Liberals, Amygdala Hijacks, And How The Amygdala Scans Ideas

If ever a website had a big hairy carbuncle hanging off the cheek of its ass, our Sam Eip is it. But his comments are pure gold for the student of leftist/SJW thought patterns.

Below is a comment he posted, followed by an analysis.

“The criminal mainstream media? Isn’t that rather cliché, the mainstream media is a criminal organization? Could it be perhaps that you are out of sync with the mainstream? There is nothing criminal about that. Am I any closer to understanding the OP when I surmise that our amygdala drives us to fantasize about shooting those that we’re out of sync with?

Don’t you suspect that it’s time to stop being a little crybaby and grow up? There are all kinds of media. What is the mainstream media, the most prevalent common consensus? Are you really going to tell me that you and you’re like-minded buddies are being exploited by a criminal enterprise that spreads misinformation for the sake of some masked illuminati? Do you really think that you and your buddies are really smart and nobody else can keep up with you? Is that your view of society?

Face it; the facts are right in front of you. Donald Trump is the result of a corrupt political party that panders to misfits. For ten years we’ve had the Tea Party where you can’t be republican enough. First there were the Rinos and now there are the Cuckservatives. Any hint of compromise or concession spells defeat. Hence Donald Trump is your candidate. We’ll let me tell you something: he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance. Come November 8 the election is going to be over by 11:00 PM Eastern Time; just like in 2012. The media isn’t going to tell you that because they can’t afford to be accused of causing people to stay home. They can’t be held responsible for any party losing the election. On Election Day morning they are going to tell you that it is going to be a close race but, trust me; it will all be over as soon as the polls close in California. Donald Trump the president??? Bwaaah!!!

Of course you will accuse the mainstream media and everybody else of being blindsided by a secret society of fuzzy rabbit fairy faggots and continue fantasizing about shooting liberals in compensation for your lost hopes and dreams. Let me ask you quite frankly what do you think is going to happen if Donald Trump is elected? What’s he going to do; mail you a winning lottery ticket?”

I love these comments, because they are a great exercise in profiling people through the text they write. To do that, you need to understand the process by which the text above came to be written on the page.

Sam is operating from the emotional, rather than unemotional/logical perspective. He hates us, or rather his amygdala is enraged by the triggering ideas/concepts we present to it, and that drives him to seek relief by trying to hurt us. He can’t really do anything but write words on a page, so he is trying to inflict pain through these words to give vent to his amygdala.

The way he does this is wholly projecting. That is, he tries to see himself in our place, and imagine what would hurt him the most, if he were us. He then hones what he writes, imagining it being said to him, and trying to imagine how to maximize the mental pain it inflicts. I assume he adds pieces there, changes wordings here, each time rereading it, trying to visualize himself reading it, and trying to maximize the hurt. I recognize it because I do the same thing with my writings, though I am trying to harken back to my less-understanding self, and perceive the best way to make that old me believe an idea I know I would have viewed as ridiculous back then.

This “trying to maximize the hurt,” is similar to a trait of narcissists, which is, essentially, “I want you to be hurt like I am.” They tell themselves it is so you will understand their plight better, but it isn’t. It has a much darker origin. Visualize it accurately, and your brain will actually feel dirty.

It never seems to dawn on Sam that we think differently. We don’t seek out liberal websites to barge into and begin attacking people. Indeed, nobody even bothers to respond to him, because what he says has no effect on us. To us this is like a two year old trying to taunt Arnold Schwarzenegger as he walks by the playground. But Sam believes it will savage us, and because of that, we get an unusually clear window into his mind, his amygdala, and what would trigger it the most.

Since the amygdala is really, in a very real sense, the seat of personality and the organ which drives action, this is almost a totally free, unfettered window into his soul – and what formed it – if you can visualize how such amygdala pathways would be laid.

It is a little complex, but if you practice, you can get scary close to reality, because the mechanism you are examining is as mechanical, with clear cause and effect, as gears in a clocktower. The key is grasping the amygdala, and how it works.

Now, the analysis:

“Could it be perhaps that you are out of sync with the mainstream?”

You will see this throughout his writings. This, to him, is exposing an amygdala bombshell. If you exposed him as “outside the mainstream,” it would elicit reflexive waves of angst, terror, and misery. For him, being on the outside is associated with agony. That is why he put this here. Remember “out-grouping,” in Touching the Raw Amygdala? This is it.

