appendix 4: worst case culture/community stuff

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appendix table of contents

an orienting model; layers and tangles; from "parts" to people to groups
evil

an orienting model; layers and tangles; from "parts" to people to groups:

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part 1; a brief layer/tangle model of mind, "parts," personality, groups, and (global) culture:

Consider the mind to be made up of a large number of parallel (information) flows, or pipes, or tubes.

Countless numbers of these tubes all happening, all at once, is you.

Sensory information goes in one end of a tube (sensation) and immune system, hormonal, glandular, smooth muscle, and skeletal muscle activity goes out the other end of a tube (actuation).

(Sensory information flowing through the tubes spontaneously sculpts the tubes, spontaneously sculpts what’s happening in the tubes, spontaneously sculpts the length of the tubes, and spontaneously sculpts how the tubes are connected to other tubes. (There’s a way/sense in which the tubes, and interconnections, are all the sensory information that’s ever flowed through them.)

Tubes can be short and long.

A short tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, in a small number of milliseconds.

A long tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, taking hundreds of milliseconds.

In addition to normal input (sensory information; sensation), some tubes can incorporate information from other tubes prior to termination (actuation). And, in addition to normal termination (skeletal muscle, etc.; actuation), some tubes pass information to other tubes. Information transfer happens at junctions. [Note that this theory doesn’t have any "fully internal tubes" or tubes that are "sensation+internal" or "internal+actuation." A future theory might need to allow for this.]

When tubes pass information to other tubes, (internal) loops/cycles can form.

There is a shortest possible length of tube.

There is a shortest possible length of loop.

Below a particular tube length, there can’t be any loops.

Sensation alters tube lengths and junctures. (And actuation influences sensation.)

Some tubes pass through awareness. These are awareness tubes. If those tubes happen to have junctures with other tubes, then we can experience the sensations passing through those other tubes. (And, we can participate in our actuations via external loops.)

Tubes that happen to have junctures with awareness tubes are called junctured awareness tubes. Some tube lengths and junctures can only be modified or created when the relevant tubes are currently junctured awareness tubes.

When junctured awareness tubes are very short and contain no loops, then there is no self-experience, and "in the seeing there is just the seen," "in the hearing there is just the heard," "in the feeling there is just the felt," "in the doing, just doing," etc. There is just "what it feels like."

When there are loops in or proximal to junctured awareness tubes then there is self-experience. There is, partially, "what it feels like to be you."

Countless tubes at any given time are junctured awareness tubes, but most tubes at any given time are not junctured awareness tubes.

When loops are minimized there cannot be contention or compensation.

When loops are minimized there cannot be improperly reified concepts.

A state of minimal loops is primordial or natural (though not necessarily ordinary).

The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee constructive, good behavior. The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee the absence of destructive, bad, unskillful, and evil behavior.

Contention can cause ill-health, accelerated aging, excessive actuation, and suffering.

Contention in junctured awareness tubes is experienced as logical contradiction and (sometimes extremely subtle) muscle tension.

Compensation can be locally elegant but is globally inelegant.

If someone has a problem, a loopless solution to that problem will not have any compensation. A non-loopless solution will have compensation. Compensatory solutions are much easier to find than loopless solutions. Loopless solutions are minimally costly in the limit. Compensatory solutions are locally costly. The greater the accumulated cost, the harder it is to find additional solutions. The lower the accumulated cost, the easier it is to find additional solutions, though the solution-finding process may still be lengthy.

An example of compensation is "I’m doing X which is bad but if I also do Y then it will cancel the bad effects of X."

Compensation is usually not perfect and so begets further compensation. An example of this is "I’m doing Y to compensate for X but Y creates a further problem Z so I must do R to compensate for Z but R also has a problem..."

Compensation is fractally self-similar. That is, micro-compensation produces larger-scale patterns of compensation. Examples of larger-scale patterns are tics, neuroses, hangups, blindspots, personality disorders, etc.

Compensation can produce occlusion. Occlusion is when tubes are not and cannot easily or quickly become junctured awareness tubes.

Large-scale compensation and occlusion produces personality layers. If experience happens too quickly, too surprisingly, or too traumatically than personality layers are more likely to form.

So, someone can have childhood confusions or uncertainties or inabilities and/or (by defintion unhealed) hurts and traumas, and, on top of those, have adult-style regulation. (That adult-style regulation will be crippled in many ways because of the excessive cost of compensation. That person might read lots of books on e.g. relationships, but, without delayering, their relating might remain laborious and "unnatural.")

Because of mimesis, love, power, and technology, compensation and layering can extend to groups, cultures, and society. There are global-scale cultural layers, in part produced through famine, colonization, war, etc., as well as locally adaptive but global maladaptive traditions of child-rearing, etc.

Individual and group practice can de-layer and de-compensate, solving problems without the use of compensation, until individuals, and even communities, or larger, are relatively natural. Again, compensation is necessary and adaptive. And naturalization only guarantees a subset of good things, with opportunity costs. It is only better, all (other) things being equal.

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part 2; the blooming, buzzing confusion:

Layering and occlusion can make it very hard to turn tubes into junctured awareness tubes. But, sensation and actuation, the inputs and outputs of tubes can’t be blocked. Sensation is always happening for all of a person’s tubes, at every layer. And actuation is always happening at the termination of every tube.

If an adult has childhood confusions or uncertainties or inabilities and/or (by defintion unhealed) hurts and traumas in their system, then this can be problematic because that childhood self can be triggered. And then that person’s behavior, in a particular situation, will have behaviors reminiscient of childhood, which can be inappropriate, maladaptive, or dangerous to relationships or livelihood. So this must be careful managed.

A person manages always-triggerable lower layers by reducing the scope of their lives (never entering particular situations), creating controlled situations (only entering situations that they themselves have carefully prearranged), managing attention in situations (carefully using actuation to manage the sensation stream), or arranging temporary compensatory sinks (teeth-gritting, white-knuckling, stomach-clenching, etc.). [An alternative, of course, if resources are available, is to take the time to naturalize layer after layer, to find noncompensatory solutions and thereby widening the scope of life.]

A person will have learned to manage some of their lower layers. But, typically, many layers (and "pockets") will not be well-managed. A further complication is that lower layers, while not always, tend to be occluded and so can be affected outside of awareness and those effects may be hard to infer from downstream, ramified experiences. In short, it’s possible for vulnerable lower layers to become traumatized or further traumatized. (A way to restate this is that tubes can be receiving input from the outside world, but that reception and its proximal downstream effects might be outside personal awareness (though potentially evident in behavior that's observable by other people), and distal downstream effects (eventually, in milliseconds to days) will be in personal awareness, though not connected to the relevant (maybe high-dimensional, thin-slice) "causes" from the world. Over time, a person gets ever-better at connecting inputs/causes to effects.)

It gets worse in that everyone, at all layers have both functional ontologies as well as remaining blooming, buzzing confusion (as per William James). That is, everyone has patterns of input that can produce hard to predict effects in the system. This is a further dimension of vulnerabilitiy.

To explain further, when we were at our youngest, while we have genetic predisposition towards certain types of interpretations, the world doesn’t come pre-given. We have to assemble feeling, sound, light, touch, etc., into appearances, inferred objects, causal relations, and proactive management of self and environment. Prior to this, and always alongside this, there is blooming, buzzing confusion. There is "static," "noise" limning the edges of experience and even shot through all of experience, the "feel of reality."

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part 3; the demon-haunted world and science as a candle in the dark (as per Carl Sagan):

And, so, this static, this noise, this blur that colors everything, and it comes in layers, there is some at every layer—this is the domain of shamans, of magick, of the siddhis, of the powers.

Western and so-called "universal culture" has factored away much of this blur into legible ontologies and compenstory pockets.

But consider, childhood fears—monsters, ghosts, etc. Consider cultural and religious—demons, hells, etc. Consider childhood extremity—terror, loss of control, disregulation, bullying, abuse, violence, hatred.

Also consider, adult desperation around money, poverty, power, status, sex (coercive fantasy and actuality in kinks, fetishes, and paraphilias), intimacy, belongingness, health, aging, sickness, and death.

Consider the desperation of infant, child, adult to affect the mother, peers, adults, the powerful, and vice versa. Consider the childhood insecurities and fears still layered into the adult narcissist, the adult schizoid, the adult borderline.

Consider how desperately, out of love and fear, how desperately people are trying to affect each other all the time.

Consider that what the brain does is make sense of blooming, buzzing confusion, to find signal in noise. Consider as well that those vast number of tubes. Consider our sensitivity to transduce single photons. Consider facial expressions, flickering of the eyes, body language, voice tone, timbre and prosody. Consider temperature fluctuations in the air. Consider subtle changes in air currents as we move our limbs. Consider those vast degrees of freedom as well as that sensitivity. Consider the heights of skill of say olympic athletes versus weekly joggers.

