In the catagory for more dribble than Will Pitt, the award goes to:

[dutch508]

Morpheal (145 posts)      Mon Nov-24-08 08:55 PM
Original message
SIGNS THAT YOU ARE SUFFERING FROM DESPOTIC TOTALISM:
 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=226x6813

SIGNS THAT YOU ARE SUFFERING FROM DESPOTIC TOTALISM:

Now remember these are signs, indicators, and everything can happen, by chance in unmanipulated life, outside of a dictatorship, totalism or despotic system. However, the violently destructive patterns causing resigned despair among the many, who urge a “sane” sense of futility of striving, as their answer to what they see as “reality” is something different. Distinguishing normative bad luck from totalistic despotism is not always easy, but if the signs are too persistent and repetitively experienced, you have a strong indication of where you are pinned down.

1). You recognize a strong pattern, with few or no exceptions to that pattern, across a significant number of instances, which is outside of normal life expectations. This is harder for people who have lived for a significant part of their lives under a totalistic, despotic, regime. They are too accustomed to the patterns being abnormal and do not know what a normal experiential pattern really is like. The pattern you recognize has strong personal significance, and is an obstacle rather than nurturing or facilitating development of your own potential, contrary to personal aptitudes and interests, and peculiarly damaging to efforts at achievement.

2). You experience social manipulation where you function as if free to associate with whomever you happen to choose and who in return allows you to associate with them, but the chosen relationships never work out to any reasonably expected results. You find that the development of those freely chosen relationships is peculiarly difficult, or outright thwarted. Even if you severely limit your expectations below social norms, the results still fall below those expectations with routine predictability. This is to be distinguished from outright hostility against your joining. The social door appears open. You can enter. No one stands in your way or challenges you in any significant manner. Nevertheless, you find that the results of social investment do not have a payback, whereas you find other groups, whom you have no desire or interest as to joining or participating in pay a higher dividend, for nearly no social investment. Clearly you feel someone is messing with your social capital and thwarting your freedom to invest where you choose. Clearly you are not in a social “free market” even if you were taught that you are and are expected to claim that you actually are “free” to invest socially and reap increase in social capital according to your own free choice.

3). You experience sudden, inexplicable, repeated instances of loss where you have reasonable expectations of continuity of social dividends, from having invested more heavily than you tend to invest in relationships on average. The relationships you value, for the sake of social capital, are terminated without reasonable expectation, or warning, often in exceptional ways, under peculiarly suspicious but unexplained circumstances. You lose your investment. You get no social dividends. You are discouraged from further investments of that type by repeated instances of that type of unpredictable and exceptional failure of social investment, and the damage from the loss is damage tied to your efforts at achievement, in terms of your own potential, personal interests and aptitudes, and your own free choices from among the social spectrum that is accessible to you in your socio-economic circumstances.

4). That brings us to that point of repeated disappointment. You invest in what you believe in, are interested in (often shared interests in common with others), and you find that the positive beginning and the social investment, even if it appears to be going well, is doomed to create disappointment. When this exceeds the statistics of what is normative, and you know you have done nothing unusually wrong, you know you are a victim of toalistic despotism.

5). You experience an unusually rigid class structure barrier which stops you from communicating, relating, and collaborating with those who are doing better than you are, in relation to your personal interests, aptitudes, and goals. You find you simply don’t have any of those chances, and you find that others at your own level start pointing out how they, with less interest, less aptitude, lower aspirations as to goals, and sometimes some very negative characteristics and habits, have the chance, and can boast about it to you with surprising regularity even if you never told them about your own experience. They don’t know you that well, but their behavior is strangely relevant, rubbing it in, outside of the statistics of chance.

6). You experience tokenism. You get repeated instances of a chance to sample, but you never really get more than a taste to wet your appetites. Then it is gone, with remarkable regularity and nothing at all to replace the desired opportunities, experiences, situations. You were given the illusion that you were getting the chance, but as soon as you believe in it, it is completely gone. Poof. Vaporized. Totally an illusion. You find that that is at variance with the experiences of some others who again take pleasure at your disappointment, if you chance to express it. Well, that is all ordinary competition, isn’t it ? Not quite, but their reaction might be. You find you are becoming increasingly disillusioned, no longer able to believe in what might be tokenism, being realizable as anything more than the fleeting illusion that tokenism is. Then despotism has begun to win and you are losing ground to its persistent violence.

7). You experience repeated instances of entrapment. You are reasonably sold on something, and given a variety of apparently disconnected, not communicatively or causally related, positive experiences to sell you on the potential of the situation. When you invest, buy into it, socially or financially, or both, you suddenly find it is all a bill of goods. You have spent effort, time, and money, to get nothing of what you were being lured to bargain for. This can happen in personal relationships, occupational pursuits, personal business endeavors, or attempts to develop talents and aptitudes to their fuller realization. Now, once or twice, disconnected by causality, is part of normative live. When it happens too often, you know you are in totalistic despotism.

