Narrative Lock-In: When Belief Becomes Bulletproof – a guest post by Todd R. Maxwell

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Narrative Lock-In: When Belief Becomes Bulletproof – a guest post by Todd R. Maxwell

I could have written about narrative lock-in at any time. It happens over and over. In fact, the last several years present example after example. We’ve seen lock-in ready narratives about COVID, with many people trapped in a mask-wearing, jab-taking bubble to this day. When Donald Trump first became president, the political left escalated their usual “start a fight at Thanksgiving” tactic to “cut your family off at the holidays.” On the political right, many pundits disavow their own long-held worldviews and policy prescriptions because a formerly Democrat outsider grabbed the party reins. The list goes on and on.

The cartoonist turned political commentator Scott Adams describes the phenomenon as “two movies on one screen,” but that doesn’t quite capture the ramifications of disagreement.

Let me start with what I mean by narrative lock-in: It is when a belief in a particular, usually emotionally charged story becomes resistant to change, deeply influencing identity and behavior, often leading to extreme actions or entrenched beliefs. At the group level, it can fuse individuals’ identities to a cause, creating a visceral oneness with the group that makes extreme pro-group behaviors more likely. It can even lead to extremist recruitment. Signs of narrative lock-in include unusually consistent language in reiterating events, a persistent, unchanging perspective even and especially when acknowledging new information, and most importantly for purposes of this discussion, moral-emotional resonance, that is a strong emotional and moral appeal.

Narrative lock-in is very relevant at the moment, but let me tell you a personal story that reveals how powerful it actually is. I knew a lady who was into all the causes. I say “into” with some exaggeration. She didn’t do anything but “raise awareness,” i.e., endlessly cycle talking points. She was a nice lady, not someone I wanted to argue with, so I would just nod and change the subject if she brought some “issue” up. Except on one occasion, where I didn’t realize she had brought up one of her causes.

She mentioned bees. I don’t know a lot about bees, but it just so happened that I had read something lately about how Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was no longer the biggest concern among beekeepers. They were more concerned about mites, parasites, and viruses. I shared this in what I intended as agreement with the cause of “saving the bees.” I had no idea that CCD was one of her causes, and that the very idea that there could be other, bigger threats to bees was unallowable.

I had never seen this nice lady upset before, but she tensed up as soon as I said it. For a moment she just shook her head, saying “No, uh-uh” several times. Then she very tersely told me that without bees, crops will fail and I will starve, as though I’d be the only one. I fumbled something out about how bees are good and needful and backed away. I still hadn’t sorted out what I had gotten wrong before the next time I saw her. She had prepared a stack of printouts—outdated articles on CCD from years prior—and presented them to me without a word but with a triumphant look on her face.

That is what narrative lock-in looks like when the subject is merely bees, and when the disagreement is merely over the shape of the problem and not the nature of it. Now raise it to human stakes and frame it as a moral issue, and you can understand why it is that some people will never be swayed.

Compare this to what’s happening right now. The world (or at least the nation) is watching in real time as two narratives take shape in response to a tragic encounter in Minnesota. A protester attempting to thwart ICE operations, Renee Good, ended up dead for her troubles. The resulting divide is over whether the agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross, was acting in self-defense as she attempted to run him over with her SUV, or whether she was murdered while trying to commit a different felony—fleeing an officer—by fleeing.

The view that it was self-defense hasn’t shifted much in the days since the event became public. Video from multiple angles appears to show Good first backing up while turning one direction, then turning her wheels in the opposite direction before driving toward Ross who, in a fraction of a second, drew his weapon and fired, killing Good. That is, the self-defense view is basically that what the video shows is what happened.

The opposing view is, to put it generously, fluid. It relies heavily on what I call “caption bias.” This is the phenomenon where people rely on a headline, a voiceover, or an explainer to tell them what they are seeing, rather than trusting their own senses. It’s a subversion of the old adage; if a picture is worth a thousand words, a five-word caption can turn those thousand words into a lie.

Early versions insisted that Good was scared and confused, that she was simply trying to execute a three-point turn, and that she didn’t know the men who approached her vehicle were law enforcement. Additional footage showed her dropping off her wife before blocking the roadway for several minutes, interacting with ICE agents, and acknowledging who they were while her wife stood outside the vehicle taunting them. These additions promptly put those earlier notions to bed.

