Brainwashed kirjoitti: ↑20 Elo 2024, 16:07
Otan osaa, jos koet angstia pikku kätösistäsi, ja uskon kyllä jos sanot ettei ole tekemisen puutteesta kiinni.
Tyttären poikaystävä on homppeli (ei siis homo, vaan homppeli), mutta katson sitä seikkaa paksujen sormieni välistä, koska suvullansa on fyrkkaa. Toivottavasti kosii, että pääsen edes yhdestä kunniallisesti eroon.
Kyllä mää oon aina ymmärtänyt, että homppeli on sama kuin homo.
Ei minun kirjoittamana, tarkoittaa suurin piirtein samaa kuin vässykkä, mutta pienillä vivahde-eroavaisuuksilla joita ei ole tämän tarkemmin tarpeen vatvoa.
Sinä et ole kumpaakaan, se homppelius ei ole käsistä kiinni, vaan siitä mitä niillä tekee tai jättää tekemättä.
”Brainwashed on tyyppi joka latelee omakohtaista törkyy muitten päähän väheksyttävästi, - samalla mainostaen omaa figuuriaan.”
Brainwashed kirjoitti: ↑20 Elo 2024, 16:07
Otan osaa, jos koet angstia pikku kätösistäsi, ja uskon kyllä jos sanot ettei ole tekemisen puutteesta kiinni.
Tyttären poikaystävä on homppeli (ei siis homo, vaan homppeli), mutta katson sitä seikkaa paksujen sormieni välistä, koska suvullansa on fyrkkaa. Toivottavasti kosii, että pääsen edes yhdestä kunniallisesti eroon.
Kyllä mää oon aina ymmärtänyt, että homppeli on sama kuin homo.
Ei sillä ole muuta kuin paskaset kätensä ja ilmeisen naimakelvottomat tyttäret. Anna se sille.
Kiitos.
”Brainwashed on tyyppi joka latelee omakohtaista törkyy muitten päähän väheksyttävästi, - samalla mainostaen omaa figuuriaan.”
Kohina kirjoitti: ↑20 Elo 2024, 18:34
Ja joka tapauksessa tässä tuli todistetuksi että ei se ole se pienet kädet, jos on komea naama, eikä se ole se komea naama, jos on verbaalinen, eikä se ole välttämättä se verbaalisuuskaan, jos on...
Mitä sulla on tarjottavaa, on kysymys. Sama se mitä vaikkapa BW on asiasta mieltä, kun joku nussii sen tytärtä joka tapauksessa.
Kumpikaan ei ole enää neitsyt, ja hyvä niin.
”Brainwashed on tyyppi joka latelee omakohtaista törkyy muitten päähän väheksyttävästi, - samalla mainostaen omaa figuuriaan.”
Taisikin olla jo vanha juttu, mutta näin ensimmäisen kerran vasta eilen tämän Perjantai-dokkarin. Voi vittu mitä touhua saatana. Tolla tyypillä on varmasti tosi äijämäiset kädet. Ei ole kuulemma ollenkaan noloa olla pukeutunut tuhansilla euroilla, tai käyttää ulkonäköönsä tunti tolkulla päivässä. Toi tyyppi on kyllä nolompi kuin moni muu huonomminkin pukeutunut. Ja aivan selvästi joku sellainen, joka ei ole rahojaan itse ansainnut. Mihin olemmekaan menossa, jos tuollainen vetoaa vielä naisiinkin. Huhhuh.
Pattinero kirjoitti: ↑21 Elo 2024, 06:33
Taisikin olla jo vanha juttu, mutta näin ensimmäisen kerran vasta eilen tämän Perjantai-dokkarin. Voi vittu mitä touhua saatana. Tolla tyypillä on varmasti tosi äijämäiset kädet. Ei ole kuulemma ollenkaan noloa olla pukeutunut tuhansilla euroilla, tai käyttää ulkonäköönsä tunti tolkulla päivässä. Toi tyyppi on kyllä nolompi kuin moni muu huonomminkin pukeutunut. Ja aivan selvästi joku sellainen, joka ei ole rahojaan itse ansainnut. Mihin olemmekaan menossa, jos tuollainen vetoaa vielä naisiinkin. Huhhuh.