8). You feel you can choose freely, among available ideas, such as are apparent in some others lives around you. However, when you choose in any way outside the most mainstream and narrowly ideological position prevalent in your society, you find that you only get the most negative side of the experience of what you chose. Suddenly there is no positive side for you to know. You only get the nasty side, not the pleasant. It acts as a type of persistent conditioning of your choices and responses to ideological conformity with the prevalent system. You try to fight it by choosing differently, but you find that the result is the equivalent of a high voltage electro-shock, even if it is not physical, but rather socio-psychological in nature. Bad experiences add up and too many bad experiences tend to put a person off of whatever it is. Most people give up relatively easily, but some persist, depending on the strength of the attraction and interest. Some never give up. Might be some eventually die, still trying to fight for their freedom of choice. Always some others have the free choice in question. It isn’t unique and something no one else has got and certainly it is never something that no one else has any positive experiences of or within. It is always something that seems to be available to choice, but ends up being unavailable to any positive realization of the choice. Despotism particularly loves this little trick as it is so very hard to fight against. The argument that there is always prejudice against minority views, and minority interests, is insufficient and in fact illogical when you examine society more carefully. Despotism, however, loves that argument as much as the form of torture that it allows despotism to utilize, often so successfully.

9). You only get the opposite of whatever your personal choices are, no matter what those attractions entail and quite without any real moral or ethical justification. It is simply that free choice as to what attracts is severely opposed beyond statistical norms for the population. What attracts and what you strive to know is as if completely unavailable to you. However, the opposite, and therefore what you do not particularly like and perhaps cannot even tolerate much if any of, is peculiarly prevalent and responsive. Whatever attracts you is peculiarly non responsive. For instance if you are a person who only feels strong enough sexual attraction to people who are thin, and of the opposite sex, you find that those are completely disinterested in you and unresponsive. Instead only fat people of the same sex are responsive, and show real interest, contrary to your own choices. Of course despotism likes the argument that some people fall for that says that you were simply making the wrong choices for you, and that you should be more open to what is interested in you. Well, that doesn’t really hold up under real logical scrutiny in any real way at all. Of course I used the sexuality and body type example because it is easier to understand. It is not something limited to sexual attraction, or body types. It could be that if you are interested in being a particular occupation, and know you have some talent for it, you find that the people you need to know and enter into activities with in order to pursue your dream are peculiarly disinterested in you and unresponsive to you. However, people in some opposed occupation, which you have no personal interest in, and no special talent for, will offer you more than statistical normatives of what you needed from those others who _all_ suddenly went dead cold to you, for no apparent reason. Negative and positive reinforcement away from rather than towards what attracts your own choices. That is despotism. It works that way. It dictates against your every choice, to break your will power, and end any of your choosing. In this way your political will is also broken.

10) If you take up a special cause and side with the group that you feel is right and true in its position, you end up spurned, strangely ridiculed, and ostracized, by that same group. Instead you find that the opponents of that group, of the opposite position in life, welcome you, take you seriously, and include you. Well, that makes a big difference if you have black political activism on the one hand and the KKK on the other. Similarly a big difference if you have achieving peace as your goal, and you get kicked out of peace movements and inducted into an army to fight a violent conflict, but with no other choice as to belonging. You are simply forced into the opposite side of the equation after making your own choice known as to your own freely chosen position.
Apply the same idea to any similar situation. For instance male/female equality and those believing in it reject your faith in that fundamental principle, but those of religious fundamentalist persuasion where the man must be always the “head” of the woman and lead her to righteousness because she is deemed unable to do anything right or good without his direction, quickly seek your inclusion among their midst. Rejection and acceptance, totally manipulated is a sign of despotic totalism. When it is ideologically blatent it is easiest to discern, but many people still fail to discern it in their own lives so it is tending to triumph.

11). Playing on your human needs, such as food, shelter, sex (according to your own sexual gender and sexual predilection), and perhaps social acceptance or inclusion, and certainly the very important factor of some sort of support structure (in economic and psychological terms) is another sign of despotism. Extremist religions and extremist politics have used that forever. It’s not new, even if the mechanisms for the manipulations based on playing on needs, on deprivation and reward in terms of needs, and in terms of terrorism with contrary situations than those that an individual is able to adapt to and function properly within, tend to be increasingly subtle. Could write a whole article simply on this one, but no need to. It’s easier to discern. I recall those instances where someone could not find a spouse, of any persuasion, unless they were first willing to accept and prove psychological internalization of a belief in Jesus. Well, it does happen in our North American world of today. It should never happen, but it does. That’s only one example. Don’t stop at religion. Don’t stop at the problem of Jesus. Don’t even stop at the problem of people finding a match, as to having a spouse, and thus a life partner and support structure. It goes far far beyond that.