The next phase of narrative lock-in for those refusing to believe the self-defense narrative was to insist that she didn’t actually hit the cop—that she was actually trying to avoid him as she fled a lawful order to exit her vehicle. It was also to focus on the agents’ behavior and scrutinize whether they handled the situation as well as they could have. Other attempts to maintain the narrative lock included intense scrutiny of exactly what angle the tires were at, how far in front of the vehicle the agent was or was not, whether his reaction was “too fast,” whether the tires slipping gave the agent more time to (cinematically) leap out of the way, whether the agent appeared to be limping (or limping enough) afterward, whether he should be ‘tough enough’ to ‘take a hit,’ whether he was too slow to render aid or call for aid, and his demeanor after the incident (calling the deceased a ‘bitch’).

All of these, regardless of how germane they are, regardless whether they contradict other versions, are in service to locking in the narrative that the ICE agent was in the wrong and some of these serve to preemptively hold that narrative even if investigation should determine he was fully justified, as the existing legal framework for use-of-force suggests. It can be confidently predicted that if the outcome is in the agent’s favor, it will be chalked up to corrupt conspiracy rather than rules that do, in fact, allow LEOs to protect themselves and which treat motor vehicles as deadly weapons when used in an assault. The narrative lock-in will never budge.

So it’s a one-two punch.

First, the caption provides a psychological shortcut: the brain finds it much easier to store a five-word sentence than to process ten seconds of complex, high-stakes video. Eventually, the memory of the caption simply replaces the memory of the image. Once the frame is set, the person begins to identify with it, because to do otherwise would be to admit to having been fooled. If they repeat the narrative as it has been framed for them, the identity deepens.

What makes this incident particularly prone to lock-in is its moral-emotional resonance and its virality. The narrative surrounding the shooting incident follows from existing narratives about immigrants and immigration enforcement—namely, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. While there are passionate views on both sides, the view that immigrants are persecuted victims against a Gestapo-like ICE patrol is hard to find a match for on the other side. Certainly, there are those who would see all immigrants deported, but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t at the very least acknowledge that not all illegal immigrants are, for example, murderous gang members. Conversely, the agents charged with enforcing immigration are viewed by their most extreme opposition as uniformly monstrous—more like movie villains than even soldiers for a historically wicked regime.

The virality of the moment encourages people to argue and reargue the event, reinforcing in their own mind the version of the event they’ve attached to until any alternative becomes literally inconceivable. A tell for this, as already alluded to, is the tendency to repeat the same arguments almost verbatim every time, even in the same conversation. A person who is not so locked-in will instead try to modify their explanation, using different words and metaphors to get the point across.

The point of identifying this isn’t to win a debate about a shooting in Minnesota. It’s to examine the machinery of narrative lock-in. There’s actually not a lot to say about it directly other than that it is a psychological self-preservation method. (The Freudian ego, I believe.) It’s a means to cope with cognitive dissonance and protect one’s self-identity. People don’t like to be wrong, but people do like to make their minds up about stuff really quickly. It can be a disastrous combination, especially when the person locked in believes that they are morally compelled to hold the line on whatever it is they’ve decided in a snap.

This isn’t just a quirk of human nature; it’s a feature of our environment. Marketers use this technique, I think, benignly when they try to capture buyers in their formative years, locking them into their brand of deodorant as “the best,” often for life. (My brand keeps changing, however, because the best deodorants keep going out of production.) Media and politicians, however, use the same tactics to get people not to reevaluate—or even to evaluate—their positions, instead tying identity to a brand, and letting the ideas shift under the label.

So what do we do about narrative lock-in? Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much we can do when someone else is locked in. The lady with the bee articles wasn’t going to hear me out, and the people convinced that Renee Good was murdered aren’t going to be persuaded by any investigation that clears Agent Ross. As the old adage goes, you can’t argue a person out of a position they didn’t argue themselves into.

But we can recognize the signs. When you see someone obsessing over tire angles and limps instead of the basic facts of the story, you aren’t looking at a disagreement over evidence. You’re looking at a person desperately trying to keep their world from falling apart. And once you see the lock-in, the mystery of why people refuse to see the obvious disappears.

Todd’s Twitter.

111 thoughts on “Narrative Lock-In: When Belief Becomes Bulletproof – a guest post by Todd R. Maxwell”

  3. It’s a “Myth-information” problem, innit?

    (with apologies to Robert Aspirin).

    Most people (1) can’t “see” anything that conflicts with their own mythic worldview; AND

    (2) aren’t aware that other mythic structures even exist; AND

    (3) don’t realize that Narrativists are Myth-makers first, and Truth-seekers second (if at all).

