove yourself permanently from his influence. Any contact with him keeps you trapped in his web of manipulation and deceit. In some respects, however, this is a circular proposition. If you have the strength to leave a psychopath and the lucidity to reconsider your relationship with him, then you’re probably not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

As we recall, psychopaths establish control of their victims BITE by BITE, like emotional vampires. Once again, “BITE” stands for “behavior, information, thoughts and emotions.” Psychopaths attempt to control all aspects of their partners’ experience of reality.

To counteract their dangerous influence, you need to BITE back. Give the victim a true perception of reality and real emotional support.

Whites need to produce our own media, which offers a true perception of reality and real emotional support. Explain what the jews are doing, and how they are doing it. Counter the lie that they’re just an odd kind of “white” people who are, or could ever be, on the same side. Point out that the jews are gaslighting Whites – that their anti-White narrative about “racism”, “anti-semitism”, “blood libel”, “the holocaust”, and more is manipulative, abusive. Whites shouldn’t put up with this because it obviously isn’t good for Whites.

Simon Sheppard Interviewed by Paul Hickman

reverse_samson_option

See Voice of Albion: Simon Sheppard of The Heretical Press (Download), at Renegade Broadcasting. Sheppard comes at the War on Whites, nationalism, racialism and sex differences with a focus on behavior, psychology and Darwinism. It’s a stimulating two-hour discussion, well worth the listen.

The work Sheppard posted at The Heretical Press, and especially the essays of his accomplice in heresy Stephen Whittle (under the penname Luke O’Farrell), helped educate and bring me up to speed. Their arrest and persecution was a gut check, a glimpse of what the judaized justice system can do to anyone who stands, or even simply speaks, against them. I’m glad he was willing to speak to Paul, and glad to hear that he has not recanted.

Procedural Analysis: The DSoD Theory is an example of Sheppard’s original psychological theorizing, mentioned in the discussion. The image above is the “punchline” of the R. Crumb cartoon Sheppard refers to, When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America, a fantastic inversion of the Samson Option reality.

The Interplay of Ideology, Biology, Guilt and Shame

In whatever happened to european tribes? hbd* chick posits that Christianity discouraged inbreeding, which in turn triggered the dissolution of European tribalism and consequent shift in emphasis to the nuclear family.

We can see in this the give and take between ideology and biology – the roots of identity are genetic, but memes, over generations, do shape the underlying gene pool. To the extent outbreeding produces a relative shift in identity rather than simply destroying it, this also provides a partial, biological explanation for why Whites tend toward both broader (nationalist, racialist) and narrower (individualist) forms of identity. An even more proximate and substantial cause lies in decades of anti-White propaganda, and it encourages more extreme shifts, whether outward into humanism or inward into solipsism.

hbd* chick has been writing thought-provoking articles about the nature and origins of Europeans for some time. This article on European tribalism is from 2011, part of her inbreeding in europe series. More recently she has written about what she calls the outbreeding project, a subset of her general theory of the west – all based on the realization that clannishness goes hand in hand with consanguinity.

Two of her more recent posts, more on the origins of guilt in northwestern european populations and the transition from shame to guilt in anglo-saxon england (and “core” europe), are a critique of Peter Frost’s The origins of Northwest European guilt culture and Part II.

Frost begins Part I by noting the crucial difference between shame and guilt:

Shame is the primary means of behavioral control in most societies. If you are seen breaking a social rule, you will feel shame, and this feeling will be reinforced by what people say and do (gossiping, malicious looks, spitting, ostracism, etc.). Shame is much less effective if you break a rule without being seen or if you merely think about breaking a rule.

Guilt is more important in European societies, particularly those of Northwest European origin. It operates even when you act alone or merely think about breaking a rule. Behavior can thus be regulated in all possible situations with a minimum of surveillance.

Put more plainly, shame is the means by which more particularist/collectivist non-Whites maintain group cohesion, whereas guilt is the means by which more universalist/individualist Whites are encouraged to selflessly maintain a civil society in which everyone but Whites can thrive. Shame is something groups inflict upon themselves, for their own benefit, whereas guilt-tripping is a weapon of group warfare, used by non-Whites to discourage White group cohesion in any form between family and race.

Ironically, Frost cites Ruth Benedict on how shame compares to guilt:

Ruth Benedict first made the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures”. Pervasive feelings of guilt are part of a behavioral package that enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to complex social environments where kinship is less important and where rules of correct behavior must be obeyed with a minimum of surveillance.

Benedict helped establish cultural anthropology, which has since largely displaced physical anthropology, substituting jewish pilpul and narrative for the objective science developed by Northwest Europeans. If nothing else Benedict’s cultural theorizing helps explain her own mindset, moved by her “guilt culture” to work with members of a “shame culture” – jews like her mentor Franz Boas, her colleague Gene Weltfish and a swarm of other social science activists who were more or less openly obsessed with advancing the interests of their own tribe.

In order to prevail these cultural anthropologists literally made up stories and falsified data. They shamelessly leveraged tribalist networking, using their power and authority to advance pseudo-science while denouncing, shunning, defunding and otherwise tearing down their opponents. What’s more, they never expressed the slightest twinge of shame or guilt about it. They were far too busy feeling morally righteous about themselves and their cause.

The “behavioral package” of jews is adapted to parasitism. They do not empathize with their hosts. They will use shame, guilt, or any other mechanism they can in order to marginalize their enemies and hijack or hoodwink others into serving their interests. In contrast to Whites, who actually do feel guilt and shame each other mercilessly over “racism”, jews feel guilt and shame each other for not being obsessed enough about what’s best for the jews.

Frost argues that Northwestern European “guilt culture” predates Christianity. hbd* chick argues the origins are more recent, a consequence of the avoidance of cousin marriage. I’m intrigued by the subject and recognize some truth in both arguments. What leaves me vaguely annoyed is the calm Northwestern European detachment with which they discuss the subject. The “guilt culture” is only one facet of White pathology, the more general attribute of which is the absurd pretense that everybody is, or with enough effort on our part can become, “us”. The affliction isn’t unique to either Northwestern Europeans or Christians. It also, frankly, doesn’t seem to be either shame or guilt which keeps Whites who are so intelligent and knowledgeable about history and science and conscious of Northwestern European distinctiveness from taking more notice of the jew elephant in the room.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the main mechanism lies even deeper in the psyche, below guilt and shame. In pain. In the fear of pain. In the fear of even mentioning those things we suspect might cause us pain. Here too I can see the interplay of evil thoughts and breeding. The dysgenic consequence of two centuries of fratricidal revolution and war selecting out Europe’s most fearless and noble. The sterile fruit of parasite-fomented, parasite-serving materialism and “enlightenment”.