My alternate hypothesis is that you're (aspirationally?) mistaking for dark triad traits your mild ASD. (Cf. your anecdote about parceling through all those text messages.) NPD and ASD can present similarly, such that the borderline girlfriend type who thrives on the jerkass indifference of the former will often be found misguidedly wrecking the world of the latter—but they are very different.
(As to circling, it seems to be for neurotics and women—that is, people who have the ever-present need to prattle on about who and what they are etc. On this we're agreed: it is a set of techniques for shallow people to imbue their externally-directed self-talk with an illusion of depth; conversational three-point perspective.)
I've also long suspected similarly as someone who scores high-mach yet doesn't really seem to match the description; seems to me the questionnaire could just as easily be a test for mild autism + acute self-awareness.
As someone who lives in the bay area I've been exposed to innumerable micro-cults and variants of non-violent communication, prosocial behaviorism etc. What I always founds strange/interesting about them is that they seem to be a deeply boomer phenomenon which has more or less passed over gen x and hit the millennials like a bus. I wonder if it goes back even further: Are the boomers just the cultural continuation of the bohemian artists of the lost generation, which skipped over the greatest generation? I can't help but feel that with some exceptions (like Pound or Elliot) most lost generation types would be more at home with circling than traditional religiosity.
also as an aside: I think it's interesting that these fads seem to only appeal to Anglo or Anglo-assimilated cultures. I almost never see Black or Hispanic people attending these psudo-religious events, east Asians are perhaps the exception.
Probably because Anglo and Anglo assimilated cultures are the culture that got hit the hardest by modernity and are the ones with the lowest religiosity right now
East Asians may be susceptible to New Age belief in the same way Americans are attracted to Japanese art that reflects American culture.
Eastern religion and New Age cult practices are pantheism. Dawkins calls this "sexed-up" atheism. Eastern religion still retains the natural, pagan recognition of the family.
The "self as God" may be a tiny bit narcissistic.
...everyone did what seemed right in their own eyes.
At 8:30AM in the park there were about 40 old Chinese ladies grouped around the flagpole doing synchronized dancing to loud electro-pop. In the evenings you get multiple groups; I've counted 75 in the largest one, which spills out from the paved area where the benches are pretty far down the lawn. They're all in masks, of course. I think they're glomming together into a group-feely hive-soul. However, I'm not sure that they'd identify this hive-soul with the primordial Self that glares out through every twig-tip and dust-mote.
The Stoics were pantheists, but didn't synchronistically group-dance, as far as I know. At any rate, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius don't approvingly (or disapprovingly) mention such practices.
One might be a sort of evolutionary pantheist who sees the primordial Self as temporarily "othering" parts of Himself from Himself, these parts becoming finite selves such as chipmunks and human beings. This would be a way to reconcile a typically theistic experience of God-as-other with a pantheistic doctrine that has conceptual advantages such as enabling us to avoid speaking nonsensically of a generation-from-nothing of other-selves by the primordial Self.
Stoic religious views vary, but the core belief seems to have been of Zeus as more or less identical with the universe as a whole, with a lack of real belief in the Greek pantheon or anything like it. Of course there must have been esoteric and exoteric Stoicism, and the Eleusinian Mysteries played some kind of role for some.
Or else the name "Zeus" is applied to the intelligent pneuma that pervades the universe, but the other elements are supposedly sweated out of this pneuma in any case, so that if it applies to the pneuma then it can be appropriately applied to the whole universe.
Marcus and Epictetus both speak of gods in the plural ("Hand your will over to Zeus and the gods" -- Epictetus, Discourses II:25), as does Cicero's Stoic in De Natura Deorum where they're identified with stars and natural forces if I remember correctly, but, right, they're not Homer's gods. I can see how distinct selves can be attributed to stars, but wouldn't natural forces have to be internal currents of overall cosmic selfhood?
I don't recall having encountered any evidence of an esoteric Stoicism. I wonder what their attitude toward the Eleusinian or other Mysteries might have been. Neoplatonists such as Apulieus took Mysteries seriously, presumably seeing them as accomplishing some kind of unification with an immaterial Intelligence, but how would Stoics who took them seriously have made sense of them? Maybe seeing them as pneumatic activators?
This is the first Gray Mirror post that came at me like the New York Review of Books. I did a head fake, slipped the jab, and caught just the last two paragraphs. A reader has to know that styles make fights. Collapse the pocket.
Good paragraphs, those last ones. Worth the ticket.
I vaguely remember camp counselors from the 1970s spouting this sort of thing. "I'm OK, you're OK," I think it was. Fortunately, I wasn't adorable enough to attract extra attention.