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  4. You can try and make sense of the world either by formulating a world view and then adjusting the world view by testing against reality. Or you can formulate a world view and then try to adjust reality to fit your view. When I look at the political sides the biggest difference is the conservative side has a lot of debate and disagreement on principles. Take abortion, you see everything from 100% “pro-life” to 100% “pro-choice” with lots of people in between. But on the left it is 100% pro-choice, period. People on the right range from Trump is “god” to Trump is a “jerk but I’ll support him as the better alternative”. 100% of the left think Trump is Hitler, period.

    Your “bee” woman friend is like most people on the left – they make up a world view and then get violently mad when reality is different. They don’t slap themselves on the forehead and say “I could of had a V-8”! They just double and triple down. Of course, tomorrow they might do a complete 180 degree flip but they will never admit they flipped – “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” No point to engaging them in conversation; it is like a bee trying to convince a fly that honey is better than crap…

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  6. I have been interacting with someone on a different topic (rabbit starvation, a mostly-myth that gets trotted out any time the topic of raising rabbits for meat comes up) and feeling like I was beating my head against a wall – glad to have a name for this phenomenon.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

      1. It seems like everyone has heard of rabbit starvation, but then misapplies it to domestic rabbit! It is possible to get rabbit starvation – if you are eating nothing but winter-starved rabbits that have used up all of their stored fat. It’s not anything intrinsic to rabbit; any meat completely devoid of fat (actually, any diet completely devoid of fat) will be equally problematic. What the proponents of rabbit starvation fail to realize is that 1. people raising domestic rabbits as a meat source are almost never going to be eating only rabbit meat, with nothing else in their diets, and 2. domestic rabbits, as long as they are not being starved, will never be so totally devoid of fat as the wild rabbits in those instances of actual rabbit starvation.

        Anywho, LOL! It just points up the fact that narrative lock can happen in just about any field.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. That’s very interesting, and I’m glad to learn that!

          Apparently there’s evidence that Neanderthals and other early humans went to a lot of trouble to hunt fat, healthy critters in their primes, because they had more delicious, nutritious fat and offal, as well as all the other stuff. Because they keep finding more bones of prime animals than of old or young animals.

          Apparently they’re still not entirely sure how early peoples avoided scurvy when they didn’t have much Vitamin C in their area to eat, but I suspect the answer is that they ate a lot of different stuff that added up to “just enough.”

          Also, hanging meat apparently keeps more vitamins like C in the meat. Um. Not sure if that’s a good argument for hanging meat, but eh.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

          1. Used to hear stories of grandfather and great-uncles, who used to eat “fat” sandwiches. Which (ew, seriously ew) was a section of protein fat between two thick slices of bread. Not a grilled meat sandwich, or grilled cheese. Which is two pieces of bread with meat fried in fat, usually real butter, or saved bacon fat. I suspect the same reason I hate deep-fried floor rolled (called crispy these days) chicken, or anything deep-fried, is the reason why the same generations born late-1800s/early-1900s relatives craved it.

            Like

            Reply

            1. My grandfather, born in 1906, was a professional trapper, so he spent a lot of time outdoors in all kinds of weather. He’d take a sandwich made of bread and bacon grease for his lunch. Grandma protested that (too much fat made her sick, but she had a bad gallbladder). But it worked for him, and he was never the least bit overweight right up until he died, at ninety years old.

              Like

              Reply

            2. When my mother cooked for the Outing Club’s Winter Mountaineering School, people would fight over the bacon drippings.

              Like

              Reply

          2. Interesting fact – it’s possible, and fairly common, in fact – to never eat any fruits or vegetables, just eat meat, and never get scurvy! The key factor seems to be that the people doing this must also not be eating anything made from grains or legumes. So what seems to be happening is that, if you eat foods made from grains or legumes, your body needs quite a bit more Vitamin C (and if, as sometimes happened on long sailing voyages, you are almost entirely eating stale ship’s biscuit, you probably need a LOT more Vitamin C!). Meat, particularly fresh meat (as opposed to canned or salt/corned), does have some C in it, and – as long as you are avoiding the grains and legumes – it seems to be enough for good health. Personal experience here of three years, so far, on a primarily-carnivore diet. And no scurvy!

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

            1. What *I* have read is that the vitamin C in meat is almost entirely destroyed by cooking or drying, BUT as long as you eat a lot of RARE or RAW meat, the C is available in quantities sufficient to keep you from scurvy. (No mention was made of interactions with grain.)

