[This item grew as a footnote to another post, but kinda grew larger than I intended and really does have enough meat to be a standalone item.]

Quantum Sardonics & The Stanford Prison Experiment

Information is colluding again.

Reviewing this madness, this is shaping as yet another example of what I call quantum sardonics, where the sub-atomic universe conspires to bring otherwise unrelated data into bizarre synchronicity that can drive some folks insane. Serendipitous coincidences, providing you are not bat-shit insane to begin with, can be fascinating things, often giving new insights and understanding of the world around us. Science itself is full of such stories of ideas spontaneously generating via unrelated events colluding. Failing to maintain objectivity about it is probably the root cause of what we know as mysticism, and quietly collating and ruminating on these coincidences and understanding how they may reflect elsewhere is what I like to call wisdom.

So it is quantum sardonics at play here as, on the tail of the Watson/Skepchick circus, we find that just this week it is also the 40th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment was fascinating in that it showed how quickly what we consider to be humanity vapourises in social bubbles where artificial division is imposed, all regular inhibitions are removed and one side is given authoritarian carte blanche and immunity from accountability or consequence, while the other is marginalised and stripped of all powers of protest or defense.

This miasma of victim feminism1 / slave morality that Watson et al. are peddling, rather successfully, coupled with the almost universally obsequious response to it, are all part of a much wider, though much subtler, revisitation of the Stanford Prison Experiment that has been running, at my guess, since the ’80s – without anyone actually realising it, and in fact only the coincidence of the anniversary has made me notice how similar it all is. Just automagically, the social experimentation we have been conducting chasing some mythical utopianism, with the very best of intentions, has pretty much mirrored the experiment and the findings at Stanford 40 years ago without ever meaning to or understanding that, inadvertently, very similar laboratory conditions had been allowed to manifest.

The ecosystem is an idealised state governed by slave morality, and it is important to note that this state can only be entered into by the participants voluntarily. This is not a state that can be imposed where a will resists it. The guards here are the oppressed, the Watson/Skepchick crowd. The prisoners are, of course, the oppressors – all of those already arbitrarily branded misogynists and sexists for refusing to acknowledge that the state of slave morality has any merit. To begin with, all it takes to be a prisoner is a penis and denial that the slave condition is valid. This is why Dawkins’ offense was perceived to be so great – using allegory, he requested that the slave stop being a slave, as they need not be in that state, that it is a self-created and self-imposed state, and that, really, it is nauseating to behold.

The dynamic of the experiment, and its results, otherwise plays out in a carbon copy to that at Stanford –

  • The guards, free from oversight, reason, criticism or restraint, and in the knowledge that no absurdity, no matter how extreme, will ever be questioned, lurch from one accusatory, crescendoing excess to the next in their efforts to slander, vilify and debase their prison population – free from all inhibition, shame or accountability.
  • The prison population, in response, produces its usual proportion of those that seek mercy through submission (PZ, Gollum2 etc.), at the price of denouncing other fellow prisoners (Dawkins etc.), seeking favoured trusty status.
  • Prisoners that refuse to submit and have the temerity to speak back to the guards are singled out for special punishment – placed in stocks in the town square for general public derision and humiliation (Dawkins again).
  • Of course, there will also be guards that decry the corruption and degeneracy of their fellow guards – they get branded and degraded to prisoner status for being collaborators and traitors (currently, Paula Kirby as mention in Watson’s video and any other woman that speaks up).

Stanford Prison pin-up girl Lynndie England

Of course, I don’t seriously expect any of the fem-bot Watson groupies (both male and female) to do anything other than dismiss this observation with the usual contempt. I, however, find it to be a pretty convincing display of real life mirroring what went on at Stanford, albeit not quite as spectacularly.

This is how our reality is now being malformed into a perverted yin-yang of perpetual accusation and perpetual guilt by the Watsons of this world – a true, pitch black, nihilistic void from which nothing positive can ever emerge. It is as suffocating a moral idiocy as anything the religious have ever been able to come up with.

If there is to be a second Great Enlightenment, the battle will be as much against the poison of these “new”, new atheists as against any established political and theistic dogmas. As it is, our movements are being flushed down the toilet, with the well intentioned assistance of folks like PZ.

Yes, there is a crisis – and it’s not what most folks think.

1 – The arch-heretic first responsible for this concept is probably Christina Hoff Sommers, who is curious by omission from all of the noise to date (it’s probably on the grounds of making too much sense).

2 – “Gollum”, or Phil Plait. Coined by a character called CK, so ask him. I like it. “We mussst be nice, preciousss, yesss nice. Not assholesss, oh noes… must never be assholesss my preciousss, we are nice, yesssss…”