Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  Identification with the aggressor is a human survival technique intended to deceive the aggressor and preserve the lives of their victims. Aggressors are nothing special or even particularly human. They offer nothing that any rational person wants, so you are always free to lie to them and deceive them. For example, having a group of animalistic aggressors surround an individual in a parking lot and ask for a “loan” is a typical form of criminal aggression. Groups are always a threat. Those who agree are free to give the aggressors their own money, not yours. Groups always come with the baggage of explicit or implied aggression of the physical or verbal sort. This is also common among the sort of criminals who work for debt collection agencies. They typically state as a fact the lie that some sort of huge team at their agency will crack down hard on their targets. There are no huge teams, of course. Recording what they say can produce legal problems for them, which is a good thing for their victims.

  There is no real difference of any kind between a bunch of guys who want you to join a team and do the dirty work without reward and guys who surround you in a parking lot demanding a supposed loan which is simply an implied threat. People who refuse to do so tend to wind up with concussions or worse. Anything that involves involuntarily donating time, effort or money to anyone always comes with undesirable consequences. Criminals are animals.

  There is a remarkable similarity between criminal gangs and people who ask you to volunteer to become the waterboy for the football team. First of all, they are xenophobic and have a total lack of respect for anybody who is not a pre-existing member of their team. You are not a member of their supposed team so you get zero respect. If you are unlike them in any way they are always dangerous. It is up to them to explain how being an involuntary crime victim differs from being the involuntary water boy upon whom the whole team looks down upon differ. More to the point, there is no payoff or benefit from either position. If there is it is up to them to explain it in public. They should of course be treated as the waterboys themselves. It must be okay to do this to them if they want to stick anybody else with the job. It is doubtful that any of the football team members would do the work they are so eager to stick an outsider with. They will, incredibly enough, claim that simply being a member of the team on any level is all the compensation they will ever need. Obviously they think that those they subject to their lies are of subhuman intelligence. People who habitually operate on the group instinct intellectual level often do this. Groups don’t benefit outsiders.

  Working as a waterboy for the team is a low-intensity version of the Stockholm Syndrome. They identify with the aggressor to the extent that they are willing to subordinate themselves to water boy status. Being in a group always lower your intelligence and ability to think as an individual. Aggressors can spot such potential victims at a distance by their abject desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves and hope that the second-hand glory of the quarterback will somehow trickle down to them. Gangs also want people to identify with them to the extent of becoming crime victims without putting up any fuss. Group members of groups ranging from criminal gangs to football team automatically disrespect outsiders, a form of xenophobia mixed in with the group instinct. There is no rational reason to defer to those things.

  Individuals Outrank Groups

  Groups produce nothing beyond lowest-common denominator muscular effort, sweat, and various other nonintellectual things such as anger. Groups do not do much of anything that individuals cannot do much better. For example, a single man can hunt an animal with his handmade bow and arrow better than a group of savages can with their dozens of sharpened spears in a forest. That sort of hunting went out with our prehuman ancestors, none of whom were very good at things like creating bows and arrows. They just did not have the smarts to do it. Progress is made by individuals, not groups of conformists and their expectations that everyone do as all of the others do. It is simply not a thing that smart people do.

  It is impossible to make any progress when everybody does the same thing as everybody else due to their instincts making them all the same. If there is any example of any group doing something new and advanced, the human race is waiting to hear about it. It just does not happen very often, if at all.

  Agriculture was not invented by people who sat around pointing sharpened sticks at animals in the forest. Some lone individual with an active cerebral cortex saw that seeds sprout in a forest and could be cultivated deliberately. Nothing in a group instinct pointed men at developing agriculture. If somebody claims that was the case, they need to present the supporting evidence as proof. Groups do not think about evidence and rational thought, they think only about the here and now. All of us have been compelled to work in groups over the years. None of us can remember anything of an intellectual nature that any such group ever developed, though they often water down things they have observed other people to have developed.

  Individualism is at the opposite end of the cognitive spectrum from any sort of instinctually motivation actions. Individual thought is intellectual thought. Instinctual thought is not intellectual in any way. Instincts are a primitive mode of thinking we inherited from prehuman ancestors such as Homo Erectus. Individualism developed out of the cerebral cortex part of the brain found only in Homo Sapiens, group instincts developed out of the emotional animal part of the brain we share with dogs, cats and chimpanzees.

