Previous: Tools for a Jailbreak
Ziz’s prospective cabal-mate— Maia— having not read pt. 5 of "Strange New Vegan Death Cult Murders"— understandably becomes stuck on Ziz’s word “sociopathy”: this, for her, “raises… alarm bells”. Sociopathy, to Maia, is “a tough game, miss one piece of it, and you would be pwned. Everyone would try to pwn you.”
Regardless, she says she’s happy to hear more, & offers to video chat w/ Ziz. She will later suggest that she, Ziz, & Gwen start “a chat/fb group/whatever exclusive to trans girls trying to save the world”— which Ziz declines, perhaps thinking that a chat/fb group doesn’t quite have the ring of “cabal”.
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Maia comes to stay w/ Ziz & Gwen, &, like us, suggests that Ziz relabel “sociopathy”. Unlike us, she suggests that Ziz relabel it “psychopathy”. This Ziz describes as not just “Forbidden socially unconstrained knowledge”, but as “internal connectedness of knowledge of the psyche”. This “psychopathy”:
Allows bypassing deeper-than-human-social-software moral constraints that sociopathy alone does not, and adjusting that software to serve the values of core*.
*”Core” is Ziz’s word for that within which holds the “terminal values you would sacrifice all else for, and then do it again infinity times with no regret.”
Just as “sociopathy” can turn neutral humans evil, but is recommended for the “good” among us, Ziz warns that “psychopathy” can “destabilize single good humans”— that is, ppl w/ one “good” brain hemisphere. “double good humans can use it just fine though”— and when they do, as w/ “sociopathy”, they can become “scary good people”.
The girls “each [go] on [their] own journey of jailbreaking into psychopathy fully.” For her part, this leads to Ziz going no-contact w/ her family— whose reaction to her transness (explored in pt. 3) we can perhaps define as not in alignment w/ her “core”’s terminal values.
On her blog, Ziz is musing about how her thinking has evolved since joining the Bay Area Rationalists. She writes on “resisting the mind control virus inserted by… society to try and turn you against yourself and towards their will.” She cautions readers to “drop every concept tainted by their influence”, as if these concepts are “radioactive”.
Ziz has defined her religious beliefs too— as “vegan Sith”. To this end, Ziz has taken to wearing black “Sith” robes— because the Sith, in her words, “do what they want deep down. They remove all obstructions to that and express their true values."
The “mental tech”— namely, “psychopathy”— which allows the “flowing out” of these true values from within gets labeled by Ziz as a “dark side technique”. This is, once again, unfortunate in hindsight; bc, however dangerous or transgressive these techniques may feel to Ziz, they are not, in fact, “dark-sided”.
Ziz is not describing “dark triad behavior”. She is rather describing a process of radical self-authorship—rewriting the internal constraints imposed by her conditioning in order to act in alignment with deeply held, self-determined values.
She is- again unfortunately- doing this w/ a vocabulary borrowed from “Star Wars”— not a vocabulary borrowed from the kinds of psychological* or theoretical works which may have helped her express both her dilemma & her ambitions for life.
*Surprise surprise: our Rationalists are also highly skeptical of mainstream clinical psychology, & of psychoanalysis. We can thus surmise that Ziz has not read the writings of Alice Miller on the "true self", the "false self", or on "poisonous pedagogy"- & therefore cannot benefit from the satisfying realization that Ms. Miller's ideas dovetail nicely w/ her own re: "the dark side".
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The opposite of Ziz’s “dark-side techniques” are “light-side techniques”. These include making ppl fear their true selves, & making them believe that repression is essential to containing their “evil” nature.
“Light-side techniques”, in other words, are mechanisms of control. They create an internalized policing system where individuals feel compelled to suppress their emotions, ambitions, or unconventional thoughts in order to conform to external standards.
Ziz has come to believe that these techniques do not truly foster “rationality”, but rather foster compliance. They train people to censor themselves, defer to authority, and reject anything that threatens the stability of the system they exist within: in this case, anything that threatens the stability of the Rationalist establishment (RE).
Ziz notes that, in her experience, many of her problems w/ motivation & procrastination stopped once she started using “dark-side techniques”. We may note that her adoption of “dark-side techniques” happens to align w/ the year she decided to transition. She describes the inner benefits of her transition in strikingly similar terms to the benefits of her “dark-side techniques”:
My anxiety symptoms went away over the next day. I became extremely productive, and spent pretty much every waking hour over the next month either working or reading things to try to understand strategy for affecting the future.
In short, her “dark-side techniques” seem to function as a method of radical self-permission. Rather than filtering her actions through external moral gatekeepers, she has begun allowing herself to act directly on what she feels to be true and necessary. We once again applaud Ziz for both her efforts & her progress in escaping from the long & fearful claws of the RE.
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Next: A Clownish Test