The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God
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Highlights
- This process of carving out, via subtraction, finite and tractable realities for the Clueless and Losers to inhabit, can be repeated *ad infinitum,*creating layers of social realities for evolving Clueless and Losers to journey through. If the first layer is a morality theater run by the amoral, other theaters involve other comforting social realities. If this sounds like gamification, itโs because it is. It is possible to progress through these layers without discovering the
- This process of carving out, via subtraction, finite and tractable realities for the Clueless and Losers to inhabit, can be repeated *ad infinitum,*creating layers of social realities for evolving Clueless and Losers to journey through. If the first layer is a morality theater run by the amoral, other theaters involve other comforting social realities. If this sounds like gamification, itโs because it is.
- That is what Sociopaths ultimately do with their lives if they survive long enough: generate amoral power from increasing inner emptiness, transforming themselves into forces of nature. As a side-effect, they also manufacture transient meanings to fuel the theaters of religiosity (including various secular religions) that lend meaning to lives of Losers and the Clueless. This meaning is achieved via subtraction, through withdrawal of complexities that the latter are predisposed to ignore, leaving behind simpler, more satisfying and more tractable realities for them to inhabit.
- With each new layer decoded, Sociopaths find transient meaning, but not enduring satisfaction. Much to their surprise, however, they find that in the unsatisfying meanings they uncover, lie the keys to power over others. In seeking to penetrate mediated experiences of reality, they unexpectedly find themselves mediating those very realities for others. They acquire agency in the broadest sense of the word. Losers and the Clueless delegate to them not mere specialist matters like heart surgery or car repair, but control over the meanings of their very lives. So in seeking to unmask the gods, they find themselves turning into the gods.
- Which means that the power of Sociopaths derives from the things they remove from the scene: illegible, emotionally charged material realities that are potentially infinite in their complexity. In other words, the raw material of power. Over these withdrawn realities, Sociopaths exercise agencyon behalf of others. They do not grab power. Power is simply ceded to them.
- Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there areno social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something specialabout the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe. There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human โ such as justice, fairness, equality, talent โ is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking.