Tag: psychology

The Marketplace of the Broken

Posted on by Flag Bearer

The Harvesting of Childhood Wounds

Communities often carry unspoken layers of trauma, and the individuals within them are quietly shaped by these histories in ways that are not always obvious. Childhood trauma does not simply vanish; if left unresolved, it mutates, seeking new contexts in which to replay itself throughout adulthood. Even seemingly harmless hobbies and lifestyle choices, such as planning or aeroplane modelling, can carry this charge. These are not trivial quirks but patterned behaviours, because the mind recognises threats in structure, not in literal content. Evolutionary logic makes sense of this: it is safer to over-detect danger than to miss it, and repetition serves as protective rehearsal.

Online communities reveal this pattern at scale. What presents itself as shared interest is often a network of trauma-driven behaviour. Take the journalling and planner communities: on the surface, they are harmless hobby groups, sticker enthusiasts, stationery lovers, fountain pen aficionados. Yet beneath the carefully curated layouts lies a compulsion, a ritualistic display echoing unmet childhood needs for validation. This is where the symbols begin to speak. Their Superior Labor planning café totes stand in for school bags, and the oversized jumpers so often worn in this YouTube community evoke a little girl swallowed by clothing too large for her, a vulnerability hook designed to make the viewer want to protect her. Each calendar week spread is a Groundhog Day repetition, an attempt to quench the unrequited validation once sought from mothers and teachers in early childhood, showing mummy their crayon creations. It is a trauma response, a compulsion to recreate the past in order to process it and master it.

Beneath these behaviours lies a shared trauma narrative rooted in childhood neglect, invalidation, abandonment, or abuse. The way participants gather, plan, and create, often in infantile or fickle ways, makes it clear that productivity or creativity is seldom the goal. Unconsciously, they offer an adult version of a daycare arts corner, where planning sheets echo children’s school crayon drawings. The dominant behaviour is the ritualistic display itself: planners, stickers, pens, corner punches, and countless other accessories. Journal flip-throughs and haul videos dominate YouTube and TikTok, offering little practical information; their purpose is simply to trigger followers’ lust to encourage others to buy similar products or tools, which gives them a sense of mastery or completion over the trauma.

When watching these women, it becomes very apparent that childhood trauma doesn’t simply vanish with time; it mutates, latching onto new contexts and disguising itself in places that, on the surface, seem entirely innocuous. Trauma lays down patterns, not just memories. The child’s memory is trained to scan for threats, and once trained, it generalises. It does not matter if the new situation is harmless, the circuitry fires anyway, because it was built for survival, not accuracy. By dragging the past into new contexts, the mind tests whether danger is still present, running the same drills to prevent surprise.

These mechanisms endure even when the original sources of care were absent or insufficient: mothers occupied by work and household duties, daycare teachers stretched thin among dozens of children, unable to soothe every cry. The unacknowledged wounds of neglect or inattention are carried silently, often outside conscious awareness. In the digital age, these symbolic loops find new stages: the comment sections of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram become surrogate caregivers, spaces where the afflicted reach for validation and comfort. Here, they grasp for the words they never received as children: Tell me I am good. Tell me I matter. Tell me I am loved, validated, protected… Mummy.

This heartbreaking dynamic becomes even more poignant when considering the racial context. A high number of prominent planner influencers and followers are Black women, whose videos, TikToks, and planner-related businesses dominate the community, at least on my stream. Statistically, this demographic is also more likely to have experienced childhood trauma, fractured family systems, and institutional neglect or abuse. Their presence is particularly visible in a related community known as the Cash Envelope community, where childhood poverty and deprivation have transformed a simple budgeting method into a system of tens of binders holding countless cash envelopes stuffed with $1 notes, creating the illusion of volume. This excessive micromanagement of funds is less about financial control and more a reaction to chaotic homes and poverty-related trauma rooted in their upbringing.

The evolution of these communities, facilitated by the internet, makes it strikingly clear how widespread childhood deficits of security and validation are in Generations Y and Z, generations which have, coincidentally, been overwhelmingly raised in daycare centres and after-school care. These individuals have grown into a compulsive generation, driven by the need to satisfy their wounds through the display of purchasing habits or ideological signalling. Their desire knows no thematic boundaries: if it shines, they want it, not just because it glitters, but because they want to impress the world. Online communities have gathered these love-starved children and turned them into lust-driven cults, led not by people of remarkable qualities, but by facilitators of desire, consumerism’s pimps.

Childhood trauma tends to distort one’s sense of self, leaving identity fragmented or shaped by false selves developed to survive neglect or invalidation. Without a coherent sense of who they are, these individuals lack the internal narratives and boundaries that normally provide meaning and regulate desire. As a result, their pockets are emptied, not through purposeful choice, but through scattered, impulsive craving. Unlike someone who embraces a moderate planner style and resists every new distraction, they have no internal filter to decide what fits or what disrupts.

The behaviour of the journalling and planning community is mirrored across most online consumerist and ideological communities, often spiralling into competitive display and actively preventing members from developing and healing. Participants are encouraged to create, one-up, and endlessly refine their lives for likes and comments, fuelling a toxic arms race of consumption where authenticity is sacrificed for approval and status. The result is a subculture driven not by passion, creativity, or independent thought, but by the display of possession and the illusion of understanding, and, in ideological communities, even extremism, since challenging the system risks invalidation from followers.

While in smaller hobbyist communities the consequences of trauma-driven behaviours are often limited to the individual and their niche market, the underlying dynamics point to patterns that can scale as communities expand and exert wider influence. This broader influence is especially evident in ideological communities built around the consumption of concepts. Once amplified, these patterns shape norms, drive cultural trends, and ripple outward to affect the behaviour of countless others, eventually imprinting themselves on laws and morals. One such community is MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), where personal experiences of loss, rejection, or systemic frustration are channelled into a shared narrative that extends far beyond the self.

Beneath the surface rhetoric of independence and “walking away” lies unresolved grief. Many of these men carry the trauma of divorce, the loss of children, homes, and their identity as husbands or fathers, as well as the danger of investing in a child who is not their own. Others are haunted by a lifetime of rejection, never chosen, or only chosen for their money. The community becomes a surrogate shelter, a place where the wound is hardened into ideology. Its structure rests on the belief: “I am not at fault; the system or women are to blame.” This provides a sense of agency over chaos. Yet the structure is double-edged: it externalises grief and removes all accountability, preventing internal processing and perpetuating a cycle of resentment, transforming individual trauma into collective identity. What begins as a coping mechanism ossifies into dogma, allowing resentment, outrage, bitterness, hatred, and mistrust, left unchecked and collectivised and preyed upon by exploiters.

And just as MGTOW channels unresolved male trauma into collective identity, other communities, including contemporary feminist spaces, reveal a parallel process. While feminism attempts to projects strength, independence, and empowerment, much of its raw fuel stems from trauma imprinted in fractured childhoods. The absence of a nurturing father, or the presence of a stepfather who unconsciously resents his reproductive disadvantage in raising children who are not his own, or who desires to impregnate them to reclaim his genetic agency, instils hyper-vigilance, suspicion, and a persistent sense of threat. Girls raised in homes where the mother has taken in a boyfriend often grow into women for whom betrayal, suppression, and subtle emotional harm shape both their adult relationships and their view of the world.

Not all communities follow this pattern. Some create spaces where trauma is acknowledged, explored, and transformed, fostering personal growth rather than perpetuating cycles of projection. The carnivore movement provides a striking example. Often framed as rational health optimisation, it is deeply entwined with trauma related to the body. For many participants, this trauma originates in childhood or adulthood experiences of parental influence based on exploiters’ narratives or on their own naivety regarding the health and food industries. The body, once a source of shame, insecurity, pain, and disease, becomes both battleground and teacher. In this context, the diet evolves from a simple nutritional experiment into a symbolic exorcism, helping individuals reclaim control over a body that once felt chaotic, uncontrollable, or treacherous. The community establishes clear boundaries and cultivates a narrative of wounded flesh striving for redemption, mastery, and self-sovereignty.

What distinguishes this community is its implicit psychological architecture. Unlike ideological groups that externalise trauma into dogma or grievance, carnivore adherents largely work through their trauma via acknowledgement, accountability, progress, science, and community sharing, all of which provide repeated, structure and mastery. Each pound gained or lost, each adherence to a self-imposed rule, each remission, each obstacle overcome becomes a rehearsal of agency: a tangible demonstration of recalibrating from past helplessness to present efficacy. The trauma is largely acknowledged, processed, and contained rather than projected outward.

This inward focus makes the community unusually resilient, constructive, and compelling to both allies and observers. As a result, the group scales naturally: it is primed for rapid growth and success because its foundation rests on self-awareness, healing, and skill acquisition. Unlike communities driven by reactive and unconscious grievance, the carnivore network thrives by fostering mastery, promoting autonomy, and encouraging discourse. Here, trauma healing becomes the vector of growth, the more members engage consciously with their trauma, and their successes, the stronger and more enduring the collective becomes.

Communities such as MGTOW and feminism channel would greatly benefit from taking the Carnivore community’s approach instead of managing trauma by externalising danger. The “enemy” is named and contained, but understanding allows us to step outside the cycle. We need not be drawn into others’ unresolved wounds or project our own grievances onto the world. Trauma, left unprocessed, keeps us suspended in the past, effectively leaving many adults operating with the guidance and boundaries of children. Recognising these dynamics brings clarity. It explains why patterns repeat, why some groups implode into toxicity, and why others remain contained. Our psychology is primordial, our evolutionary wiring persistent, and understanding it allows us to navigate human behaviour with insight. Ultimately, every ritual, hobby, or ideology is a mirror. How we respond, with reflection, curiosity, and awareness, determines whether trauma continues to run us or whether we finally master the patterns that control our lives, our systems, and our culture.

Annabelle Fearn

The Curdled Melting Pot

Posted on by Flag Bearer

We have long accepted the notion that the West depends on skilled immigration to sustain its economies and address recurring labour shortages, a narrative repeatedly reinforced by the media, academia, governments, and correlation-based studies. It’s a convenient, self-contained construct, where the problem and solution are neatly packaged into one concept to prevent people from venturing beyond its confines.

Growing up through this immigration transition, I have witnessed four generations of non-European immigrants embed themselves into my Western ecosystems, reshaping its landscape. I’ve watched suburbs transform into brown, black, or yellow. I’ve seen shops evolve into stalls, malls into street markets, steakhouses into noodle joints, flower beds into garlic patches, and pet dogs into goats. Yet, the elites march on, arrogantly assuming no one will notice, even going so far as to rescript history.

From the Industrial Revolution to the birth of modern computing, the majority of technological breakthroughs have been overwhelmingly driven by native European innovators. Acknowledging this does not negate contributions from other races but does challenge the narrative that innovation is equally distributed across all cultures. And therein lies the issue, the prioritisation of ‘skilled’ immigration risks diluting the intellectual resources of developed nations while perpetuating the false narrative that credits technological progress to diversity.

Even if we accept the conclusions of these correlational studies at face value, that skilled immigration is associated with increased innovation in the West, it is worth interrogating what kind of innovation is actually being measured. The overwhelming majority of these studies rely heavily on patent counts as their primary metric. But does filing a patent for a minor technical tweak, for instance, moving the closure of a zipper from one side to the other,  truly constitute meaningful innovation, or is it merely a reworking of pre-existing ideas within a narrowly defined legal framework? And who’s to say that the studies’ report, say, a 4% increase in innovation in a Western multicultural segment, that in a more homogeneous society the increase wouldn’t have been 6%, 8%, 10%, or even 2%? In this context, the 4% figure is largely meaningless. If our measures of progress are so granular and procedural, then an apparent rise in innovation may mask stagnation in genuinely groundbreaking or transformative technological advances.

This concern becomes even more pressing when set against the backdrop of declining academic standards, literacy, and numeracy across the West. PISA and OECD data show that both students and adults are performing more poorly in reading, math, and problem-solving than in previous decades, suggesting that the intellectual foundation necessary for truly original innovation is weakening even as patent counts rise.

If the evidence is so inconclusive, then why do Western governments permit, even encourage, the immigration of non-Western workers who, as a group, may be retarding technological progress? The answer appears to lie more in broader strategic considerations than in the purported economic or innovation gaps.

To understand the schemes at play, certain concepts must first be clarified, one of which is the technocrats’ leverage. In a globalised economy, multinational corporations and influential business leaders wield extraordinary power over national economies. If Western nations were to restrict immigration, elites could, and have, relocated operations to countries offering cheaper labour and fewer regulatory constraints, using global mobility to maintain strategic advantage.

The recent Musk-H1B controversy on X seems to fit squarely within this framework. Western governments permit ‘skilled migrants’ to enter our countries to effectively devalue high-paying roles as leverage to dissuade industries from relocating abroad. Simultaneously, these opportunities help our nations strengthen their alliances by assisting in building a technically skilled ethnic workforces, thereby alleviating some of the pressure caused by their nation’s limited economic resources.

