Amerika

You have seen it your entire life. Other humans botch everything. Somehow, the bad people are in power, and the good people are forced into servitude, like some bizarre homage to Cinderella. Nothing ever gets smarter; everything always gets dumber, cheaper, crasser, more disposable, and uglier.

Why bother? You know are doomed; you can tell which way history arcs, and the arc of history bends toward the West becoming a series of third world countries that will never be historically relevant again. Your nations are becoming groups of mostly-white but racially-mixed people who will have no culture that is legitimately their own.

You ask a good question; in fact, this is the essential question. Without knowing why we should resist the inevitable entropy of history and human stupidity, we have no hope of finding the will to push back against the corruption of our societies by moronic parasites from lower social orders. So let us explore this vital question.

***

We might ask the same question about life itself. Consider two people similar to those you may have met:

1. Sal sits on his couch, orders pizza, smokes weed every night, and then goes back to his job that he can do in a few hours and then slack off. He is having fun, and enjoys his life in the moment, but admits he has trepidation about the future. “No one is going to really remember me for anything,” he says. “I’m just having a good time, but I feel like I’m passing through, just letting the days slip through my fingers.”
2. Sam has more of a hard life. He gets up early, grinds on a vision of his own, then goes to a job that he can do in a few hours, then goes back home to work on his vision, which may or may not pay off. He spends the rest of his time on family and goes to bed exhausted. “I’m not really having fun,” he says. “I would say more that I am satisfied. I am where I should be, and the future will have even more options.”

Assume that directly between these extremes is Suit and Tie Guy, who packs off to work every morning, puts in his eight hours, then spends four hours watching television and sampling indie beers while playing video games. He has less free time than Sal, but more than Sam, and his life is very comfortable. Thanks to having been at his job for a decade, he has a title and a decent salary, so he has a comfortable home, a car less than seven years old, good healthcare, and all the entertainment he can consume.

This presents us with several options. We can struggle for meaning, just cruise and be comfortable, or give up on pretty much everything to enjoy the present. It might make sense to view these as stages in a cycle of maturation. When we are children, we live in the present and are most concerned with lack of pain and having varieties of comfort; everything is new to us, so each instance is very important. As we grow closer to adulthood, we start to want to have time for ourselves, but really do not have a direction as we do not have enough experiences to make sense of that. When we reach full maturity, we have a sense of purpose, and therefore are less concerned with the physical sensations of any experience as we are with its end results and how it orients us toward meaning in life.

You will find yourself somewhere on this spectrum. If you see no reason to care about anything, you are still in the childhood years, trying to gain experience; if you are just cruising through, you are a young adult, looking for a more permanent direction; if you already spend a great deal of time and energy on giving a care, you have reached a later maturity, where you are less concerned with the sensation of experience and more with the legacy you are building.

***

It takes little effort to see why the question is a hard one. After all, one path leads to risk and pain; the other leads to comfortable sofas, pleasant oblivion, and endless distractions.

However, experience provides great instruction. That which satisfies you the first time around may be entirely unwelcome the hundredth or thousandth time. Even things that were fun as a child, if they were your only options for fun, would become onerous.

One wonders about a laboratory rat gifted with a pleasant but meaningless existence. How long before the rat longs for the maze? Or the caged bird that sings, until one day it stops because there really is no point to it all. It will never escape, never have a mate, and never fly free in the arboreal wonderland of its origins.

We will never know if the bird or the rat would prefer a shorter life in nature with greater ability to have choice, or the safety of the cage, but we know that for ourselves, satisfaction of simple desires leads to more complex desires. We are not made for stasis, whether emotional or physical.

In fact, our greatest fear may be what we see in the mirror at the end of the day. What can we say about ourselves, in a world of billions, that speaks to us being more than simply self-focused people like any others, moving through life like plankton, seeking food and safety with nothing in our souls?

We face what seems like a terrible enemy — and its deeds, indeed, are terrible — but which might be a phantom. After all, Leftism seems more like the dancing sickness of our time than an innovation in human thinking; it is people giving in to a pathology, a trend for those who are tired of reality, a fascination with fantasy directed more at fears than hopes, a herd behavior legitimized only by our ability to hide it behind pleasant words and images.

It spreads like a virus. People want to get ahead, socially, and the best way to do that is to commiserate with others, which takes the form of explaining away their failures as victimhood and agreeing that the world is unfair and horrible, and “we” — a quantity never defined — should do something about it. This thinking will be familiar to anyone who has encountered a child having a tantrum when dinner was not what they expected, or when they could not go to the park because it had rained. Leftism says to people that reality is bad, so whatever you think should be real is good, and since we are good people, we will replace that bad reality with the good fantasy. This is not philosophy; it is neurosis.

Those in the grips of this pathology come to it through a desire to find a social group and to be important in lieu of being like Sam and doing something of actual relevance. It is chatter made into policy, gossip turned into theory, and wishful conjecture converted to policy. Their method is passive-aggressive bullying which comes from their assumption of themselves as good: when challenged, they turn on the challenger as if he were the one denying reality, when in fact he is usually the one asserting reality against the “good” fantasy. For those who have seen its actual nature, Leftism forms a kind of hysteria and hilarity in the same breath.

