Spook Psychology
modeling the mindset murdering the American Dream
In the end, he couldn't quite make sense of it; he couldn't accept living in that epistemic fog we must all inhabit; he reached for more certainty than he could have; and it drove him mad. -John Carter
In some ways the world is very complicated. If you try to make sense of it in those ways, it’ll just make you want to set yourself on fire. In other ways, it is simple. Those simple ways involve considering fundamental principles that facilitate the employment of heuristics that encapsulate complexity allowing you to communicate with the world more effectively. Put more plainly, there are mental shortcuts you can use to better understand the world for practical purposes. I recently advanced the heuristic that liberalism is simply camouflage for Political Realism. This heuristic serves as a mental shortcut that can be employed when confronted with claims that a given policy intends to serve the oppressed or promote equality. You can save yourself the cognitive resources required to evaluate the sincerity of any such rationale on a case-by-case basis because it is de facto insincere everywhere and always. The fundamental and incontrovertible principle that all human action is reducible to self-interest assures us of this a priori.1 To continue with this theme of advancing heuristics useful in the Mindwar, I’ll use this article to model the psychology of a quintessential Spook. What motivates these people, and why can we be certain a priori that if they get their way the American Dream will die a final death beyond any capacity for resurrection?
Heroes of the American Nightmare
To model the psychology of any group of people, especially our enemies, we must recognize that they see themselves as the heroes of their own story.2 If we allow ourselves the delusion of painting those with fundamentally opposing values as fully and openly embracing evil, we can never truly understand them as this type of psychology is rare in the human condition.3 This leaves us to consider a group of people who must believe on some fundamental level in an abstruse “greater good” to justify the lies, treachery, deceit, and duplicity that neurotypical Westerners rightly consider abhorrent. Just as liberalism launders a pursuit of self-interest that is obviously corrosive to Western social order as noble and necessary, the spook class launders irredeemable character flaws as indispensable weapons in service of a greater good. In a Western culture fixated on honor, the spooky professions draw those most sensitive to social status with the most traditionally dishonorable character like shit draws flies. Their only alternative is to destroy foundations of Western normative values. Unfortunately for us many of the spooks are hedging their bets by adopting both strategies concurrently, but that is another story.
Lies in Service of…
While the liberalism heuristic previously described is useful to help clarify the true nature of the political and disabuse normies of the ironically self-serving notion of altruism, this won’t apply to spooks. Spooks see themselves as above the normie justifications for violating natural law inherent to liberalism. When spooks violate natural law, they tend to understand that they are hurting people, but that this is justifiable given a very sophisticated rationale that non-spooks couldn’t ever hope to understand. To illustrate this point lets examine a spook featured prominently in media headlines recently, Katherine Maher:
If you’re using an unsophisticated model of spook psychology you might write this kind of thing off as a typical longhouse preference for “security” over freedom. Maher isn’t a normie longhouse warden, though, she is a spook. She understands all too well the value of freedom of expression and how domestic dissidents depend on these vectors to achieve political change. This is in fact the reason she sees 1A as a challenge to her “noble” objective of shielding the regime from widespread popular opposition.
The heuristic of rules for thee and not for me that Benz describes above can be applied broadly to all of spook psychology. As a rule, they believe they have special knowledge that broadly justifies a deficiency of character that any true Westman reflexively considers with disgust and contempt. As is their way, they reframe their character as serviceable to an abstruse greater good that they’ll never rigorously define. This is where terms like “rules-based international order” come from. What does that mean? Really it is a complex rationalization that allows these repugnant cretins to enjoy the status they crave without having to rectify their cosmic deficiencies. This isn’t how the spooks see it of course. They use the health and wealth of “democratic institutions” as a proxy for the “greater good” because it is superficially plausible.
