Thread by @ConceptualJames

We all talk a lot about "Cluster-B personality disorders" these days, and there's likely a very simple reason why: social media facilitates their amplification. There is almost no playground better for these destructive disorders than social media, and the consequences are huge.

Cluster-B personality disorders are the particularly nasty ones: histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, and borderline. They are stable psychological deformations, at least by the time adulthood is reached, and they cause disruption and destruction everywhere they go.

Some years ago, Jordan Peterson gave a controversial interview in which he explained that male violence (physical) doesn't "upload" to the internet well, but female violence (social) does "upload" fluidly and easily. He did so in attempt to explain the toxic femininity of Woke.

There are other explanations for the toxic femininity of Woke, but Jordan was hitting on something important with that claim. The toxic femininity caused by feminists, most of whom were/are Cluster-B personalities hiding behind feminism, uploads and is socially contagious.

Feminism, for what it's worth, is effectively the flux (in the chemical sense) within which Woke was forged (which mostly took place in education theory and critical pedagogy as its crucible). That explains why Woke bears so many cluster-B toxic femininity traits and behaviors.

The point Jordan unfortunately missed, though, is that as well as "female" (social) violence "uploads" onto social media, cluster-B social violence "uploads" even more efficiently and social media is literally its perfect playground: anonymous harassment, sock puppets, etc.

I think we predominantly have to keep talking about Cluster B personality disorders today so much not only because they're part of our everyday experience since they significantly contribute to or even dominate our political discussions online but also because they're contagious.

The contagion of cluster-B disorders is usually called "the cycle of abuse." People who are abuse targets of cluster-B disordered individuals frequently (a) join cults around said individuals and (b) adapt to the abuse by replicating it outwardly to others.

In a rather strange book called Political Ponerology, Andrzej Łobaczewski discusses this problem in the political context in general, including also psychopathy and sociopathy, but not with regard to social media, which was after his time. It's an interesting read.

Łobaczewski makes the point that there are two kinds of psychopathological states: essential (born with) and functional (manifesting due to the result of environmental pressures). Most "Woke" behavior is functional psychopathology driven by essential psychopathology.

Łobaczewski's point is that tyrannies are virtually always the result of what he calls "pathocracy," a state of toxic governance by the psychopathological. He argues that such people turn society into a cult that aims to force everyone to create a false world the psycho needs.

What Łobaczewski could not have imagined was that our political discourse, due to the structural features of social media, would primarily take place in an environment that overwhelmingly favors cluster-B pathologies and their functional spread into others. We live there now.

This problem is exacerbated by the "modernization" of the Smith-Mundt Act, which Obama did in 2012 and enacted in 2013 (when everything went crazy, roughly). That act allows the US government to do agitation and propaganda on the US people through mass media, including social.

We have to figure out how to reckon with the fact that online discourse, thus much political discourse, is susceptible to both of these problems: the high enablement of functional psychopathy of cluster-B and other psychopathologies and hostile agitation to inflame it.

Hostile entities both foreign and domestic, governmental and otherwise, will understand this circumstance and exploit it, and they do, even if they've learned it otherwise than through Łobaczewski himself. This is the political world we now live in, though, and we need solutions.

One of my biggest sociopolitical hypotheses, especially since reading Łobaczewski, is that societies live or die by whether or not they figure out how to contain and channel psychopathologies like these (as one key factor among others, obviously). Social media opened the Box.