On Disappointment with Reality

01 Mar, 2025

Keith Raniere¹ is a famed sex trafficker and cult leader for the now defunct NXIVM. NXIVM was an MLM-scheme modeled on a healthy mix of scientology and Amway where Raniere was the thoughtleader passing down his incredible insights on to his customers. NXIVM was mostly a course and retreat company where you would enter into the ranks of Raniere and his strange karate-belt cult and unfortunately those who were gullible enough would continue. The problem was that Raniere was a massive creep and womanizer to his core. He started NXIVM to have power over people, a theme which we can see going all the way back to Raniere’s beginnings. He lied about his academic achievements, he lied about who he was to get close to women (and children) he fancied, he would cauterize women to know their place as “sex slaves”, and he is, as Kendrick would probably put it, a master manipulator. Raniere had a relationship with a 15 year old when he was 23 for crying out loud. The overarching theme of Raniere’s life is, and always was, to have power over someone.

By the facts laid out on the table like this, it seems as if the person above is a monster. Indeed he is – all but physically. But I was quite stunned when the video I had put on as background noise mentioned him by name. Around the 24 minute mark, I heard his name. I lowered the heat on my top and rewound the video a couple of seconds to catch the full context:

I would meet him in court-ordered mediation hearings, and I can tell you that he was a strange little man. He looked like a garden dwarf. Quite frankly, he stank. I don’t know if he ever took a shower or how often he took a shower. Because when he walked into the courtroom, he had an aura. But it wasn’t anything charismatic. It was just a bad aroma.

The understanding I had come to after hearing about all of this guys crimes – which need I remind you includes: sex trafficking, attempted sex trafficking, forced labor conspiracy, and alleged crimes like statutory rape – was markedly changed. How could anyone find themselves looking at this man and having any interest? A garden gnome which stunk? A lazy man who leveraged people’s secrets for his sexual gratification? How do such people find themselves in their positions?

Moments like these bring you out of your own box for a little bit. They make you reconsider your thoughts about people and power, about what the fabric of the world is sewn together by, and about how this is the reality we have to deal with. There is a bluntness about reality showing itself so nonchalantly, like it doesn’t really mind us looking. This was definitely one of those moments to me. Because it had turned the image – the perception I had of Keith in my head – on its head. This can be done to take people’s power away from them like hanging Mussolini up by his feet in a public square after being shot in the head. But this example ultimately shows a justice in the world. While the Raniere example, along with many others, mostly is reality not living up to its perceptions.

The disappointment could just as easily be levied against humans. Why does reality itself deserve the title? Because it isn’t only humans who disappoint. Blaise Pascal wrote that:

Our reason is always disappointed by the inconsistency of appearances.

Which is what is the main problem. It isn’t that humans are bad or weak-willed, but that our perceptions, our reason as Pascal puts it, is so often disappointed by what we thought it might be. Disappointment with reality and our external circumstances might just be baked into our experience with the world writ large.

Except Pascal never wrote that! In all of the Pensées, I could not find this quote one time. I could find variations on the same themes but the quote was made up or simply a translation passed off as fact. Yet another thing for disappointment to grab its hands around.

To clarify, my disappointment with Raniere isn’t with him looking like a garden gnome because that was evidently obvious. The disappointment must have been his stink. His odor, as portrayed by the cult deprogrammer, was bad. The fact that despite his garden gnome stank, he was still able to put his will into the world. He was still able to put his wretched cauterized print upon people. That the bad things he did wasn’t recognized as bad way earlier. And this is my disappointment with lots of the world. I want to believe in some sort of moral gravity in the world. In my heart I think that the world ought to have some kind of moral center which guides us. But I realize that morality is our monkey brains sense of justice put upon an unfeeling space rock. This – if you can grant me this aside – is the death of God. The truth is that we are the arbiters of justice and it just seems like we are failing recently. And as much as I want reality to have a moral gravity that pulls us toward justice, I also recognize that this is motivated reasoning.

So it was humanity all along? Not so fast. Humanity, ever the vague concept, is still not to be blamed for our disappointments. Raniere was – as has been mentioned earlier – very good at manipulation. The same video I mentioned earlier says in literally the next sentence.

What Raniere possessed was a savant-like understanding of people’s weaknesses, and how to leverage them for control.

It has to do with the frailty of secrets and the leverage that secrets give you over someone. Humans are able to be manipulated. Some easier than others. And it is in the understanding and knowledge of the mechanisms of power which made Keith so effective. While many were drawn in, many more actively sounded the alarm about NXIVM. The problem with NXIVM was that its victims were actively propagandized to and made to be confused about the world. They were told that their own intuitions were wrong. And the simple fact is that some people are open-minded to a fault. It might be the thing that someone loves about them. I don’t think being gullible is a good quality, but how am I going to tell someone that I am disappointed by them for being victims of a man who obviously acted maliciously? He very much tried to fool them. Sometimes people get fooled.

More to the point, is that there were people who warned against NXIVM. There were quite a few of them actually. There was the 2003 Forbes exposé, the mass exodus in 2009, and of course the whistleblowers who really put our attention on the problem.

So, is our storytelling abilities at fault? Are we more interested in a bad man, more than the people who expose them? Is my disappointment the result of my faulty ability of concentration on the right things? That while hearing the story having my outrage at the man occlude my perception of the surrounding whistleblowers? Maybe.

I do think that we have a bias towards the negative when it suits our cynicism. We can just as easily have a positive bias for other issues where looking reality in the face is difficult and uncomfortable. But in this case there was also a slowness in the justice system. While the cops were hot on the trail of Raniere, they couldn’t catch him after he fled to Mexico. It was the lack of care of his “Dagny” at the time which finally led the police to catch him. So the reality that are systems were much to slow to act is one such disappointment. But what am I doing right now?

Is disappointment with reality even constructive? Does it do anything but alleviate some kind of discomfort you have when you look at injustice? I can’t definitively say. I think that the world is rife with injustice and cynicism is comfortable but more importantly compliant. It lets those you are disappointed with that you are beyond hope or action. That the best thing to do at the moment is to just sit back and watch the world burn.

This phrase has always troubled me. Sitting back and watching the world burn implies that you won’t be first on the chopping block and that passivity towards injustice is fine as long as it is inevitable. But when is something inevitable? Napoleon (yes I know) is rumored to have said that:

Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.

Except it very much isn’t what he said. Have you not been paying attention? The truth of the matter is that, as far as I am aware, he wrote in a letter to a general of his that:

"Ce n'est pas possible", m'ecrivez-vous: cela n'est pas français.

Which roughly translated could be something like:

You write to me that it is impossible; the word is not French.

Is this pedantry? Yes. Most certainly. But is it an important distinction? Also yes. The problem of disappointment being within our attention to appearances is that it requires us to be diligent about what we are paying attention to and how we pay attention. The small differences of quotes are insignificant in a larger sense, but as a rule it degrades our perceptions of the world. It makes our perceptions about it stretched and fuzzy like bad or overly compressed JPEGs. So informational quality and informational attention is then of the utmost importance. Being diligent requires effort which is difficult to muster if you already feel tired or worn.

So even then, I think that there is something correct about the the intuitions of Pascal. Even if you muster all the strength you get, the world will still continue to disappoint you. But what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow like bleak Pascal did?

.dash

Comments

I don’t have any personal business with this man. He is only used here to illustrate the larger point of the essay.↩

#misc-essays