              Like

              Reply

          3. I just saw a piece about two guys who tried to reach the north pole back in the 1920s and they lived for months on basically just meat and had no trace of scurvy. The belief is that they ate so much fatty meats that were barely cooked that they got the C from that. Meat fat contains vitamin C but we cook it out too much. I tried to find the link but can’t. Take with appropriate salt.

            Like

            Reply

            1. I know who you are talking about, I think. There were two Arctic explorers back in the earlyish 1900’s who, after they came back, cooperated with a year-long study where they just ate meat, and they were fine. I can’t think of their names, but they were real, and so was the study.

              Like

              Reply

            2. I believe you’re are talking about Admunsen and Scott trying to reach the Antarctic (south) pole. Admunsen a Norwegian took food similar to what he saw laplanders consuming, a pemmican like substance of fat/blubber and various bits of meat and perhaps fruit/vegetables, lightly processed. Scott took what were basically naval rations, crackers, biscuits, some dried meat and Tea (they were Brits after all). Admunsen got to the South pole first and his team returned in good health. Scott’s team got there but by the return his team was in bad shape. The main issue was the rations. Although boring the Pemmican had a high calories to weight ratio and fat processes slowly keeping Admunsen’s people more comfortable in temperature and hunger. Scott’s carbohydrate heavy diet was less dense, missing several nutrients AND the carbohydrates process quickly meaning the team was often cold in the brutal Antarctic temperatures leading to severe issues (even with likely better cold weather gear).

              Like

              Reply

        2. In the late 1850s, a number of Comanche bands had endemic malnutrition caused by over-consumption of excessively lean meat, so much so that they no longer got benefits from what they were eating. A drought had been in progress for half a decade (longer depending on where precisely in TX-NM they were), and the bison had become less fatty, even in fall. Since the usual source of carbs was trading with the Pueblo peoples, and they had nothing to spare due to the drought, the Comanche suffered generalized nutritional stress and a plummeting birth rate.

          As you say, freeholder, it was the excess-for-health consumption of super-lean meat, not the kind of meat per se, that caused the problem. (The High Plains are very, very low on native, human-edible plants, more so than the Great Plains to the east.)

          Like

          Reply

  7. I just watched a half hour long TimcastIRL clip in which the female guest exhibited this sort of narrative lock in for the entire time. It also reminded me of something I read in the last couple of days that compared this sort of lock in to the way an LLM gets disconnected from reality and evidence, relying entirely on regurgitating previous written narrative.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

      1. Holy cow so many of those people on the show haven’t got even a passing acquaintance with reality… The worst is when the one like that is one half of a couple, and the other half IS in touch with reality.

        It’s making the ones who come on who do actually adjust their worldview (or who are in dire straits through no actual fault of their own–like the poor girl whose parents ruined her credit when she was still a child and left her saddled with all the credit card debt!) rare and precious indeed.

        Like

        Reply

      2. I took a brief look at one episode of that Caleb Hammer nonsense. I don’t expect to look at it again. It would make me despair for my children’s and grandchildren’s future. I don’t need that.

        Like

        Reply

    2. Was it ESR and/or Devon Eriksen by any chance? When I heard that comparison it was the former going off of one of the latter’s signature lengthy X posts. I found the whole thing to be disturbingly plausible as well.

      Like

      Reply

  9. I don’t know how to respond to such people other than to say to them, “That’s simply not true.” Showing them facts that contradict their view obviously does nothing to dent their convictions. I guess I’ve successfully avoided most such people. It’s such an alien mindset to my own, that I can’t actually comprehend it other than to acknowledge that it obviously exists.

    Fortunately I rarely interact with such people.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. “Oh. Look at the Time! Gotta run.” or “Excuse me, I need to …” (so when I return the topic has, usually, changed). Works better.

      The ones I deal with are family, avoiding is not an option, when we are together. Best to avoid any politics period. Or at least not bring it up. Sister and I have a saying to our husbands (more likely to stir the pot, just because), “Do Not Make Mom (ours) cry. Do Not.” Mom is not the problem. It is our other sister and nieces (including the other conservative’s children. How that happened, IDK.) Although now that nieces are hitting 30, marrying and having children, they are less likely to be pulled into the left’s narrative these days. Not a guaranty this combination works, after all the other sister has the same conditions, plus grandchildren, plus over 60, and she is 100% infected by the left and TDS (I blame Stanford and Cal State).