And then is it any wonder that hapless creeps, dark wizards, cult leaders... and healers walk among us?

[continues in section "part 4; Everyday blah, hapless creeps, dark wizards, and cult leaders"]

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evil:

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part 4; introduction:

If you start doing work on yourself, you’ll become more sensitive to a lot of things. And that sensitivity, initially, can make you more vulnerable to bad things than you’d otherwise be. That sensitivity can also make you become a more dangerous or harmful person to be around, initially. Over time, asymptotically, nonmonotonically, what you were vulnerable to, what used to influence you or cause disendorsed changes to you, becomes just information. And this information can be used to enhance safety for self and others. And your sensitivity and responsiveness, from ongoing meditation, and the knowledge that’s easier to acquire because of that sensitivity and responsiveness, can make you safer and safer for other people.

Additionally, you may more often find yourself in communities of practice, as you explore things like meditation, energy work, shamanism, or whatever. Communities of practice sometimes have coercive things "in the air," and sometimes communities of practice contain, or have adjacent, "dark wizards," and sometimes they are created, run, influenced, or ruled by "cult leaders."

Reading the sections below may help to minimize risks to self and others, in relation and in community.

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part 5; everyday blah, hapless creeps, dark wizards, and cult leaders:

[continues from section "part 3; the demon-haunted world and science as a candle in the dark (as per Carl Sagan)"]

The mind is vast and occlusion is a thing.

On the surface, most people genuinely and authentically want to be good to people and to be better people. Almost everyone has at least a little vicious hatred, or ill-will or at least just reckless terror at lower layers. Those negative things will typically be latent in lower layers. But they can be triggered under the right circumstances.

And, upon being triggered, negative behaviors, both gross and subtle, will feel right, normal, appropriate, justified. And then that person will do obvious or subtle bad things.

The obvious stuff is bad enough, from glaring to shouting or even hitting. But the subtle stuff can be really bad, too. It can be coercive, soul-damaging—it can create vulnerabilities which beget further harm.

We all do things we don’t endorse. We all can cause subtle harm. And, if we had adult abuse in our past, sometimes we can do harm "above our weight class," and it’s very regretful.

The above few paragraphs describe the spectrum from everyday blah all the way to hapless creeps.

The is a worse level, which is that of the "dark wizard." For the previous level, the ability to do harm is accumulated incidentally and unsystematically. But, a dark wizard systematically cultivates the ability to influence people. This can be both "deliberate and unreflective/accidental," "deliberate and reflective."

For the "deliberate and unreflective/accidental" category, a good example of this is in relation some kinks, fetishes, paraphilias (and also "vanilla-sexual"). Some kinks are pure fantasy, some involve "consentual nonconsent," and some, usually disendorsed, involve the actualization of nonconsent, either incidentally or essentially.

Unfortunately, all of those cases can potentially produce unwanted effects in other people because, even for the pure fantasy cases, there can be "actualization bleed." And, often people have lower-layer material/"tubes"/etc that want to realize some "actual nonconsent," even if this is disendorsed by much else of the system. And even if this is compensated for at the higher layers. There can still be subtle, harmful effects between people via lower levels.

The situation is analogous for safety/control fantasies and revenge fantasies. (For the safety/control case, the person wants other people to behave in highly specific ways so that that person can feel safe. Often, this will be in childhood, parent-child, or religious ontologies.)

In all of these cases, sexual, control, revenge, the person is cultivating the thoughts, fantasies, beliefs, material, behaviors over time. There’s something building up over time and becoming more powerful, more effective, more insidious, even if unintentional.

It would be a much better world if people’s sexual fantasies stayed safely inside our heads, but unfortunately this isn’t always the case. And that’s pretty intense, but it seems to be true. The worst of this, here, is perhaps "community sexual predators" that are somehow "more effective or successful than they should be."

Moving on from "deliberate and unreflective," pickup artistrty (PUA), "business influence," and "persuasion" type books are in a gray area between "unreflective" and "reflective." The person is systematically cultivating something but the ontology is pretty intrisically low-key, relatively speaking, as compared to sexual stuff or what follows below.

In "deliberate and reflective" proper, these are people that are reading spellbooks or doing chaos magic or summoning demons or dabbling in curses and in any case deliberately seeking to influence people for personal gain. There are cringy and toothless versions of this, and there are very, very terrible versions of this. Remember, all of this has naturalistic explanations, but the layers of the mind reify things and we experience it as real. And it can drive up blood pressure and cause heart attacks and stroke, subtly or grossly reduce quality of life forever, drive people insane, tear communities apart, etc. And, all the while, there is gaslighting and self-gaslighting that that isn’t what’s happening.

Historically, and in some places contemporaneously, each village had a shaman to deal the intentional and unintentional, from blah to terrible, stuff happening between people and villages/tribes/etc.

Cult leaders will be discussed more below.

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part 6; spot the dark wizard:

A final note is that, if you’re trying to influence people at all, if you have any perceived need at all with respect to other people (belonging, care, money, intimacy, sex), unless you and everyone are in a tremendously high-resourced environment, and everyone is engaged in mutually creative synergy, then you’ve likely got at least some baby dark wizard going on, or some latent dark wizarding that could get triggered.

And if you’ve been cultivating, ruminating, working over, developing in/on/over anything that in some way involves thinking, other people, or influencing other people, then you’ve likely got something either full-on dark wizardy or something that could easily be converted over to dark-wizard-ness with the right push.

This section is not to normalize the above, though. ("Oh, he’s saying everyone is a dark wizard, ok, so it’s not that bad.") This section is a warning. In other words, if you don’t think you can’t have "things that are that bad" in you, or you don’t think things in you will bleed out into the world, or you are "good at mind stuff" or "good at ethical interaction," then you should probably be very careful. These are all surfaces areas for you to do unrelfective harm. And doing transformative practices can make things worse, in the short-term or for a long time.

If you see yourself as a helper or a healer, this is also a yellow flag. Often "helping" or "healing" can contain perversity, not just good but also harm. And the goodness makes it harder to see the harm.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of, here. Layering and misconceptualization or non-conceptualization mean that it can take time to find the bad stuff, sometimes years.

But given that it’s possible to hurt people in the meantime, one should be listen to people when they say you’re being weird, creepy, harmful, etc. (Sometimes it’s munchausen or gaslighting when people say they’re being harmed, but you have to do due diligence—it could be both partially not your responsibility and partially you doing harm. If you dismiss people’s concerns as not valid then that’s a red flag that you’re at least low-resourced and probably doing additional harm on top of the dismissal.)

You have to be ready to isolate yourself, to walk away, and sometimes you should let people excommunicate you. Sometimes, it will be the case that you were in an unhealthy environment, and you defending yourself is further hurting people around you. But "active" defenses mean you aren’t skilled enough yet. When the environment becomes "just information" as opposed to something that needs to be defended against then you can consider yourself skilled. At that point you won’t be "actively" hurting people in such an environment, but they could still experience your being there as harmful because of things in them that don’t want to be exposed, even passively via your side, to things in you. Sometimes it can take a very long time to figure out who’s doing or not doing what to whom, and it’s better to just not interact.

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part 7; healers:

Healers, bodyworkers, energy healers, reiki practioners, healing touch practitioners, qigong practitioners, exorcists, shamans, etc., can be great. Keep in mind that there is a vast range of skill. Some people are completely ineffectual. Some are very effective but cause both harm and good things at the same time. The rare individual with decades of (lineage?) training and experience is excellent. (And some "healers" are dependancy-inducing predators.)

Minds are vast, people have weird beliefs, and the mind makes it real. Healers work in different paradigms and so there can be ontology shear and effect shear. Healers might have different beliefs than you (and your mind) about what changes are good and bad, and when, and why, and how. Healers will have their own blindspots and malevolent layered intentions. Healers can sometimes pick up lots of bad stuff from people they’re trying to heal (or teachers that they’ve worked with) that they haven’t entirely cleared themselves. And then they can pass it on to you. And sometimes healers can have bad days where they’re mean and ill-willed.

If someone has been practicing for decades and you can talk to other people they’ve worked with who say good things, then they might be a good fit for you. If someone has seemingly produced miracles (they’ve gotten a stroke victim to walk again or otherwise given someone their life back) but they seem creepy to you, then it might be better to stay away. (Most reading this will not be in need a miracle that they cannot ultimately produce themselves, possibly on a faster timeline with less resources.)