Institutions over People
Since the typical Westerner rightly despises the spooks actively working to rob them of their birth right, spooks must be very creative to justify all manner of subjugation, subversion, and harassment they feel compelled to heap upon the American people they ostensibly serve. The proxy of “democratic institutions” performs this function famously.4 Given this framing, foreign meddling that sucks the lifeblood out of the American heartland to ensure the deals set up by State and the IC for large multinational corporations like Shell, Exxon Mobile, and Halliburton are as profitable as possible is both rational and righteous. If these institutions are successful that is all that matters. It isn’t just that the American people don’t matter, though. They are in fact the principle threat to this continued parasitism. This is why you won’t ever find a spook critical of FISA. FISA is how the spooks cut down any opposition to the hegemony of “democratic institutions.” Just as Westmen may be tempted to conceive of spooks as some combination of evil and stupid, they are no doubt tempted to do the same in return. They find it easy to write off those simply advocating for their own interests as backwards bible-thumping, gun-toting rednecks incapable of seeing the bigger picture. The more charitable among the spooks hope their enemies can evolve to appreciate the supremacy of institutions over their own primitive preferences while others simply wish to see any they regard as inferior exterminated.
Closing Thoughts
The basic psychological profile of a spook is a status-obsessed moral retard with sufficient narcissism to dismiss all class enemies as unsophisticated ignoramuses. Their sensitivity to status ensures they will typically espouse the full gamut of luxury beliefs which will most often coincide with superficial Progressive Eye worship. Unlike their normie counterparts, spooks will be more likely to embrace taboo ideas like centrally imposed eugenics as they believe they have secret knowledge of some ends that justify publicly indefensible means. This applies to the policies they support as well, and explains why the public justifications for the policies they advance are so transparently ridiculous. For example, they know very well Putin has no intention of taking all of Europe, but they can’t justify sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Slavs and trillions of taxpayer dollars with the promise of profitable business deals for globohomo.
It is possible spooks have better justifications than I can imagine, but I doubt it. The disclosed history of the CIA reveals a legacy of ashes. It would be foolish to assume anything has changed given the incentives at play and overall cultural context has only decayed in the current and still classified era. I expect the unredacted truth of exactly who these people are and what they have done would be enraging to those with Western sensibilities. They have a convenient predicate to ensure that we never do find out. We’ve already seen that this predicate carries more water for them than the Constitution as demonstrated by Edward Snowden. The courts ruled what he revealed was unconstitutional, and so all Westmen should appreciate what he did, but he is of course reviled by the spooks. It all makes perfect sense, its also just very unfortunate having to witness a beautiful dream borne of eons of hard work and perseverance being twisted into a horrific nightmare.
Those familiar with Ludwig von Mises’ Praxeology may recognize this as the action axiom restated.
Though people may exist who rationalize their actions with internal narratives where they are the villain, it is pointless to consider this type as a part of any group analysis, as they will necessarily transgress the norms of that group.
Good xitter thread expanding on this: https://x.com/Bob_Lob_Law99/status/1773833696854049039
This post reminded me of a David Rockefeller quote. Rockefeller had deep CIA ties, of course: https://thegrayzone.com/2017/03/21/david-rockefeller-us-foreign-policy-cia-kissinger/
Here's the quote: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."
In the quote we see all the traits you mentioned -- Rockefeller as the hero of his own narrative, a glib arrogance and aggression, a hatred of national populism, the necessity of quiet conspiracy so the masses wouldn't wake up...whatever perspective is necessary so he and his friends stay in power and everyone else stays out of it...
Also, there is something about what we think of as an "evil" personality -- they tend to deny their own darkness. In Jungian terms humans becomes more whole and complete when we acknowledge our unconscious/subconscious desire and beliefs which regularly are dark and disturbing -- by bring the darkness into the light, by acknowledging and incorporating it, we ascend to another level of personal and spiritual development.
By denying their own darkness, though, these "evil" types tend to subconsciously project their own traits onto their hapless enemies. As Scott M. Peck states in People of the Lie, p.73-75, "A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection....Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad….In The Road Less Traveled I defined evil "as the exercise of political power - that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion - in order to avoid...spiritual growth". In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one's need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our own imperfection....Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social norms and what others might think of them....the words "image," "appearance," and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their "goodness" is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the ‘people of the lie.’”
Also, p. 119: “Evil [is] defined as the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves. In short, it is scapegoating. [The evil] scapegoat not the strong but the weak. For the evil to misuse their power, they must have the power to use it in the first place. They must have some kind of dominion over their victims.”