How Bureaucratic Institutions Contribute to the Uniform Deployment of Targeting and Dehumanizing Behaviors
“No one talks: silentio is the explicit rule.” In the Inquisition archive, officially titled “Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede,” this is one of the requirements of being an occupant of the archive. The archive records preserve the mainly grim record of lives disrupted and sometimes summarily put to an end, of ideas called into question and often suppressed, of voices silenced, temporarily or forever, of blind bureaucratic inertia harnessed to moral certainty and to Earthy and Spiritual power. The similarity between archaic Inquisitions of the Church and the high-profile media coverage of egregious wrongs done by political leaders, as well as others residing on Capitol Hill, Hollywood, and other high profile positions, may know all too well what the phrase, “Let the Inquisition Begin” or “Let the Witch Hunt Commence” truly means. Who can forget the 2016 election scandal and the entire four years that followed Trump’s presidential administrative behavior?
The grim reports of the Inquisition and the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual in what has been categorized as Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic targeted assaults and psychotronic torture also convey a record of lives disrupted and sometimes summarily brought to an end, their voices silenced, temporarily or forever. The Inquisition, as is the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual, is an action taken in the belief of masquerading “virtue” but somehow seems to go far beyond what that word implies. For what is any archive or historical repository but some sliver of what civilization has wrought on others; for good or bad?
It was the Roman Inquisition that put Galileo on trial for his arguments about the heavens. This inquisitorial spark, with its rhythms and procedures and all its insanities, will be recognizable to anyone with experience with large bureaucratic institutions. Men mad to be normal who invent technologies, policies, and protocols to control, exploit, change (treat) and kill their creditable threats in a manifestation of a delusion about another’s perceived or fantasized identity.
The Inquisition can be seen as something greater and more insidious, as is the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual. It can be viewed as a sustained effort to pursue a single institution or promote a single coalition’s success. That the ills of the world have been spawned by the Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, Opus Dei, Skull and Bones, or Goldman Sachs represents the conspiracy-theory view of human history and an easy way out. If only the source of evil were so simple to identify, so easy to confront. Can you see that the Inquisition was enabled by some of the broader forces that brought the modern world into existence? Cullen Murphy said this fact makes the inquisitions of various kinds “a recurring and inescapable feature of modern life.” I say inquisitions, witch hunts, and the phenomenon of the targeted individual are being played out as an infinite game in game theory of NON-COOPERATIVE gaming based in competition because advancing technology promotes and advances the game (constantly advancing high-technology, and weapons as a business is an infinite game). However, the game between the players/coalitions are finite and with respect to Inquisitions and the Targeted Individual, will come to an end until one side commits to the will of the dominant coalition, dies, or the game ends in a draw. Business is an infinite game and the industrialized military complex is a business. As I have said, this means the business of advancing technologies and new weapons are also infinite games. Inquisitions and persecutions, as do targeting of certain groups, advance hand-in-hand with civilization itself.
Why is it, at any given time throughout the historical archive, intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of “the other,” often based on ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, and religion have always been with us? It is because its very purpose is “to promote a change in those being tortured.” Through warrant, an inquisition’s purpose was to enforce and discipline among its members of the Church (not outside of it). The purpose was to correct the behavior of the individuals who had “fallen into error who had in some way loosened the bonds that previously bound them to another.” Looked at in this way, it very closely resembles the phenomenon of the targeted individual suffering group (gang) stalking attacks, electronic targeting and psychotronic torture. Much like the bureaucratic institutions that guided the various inquisitions throughout history. In like vein, gang stalking utilizes a centralized command exercising their “authority” outside the limits of civil and criminal law. The highly localized efforts of conducting inquisitions and interrogations of the Dark Ages have echoed and rippled its way to the White House and the Justice Department. Institutions that are organized and governed by formal legal protocols and procedures. So too, do interrogations and inquisitions of organized crime and organized contract stalking. In a repetition of history, the targeted individual has become like the Cathars and what the Cathars represented to the Dominican Catholic. Or similar to what a Protestant meant to a Jesuit. The difference between Dominican Catholic and Jesuit is this. Have you ever met a Cathar?
The phenomenon of the targeted individual is like any other inquisitorial process that is governed by an “arm of the law” or monarch. But whose idea of “justice” is being served?
Tomas de Torquemada, a Dominican monk, has become synonymous with the inquisition as a whole. His expulsion of unconverted Jews from his kingdom in 1492 cleansed Spain of religious contaminants during the Spanish Inquisition. I believe this is what Targeted Individuals represent to their “Inquisitors”; that is, a contamination or toxin that needs to be expelled from the environment.
What led to the conclusion of Inquisitions? Some may say “a shortage of combustible material” as many were burned alive. But I say it never really ended. It has only transformed itself. The players are different but the GAME is still the same. It’s a NON-COOPERATIVE GAME based in competition where a creditable threat sparks the formation of a COALITION. A COALITION that has supreme value and that value has been endowed upon the COALITION’S MEMBERS who are clearly in a superior playing position on the field and where the superior coalition is absolutely always right.