My complaint is not that fetishization is bad. It is bad, often, but so is unprotected sex, and both are fun, and you knew that already. Hot take: use your judgment.
My obsession is rather with the way in which fetishization is subsidized by society. All societies. The bigger the society, the more one has to perform the anthropologically modern task of pleasing a stranger, and a thumbnail glance followed by upvotes-to-the-left will always favor viral image over substance. The prior essay established a formula for our betrayal by appearances: When you ask for a display of X, you select for people who are good at displays, not X. If the display measures ability to lie, and X is a virtue, then map not only differs from territory, it insults it.
Strictly speaking, this formula only implies that it is advantageous to allow oneself to be fetishized. “So what? Normies gonna norm.” But as competition increases, the cool kids are judged both for their selfie poses and for the tagged faces around them. And if brand is everything and your peers reflect your brand, then fetishizing others is now rewarded.
Samzdat—for my money, the smartest guy in the game today—wrote a superb essay sequence in part about the replacement of metis, defined as “hard to express,” “local,” “accumulated, experiential knowledge,” by episteme, i.e. “top-down,” “abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge.” Think Soylent in lieu of meals, Brutalist apartment complexes instead of town squares, standardized tests over apprenticeship, nuclear replacing extended family, and the way capitalism selects for profit at the cost of...externalities. https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-uruk-machine/
My thesis is that the same checkboxing that has occurred at the macro level is now taking place in the micro: the regulation of the interpersonal for mass appeal. I don’t know how this will affect any one individual, but I can guess at the societal trend. The left will correctly observe an increase in the granularity of racism, classism, sexism. The right will decry political correctness and its penalties for saying the wrong words or liking the wrong things. History will witness a generation of neurotics: body image, IQ, mannerisms, self-worth. But to the system, this is optimization. https://www.tumblr.com/hotelconcierge/1 ... me-society
Hyvähän se on että kaiken tuon vaivan jälkeen saa pillua, niin ei tarvitse ammuskella pallit sinisinä ostarilla. Sanoisin että se olisi suuri sääli olla saamatta mitä haluaa, kun näkee noin paljon vaivaa jonkin eteen. Onhan hänellä yhteinen harrastuskin useiden naisten kanssa.
Mutta eihän hän sentään kaikkia naisia ehtisikään panna ja monikaan ei häntä edes huolisi. Hän esittelee värejään räikeästi ja ne kiinnostavat kohdeyleisöä. Se mistä kannattaisi ottaa oppia, on oman arkkityyppinsä esittelyn. Breivik on varmasti suositumpi kuin sinä naisten keskuudessa sillä hänkin esitteli verenpunaista väriään hyvin räikeästi ja monet daamit olivat heti myytyjä.
Pattinero kirjoitti: ↑21 Elo 2024, 06:33
Taisikin olla jo vanha juttu, mutta näin ensimmäisen kerran vasta eilen tämän Perjantai-dokkarin. Voi vittu mitä touhua saatana. Tolla tyypillä on varmasti tosi äijämäiset kädet. Ei ole kuulemma ollenkaan noloa olla pukeutunut tuhansilla euroilla, tai käyttää ulkonäköönsä tunti tolkulla päivässä. Toi tyyppi on kyllä nolompi kuin moni muu huonomminkin pukeutunut. Ja aivan selvästi joku sellainen, joka ei ole rahojaan itse ansainnut. Mihin olemmekaan menossa, jos tuollainen vetoaa vielä naisiinkin. Huhhuh.
I read Sadly, Porn around the same time I was writing Motivated Reasoning As Mis-Applied Reinforcement Learning, and the particular way I probably mangled the antimeme owes a lot to that thought process. It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Instead of acting, people play head games with themselves trying to figure out the best way to convince themselves they’re high status - ie replacing behavioral reward with purely epistemic/perceptual/mental reward.
And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test. One group got an easy question, the other an impossible question (they had to guess anyway). Then the psychologists told both groups that they’d gotten the question right (the easy group was presumably unsurprised, the impossible group presumably thought they’d gotten really lucky). Then they asked both groups to try again, but offered them the chance to try a performance inhibiting drug they were testing. The easy group accepted at some rate; the impossible group at a much higher rate. The psychologists theorized that the impossible group wanted to preserve their “good opinion” of themselves as people who correctly solved problems (even though on some level they realized they didn’t know how to do the problem and had just guessed) - they figured that if they took the drug, they could attribute their inevitably-worse performance the second time to the drug, rather than their own inadequacy. There are lots of experiments like this.