  Individual thoughts are more important than group instincts such as hunting. Even animals such as dogs and wolves can hunt in groups. They probably have survival instincts generally similar to those of early human hunters. Animals do not have any sort of intellectual capacities similar to those of humans. They do not have any counterpart to the human cerebral cortex, so they do not produce human-type things such as bows and arrows and agriculture. They do not think as we do. Their lives are primarily instinctual, focused on hunting food. They do not think ahead, and do not plan to develop inventions. They are just incapable of doing so. Their biology is their destiny.

  Individualism is more important than the group because long-term survival is linked to moving beyond the inherent limitations of instinctual group thinking. Groups are destined to not advance because they cannot move beyond the limits of their animalistic group instincts. Animals they are and animals they shall remain.

  The stronger the instincts, the less the possibilities for advancement. The greater the extent of truly human thought the less control the instincts exert. There may some unknown mechanism within the mind that allowed the instincts to limit the influence of the cerebral cortex. The problem may even have been cultural. It is not hard to see tribal culture as a limiting factor in the development of technological progress. If a tribe has been successful in a Stone Age environment, they may have developed a culturally-embedded fear of change. After all, even modern day street gangs stick with what they do best, meaning act as gang members, not create science fair projects. Even the modern hunter-gatherer societies in Alaska, Africa and Australia are not noted for making scientific advances, despite being surrounded by examples of products from technological societies. Their cultural inertia is formidable and blocks change. Most people modern and ancient were just not very smart.

  Individual thinkers are important, jealous dimwitted group thinkers are not. According to Helvetius: “There are [those who] can esteem in others such ideas only as are conformable to their own.” These are group thinkers, who believe that nothing outranks the group.

  Instinctual People

  Don’t Move Up

  Instinctual people are ordinary people who are going to lead ordinary lives. Many will lead below-ordinary lives because making your life and mind into community property is guaranteed to be a disaster. When the subjective opinions of everybody except yourself predominate for absolutely no reason, you will utterly unable to allow your personal opinions to predominate in the conduct of your life. John Stuart Mill said “In proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usu
ally repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of ‘the world’ in general.” Trusting everybody but yourself is the world’s worst conformist idea.

  The world of other people is not infallible and is rarely even correct to any degree. There is one thing nobody ever mentions. There is no factual proof that doing what other people expect actually works out in practice in terms of producing results. There is no such evidence that it does in fact work out in reality. The subjective opinions of other people are merely subjective opinions of other people and nothing more, period. The rare times they do pan out are simply statistical flukes, like rolling dice and coming up with a winner on rare occasions. It is up to them to provide that their opinions are anything beyond purely subjective matters on the level of rolling dice. There is no such proof that the instinctual opinions that you are expected by imbeciles to bow down before them are anything more than the subjective opinions of a street gang. They will be jealous, of course, because your individual successes make them look like the idiots they are.

  Sometimes jealous instinctual people become violent when you speed past them in your individuality to the extent that you leave them behind in the dust. This is what happens when they were wrong in the first place and persisted in being wrong. Groups are not smart as individuals because they think with their gut group emotions, not their rational cerebral cortex. Violence will lead them straight into prison sentences. In the adult world that is what should happen to them.

  Slow, stupid, instinctual people will always lie to you. One, instinctual people are mindlessly anti-intellectual. They think with their gut feelings, not the cerebral cortex where rational thoughts emerge. Two, they lie because they are natural liars. They seek ways to control people by lying right and left. Thus there is no reason to talk with them. You can do better without them entirely. Lying is an instinctual attempt to bypass their slow and stupid instincts, but you can usually think your way through their lies unless you do not allow them to mesmerize you.

  People who have slowly gotten used to being deferred to because they are slow, stupid, instinctual liars usually react negatively to being laughed at because they are only group members of no particular intelligence. They typically describe non-cooperative individual thinkers as “having a bad attitude” or simply as “uncooperative.” This is the typical reaction of Neanderthal thinkers to being outclassed by their betters. They are not rational or intelligent, they know it, and try to hide it and lie about it.

  The group instinct has two negative things that can be said about it. One, group thinking of the instinctual variety is something out of the childhood of the human race. Two, group thinking of the instinctual type is something out of the childhood of our individual lives as well. It has no usefulness in intellectual adult life in colleges, offices and so on except for pep rallies.

  Groups are almost always organized into hierarchies, with the exception of groups that are organized on the spot, such as a group of unorganized people fleeing from a fire or earthquake in a completely disorganized manner.

  Hierarchies have leaders and followers. Most people in groups consist are followers. Their instincts make them good followers. Followers know a lot less about what they are doing than the leaders. They usually are deliberately kept in the dark because leaders for any type do not want challengers of any sort. It possible for someone to be kept in the dark about what the group is doing for many years at a time, particularly criminal groups where they may pay cash to unwitting accomplices to help them steal stuff, such as restaurants thieves throwing silverware into dumpsters for later retrieval by the criminal leaders.