12). You work hard, suffer incredible hardships, make amazing sacrifices, to achieve the means and ways to do something you always dreamt of doing and wanted to do. Soon as you have those means and ways, in order, having suffered on a shoestring and nearly starved of most of the pleasures of life, to get to having a chance at your dream, whatever circumstances you needed for continuance of your hard work on achieving it, is suddenly gone. It’s as if some evil genius, letting you get that far, pulled the rug suddenly and violently right out from under you. All your hard work to exhaustion. All your searching and finding. All your researching through the jungle of competitive lies. All your preparation and skills learning. All your investment, in terms of time, money, and labor. All of it suddenly attacked. Unexpectedly attacked. You are inexplicably, suddenly and overwhelmingly undermined, sapped, and broken down. What happened ? Ok, it was bad luck. Let’s use the normative thinking. You get up, somehow from the floorboards, finding no one ever helps you up off of them anyway, to begin again. So you pursue your dream. You build it up again. You invest your time, money, effort, again. You see the holy mountain of success not far forward in the distance. Then just as you feel confident again, invigorated with the goal in sight, and feel a sense of new progress, bang, it all comes down again. The rug comes flying out from under you, completely unexpectedly, bringing you violently and suddenly down. Now you still believe it was pure luck, pure chance, purely a coincidence ? Try it three times, and tell me then it was a pure luck, chance, coincidence... and some people have tried that many times to achieve their dreams, their holy mountain to climb and get to the top of. No, in totalistic despotism it isn’t purely luck, chance or coincidence. Also you cannot expect that the amount of effort, investment, and sacrifice that you put in will buy the opportunity that you strive to gain. Someone else with no effort, no investment to speak of, and no real sacrifices, might be seen laughing at you from above. Then you know what despotism really means.

13). Simple, usually fool proof, reliable as clockwork, situations in life suddenly start to go wrong with amazing statistical regularity and you get more and more entangled in trying to fix, rectify, and remedy what should have been relatively logical, simple, easy matters to take care of. Except that now they aren’t. They become major entanglements consuming more and more of your time, money, energies, and resolve. You get more and more beaten fighting fights you never thought would ever need fighting, as to trivial issues that you never were taught or knew could ever require that much fight. You become more and more exhausted and no amount of pleas as to cooperation, rationality and common sense are of any use. Now you know you are a victim of despotic totalism. That’s the way it can work, and often does.

14). You find that too man people whom you treated right, and with due respect, and whom you made your effort to please, for their sake and for mutual good of you, their selves and the groups involved (if any), treat you exactly the same, irrationally wrongly. Now, remember, these different people, not even knowing each other, treated you wrongly and they all did something too similar to be ignored. Now there is a problem. And nothing you could do about it. They all did you wrong. They all did it similarly. They all disparaged, demeaned, ignored, and failed to recognize your best efforts, what you really accomplished, and of course your real potential (proven and as yet unproven). You lose but you needed to win and you did your best to do everything as right as the situation would let you. Well, you must have made one small mistake. After all you are human. The key in this one is different people, in all probability not knowing each other or you and certainly not knowing much if anything on that, all became reflections of each other, outside of statistical norms, and contrary to your own best interests. They did similar damage to you. If you complain you will be labeled paranoid. That won’t help, so shut your mouth. Besides that you have no solid proof. No evidence as to their doing it to you. And if there was a conspiracy, as is unlikely according to the facts and very irrational and illogical to assume, outside sociological norms for the situations involved, you could not prove it anyway. So you take your lumps and move on, but you are damaged and you cannot achieve what you sought to achieve in consequence of those contrary and essentially unpredictable, unforeseeable, actions. A lot of people ignore those types of patterns. I have heard about them happening. They are more frequent than you might think. The root cause, however, is despotism. Despotic pawns leading others in a despotic system which manipulates its lesser despot pawns, but gives them some small privilege for being despots and remaining manipulable tools of despotism.

15). You are always treated differently, as if privileged in some way, but it always proves to be contrary to your own best interests. You get more work to do for less pay. You don’t get any of the “frills” such as benefits, holidays, perks that others get, but you have the position, the responsibility and the stress to deal with same as anyone in the role. You simply don’t get compensated for it like the others do. And heaven help you if you make even one mistake, but the others make mistakes all of the time. Then no matter how long time you manage to hang on and remain responsible, trying to equalize your position with others by means of meriting it, you inevitably fail. You must have made one mistake. That’s it. That’s the end of you. Well, if you chance into that once, you might in fact be unlucky. Twice, really unlucky. However compare your luck to the average and three, four, five, times you know you are a victim of despotism.

