I subscribe to emailed publications from Chris Rufo to me. I will share so lines from this email from Chris, written on 9/27/2023, entitled Comments on the ‘The Cluster B Society’. I will the respond to the comments recorded.
Rufo: “Last week I premiered a short film, The Cluster B Society, which reveals how a strange new pattern of psychopathologies has deranged our institutions and plunged our public life into hysteria, narcissism, and moral theatrics—all in the name of ‘care’.
My response: Rufo is a rising star among conservative thinkers, and deservedly so. His paragraph above captures what is going on now, and is sick, pervasive, and dangerous. I think this sick society is the fruit of the labors of the mass movement sweeping America and the world, the postmodernist Marxist cause, and it is predictable that true believers promoting their wicked ism, will reveal to the world their lack of inner psychological health, their seething, passionate self-hatred that shapes all of their relationships, and, how collectively and socially, these people and their converts seem pathological, irrational and pathetic to sane people everywhere.
Rufo: “The Cluster B Society has sparked a number of interesting comments from Substack readers, some of which I share below, lightly edited for clarity.
Graham Cunningham, writes: I think perhaps the greatest degenerative element of our Western social psychology over the last 60 years has been the displacement of a mentality of ‘we are all sinners’ by a narcissistic mentality of maximal ‘self-esteem,’ Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone or something else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as ‘victim’ and then ask: Who needs to be canceled?”
My response: I have been writing and suspecting for 6 months now that current conservative political thinkers in America and Canada (Prager, Peterson, Rufo and perhaps others) are more champions of individualism, individual identity, individual sovereignty and individual rights more than they are for collectivism, collective identity, collective sovereignty and collective rights, but their Judeo-Christian faiths and theology leads them to side with standing for altruist-collectivist ethics as opposed to egoist-individualist ethics favored by Randians and me.
They are engaged in a moral contradiction, as exemplified by what Cunningham described above: current altruistic Jewish and Christian conservative thinkers favor individualism, liberty and capitalism over collectivism, tyranny, and Communism but their altruist-collectivist ethos will lead to limiting human ethical and political reform because their ethics undercuts their religious, moral, and political ambitions, and they are not aware of their sabotaging their own program.
Their stubborn allegiance to altruist ethics means that the Rufoian Cultural and Political revolution that he proposes in this book—a most worthy project—can only become as limitedly successful as we have been historically, as capitalist, as liberated and advanced as was the American society of 1946 with its tolerated but insufficient degree of allowed individualism, its limited capitalism, it restricted liberty, restricted by too much groupism, too much collectivism too little liberty, too little self-realization: these stifling restrictions kept Americans and the West down and back. Altruist ethics keeps us looking back, and unable to go forward.
All of these conservative thinkers need my moderate, Mavellonialist ethical outlook of egoism-individualism as our primary ethical emphasis, and then an acknowledgement and acceptance of altruist-collectivist ethics as our secondary system of moral aims.
The self-esteem and self-love of anarchist indivudator supercitizens has nothing to do with selfishness and evil, and everything to do with love of goodness, spiritual and moral, the love of God, the self, and others, that lifts all boats morally, allowing eventually the children of light to rule this world.
Like Cunningham, we need to agree that we are all sinners is the place to start. He is mistaken in conflating self-esteem with narcissism. It is not those that esteem themselves that are selfish, evil, and narcissistic: that belongs to the altruists the fail to self-realize and individual live, and conservative thinkers need Mavellonialist and Randian corrections to their moral thinking to help us find our way out of this hopelessly, confused moral description of what people are and how they work.
The collectivists are the ones that see themselves as blameless victims and that narcissistic, selfish, mendacious outlook is groupist, the ugly, worst effect from the altruistic motive to act. They seek to cancel others that are not groupists, but those that live and speak out as individualists.
Rufo: Graham is right. The primary reason we are seeing the Cluster B Society is the collapse of authority, including crucially, the collapse of religious authority. The therapeutic replacement is disastrously unprepared for governing a society. It is circular, one-dimensional, and incapable of imposing rational limits . . . R.E. Nichols reminds us that while the film focuses on the consequences of ‘overly feminized institutions,’ our society seems to have lost many of the redeeming qualities of the feminine archetype.
There are a number of traditionally feminine traits that our society lacks. Humility, patience, gentleness, kindness, mercy. Toxic femininity is what has taken over. I think of wicked queens and witches from fairy tales.
This is an important point that should be emphasized. Both male and female archetypes contain a combination of good and bad traits. For example, men can serve as protectors who defend the vulnerable—or they can act as tyrants who exploit the weak for their own ends.
The essential problem that we face in our institutions is an imbalance, not only between the masculine and the feminine but also between the healthy and the pathological.”
My response: Rufo demonstrates his moderate wise, kind approach to political, societal, institutional and--by extension--personal self-reform, as in need of sensible balance of opposing character extremes in character, behavior, outlook and programming, the need to balance the feminine and masculine with each other, seeking to blend their positive character traits without overindulging in their negative character traits. Rufo also wants balance maintained between the healthy (the moderate, individual, and rational approach to problem-solving versus narcissistic, radicalized, passionate, hysterical responding that leans pathological).
What Rufo and Jordan Peterson do not offer that would help us move away from corrupt, tyrannical institutions and hierarchies towards democratic institutions and as flattened a set of hierarchies is my suggestion that we populate all hierarchies and institutions with individuating supercitizens at all levels of these formal structures. Nothing else will so bring about reform and healthy to these centers of pathology.
Rufo: “Larry offers some thoughtful criticism and a reflection on how these personality traits replicate through social responses:
My approach would be to see the attacks on our society as the result of lowering in emotional tone across the board, which triggers different behaviors depending on the exact line of experience of each person who succumbs to it. The emotional tone that is most dangerous is fear . . .”
My response: If the individuating supercitizen becomes common, this paragon of calmness and practical common sense, especially serving as the majority of citizens mulling over public policy, their intelligence and powerful resistance to fear and being stampeded by demagogue cracking the whip over their heads and upon their backs—they would reach back and grab the whips out of the hands of their cruel, clever tormentors and herders—will help calm down the public so that it can endure and persist with civility, non-panic and thoughtful versatility, to adopt ways to handle whatever problems come up
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