Generally speaking, for serious meditators, there are very quickly diminishing returns for working with healers. Meditation is essentially self-sufficient, self-healing that "goes all the way," all things being equal. Sometimes a healer can get you out of a rut or help you deal with an acute issue. Often, maybe almost always, you’ll have to rework whatever they did, in the future. Maybe almost always, what healers do are just a temporary patch, for a serious medtitator. (For non-meditators a "patch" can be life-saving. Just different needs for different life trajectories.) So, sometimes it’ll be net good and sometimes net bad.

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part 8; witch hunts, vulnerability, contagion, tragedy of transformation, community decompensation:

It can be hard to assign blame and decide what to do. We all can have layered material that can be vulnerable in idiosyncratic ways. Someone can have a sex or revenge fantasy that they’re barely broadcasting, that wouldn’t affect 95% of people. But, when you’re in a room with them, it does awful stuff to your system. So who’s at fault? In this case mostly nobody, but there’s still the issue that you can’t be in a room with them. It might be both people’s responsibility to change. The person with the fantasy to figure out how it’s bleeding into the world a little bit. And you to figure out why it’s affecting you. But, for one or both of you, that could be hundreds of hours of work (though which will produce all sorts of collateral positive effects along the way), and one or both of you might not currently be systematic meditators.

It gets harder when the content is occluded—one person might be competely unaware that something is bleeding through or that it even exists. Or they might sort of know but reflexively gaslight that it isn’t happening. Or they might be very scared and angry that a) they might be hurting people or b) that their fantasy isn’t actually private.

To make things even more complicated, people can manufacture or play up harm. They can accuse people of not just being creepy but also being subtly harmful. And sometimes they’ll be right, but it will be low-grade harm, and sometimes they’ll be mistaken, but some part of them, reflectively or unreflectively wants it to be true because it would be convenient if it were true.

To make things even more complicated, often people who are vulnerable to what another person is doing will in some sense want to be affected, in part, by what the other person is doing. Usually what the other person is doing will have "good" parts and "bad" parts, and a person’s system will "unreflectively/subconsciously choose" to take the bad with the good, in order to get the good. This will usually be reflectively disendorsed—the "good thing" upon examination, will be confused, somehow—but can still, in some sense, be used to point to complicity on the part of the person being affected. [One way of becoming less vulnerable, by the way, is to make it safe to see what is or feels good about what’s happening, or the current thing in the system, and to find a healthier version of the attractive but disendorsed thing, which can replace the net bad package as well as the receptive surface] In any case, often the seemingly good thing will in some way have been sculpted to have that attractiveness/temptation, and so on, to make it more likely that people will be hooked by it. And often the person who has the attractive/tempting thing will (at least eventually if not immediately) reflectively disendorse it being that way, too.

This is all very hard.

There is an additional phenomenon of people believing that they are protected by their rationality, reaonabilitiy, belief in science, or strength of will. But, very often, such people will still be affected in occluded layers. And so their behavior will become more harmful, because they themselves have been harmed by something, but they will be resistant or unable to investigate this. And they might also further transfer bad things to other people; they might unknowingly pass bad stuff along. Such people are good candidates for interaction with a healer, if they agree to it.

Another problematic thing that can happen is, when someone becomes a systematic meditator, they can start decompensating in ways that influence occluded material. They might have cycles of increased desperation or neediness that bleeds through in problematic or intense ways. And people who are good-faith trying to become safer to be around, or just better people, can actually become more dangerous to be around for a period of time. This extends to communities as well. For a community of self-transformers, things can get much, much, much worse until things get better—lives can be ruined and communities can get torn apart, even as people just wanted to get better together. All the bad stuff can come out in insidious and explosive ways.

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part 9; timelines and stopgaps and sanity checks:

Part of what makes this so hard is how long the timelines are. Self-transformation takes thousands of hours, and people’s patterns of vulnerability to each other are idiosyncratic. So if harm is occurring, it can take dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours to to sort out who’s doing what to whom and to fix it. And this is superexpontential the more people that are involved.

Sometimes people just need to stop associating, even if they were lovers, friends, or colleagues before starting to self-transform. And this can be tragic when a relationship or community has formed with the best of intentions. (But people do grow apart under "normal" conditions, too.)

Discussing all this stuff up front can help. Documents like this can help. Effective self-transformative practices like the ones in this document can help.

If one is exploring the many protocol with people (see further in the document), it can be helpful to start very, very slowly, maybe just five minutes per day for months, or to not do it at all with some combinations of people. Sometimes solo transformation only is a better choice for a community.

It can be helpful to just leave the room for five minutes, if something is going on, to metabolize it and maybe come back more resilient.

If you feel buzzing or tingling in your body, localized or not, or the air seems "thick" or "shimmery," or the reality of the room seems to become "less," that doesn’t mean something is bad is necesarily happening, but something is probably happening.

But remember the issues with witch hunts, manufactured victimhood, and determining harm. But also remember the reality of gaslighting. If something feels wrong, something is wrong, somewhere.

You can intend to know exactly what’s going on. And you can intend to have a solution that’s good-faith, good-will for everyone. Sometimes you’ll need to leave or have people leave. But hopefully you won’t. May the best thing happen for everyone.

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part 10; the late-stage meditator in community:

People often become more sensitive and more vulnerable at first, possibly for months or years. But eventually...

This is just a conceptual model. The reality of it feels different, maybe, sometimes. But the below is a good way to provisionally think about what happens for a late-stage meditator.

So the late-stage meditator is mostly de-layered, de-occluded. They have access to most of their stuff, and most of their stuff healed or grown up or a bit wiser. Two particular dimensions are important, here:

The first is the dimension of self-other confusions. We can pick up stuff from other people and think it’s ours, think that it is us. And this becomes actuation just like everything else in our system. That part of us literally thinks its an extension of the other person, it feels like the other person from the inside. Any part of us that’s a little bit confused about self versus other can acquire "otherness" at any point during our lives. Over time, the systematic meditator helps their parts realize who they belong to and to realize that they only have to be themselves. Those parts, all things being equal, become "invulnerable" to future otherwise potential incidents of self-other confusion.

(Remember, you’ll always be bathed in the stuff, all the time. But it becomes information instead of influence.)

The second dimension is that of goodness/badness inversions. Sometimes we think something is good when it’s actually bad and vice versa. And often it’s highly contingent and contextual as to whether something is good or bad. And somethings can benefit one person at the expense of another. And childhood parts and layers can be quite confused or jumbled as to what’s good and bad, especially in cases of neglect and abuse but where that person was still dependent on an adult for love and protection. This can ramify as goodness/badness/self/other/boundary issues throughout a person’s system. A person is much more vulnerable to coercion when they believe something is good for them that is actually bad for them. They will "receive" material, content, intentions, will from another person to placate them, to be loved, all sorts of things, that might locally seem good to an occluded part is in fact terrible for the system as a whole. Over time, the late-stage meditator becomes wise and that wisdom percolates through the entire system. And, over time, the late-stage meditator is less and less likely to make local, perverse tradeoffs involving acceptance of ultimately unnecessary influence from other people.

So self/other confusions and good/bad inversions can be abstractly considered as the main sources or enablers of subtle interpersonal disendorsed effects.

(You may wish to temporarily skip to "part 17; the quiet interaction and the beauty of subtle interpersonal effects" before moving foward.)

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part 11; cult leaders:

Cult leaders are different. Anyone, including cult leaders, can change with luck and likely thousands of hours of work. But, a cult leader that’s a cult leader, right now, is different.

Bad things happened to them (very) early in life, or they responded to normal or bad early life things in particularly unfortunate ways. And then bad things accumulated on top of that. And now they are like this:

Most people aren’t trying to affect everybody like they’ll be affecting "peers" or "potential lovers" or "direct competitive threats" or "people who are the object of my sexual fetish". And it won’t be turned on all the time. But some people, e.g. cult leaders, want to "affect all humans all the time" in some way or some significant subset of that.
Not all effects have "teeth" in that there could be a superstitious element, like, the person is "doing a thing" like wanting people to die or be angry, and people are picking that up, but it’s not actually causing people to do that thing. Cult leader stuff will have teeth.
There’s an issue of "grain," like people do have filters, but if someone is phenomenologically skilled (into meditation, spirituality, magic, etc.), in some literal sense a finer grain will get through people’s filters and affect them in ways that are too articulated for the average person’s system to manipulate and fix or much more likely at least "encyst".
Some people claim special knowledge or authority about truth, goodness, power, sex, intimacy, connection, minds. And those claims might not be legitimate, but if the other person’s system believes them that makes it much more likely transmission will occur.
Finally, that seeming special knowledge about truth, goodness, power, meaning, etc., will in some way be instantiated in that person’s mind, but will usually be in some ways perverted, warped, or incomplete (even if seemingly clear, persuasive, attractive, and valuable). And prolonged contact with such a person can have a whole-mind warping effect, which would not be the case for someone who hadn’t developed such coherent-yet-still-perverse views.
FInally, some people are particularly schizoid or exquisitely walled off from the effects of sensations, somehow managing sensations such that they flow through a keyhole in order to preserve a fantasy reality of control, megalomania, (terror, fear), etc., sometimes hidden even from themselves. They might seem somewhat normal, if otherwise charismatic and/or creepy, but their minds will be arranged in a way that makes it very, very, very hard for them to responsively learn and grow, to understand the harm they’re causing and to all-the-way-down care about not hurting people or to realize, all the way down, that they’re even hurting people at all.

