Nov 30th 2010, 18:44:14
"i love it when a plan comes together"
-anonymous
i enjoyed watching the psychological techniques and political science theories learned in college and practiced sporadically in real life work so well in a game setting.
When faced with a united front, the political principal of isolating an individual in the front and marginalizing him, reducing his stature and getting others in his organization to question him is taught by many theorists including Maoists, Alinsky and Gehring.
In this case, HWCNG made it easy because of his desire to constantly push the envelope way past the breaking point. Fordy and dunder were put in the untenable position of having to support outright racism, flagrant homophilia and blatant antisemitism or abandoning the united front. I went back and read the posts showing the power of LaE's united front during the scandal itself when they all held the line on a single lie until it was disproven conclusively and then uniformly adopting the next party line until it was disproven and then adopting yet another lie. One has to admire as a sick fascination, their fecklessness and tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence. This united front was impervious to fact and stood the test of time for several months.
Perhaps the admins' decision not to punish LaE for the cheating scandal and the uniform lying that followed its discovery, hastened their demise. Perhaps the admins were right. Because the leniency prevented the genesis of the true "us against the world" mentality that fuels many criminal organizations and several sports franchises. Knowing that their punishment could and should have been much more severe, they were just left with neither a guiding philosophy nor the self-sustaining paranoia of say, the Oakland Raiders. The true believers like ice and jag who however misguided had a driving passion for cheating were gone. As the gravity of their offenses settled on the community, as they morphed from respected clan into reviled convicts, and as the community's sentiments against them began to accumulate, the rebellious bad-boy thrill of cheating, lying and whining like five year olds began to be overwhelmed by their sense that most of the smart guys on this server were now mocking them.
The moderators' decisions not to punish HWCNG no matter what he posted on the forum clearly hurt LaE in the long run as well, no perhaps here. Had the mods adopted a strict policy against HWCNG by deleting his racist posts, the pressure on fordy and dunder would not have been as great. They would not have had to support a deleted post but could simply have ignored it. When the LaE "leadership" as a whole had to adopt HWCNG's racism as clan policy that put fordy in a very tough spot. As a twist of irony that i love, fordy was made the editor of wiki and confronted with the task of having to decide whether to delete one of his side's racist homoerotic posts on the wiki or break ranks with the front. He decided not to delete the post and so qz had to do it.
Having successfully marginalized one member of the front, theorists then pressure others in the front to either support the marginalized member or break ranks. In this case, Fordy has a strange compulsion to deliberately misspell words and to sometimes post statements that are completely gibberish. The temptation is to attempt to marginalize him as well but unless care is taken the front will realize what is happening and simply remove the original marginalized member from the public front thus protecting him. I can not imagine why LaEx did not simply ban HWCNG from posting on this forum when they realized what was happening to him. The decision to allow him to continue posting long past the time when even Fordy and dunder were condemning him as "a idiot" (sic) and publicly telling him to stifle it was the nail in LaE's coffin. The rifts within the united public front spread through the organization like the cracks through a calving glacier. One tiny, apparently minor, crack on the surface led to the collapse of tons of ice.
I want to thank the admins for saving a game that allowed me over the course of several months to play out the psychological and political theories I love. This is the greatest game and i am indebted to slagpit qz and pang for hours of enjoyment on the forum.