(Etuoikeutetut ovat yliedustettuina mielenterveyspotilaissa. Jätin Redditin discord-serverin sillä en saanut nauraa mielisairaille ja kaikki voitiin tulkita rasistiseksi, vaikka olisi voinut olla tulkitsemattakin. Minä, psykiatrisella, en saa nauraa mielisairaille. Mitä varten sitten on mielisairaita, kuten vaikkapa meidän moraalinvartijamme? Ja mitä minun pitäisi tehdä mielisairaiden kanssa sitten. Jättää heidät kokonaan noteeraamatta, tai jopa vahvistaa heidän käytöstä? Siitä seuraavassa:)
Also, here’s a kind of patient every doctor has seen: the hypochondriac who goes to the doctor to be reassured she isn’t ill. That’s it. She’ll describe her mouth feeling weird or something, you’ll say something like “By the way, just so we’re on the same page here, you’ve come in here with mouth-weirdness twenty-six times already this year, it’s always been nothing, it’s never gone anywhere, and now you have another case of mouth-weirdness exactly like the others, and you want me to tell you if it’s serious?” And she’ll say “Just say the words, Doctor”. And you’ll say “Don’t worry about it, it’s probably nothing.” And then she’ll be happy and go home and live a normal life for two weeks or so until she gets anxious about the same thing and comes in again. Again, this seems to suggest a really weird relationship with knowledge and reassurance.
(Sosiaalinen todistus siis. Minun pitäisi paijata kun toinen haluaa huomiota. Se tarkoittaa sitä että viiltämällä ranteesi auki, minä olen koirasi. Ei se niin mene.)
Also, compliments. We all know the “fishing for compliments” phenomenon. And we all know the “I fished for compliments and someone complimented me but it doesn’t count because I know I was just fishing for it” phenomenon. And its close cousin, “someone complimented me, but it was for the thing I already know I’m good at, so it doesn’t count”. And their weird uncle, “someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!” This seems a lot like “using other people as pawns in a mind game to feel high status”, and at least a little like the ledger where you resent someone forever if they do something nice for you.
(half of you are saying “Nobody really thinks like that, right?” and the other half are freaking out: “How did he know what I think?”)
Also: one strategy I notice the sort of high-charisma manipulator people who read Lacan doing: they’re misanthropic, yes, but mostly in some vague sense, to people offscreen, such that they have a reputation for misanthropy and harsh judgment. Then when they talk to you they’re very nice and complimentary, and you think “Oh man, this person who hates and judges everybody likes me, maybe I’m special.” And this is strong positive reinforcement, and talking to the person and getting those hits of praise becomes mildly addictive, and you want to talk to them more often and continue earning that praise, and then later you describe them to a friend as “charismatic”.
Since this is theoretically a porn book, we should get back to things at least vaguely related to sex and romance: why is it so hard to ask someone else out? I spent about ten years miserable and romantically frustrated and wishing that I had a partner every single day. The total number of people I asked out during that time was one or two, I can’t remember. Even then, it was some kind of incredibly ambiguous form of asking out with five layers of plausible deniability. This was stupid and I know it was stupid. Still, when Teach comes with some psychological theory that purports to explain why I am “incapable of action”, I can’t plead completely innocent.
As far as I can tell, I enjoy relationships for their own sake - contra Teach, who says you only really enjoy sex because it gives you status, or because you’re depriving someone else of the use of your sexual partner, or because it’s otherwise a winning move in your mind game (cf. Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”) But - don’t laugh - a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about being the person who wrote the music, or playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me, or something like that. It seems that my enjoyment of music - maybe not quite as primal as sex, but still pretty primal - actually is at least assisted by status fantasies. Maybe for some reason I can admit this about music but I’m still defending against realizing it about sex. Or maybe I’m 100% completely honest when I say I don’t have a status motive for enjoying sex - which explains why I’m kind of on the ace spectrum and don’t really enjoy the sex act itself.