So charismatic cult leaders, or whatever, really are doing something especially bad.

If:

you find yourself tongue-tied, stupified, unable to argue with someone. And they’re charismatic.

And/or they make you feel sometimes incredibly good and sometimes worthless, like you and your entire life and anything you’ve ever done or will ever do again is worthless. Or that they are the only way to get X.

And if you do manage to argue, and they even don’t dismiss what you said, and even say it back to you in almost your own words, and it seems like they’re being reasonable, and something wrong still happens, you lose track of what you were going to say, or your "words get damaged," and you still find yourself tongue-tied, stupified, or ultimately unable to argue with someone.

Then, they might be a "cult leader."

They might have a magnetic pull on a person’s entire mind/belief/representational/behavioral system that causes a person to start layering. This might produce value in some ways but also produces a net global cost for that person’s system (usually). Prolonged contact might mean years of cleanup and significantly increased self-transformation timelines.

The will present themselves (overtly or subtly) as having extremely rare, or unique, critically valuable special knowledge, but, usually it’s a lie or it’s not worth it because it’s mixed with poison and detoxing before consuming is prohibitively costly.

A good self-transformation technique will typically endogenously generate sufficient value such that subtly and overtly authoritarian and coercive individuals can be in some sense ignored, at least for the purposes of acquiring the most precious things.

(Such individuals will claim to have such techniques, and will dribble out some initial value, but engaging in such techniques will likely ultimately be damaging and counterproductive. If you decide to collect "pieces" from such people, beware. Sometimes they will have stumbled on a special, rare thing. But it will be perverted in some way and will come at a price.)

It’s hard to overstate how much such an individual, one who, deep down, is relentlessly determined to control you and have you be a certain way, whether they realize it or not, can fuck up your life before you’ve realized it’s happened. Ten minutes with an individual like this can, worst-case, can mean hundreds of hours, or longer, to unfuck yourself.

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part 12; spotting a cult leader by overt signs:

Because the subtle signs are harder to detect and sometimes can’t be detected immediately, here is an incomplete list of overt signs that you’re possibly in the presence of a cult leader:

[...]
noticing you’re holding your body very still
muscle tension, tension muscles in stomach, shoulders, neck
finding yourself barely breathing
tingling buzzing shimmering anywhere in body
noticing you’re getting sleepy or "stupid"
not being able to articulate something you can easily or could easily articulate in other environments, becoming tongue-tied
feeling fear, anxiety, love, sexual arousal, acceptance, belonging, power, "elitism," or "having arrived" with no discernable cause or it’s sudden or there’s something intuitively strange-feeling about it
environment where there are "right answers" and "wrong answers," in actuality, even if lip-service has been given to inclusivity or (provisional) openmindedness
environment arranged for e.g. high-stakes or fast responses, that in order to "get the right answer" you have to not just act but also think and feel a particular way.
narrow interaction patterns—can only interact with them in a certain way because if don’t then they won’t engage or don’t even seem to understand
things that they say are wrong, according to them, are all wrong and completely dismissed, can’t find partial value in things or evaluate things with nuance.
if the good sides of other teachers or teachings are considered, it’s mere lip service and subtle body language or even subtler things is dismissing those teachers or teachings whole-cloth and also dismissing you for even considering their value
body language or tone implying you’re not even wrong, that your question, consideration, position has no value and that you don’t have any value.
they imply other teachings, other goals, other plans, other groups have no value
if "caught out" or forced somehow to interact outside of their normal,narrow window they might become very anxious or very angry
holding up very narrow patterns of behavior (like particular types or styles of interactions) as universally good and that all other interaction styles are bad
in general they’ve created a "closed universe" around themselves where only a very narrow range of things can happen, even if a small number of those things are cool, impressive, or in some way world-facing.
interacting with them will have a "hermetically sealed" quality, where they’ll have an immediate "cached" or "cued up" answer to every possible concern, objection, accusation, etc. You’ll know it’s cached because of the speed of the response as well as the ways it doesn’t quite address the issue raised but seems to talk past it or not consider it freshly.
interacting with them will have a "never quite reaches them" feel, in that, even if your position is restated by them, it will be a "frankencreation" in their own concepts or their own perspective and your actual position will be discarded or dismissed by them. You’ll know this by how their restatement seems to "do harm" to your position makes it less accessible to you.
acting like their "logical" arguments are complete, closed, timeless, eternnal, acontextual, true everywhere, final, and dominating. playing with definitions of words or philosophical ideas in order to win an argument. becoming extremely abstract or meta—needing to hairsplit premises as a way to win an argument. needing to win all arguments or to dismiss the other position is not even wrong or not worth engaging in.
takes advantage of "good-faith, good-will to resolve disagreements to get to the bottom of things," takes advantage of "mutual" understanding as a way to get more airtime and sink hooks in, with no intention or even necessarily ability to understand or gain insight from your position, perspective, feelings, etc.
the person has created carefully structured or cultivated groups, organizations, etc. in an attempt to have people behave in a very specific way (because they really need people to interact in a very specific way or they need the world to work in a very specific way, and this is their starting point or safe haven)
in general any hint of rigidity in behavior or what can happen around them or black-and-white-ness or foreclosing or shutting down the behavior of others is at least a yellow flag. If they want a particular type of interaction that can be ok, but if it seems like they can’t handle something else even for a second or they’re white-knuckling or teeth-gritting through part of something until they can get the thing they want, that’s a yellow flag.
particular advocacy for the world being unsafe or bad: doom, apocalypse, collapse, etc. [That’s not to say such things might or might not be true, but claims of their truth are part of a lever to control other’s behavior.]
they speak of elements of human interaction like they're "tools" or "toolkits" [cf. "tool-ification"*]; they turn human relating into checklists, flowcharts, actions and responses. and, some people have the tools, or know how to use the tools, and some people don't.
they tell you about yourself, they make a "package" [cf. "packaging"] of it, they say "this is you, and this is how you work, and this is what you're experience is and what it means," in words/ideas/concepts that make you doubt the legitimacy/safety/goodness/poewr of your own ongoing experience and active self-care, and your interpretation of that experience and active self-care
they claim the presence of unseen/unfelt forces/happenings/causes/effects, and you feel pressure to acquiesce to their claims or to their ontology, or that there's no "surface," space, time abundance, safety, something to question their claims, directly to them, or to other people
they vibe, imply, or even explicitly state any or all of: (a) "objective", (b) non-ideological, (c) "view from nowhere", (d) unremarkably (d1) sane, (d2) normal, (d3) natural, (d4) sensible, (d5) rational, (d6) reasonable, (d7) legitimate, (d8) authoritative, even (d9) saintly, (d10) with the mandate of heaven, and, this is in fact so unremarkable, that the faintest pause, whiff of an objection, marks one as ("of course!"; "goes without saying!") immature, dense, stupid, immoral, crazy, inconsistent, lesser, worthless, etc. ["big gaslight[ing] energy"] There is also an bit of a double bind or contradiction--what’s happening is all of unremarkable, reasonable, normative/normal, special, good, all at the same time and are even somehow conflated; but, all those things are sort of of different and sometimes incompatible kinds. And this can be disorienting and another vector by which a cult leader can cause a problem or confusion and then offer a seeming solution, to further possibly induce or entrench dependency.
[...]

part 13; incomplete list of relatively succinct concepts/definitions:

Of course there’s many ways to use the words below! The defintions given are partial, flawed, and idiosyncratic.

misleadingness -

It can be helpful to remember that someone can be misleading or deceptive without lying. They might very carefully only say things that are true ("selective-truthing"). They might very carefully only say things that aren’t quite relevant. They might say things in response to questions that aren’t actually answers to the questions asked. They might give special, private meanings to words and phrases that they can sufficiently defend at a later time as being what they really meant. They might say ambiguous things that can mean both something and it’s opposite, depending on later events or later clarification.

authoritarianism -

"the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom" [according to google]

Such advocacy, as mentioned above, can be both explicit and implicit. If explicit, there might be reasons given. If implicit, behavior will be presumptive. Reasons might involve appeals to the greater good or the need to make hard tradeoffs or for the (necessity of the) prevention of something highlighted as bad, either imminently or inevitably in the far future. Many other reasons and arguments can be given. Also: tragedy of the commons, volunteer’s dilemma, threat of anarchy or dog eat dog or inefficiency or...