16). You meet each challenge that you are given, and you exceed the performance of others, repeatedly, in terms of some achievements, some accomplishments, some dedication and endurance even when suffering extreme adversity, opposition or deliberate distraction. However, you can never achieve enough in anything, even in what you are best at and particularly gifted at doing. No, its never enough. Never enough money spent to buy your way in. Never enough social capital gained. Never enough production. Never enough of whatever it is never enough of, but always never enough of something else and something more. That in any area of life. Ah, again you know you are a victim of despotism. In totalism you can never be good enough, no matter how hard you try. You are always a failure no matter what you do, and no matter how you do it.
Eventually only the system is right, and you are forever and always wrong. That is how totalistic despotism functions in the world. If you see that trend you know you are its victim.

17). You invest heavily into something, in all the ways I mentionned before, and everyone is eager to join in while you do so. Everyone you ask is all for it. They are all friendly, inviting, socially welcoming, smiling faces of encouragement. Then when you are ready with the efforts, the means and ways, that they all were so encouraging that you acquire, you find there is no one interested. No one smiles anymore. No one is friendly. No one is available anymore. Seems you were led down the garden path to nothing. Disillusion, disappointment, and it can bridge across many social divides where the people in each individual group do not even know each other, and yet behave synchronously. You would never predict that happening if you know conventional social psychology and sociology reasonably well enough. It is not consistent with normative science, but you witness it happening and you know you are a victim of totalistic despotism.

I am sure there are more indicators of people being victimized by despotism. I am sure there are far more ways to kill a man or woman, without leaving a mark on their bodies and without using any substance or implement of physical violence, than are dreamt of in most imaginations. These are some signs of being killed by totalistic despotism. The death can be slow, agonizingly painful but tends to be unrelenting until those who are victims of despotic tyranny give up their own lives, dreams, hopes, goals, and give in completely, hopelessly, to the despotic system. After all, in despotic totalism no individual has any real talent of their own. They have no real accomplishments or worth of their own. They have no value as individuals. They have no worth in anything they do or could ever do. There is only the system. It is the only and highest worth. It is the only value. There is no individual. There is only the jackbood of despotism stamping forever upon a human face that forever ceases to be recognizable.

I know that knowing these signs of despotism others will find more signs of despotism and will add their own to this little collection that has been gathered in various ways, by various means, and that I have attempted to expound herein. Yes, do so. Revealing despotism, revealing tyranny, revealing totalism does tend to kill it, before it kills us all.

Robert Morpheal

TygrBright  (1000+ posts)        Mon Nov-24-08 09:45 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. I don't think I UNDERSTAND most of them. 
 But I have been having issues with reading comprehension lately...

quizzically,
Bright

Ooooo...bitchslapped by a dislexic [sic] tiger...

[franksolich]

Oh my.

That's a long one.

Longer than John Holmes, or whatever his name was.

[DumbAss Tanker]

I couldn't force myself to do more than scan the first few.  I gather it is really a list of "You might be a mentally-ill loser IF..." from a Leftist version of Jeff Foxworthy (and being Leftist, therefore utterly bereft of any actual 'Humor' content). 

[dutch508]

I couldn't force myself to do more than scan the first few.  I gather it is really a list of "You might be a mentally-ill loser IF..." from a Leftist version of Jeff Foxworthy (and being Leftist, therefore utterly bereft of any actual 'Humor' content). 

oh, I don't think he was trying for funny.

[comradebillyboy]

oh, I don't think he was trying for funny.

Nor was he trying to be concise, coherent or rational. But he did a mighty fine job of being verbose, pompous and self-righteous.

[DumbAss Tanker]

oh, I don't think he was trying for funny.

I agree, of course you can't really tell with a Leftist.

[Duke Nukum]

Not knowing exactly what it is I did a google of "DESPOTIC TOTALISM" and it seems someone is busy posting this to several message boards.

Maybe it's like that thing in Star Trek:TNG where they are going to show the Borg a picture that somehow is going to screw up their programming.  Someone is trying to screw up the left by choking them with wordy screeds, or something.

[miskie]

Maybe it's like that thing in Star Trek:TNG where they are going to show the Borg a picture that somehow is going to screw up their programming.  Someone is trying to screw up the left by choking them with wordy screeds, or something.

..Or destroying Robot Santa with a logical paradox - which would work if he wasn't equipped with paradox absorbing crumple zones.
Maybe that's the problem with the Primitives. They have stupidity absorbing crumple zones which prevent the head splodin' effects of verbose yet meaningless moonbat screeds.

[Chris_]

..Or destroying Robot Santa with a logical paradox - which would work if he wasn't equipped with paradox absorbing crumple zones.
Maybe that's the problem with the Primitives. They have stupidity absorbing crumple zones which prevent the head splodin' effects of verbose yet meaningless moonbat screeds.

Otherwise, the Subway Cat would be a mass murderer, with all of the 'splodin' gray matter flying after one of those rants that nobody can read all the way through.