Amerika

Societies past their youthful years enter an age of anti-realism which begins, ironically, when they succeed. Every success means an introduction to new challenges; there is never safety or permanent stability, contrary to what the bourgeois middle class who overthrew the aristocrats tell you.

Anti-realism begins when authority shifts from nature to man. In early societies, people grow their own food, manage their own affairs, and fight off wild animals. As time goes on, government and industry take over many of these roles in the interest of safety, efficiency, and standardization.

Those who resist this ironically are the organic leaders of the land, the kings and aristocrats. They by nature detest bureaucracy and red tape, so tend to run societies based on naturalistic principles like natural selection, rewarding the good, and letting people solve their own problems locally.

However, they run into a death trap. A good aristocrat goes down in history as having an uneventful rule because he steers off threats before they become crises; by succeeding, here, too, he causes problems. His society quickly becomes inundated in its fastest-growing group, the low-IQ laborer population.

Eventually there are so many of those that their buying power outpaces that of the aristocrats and the middle classes jump sides to support the proles against the kings because the sophomoric bourgeois outlook sees only cash-in-hand, not the value of stability, beauty, order, and other things which do not fit in a cash register.

(Everything the far-Right says about the Jews is in fact an assessment of the White middle class. They are money-grubbing manipulators just smart enough to cause vast ruin, but not bright enough to avoid self-destruction. They are prone to race-mixing for the right price. They posture about altruism to sell stuff and ignore its consequences.)

When the middle class takes over, they run the nation like a shop. They assume that everyone is pure self-interested, greedy, idiotic, crass, and easily distracted, mirroring the narcissistic individualism that running a small business either attracts or imprints on people.

Consequently, they turn toward bureaucracy. Bureaucracy specifies in narrowing just like computer models; it reduces the complexity of nature to a few multiple-choice questions, Scantron forms, or products on a shelf. Bureaucracy treats people like an assembly line by assuming the minimum qualifications for human.

In this way, bureaucracy is both inherently egalitarian and controlling. It appeals to the lowest common denominator instincts in humanity and because it depends on those, makes them the norm and slowly squeezes out everything else. It uses narrowing to make itself function, but in doing so, pushes people away from reality into a false reality.

This false reality — a form of anti-realism, or rejecting of reality itself in favor of human opinions about reality — consists of human models resulting in narrowed choices so that those who do what the system desires are rewarded. Bureaucracy selects winners against the group that would prevail in nature.

By this method, every civilization known to humankind so far has burned itself down. This has killed more than war, famine, weather, and disease. Every society, by succeeding, disconnects from reality and then pursues anti-realistic goals until they destroy it.

Narrowing takes several forms. Consumerism is the most obvious; people think in terms of what product might solve a situation, instead of creatively imagining solutions. Meritocracy rewards those who are good at memorizing facts and dogma. Jobs take the focus away from end product and channel it toward obedience to management bureaucracy.

Control itself is a form of narrowing. Control, or tyranny, refers to any system of power whose only interest lies in self-perpetuation. Therefore, it ignores the long-term and the best interests of its population, and destroys these in order to stay in power today; it has narrowed its focus from results to mechanisms, methods, and procedures.

We might see narrowing as inherently “means-over-ends” in this way. With narrowing, the means become the ends; in a bureaucracy, the person who fills out the form (method, process, procedure, mechanism) gets ahead of the one with the right answer in the wrong form (goals, ends, ideals, intentions).

Nature on the other hand is “ends-over-means.” It does not care how you achieve something, only that you do. You need a certain number of calories, water units, and degree of shelter every day; as long as you achieve that, you survive. Bureaucracy says you must achieve it a certain way so that the bureaucracy remains in controls.

Jobs form the archetype of narrowing. A farmer must make his fields and animals succeed by any means necessary (ends-over-means); his employee, on the other hand, has to do only a plausible version of what he has been commanded to do, even if it fails to achieve the goal (and especially if, because that way he is blameless when it fails).

All of these are reality replacements based on human neurosis, itself arising from symbolism, or the condition where a part of a situation represents the whole situation. When you do a job, you have symbolically worked; this is different from having achieved the goal of that work. Same with “letter of the law versus spirit of the law.”

Symbolism means that you sacrifice the future in order to make a happy mental state now by satisfying the symbol that, like an idol or talisman, we hold up to control reality in a type of superstitious, narcissistic neurosis. We figure that if the symbol means good things in our mind, the world will follow somehow.

Most people become infected with symbolism because it is how you control others. If you produce the happy symbol, the whole group quiets down and feels a sense of unity, so they will sacrifice wrongdoers and keep everyone basically in line. If you produce the bad symbol, they attack. This is how you manage people in a bureaucracy.

Anti-realism creeps in with symbolism because any symbol is the ultimate narrowing, even more extreme than a computer model. The symbol stands for reality; it is a half-truth turned into an absolute and universal truth-concept that is then used to control other people.

With it we always get a binary morality of “good” and “evil” in an absolute and universal sense. Ancients understood these terms to mean fortune and misfortune to the individual, and did not see them in a bureaucratic sense as appying to everyone. In bureaucracy, good and evil are methods.

For example, the bureaucratic state likes to keep order to prevent people from defending themselves, so it styles violence as “evil” and non-violence as “good.” This keeps the sheep in line and avoids revolutions, which has been the top goal of Western government since 1789.

This is morality by method. Ends-over-means morality asked what the consequences of the violence are; if you killed someone intent on harming you, this was a good thing, even if the method was “evil.” Bureaucracy needs to narrow the field so it oversimplifies into linear categorization, classing methods as good or evil and ignoring ends entirely.

Morality by method is effective for centralized control, in comparison to the mesh network that aristocracy applied with cascading control from national to local levels, with the greatest power over everyday life at the local and not national level. You tell everyone to do the “good” thing and to ensure no one does the “evil” thing.

Naturally it takes humans almost no time at all to game this system through passive aggression. They avoid the “evil” thing and use the “good” thing for bad ends, at which point they play the victim when their victims retaliate. This allows criminals to gain control of every bureaucratic society and eat it out from within.

All bureaucracies emphasize “safety” over everything else (this is the phenomenon that Nietzsche mis-characterized unintentionally as “feminization”). Safety thinking shows means-over-ends logic at its core: instead of aiming for the good, we defensively and fatalistically aim to avoid bad methods, assuming that this avoids the bad.

Not surprisingly, narrowing and anti-realism lead toward tyranny. They create a system with one path to success only, and that is through the system, at which point the system picks losers and winners. Like teachers choosing hall monitors, they select the obedient and passive over the competent and engaged.

As time goes on, this system replaces natural selection and chooses individualists over people with a wider view of reality and the transcendent need for qualitative improvement (aka realists). When the number of individualists exceeds that of realists by too great a margin, the society collapses.

In the end — as in the Late Stage Democracy we see in the US, UK, and EU at this point — organic culture is replacement by the government bureaucracy, which concerns itself only with redistributing wealth in such a way that it stays in power through the vote of the takers who outnumber the makers.

This creates a death spiral in which the society consumes itself, disincentivizing production and incentivizing parasitism, to the point where it can no longer feed itself and it collapses like the Soviet Union, quickly replaced by a warlord oligarchy that keeps the bread flowing but steals everything else for itself.

Tags: beyond good and evil, collapse, crowdism, dark organization, decline, the civilization disease