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. Sis: “I’m not going to bring up politics, but I gotta say (Hard left Rant You Must Not Rebut)”

        Me “Since you brought it up, (short-form rebuttal of leftwing notion)”

        Sis: “I said I wasn’t brining up politics!!! Why do you always bring up politics!!!”

        Me: (Grin)

        (sigh) I do miss my sister very much. She was a good person, despite the odd views.

        Like

        Reply

        1. Oh. I know how that goes. I do. I do.

          Me and reasonable sister to our husbands, my son, and I think to one of their sons-in-law (he usually has to work on the family get-togethers, so he gets a pass) “Behave! No Politics.” Then liberal sister has to bring up something. Usually not long before everything breaks up for heading home. Love family to pieces, but people are so exhausting!!!!!! Neither hubby or BIL can refuse that bait.

          What hasn’t happened are the screaming matches that used to happen during the Nixon and Vietnam years. Between mom’s somewhat smaller family, dad’s huge family, including great uncles, and their kids and grandchildren … It was loud. No physical violence. But it was painful. FYI, opinions were not family based. *Most of the liberals then? Are not now. Reason? Money which each have now, and earned the hard way.

          Forget about mom crying? It gets like that again, I’m walking away. Back then I couldn’t just walk out, at least until old enough to find a reason to not be there. Fade into the background, I could and did.

          (*) Most, not all. Some never acquire that lick of sense they should have.

          Like

          Reply

      3. Shocked look on face. “Look at THAT!!” while pointing behind the other person. As soon as they turn, run very fast in the other direction.

        Like

        Reply

  10. Someone made a comment that we should perhaps not call such people “NPCs (non-player characters). But this is exactly why it is a good description – they are running a program. For most, that program is burned into read-only memory to boot.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  11. Interestingly I’ve been following posts by an expert in vertigo issues, as I have serious chronic problems there. Many problems with chronic vertigo stem from how the brain processes and maladapts to conflicting and erroneous if not disingenuous input from the various special senses and vestibular organs. I see a parallel with the problems of folks who have developed chronic malperception involving society, politics, and how the real world is versus how they perceive it. It takes a lot of expert help and a lot of personal effort/commitment to overcome the disabling vertigo issues regardless of etiology. I suspect the same brain traits are active here in the problems noted in the post. I have NO IDEA how to effectively approach them, but just as in the vertigo problem, the person suffering must recognize the problem and decide to fight it/overcome it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Don’t know if this helps or not, but here goes:

      A buddy had vertigo so bad he could barely stand for a moment with his eyes closed. Lots of fall related injuries.

      A very clever doc found out it was a rare genetic flaw in one of his inner ears. The signals never matched. An outpatient zap (cryogenic?) to neutralize the signal from that side, and bam, he could do some seriously weird poses. Never bothered him again.

      Like

      Reply

        1. Electro-Convulsive Therapy is pretty routine (and carefully done!) these days.

          Better that than Grasping the Live Wire Of Truth.

          Like

          Reply

          2. I had a friend go through that for suicidal depression and ideation. (She’s very open about that, because she thinks that shame makes it worse.) It did involve memory loss, so it’s not a first-choice item, but it does work.

            Best part? I asked her how it worked and she said that they literally have no idea why it works. But it does, so it’s in the toolkit.

            Like

            Reply

            1. A perhaps related treatment is https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/17827-transcranial-magnetic-stimulation-tms TransCranial magnetic stimulation is Thought (don’t you love those words :-) ) to work by causing some of the pathways to remap (pathways being sort of electrically establish and shifting magnetic fields induce currents and vice versa). It has fairly good results sometimes other times it does nothing. Someday we’ll get a decent idea of how the brain works but for now that seems to be Star Trek Tricorder level stuff.

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

        2. Outside my current scope of practice. (grin)

          For his ear/vertigo, I believe he said it was cryo, not electric. Like a nerve block, but permanent.

          As to crazy libs, don’t get me started. I read Kratman’s “Carreraverse” books to cheer myself up.

          Like

          Reply

          2. to get back to medical that is a rare but treatable problem

            most vertigo patients have more complex and multifactorial causes

            well hell, so do most liberals

            Like

            Reply

  13. We all fancy that we fighting the good fight for everything good. (It sure helps the old self esteem … )

    But, increasingly, I suspect that we are ALL influenced by the product of political marketing/advertising professionals much more than we would ever want to admit to our ruggely individualistic selves. We eagerly consume those captions in this confusing, tumultuous age. (That is definitely a take away concept In Todd’s excellent column.)