It’s hard for me to respect the Catholic Church where no fewer than three grand inquisitors went on to become Pope. The main focus of Roman Inquisitions wasn’t just to eradicate “religious heretics” it was homosexuals, people accused of witchcraft, and certain kinds of quirky or annoying free thinkers and gadflies who might be considered today as “public intellectuals.” I think the inquisitorial need to torture and abuse may have very well been due to the fact that a bunch of very powerful, angry men were denied coitus which may have very well cured them of their affliction. This is certainly the reason behind why some men choose female targets for “sex grooming” (Van Brunt, Murphy, Pescara-Kovach, & Crance, 2019). Women often become the targeted objects of men’s disgruntled hatred during times of “non-selection” in mating. These men, as a general observation, possess some type of personality disorder like narcissistic personality disorder or schizoid personality disorder.
So, in theory, just like how inquisitions could rely on a certain amount of revenue confiscated from the individuals they targeted, similar to how the Germans during the Jewish Holocaust of World War II usurped money, property, and valuable objects from their Jewish targets to pay off their war debts, so too, the Targeted Individual suffers similar types of confiscations. Whether it be money, bodily usurpations such as rape, or other forms of theft of property. However, the most prominent one being the confiscation of identity, which may be followed by an unwilling confiscation of property. But what gives an Inquisition or persecution the staying power it needs to operate? It is given the power to operate for any sustained length of time by giving it an institutional life. This means a form of bureaucratic, legislative life, as seen in medical insurance and healthcare, either paid for by insurance or out of pocket. This is another type of business bureaucracy and another type of infinite game. Once institutionalized forms of power and governance became standard operating procedures, we see the emergence of persecutions known as inquisitions. They are not confined to religion. They are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisitorial impulse can quietly take root in the very system of government and civil society that orders our lives; hospitals, physicians’ offices, dentists’ offices, etc. In fact, research has uncovered the fact that in business certain types of dehumanization do in fact occur (Haslam, 2006). Such types of dehumanization are observed in failing to provide people of color adequate healthcare as well as traits consistent with the Dark Triad and subclinical sadism in people possessing business degrees in general (Lyons & Jonason 2015; Krick, Tresp, Vatter, Ludwig, Wihlenda & Rettenberger, 2016; Johnson, Plouffe & Saklofske, 2019).
Cullen Murphy has outlined the following tools need for “Inquisitions and Persecutions”:
“The tools are these: There needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity, there needs to be a well-defined process for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism — a bureaucracy — is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances — and also some capacity to restrict the communications of others. And there must be a source of power, to ensure enforcement.
The source of power can vary. From the outset, the religious aims of the Inquisition were enmeshed with the might of secular rulers. The relationship was sometimes symbiotic and always complicated, and it changed over time. With the Medieval Inquisition, the Church sought to leverage secular power to achieve its ends (though the secular authorities had their own purpose in mind). The Spanish Inquisition threw this arrangement into reverse: the crown made the inquisition an official component of the Spanish state. During the Roman Inquisition, the tribunal was controlled directly by the papacy, and within its own territories, church and state were the exact same thing. (Outside the Papal States, the Inquisition operated on terms laid down by local governments.) The twentieth century would bring a new evolutionary stage: inquisitions that lay fully in the hands of the state and required no religious dimension at all.
And there is one more factor in the making of an Inquisition; the conviction that one is absolutely right. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the prefect of the Holy Office through most of the 1960s, adopted as his motto the Latin phrase Semper idem — ‘Always the same.’”
We might conclude the phrase, Semper idem, as a rather perfect phrase for a game that seems to be an infinite game.
Sources:
Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An Integrative Review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 252–264.
Haslam, N., & Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and Infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 399–423.
Johnson, L., Plouffe, R., & Saklofske, D. (2019). Subclinical Sadism and the Dark Triad. Journal of Individual Differences, 40(3), 127–133.
Krick, A., Tresp, S., Vatter, M., Ludwig, A., Wihlenda, M., & Rettenberger, M. (2016). The Relationships Between the Dark Triad, the Moral Judgment Level, and the Students’ Disciplinary Choice. Journal of Individual Differences, 37(1), 24–30.
Lyons, M., & Jonason, P. (2015). Dark Triad, Tramps, and Thieves. Journal of Individual Differences, 36(4), 215–220.
Murphy, Cullen. (2012). God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the making of the modern world. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Sheridan, Lorraine; James, David V.; and Roth, Jayden. (March 12, 2020) The Phenomenology of Group Stalking (‘Gang Stalking’): A Content Analysis of Subjective Experiences. International Journal of Environmental Research Public Health. 17(7), 2506. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/7/2506/htm#B5-ijerph-17-02506
Van Brunt, Brian; Murphy, Amy; Pescara-Kovach, Lisa; Crance, Gina-Lyn. “Early Identification of Grooming and Targeting in Predatory Sexual Behavior on College Campuses.” Violence and Gender. Vol. 6, №1. March 11, 2019.