I once asked a friend who identifies as sexually submissive how she came by her fetish. She said that she was raised to believe that sex was kind of shameful and that women who sought it out were sluts (I should mention here that Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese! - but my friend was raised by first-generation immigrants from a more conservative area and maybe she’s a legitimate exception). Anyway, she says she used to fantasize that people would enslave her and force her to have sex with them, because then she got to have sex without the stigma of being the kind of slut who asked for it. Even in her fantasy she had to maintain high status - not the social high status of being a non-slave, but the moral high status of not admitting she had the taboo desire. This is basically Teach’s “people beg to be enslaved so they don’t have to admit their desires” thing to a T.
Why do some people have sexy nurse fetishes? “Because nurses are people who comfort you when -” No, I mean why that particular nurse costume, which no nurse has worn since World War II? And I assume Japanese men have Japanese schoolgirl fetishes because they remember the puppy love of their own high school days, but why do so many American men have Japanese schoolgirl fetishes? I distinctly remember teenage me thinking breasts were weird-looking and not sexually attractive at all - I don’t want to touch people’s weird milk-producing glands - and then getting gradually “socialized” into finding breasts attractive just like most other straight men. Teach says that nobody actually finds nurses or Japanese schoolgirls or breasts or even women attractive in the deepest and most fundamental sense, they learn what other people find attractive, then want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them.
When it comes to illustrations of the strength of social proof, there is
one that is far and away my favorite. Several features account for its
appeal: It offers a superb example of the much underused method of
participant observation, in which a scientist studies a process by becoming immersed in its natural occurrence; it provides information of interest to such diverse groups as historians, psychologists, and theologians; and, most important, it shows how social evidence can be used
on us—not by others, but by ourselves—to assure us that what we
prefer to be true will seem to be true.
The story is an old one, requiring an examination of ancient data, for
the past is dotted with millennial religious movements. Various sects
and cults have prophesied that on one or another particular date there
would arrive a period of redemption and great happiness for those who
believed in the group’s teachings. In each instance it has been predicted
that the beginning of the time of salvation would be marked by an important and undeniable event, usually the cataclysmic end of the world.
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 91
Of course, these predictions have invariably proved false. To the acute
dismay of the members of such groups, the end has never appeared as
scheduled.
But immediately following the obvious failure of the prophecy, history
records an enigmatic pattern. Rather than disbanding in disillusion, the
cultists often become strengthened in their convictions. Risking the ridicule of the populace, they take to the streets, publicly asserting their
dogma and seeking converts with a fervor that is intensified, not diminished, by the clear disconfirmation of a central belief. So it was with the
Montanists of second-century Turkey, with the Anabaptists of sixteenthcentury Holland, with the Sabbataists of seventeenth-century Izmir,
with the Millerites of nineteenth-century America. And, thought a trio
of interested social scientists, so it might be with a doomsday cult based
in modern-day Chicago. The scientists—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken,
and Stanley Schachter—who were then colleagues at the University of
Minnesota, heard about the Chicago group and felt it worthy of close
study. Their decision to investigate by joining the group, incognito, as
new believers and by placing additional paid observers among its ranks
resulted in a remarkably rich firsthand account of the goings-on before
and after the day of predicted catastrophe.5
The cult of believers was small, never numbering more than thirty
members. Its leaders were a middle-aged man and woman, whom the
researchers renamed, for purposes of publication, Dr. Thomas Armstrong and Mrs. Marian Keech. Dr. Armstrong, a physician on the staff
of a college student health service, had a long-held interest in mysticism,
the occult, and flying saucers; as such he served as a respected authority
on these subjects for the group. Mrs. Keech, though, was the center of
attention and activity. Earlier in the year she had begun to receive
messages from spiritual beings, whom she called the Guardians, located
on other planets. It was these messages, flowing through Marian Keech’s
hand via the device of “automatic writing,” that were to form the bulk
of the cult’s religious belief system. The teachings of the Guardians
were loosely linked to traditional Christian thought. No wonder that
one of the Guardians, Sananda, eventually “revealed” himself as the
current embodiment of Jesus.