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  14. We all fancy that we fighting the good fight for everything good. (It sure helps the old self esteem … )

    But, increasingly, I suspect that we are ALL influenced by the product of political marketing/advertising professionals much more than we would ever want to admit to our ruggely individualistic selves. We eagerly consume those captions in this confusing, tumultuous age. (That is definitely a take away concept In Todd’s excellent column.)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. A significant amount of Threat effort is not directed at one particular side winning, or one particular philosophy in triumph. Threat propaganda effort is directed at maintaining a constant state of intractable conflict, with a goal where possible of escalating to outright systemic violence.

      “Sow discord in the enemy camp” is the thing. It can be Ford versus Chevy or Trump versus Genghis Khan for all they care. As long as conflict is intractable and unending.

      Note the shift as the Republicans start actually winning consistently, we now have “major fractures” on the right.

      Odd that….

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. “They’re not that strong, so don’t listen to them or side with them,” seems to be the underlying theme in a lot of messaging about the Right/Republicans/conservatives/et al these days.

        Like

        Reply

  15. Once you’ve established this as being the case, the only point of arguing is to win over the spectators.

    Shaking your head sadly, and regretfully stating, “You’re too smart to actually believe that.” is a lovely fork to twist. Provoking an illogical, spittle-flecked, emotional meltdown with a polite pushback to sway an audience.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Over on social media Larry Correia has taken to replying to the “ICE has no power over citizens” NPC dialogue with encouraging them to go for it, there won’t be any negative repercussions from doing so.

      Kind of sad how many who are otherwise on his (and our, I believe) side miss the point of his encouraging FAFO, however.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

        1. “The burnt fool’s bandaged finger/ goes wabbling back to the fire,” alas, as Kipling so well phrased it. I suspect the Gods of the Copy Book Headings are checking their saddle girths and preparing to ride, at least in some parts of the world.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

    2. This is particularly why debates–real ones, not the presidential format–are held at all. It is extraordinarily rare for a participant to change his mind, but it is the ones who aren’t arguing who are easiest to persuade.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    3. That is my thought as well.

      Maybe a third of the readers of a thread will actually post. The bashful others are our audience. We can Rock ’em Sock ’em robot combat with each other, flinging poo with fury, but any chance of persuasian is the passive viewer that I used to be.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  16. “When you see someone obsessing over tire angles and limps instead of the basic facts of the story, you aren’t looking at a disagreement over evidence.”

    The problem we have is that there are two different things going on. One is your “Bee Lady.” She’s an “enthusiast” let’s say. It’s her hobby. She doesn’t have skin in the game. One of those people commonly referred to as a Useful Idiot.

    But then there’s the other ones, the source of the true problem. This week’s example, the mayor of Minneapolis. That guy’s -entire- skin is on the line, he desperately needs chaos and unrest. Skeletons are tumbling out of his closet to be put on display by every YouTuber and blogger in the nation, so he’s going to say -anything- he thinks will resonate with his legions of Useful Idiots.

    Once you dig only a little into most of these modern causes like global warming, gun control or anti-racism you find socialists manipulating the gullible to steal money.

    My long history in the gun control “debate” makes this very plain to me. I’ve been screaming about this since 1992, and I can tell you there is no fact or logic that can sway anyone on this subject. Their beliefs are cast in stone.

    All the actual evidence I’ve uncovered over the years is on my side of the argument, the other side doesn’t bother with it. They just lie. They lie in journals, they lie in Parliament, they lie on TV, newspapers, books, everywhere. Every lie they tell, I can refute with observations, studies, common bloody sense, etc. But it doesn’t matter. Those anti-gun people picked a side, and that’s it.

    To your point about shifting narratives and lock-in, of late in Canada there has been a shift in the gun control narrative that I find incredibly irritating. Since #TheDonald made his 51st State comment to the never-sufficiently-damned #ShinyPony former PM of Canada, there has been a large but un-reported shift among the Elbows-Up! community, those #LiberalParty voters with money who have been screeching for more gun control for 40 years.

    TL/DR, they’re buying guns. I kid you not.

    Those imbeciles who won’t listen to reason and won’t ever stop trashing me and my opinions on firearms, self defense and nationalism, are suddenly buying guns. Like, a lot of them. Enough that the wait for a PAL is months. (PAL is “possession and acquisition license” and you can’t even touch a gun in a store without one.)

