Terrible People in Terrible Communities
This entry is part of a five-part series on “terrible communities”: 1. All Communities are Terrible Communities. 2. Terrible Outcomes of Terrible Communities. 3. A Less Foolish Power Literacy. 4. Terrible People in Terrible Communities. 5. An Antidote to Terrible Communities. Appendix. I Am Not Writing to the World: A Guide to Creating "Theory Sketches.”
I'll be continuing my exploration of terrible communities this week. Last week, I argued the following:
All communities are terrible communities, a premise inspired by Tiqqun's "Theses on the Terrible Community."
Three terrible outcomes will emerge in changing terrible communities without sufficient wisdom: the tyranny of structurelessness, cult states, and intimacy without friendships.1
Power literacy is needed to be responsive in changing terrible communities effectively.
In the previous entry, I discussed a terrible person, the archetypal malevolent sociopath, what psychiatrist M. Scott Peck calls the “people of the lie,” people whose primary orientation is to live a lie, leading them to make others suffer for suffering's sake. In today’s entry, I’ll discuss three “terrible people” found within terrible communities, those who are not bonafide sociopaths but have some characteristics of them.
The three terrible people are sneaky fuckers, unconscious gaslighters, and conversational narcissists. The commonality between all three examples is, on some level, they are fundamentally lying to themselves, albeit unconsciously. With this self-deceit, each party adopts social strategies of the people of the lie2.
There are a few important caveats to share before discussing these three cases. I will be speaking in terms of social archetypes, not actual people. This entry is not about shaming people who adopt the archetypes' strategies but about having greater compassion for them. Many will fall on a spectrum of these archetypes to a degree, and most can grow out of them.
Having compassion for people who adopt these archetypes' strategies is wise. Having compassion with power literacy to protect against their machinations is wiser. The latter provides self-protection and the wisdom to invite them to a new way of relating. I encourage zero tolerance for “idiot compassion;” these behaviors must be openly recognized, regardless of whether it hurts people’s feelings who are currently operating with these strategies.
I will discuss these archetypes in their male expressions; there are female expressions, and this list is non-exhaustive. Other archetypes exist, and their elaboration will further help develop a metalanguage responsive to terrible communities. I will provide a character analysis, promoting a deeper sense of what many already socially experience.
The Sneaky Fucker
The “sneaky fucker strategy,” known as kleptogamy, was coined by evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith to describe the mating strategies of low-status males to mate with females while the high-status males are preoccupied. An example Smith provides is the red deer. When the high-status males are engaged in “rutting,” males crashing their antlers against one another to establish mating hierarchy, the low-status males sneakily take advantage of their absence.
Does this sneaky fucker strategy happen within humans? Do low-status heterosexual males, hereafter described as unattractive males, engage in sneaky mating strategies? Yes. If you take a transperspectival approach, you will see the sneaky fucker phenomenon called out from different cultural perspectives.
This phenomenon is most popularly articulated as the “friend zone,” being a “friend” as a backdoor strategy for something more, resulting in being stuck as a friend without romance or sex. Amongst feminists, sneaky fuckers are called Nice Guys™, a man providing emotional support for women they are attracted to, secretly motivated by romantic or sexual desires, with an entitlement that being nice deserves certain benefits. Those in the manosphere would point to a man being a “white knight” who defends women disingenuously for romantic or sexual advantages.
In all these cases, the male inherently feels unattractive to women they are attracted to, resulting in interpersonal neediness, which is unattractive. He adopts corresponding “sneaky” strategies to achieve his romantic and sexual needs. An aspect of the sneaky fucker phenomenon that is frequently underestimated is the way in which men who embrace these mating strategies interact with men who do not. If one implements a sneaky fucker strategy, they are lying with their behavior to others and lying to themselves. The sneaky fuckers mating strategy is their fundamental lie. This lie does not stay within the domain of their relationships with women; it has transferable effects on their relationships with other men.
Sneaky fucker males in a communal setting are best described as dishonorable, especially towards attractive males or those who do not share their attractiveness insecurities. "Cattiness" is often discussed in groups of women as indirect conflictive behavior consisting of mean-spirited gossiping, passive-aggressive comments, and what is colloquially described as "bitchiness." This bitchiness happens amongst men as well when a certain amount of sneaky fuckers are in the group.
Being a group of non-sneaky fucker males has a certain quality. There is forthrightness, the establishment of competitive protocols, and general respect amongst the males, and if that respect is broken, aggressiveness will be timely and upfront. Add too many sneaky fuckers in the social field, and bitchiness will rear its head with masculine aggression, as the sneaky fuckers still compete with other males in indirect ways masked with plausible deniability.
The sneaky fucker promotes the terrible outcome of the tyranny of structurelessness because their relational strategies have a greater advantage under the pretense of a structureless group, allowing them to meet their unconscious needs sneakily in the shadows.
The Unconscious Gaslighter
Gaslighting happens when someone fosters a sense of doubt in someone else's ability to make sense of reality. Gaslighting techniques include:
Questioning a person's memory.
