Orwell’s Five Warnings About the Psychology of Totalitarianism Orwell understood totalitarianism’s psychology: unlike dictators who seek wealth and status, totalitarians aim to reshape humanity. They often claim to act “for our own good,” with conscience on their side. After reading Orwell, five lessons stand out: 1. Political correctness can become mind control “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Words frame reality and limit solutions. 2. Doublethink is the hallmark of propaganda “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” When contradictions become acceptable, rational thought collapses. 3. Control the past and you control the future “Who controls the past controls the future.” Rewriting history turns gratitude into guilt and inheritance into theft. 4. You cannot fight for freedom with a shackled mind “Until they become conscious they will never rebel.” Team loyalties replace judgment; challenging the narrative grants permission to ask questions. 5. True power is the power to shape perception “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes…” The goal isn’t mere obedience, but surrendering the ability to distinguish truth from what authority declares true. Orwell’s warning: don’t let it happen—resist arbitrary power by holding to truth, conscience, family, community, faith, and the people you love.
The Left Didn’t Replace Religion… It Became One Many leaders in the West may reject God, but they often believe with near-religious fervor in something else. The progressive worldview mirrors religion: people still crave meaning, so it gets redirected. Science is treated like scripture interpreted by an expert priesthood; capitalism becomes the fallen world; revolution is purification; climate change is apocalypse with repentance; gender identity is the soul, the “true self” trapped in a betraying body. Without metaphysics, evil must be placed in the material world. For many on the left, Hitler functions as a secular Satan, so anything tied to him can be treated as morally contaminated—nationalism, borders, ethnic identity, masculinity, Europeans, industry, and Western traditions. Jung’s “shadow” is projected onto an enemy, letting adherents feel morally pure while avoiding the harder work of facing their own capacity for evil. Where Christianity locates sin inside every heart (“original sin”), the secular version relocates the flaw into the world—into whiteness, the West, nationalism, borders, or any chosen symbol. This framework makes moral judgment easy and singular: if Hitler is evil, then opponents become “fascists,” “Nazis,” or “Hitler.” Disagreement turns from political to moral and existential. This isn’t a claim that progressives can’t see evil elsewhere—it’s that this framework has become an instinctive moral compass. The ruling class isn’t truly secular: it has its own faith, and increasingly expects you to live by it.
Why Therapy Culture Is Making Us Weak Why, despite unprecedented mental-health awareness and therapy language, does mental health seem to worsen? If both “the cure” and “the disease” expand together, we should ask what culture produces them. Modern therapy culture often teaches us to prioritize feelings, explain flaws through trauma, and treat negative emotions as reactions to others. Carl Jung proposed a different order: consciousness—judgment, values, and will—should govern the unconscious, including instincts and emotions. Health means understanding these forces without letting them rule. Today that hierarchy is frequently reversed: emotion outranks reason, and “lived experience” can outrank evidence. Jung warned this resembles “psychological Bolshevism,” where lower impulses overthrow higher faculties in the name of freedom. Nietzsche cautioned that “for every drive wants to be master.” The key question isn’t only where feelings come from, but whether we govern them. Therapy culture can also weaken self-criticism, treating conscience, guilt, and shame as oppressive rather than corrective. With “concept creep” (trauma/harm expanding to cover normal discomfort), personal agency can shrink: if everything is done to us, responsibility becomes harder to exercise. This can spread socially: victim identities bond through grievance, replacing judgment with collective resentment. History shows where that leads. The defense is older than therapy: govern yourself before demanding the world be changed.
Pathocracy: How Institutions Become Captured by the Pathological **Pathocracy** is the process by which institutions are gradually converted to serve the pathological. It often starts when normal people lose the ability to distinguish honest, well-intentioned behavior from manipulative and perverse motives. The institution may keep its name, image, and stated purpose long after it has changed in practice. A key warning sign is the normalization of pathological individuals: when a community treats the judgments of manipulative, conscienceless people as equal to those of everyone else, pathocracy is already underway. These individuals are rarely obviously unstable; they are often composed, confident, and even charming—so alarms don’t trigger. As more institutions are pathocratized, the pathological begin coordinating across them, reshaping society to match their impulses. Lobaczewski described roles such as ideological architects (producing simplistic “two camps” doctrines), marketing teams (simplifying reality into emotionally compelling narratives), and then psychopaths taking command to capture institutions. He estimated about 6% could become the new authority class and ~12% the intermediaries who make the system function, with at most around a fifth genuinely backing it. The rest usually build quiet networks of resistance. The central lesson of political ponerology: totalitarianism isn’t made only by a single tyrant—it emerges when society can no longer tell the pathological from the honest.
Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”
Empathy, Compassion, and the Limits of Emotional Moral Judgment Empathy is widely regarded as a foundation of morality, but psychological research suggests that it is not an unqualified virtue. Paul Bloom (2017) argues that affective empathy—the experience of sharing another person’s feelings—has important limitations when used as a guide for moral judgment. First, empathy is biased. We respond more strongly to suffering that is vivid, identifiable, and psychologically close. Research on the “identifiable victim effect” shows that people can be more willing to help a specific individual than anonymous victims, even when the latter represent a much larger number (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Lee & Feeley, 2016). Emotional salience therefore does not necessarily correspond to moral significance. Second, empathy is innumerate. Human emotional responses do not naturally scale with the number of people suffering. A single identifiable victim can evoke a powerful response, while thousands or millions of anonymous victims may produce comparatively little emotional engagement. This creates a problem when moral decisions concern suffering on a large scale (Bloom, 2017). Third, empathy can be exhausting. Repeatedly sharing the distress of others may produce empathic distress and emotional fatigue. Research suggests an important distinction between empathic resonance and compassion: while empathic engagement can increase negative affect, compassion can promote positive affect, motivation, and prosocial behaviour (Klimecki et al., 2014; Weng et al., 2013). The implication is not that we should care less. Rather, caring and feeling are not the same thing. Compassion allows us to recognize suffering and remain motivated to alleviate it without necessarily absorbing the suffering ourselves. Empathy may therefore be valuable for human connection, but it is a poor stand-alone system for making large-scale moral decisions. When millions of lives, limited resources, and competing needs are involved, compassion must be combined with reason, evidence, and deliberate judgment. The goal should not be to feel everything others feel. It should be to care deeply enough to help, while remaining clear-headed enough to help effectively. References: Bloom (2017); Kogut & Ritov (2005); Klimecki et al. (2014); Lee & Feeley (2016); Weng et al. (2013). Empathy and Its Discontents https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27916513/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
It's surely at least arguable that the Employment Tribunal was biased against Sandie - the judgment included invented and misrepresented references from several legal authorities and some genuinely bizarre legal interpretations #EmploymentTribunal #LegalBias #JusticeForSandie #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.
AI is making output cheap. It can generate proofs, diagnoses, designs, code, arguments and art. But producing an answer is not the same as understanding the question. The real scarcity in the AI age may be judgment, meaning and responsibility. New article ↓ #AI #Automation #Judgment #Therearenospecificcountrycodesmentionedinthetweet.
This is what the distinguished “educational committee” had to say about the decision to discuss the paper in class: “a serious error of judgment.” It sounds Orwellian, but this is the state of academia today—or at least of @UGent. The problem of ideological capture has been a https://t.co/AicHHNivk6 #AcademicFreedom #IdeologicalCapture #UGent #BE
This is what the distinguished "educational committee" had to say about the decision to discussi paper in class: "a serious error of judgment". It sounds Orwellian, but this is now the state of academia, or at least of @UGent. The problem of ideological capture has been long in https://t.co/4QozBKv213 #Academia #IdeologicalCapture #UGent #BE
Entiendo que Roxanne Perez no haya tenido una progresión meteórica como otras, siendo Stephanie Vaquer precisamente un ejemplo de eso. Pero lleva un año en el main roster impecable, aunque sea un poco en la sombra del Judgment Day. No tendría ninguna duda de darle el Money in the Bank. #WWERAW #WWE #RoxannePerez #MoneyInTheBank
ChatGPT Pro is remarkably good at solving rare-disease diagnostic puzzles. When working with fully anonymized, non-identifiable clinical vignettes, its ability to generate and refine a differential diagnosis can be genuinely impressive. It does not replace clinical judgment - #ChatGPTPro #RareDiseases #DifferentialDiagnosis #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.
Sol Ruca y IYO SKY VENCEN al Judgment Day con un GRAN Sol Snatcher de Sol Ruca, que antes hizo un pedazo reversal al Pop Rox de Roxanne Perez. Atléticamente, de las mejores del roster. Qué gran secuencia final. #WWERAW https://t.co/xFxwb8yV34 #Wrestling #WWERAW #WomenInSports
Stephanie Vaquer: "Universo de la WWE, he echado de menos este ring y os he echado de menos a vosotros. Pero sobre todo, echaba de menos ver a Liv Morgan y al Judgment Day tener miedo de mi. Yo voy a destruir al Judgment Day uno por uno" EMPIEZA POR ESTA NOCHE DOÑA #WWERAW https://t.co/WhqnjJ8s3o #WWE #WWERAW #LivMorgan
Like other authoritarians before him, Trump has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed https://t.co/Tk0nJ6G0kC #Trump #Authoritarianism #ForbiddenCity #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.Therefore #theresponseisempty.
A study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making revealed that readers prefer news generated by artificial intelligence over that written by human authors, questioning the capabilities of current models while highlighting the importance of human creativity in the writing process. (translated)
Sally Hines wrote a paper arguing that deformed babies were a small price to pay for bearded ladies yet she still thinks she has the right to judge literally anyone else on moral grounds #Hypocrisy #Ethics #Judgment #Therearenospecificcountriesmentionedinthetweet.Therefore #theresponseis:
