An introduction to group dynamics
As the Enlightenment began with the premise that man is a rational animal and the post-Enlightenment began with the premise that man is an irrational animal, so begins the Dark Enlightenment with the premise that man is a social animal—and this beginning, one must hope, heralds the birth of the meta-Enlightenment, the extension of the realm of the movement that booted reflexivity to encompass not only the world but also itself, drawing into question the premises of not only the enemy memeplex to be outcompeted but also the new outcompetitor sprung Dionysus-like from the thigh of the old. This shows the importance of the reference-point of Chinese philosophy referenced obliquely by Mencius Moldbug (who then proceeded, in true libertarian fashion, to ignore the question) and explicitly by myself: they began not with the answer of rationality, but—note that Douglas Adams continues to be the prophet of our time—with the corresponding question. The fundamental difference between Mencius and Xunzi is that the former held that human nature was good and the latter held that it was bad; both proceeded accordingly from there, but the philosophical tradition, unlike ours, was at least conscious that the question must be asked.
So. Man is a social animal. Enlightenment philosophers, believing themselves to be atoms of reason, still functioned according to the social laws of man. National Socialism has its roots not only in the masses of the unenlightened, but also in Fichte, the Kantian. But what are these laws? I have referred to a certain subset of them before as group dynamics: the rules governing individual affiliation to the superindividual, to ingroups, and individual disaffiliation with the superindividuals contrary to their own, with outgroups. But these terms are derivationally clumsy: to derive the necessary terminology from them would result in weighty, awkward polysyllabisms of the sort that would make even an amateur black magician shudder in disgust; and the true wizard notices that group dynamics are embedded in the Germanic languages themselves, as I have previously noted.
Language is a clumsy weapon, but in the hands of an expert wielder it can be made slightly less so. Instead of ingroups and outgroups—certainly instead of tribes, which do not allow us so much as a descriptor for the foreign—we can speak of thedes and elthedes.
What is a thede? Definitions of the prerationally grasped can only be imperfect, but to begin, a thede is a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel affiliation with and (therefore?) positive estimates of.
What I’m famous for is the experiment where we put some kids in red shirts others in blue shirts. It doesn’t take a lot, but after a few environmental messages, then the blue shirts think they’re better than red shirts, and red shirts think they are better than blue shirts—even though they’re exactly the same shirt otherwise. Human beings can have a bias: ‘Whatever group I’m in is better than yours…’”
Thedes are defined by their thede identity, their thedishness, and in opposition to elthedishness; but these are not two separate phenomena, but one with multiple facets. Brahmins are intellectual—but intellectual unlike Vaisyas and Dalits. Vaisyas are hard-working—but hard-working unlike Brahmins and Dalits. Dalits are fun-loving—but fun-loving unlike Brahmins and Vaisyas.
Thedes are multiple: one does not simply affiliate with one thede, but with an overlapping mishmash of thedes of different and shifting priorities—and some thedes are concentric. A guy from western Tennessee once said to me that, when hes in a bar at home, hell get along with the guy from western Tennesee and fight the guy from eastern Tennessee; when hes in a bar in eastern Tennessee, hell get along with the guy from Tennessee and fight the guy from Georgia; and when hes in a bar in Alabama, hell get along with the guy from Georgia and fight the guy from Vermont.
Thedes can form along multiple lines: one can simultaneously be thedishly from western Tennessee (and then Tennessee, the South, America), thedishly an analytic philosopher (and then a philosopher, an academic, a Brahmin), thedishly a fan of black metal (and then metal, non-mainstream music), and so on.
Thede identity can be reinforced in many ways: important examples include participating in thedish activities, bashing elthedes and their members, throwing exosemantic gang signs, and attacking the use of elthedish exosemantic gang signs. As I said on Twitter long ago:
Feminists are often empirically wrong about the meaning and use of slurs, but meaning and use arent the point of their policing. Its about exosemantic gang signs. You cant be One Of Us and call people cunts. Perhaps linguistic taboos can be seen in terms of group dynamics in general.