One possible way to dissolve the seeming need for a blanket ideology involving overt or covert authoritarianism might be to get very concrete about "what would actually happen" in various particular, realistic scenarios, involving specific people, groups, or places.

coercion -

a person causing another person to unresponsively lock in stable or escalating patterms of mind or behavior, usually in a way that has utility for the preson doing the causing.Iif a person is coerced, then that person will have resources bound up in executing, elaborating upon, or being prepared to execute the mechanical behavior. The person will be less creative, less generative, less able to flexibly use environmental opportunities to changes and grow, relative to the degree they have been or are being coerced. [I threw this definition together, and there are cleaner, more self-consistent ones out there.]

A related concept is the usual "learned helplessness," where a person has now has new "waiting steps" such that they’re dependent on occurences outside of themselves in order to move forward on various things.

This is one route that these sorts of things can be facilitated:

Demonstration of inadequacy, demonstrate a person is inadequate on some (possibly narrow) dimension. Do this be leading a person to a surprising, possibly negative result, with the implication they weren’t enough, that they were in error.
Demonstration of generality. Demonstrate to the person some degree of generalization, that this inadequacy more generally applies.
Hope for overgeneralization. Hope the person generalizes their inadequacy as much as possible.
Demonstation of non-self-bootstrapping. Ideally-perversely, repeat steps 1-3, starting with some narrow demonstration that the person can’t resolve (at least once aspect of the original inadequacy) and again ultimately hope that person overgeneralizes to "not being able to become able to help themselves," on as many wanted dimensions as possible.

idolatry -

One might grant that goodness is objective, real, in some sense.

But, one might claim a fixed, "exteriorized" defintion for that good thing. "Goodness is X." "Goodness is righ there." "Goodness is this." "Goodness is in this." "Goodness has object-ness or thing-ness."

A possible correction is to consider that irrespective of any objective dimensions of goodness, it still must be subjectively, fluidly found, by route of a personal, unfixed path. One could take this as provisional and explore, over time, whether it has validity, including even the concept of "goodness" itself and/or the various/many senses that that word might have, inclusive of related useful concepts/words/ideas, and so forth.

maximization -

appeals to or capitalization on insecurity or paranoia ("never enough") by evoking ideas, images, or promises of "infinity," "hugeness," "foreverness," "everythingness," "all of it," etc." (as either carrot or stick)

pascal’s mugging (idiosyncratic interpretation) -

"I (may have) rare or unique things/goods of great value that you won’t be able to get anywhere else, ever, forever, if you don’t stick around or do as I say."

stipulation -

Stipulation is very useful tool when playing with arguments, thought experiments, and ideas. ("Stipulate, let, grant, given, say...") Here, I mean something more narrow.

There’s a pattern where someone will offer reasonable assumptions, and then narrowly follow the implications of those assumptions, while implicitly denying that any other reasonable assumptions are possible or that there’s even potentially another, better activity to be doing at all.

For example, one might say, "The world consists of agents who have goals." A bunch of implications would follow from that, and it seems reasonable as a starting point for discussion. But what of resources, nature, the material versus procedural nature of those goals, the implications for whether those agents have experiences or not, and the relevance of that or not, in the discussion, and so forth. (not to mention, for this example, considering e.g. humans to be agents who have collections of goals gets philosophically problematic very quickly, but, again, can be stonewalled or gaslighted as the only reasonable starting point for a large class of communicative contexts)

Besides "stipulation," other words for this might be "frame control," "schematic dominance," "framing," "out of sight out of mind," "what you see is all this is..."

An extreme version of this is foundationalism, according to wikipedia: "Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises." This is a very useful frame! But engagement with explicit premises as an activity as such is not the only way to interact or to seek truth or goodness or etc. And/but, the implication might be that any other activity is worthless, dangerous, immature, etc.

Stipulations can build up in the environment, can become implicit, omnipresent, and also interjective—it might become a norm that some people can add new stipulations at any time (whenever it’s convenient for them) and other’s can’t. And this is way to control discourse and behavior.

Another thing that can happen is "matching," where people’s perceptions and behavior tend to gel around explicat assertory statements, cf confirmation bias and/but with respect to behavior and perception as well.

more -

This list and the entries under each current item are very incomplete!

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part 14; teachers and leader timelines:

Timelines are very long. Meditative practice can take thousands of hours to make substantial progress. Real progress is "de-layering," but many seemingly good practices and produce a combination of layering and de-layering.

Even "fully de-layering" is insufficient because a person must also acquire lots of real-world knowledge about how to be good and safe for other people. And that real-world knowledge has to be "propagated throughout the system."

Becoming good, safe, and effective is a life-long journey.

If a teacher is doing something weird, it’s usually the case that they have a blindspot or hangup. It’s unlikely that they’re playing n-dimensional chess.

Good teachers can still have buried malevolence and sex stuff that even they aren’t aware of. Unburying and working through all of it will typically take someone thousands and thousands of hours, even if they have a practice that is doing very little initial layering.

But, "asymptotic perfection" is something good teachers and any serious practioner should be aspiring to, in my opinion.

Mistakes, blindspots, and fuckups should be expected, though. And if someone is doing something weird, that you’re vulnerable to, you might want to check back with them every few years instead of sticking with them and experiencing quite a bit of harm, before you realize it, that you ultimately have to undo to make further progress.

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part 15; layer theory and high-level principles of ethical, nonharmful, noncoercive, safe interaction:

Generally but not universally, de-layering, or at least not adding layering, is good. Layering is still good as a stopgap, when things are happening too surprisingly, too fast, or in some other unhandleable way, for a particular person.

Remember, layering begets more layering, and, the more layering a person has, the harder it is for that person to make further valued changes to their mind/self/behavior/etc., all things being equal. De-layering creates more optionaity for change, and faster change, all things being equal.

If a person is short-term "forcing themselves into a shape" or "trying to be or act in a particular way," at the expense of long-term growth, then that is, more or less by definition, layering.

The more a person can "just be themselves" around you, the less likely it is that they will be layering around you or layering in preparation for interacting with you. This is not universally true—a person can, for example, be layering all the time (almost everyone is, in some way), or layering before interaction with anyone, not just you, and so on. So, trying to have it be that a person can let their guard down around you, be unreflective around you, etc., will usually be at least neutral for them, relative to their baseline, and possibly good for them. One could describe this as a "low-stakes" interaction or a "safe" interaction.

There is a failure mode to the above, which is you overtly or explicitly communicating that you are safe or being seemingly safe, but, actually you are being unsafe because of subtle or overt coercive effects.

In subtle ways, you might be wishing (or "needing") that they would change their behavior, either in interaction with you or in other contexts, and that could subtly bleed through.

You might not even be aware of that wishing or needing, but if it’s safe for them to tell you that they’re experiencing it, then that’s really good. If you are aware of it, then, sometimes, often, it’s better to call it out, to explicitly note the problematic things that you’re doing, to create mutual knowledge. Sometimes, after that mutual knowledge is estabilshed, then it’s better to just end that particular interaction.

Talking about "truth" and "goodness," as such, can sometimes feel like the implication that the person needs to "change now" or "be different now." Any model or ideal or goal or concept or principle, etc., can be used as a hammer, and might be, even if a person disendorses doing so to themselves.

This can be less likely to happen if the interaction is truly low-stakes.

Interactions can become high-stakes when one person has something rare, hard-to-get, unique, and valuable or even perceived to be critically good or necessary by the other person. Then that other person is especially likely to try to be a particular way to get that value.

A situation can be made more low-stakes for that other person by good-faith and competently trying to either get that person that thing, or to show them how they can get it themselves, or to show them that it’s not actually valuable or real, or to show them that they are mistaken about its rarity or difficult-to-get-ness, and so on.

The more you can obviate yourself in the other person acquiring value, then the more low-stakes the interaction is.

Low-stakes interactions are more likely to be creative, in that both people can work together to do something even better for each other, and everyone, than they could alone.

There are of course issues of low resources (time, money, etc.), coordination costs, entrenched beliefs or preconceptions, excessive ill-will, preconceptions, etc., that it make it hard to have noncoervice, low-stakes, and creative interactions with another person. Sometimes, often, it can require tremendous preparation, over years and years, to arrange self and world to interact with other people noncoercively. But you can do your best, wherever you are on that journey, and it’s worth it.

