Dunning-Kruger, fnords and the smugosphere (homeosmugopheric mechnanisms)

I am fascinated by failure – personal, movement, species (not that the three are distinct, of course, but that’s for another time). (see previous blog post, to which this is a sequel).

How is it we persist with doing things so “obviously” stupid and self-defeating? Are we just blind? Blinded by ego? Blinded by fear? Unwilling and unable to take a look at ourselves? Lacking the equipment – the courage, the vocabularies, the venues? Fearful that if we DO look, if we DO articulate, then there will be a narcissistic collapse? Fearful that any admissions of weakness/failure/incapacity will be weaponised, used against us by bad-faith actors? Probably all of the above, I guess, and more. We’re so fubarred.

So, Dunning-Kruger effect says, in essence, that some people are so stupid that they are unable to see that they are stupid. And I guess creepy white men are so entitled they don’t see when they are being creepy (the Spanish football association guy is a case in point?) And within the smugosphere, there are people so smug, so embedded, and so in need of being embedded that they cannot see anything around them, or their own behaviour. Fish in the goldfish bowl, unable to grok the concept of water.

Fnords – fnords is a concept popularised in The Illuminatus Trilogy. Basically, there are questions so dangerous to the maintenance of “the system” (“man”) that they must not be asked. And so invisible warnings are planted, and then people are trained to see the warnings and then forget that they saw the warnings. Probably Steven Moffat was inspired by this for his alien species The Silence. don’t know. And within the smugosphere there are a load of these fnords. You’re allowed to name names of state operators, corporate operators, even some particularly egregious NGOs who are in bed with state/corporates. but you’re not allowed to name harmful formats, harmful behaviours. Too close to home. Fnord.

These mechanisms, they work. Of course they do. And they themselves are invisibilised. If you try to articulate them, then when people get close to understanding them, and realising the full implications, they often change the subject, attack you, do anything to avoid seeing the smugosphere and its mechanisms. (Blah blah phagocytes of the intellectual immune system, blah blah homeostasis, blah blah selection pressures for group cohesion, blah blah collective-ego-defense mechanisms blah blah).

It is, in the original sense, pathetic.