I see two paths. Either we convince everyone "Circling" reinforces white supremacy (probably true!), or we just nuke it from orbit.
Seems to me like we should be encouraging our opposition to engage in such practices. How is it anything but good for us that they are willfully deluding themselves?
I kept thinking how seamlessly Pete's prose folded into CY's, as though "Pete" were in fact a circle-forked version of Curtis, chiming in from the other side. Some amount of this is probably just the blogger/conversational tone, the exclamation points, the casual philosophizing ("Hey, man, I get it, I philosophize, too!"), but I found it pretty striking. Heavy doppelgänger vibe. Also—and I won't bother to tease out the parallels—but there's some real symmetry between the impulse toward "deep, phenomenological listening, etc." and the impulse toward an "autistic analysis" of 300MB worth of texts and emails. Both exercises probably have their marginal (or let's call it baroque) value, but a well-adjusted psyche would see them as the fool's errands they are and, having considered them briefly in that corner of the mind where such things come up for consideration, promptly set them aside.
I know this comes off like a jerk, but if some broad says she's into 'circling' or some other word you've never heard of that has a SWPL rig to it, that's the end of the date. If you were a misogynist you'd know that, so this is probably a tip that you should become a bit more misogynist.
Quite an enjoyable read, and it reminds me of a relationship I sunk a decent amount of time into as a slightly younger and much more misguided man. The younger generations do this unconsciously. Sadly, I’ve always had to learn the hard way. Here’s to being fashionable!
I miss the zeppelin based world conquest. This shit is way too gay.
There is this off-blog content:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/08/investigative-reports/the-father-the-son-and-the-mencius-moldbug/
10-4 on that. Graf von Z looks down in disgust.
I'm quite surprised how much I'm enjoying this detour Curtis...
Curtis Yarvin and Taylor Swift were separated at birth. Few know this.
It wasn't obvious until after he started dating again and, more to the point, breaking up.
What's next? A poem about this millennial? (Don't tell us she was a zoomer. Oh lord don't...)
She isn’t hard to find. The same 3 people lead all Bay Area circling meetups, and only one is a woman.
I did - are you using this garbage on me? Your statement is not non-violent communication, lol!
*Dark Triad Curtis teleports behind you*
"psssh...nothin personnel...kid..."
coitus yarvin
My alternate hypothesis is that you're (aspirationally?) mistaking for dark triad traits your mild ASD. (Cf. your anecdote about parceling through all those text messages.) NPD and ASD can present similarly, such that the borderline girlfriend type who thrives on the jerkass indifference of the former will often be found misguidedly wrecking the world of the latter—but they are very different.
(As to circling, it seems to be for neurotics and women—that is, people who have the ever-present need to prattle on about who and what they are etc. On this we're agreed: it is a set of techniques for shallow people to imbue their externally-directed self-talk with an illusion of depth; conversational three-point perspective.)
I've also long suspected similarly as someone who scores high-mach yet doesn't really seem to match the description; seems to me the questionnaire could just as easily be a test for mild autism + acute self-awareness.
Autism
As someone who lives in the bay area I've been exposed to innumerable micro-cults and variants of non-violent communication, prosocial behaviorism etc. What I always founds strange/interesting about them is that they seem to be a deeply boomer phenomenon which has more or less passed over gen x and hit the millennials like a bus. I wonder if it goes back even further: Are the boomers just the cultural continuation of the bohemian artists of the lost generation, which skipped over the greatest generation? I can't help but feel that with some exceptions (like Pound or Elliot) most lost generation types would be more at home with circling than traditional religiosity.
also as an aside: I think it's interesting that these fads seem to only appeal to Anglo or Anglo-assimilated cultures. I almost never see Black or Hispanic people attending these psudo-religious events, east Asians are perhaps the exception.
Probably because Anglo and Anglo assimilated cultures are the culture that got hit the hardest by modernity and are the ones with the lowest religiosity right now
East Asians may be susceptible to New Age belief in the same way Americans are attracted to Japanese art that reflects American culture.
Eastern religion and New Age cult practices are pantheism. Dawkins calls this "sexed-up" atheism. Eastern religion still retains the natural, pagan recognition of the family.
The "self as God" may be a tiny bit narcissistic.
...everyone did what seemed right in their own eyes.
...and that way ends in Death.
At 8:30AM in the park there were about 40 old Chinese ladies grouped around the flagpole doing synchronized dancing to loud electro-pop. In the evenings you get multiple groups; I've counted 75 in the largest one, which spills out from the paved area where the benches are pretty far down the lawn. They're all in masks, of course. I think they're glomming together into a group-feely hive-soul. However, I'm not sure that they'd identify this hive-soul with the primordial Self that glares out through every twig-tip and dust-mote.