The transmissions from the Guardians, always the subjects of much
discussion and interpretation among the group, gained new significance
when they began to foretell a great impending disaster—a flood that
would begin in the Western Hemisphere and eventually engulf the
world. Although the cultists were understandably alarmed at first,
further messages assured them that they and all those who believed in
the Lessons sent through Mrs. Keech would survive. Before the calamity,
spacemen were to arrive and carry off the believers in flying saucers to
92 / Influence
a place of safety, presumably on another planet. Very little detail was
provided about the rescue except that the believers were to make
themselves ready for pickup by rehearsing certain passwords to be exchanged (“I left my hat at home.” “What is your question?” “I am my
own porter.”) and by removing all metal from their clothes—because
the wearing or carrying of metal made saucer travel “extremely dangerous.”
As Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter observed the preparations
during the weeks prior to the flood date, they noted with special interest
two significant aspects of the members’ behavior. First, the level of
commitment to the cult’s belief system was very high. In anticipation
of their departure from doomed Earth, irrevocable steps were taken by
the group members. Most had incurred the opposition of family and
friends to their beliefs but had persisted nonetheless in their convictions,
often when it meant losing the affections of these others. In fact, several
of the members were threatened by neighbors or family with legal actions designed to have them declared insane. In Dr. Armstrong’s case,
a motion was filed by his sister to have his two younger children taken
away. Many believers quit their jobs or neglected their studies to devote
full time to the movement. Some even gave or threw away their personal
belongings, expecting them shortly to be of no use. These were people
whose certainty that they had the truth allowed them to withstand
enormous social, economic, and legal pressures and whose commitment
to their dogma grew as each pressure was resisted.
The second significant aspect of the believers’ preflood actions was
a curious form of inaction. For individuals so clearly convinced of the
validity of their creed, they did surprisingly little to spread the word.
Although they did initially make public the news of the coming disaster,
there was no attempt to seek converts, to proselyte actively. They were
willing to sound the alarm and to counsel those who voluntarily responded to it, but that was all.
The group’s distaste for recruitment efforts was evident in various
ways besides the lack of personal persuasion attempts. Secrecy was
maintained in many matters—extra copies of the Lessons were burned,
passwords and secret signs were instituted, the contents of certain
private tape recordings were not to be discussed with outsiders (so
secret were the tapes that even longtime believers were prohibited from
taking notes of them). Publicity was avoided. As the day of disaster
approached, increasing numbers of newspaper, television, and radio
reporters converged on the group’s headquarters in the Keech house.
For the most part, these people were turned away or ignored. The most
frequent answer to their questions was, “No comment.” Although discouraged for a time, the media representatives returned with a venRobert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 93
geance when Dr. Armstrong’s religious activities caused him to be fired
from his post on the college health service staff; one especially persistent
newsman had to be threatened with a lawsuit. A similar siege was repelled on the eve of the flood when a swarm of reporters pushed and
pestered the believers for information. Afterward, the researchers
summarized the group’s preflood stance on public exposure and recruitment in respectful tones: “Exposed to a tremendous burst of publicity,
they had made every attempt to dodge fame; given dozens of opportunities to proselyte, they had remained evasive and secretive and behaved
with an almost superior indifference.”
Eventually, when all the reporters and would-be converts had been
cleared from the house, the believers began making their final preparations for the arrival of the spaceship scheduled for midnight that night.
The scene, as viewed by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, must have
seemed like absurdist theater. Otherwise ordinary people—housewives,
college students, a high-school boy, a publisher, an M.D., a hardwarestore clerk and his mother—were participating earnestly in tragic
comedy. They took direction from a pair of members who were periodically in touch with the Guardians; Marian Keech’s written messages
from Sananda were being supplemented that evening by “the Bertha,”
a former beautician through whose tongue the “Creator” gave instruction. They rehearsed their lines diligently, calling out in chorus the responses to be made before entering the rescue saucer, “I am my own
porter.” “I am my own pointer.” They discussed seriously whether the
message from a caller identifying himself as Captain Video—a TV space
character of the time—was properly interpreted as a prank or a coded
communication from their rescuers. And they performed in costume.
In keeping with the admonition to carry nothing metallic aboard the
saucer, the believers wore clothing that had been cut open to allow the
metal pieces to be torn out. The metal eyelets in their shoes had been
ripped away. The women were braless or wore brassieres whose metal
stays had been removed. The men had yanked the zippers out of their
pants, which were supported by lengths of rope in place of belts.