We know Leftism is a passing fad, or rather, will pass rather quickly mainly because like all anti-realistic thinking, it quickly destroys any elements in reality over which it has control. Leftist societies most resemble those turn-of-the-century communes where some aging and plain heiress invited her bohemian friends to come live in a planned community on the remains of a once-great estate, and then everything fell apart because without someone to lead and force people to do the work, the crops did not plant or harvest themselves.

These societies rebirth themselves anew because of the closeness of Leftism to human thinking. We like improving our lot in life, and we like to be social, which causes us to eternally confuse what makes other people feel happy in the moment with what they actually need over the broader span of a lifetime or the lifetime of a civilization. People eternally reinvent wishful thinking because humans are self-destructive and self-deluding because we resent our lack of power in this world, having an intelligence that seems to be “of the gods” but bodies mired in animal insignificance, needs, and obligations, including a death after which point everyone essentially forgets us, not that having them remember us would really help anyway.

At the end of the day, Leftism is simply herd behavior, and herd behavior is simply undisciplined human behavior — stupidity, fear, nervousness, doubt, lusts, greed, paranoia — when legitimized by the fact of a lack of accountability, i.e. “But Mom, everyone else is doing it!” It shows humanity marching inexorably toward lemming-like suicidal and self-destructive behavior, like the drunk so busy chasing the moon that he fails to notice he has raced over the edge of a cliff.

It would be hard to take it seriously, at all, if they had not overthrown so many good ideas and good societies, and killed so many good people. If Leftism has any legacy, it is a dual set of tombstones: individuals and societies. The brave people who stand up and affirm reality seem to vanish — into guillotines, gulags, gas chambers, and mass graves — whenever the State gains power, and Leftism gives it the ideological basis to go to absurd extremes. Even more attempts to escape Leftism are created within the Leftist mold, and so it is unsurprising that they begin behaving like Communists attempting to be Right-wingers, instead of Right-wingers finding an alternative to the State and its managerial methods of control.

Going up against these people takes some guts. Not everyone will make it out alive. Worst of all, you may lose, and then everyone who was not on-Narrative goes away, since this is what happens after every Leftist revolution: the ideological purge.

***

If you decide to take on these dangerous clowns, you will find yourself saying “why bother” several times a day, at least at first.

You will do this not so much because of the dangerous clowns but in response to others around you, who treat you as if you are speaking a language from another planet. To them, admitting that there is a problem is to reveal a personal failing, mainly because if there is an elephant in the room and they are not dealing with it, they are in denial. Even worse, they will now have a new task to add on top of all the other things cutting into their television time.

You could just go back to your gated community, get the better cubicle job, upgrade your condominium, drive a BMW, and spend tons of money on Amazon. Most people are content with that. Maybe you would be? Then again, if contentment is your only goal in life, you have sacrificed any hope for anything greater than that, haven’t you? That seems a bit sad, as if you settled for what was within reach, and gave up on life having any greater purpose. You might feel as if you are living in a giant black bowl of infinite size, in which nothing you do really means anything more than the sweater you are wearing or the drink you are sipping, and at the bottom is death, a sweet release from really having nothing to say, do, or feel that hits you deep in the gut.

Most people live by the hamster code. Typical modern person: “I engage in certain behavior because it reflects who I am. I set my own standards and morals, as long as they are within lawful limits, of course. I do not concern myself with what others do, so long as they do interrupt my pursuit of my own self.” Democracy, a form of pluralism, encourages this thinking: we all live in little boxes, and as long as our boxes do not overlap, we can continue to function, even if by doing so we have implicitly forsaken the questions of civilization, purpose, and meaning.

The point of this code is not to have a code, but to affirm the person claiming to have a code. They want to sound independent by proclaiming that they make their own rules, but then immediately point out how their rules are restrained by the rules of others. They follow The Enlightenment™ idea that whatever a human wishes to be real is in fact real, ignoring the necessity of dealing with the reality in which we live, which has its own rules which supersede our own, at least if we want to avoid the negative consequences caused by acting in denial of reality.

If you want to know what will make you say, “why bother?,” it is this attitude by your fellow citizens. They think only of themselves. They act, however, only to placate others, because their sense of self depends on those others. This produces the ultimate herd behavior, a group reacting to its own doings, oblivious to the needs outside of it, vacillating between complacent inertia and emotional stampedes, never quite grasping the task of adaptation before it and thus providing ripe picking for predators.

On the other hand, if you want a reason to bother, perhaps you can take solace in having now seen how transparent and useless most human behavior is, and from that, having seen the threat to your own well-being and happiness. If you want to wake up one day with the most enjoyable days of your life spent, wondering how you ended up dedicating your irreplaceable time to the nothingness, following the herd is really the best way to start.

***

The State recognizes the hamster within and takes a managerial approach to it. This bureaucratic form of control emphasizes methods, or the ways in which one behaves, and removes intent and results from the equation. It does this so that it can keep the sheep orderly because its only goal is the perpetuation of itself, like a parasite or virus. For that reason, everything that is done under control serves only the goal of control itself. This tautology mimics the human ego claiming that it makes its own choices, but really seeks only to be fit within the herd.

