Narrative Warfare: The Lovebomb Did It

During my time as a graduate student, I took an elective that met on Saturdays. I would go home by taking the bus across town, and when I did I'd pay attention to whom I rode with. One day I sat across from a young woman who attended McNally Smith in St. Paul, aiming to get the technical training needed to get work in the music business as an engineer. I learned all of this because she chatted away with some hood rat trying to pick her up (and failing) using the "I'm a producer!" line.

I had some hope that she'd make good on the connections she talked about to get somewhere after graduated, so I kept an eye out. She disappeared, which I did not think anything of at the time; the crash hit, most folks struggled to find work worth doing (as they do now), so I figured that she was flipping burgers or serving coffee until she got into the business she trained for.

Well, that didn't happen.

You see, she became an Islamist.

I recalled her name a year or so later, only to find her Twitter account (since suspended) where she spouted propaganda lines straight out of what you'd expect from an ISIS video and spewed the salt good and hard upon the world she was born into, grew up within, and previously had a long-term plan to contribute to. She moved to Wisconsin, found a Muslim enclave, and made herself at home there.

I was shocked. Her timeline, however, revealed the clue to solve the question of "Why?": a man.

Once that fact came to my attention, everything else fell into place. I'd seen this sort of thing twice in recent years, and by that I mean the phenomenon of a woman undergoing wholesale overhauls of their persona due to the presence of a desirable man electing to take said woman as his woman. She surrenders herself into his frame of reference, willingly becoming an extension of his will as a display of loyalty to him for being with her.

One was a woman of my acquaintance who turned into a Blue Line cultist when she got with the man who is now her husband and the father to her son, a woman who was at the very end of marriageability (and fertility) at the time that gave her what she most desired. The other is a famous woman who is no longer the New Hotness, but still able to work in her field due to past success carrying her (and a good work ethic), but wanting to swap to being a wife and mother; she got her hands into a man who's talent allows him to work anywhere he can get Internet access.

Let's break this down: a woman who has long be unable to satisfy a primal need, and is on the threshold of being forever denied that satisfaction, finds deliverance in the arms (to put it politely) of a man willing to accept her as the vessel for the fulfillment of his similar desires; she's so overcome by this relief (and fears it being taken from her) that she subordinates herself utterly to the man in order to keep him, taking his side against all others in all things, even if it meant forsaking all she formerly was.

This is hardly unbelievable. Cults depend on this, specifically profile people to select for it, and deliberately exploit it to gain the fanatical recruits necessary for the messy business. It's called "lovebombing", and what the two examples I gave above show is that this thing is so emergent that--given the preconditions--it can come about without the man intending it. (Which is the case in the two examples; totally emergent and unintended.)

So, when looking for an explanation for why Bobby suddenly turns his coat and stabs you in the back check his intimacies: a shift there is very often the cause, which makes the behavior a rather obnoxious and dangerous form of virtue-signalling (however sincere the speaker), and should be regarded accordingly.

And there is your Narrative Warfare tip for today.