Amerika

Societies die the same way: they give up on tradition, or an eternal order in union with nature and the divine, and focus on convention, or the way things are normally done that elicit few complaints and most people think are “alright I guess.”

This leads to a situation where societies adopt a utilitarian view and start managing their citizens, meaning that they use subsidies (carrot) and police (stick) to keep everyone behaving essentially the same way in order to avoid the optics of disorder.

As part of this control approach, they tend toward becoming welfare states, at which point culture is replaced by government and morality by whatever you can extract from others by playing a victim. All socialist and third world countries have this attitude.

In America, we brought this upon ourselves with diversity welfare in the wake of our disastrous Civil War:

Kelsey Shoub, assistant professor of public policy, is part of a team that has established a link between the prevalence of Freedmen’s Bureau field offices—created to assist freed slaves in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War—and more coercive policies imposed by some states today under the federal government’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

States that historically had more field offices during Reconstruction are more likely, on average, to spend TANF funds on programs aiming to correct perceived societal deficiencies, such as having children out-of-wedlock, single-parent households and non-participation in the labor force, as opposed to direct cash assistance to recipients.

When people must interact with nature to produce what they need, they have no one to blame and no one to appeal to as an omnipotent authority. Once government starts with the payments, the only way to get ahead is to portray yourself as a victim so that you, too, “deserve” something.

Over time this snowballs, and soon you end up at a bankrupt welfare state like the current West, where the few producers are taxed so much that they have stopped reproducing, and all of the money goes to non-productive consumers who will never have enough even as it drains society of wealth.

Tags: diversity, socialism, welfare