Posing alternative theories as blame-shifting.
Always denying wrongdoing.
Switching to victim-playing with claims of being misunderstood.
Rewriting history to favor their story.
The crux of all gaslighting techniques is to sow mistrust in a person's intuition.
You’ll find the most terrible examples of gaslighting in cults, where men use their asymmetry in “spiritual capacities” to cast doubt on their follower's intuition. The cult leader usually has some form of nonduality, could even be “awakened,”3 and sees the spiritual asymmetry as entitlement to tell others how to live. They see their awakened state as akin to wisdom, as do their followers. This shared belief is a lie: being awakened and being wise are not synonymous.
A man gaslighting a woman in a heterosexual relationship is the most frequent manifestation of this phenomenon. These men usually have a slew of past girlfriends who are “crazy,” when in reality, they are the ones who make them feel crazy by systematically sowing doubt in their intuition, as well as the wisdom that comes from their emotions. They cast this doubt because they believe they have superior reasoning capacities that provide greater contact with reality.
Gaslighting can also happen with women gaslighting men, women gaslighting other women, and men gaslighting other men. Unless the person falls within the people of the lie archetype, all these cases will be engaged in unconscious gaslighting, attempting to meet their needs in ways that undermine others’ self-trust. I’ll focus on the case of unconscious gaslighters in intellectual communities, usually disembodied men who are strong in unconscious emotional regulation and lack conscious emotional integration4. Given their lack, they do not have access to the wisdom of their or others' intuition and emotions, viewing them as irrational threats.
Their reasoning capacities are strong, but their arguments, when pressed, are weak because they are unconnected with their intuition. They make up for this weakness by having high IQ and verbal intelligence—the ability to manipulate abstract information quickly and extemporaneously speak in a controlled way without pause5. Given these capacities, similar to their spiritual counterpart, intellectual gaslighters' have "reality distortion fields,"6 causing a disorienting fuzziness when interacting with them. When they speak, they have the “Truth Voice,” sounding as if the truth anthropomorphized is speaking. An adjacent phenomenon is the “Status Voice” (or “NPR Voice” for Americans and “CBC Voice” for Canadians).
Instead of displaying high status and being in good opinion like the Status Voice, the Truth Voice conveys that the person is always correct, never wrong, with superior sensemaking. The unconscious gaslighters' superior sense of reality is their fundamental lie. This lie comes from concealed arrogance; they grew up as the smartest person in the room, easily passing multiple-choice tests and effortlessly signaling competence with their words. With these experiences, they cultivate a false belief that they can make sense of reality better than the people they are in a relationship with.
The unconscious gaslighter promotes the terrible outcome of cult states because their relational strategies have a greater advantage when their unfair advantages go unchallenged, resulting in mini-cults forming around them within their social fields.
The Conversational Narcissist
Sociologist Charles Derber used the term “conversational narcissist” in his book The Pursuit of Attention. In a conversation, he differentiates between the “support-response” and the “shift-response.” The former keeps the attention on the person who just spoke; the latter shifts attention to the person who is currently speaking. An example:
Peter: I am going to Dublin soon.
Marcus: Why are you going there? (support-response)
Peter: I am going to Dublin soon.
Marcus: I was there a few years ago. I had such a good time. (shift-response)
A healthy conversation has the following response configuration: the shift-response prevails for a person when they have something bothersome to discuss, and if their interlocutor can support them, they will use the support-response. Another situation is when something is quite alive for one person, usually something rare, like getting married, promoting healthy asymmetry in responses. When these conditions are not met for either party, and healthy conversational dynamics are still present, each person will use a mix of both responses to find what is “in the middle.”7
While both responses naturally occur during a conversation, a person can be said to be a conversational narcissist when they overuse the shift response and underuse the support response. Conversing with them is boring, disappointing, and annoying. For those emotionally attuned, when conversing with a conversational narcissist, the experience of shutting down their expressiveness occurs, avoiding sharing anything important because the felt sense signal is that their narcissistic interlocutor does not care to hear it.
Conversational narcissists are sometimes overt and not shy about immediately using the shift-response. Others are covert and use the support-response instrumentally to shift the conversation to themselves. The vibe is the same for both: they feel more special than others, deserving more attention. The conversational narcissist's zero-sum specialness is their fundamental lie. They feel special, get doped up on their feeling of specialness, and demand others recognize their superior specialness.
Being in a conversation with a conversational narcissist can feel like stumbling into a competition for attention. This competition feels pointless and uncomfortable for people lacking conversational narcissistic strategies. If sharing something that the conversational narcissist views as special, which they cannot compete with, their mood will drop, and they will experience feelings of worthlessness that undergird their attachment to feeling special.
Social media trains for conversational narcissism, which is one reason for the claim that we are experiencing a narcissism epidemic8. An explanation for the rise of we-space practices mentioned in a previous entry is that they are in response to the narcissism epidemic. However, when there are too many conversational narcissists in a group, all using the shift-response to get attention, they will prefer conversational spaces with protocols to diffuse the attention, competing in new ways.