One final pithy thing, if you’re looking for a quick-and-dirty way to try to know whether you’re being coercive versus, say ethically persuading, is you can ask, whether, functionally, you are influencing a person or informing them. Of course, seeming informing can actually be influencing, and vice versa. But I have found it helpful to check whether I’m influencing (bad, in this usage) or merely information (good, in this usage). If you need a person to respond in a particular way then there’s a real, stringent sense in which you cannot ethically interact with them, at least along that dimension, and more work is required on your part. If you have optionality, power, freedom with respect to X (or they do, or you both do) then the interaction becomes ethical with respect to X. Sometimes this can happen upstream or obliquely. For example, if both people have lots of money or other resources, then there’s less of a surface area, very generally, for either person to "coercively need" each other.

Of course, it’s nice to be needed, or is it? It’s maybe safer to be needed, in the short term. But true safety likely comes from flexible, creative interdependence, trust and reliance and skill versus brittle, inflexible (i.e. layered!) coercion.

Other people’s intelligence, skill, compassion, and love keep us safe, not them being forced into a narrow range of behaviors around you. Of course, people can locally disagree about what’s safe and good, and people can not realize how they’re being harmful, and people can be manufacturing victimhood or engaging in net-destructive self-healing strategies, and so on. So, ideally, as many people as possible are collaboratively and synergistically engaging in effective self-transformative practice and resource acquisition and distribution, etc.

In any case, if someone doesn’t need to layer in your presense, then they can grow in your presence. And, if this is mutual, then you can grow together.

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part 16; it’s not cool:

It’s best to consider the powers, the siddhis, the effects as not cool. They can become a thing in communities of practice. And they can become an ugly, escalatory, ruinous thing between practitioners. One or both people can do disendorsed, yet still hate-filled, tremendous harm to the other or to people caught in the crossfire.

(This is a bit of an overgeneralization, but: People uncontrollably (or deliberately) reach for the powers when they have social skill deficits, or they’re very afraid, or deep-down they’re resigned and feel helpless and hopeless. Otherwise, they would have already backchained to something collaborative and onstructive, both non-verbally smooth/friendly and explicitly clear, and they likely wouldn’t have found themselves in the triggering situation in the first place.)

If something especially subtly weird is going on, there is minimal to be gained from toughing it out, being seen as strong, by self or others.

And it can be very counterproductive to try to early-on become "invulnerable" to subtle interaction effects. (One is always vulnerable in the sense that we are bathed in it all the time, all things being equal. We can however transcend it, have unconfused, good information processing around it, to let it flow through us as "just information," "just background," etc.) Done too early, before enough meditative skill, trying to become "invulnerable" will produce additional layering, increase timelines, and not do much for becoming less vulnerable.

If negative effects are detected, try to separate early and often. Try to reduce incentives for unnecessary interaction (e.g. record talks or publish summaries so not everyone needs to be present).

Try not to hold grudges as this can increase meditation timelines. But, so too, if you are feeling strong negative emotions towards someone, don’t self-gaslight yourself into believing you’re not or that you shouldn’t.

And, you can just leave. You can find meaning elsewhere. You don’t need what they’re selling if it’s a group situation.

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part 17; the quiet interaction and beauty of subtle interpersonal effects:

(You may wish to read "part 10; the late-stage meditator in community" before this section if you’re skipping around.)

Over time, interactions between two trained individuals or one highly trained individual and other untrained individuals become relatively gentle and quiet, noncoercive, barely there. Interaction effects gently and liminally enhance intimacy, connection, etc.

(Remember, you’ll always be bathed in the stuff, all the time. But it becomes information instead of influence.)

Brave individuals might use intense interaction effects for training purposes, relating purposes, sexual purposes, etc. All is permitted, as it were. But I imagine most people will have no need or desire for such things, whether they’re leading quiet lives or doing big things, or doing both.

Sometimes, not all of the time, you can just walk away from shit like this.

All that said, sometimes communities become infected, and then one must engage with all this stuff in order to protect the community from the worst of what’s described above (harm to individuals or community dissolution). A community can need boundaries and sometimes "sterilization" or "clean room" approaches. That is, some communities may need skilled shamans*, some of the time.

But if a community hasn’t been "de-layered, de-compensated, cracked open" and there currently aren’t any "dark wizards" in or on the edges of the community, then it’s probably best to leave things well alone. Group practices** that can influence the boundaries between people should be used very sparingly and carefully. They are not games and even sporadic experimentation can have consequences. See the Many Protocol in this document. The Many Protocol should possibly only be explored when there is at least one highly-skilled practioner in the group (thousands of hours of effective practice).

*Stephan, V. Singing to the plants: A guide to mestizo shamanism in the upper Amazon. UNM Press, 2010.

**Katz, Richard. Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung. harvard university Press, 1982.

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part 18; depth of horror:

Horrible things have happened to individuals, often in childhood. Violent abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, extreme coercion. There is religious terror around hells, devils, demons. Terrible things happen to parents and grandparents, too, and that will affect the kids. There is also medical and death horror, we see relatives suffer and die in front of us or we walk in on dead bodies. Even if onself or relatives ultimately survive it can still be very tulmultuous. And there is cultural horror—slavery, extreme racism and bigotry, colonization, imperialism, genocides, holocausts, world wars, ancient curses, ancient gods, etc. All of this is rattling around in people’s minds and between minds, brought forwards through the centuries and decades. The skilled meditator will systematically work through all of this and their own stuff, over time. But there’s a lot and it takes a long time. In the meantime, one is exposed to it, in the water, as it were. And if something gets decompensated, cracked open in a group environment, then it can cause problems for multiple people.

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part 19; wisdom and antiwisdom:

gestural taxonomy:
- antiwisdom
  - non-power-seeking
  - power-seeking
- wisdom
  - non-power-seeking
  - power-seeking

Say there’s "wisdom" and "antiwisdom." Antiwisdom is childhood stuff that's hurt and confused, hidden away, nevertheless trying to affect self, others, and world.

Sometimes antiwisdom desperately seeks power, out of a combination of fear and grandiosity.

Sometimes this kind of power-seeking-antiwisdom masquerades as wisdom. When this happens, this power-seeking-antiwisdom gaslights, like, "we are bravely accepting power, to fix things or to do good," and things like that. It's gaslighting because this power-seeking-antiwisdom has reflective or unreflective, mixed or ulterior motives, e.g. exploitative self-enrichment or facilitating coercive dominance and/or sexual opportunities.

(Note, wisdom might sometimes say things like "bravely accepting power", too. So it can be hard to tell when antiwisdom is at play, just from surface words, alone.)

Besides power-seekig-antiwisdom, there is non-power-seeking-antiwisdom. Antiwisdom that is not seeking power can be irrationally hypersensitive to antiwisdom that is seeking power, especially when that power-seeking-antiwisdom is doing so by masquerading as wisdom, as above.

I say irrational for two reasons; one because the reaction to power-seeking-antiwisdom isn’t always targeted or constructive; any reaction to power-seeking-wisdom might be disproportionate, accidental, scorched-earth, disendorsed or accidentally involve collateral harm, or not involve compassion or routes to rehabilitation or redemption for that power-seeking-antiwisdom. (Some of this can be understandable, sometimes! A reaction that is targeted and measured and compassionate and constructive is a high bar—it involves wisdom!)

Power-seeking-antiwisdom (PSA) can use "irrationally hypersensitive non-power seeking antiwisdom" (NPSA) against itself by pointing out disproportionate, untargeted, or non-compassionate actions of NPSA with respect to PSA.

The second irrationality is that NPSA can sometimes mistake wisdom for antiwisdom, that is, it can be "irrationally paranoid" by seeing antiwisdom even where it is not, or can mismatch/misidentify/swap some seeming of wisdom and antiwisdom in the same person.

Non-power-seeking-wisdom can have an unboundedly aspirational relationship to wisdom and even power. That is, there are still ways in which NPSA (non-power-seeking-antiwisdom) could actually technically be "seeking power" (though that may be just to try to constructively engage with PSA or to just otherwise become safe from PSA.) And, finally, to reiterate an aside, above, wisdom and antiwisdom, including power seeking and non-power-seeking antiwisdom, and so on, can exist in the same person. (These are all too-simple abstractions, in any case.)

So, there are times when non-power-seeking-antiwisdom has to be multiple times as good/skillful as power-seeking-antiwisdom:

Non-power-seeking-antiwisdom has to learn how to distinguish (a) wisdom from (b) gaslighting, power-seeking-antiwisdom, sometimes in the same person. (Power seeking antiwisdom may not care to make some nuanced distinctions and so will have "more resources," more bandwidth, even on top of power it’s already acquired.)

