Getting up to date

I want to clarify and summarise some of what has been going on in the Outpost over the years, how this has evolved and to illustrate the most recent evolution with a contemporary political example.  This will bring us up to date for the more recent evolution (to follow).  

Ever since the insight that there are common or garden tyrants, private individuals that act behaviourally very much like national tyrants, there has been a gradual change in how I see people in the world. This is not a new theme. Any readers of The Outpost will have seen an evolving theme over many years: 

1. It started with realising that there are people with, who are motivated by and will seek power, greed, status, money, and people who aren't and that the division is very stark.  

2. That those with those motivations can and will pull the wool over the eyes of others.

3. That those with those motivations will go to quite extreme lengths, including propaganda, lies and narrative control (there was a post with that very name on The Intertidal); they will employ quite nefarious means without compunction in order to achieve their ends.

4. Much of this will be self-delusional. They will not realise they are doing it because they cannot afford to. I’m not sure that I’ve made that specific point before.

5. I have mentioned before the “empathy gap”, the difficulty, the moral chasm, the psychological chasm, perhaps, separating people who will behave this way and people who won't. 

6. At this point there is a jump in thought because of the attacks I went through.  I recognised at a personal level that there are people who will want to achieve certain ends and will set morality aside to do so but to a much greater extent than I had realised. I knew that family members could kill each other, but it was remote  from my experience. These are the posts on tyrants that started in 2024 in The Outpost.  These people exist at a national level, but also on a much smaller,  common or garden level - your everyday manipulators and tyrants. There are behaviour traits in both the national tyrant or dictator or their lookalikes and individuals who just have ordinary jobs.  It’s not a difference of psychology but of scale of influence. A mere bully and a dictator are not the same. A bully probably has limits, most often when you stand up to them. 

But I think there are remarkably similar, possibly the same psychological mechanisms in national and everyday tyrants, a different category: people who will not just intimidate others but coerce, manipulate in multiple ways, use other people and control perception to get what they want, but also indulge in things like self-aggrandizement, narcissism, and tell themselves stories of entitlement. A bully might be brought to feel remorse.  A tyrant can’t afford to, will never admit to ever being wrong. Ultimately they construct a false narrative to prop up the story they tell themselves about themselves and about the harm they have caused to get what they want. 

The difference is also one of constraint, amplification and reach. Some dictators have got away with murder in the millions whereas the mere individual might cause one or just “mere” immense harm to one person and their family.  But I believe people who have experienced the harm I describe from an individual will recognise the same psychological mechanisms as are present in national dictators and tyrants.

I don’t know how common these people are and being a bully might well set you on that path, but a bully is quite a blunt instrument and these types are sharp, perceptive, intelligent, strategic and utterly cold and calculating whereas we commonly think of bullies as boorish.  I don’t know how much psychology recognises the similarities I refer to between the national and the individual type. 

It does worry me that it’s not a national debate.  There’s no shorthand label like “#MeToo” that says, yes I’ve been abused by or recognise abuse by or support people who’ve been abused by perpetrators of this kind. We don't really recognise the kind, except in the very fringes of the news when some poor woman is killed by partner.  Most of all there is no national: We know what this is and we know the extent of it. I have heard though through inheritance or Power of Attorney stories of just what people will resort to for money and power but mostly money and it is shocking, but they are all quiet, individual stories that are so awful people mostly want to forget and move on, so the perpetration continues, probably by the individual and certainly by society.  

I don’t think most people resort to the kind of abuse and tyranny I have been subjected to and I think some victims or potential victims are able to extricate themselves and/ or the person they are trying to help, or get support before it gets too bad or perhaps were in a strong position before it started and were able to defend themselves.  

The reason the lack of national conversation worries me is because abuse of women by men is still shockingly common, even in Britain.  Most trauma comes from men. In Britain, ‘Refuge’ says less than 24% of domestic abuse is reported.  Sexual abuse, harassment, stalking is experienced by about 12% of women - but that’s what’s reported and maybe only the proportion of women who get validated.  And it doesn’t include the intimidation or coercion of women that isn’t sexual or isn’t domestic, that happens in families, or work or in education or health where there are vast power imbalances, or institutions or any other setting.  So I think the many kinds of abuse of women across society as would be reported by them in some truth-telling world, is probably much higher than we can even guess, probably jaw-droppingly high. And if it’s like this in Britain, where, in terms of sexual equality we have apparently been going in the right direction for decades, what is it like in places where the patriarchy is still virtually untouched?