Amerika

For an unusual start to an Amerika article, let’s talk about you.

You come here — if you came here deliberately, and are not simply looking for a television show, book, or movie with a similar title — because every other source has not just an agenda but a self-interest in telling you a partial truth in order to compel you to do something.

Usually, that “something” takes a simple form, like buying a book, joining a political party, following a YouTube channel, or things of that nature. More insidiously, it often consists of brain programming; people write to shape the minds of others, and some want to control them, or keep them away from certain conclusions.

What we do here is something every gardener knows well: we try to get to the bottom of the tap root of an idea, so that we can pull it out fully if it is a weed, or know how to feed and nurture it if it is a plant we desire. We are looking at the origins of ideas in order to understand their eventual scope and effects.

Most other channels focus only on the plant and whether it is good or bad according to the plan that they have set in motion, one that involves you as a foot soldier out there buying books, repeating dogma, voting for the right team, and influencing others to form a human wave representing a certain brain programming.

You come here because you want to understand the why behind how things are, and not just to have someone tell you that all of your problems originate in a certain group or idea, and how everything can be better if we just smash that down and replace it with convenient agenda goes here.

In our quest to give you the straight dope, we have had to abandon politics almost entirely and go to a root understanding of human beings as individuals and groups and what motivates them. We have had to look at language and concepts as structures, to see how one tiny seed of an idea always flowers into a more complex mental organism.

This means that we are never going to be Disneyland, the Beatles, or even The New York Times. They give you little slivers in dribs and dabs, always intensifying the emotion, and then hammer their ideas home with repetition. Their ideas are simple, so they catch in your mind and you become a carrier of their mental control agenda.

(Again, this is often simple. In their sanest days, the Beatles simply wanted you to like their songs, hum their songs, and therefore, buy their records.)

Most people form their opinions by looking around them to see what other people are concerned about. From this they compile a list of “issues,” and on those, they try to find opinions oriented toward their gut instinct about the issues. They rarely concern themselves with an overall direction toward a social order, only these granular issues and a hodge-podge of opinions about them.

Here we look at the biggest picture: what is the best social order that we can have, and how do we keep civilization from self-destructing, as it has been doing around us now for a few centuries? We want humanity to thrive and exceed its past achievements, but that requires getting over the hurdle of our unstable societies and selves.

Speaking of you, you are most likely — more than any of the “normies” around you — to recognize that Western Civilization has died and that democracy is its suicide organ. The greatness of the past lives on mostly in museums, and now we are little round people who attend jobs, shop, vote, and have really interesting hobbies but do little of any impact. And, in the end, who really cares about your dioramas of pre-Columbian cities or collection of Eastern Bloc cameras?

We can see from the people around us that the former West is drowning in stupidity. People make themselves oblivious, and that means that the only others they recognize are oblivious, so we get literal fools — people without a capacity for making judgments for the best — running our nations, corporations, institutions, and communities straight into the ground.

Since the middle of last century, our output of anything actually great has dropped off, although we keep hyping the nonsense we are cranking out as if it were good. Our refrigerators last five years; our music is toneless rhythm with angry self-pity lyrics; one literature is propaganda; our food is a permanent ersatz substitute for the real thing. How far must one go to get a tomato that actually tastes real?

Sure, sometimes we beat the demon, or seem to. There is a craft beer boom now, making lots of small batch beers which seem a lot better than the alcoholic soda water concoctions that the big brands sell. Most of them are very similar, however, in essence, and the harder they disguise this with exotic ingredients, the more it slams home as truth. And how long will this boom last before the inevitable entropy of the crowd creeps in, and industry goes back to selling the lowest common denominator and distributing the profits through a parasite matrix of excess employees, rapacious shareholders, regulators, lawyers, and suited conference room pirates?

Something went wrong, and unless we figure out what it was, reverse it, and engineer ourselves to avoid doing it again, we are doomed.

At the core of it, we begin to suspect inclusivity itself, meaning that we may have been too broad in our determination of what constitutes “us.” That is: we let our quality slip, and as soon as a large enough group of fools existed, they took over.

Bruce Charlton argues persuasively that low infant mortality caused a prevalence of deleterious mutations, including those for lowered intelligence:

It seems very probable that general intelligence (or ‘genotypic IQ’) has declined by more than one standard deviation since late Victorian times, and presumably even more since about 1800 when the Industrial Revolution began to become obvious and these changes probably began.