    Why are they doing this? Because #TRUMP!!! that’s why. How did #TRUMP!!! get to be more important than gun control? The media. And it took about a week. The nation is in peril, and my formerly insane, radical, hate filled Right Wing views on firearms are now weak-sauce. Listening to them bitch that they can’t find anywhere to shoot is enough to make me scream, because these are the exact people who made it impossible to shoot in Ontario.

    I would bet that your #BeeLady has moved on to other things and doesn’t even remember the damn bees.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    1. “they’re buying guns. I kid you not.“

      –

      Not surprised.

      We’ve seen that happen here in the US. Then they whine that the process is too hard, it takes too long, or they can’t get a gun. The last? My response is usually “good”. I’m generous that way.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. The truly crowning glory is that they KNOW I know everything, and now after 30 years of cheek, telling me I’m crazy, they have the chutzpah to ask me what the best gun is.

        “The ones they banned already,” is my helpful answer. Or the $20,000 sniper rifle in .338 Lapua, I love telling them about that one. “Yep, that’s what the SEALS use.”

        [sounds of the grinding of teeth]

        Like

        Reply

        1. We have only had one handgun, a little 25 cal semi-auto (irony? Not completely safe to fire. It “rattles”.)

          OR Prop 114? Got us off our ass(ets) all three of us are CCL’s now. Haven’t done the range safety requirement.

          Do have a question if 114 actually goes into effect. How does one “safely transport” a firearm to the range “to show safe storage and use” if one does not own a firearm but needs the proven safety portion completed to buy a firearm?

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. Just spitballing, but purchase a locking airline compliant gun case ( that means that it can’t be opened without your key or combination, has solid sides/ seals, and the hinges can’t be tampered with when closed without destroying it). Also get a locking ammo case. Demonstrate that you would use those to transport the weapon. I’m not sure on the OR laws, but several states are big on keeping ammo separate from the firearm. If Oregon isn’t you can skip the locking ammo can.

            Like

            Reply

  17. “Should laws be enforced? I mean the essential laws against murder, rape, torture, slavery, armed robbery and the like?”

    They’ll say “Yes, but…” and the “but…” reveals their incomprehension. Because they believe that some laws should be enforced against some people, selectively and unequally. Such beliefs are incompatible with living in a civilized society.
    ———————————
    You can have a civilized society, or you can have mob rule. You can’t have both.

    You can’t restore a civilized society by pandering to the mob.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

    2. I find that waaaay more often than not, when anyone argues “X, but Y”, you can ignore anything up to and including the “but” for a lossless compression of data.

      Like

      Reply

  18. Tangential to this idea is the what constitutes a civilization. The simplest definition is “women and children first”.

    This is incomplete. A civilization not only protects the women a d children, but the sick, infirm, and the old.

    We currently are in a barbarity not a civilization. Aside from abortion and child mutilation, we are shaping a war between old and young and a large percentage of the population is old and culturally dominant and is destroying that for virtue.

    So, a barbarity, not a civilization

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

        1. “harems of compliant concubines…” Lefties seem to really go for those. Handmaid’s Tail anyone? So disgusting…

          That’s another reason I write robot girlfriends. Legions of fabulous “women” with no biology at all, and therefore reason whatsoever to spend a moment of their time on Our Hero. But they do. So the ridiculous humans are left to wonder what it is about themselves that the machines give a rat’s whatsit about.

          That’s a pretty good question, and one I don’t see asked very often in Dead Tree of late. All I see is Frankenstein and grey goo.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

  19. the great datarepublican has a post, and soon a book huzzah, talking about this by way of systems theory, which is something I know something about so, huzzah. She posits that systems fail because they become autopoietic, which in social systems theory is self-referential I; that only the system matters and why the system exists is irrelevant. Fascinating stuff.

    It’s also interesting that this is happening right around the time the describer of cognitive dissonance has been shown to be a liar but that the concept is still valid, though not as applied to the religious people he highlighted as rubes, but by the edumacated people he taught to sneer. Almost as if they do know and can’t face it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

      Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

       First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

      Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

      The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

      Though Dr. Pournelle here in turn falls prey to Benchley’s Law, documented in 1920 by Robert Benchley in “Vanity Fair”:

      There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know.

        As I saw on a T-shirt (and, I think, in a meme post right here many months ago):

        “There are two kinds of people in the world.

        Avoid both.”

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

    2. I’m not sure on datarepublican’s histography. (Perhaps the book will clarify.) The history model feels like it is correct, but that I interpret as a clue I need to check what I actually know. Her historical claim is that this matches to empire failure, and is a very minor point. But, rhetorically it could have effect on some of the people who religiously view history as forecast.

      The rest, the paired ‘opposing’ groups, and their incentives and psychology? Feels plausible and accurate to me.

      Mandie Rice-Davies applies. If Datarepublican did this sort of synthesis, she has a chance of finding answers that I am likely to agree with.

      Though, my stock answers in this area is that we need to be very careful generalizing from, say, electrical engineering to human behavior. Human behavior has other funkiness on top of the nonlinearities, and the mathematical models that cope well with nonlinearities can perhaps be prohibitively expensive for our problems of study of behavior.

      Datarepublican’s specifics look good, but that does not mean that we should expect someone like me to do as well. Especially trying to imitate the general method, or when I am looking at something new to me. There’s a good chance that a lot of finding the right specifics was down to the intuition from slogging through so much EIN data.

      I think very few of us novices are going to do well assuming we can easily match Datarepublican’s gift for perceiving numbers. (Whatever gifting I have for numbers may be pretty moderate. I don’t /notice/ much that seems unusually strong, but my general lack of understanding average ability may also hold strongly here.)

      Like

      Reply

  20. Back when he was affiliated with Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden used to write about “social metaphysics,” or the idea that ground level reality was what other people believed, rather that what you perceived with your own senses or judged true with your own mind. It’s been dropped from the Ayn Rand lexicon (Branden is an un-person), but I think it fits some of my observations.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. “…ground level reality was what other people believed, rather that what you perceived with your own senses…”

      Reality is what it is, there’s no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what people believe, Reality will not bend.

      But you certainly better ACT like what other people believe is true, no matter what your lyin’ eyes say, or there will be trouble.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  21. Nothing I can really add other than well said, well put, and I’m glad to see you doing another guest post here! It is one of the most damnably frustrating things to encounter, especially in people who should know better, and all the moreso when you know things aren’t going to end well when reality catches up to said people, as it always does.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  22. My sister once lost a political argument with our 12 yo niece. When complaining about it to her husband, his response was “Ignore the facts. Stick to the talking points.”

    You don’t have to ask which side of the political spectrum they’re on.

    Sometimes it’s willful and deliberate.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea what it might have been:

      Just saw some Democrat blathering about Trump having ’10 times more impeachable off enses this term!’

      For an idiot, he actually got the math right: 0 times 10 is still 0. 😛

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I think it has to do with the favorite three-letter handle of a certain prolific troll; it’s probably been blacklisted locally as a send-to-moderation trigger (pretty sure WP can do that), but it also occurs in the middle of a few relatively common words, so there’s some collateral mod-binnage happening.

        Like

        Reply

  25. So if I am down at the publican to have a quart of everclear,
    the guy telling me that the marines or paratroopers are push overs,
    and that I can take them all in a fist fight, might not be my friend?
    He might not be entirely honest?

    Comes to mind that this is maybe downstream of River Tam.

    AKA, the wages of feminism are death.

    Like

    Reply

  26. Anyway, self hypnosis to just act or speak, without deliberation or consideration, can be tactically useful in politics. Or easily seem so.

    Analgesiacs in fistfights are metaphorically similar. Dish out a lot of damage not feeling the pain, but you can ignore that you have pretty much killed yourself.

    One of the thing you can lose living only in your own head, is the mental flexibility to adjust your ad copy to reach a wider audience.

    If you don’t do the intelligence analysis to consider several explanations for what you see, you have a great chance of mistaking how people are thinking.

    For a case where factions have very different theories, this can lead to arguments that just would not persuade across whatever boundary.

    Like

    Reply

  28. The communists do not really believe that anyone has an inherent right to self defense.

    This is why their revolutions go as they do.

    They /need/ an explanation for the latter, which is why they so firmly believe in the witchcraft of facism.

    ICE is the current witches that the Outer Party are targeted upon, and so they feel wholly justified. But this does not persuade outside of the cult. (Witches in the Outer Party and especially Inner Party are why communist revolutions ‘get stolen by facists’.)

    Anyway, the conservative positions are actually split, but the self defense narrative works for pretty much all of the conservative subsets.

    On the left, these are the people we are trying to talk off the ledge, for their own sake. (Or, ‘we’ should be trying, but I do not think I do a good job.)

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to B. Durbin Cancel reply