John Bailey, a graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Brenna Harvey, a grad student at the University of Connecticut, are showing a group – an even mix of men and women, mostly in their 30s, mostly graduate students studying gender – the fruits of their research into bronies: men who like My Little Pony. They have been studying a particularly extreme subset of bronies, they explain. Men who fetishise the ponies. The pair bring up a screengrab. One brony has posted a picture of a My Little Pony wearing sunglasses and drinking lemonade by a pool. In the comments beneath, the poster has made the fatal mistake, at least within this community, of admitting that he lost his “wizard eligibility 26 years ago” – has had sex with a person – and that he does not “clop” – that is, masturbate – to the images. Another brony had responded immediately: “Go be normal somewhere else, faggot.”
This an interesting phenomenon, which can be seen elsewhere in the SJW movement. First there is a demand for “tolerance,” driven by a mild amygdala discomfort which the aberrant feel at being ostracized by others. Once tolerance is achieved, the aberrant set up a clique. Once there is a clique, they insulate themselves from criticism, reimagine their aberrance as normal to shield their amygdala from irritation, and their amygdala adapts to this ease – this new, lower level of ostracization-based stress produced by their false reality of normalcy. This is very much like an addict who begins by using drugs to feel good, grows addicted to the feel-good, and soon begins to freak out in withdrawal if the feel-good cannot be maintained at a super-high level forever.
Meanwhile, the aberrant know they are aberrant, and this knowledge of their aberrance triggers tremendous amygdala irritation if even vaguely touched upon. It is not long before the mere sight of the vaguely normal triggers such rage that you have Bronies rampaging aggressively over the mere fact that other men (even those who somewhat embrace the brony lifestyle themselves) might not feel obligated to immediately clop to pictures of a stuffed Pony doll lounging by the pool.
Suddenly the simple request for tolerance morphs into a tyrannical, amygdala-driven demand by the aberrant that everyone either embrace the aberrance themselves and conform with the aberrant group, or they leave the sight of the aberrant under threat of violence and aggression. All of this is best viewed using an addiction paradigm, with amygdala-relaxation as the drug. To paraphrase Guns’N Roses, “I used to use a little but the little wouldn’t do, so the little got more and more. Now I’m clopping to a puppet and the puppet won’t do, so I’ve gotta find even more.”
Perhaps if the mechanism is documented, society could see that conformity and ostracization is a tool designed to keep groups from being terrorized by defectives who should never have been allowed into the group to begin with. Perhaps the process could be avoided some day at the outset, with a demand that the aberrant keep their aberrance private out of politeness, and gain acceptance that way.
Eventually, as they enter the end-stages of the addiction to ease, they will begin to look at other cliques of defectives, and wonder to themselves, “Why are they not serving me as well?” The similarity to Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder is just astonishing. It is all the same.
The feminists are now blaming these men for not dropping their pony dolls and supporting the feminist cause more aggressively. Soon the Pink SF crowd will begin to complain they are focused on the pony, rather than a strong lesbian/transgendered werewolf character, and liberals will want to know why they are not more politically active.
We are at the point where our defectives have begun blaming each other for all of the myriad of problems they see as caused by the normal. You know your society is screwed when your problems have become so numerous that you mostly just sit back and look forward to how they will intersect and interfere with each other, in their numerous and varied attempts to destroy all that is good.
Even understanding the mechanism, it is still difficult to fathom the insanity to which a society has fallen when men begin to fixate on horses instead of pretty women. At least in Rome, as the end approached men married real horses. It appears that in America, our SJW cohort is so defective they are falling short of even that mark.
Bring on the collapse.
Interesting. I’ve long searched for a reasoning I could use to explain why normalization of homosexuality is generally bad for society that didn’t rely on the simple “God says its a sin” reasoning (since such reasoning falls apart under the rubric of a “pluralistic” society). This explanation certainly fills the bill there.
This is a profoundly important insight. Thank you.
Ah, but we have people marrying the Eiffel Tower. Does that not count?
It is better than Bronies.
This really is the fault of the Boomer generation of helicopter parents who never allowed their children to suffer any adversity or setbacks, thus not allowing the child’s amygdsla to develop.
Once a child reaches early adulthood, is there any way to jump start their amygdala? Any therapies, any natural remedies? Or are they pretty much toast?
I think it will depend on the individual, and I have no idea what the delineator is. Some people can adjust to adversity, and others will have much more trouble. I’m an adjustor, or at least I historically have been. I can encounter a tremendous amount of stress, accept that the stressful condition is the new normal, and then feel my brain adapt to focus on the stress, and adjust to it as normal. I have even liked it, because if a situation is stressful enough, you will see normal stresses melt away into nothing.
Was the neighbor offended by the insensitive joke I absentmindedly made? Normally, I’d feel bad about that, but now, who cares? I’ve got fifty Hell’s Angels trying to kill me because I accidently drove over one on the highway! It is almost like those ads for debt consolidation. Consolidate your debt into one manageable payment. Having one big bad thing to worry about and manage is easier and nicer than a myriad of minor ones. I’ve also found my body functions better with stress. When things are easy and comfortable I don’t have as much energy, don’t lift as much, and my muscle/fat ratio drops considerably.
I think it speaks to the two mindsets you see in politics, and the difference between the narcissist and the non-narcissist. Normal people have amygdalae that scan for the bad. If things are good, they still look to optimize them by focusing on whatever the worst they can see is, however minor, and trying to address it. If things are good, you still have bad, and then things are bad, the increased bad almost becomes simpler.
Narcissists and leftists tend to be about ignoring or minimizing the bad in their mind. We can spend whatever we want, collapse will never happen, Muslim immigrants will assimilate and enrich us, etc. They want to deny the bad as a defensive mechanism to shield their amygdalae. They can do it when the times are good, but as times turn bad, they are the ones who jump out the windows as the DOW goes down, because they just can’t handle it.
I don’t know exactly what is coming or when, but I think it will be as interesting as times come. We’ll protect our own, do the best we can, and at the end of the day, I think we’ll be fine. Like the modern preference for Zombie movies and shows, we may even prefer it on some level. The rest of the nation will either adapt, or flee, which how I think nature intended it.