Exosemantic gang signs? Exosemantic gang signs! We can simplify and call them Im not sure what. My first inclination is to say tokens and eltokens; I hate overloading existing words, but Ive got nothing better, so Ill go with it for now. (Does anyone have anything? It looks like all the Germanic roots that could be useful have given existing English words. I could use mantra and elmantra, but thats even worse. I could try to derive something from δείχνω or σημάδι, but that might not work. Semn retains the link to semiotics at the heavy cost of openness to unfortunate puns and typos. Semeion is almost as bad, and recalls the Russian name Семён, which USG, in its wisdom, anglicizes to well, you know. Latin borrowing patterns would give semium, which sounds like half of a chemical. Code is just bad. Another possibility is oth, which allows for puns on oath and the homophone auth (as in authentication), but looks weird and requires drawing from a language that doesnt borrow well into English. Black magic is hard!)
What is a token? A token is, obviously, a gang sign, a thedish unit of communication; but what is this exosemantic?
exosemantic – the part of a word or statement that isn’t its strict entailments, but which are extremely common implicatures– specifically, these shouldn’t be contextual or Gricean implicatures, but socially bound ones, which have been formed by continued use of the word in particular contexts, or by particular speakers. The exosemantics of a word may eventually become incorporated into the defining entailments.There should be a correlate, endosemantic, but this would simply be the lexical entailments of a word, so I don’t know that we need a new word for that.
It is commonly known that words carry meaning on two levels: denotation, or strict, dictionary-level meaning, and connotation, or emotional association; but there is a third, exosemantic level. The word eldritch, for example, denotes otherworldliness and connotes a feeling of cosmic horror toward its referent; but it also exosemantically implies that its user has read Lovecraft. The word liberty is no different from the word freedom, The word praxis is no different from a certain definition of the word practice except in its exosemantic layer: praxis is heavy; praxis implies familiarity with—association with—the academic tradition that uses the word praxis.
Heavy? Heavy. And dense.
volume – the phonetic, syntactic, and morphological space that a word occupies. A very “long” word is one with a lot of syllables, a very “tall” word is one with a lot of morphemes.
mass – the semantic, pragmatic, and social impact of a word. A very “heavy” word has not only a lot of specific entailments, but may also have a lot of socially linked implicatures that are strongly bound to the word itself or to its use in certain contexts.
density = mass/volume. A very dense word is one with a low volume and a heavy mass. A very non-dense word is one with a high volume but very little mass.
Heavy words are likely tokens, and repeating tokens reinforces thede identity. Some tokens are identifiers, markers of identity that one can apply to oneself; identifying oneself with these tokens also reinforces thede identity. (Tumblr about-mes are the thede-identification equivalent of heroin.) Stating the thedish position on a certain issue also reinforces thede identity, and is indistinguishable to at least the untrained from rational thought.
It should be obvious from this that politics is the mind-killer. Political ideologies are thedish identifiers; political positions are tokens; political debate is thede conflict and reinforcement. To even answer the question what are you politically? is to reinforce a previously determined thedish identity.
Hence anarcho-fascism. (Update 7/11/13: But of course some idiots had to go off and use that and mean it, so I cant use it anymore.)
Shibboleths
Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites [are] fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, [and] among the Manassites.
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, [Art] thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
jamesd127
March 27, 2013 at 19:49
The proposition that politics is the mind killer comes from the Less Wrong cult of the AI singularity. Whenever someone says something that contradicts one of the many, many, many tenets of their cult, which has an almost encyclopedic collection of tenets, they respond like monkeys howling in the trees hurling shit at intruders, and, among the numerous screams of abuse a the heretic, they say his mind has been killed by politics.
jamesd127
March 27, 2013 at 19:59
Less Wrong is a cult founded on the idea of avoiding cults.
Its quite poetic really.
spandrell
March 28, 2013 at 09:16
I didnt understand the blockquoted philosophese definition of exosemantic at all. I would like to try to explain exosemantic to myself in regular dudebro english. I tried to tease out a meaning from your examples, and so far I have that exosemantic is the content of a word that conveys the properties of the people who use the word (which categorizes the users into social groups?). I dont think this is incorrect but probably incomplete. Is it intentional on the part of the user? Does it matter at all if its intentional or not?