The group’s fanaticism concerning the removal of all metal was
vividly experienced by one of the researchers who remarked, twentyfive minutes before midnight, that he had forgotten to extract the zipper
from his trousers. As the observers tell it, “this knowledge produced a
near panic reaction. He was rushed into the bedroom where Dr. Armstrong, his hands trembling and his eyes darting to the clock every few
seconds, slashed out the zipper with a razor blade and wrenched its
clasps free with wire-cutters.” The hurried operation finished, the researcher was returned to the living room a slightly less metallic but,
one supposes, much paler man.
94 / Influence
As the time appointed for their departure grew very close, the believers settled into a lull of soundless anticipation. With trained scientists
on site, we are afforded a detailed account of the events that transpired
during this momentous period in the life of the group:
The last ten minutes were tense ones for the group in the living
room. They had nothing to do but sit and wait, their coats in their
laps. In the tense silence two clocks ticked loudly, one about ten
minutes faster than the other. When the faster of the two pointed
to twelve-five, one of the observers remarked aloud on the fact. A
chorus of people replied that midnight had not yet come. Bob
Eastman affirmed that the slower clock was correct; he had set it
himself only that afternoon. It showed only four minutes before
midnight.
These four minutes passed in complete silence except for a single
utterance. When the [slower] clock on the mantel showed only one
minute remaining before the guide to the saucer was due, Marian
exclaimed in a strained, high-pitched voice: “And not a plan has
gone astray!” The clock chimed twelve, each stroke painfully clear
in the expectant hush. The believers sat motionless.
One might have expected some visible reaction. Midnight had
passed and nothing had happened. The cataclysm itself was less
than seven hours away. But there was little to see in the reactions
of the people in that room. There was no talking, no sound. People
sat stock-still, their faces seemingly frozen and expressionless. Mark
Post was the only person who even moved. He lay down on the
sofa and closed his eyes but did not sleep. Later, when spoken to,
he answered monosyllabically but otherwise lay immobile. The
others showed nothing on the surface, although it became clear
later that they had been hit hard.
Gradually, painfully, an atmosphere of despair and confusion
settled over the group. They reexamined the prediction and the
accompanying messages. Dr. Armstrong and Mrs. Keech reiterated
their faith. The believers mulled over their predicament and discarded explanation after explanation as unsatisfactory. At one point,
toward 4 A.M., Mrs. Keech broke down and cried bitterly. She knew,
she sobbed, that there were some who were beginning to doubt
but that the group must beam light to those who needed it most
and that the group must hold together. The rest of the believers
were losing their composure, too. They were all visibly shaken and
many were close to tears. It was now almost 4:30 A.M., and still no
way of handling the disconfirmation had been found. By now, too,
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 95
most of the group were talking openly about the failure of the escort
to come at midnight. The group seemed near dissolution.
In the midst of this gathering doubt, as cracks crawled through the
believers’ confidence, the researchers witnessed a pair of remarkable
incidents, one after another. The first occurred at about 4:45 A.M., when
Marian Keech’s hand suddenly leapt to the task of transcribing through
“automatic writing” the text of a holy message from above. When read
aloud, the communication proved to be an elegant explanation for the
events of that night. “The little group, sitting alone all night long, had
spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.”
Although neat and efficient, this explanation was not wholly satisfying
by itself; for example, after hearing it, one member simply rose, put on
his hat and coat, and left. Something additional was needed to restore
the believers to their previous levels of faith.
It was at this point that the second notable incident occurred to meet
that need. Once again, the words of those who were present offer a
vivid description:
The atmosphere in the group changed abruptly and so did their
behavior. Within minutes after she had read the message explaining
the disconfirmation, Mrs. Keech received another message instructing her to publicize the explanation. She reached for the telephone
and began dialing the number of a newspaper. While she was
waiting to be connected, someone asked: “Marian, is this the first
time you have called the newspaper yourself?” Her reply was immediate: “Oh, yes, this is the first time I have ever called them. I
have never had anything to tell them before, but now I feel it is
urgent.” The whole group could have echoed her feelings, for they
all felt a sense of urgency. As soon as Marian had finished her call,
the other members took turns telephoning newspapers, wire services, radio stations, and national magazines to spread the explanation of the failure of the flood. In their desire to spread the word
quickly and resoundingly, the believers now opened for public attention matters that had been thus far utterly secret. Where only
hours earlier they had shunned newspaper reporters and felt that
the attention they were getting in the press was painful, they now
became avid seekers for publicity.