Non-power-seeking antiwisdom ideally must learn how to contain, to distance from, and/or to rehabilitate power seeking antiwisdom. If the latter, one has to be less coercive than the power-seeking-antiwisdom, in order to not recreate/perpetuate it in a new form, which can involve seeking towards an ideal of "full noncoerciveness. And this has to be done in even in the face of bad examples and race-to-the-bottom attractors.

In short, sometimes non-power-seeking-antiwisdom sometimes might incline towards becoming wise, becoming wisdom and even "power-seeking-wisdom" or powerful wisdom.)

Note, even possible constructive inclinations (of non-power-seeking-antiwisdom possibly striving to become wisdom or power-seeking-wisdom) can be perversely coopted and exploited by power-seeking-antiwisdom, by somehow inclining people instead towards unhealthy versions of power or false wisdom: "we must be strong to combat evil or irrationality, and/but we must do so through self-sacrifice, self-martyring, and self-abnegation: it’s supposed to hurt." (Or they’ll say it’s not supposed to hurt but subtly "vibe" or imply that it is supposed to hurt: a subtle vibe-y, gaslighting double-bind.)

In any case, non-power-seeking-antiwisdom may sometimes seek wisdom and even power, in some way that is not self-sacrificing, not self-abnegating, not self-martyring, that is, not in a way that is just yet more, different, (self-)coercive power-seeking-antiwisdom in disguise, and so on.

To be sure, sometimes, often, wisdom consists of just maintaining boundaries and/or leaving a situation (or finding a way to leave the situation and doing so, if leaving isn't immediately possible). And part of wisdom is knowing or coming to know when that’s the right thing to do. And sometimes that's straightforward and sometimes that's complex. Outside perspectives, when possible, can sometimes be helpful.

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part 20; inappropriate reification:

Remember all the above is just a theory of convenience, a story. Find your own truth. Don’t inappropriately reify any of this or take my word for it. Good science is still true. Planes still fly. Government still do the thing they do. Computers compute. Stuff that’s true is simultaneously true. Give yourself time to integrate new, surprising stuff into a unified worldview. It will take some time.

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(super)deception, etc. (draft) (needs an initial editing pass):

I am workshopping an idea of “superdeception” and "superdeceivers." It's not a great name; it's a little cringy. I might pick a different name later.

A superdeceiver might make use of any or all of pretense, lying (including lies of comission and lights of omission), deception, misleadingness, misdirection, equivocation, prevarication, reframing, paltering [1], and bullshit [2]. Some of the previous are of course vague or overlapping, while some are pretty specific. And some of these can be used for neutral or even constructive purposes, and inadvertent use of some them doesn't necessarily mean someone is causing harm or is a "bad person."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paltering [Last accessed: 2021-12-09]
[2] (as in, without regard to its truthfulness or falsity; Frankfurt, Harry G. On bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2009.; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit [Last accessed: 2021-12-09]

In any case, I think a superdeceiver is especially someone who has the following traits:

(a) They are someone who has a relatively increased degree of fragmentation, compartmentalization, separation between any “modes”/“personalities”/“states”/"parts"/"selves"/"ways of being" And this allows such a person to lie/“lie” more smoothly and with greatly reduced “tells” or "leakage," sometimes down to effectively, (non-)detectably zero, during any particular instance. They can sometimes appear "completely" sincere, confident, contrite, emotionally injured, and so on. [Note: Philosophy and psychology have written about self-deception and "leakage," as other places to look for more on this.]

(b) They are someone who makes use of something like, other individuals' beliefs of the form, “if they were lying they would never do X, let alone Y”, in that the superdeceiver privately expends extraordinary resources in order to then in fact do/perform/display at least one Y, or two, and to maybe throw in a sprinkling of X's, to boot.

A superdeceiver comes in two main types, though any superdeceiver can be a mix of both, and there is a necessary relationship between the two. These types are "unknowing, natural" and "knowing, synthetic, reflective":

The unknowing, natural superdeceiver might experience themselves as charming, persuasive, charismatic. They are "naturally" chameleonlike, changeable, smooth. They are more likely to "really deep down believe" the things that they're saying and to "really deep down feel" the things they seem to be experiencing--for both, at least in the moment that they're saying them or feeling them. They are relatively unaware of their other parts or states, or their current one, "as such,"" or of their contextual "activation" and "deactivation." They are relatively unaware of thought, believed, or spoken contradictions, hypocrisy, apparent self-deception. And/or, these are ignored or rationalized away, from their current vantage point or state. Further, if other's press the issue, they may intensify misdirection, with lying, paltering, or belligerence or tacit threat. They are perhaps fractionally relatively more likely to experience paranoia or have a persecution complex, to have the experience of being a victim or being treated harshly or unfairly, while they're self-believed to be "well-intentioned," "just doing their best," "having perhaps taken regrettable and unintentional but not-too-bad harmful actions." (Regarding the experience of unfair persecution, this is especially when the weight of their caused harms eventually incites others to publicize perceived harm or to pursue remedies and reparations). (This can be exacerbated because people who've been harmed may focus on relatively more legible harms, or desperately or inadvertently round off harm to something more legible, in a way that isn't quite accurate, because of the ambiguous, vague, or nebulous nature of how they've been harmed, at least as they experienced it. So a superdeceiver might rightly point out that they never committed some specific harm, intentionally or unintentionally; but, first-pass, it's equally likely that the superdeceiver is, in their own mind, reframing, reconceiving, ignoring details, forgetting, or simply deceiving themselves about what actually happened, with possibly no awareness that this is happening.)
The knowing, synthetic, reflective superdeceiver sets aside deliberate time to reflect on and plan how to persuade and influence. They are perhaps fractionally more likely to be malicious, vindictive, malevolent, vengeful, hateful. They might self-style themselves as a planner, a strategist, and might even idolize fictional supervillains (but ironically or only partially, of course). Contradictions and hypocrisy are relatively more likely to be somewhat reflected upon and tolerated, though outwardly denied and minimized, for their utility in getting out of situations where they're accused of harm or for the purposes of securing trust. They'll both partially, sometimes kind of know, and kind of not know, that they're doing what they're doing, in different contexts, relative to contexts in which they're "being a different part" or "in a different mode."
Importantly, a superdeceiver may have a mixture of multiple unknowing parts, showing different sides in diffrent contexts, with perhaps at least one knowing part. Importantly, if there is at least one knowing part, then perhaps by definition, there "must" be at least one unknowing part, spontaneously or reflectively deployed, for damage control and influence.

Most people are just not prepared to encounter superdeceivers, to encounter traits (a), (b), or (a)+(b), in the wild. And, when it happens, perhaps one or two things will happen:

(1a) A person will be influenced by a superdeceiver in a way that's up to extremely "reality distorting" or "[experience of] reality damaging." Someone might be quick to point out that people experience "reality" in different ways or that their can be multiple conceptual schemas or lens/frames to interpret the world. What a superdeceiver is doing is distinct from merely offering different lenses in that those lenses will usually be "shaped" so that they don't admit anomalies or edge cases into those lenses, and those lenses will contain some fractional or large percentage of outright fabrication. And then this is doubled-down upon, when questioned, or questioning is headed-off. So the cumulative effect is a kalleidescope of distortion and self-distrust on the part of the person being influenced, which might cause suffering and take a long time to untangle.

(1b) Additionally, there may be a mismatch between what a superdeceiver is saying and what they're doing or vibing, including a mixture of requests, bid, warnings, invitations, refusals, and so on. And this can be confusing, crazy-making, or jamming, or can elicit compliance or curbing that can last for a long time into the future.

(2) A person might also be very hurt on the meta-level. Some people don't have any expectation of such a level of reflective or unreflective deception, so it can be shockign and destabilizing when it they finally realize it's happening (which can take a very long time to come to terms with), and while it's happening, and during the period of coming to terms, there can be a lot of subtle or overt suffering, in the tacit and perhaps eventually explicit sensemaking. Even when a person believes or is aware of ("bad-faith") adversariality or competition in the world, or even malevolence or hatefulness, or callousness, inhumaneness, or disregard, that can sometimes be only abstract, and a concrete encounter can be just as destabilizing as in the naive case, and potentially more so because they believed themselves inoculated against being susceptible, or more resilient to harm than they happened to be, or it simply "wasn't the way they thought it was going to be," in the concrete particulars. It might take a while for it to be recognized as an instance of what it was. This can be existentially, metaphysically, morally destabilizing in the "human nature", "personhood", and "how the world works" senses.