Prior to this, I would have just thought of exosemantic (without having a word for it) as a subset of connotation. But really that is just an argument about semantics, you could draw the lines either way.
Aaron
March 27, 2013 at 20:10
A speakers words say something not only about whatever the speaker is talking about, but also about the speaker. Thats the exosemantic content. It just happens that that content is usually that the speaker is a member of a certain social group.
nydwracu
March 27, 2013 at 20:36
You never explained what is anarcho fascism.
jamesd127
March 27, 2013 at 20:14
Anarcho-fascism isnt anything. Its a more polite version of the finger in response to a stupid question.
nydwracu
March 27, 2013 at 20:34
In other words, its content is all exosemantic (0,1) in the semantic Cartesian quadrant.
Though, just as words can have double semantic meanings, I think there are probably many forms of exosemantics. There is the subculture-belongingness part that shows where in the vast space of overlapping Venn diagrams of human social populations you fit (I think I recently saw a graphic of the twitter-analysis version of this at GLPiggy.net). And there is the refusal to answer a stupid question and play the dumb game. Maybe some quaternion would better reflect the factor analysis.
Handle
March 28, 2013 at 06:07
Freedom from group identity perhaps?
Rachel Haywire (@RachelHaywire)
March 30, 2013 at 04:45
Sometimes I ask me: why people who think politics is mind-killer spend a gazillon of time talking about politics. Maybe this is only a signaling game, or value these things really.
br1nocoelho
March 27, 2013 at 22:36
Its kind of like how pick-up artists, novices, and aspirants, spend a lot of time talking about how f*sked up modern women are and yet also a gazillon of time talking about how to mimic certain patterns of behavior and trigger and maintain the function of their arousal subroutines and Game in general.
Because, unless we live like Amish hermits or passive spectators to the great evolving, oozing blob of informational connective tissue we call the internet, then our human lives and our attempts to navigate them successfully are dominated by social interactions which it pays to understand and master. Just being able to observe it clearly without mental clouded cataracts is worth it for the humor content alone.
Handle
March 28, 2013 at 06:16
Liberals have very successfully reverse-engineered tribalism, playing divide-and-conquer inside every nation so as have them suicide willingly.
spandrell
March 28, 2013 at 09:19
Thedishness can I call it groupishness? is certainly a human constant, but its also distributed across a broad range. How do the aggressively low-groupishness population fit into your schema? Because to me, it looks as if the really fierce and consequential conflict is the one between the two poles of the groupishness spectrum.
Nick Land
March 28, 2013 at 10:48
Where are the low-groupishness populations?
nydwracu
March 28, 2013 at 18:44
There are a number. The (non-tribalist) HBD network is one obvious example. An indicator is effective mimickry of at least low-grade autism. Ultimately, anyone with more concern for the truth value of a statement than its social signal value demonstrates anomalously low groupishness. As a consequence, low groupishness people are the only source of statements worth regarding with any seriousness. (And anyone describing themselves as an anarcho-fascist clearly isnt polishing a group-identity badge.)
Nick Land
April 1, 2013 at 20:46
I spent my entire time in grade school with government psychologists trying as hard as they could to diagnose me onto the spectrum, so
nydwracu
April 1, 2013 at 21:45
Let me contribute one pet idea of mine: language is not a means of communication. If it were, wed all just speak English and communicate.
Languages are a badge of tribal membership.
spandrell
March 28, 2013 at 11:50
Correct. This is most visible within actual tribes, where language revitalization efforts market themselves very successfully as revitalizing a marker of the tribes culture and heritage; but within languages like English there are sublanguages (just as within, say, Brahmin culture there are subcultures) words, forms of speech, etc. innovated by the group and used only within it and therefore serving as tokens of group membership.