The State remains popular because it tells people that what they want to believe about themselves is in fact true. Born a serf, they can be a king, just for wishing it; their inability to figure out reality, if they rationalize it, becomes a higher morality. Humanity produces a few winners, most people in the middle, and some who will never be anything but minor players. The State recruits the latter, induces the middle to support it out of fear, and uses that to penalize the winners and take what they have. This means that the supporters of the State are not natural winners, nor naturally competent, but the revenge of the inept upon those who know better.

Breaking down the question like this makes it clear why someone of us will bother, and the rest will hide behind the easy escape of saying, “why bother?” Those who are losers want the State, egalitarianism, and other band-aids for their loserdom; those who are not losers want to clear the losers out of the way and do something impressive instead, but as long as the State and its egalitarian horde exist, whatever good the winners do will be subverted, turned against them, democratized into disposable lowest common denominator mediocrity, and then destroyed. Winners cannot coexist with our dying system.

Big point is: if you love life, and understand it enough to succeed at it, you believe in goodness, beauty, and accuracy. That leads you to believe in personal moral integrity, social order, civilization, and a natural framework larger than the individual, possibly including the metaphysicals (gods/God).

This in turn nudges you to oppose the egalitarian notion that we are not determined by who we are, but by what we want to be. You then recognize that most people are afraid of breaking the social barrier which holds taboo the act of confronting the troubling truth of how powerless we are over our destinies; we are what we were born to be, and we each have a place somewhere in a natural order, but we are not the same, nor are we gods, so we are not “equal” in any sense.

The herd fears the order larger than human intentions and social emotions which tells us where we fit in the natural order. That includes genetic determinism, social class, race, IQ, ethnicity, sex, and physical differences. They want us to be “equal” so that none rise above in the order and none are forced to admit that, despite their human desires and social chatter, they must take a lower rank because they have lower abilities.

Once you see exactly how deep the decay goes, it is impossible to support it, if you love life. Once you have seen what it is, you can never go back to comfortable sleep. You have fallen from the false Heaven of human social sentiment and descended to the raw barren wasteland of Hell where nothing is safe, but anything can be created. In other words, you have seized power over safety, and embraced reality over pleasant human illusions.

***

In the Garden of Eden, a slimy serpent offered up the words of a salesman, promising the knowledge of God to someone in a much inferior place. Seduced by the thought of power without responsibility — since being God means being condemned to serve for eternity — and tormented by his large brain which told him that what he perceived was more real than what he could verify as real, early man took the bait. This metaphor describes the eternal conflict in humanity: we search for control of our world, when no such thing exists, instead of finding a place in the order above us where we can further create beauty, goodness, and clarity.

One does not need to believe in gods/God for this to be true. A diehard atheist, although an agnostic would be taking the more scientific position, could simply decide to accept reality as it is and then work within it. Most humans however choose themselves as the center of the universe, a condition called solipsism, and band together with others who have the same pathology, creating herd behavior called crowdism.

These people believe in nothing but themselves even though they are not worth believing in, and they ruin everything they touch because they are bigoted against reality and thus act in emotional or social ways instead of recognizing the facts of a situation and adapting accordingly. Adaptation does not mean giving in to nature; it means accepting what is necessary and then steadily improving that position, like a man who realizes that to survive in the forest at night he needs a fire, but the next day he builds a lean-to and fire pit, and the day after that a small cabin and fireplace.

We can live in paradise, an Eden on Earth that we left only in our minds, if we choose to be sane. That requires seeing the world as larger than ourselves, causes as larger than effects, and the ability to have an unequal position where we can act according to the structure of reality to increase the good in the world as larger than having power without responsibility. This is the least popular view in any herd, but also the one least likely to lead to insanity, instability, and mental unhealth.

If you want to know “why bother?” the answer is that greatness is at hand if you just reach out to seize it. We can be like the ancient Greco-Roman-Nordic civilizations that achieved greater order and beauty than our modern techno-shambles, and then even improve on that. We can reach new heights of knowledge and explore the stars. First, however, we must become sane, and sanity starts with realism, not human solipsism or social hive mind impulses.

The great life awaits us out there. We will not find it in humanity, but in going within ourselves to see what our intuition tells us about the universe. Children are born believing in a place before life, and a place after death, but even more, in an order which fundamentally tends toward the good, even if there are scary things out there. Adults learn that the greatest satisfaction comes from the enduring and eternal, and that only comes from an understanding of our world, even though most of us are geared against that mental discipline.

For now, our chance at the great life is obstructed by the human pathology. This, too, can be defeated. Over time, it can be bred out of us, and we can reach upward to greater heights. Only then will we find satisfaction in life, a sense of greatness and purpose, and a joy in existence. Abandoning this fallen time brings at first pain, and later delight. This is why I bother, and why someday, you will as well; if you are lucky, you will meet this challenge earlier in life and have more time to explore it.

Tags: apathy, crowdism, pathology, solipsism, why bother