Since deep amygdala pathways are either laid through isolated, but massive and shocking stimuli, or minor, but highly repeated stimuli, and they are best inculcated in childhood instead of maturity, you can usually assume the trigger you see was most likely created repetitively, when the individual was young. Larger stimuli, or stimuli repeated enough in adulthood to burn in these pathways are far more rare, than small stimuli seen often when young.

So here, Sam was conditioned to feel aversive stimulus whenever he let himself be “outside the group.” It speaks to a childhood spent around bullies, and his coping mechanism was to try and disappear into the crowd, which was controlled by the bully. When he was under the bully, in the bully’s group, he felt safety. When the group was focused on someone else, he felt safety. If he were thrown outside the group he felt horror. The amygdala learns from precisely that type of thing. Now, that simple picture – being outside the group – is a trigger.

Once you are in that milieu, it is a small jump to realize that if you can cast someone else out of the group, and expose them to that terror, it would feel good to do it to anyone who bothered you. From there, it is a small jump to being conditioned to feel good about doing it, even to people whom you don’t really care about.

The amygdala is funny like that. It can guide you with such imperceptible cognitive pushes, that you will be convinced it was your logic and intellect moving you all along. Next thing you know you are seeking out strangers online to tell them they are outside the mainstream, and that is relieving, because your brain is telling itself that now it is safe. Once the pathways are burned in, the actions and expectations are more important than reality.

Now you have an individual who reflexively falls into line under bullies, while seeking to inflict misery on the people who stimulate his amygdala, by getting the bully and the group to see them as outsiders. Like a dog raised in a cage, never knowing freedom, that is now your willful destiny. Even with the cage door open, you won’t leave.

Once you are such a bully-slave, nothing will enrage you like the sight of a happy, free man. I almost deleted that sentence, because where it approaches is so dark and dirty I am still not sure I want a reader to go there by trying to see themselves feeling those emotions for others. It is a really dark, unhappy place. Just imagining it feels like it could blacken your heart.

Of course, if you are kind of an individualist, who was never bullied, and who would view taking on a group as merely making things interesting, this type of hijack will not have any effect on you.

As I delve into persuasion, I find there is a clear difference between what persuades K-strategists, and what persuades r’s. If I didn’t understand how Narcissists think so completely, this, and its triggering purpose, would go right over my head. But if I was a rabbit, this is my language and I am stricken.

“Am I any closer to understanding the OP when I surmise that our amygdala drives us to fantasize about shooting those that we’re out of sync with?”

The association of the concept of fantasy (and the associated impossibility), with taking action to take power, is supposed to make us feel that any idea of us ever having any power is impossible and total fantasy. This is an amygdala hijack based on exploiting an innate feeling of helplessness. Imagine the mind which hears that any idea they might ever be strong is a fantasy, and which immediately collapses into a morass of depression and apathy.

This is the bully-slave’s conundrum in childhood, and it conditions this amygdala trigger constantly as they grow up. They accept safety, in return for always being the bully’s slave – and that ingrained powerlessness gnaws at them all through their lives. To the point that if you point out to them in adulthood that they will never have any power themselves, and will always be impotent peons, it is immensely triggering.

That was conditioned through an entire childhood not just recognizing their own helplessness, but hating it, even as they willingly and gratefully accepted it to save themselves. Being stuck in that state for decades makes them a vastly different person from us. You can see how a self-hate could emerge from that, as well as triggers set off by the unpleasant thoughts and concepts that they were always prone to drift to.

Remember in Touching the Raw Amygdala, Mike Wallace, laying out on the battlefield wounded? Imagine him, one foot crammed up under an armpit, one arm jutting up in the air crooked and swinging in the wind, intestines spilling out of his stomach, impotent and helpless as he cranes his head around with its broken jaw swinging back and forth. And there is Colonel Connell, calmly looking out over the battlefield through binoculars – the only one who Mike Wallace would look to, who could walk out onto that battlefield fearlessly and save him.

Mike Wallace saw his own cowardly powerlessness contrasted with Colonel Connell’s fearless power. It drove home the fantasy that was the idea of Mike Wallace ever being powerful like that. He would always be that helpless peon on the battlefield, needing other men to save him. It added in the idea of Wallace being outside the group’s protection. The result was that blank, vacant, glassy-eye’d stare of the suicidal, that Mike Wallace wore at the end of that interview.

