Amerika

Illusions live while people still believe in them. Any preposterous idea will do; as long as enough people believe in it and act as if it is going to work, the system will keep going even if absurd. In fact, most human systems are absurd because the absurd is arbitrary and our minds believe it must be powerful to survive without being realistic.

America was first and foremost an extension of England. Basing itself on the past five hundred years of developments in England, the new American government aimed to do away with the dying monarchy, avoid the excesses of democracy and state religion, and build a system of laws which would restrain the worst in humanity.

This plan had a flaw, namely that laws are written in language, and for that reason those who want to subvert laws do not attack them directly but instead change the language behind them. Even simple binaries like “good” and “evil” could be redefined. Once that was achieved, the system would move in a different direction.

American democracy came undone in the 1860s when radical Republicans decided that human rights were more important than culture. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for abolishing themselves because nothing could withstand the onslaught of equal individualism. Culture, mores, standards, aesthetics, nature, even genetics… all had to fall.

What we are seeing in the news now is just the fallout from those decisions. Things abolished no longer hold the system together; “the center cannot hold” because its periphery has been erased. As a result, no decision is made with an attention span longer than forty-eight hours, and no one believes in the future.

The usual idiots are out there offering scapegoats. The rich did this, technology did it, or we were just too grandiose in our aims. In actuality, what we are seeing is typical human behavior that our forefathers suppressed but we have tolerated, and having nothing to do but take over, it is taking over.

Empires die over time because they pile up useless people. They do that because they forget their goal of being themselves in the rush to make sure everyone is happy. At that point, the useless become equal to the useful, and the former group grows wildly while the latter dies out.

At the end of any empire, all of the good DNA is depleted because natural selection worked against it. A society that rewards jobs and being inoffensive breeds neurotic rule-followers without souls. And those, as time goes on, have no hope of maintaining what once made the society great, and so it begins its slow but inexorable slide into irrelevance.

Tags: collapse, decay, decline, empire