Our bad actors

What we don’t seem to understand clearly enough to form social agreements is that bad actors are twisting our information architectures: between people, culturally, socially, in our economics, and in our laws. They have a well-formed future-sense; what seems to be a talent for navigating complex information pathways intuitively; and/or an absolutely trust in the win/lose dichotomy. They don’t see people as people, but as information constructs that is no big whoop when they disappear or are subsumed.

That "disappear" or "subsumed" often translate to "died" is just gravy; that particular informational nuisance won't crop up again, and will chill similar constructs.

People are nothing more than a book for them to read and burn. They will twist and obfuscate the environment and reframe scope to always be the acted-upon, never the actor. They are not the one who were wrong; they were acting on trusted-but-wrong information. It's your fault they were wrong, it's your fault you were hurt, it's your fault whatever they do, unless they are winning.

When thwarted, those bad actors attempting to achieve their future-sense escalate. When unheeded, those who don’t believe or agree enough to comply are lashed out at with equal or heightened force, according to the bad actor's stress and sense of safety-removed. Anything that doesn't set up their 'winning' as the only available future tense degrades their safety.

The key problem here is that we have codified where escalation is right and good. It usually follows social hierarchy. The expectation is that the dominant point in the hierarchy is “just” getting people into line — it’s an order issue. To be clear, fairness and harm are not order, and are not honored. That they aren’t honoring the lived experiences of fully fledged humans is deprioritized to the information hierarchy; those experiences are thrown away as outside of the relevant order. When those fully-fledged humans respond with stubborn recalcitrance, equal force, or a get-out-of-my-face escalation, they are painted as troublemakers, at best. 

In other words, the actions are signifiers: people reach for them as natural tendencies, as training, or as last-ditch recourse. Discerning which usually involves narrative and perceptual truth, which is often skewed by social order. So once the bad actors are in charge, there is no stopping them without reaching for the same tools they use without hesitation.

It is not the escalation that is the tipping point; it’s once again our bad actors, our dark triad.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to our bad actors.

Their behavior spreads. Not because, suddenly, Carroll and Pat have become a psychopath, or sadist, or narcissist, or machiavellian; but, because they have to deal with one. Someone, somewhere in their midst, are using these tactics and 'winning', and convincing them that they, too, need to win. Or they are dealing directly with one, have been burned, and are now burning the next person because, "this is the world now."

The behavior itself isn't steelclad evidence. It's a harbinger. Only the continued pattern building is important. And the truth is, that the pattern is hard to live with. Whether or not they can change is a future question, not a present decision point. If they're stuck, you break away and you shun them. They are shunning based on the easy answer of skin color, age, gender, a lack of willingness to let them manipulation your information interpretation, etc. When dealing with them, we are shunning based on the difficult-to-get-to answers of patterns over time. Yet shunning — making them non-impactful — is the only way to deal with them effectively.

This entire book is a hypothesis. I cannot stress enough that this section of this page is an opinion.

Where the whole of dark triad behavior and impact finally hang together is when I think about the dark triad as manipulating our information states.

Let that sink in, thinking about everything else I've written, how complex it is, how much I basically said, "this is what I understand, it's a strata, go read in these disciplines." Think about how much it is truly only models and hypothesis of how it seems to hang together based on my decades of asking what I considered the key questions. And again: I have a hammer.

If you think about the models of this book as a whole, the dark triad are doing three big shifts compared to the most of us. They are seemingly:

Most of us are muddling through our who-ness while trying to maintain a personal sense of integrity, because it helps us feel consistent, personally; and eases our management of our ouruborus of perception. That integrity — that consistency — is more or less 'read' by the people around us. Right or wrong or somewhere in between; tightly lensed or holistic or somewhere in between: we each of us use our ouruborus of perception to try to suss out who might be dealing with information and people with integrity. We are trying to suss out who we can trust. The process is self-awareness -> you-awareness -> time => trust.

Dark triad wants to early-load that trust. They will skew the presentation / optics of their who-ness to fit better with another's who-ness to get it. Once the trust is there, they work hard to skew the evolution of fantasy-to-quality-truth. Then they screw with the information architecture — both in data and cognition. The process is you-awareness -> trust => perception access. It's a data-enabled illusion, bypassing time, focused on their impression on you instead of the integrity of their self-awareness.

The people they are manipulating are nothing more than data to them. There is no or highly limited empathy involved while they are developing their access to your perception. It is a discontinuity on par with their discontinuity in the fantasy-to-quality-truth spectrum.

To be clear, we all do this to a certain degree, especially early on in our interactions with others and as we've gone deeper and deeper into a culture built on top of social media. We've all be burned, and are working towards minimizing further burning, while trying to find people who get excited about what excites us. We can't do that unless we are focused on you-awareness.

Our information technology, as it exists today, is predisposed to support this discontinuity. Data transparency is in the wrong places, and towards the wrong people. While the vast bulk of us are wandering around like we have been for generations, the few who are predisposed to these behaviors have easy access to exactly the kind of data that enables their access to perception.

They are defining how the technology is being used, and where it's being developed more deeply.

Until the data that describes people are wrested back into their individual control to decide who can see it, with their specific approval, culture and society will continue to skew to favor the dark triad.

Psychology, heavily influenced by Robert D. Hare, specifically.

bad actors:
future-sense, hierarchy from network, prioritization, top-down