In Bringing Up a Racist I detailed the steps every parent needs to take if their goal is to raise a bigot. It won’t just happen on its own. In fact, a child who is brought up in a healthy home environment will very naturally develop into a grounded, secure, kind and responsible person.
So, bringing up a racist requires very deliberate and consistent effort on the parent’s part in order to repress, stunt, shape and redirect a child’s natural (i.e., human) propensities.
The present post is intended to build on that foundation of socially engineered bigotry. My objective here is to outline the key ingredients for turning a young person into a socially improvised explosive device (or social IED) designed to disrupt the general human advance into higher civilization.
The ideal recruitment age for this project is 15-24, when youth are typically in a transitional state of confusion over their identity and purpose in life. But almost anyone can be turned into a social IED if the right conversion pressures are applied.
The illustration above depicts a bomb with its fuse lit, inside a “box” of terms which name the necessary ingredients in this bomb kit. If just one of these critical ingredients is missing, or if the proper sequence of their assembly is not carefully followed, the result will be less effective – which is to say, less spectacularly destructive.
So pay attention, and don’t try to cut corners.
The first and foundational ingredient in our social IED bomb kit is tribalism, referring to a blind but ardent loyalty to one’s tribe, be it a family, religious sect, political party, nation-state, or whatever group manages membership and controls the moral frame. A tribe’s moral frame is what defines and sets the standards of ‘right action’ (i.e., obedience) and insider identity (i.e., a ‘good person’, where good is in recognition of how committed one is to the role, or roles, assigned by the tribe).
One telltale sign of tribalism in full effect is when members have little reflexive interiority of self-conscious awareness beyond their roles and the social expectations around them.
Tribalism is more than just a role-play, however, with members performing as programmed by the moral frame. They also must hold in mind and constantly rehearse a specific ideology or belief system, both internally to themselves and (better yet) in unison with the standing congregation.
It’s always reinforcing to hear others around you confessing your thoughts out loud.
Because meaning is mind-made and not simply found in Reality, every tribe maintains a tradition of stories, commentaries on those stories, doctrines exposited from these commentaries, and officially curated beliefs stamped and promulgated as absolute truth. The working set of official beliefs is a tribe’s orthodoxy.
The word ‘orthodoxy’ means correct (ortho) belief (doxa), which has little if anything to do with factual evidence, logical reasoning, or common sense. It’s what the tradition and authority declares to be true and defends against untruth, which is only someone else’s opinion (heterodoxy) and probably originated in heresy, from some exotic and ‘pagan’ tradition, or with the Devil himself.
Youth must be sternly instructed and aggressively disciplined (or at least threatened) with punishment in order to motivate their adherence to tribal orthodoxy. They are especially sensitive to threats of public humiliation and ostracism, given their tender emotional need for security, self-esteem, and belonging.
Believing something just because others (say they) believe it can be ‘reason’ enough, if it secures their membership in the group.
Psychologically the whole point of orthodoxy is not merely to ratify an official worldview that members share, but to enforce and anchor those beliefs in place to such an extent that the individual is incapable of believing otherwise – or even thinking outside its box.
An authoritarian belief system (aka orthodoxy) serves as a perfect prison for the mind, where a thinking self is locked inside, like a convict, which is why these controlling beliefs are known as convictions.
One clever pedagogical device commonly deployed by tribal orthodoxy involves praising conviction as the sign and proof of a strong moral character. By this means, members are energized by the honor of their peers and approval of superiors for staying true to their beliefs – even (or especially) when it is obvious that those beliefs have no basis in Reality or common sense.
If they can be trained to invoke the name of god or quote a verse of scripture, their profession of faith will more likely be regarded by others as righteously unassailable.
I can’t state emphatically enough how essential an ingredient conviction is to the successful engineering of a socially improvised explosive device – also known as a true believer, an all-in fanatic, radicalized devotee, and martyr-in-waiting. The subject must be willing to give up everything, even life itself, and commit any act, even taking the lives of others.
Many so-called believers may be captives of their convictions, but only true believers are ready and eager to sacrifice whatever it takes to defend the tribal orthodoxy, demonstrate their devotion, and destroy every enemy of truth in its name.
The more extravagant and extreme the sacrifice, the more convinced others will be of the purity of devotion behind it.
This moment in history is ideal for the work of disrupting human progress toward civilization. Geopolitical instability, demographic power-shifts, climate change, the breakdown of traditional ways of life, and a growing sense of estrangement are driving a reactive retreat into tribalism. More people than ever are feeling uncertain about the future and vulnerable to forces outside their control.
Historically, a conservative mindset is committed to defending what’s familiar, time-tested, and longstanding. As a precondition of tribalism, a blind loyalty to the group that holds our membership and makes us feel safe serves as a perfect laboratory for assembling social IEDs.
Don’t go out there. The road to civilization is a dangerous place.
Tracts of Revolution 