Using reaction time data, the decline in genotypic IQ is of-the-order of 1.5 IQ points per decade – that is about 15 points in a century – or one standard deviation.

…Differential fertility would lead to a decline in intelligence – let’s say – by a reduction in the proportion of high IQ genes in the population.

This happens mostly because since the Industrial Revolution almost-all children that are born will survive; so reproductive success becomes almost-purely a matter of fertility; and the most intelligent sectors of the population are the least fertile, and less fertile with each generation; until eventually (i.e. for the past several decades) the most intelligent people are sub-fertile, below two offspring per woman – so that the genes which make them most intelligent will decline with each generation – first declining as a proportion of the gene pool, and then declining in absolute prevalence.

In other words, we made ourselves stupid by not filtering out enough stupidity, which is caused by mutations that decrease the genes that code for higher IQ. This sounds like a classic Darwinian “degeneration” situation and seems to describe the biological roots of our problem.

However, we might take an even broader view, and say that our tolerance for foolishness allowed it to thrive across the board before the industrial revolution, since we already experienced great social unrest and corresponding bad results at that point.

While our power has grown since the middle ages, our social order has declined. Something is responsible for that, and it may in turn be a symptom of something far earlier, and that is the elusive beast that we stalk: the root of the disease.

This disease proves interesting because it attacks only thriving societies, and in them, seems to appeal most to those who are the most caring and intelligent. Somehow it sneaks past their defenses, and then these formerly-thriving places — usually the best hopes of humanity — are cut down in their prime.

Charlton offers another insight into what happens to societies in the grips of this malaise, which is that people become both self-interested and oblivious to the whole, which makes them into raging individualists who promptly consume all in their path:

This has had a permanent effect on my attitude; because I realise that when the mass of people in an organisation, an institution, a profession, a nation… are complicit in corruption, when they are careerist, when they are motivated by short-termism, by the attempt to maximise pleasure and status or minimise suffering or risk… then there is no realistic prospect of overall and positive reform.

We might call this individualism tangibilism because it emphasizes what is close to the individual: material sensation, the here and now, material comfort and convenience, safety and disengagement, bourgeois apathetic me-first pathologies, and of course, ignorance of the wider picture and the long-term projection.

This shows us individuals who are “hunkered down” and withdrawn from their world, which seems ironic since it is a world where humans and not the feared forces of nature dominate.

In my experience, as someone who has come to believe the Calvinistic idea that people are born with their traits intact and are therefore “good” or “bad” from before their first breaths — this is the William Blake idea that “Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night” — this occurs when enough of the bad exists in a group that the good no longer can count on doing good acts in public to bring them approval and thus protect them from criticism by others that the good are free riders, or those posing at being members of the group while profiting personally from it at its expense, creating externalities or costs for the commons to absorb.

In other words, when bad goes unpunished, the good go quiet and the bad take over. We are all familiar with this from our schoolyards, where a few bullies could use peer pressure to exclude people and reign in terror, cowing everyone else from speaking up or enjoying the situation much at all.

In adult society, however, fear rules the herd, and so the bullies are not those that exclude others, but those that force the inclusion of others in order to create a mob oriented around the lowest common denominator. This mob then asserts its view of reality, and reacts as if hurt when others do not comply, justifying (in its eyes) retaliation against them because they were the first aggressor.

For us to survive in the future, we need a new type of intolerance: moral intolerance, including the recognition that every person is born to some level in the hierarchy and cannot rise above that. If they attempt to rise, they are acting against the stability of the order enjoyed by all, and should be seen as aggressors who are attempting to destroy social order.

In addition, it becomes clear that our approach must involve a duality of morality and eugenics. People who are born bad, act bad; those who are healthy do not. A society which hopes to survive the entropy of civilization must do so by constantly shedding its least moral and capable members.

From observation, about twenty percent of every human generation is born unfit, whether they are incompetent, sociopaths, schizoids, sadists, or otherwise broken human beings. Some others are made broken by their parents, which implies latent genes for destructive behavior.

Removing these prevents the formation of a group of disenchanted people who will then crusade to take over the society, pushing out the good and destabilizing social order. The root of civilization decay is that, in replacing natural selection, humans become tolerant of too many defectives.

For now, another great civilization — joining dozens of others of the most promising human attempts — has crashed into ruin. From its ashes will spring a breakaway civilization which will be oriented toward health, sanity, and stability, and will achieve that by exiling those incompatible with that goal.

Tags: civilization, deleterious mutations, eugenics, IQ, morality