Wallace, as the piece pointed out, was bullied mercilessly as a child. Obviously he chose the safety of the group, and years later anything else was such pain he would literally try suicide rather than face it.

There is a sort of Satanic/Demonic theme here, but I will leave that to the readers to contemplate.

“Don’t you suspect that it’s time to stop being a little crybaby and grow up?”

Where did these pathways originate again? Adult logic? Reasoned adult intellect? Or repetitively reliving the agonies of the playground, and trying to inflict those same agonies on others with words? This also tells you he cried.

I could go on with this theme. “Mainstream” is italicized to draw attention to it, emphasizing he is in the mainstream, safe, and we are on the outside, which should terrify us. RINO is italicized too, to draw attention to it and connect it to mainstream, and on, and on. We are on the outside of such a big group made of so many types that our cowardice should make us feel terror.

“Do you really think that you and your buddies are really smart and nobody else can keep up with you?”

This was funny. He has a thing for the really smart, and assumes others are faking it, meaning he was not among them growing up. Vox Day once said something like, “When I run into someone, and they tell me they are a genius, my immediate gut reaction is, ‘Oh, look at that – he’s one too!’ ”

If you are smart, you will tend to project, and assume everyone you meet may be smart like you. If you are not smart, you assume everyone you meet is not smart, and anybody who is, must be pretending. If you are pretending, it will not be long before being called out is an amygdala trigger for you, and not much longer before you are trying to use that trigger against the smart people you run into, and assuming you are savaging them with the panic of exposure.

Clearly here, having it pointed out that he is not smart should send the commenter Sam was addressing into a tailspin, because he has known it all along, and the very idea of being exposed is triggering. Sam knows that because he has tested all of this on himself.

“Face it; the facts are right in front of you. ”

Think about this one. What would a liberal, conditioned to be the bully’s handmaiden, even though he hates it and it is crushing his soul, be most afraid of?

“Face it!” “The truth is right in front of you!” “You can’t get away from it!”

For them, that is all amygdala trigger. They want to hide in that group, under the bully’s protection. They want that security. They do not want to have to face anything. As the flow of logic passes by, the amygdala grabs that concept of direct confrontation and “bang!”

The Donald Trump stuff is just accumulated pressures building that finally had an opportunity to vent. He is telling you that Donald is well under his skin, and trying to use the techniques which would hurt him most effectively, ie making it seem hopeless to support Donald.

One interesting part of that:

“The media isn’t going to tell you that because they can’t afford to be accused of causing people to stay home. They can’t be held responsible for any party losing the election.”

Notice how if we doubt the media, we are out of the mainstream, and that is a trigger. But here he needs to disbelieve the media, because if Trump is nearly tied, then Sam will have an aneurism. And yet he needs that mainstream media approval too, because he can’t be on the outside. The media needs to be on his side, and wrong, at the same time.

That is how amygdala-triggers guide perceptions of reality. He has no evidence the media is afraid of affecting the election. In his logic, if Hillary were at 98 percent, and Trump were at 2, they would not report it to avoid influencing the election to help Hillary. So in his head, the media believes what he believes, and is on his side. They are just lying for noble reasons, and saying something else because they have to. It is beyond ridiculous, but if that is the only way to avoid being triggered, he will believe it. His programming from childhood demands it, so his brain navigates that logical labyrinth, and tells itself it was a straight line.

The amygdala guides all leftist thought, and has no problem stomping all over logic, reason, and even consistency. The leftist is a big ball of neurotic mess, trying to find an internally justifiable path to a safe conclusion to quiet an anxious amygdala.

“Let me ask you quite frankly what do you think is going to happen if Donald Trump is elected? What’s he going to do; mail you a winning lottery ticket?”

The most interesting part of the piece. On first reading, I was like “lottery ticket? WTF did that come from?” If I didn’t know how carefully he crafts these pieces, it would have slipped by. But you know it triggered him somehow. So how?

Free resources? Maybe a little, but not much.

The concept of the lottery ticket is the ultimate dream, especially for rabbits. What he is doing is trying to trigger Dave with a stimulus which lights up his brain with the idea that your dreams are impossible. That would depress his brain, and screw him all up.