The new competition: who can craft the most authentic response, winning the imaginary reward for the most interesting share? At their worst, we-space practices are training grounds for conversational narcissists to practice performative authenticity, helping them grab more attention.
The conversational narcissist promotes the terrible outcome of intimacy without friendship because they do not really care to get to know their interlocutor or have real responsibility for them, preferring faux intimacy to fine-tune their attention-seeking ways.
***
The above-mentioned social archetypes, each with its fundamental lie, keep communities terrible and undermines any good community forming, disrupting different forms of collective agency.
The sneaky fucker disrupts collective choicemaking by competing in hidden ways, sabotaging the group's coordination efforts.
The unconscious gaslighter disrupts collective sensemaking by weakening others’ self-trust in their capacities to make sense of reality.
The conversational narcissist disrupts collective meaningmaking by skewing the group's attention away from what is meaningful and onto themselves.
We can map choicemaking, sensemaking, and meaningmaking onto the three transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Under this framing, we can see each social archetype preventing core properties of being from being fully experienced in a communal setting. The sneaker fucker prevents what is communally good, the unconscious gaslighter prevents what is communally true, and the conversational narcissist prevents what is communally beautiful.
Power literacy is an important skill to help spot the power games played to stop this unconscious prevention of the good, the true, and the beautiful to arise communally. Yet, other skills are needed. The following have aided me in being responsive to people who adopt the strategies of these archetypes:
Embodiment. When around certain people, I consistently experience emotional dysregulation. People playing sociopath games do not want you calm and sovereign in your body. Being deeply attuned to what is happening in the body is to have an early warning system when someone with sociopathic tendencies enters the social field.
Reason appreciation9. The capacity to reason well and coherently articulate one's arguments, especially under pressure, helps tremendously in dealing with all these cases. This skill is especially critical when dealing with unconscious gaslighters, who prize themselves on their reasoning but often have poor reasons and are merely weaponizing the pretense of being reasonable.
Metacommunication. This skill allows communication about what is happening within a social encounter. Despite failure modes, I recommend we-space practices because they can cultivate a potent metacommunication ability. Calling out someone's maladaptive social strategy directly and compassionately can immediately stop its use.
To conclude this entry, I will emphasize again the importance of compassion. Each of these social archetypes is motivated by core wounds shaping their behavior, leading to harmful consequences.
The sneaky fucker’s core wound is a deep sense of unattractiveness. They react to this by indirectly adopting mating strategies so they can experience sex and romance.
The unconscious gaslighter’s core wound is a deep sense of unlovability. They react to this by indirectly controlling others’ minds so their bodies stay nearby.
The conversational narcissist’s core wound is a deep sense of worthlessness. They react to this by indirectly adopting ways to get attention so that feeling special can provide an existential bandaid for their overwhelming pain.
Overall, those attracted to good communities forming are frontiersmen and frontierswomen navigating the complex social dynamics of our current communal settings. New and old practices will be needed for good communities to develop. In the next and final entry on this series of terrible communities, I will propose an antidote for them.
The tyranny of structurelessness emerges within seemingly unstructured groups where an unethical and covert power elite exists. Cult states arise within groups where individuals coexist, characterized by a central "spiritual" figurehead that may foster the development of actual cults. Intimacy without friendships occurs in groups dedicated to pursuing heightened levels of communal unity, often in a manner that leans toward escapism and self-indulgence.
The stock photos chosen match the vibes of the archetypes.
My favorite resource to point people to for a theoretical download on awakening is this amazing conversation at The Stoa between Daniel Ingram, Michael Taft, Frank Yang, and Evan McMullen.
Unconscious emotional regulation results in shutting down’s one emotional experience. Conscious emotional integration results in relating with and integrating the wisdom of various emotional experiences, or what is known as “parts work.”
Zoe Curzi had an excellent presentation at The Stoa on reality distortion fields and those who weaponize them.
What philosopher Martin Buber calls “I-Thou” ways of relating.
“Owing to the elevated prevalence of social media services over the past decade, it's highly likely that the rise in narcissism has only accelerated of late. We see it on Twitter, where users flock to share their 'brilliant' opinions. We see it on Instagram and TikTok, where people carefully curate their online personas. We also see it in traditional media sources, where elite-educated journalists often make themselves the story and focus on tending their Twitter profiles.” Source.
Reason appreciation is vital to anyone’s “critical thinking” talent stack and, surprisingly, an undervalued aspect in many online philosophical spaces. “Reason appreciation involves respect for reasoning based on understanding its nature, role, and significance and recognizing its subtleties and aesthetic aspects. A full appreciation of reason has both cognitive and affective dimensions. Reason appreciation should be one of the goals of critical thinking instruction.” Source.
This is a good take. A lot of truth in here, and also somewhat comforting to see that human nature transcends culture: the same or similar types of misanthropes are found in America as in other places.
Loved this read. Thank you. Any recommendations for learning more about Power Literacy ?