Amerika

Very few people have had to debug code in their lives. Relatively few have had to diagnose machine faults. Not many yet know how to suss out problems in a garden. As a result, most people are analytically-challenged and can see only an event or object as it exists in the moment, disconnected from broader time.

As a result, almost no one knows how to get to the root of a problem. They can see its surface attributes, and fit it into categories based on approval or disapproval of those categories, but not figure out why it happened or what could be done to change the cause of the problem.

Fewer still will look at the basics of the situation: for centuries, we have steadily drifted to the Left on the theory that egalitarianism (democracy, equality, pluralism) provides the best protection against totalitarianism. However, it seems to have formed a totalitarian state of its own.

Even more, this means that we are circling. We keep going Leftward, but our problems intensify as we do this. This means that some assumption we have is false, such as the idea that equality protects us from totalitarianism and makes the best possible civilization.

That assumption must logically be the idea of the human individual. The most conformist societies like those in Asia and California are ironically the most individualistic, with people competing by adopting the latest thing but remaining focused on themselves, not history, culture, nature, or the transcendent.

We must choose something to be the most important thing. It can be the individual, the group, or the transcendent. The group as a focus quickly decays to prioritizing the individual, since nothing makes people “me first” like encountering a horde of people with the same pathology.

Individualists naturally become contrarian because they hate competition for focus, and since realism is their primary competition, they demonize reality by acting as if it is arbitrary or irrelevant. This cool antihero behavior makes them look independent and decisive to those in their friend group.

If we cast aside individualism, we are left with realism and the transcendent, since to embrace reality is to seek purpose, beauty, or meaning in it, which naturally connects to the transcendent. The transcendent is the sense that for all of its perceived faults, life is designed the way it is for a meaning and it is benevolent.

Most of all, individualism fears goals above the level of the individual. Those naturally produce hierarchy based on who is able to achieve them. That in turn destroys equality and the illusion of individualism, forcing people to get their sense of self-esteem from how well they adapt to their environment like any other biological creature.

For this reason, the herd fears hierarchy, and if you want to know what Leftists really fear, it can be found in the idea that someday the monarchy will return and “equality” will be shown to be a myth:

Vaincre ou Mourir (Vanquish or Die), which was produced by Nicolas de Villiers, scion of an influential French Eurosceptic dynasty, tells the tale of the war that broke out in the Vendée region of western France in 1793 when local counter-revolutionaries took up arms. It has provoked indignation among the left-leaning Parisian elite, which views it as part of a drive to subvert France’s secular Republic by convincing the public that the country would do well to bring back the ancien régime with the divine right of kings.

Whatever the merits of the film, it has served to highlight the scars borne by France more than two centuries after the Revolution. De Villiers, 43, said his aim was “not to reopen a wound of history but to perform a work of reconciliation, to ensure that people of all different views can share a universal story”.

The uprising began when peasants rebelled against the conscription brought in by France’s revolutionary leaders to boost the army that was fighting other European powers determined to reimpose the monarchy. At the time, the country was entering into the period known as the Reign of Terror for its massacres and executions. The Vendée war was among the bloodiest episodes, with an estimated 200,000 deaths. Some historians argue that the extermination of the Vendéens who supported the restoration of the monarchy amounted to genocide, although this is contested by others

They know that democracy is failing. They are aware at some subconscious level that its replacement is monarchy. They fear the death of equality. With it the ability to blithely wander through life and obsess over their own desires dies, too, and they have no idea what they would do without that to fill their time.

Tags: french revolution, monarchism