Think about it, because this is key. The cogent, logical flow of ideas, or the honesty of them, or the correctness of their interrelations, isn’t what his amygdala is scanning. What his amygdala is scanning is one small constellation of circuits which light together, after another, as the flow of ideas pass by the amygdala. One small, raw, snippet of a physical idea, after another. The amygdala is looking for one small constellation of circuits which are lit up together as part of a concept – and which are associated with amygdala pain in the past – even though your conscious brain doesn’t see the ideas that way as it follows the broader logical argument.

In essence, the amygdala is looking for small, “twig snapping” mental images, that in the past have flashed through it just before the bully punched him in the nose, or the group held him down and fed him grass, or his big opportunity flamed out, or something else.

You hear : “Even if Donald Trump wins, him sending you a winning lottery ticket is ridiculous, and never going to happen.”

You don’t care, because Donald sending you a few hundred million isn’t your goal, nor would it ever be. You almost completely ignore the phrase.

Your amygdala sees a constellation of momentarily lit up neural circuits which hold the concept that, “Your-dreams-are-impossible/you-will-fail.”

It doesn’t affect us, because our amygdala doesn’t recognize that constellation/pattern of neurons firing. We have never thought that specific concept, lit up those neurons together, and then been devastated mentally, so our amygdala doesn’t recognize it, doesn’t flag it, and doesn’t crush us. That pattern flows right by the amygdala, ignored. But to Sam, that was a killer.

Isn’t that weird? That is how narcissists (and the leftist) “think.” The world is merely a series of hidden dogwhistles and unseen silent alarms that their amygdala flags as they flow by, by triggering panic, dread, fear, rage, and so on.

I would imagine each amygdala flag wholly interrupts actual conscious thought the same way a rampaging lion bursting into an auditorium might interrupt a train of thought being expressed in a roundtable discussion. It is why when he saw himself powerless, Mike Wallace suddenly lost the ability to argue for letting troops get killed, and sunk into a painful depression. His amygdala was hit by a small idea nobody else even noticed, and yet that was it for him. Game over.

Imagine trying to process long, complex lines of logic, when that is how your brain is processing the world. Is it any wonder politicians, in exasperation proclaim, “Oh just raise the debt ceiling already!” Logical thought is impossible among our r-ified leadership.

Yes my dear reader, civilization really is, in the long run, that doomed.

This last interchange means Sam has had lofty dreams all his life which he pinned all his hopes on, and then he watched in horror as each one failed miserably. It probably began with the dream of being the leader of his bully’s group, which he knew was impossible once he caved under the bully and let his every decision be determined by fear.

The rest of his childhood was spent looking at the happy people, and raging at his own circumstances, knowing that in capitulating to the bully, his eternal fate as a cowardly peon was sealed. Every time he thought of this, his mind drifted to that constellation of neural firings, and he got a shock.

Now as an adult his amygdala scans his mind’s thoughts and zaps him when that constellation indicating that dreams-only-fail, passes by. It really is soul-affecting. That cognitive modeling may even be why all his subsequent dreams have failed. It can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Now he hangs here with people he hates, hoping somebody will give him a reply to some comment, rather than getting out and creating the next big start-up.

He has probably also watched these failures while watching people around him, who he judged inferior, effortlessly soar and leave him behind. Enter Envy, hatred for the successful, and yet more soul-crushing, as well as a relative-inferiority amygdala hijack trigger.

It would have taken a lot of repetition to burn the pathway in so deeply that it would emerge in him when presented that subconsciously. But what you know, is that he read that line, and maybe didn’t even know exactly why, but his brain shocked him as if he was having electroshock therapy on his amygdala. I am sure he said to himself, “That is pure gold!”

The commenter he was replying to, I am sure, was just a wreck after reading it all and that is why he didn’t reply.

Either that, or it all seemed kind of weird and pointless to him.

Our enemies tell us about them every time they open their mouths. Listen, think, and puzzle over the material.

If you can grasp it, and learn to attach amygdala triggers to ideas you don’t like while offering the only path of cognitive relief to be your chosen thoughts, you can manipulate the leftist thought process, forcing them to adopt your ideas.

And if that fails, you can use these tools to torture them and make them suffer.