Zooming in, however, if one looks past this layer, a pool of temporary immigrants could serve as fertile ground for intelligence agencies to recruit, train and exert influence and control over these workers and students. It’s not unreasonable to deduce that such agencies test, evaluate, and train select individuals from these pools. Upon their return to their respective native countries, these individuals can then fulfil technical roles within intelligence operations, address shared security concerns, and maintain unofficial channels of communication between nations. A readymade network of spies in an ‘ally’ country.

Historically, intelligence agencies have consistently recruited foreign-born individuals, migrants, and temporary workers for technical, linguistic, or cultural expertise, most famously exemplified by the Ritchie Boys in WWII. Such cases establish a credible precedent: when state actors require specialised skills that are scarce domestically, immigrants naturally become prime candidates for recruitment. In today’s context, waves of ‘skilled’ migrants, international students, and temporary workers provide a large, concentrated pool of technically trained individuals who are often socially or legally vulnerable, making them particularly susceptible to influence or recruitment. While there is no public evidence of a fully systematic, global program, the structural incentives are clear: intelligence agencies benefit from cultivating technical and cultural assets within these communities, whether for domestic security, allied cooperation, or strategic leverage abroad. This convergence of historical precedent, structural logic, and observable patterns makes the hypothesis that skilled migrants could serve as covert assets plausible and worthy of serious consideration.

Such programmes would facilitate alliance building through dependency, but also enables spying with minimal presence, as there must always be a return on investment for hosting such programmes. A country like India, burdened by systemic inefficiencies and lack of funds, may readily embrace this setup, even at the risk of employing individuals whose loyalties may align more closely with American interests than their own.

However, after decades of this mutually beneficial arrangement, the oligarchs and technocrats have at their disposal fully trained technical workforces in numerous countries, ready for rehiring at a substantially lower cost. This allows them to leverage their power to hold Western governments hostage, using the threat of relocating operations overseas if their demands are not met.

It stands to reason that strategic intelligence based counter to this behavioural and technological prediction would make ways to gradually infiltrate and reshape the IT industry. Over time, intelligence agencies may position themselves so deeply within the digital and technological framework that they reduce their reliance on direct funding and instead guide development from within. In exchange, these majority owners enjoy unchallenged market niches and various local and global favours, while the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood covertly steer the trajectory of humanity. A neatly tiered ecosystem: corporate profit at the top, geopolitical leverage beneath it, and at the very base, the labour and intellectual capital of entire Western populations underwriting the architecture of control.

If we assume that much of this analysis is even approximately correct, then it naturally follows that foreign nations would not passively accept such asymmetric intelligence harvesting. Any country with a functioning strategic mind would respond in kind by embedding its own operatives within Western nations, not through dramatic Cold War theatrics, but through the quiet, deniable mechanism of permanent migration. A steady stream of technically trained individuals, professionals, students, and entrepreneurs offers the perfect cover for long-term placement. Unlike temporary workers who eventually return home, permanent residents and citizens gain deeper access: to infrastructure, institutions, defence contracts, research labs, social networks, voting blocs and political ecosystems. Their loyalties may remain dual, or strategically fluid, and their integration into Western systems anchored in bonded communities gives their home nations a slow burning but potent form of intelligence leverage. In such a landscape, migration becomes not merely a demographic or economic tool, but ac battlefield where every visa category doubles as a potential intelligence vector.

Historically, such infiltration has been referred to as a “fifth column” to describe internal actors working in support of an external enemy. Perhaps this is what Nigel Farage was alluding to when he invoked the concept in his political commentary, framing certain groups as potential internal threats undermining national cohesion. If a public figure like Farage can recognise and openly gesture toward this dynamic, then it stands to reason that intelligence services and governments are not only aware of the growing danger but have already factored it into their geopolitical calculations. They may accept, even facilitate, a degree of such an internal risk as an unavoidable trade‑off for maintaining access and leverage across the entire spectrum of undeveloped nations. In this model, infiltration is not just tolerated but strategically priced in, a manageable hazard exchanged for global reach, informal influence, and quiet compliance from weaker states.

As we navigate the complexities of AI, robotics, dysgenics, greed, and a class of individuals or groups willing to use unethical psychological tactics and strategies to control public belief, we face hard choices. Western societies must safeguard their intellectual and technological foundations from the subtle encroachments of global technocrats and dependent alliances. Preserving the integrity of innovation networks, maintaining independent strategic capabilities, and scrutinising the incentives behind migration and industry policies are not just matters of policy, they are essential to ensuring that the future is shaped by those who inherit it, not those who profit from it.

Annabelle Fearn