(3) Finally, beyond emotional harms (and, maybe less frequently, physical harm), there is possible financial impact or other resource impact, a sudden or creeping betrayal or unfairness/"unfairness" or dashed expectation, that produces a highly asymmetric or even opposite-sign payoff for the superdeceiver, or at least an absence of consequences (at least for a time, or ongoingly), at the expense of the person being deceived or misled.

All-in-all, it's usually a mixed bag or a net negative, for the person being influenced or deceived.

So, what are some things to watch out for? (And how should one take this phenomenon or schema/lens? I'll only discuss the first thing, here, though all of these are important.)

If someone checks off a lot of trust boxes or gives of a lot of seemingly costly or hard-to-take trust signals or signs ("X's and Y's"), perhaps in a short period of time, this is sort of a yellow flag, ironically or paradoxically. The shortness of time might or might not especially be a tell, in that someone who didn't have a perhaps short-term end or goal, for another person, might more naturally or incidentally space out spontaneous or situationally appropriate trust signals, in a truly semi-incidental way. A shorter timeframe will be preferred by a superdeceiver, because there's less opportunity for others to witness "tells," "leakage", or anomalies.

Additionally, if a person seems particularly smooth or charismatic, this can be a yellow flag, as well. Sometimes the "seamlessness" of the smoothness or their complete lack of vulnerability (maybe only realized in retrospect) is a tell. But smoothness seamlessly combined with vulnerability can also be a tell, perhaps in the seamlessness.

All in all, their are no perfectly reliable patterns. One might suggest watching the pattern of a person's behavior, over time, as eventually a pattern of leakage, tells, or anomalies will eventually start to surface. But this can also be dangerous because sometimes being close enough to eventually observe such a pattern can also cause cumulative harm to the observer, during that time. There will be something attractive about the superdeceiver, real or apparent value, so it can be a hard call, sometimes, as to whether to approach or avoid, and how much. If the individual creates time pressure (to commit or go away) or there are subtle or overt behavioral requirements for being in their presence or to get things from them, either enforced by them or a group, tacitly or overtly, then that can be a yellow or potential red flag.

The "Superethicist"

In addition to a superdeceiver, one could also talk about a "superethicist", with both a "synthetic" type and a "natural" type.

The synthetic superethicist will have a preoccupation with ethics, morals, consent, and they might police the behavior or those around them. The synthetic aspect sort of also means semi-"explicit" or semi-"articulated", so a lot of this will be in words and discrete actions. And this actually has a similar effect to offered lenses/frames of a superdeceiver--anomalies might be hard to account for, important details might get ignored. There might be a mismatch between saying, doing, and vibing, with, say, some destructive obliviousness and/or self-serving-ness, somewhere. So even a well-intentioned superethicist might have a destabilizing effect on other people.

And, so a synethetic superethicist is almost synonymous with a flawed superethicist.

The other type, the "natural" type, is a bit closer to "just human-ing", "just being human with other people" but since most people have hangups and blindspots, even someone who's extraordinarily non-self-abnegatingly compassionate, self-aware, other-aware, will of course likely have blindspots and limitations. That is, they'll have some "fragmentation", some lack of integrity, something, at least in some contexts or under some pressures, and that's ok.

Finally, it's not uncommon for there to be a superdeceiver in the guise of a superethicist.

Conclusion, Community, and Shadow

We are all like the above categorizations, at least little bit. Through self-transformative practice and non-coercive community, we can become less fragmented, more integrated, more consistent in a good way, have more integrity.

Something to keep in mind is that people who are particularly fragmented, may be particular drawn to self-transformative practice, because of how such practice can help, whether they realize that that's the (partial) reason, or not. But because meditation timelines are long, meditation communities are sometimes home to a higher proportion of self-deception, fragmented, hypocritical people than in other contexts. Sometimes this is partially quite reflected upon and sometimes not. Sometimes the reflected upon portion makes it harder to see the remaining shadow. Sometimes talking about shadow as such drives actual shadow even further into hiding.

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framing / frame management / frame control (stub):

This section is a stub.

*

Notes:

https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/ [Last accessed: 2021-12-09]
https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1498024628953903105 [Last accessed: 2022-02-27]
https://twitter.com/CurziRose/status/1481063067475931140 [Last accessed: 2022-02-27]
https://uncertainkind.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-will-smiths-punch [Last accessed: 2022-03-29]
https://twitter.com/kitsune_temple/status/1517556599065260032 [Last accessed: 2022-04-22]
https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1421268674313220102 [Last accessed: 2022-04-24]

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creativity:

What might (and could) we do together that’s better (more good), for everyone, than what we might do apart? What might we do together that’s better than what we might do apart? What might we do together that’s better than what we’ll do apart?

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the creativity of evil (plus sequence commentary):

Unfortunate sequences of events produce ignorance, inability, fear, and (perceived or actual) resource contsraints.
Ignorance, inability, fear and (perceived or actual) resource contsraints produce myopic, selfish desperation (that can skillfully hide for a long time from itself and from others).
Myopic, selfish desperation can be extremely generative and can produce tremendous value.
That value production usually comes with spreading, lasting collateral harm (e.g. overt or covert authoritarianism, self-coercion, etc.).
And, that (sometimes tremendous) value produced will have poisonous, toxic components woven deeply into it, usually to the very core, that in some way hurts everything it touches, even as it also can do good things.
Sometimes, evil can self-transcend, de-toxify itself, repair the harm it caused, and provide acceptable restitution and reparation.
Sometime, two or more evils can come together to mutually de-toxify.
Sometimes, one or more people from the outside can extract value from poison, without being destroyed, and can ultimately provide and share wisdom and healing that wouldn’t have been possible before.
Evil is real; it incidentally destroys goodness or directly tries to destroy goodness (and sometimes succeeds).
Evil is illusory; In its place is myopic, selfish desperation that would be (safe and) good, instantly, if it knew how.
It will be ok in the end. If it’s not ok, then it’s not the end. [adapted quote]

*

auto-commentary from an online forum / email list:

Re “myopic, selfish desperation” and the whole “the creativity of evil” section. I’m not saying evil is good because it’s creative. That section was me, first-pass, trying to personally wrestle with how some (at least initially seeming) good, valuable, useful things can come from “evil” people and situations, and how does one make sense of that, and act with respect to that. If someone who’s caused a lot of harm also produces value, like, duh, that happens, but it was surprisingly jarring, to me, to finally see up-close, concrete examples, and then when is it ok to make use of that value, how do we recognize the value without de facto endorsing the harm, and how do we act towards people who produce some combination of harm and (at least seeming) value. (Maybe all the seeming value is illusory or is too laced with poison to be long-run useful, though, and so on.) I think now I would maybe say this discussion was too abstract to be useful, and articulated along the wrong joints, and one instead has to look at the concrete particulars and nth-order effects of those concrete particulars. All of this writing is due for an update.

Generally, a lot of that whole sequence was intended to be a bit of an exoteric stopgap, for harm reduction. Ditto for other earlier sections that talk about objective truth or goodness.

But every few sections, in the earlier sections, I try to mention at least some of emptiness, groundlessness, non-eternalism, and how all of that is supposed to ultimately come out of practice, over time. (I’ve been going back and adding more of those qualifiers.) The document sort of has a deliberate gradient from (a) [hopefully qualified] exoteric to (b) “explicit esoteric,” running from beginning to end.

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joy (stub):

safety = resolution of problems + mind autonomy
safety + creativity = joy

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w_culture.md

appendix 4: worst case culture/community stuff

appendix table of contents

an orienting model; layers and tangles; from "parts" to people to groups:

part 1; a brief layer/tangle model of mind, "parts," personality, groups, and (global) culture:

part 2; the blooming, buzzing confusion:

part 3; the demon-haunted world and science as a candle in the dark (as per Carl Sagan):

evil:

part 4; introduction:

part 5; everyday blah, hapless creeps, dark wizards, and cult leaders:

part 6; spot the dark wizard:

part 7; healers:

part 8; witch hunts, vulnerability, contagion, tragedy of transformation, community decompensation:

part 9; timelines and stopgaps and sanity checks:

part 10; the late-stage meditator in community:

part 11; cult leaders:

part 12; spotting a cult leader by overt signs:

part 13; incomplete list of relatively succinct concepts/definitions:

part 14; teachers and leader timelines:

part 15; layer theory and high-level principles of ethical, nonharmful, noncoercive, safe interaction:

part 16; it’s not cool:

part 17; the quiet interaction and beauty of subtle interpersonal effects:

part 18; depth of horror:

part 19; wisdom and antiwisdom:

part 20; inappropriate reification:

(super)deception, etc. (draft) (needs an initial editing pass):

framing / frame management / frame control (stub):

creativity:

the creativity of evil (plus sequence commentary):

joy (stub):

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