The Stoics were pantheists, but didn't synchronistically group-dance, as far as I know. At any rate, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius don't approvingly (or disapprovingly) mention such practices.
One might be a sort of evolutionary pantheist who sees the primordial Self as temporarily "othering" parts of Himself from Himself, these parts becoming finite selves such as chipmunks and human beings. This would be a way to reconcile a typically theistic experience of God-as-other with a pantheistic doctrine that has conceptual advantages such as enabling us to avoid speaking nonsensically of a generation-from-nothing of other-selves by the primordial Self.
Stoic religious views vary, but the core belief seems to have been of Zeus as more or less identical with the universe as a whole, with a lack of real belief in the Greek pantheon or anything like it. Of course there must have been esoteric and exoteric Stoicism, and the Eleusinian Mysteries played some kind of role for some.
Or else the name "Zeus" is applied to the intelligent pneuma that pervades the universe, but the other elements are supposedly sweated out of this pneuma in any case, so that if it applies to the pneuma then it can be appropriately applied to the whole universe.
Marcus and Epictetus both speak of gods in the plural ("Hand your will over to Zeus and the gods" -- Epictetus, Discourses II:25), as does Cicero's Stoic in De Natura Deorum where they're identified with stars and natural forces if I remember correctly, but, right, they're not Homer's gods. I can see how distinct selves can be attributed to stars, but wouldn't natural forces have to be internal currents of overall cosmic selfhood?
I don't recall having encountered any evidence of an esoteric Stoicism. I wonder what their attitude toward the Eleusinian or other Mysteries might have been. Neoplatonists such as Apulieus took Mysteries seriously, presumably seeing them as accomplishing some kind of unification with an immaterial Intelligence, but how would Stoics who took them seriously have made sense of them? Maybe seeing them as pneumatic activators?
This is the first Gray Mirror post that came at me like the New York Review of Books. I did a head fake, slipped the jab, and caught just the last two paragraphs. A reader has to know that styles make fights. Collapse the pocket.
Good paragraphs, those last ones. Worth the ticket.
I vaguely remember camp counselors from the 1970s spouting this sort of thing. "I'm OK, you're OK," I think it was. Fortunately, I wasn't adorable enough to attract extra attention.
I see two paths. Either we convince everyone "Circling" reinforces white supremacy (probably true!), or we just nuke it from orbit.
Yeah, I was just going to say, the first Gray Mirror post since the Bitzion one that I just can't power through... Because I just don't care
Seems to me like we should be encouraging our opposition to engage in such practices. How is it anything but good for us that they are willfully deluding themselves?
I'm picking up what you're putting down, but think of the children. They're going to inflict this on everyone below them who can't get out of the way.
Fair point.
Too late
"I have the whole Dark Triad" strikes me as inaccurate. And if it is inaccurate, imprudent!
I kept thinking how seamlessly Pete's prose folded into CY's, as though "Pete" were in fact a circle-forked version of Curtis, chiming in from the other side. Some amount of this is probably just the blogger/conversational tone, the exclamation points, the casual philosophizing ("Hey, man, I get it, I philosophize, too!"), but I found it pretty striking. Heavy doppelgänger vibe. Also—and I won't bother to tease out the parallels—but there's some real symmetry between the impulse toward "deep, phenomenological listening, etc." and the impulse toward an "autistic analysis" of 300MB worth of texts and emails. Both exercises probably have their marginal (or let's call it baroque) value, but a well-adjusted psyche would see them as the fool's errands they are and, having considered them briefly in that corner of the mind where such things come up for consideration, promptly set them aside.
Well, this is unfortunate but it does appear that this post puts us in cringe territory, for several reasons.
I know this comes off like a jerk, but if some broad says she's into 'circling' or some other word you've never heard of that has a SWPL rig to it, that's the end of the date. If you were a misogynist you'd know that, so this is probably a tip that you should become a bit more misogynist.
Here is the framework that helps me wade through all those words: the woman wants to convert the man to her religion/cult. [Many such cases](http://www.artnet.fr/artistes/joos-van-winghe/phinehas-slaying-zimri-and-cozbi-the-midianite-HS5cQxvGakU022WucKbYfg2). The man, who is already in his middle age and thus (1) Already pretty well settled in his own religion/worldview and (2) Does not have raging hormones that can override it, politely declines.
Quite an enjoyable read, and it reminds me of a relationship I sunk a decent amount of time into as a slightly younger and much more misguided man. The younger generations do this unconsciously. Sadly, I’ve always had to learn the hard way. Here’s to being fashionable!
I can do one more of those.