Not only had the long-standing policies concerning secrecy and
publicity done an about-face, so, too, had the group’s attitude toward
potential converts. Whereas likely recruits who previously visited the
house had been mostly ignored, turned away, or treated with casual
attention, the day following the disconfirmation saw a different story.
96 / Influence
All callers were admitted, all questions were answered, attempts were
made to proselyte all such visitors. The members’ unprecedented willingness to accommodate possible new recruits was perhaps best demonstrated when nine high-school students arrived on the following
night to speak with Mrs. Keech.
They found her at the telephone deep in a discussion of flying
saucers with a caller whom, it later turned out, she believed to be
a spaceman. Eager to continue talking to him and at the same time
anxious to keep her new guests, Marian simply included them in
the conversation and, for more than an hour, chatted alternately
with her guests in the living room and the “spaceman” on the
other end of the telephone. So intent was she on proselyting that
she seemed unable to let any opportunity go by.
To what can we attribute the believers’ radical turnabout? In the space
of a few hours, they went from clannish and taciturn hoarders of the
Word to expansive and eager disseminators of it. And what could have
possessed them to choose such an ill-timed instant—when the failure
of the flood was likely to cause nonbelievers to view the group and its
dogma as laughable?
The crucial event occurred sometime during “the night of the flood,”
when it became increasingly clear that the prophecy would not be fulfilled. Oddly, it was not their prior certainty that drove the members
to propagate the faith; it was an encroaching sense of uncertainty. It
was the dawning realization that if the spaceship and flood predictions
were wrong, so might be the entire belief system on which they rested.
For those huddled in the Keech living room, that growing possibility
must have seemed hideous.
The group members had gone too far, given up too much for their
beliefs to see them destroyed; the shame, the economic cost, the mockery
would be too great to bear. The overarching need of the cultists to cling
to those beliefs seeps poignantly from their own words: From a young
woman with a three-year-old child: I have to believe the flood is coming on the twenty-first because
I’ve spent all my money. I quit my job, I quit computer school…. I
have to believe.
And from Dr. Armstrong to one of the researchers four hours after
the failure of the saucermen to arrive:
I’ve had to go a long way. I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve
cut every tie. I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the
world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any
other truth.
Pattinero kirjoitti: ↑21 Elo 2024, 06:33
Taisikin olla jo vanha juttu, mutta näin ensimmäisen kerran vasta eilen tämän Perjantai-dokkarin. Voi vittu mitä touhua saatana. Tolla tyypillä on varmasti tosi äijämäiset kädet. Ei ole kuulemma ollenkaan noloa olla pukeutunut tuhansilla euroilla, tai käyttää ulkonäköönsä tunti tolkulla päivässä. Toi tyyppi on kyllä nolompi kuin moni muu huonomminkin pukeutunut. Ja aivan selvästi joku sellainen, joka ei ole rahojaan itse ansainnut. Mihin olemmekaan menossa, jos tuollainen vetoaa vielä naisiinkin. Huhhuh.
Kyllä noiden kalliiden vaatteiden ja meikkien lisäksi pitäisi olla kallis urheiluauto, Ferrari tai Lamborghini, niin se auttaisi kummasti pillun saannissa.
Pattinero kirjoitti: ↑21 Elo 2024, 06:33
Taisikin olla jo vanha juttu, mutta näin ensimmäisen kerran vasta eilen tämän Perjantai-dokkarin. Voi vittu mitä touhua saatana. Tolla tyypillä on varmasti tosi äijämäiset kädet. Ei ole kuulemma ollenkaan noloa olla pukeutunut tuhansilla euroilla, tai käyttää ulkonäköönsä tunti tolkulla päivässä. Toi tyyppi on kyllä nolompi kuin moni muu huonomminkin pukeutunut. Ja aivan selvästi joku sellainen, joka ei ole rahojaan itse ansainnut. Mihin olemmekaan menossa, jos tuollainen vetoaa vielä naisiinkin. Huhhuh.
