``` DIARY OF A MEMBER ================= Stumbled upon this thing. It's hard to be much more specific than that. It's not quite a philosophy. It's sort of about life. But there's also random stuff about learning.. It's definitely not a school. If it were I would run away from here and go find it in a second. It... and that's really the most specific pronoun I can use here... it calls itself Learn Different.™ This all started when I stumbled upon a website. I was on a forum I frequent and someone posted a link and asked if anyone knew what this was. No one did. But I went to the webpage and then sort of lost track of time just... reading. If you read through it all, the webpage claims the original source is a book. It's not really a book book, but I found the thing they mean. The book claims the original source was a set of text files that were posted on some version control system (whatever that is) that I guess computer programmers use to keep track of their code or something. And when I finally figured out what all that meant and tracked down the thing and got a hold of those text files and read through them, they just claim that the first of it appeared on the same website back where I started. I feel like I know these people so well. But I still have no idea who started it or where it began. The writing style is a bit hard to figure out. It alternates between extreme humility and extreme bombast, and I can never be sure if it's more than one person writing. If I had to put it briefly, not how they describe themselves, but just how it all comes together in my head it's like... okay, when you get down to it, a lot of the worst things people do come from the psychology of how we treat outgroups. Whenever we try to make groups, they get kind of groupthink-y, and it usually fucks things up in some way or another. At least a little, eventually. Doesn't even have to be much. But then that causes a kind of feedback, because once any kind of fuck-up is there, even stuff that's not all that bad, then the group's out-groups suddenly have something kind of embarassing to demonize the original group for -- and being human, they do -- or at least some members of the out-group do, again it doesn't have to be all that many. So out-group holds embarassing thing up to the flames to demonize in-group, which naturally makes the original in-group get more defensive, because how could you not when you feel like you're being attacked from the outside, and then the whole thing spirals way the fuck out of control. So this group, whatever the hell it is, this thing that's sort of a school but insists that it isn't -- I mean they do school stuff too -- but before the whole school part, not like before as in the beginning of each school day, but before as in like logically prior -- before the school part, if you read these files, what they're basically doing is just clearing the ground by creating a group dynamic designed to hack its own group psychology out of existence and bond over *that*. Again, they never say that. But it's what the whole thing does. Here's what i mean. How do you beat the ugliest part of human nature if you can't be a utopia or whatever and you can't escape human nature? Well, it's not actually that complicated. They fucking figured it out, lol. It's a group built on publically shaming... themselves... and with a culture that places almost a cult-ish value on accepting the other. Like the most unacceptable others. It's so weird i still can't get it straight in my head. See like usually groups end up growing fundamentalists, and the way a group fucks itself in the long term is that it's impossible to stay reasonable, because these fringes set up a sort of insider peer-pressure dynamic where -- to be a more pure group member and like signal your loyalty to each other, you say all the things the group was built on, but in excess. The fringes are just the middle with the volume way fucking up loud. And because every group no matter what its content is is just, like, humans, and human nature always has that whole us/them psychology, its usually the case that the middle has just a normal not so bad amount of in-group out-group thinking, like team sports, where it's basically the same psychology as war or whatever but not actually hurting anyone and its just fun, cuz sports, but that's just the middle, and when the volume gets turned up way out at the extremes, you've got a dynamic where the way you signal to your buddies that you're a genuine group member is to be more and more volume of "us" and more distant from "them," not your buddies, I mean the "other" them, fuck i'm explaining this terribly, but like... that's normal groups right. that's not the point. the point is how these people sort of break all that. It's brilliant actually. Just build a group whose entire in-group culture is based on shaming the group itself in the most hyperbolic ways, while at the same time almost fetishizing acceptance of "the other." And the more unacceptable the others are, the more "culture points" or whatever you get for trying to understand where the outgroup people are coming from and how they're like you. I mean they don't track points or anything. But there's this thing called the game. god, the game... it sounds so fucking dumb, but this game thing is literally changing my life. like people go around saying certain things are liberating, no fuck off, nothing is as liberating as the game. here's what you do: you just... i actually already said it... you just practice and develop a kind of non-sexual fetish for learning about outgroups and all the people you most hate... and the game is to basically come to their defense. not publicly necessarily. just in private, in your mind. but then after a while you almost cant help but to go a bit public. like youll notice yourself defending individuals and groups in conversations with friends... groups you just fucking hated like a couple weeks ago. And the weirdest thing about all this is that the group -- the main one. Learn Different™ I mean -- that's not even their thing. they're not some social movement about acceptance and stuff. it's like its just a basic prerequisite of human interaction for them. it's not what they're about. if they're anything, i guess theyre mostly a school. I don't know why the hell they put those two ideas together. Maybe it's just poor planning or something. Anyways i've run out of stuff to read. i cant find any more. I read through the whole damn circle of sources and got back to the start. I don't know where to go because these fucking people are *ghosts*. And whenever anyone writes anything about them, they make it sound like they all up and vanished a long time ago. I'd love to find one of these things though. i wouldnt really know how to start one of my own. how exactly does a person even get something like this started? ```