  Hierarchies are thus not organized for the benefit of the lower ranks of the group. Be aware that leading a group necessarily involves deception within legitimate and illegitimate groups alike. Someone, usually a new recruit, gets the short end of the stick and winds up doing the dirty work, getting less pay and taking the blame in many cases for foul-ups by the higher-ups. The purpose of any group is to get something out of other people, usually meaning work at as little cost as possible. The leaders typically do not want people thinking for themselves. They simply want a team of obedient horses incapable of thinking about any sort of larger purpose. They do not want anybody thinking about larger purposes. They prefer mindlessly enthusiastic team spirit over thinking critically.

  Team spirit necessarily precludes any sort of rational thought other than among the current team leaders, who necessarily grab the lion’s share of the payoff for themselves. They always lie outright to anybody they out-rank. Whatever assurances they make are always of a bogus nature. That is why their promises, assurances and expectations are always bogus are therefore never put in writing so you can have a lawyer look at it. Whenever the silly topic of performance on your part comes up, it is always something measured by purely subjective basis by the supposed leaders. It is no different than bogus land sale companies that say that it is against their “policy” to allow you to have a lawyer look at their contracts. Fraud is their core policy.

  Individuals Versus Conformists

  Individualism has never been popular among people who are naturally inclined towards instinctual conformity and doing what other people who are not very intelligent expect of you. Misery loves the company of other unintelligent miserable people. When one person does better than his fellows, the others who are not doing so well become jealous and angry because their conformity produces nothing but a bunch of people who are not doing very well precisely because they are conformists.

  John F. Kennedy noted that “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” When a bunch of conformists go down the tubes together, all the conformity on Earth will not help them if they have refused to think intelligently and attempt to be sell-reliant. According to De Tocqueville: “Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.”

  Again, other people are never right simply because they are other people. It is up to them to prove that they are in the right. You can pass judgment on them and carry out your judgment whenever you wish. It is up to them to prove everything and anything they say, and it is up to you to use your cerebral cortex to pass judgement on what they say. Everyone once believed that the Earth was flat, but being in a majority did not make them right. A consensus of ignorance remains ignorance when facts rear their ugly head. Thomas Huxley wrote “Science [is] the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” Instinctual beliefs remain instinctual, and not rational, and are not the truth simply because a low-intelligence Neanderthal says so.

  The human race has been held back for most of its existence because of the existence of group instincts that do not allow for any opposition, regardless of the facts of the matter. It has often boiled down to a matter of time. In physics it has sometimes boiled down to new ideas taking over not because they are right but rather because over time the proponents of the old way of doing this died off from old age. The inertia of proponents of the old ways of doing things or instinctual conformity is unbelievable.

  Max Planck said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” People sometimes have their entire lives and careers invested in some old way of doing things, just as the proponents of spear-throwing resisted the coming of the proponents of bows and arrows.

  What instinctual people claim to be true is wrong in every way. What they claim to be true is simply their Stone Age instincts speaking through their mouths. They claim that what is good for the
group has to be true for every individual because they wish it was so. Wishing is just another Stone Age instinct they lie about being true. When a group of Stone Age warriors goes into battle to spear a mammoth, doing so is not particularly intelligent, because you might get a tusk in the ribs for your troubles. As time went on, even in the Stone Age people learned from experience and trial and error. Along with bows and arrows, they invented other things. One such thing was hunting nets. A few dozen people could throw hunting nets over a tiger or mammoth and slowly kill such confined and incapacitated animals and go on to make dinner out of him. You can be sure that a few members of the old guard in the Stone Age denounced such an innovation as an outrage against their sacred traditions. One thing about instincts: many instincts revolve around the interests of the group, not the individual. Using a hunting net is the result of intellectual mechanical thought. The old guard did not want any part of their instinctual traditions violated, including by any intellectual regard for individual safety. They do not care about the welfare of others in any case.

  Instincts generally involve group safety and survival concerns. Instincts often override individual survival concerns, such as an individual caught in a fire in a crowded theater. People lose their rational sense of self-regard and run amok like wild animals. It is easy to see that such group-oriented survival behavior has little regard or importance for individual survival. Anything derived from group instincts is guaranteed to be contrary to the survival interests of the individual, especially things promulgated by those in favor of group control of individuals. The world is full of people who will attempt to lie to you and manipulate you into doing everything and anything that benefits them at your expense. Attempting to manipulate you into becoming a football team’s water boy is really no different than a cult that persuades you into taking risks that benefit the group at the expense of your personal interests.