(Like subcultures vs. cultures, sublanguages change much faster than languages. Eltheders wont learn Nuxalk or whatever, but they will start using whatever English words are cool, if they can figure them out.)
nydwracu
March 28, 2013 at 18:47
Precisely. It also fits nicely with the critical period hypothesis, where you can only learn a language well during your infancy. If languages are to communicate, you should be able to learn them fast at any age. If there are a way to signal tribal membership, you dont want people to switch.
spandrell
March 29, 2013 at 02:37
[] See Nydwracu and Anomaly UK for some reactionary []
Randoms | Foseti
March 29, 2013 at 15:05
Next installment: National Futurism
Rachel Haywire (@RachelHaywire)
March 30, 2013 at 04:46
[] enough, liberal insanity is as much a part of HBD as the racial gap or the IQ distribution. Nydwracu is trying to base neo-reaction on our newly acquired understanding of human group psychology. I propose the first []
Beyond Bias | Bloody shovel
March 30, 2013 at 13:37
[] This blindness wouldnt be problematic were it not often coupled with personality types that crave power and influence. Then things get Orwellian and dogmatic belief in recycling and redistribution are classified as open-minded while those who challenge the official narrative are branded as closed-minded rubes. This is made doubleplus ungood when the open-minded types convince themselves that the object of power isnt power and that they are genuinely dispassionate weighers of facts instead of anarcho-fascists. []
Existing By Way of Comparison | Hidden Leaves
April 25, 2013 at 16:12
[] it is applied by humans, humans who hold the machinic as ideal. But the machinic is impossible. Man is a social animal, and therefore a thedish one; one with inescapable and often unnoticeable attachments and []
An open letter to Trayvon Martin supporters | nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst
July 14, 2013 at 05:45
[] talking, of course, about thedes. A thede is a group of people you identify with. Your clique, your club, your ingroup, your []
Why Theden | Theden |
July 29, 2013 at 16:08
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lyman h reynolds
August 27, 2013 at 15:08
[] An introduction to group dynamics by Nydwracu makes important points but in an awkward style. It is commonly known that words carry meaning on two levels: denotation, or strict, dictionary-level meaning, and connotation, or emotional association; but there is a third, exosemantic level. The word “eldritch”, for example, denotes otherworldliness and connotes a feeling of cosmic horror toward its referent; but it also exosemantically implies that its user has read Lovecraft. []
Links for December | More Right
December 31, 2013 at 12:19
[] talking, of course, about thedes. A thede is any group of people you identify with. Your clique, your club, your ingroup, your []
For The Intellectually Curious Woman: Theden - Return of Queens
January 11, 2014 at 20:47
[] An Introduction to Group Dynamics []
Announcing: The Neoreactionary Canon! | This Rough Beast
January 23, 2014 at 15:01
[] An Introduction to Group Dynamics []
Neoreactionary Canon | More Right
February 1, 2014 at 18:32
[] precipitate political ones. The spaces described above and others will play a vital role in the re-thedening of the []
Catalysts | This Rough Beast
July 10, 2014 at 02:52
[] instilled narratives of oppression, a kind of memetic Greek fire, if you will, for serving as an exosemantic gang sign. It provides the same function as the wearing of handkerchiefs in signaling association []
#GamerGate is an Ideological Litmus Test | Anarcho Papist
September 19, 2014 at 16:32
[] formulation of this concept was a building-block moment for NRx, but the trend in its usage has been dismally []
Outside in - Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Thedes
October 24, 2014 at 03:27
[] accurately, this overloading—of the word thede, which was originally approximately defined as a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel affiliation with and []
Thedes and phyles | nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst
October 26, 2014 at 04:16
[] punch, not least because tends to attract the wrong sort of people. Nydrwracu, the original inventor-upper of thede, says, Hmm, maybe youre right, and suggests phyle as a []
This Week in Reaction | The Reactivity Place
October 31, 2014 at 22:56
[] autonomization should be considered [phyles].” Phyles are, of course, distinguished from thedes in that a thede is a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel []
Conceptual Caste Complications | Ara Maxima
November 10, 2014 at 01:29
[] In the previous section we saw that there are a lot of downside to imprudent formalization. Still, people engage in it. Why? I suspect that there are significant upsides. I describe them below, after explaining exosemantics: []
Imprudent formalisation | Rival Voices
December 7, 2014 at 16:45