A Seminal Connexion to the Collective Unconscious of Stupidity

I notice there's been a sharp increase in stupid posts and comments on both philosophy and real_philosophy. Here are just a few things that have popped up out of the woodwork in the last week:

• You have this arrogant Objectivist monkey who seemingly came out of nowhere.



• There's this guy who might not actually be that stupid, but his post definitely generated a lot of stupid comments and pointless back-and-forths.



• Then you have this moron who thinks he's clever because he's used propositional logic to refute Plato. (He's so smart that he doesn't realize you need predicate logic to properly represent the argument.)



• On top of that you have the usual stupid shit from 4inquiries aka mucilofamucil.



• The post was deleted (after it was up for three or four days), but some hippie shithead posted this garbage to real_philosophy last week. I thought the person couldn't possibly be for real, but it turns out he is.

What I'm wondering is, why do the communities remain quiet for so long, only to suddenly erupt with stupid posts? Why is this happening now as opposed to a few weeks ago?

I'd like to present to you a possible explanation for why this is taking place. For simplicity sake, we'll call this "The apperception and zentiger Hypothesis: A Seminal Connexion to the Collective Unconscious of Stupidity". Allow me to explain.

According to our hypothesis, once the fall semester starts in September, all the white, privileged philosophy boys start feeling smart and important, so now they have lots to contribute to the communities.

In the summer, they're too busy trying to get laid. Not only have they been too busy to think about philosophy, but this entire time, their inability to get laid has actually forced the semen to back up within their bodies. The semen gets into the brain itself, in between the neurons in the prefrontal cortex (the center of manners and higher thought processes), keeping them from firing. All rational, reflective thought processes -- assuming they were there to begin with -- cease. So by the time September comes around, only the reptilian portion of the brain is working.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Because the rational thought processes are shut down and only the reptilian portion of the brain is functioning, they're actually more passive, more in touch with nature and the collective unconscious. In particular, they're in touch with a special part of the collective unconscious, one that Jung himself didn't know about. It's the part of the collective unconscious devoted to being a cocky philosophy kid who acts like he knows a lot more than he actually does.

You see, Jung theorized that each of us has an unconscious but also that each of us is connected to something called the "collective unconscious" which is a kind of shared repository of memories, histories, and even discrete persona which he called "archetypes". According to this theory, you can imagine each of us, not as discrete individuals existing absolutely independently of one another, but rather as the tips of the spokes of a wheel, all connected at the center.

Now our hypothesis is that some of these spokes terminate in a special region of the collective unconscious, the archetype of the horny, poorly socialized philosophy undergrad who fails miserably in every other portion of his life and so feels compelled to be a cocky little shit on the internet.

( Figure 1.1Collapse )

According to the apperception and zentiger Hypothesis, the connection to this archetype remains active to greater or lesser degrees throughout the year. The connection is most dormant at the beginning of the summer, after the student's sophistical abilities have been burnt out by finals. But over the course of the summer, the student, roused to more prurient interests by the oppressive July sun and the appearance of scantily clad women, suffers a build-up of semen. This semen works its way up through the student's body (since it has nowhere else to go) until it finally reaches the brain. Once the sperm has sufficiently worked its way into the prefrontal cortex and burnt out the higher functions of the brain, the reptilian brain can take over once again, thus reactivating the previously dormant connection with the rude, awful archetype.

Our hypothesis is that this happens universally amongst privileged, undergrad philosophy students, and this is why they all pop out of the woodwork at the same time, en masse.

ETA: It has recently come to our attention that kira_speaks is female, not male. Some may believe this disproves the hypothesis, but it does not. The hypothesis posits an explanation for the behavior of irritating male philosophy kids, but it does not purport to explain the behavior of irritating philosophy kids überhaupt. Nevertheless, this revelation has led zentiger to come up with the zentiger Corollary to the apperception and zentiger hypothesis:

Though, as all know, the most common cause of this unification with the Jungian archetype is biological, it is, in degenerate cases, possible to gain such a connection by creating a backup of similar material. The most obvious source of this material is, of course, Objectivism, which - again, as all know - is philosophically precisely equivalent to semen, and so can have the same effect on the rational processes of the brain.

That is, while kira_speaks does not have semen backing up into her brain, she does have Objectivism inside her brain, and this causes the same cessation of rational thought processes, thus igniting the connection the annoying archetype in the Jungian collective unconscious. Just think of Objectivism as if it were a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that doesn't kill the host but renders it more or less like a zombie in perpetuity.

Now, as it turns out, kira_speaks is home-schooled. (Heroes don't go to university.) This means that her popping out of the woodwork at this precise moment can't be explained by the commencement of the fall semester. But her action is intelligible if one keeps in mind that she is connected to the same portion of the collective unconscious as her fellow annoying philosophy asshats. kira_speaks, therefore, is responding neither to an excess of semen in the brain nor the particular time of the year but rather is responding to psychic signals transmitted to her by means of the spokes of the collective unconscious. This acausal connection is what Jung referred to as synchronicity. (It's sort of like when you're thinking about someone you haven't spoken to in ages, and all of the sudden the phone rings and it's that person.) What happens is, if you're really strongly connected to that archetype of the collective unconscious (as Objectivists always are, due to the brain damage and interest in abstract nonsense), then you will feel the pull, quite strongly in fact, to join in with your fellow morons in realizing pure philosophy doucheness.

So as it turns out, the fact that this individual is female actually supports The apperception & zentiger Hypothesis.