Amerika

When we look into the illness that afflicts the West, it becomes hard to quite pin it down. Until people are confronted by a crisis, and identify it as coming after them as members of a group, they tend to do worse than not think about it; they tend to invent superstitions to explain it.

In the modern West, some tell us technology is evil; it certainly accelerated the decline. Others point to the monetary system, hinting out how mixed economies and fiat currency make usury into a true horror. Some say our spirits died long ago and we need Jesus or Thor to make our way out of the mess.

A cynical nihilist, aiming only toward the high colonic of realism that serves as the only force delivering humanity from its own self-destructive tendencies, might say that our societies clearly lost their goal some time ago, and since then we have been focused on managing and controlling others in order to keep the group together.

In that sense, we once had good, or at least were moving in the direction of good because we had a direction that fit us and made us improve ourselves, but then we lost that direction, and not surprisingly nothing else has worked as well. We need to regain that direction as a group or we decay as individuals.

This leads us to ask what evil is. People use the term all the time to mean basically whatever scares them: death, loss, famine, crime, accident, parasitism, or disease. Some view all of these as being done to them by a mythological being like Satan or Moloch.

However, a quick rundown on those who do evil things shows us a few cases. They are either selfish or in the grips of ideological or religious fervor. The paradox of morality is that in order to achieve something perceived as good, most will accept doing “evil” things for “good” ends.

The idea of good using evil methods shows us the paradox of good as an absolute, as illustrated in the split between liberalism and full Leftism:

The words attributed to Voltaire — “I defend to the death your right to say it, even if I do not agree with what you are saying” — form the basis of free speech in democratic societies. For if we do not allow people the freedom to think and express themselves, we deny them a fundamental right as human beings. Free speech allows for differences of opinion and creativity. It moves away from homogenising culture and allows for and celebrates difference.

This stands in stark contrast to Karl Popper, who famously wrote of the paradox of intolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force … they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

If we declare that we are good, then we must be bad to those who are not good, even if this means that ultimately we are not good and will get worse as we become accustomed to categorizing everything we dislike as bad. Tolerance leads to intolerant societies.

Doers of evil deeds rarely intend evil. The criminal mind — this is the basis of all wrongdoing — sees anything that interrupts what the individual wants right now as a threat to the self-image of the individual, therefore feels entirely justified in destroying, taking, or mutilating it.

Since the criminal suffers under the weight of excess egotism, he in fact tends to want to destroy anything beautiful, healthy, innocent, good, strong, decent, sane, and in touch with the world around it. He views the world as competition for his own ego, and therefore he hates it and anything that thrives in it.

Is this “evil”? More likely, to use a term now unfashionable from former ages, his mind is disordered. That is, he has never achieved unitive bonding with the world he exists in, therefore he has been unable to see the transcendent beauty of it, and therefore only sees the bad and retaliates against it with revengeful resentment.

The criminal mind shows us the ordinary solipsism of humans taken to an extreme. Big brained creatures mostly listen to their big brains, and often confuse their thoughts about reality with what is real, especially where emotional judgments, whims, and desires come into the picture.

A criminal simply takes out the stops that allow people to orient themselves by observing reality and orienting their whims to what is logical. A sensible person will say, “Sure, I want a Ferrari, but I either cannot afford it or it is not a good use of my money.” A criminal simply looks for one to steal and justifies it with “but I was poor.”

Like most narcissists, which is the term our society uses for solipsists, criminals portray themselves alternately as gods and victims. They are gods when it comes to their desires, but victims when they have to justify those to others. They will claim self-defense to any murder, poverty to any theft, and “she led me on” to any rape.

Solipsism serves as the root of all human stupidity and the reason why an intelligent species tends to rationalize itself into doing stupid and self-destructive things. When we cut reality out of the equation, our choices become arbitrary, so we tend toward the venal like lusts, egotism, and revenge.

Religious and ideological people see this and bring out their solution, which is control or manipulation for the sake of keeping the peace and the continuity of the system. They see bad people and want to force those to be good, figuring that the absence of bad is good, when the opposite is true.

Perhaps bad does not exist at all, but good does. What is good? The organized adaptation of an organism to its environment. Bad is anything else, whether intended as bad or good, or even if intended as good and simply mistaken about how an action will unfold in reality.

The ancient pagans and natural selection scientists agreed that morality was what optimized survival, especially in a civilization context since humans are ineffectual when isolated, and therefore there were people born with an inclination to good and then everyone else.

To make a society rise, you suppress the latter and raise up the former. Religion and ideology throw out the distinction between good and not-so-good, and instead demand conformity so that everyone uses the same methods in order to participate in a false perception of unity. This is control, and it always backfires.

Trying to make the not-good “good” works in two ways: it forces acceptance of the not-good as well as the good, and it tries to control and manipulate the not-so-good into behaving in a way that society defines as “good,” meaning methods instead of goals. It makes you behave, not orient toward goodness and achievement.

A rising society operates by ends-over-means. If you have a goal of goodness, and produce good results by your actions, then you are good, even if you had to do “bad” to get there. This at least is consistent because goals are more important than methods.

A dying society guides itself by means-over-ends. It gives up on goals, and instead regulates method, so that everyone does harmless (according to the leaders) things and by doing them together, induces a mental state of obedience and social goodwill. These people become effete, ineffectual, and crassly hedonistic.

In other words, you either aim toward goodness, realism, sanity, and transcendental beauty, or you go into the garbage can, perhaps only through being ranked lower in the social hierarchy. Good people become aristocrats; mostly-good people become the middle classes; opportunistic people get filed away as plebes.

Our society currently suffers from an epidemic of choking bitterness. That is, we see how good things could be, but then look at the world and realize that not-good always wins because our system is dedicated toward making the not-good “good” through control, which means that not-good is not just tolerated but celebrated.

Democracy shows us a race to the bottom. In order to show that we are not bad, or non-egalitarian, we have to demonstrate increasing levels of egalitarian self-expression; otherwise, if someone accuses us of being non-egalitarian, we go to Robespierre’s guillotin, Stalin’s gulags, or Facebook’s ban file.

We got off-track from the good. Our symbol of good lost what it refers to, which is good results in reality, and was replaced with symbol itself, or gestures of goodness in the egalitarian framework. This is why you have a society that praises promiscuity over chastity, insanity over sanity, and crass opportunism over restraint.

Since the loss of the referent of our symbols, we have been focused on manipulation and become slaves to the ongoing need to constantly demonstrate symbols of good that are unrelated to goals of good. This makes people bitter as they see that bad will always win in this system, and so people stop trying.

The same economics that destroyed the Soviet Union — it was easier to do the minimum than strive for excellence, since getting noticed by the system was bad and working harder than others made them look bad — applies also to our spiritual economics in the West. It is easier to be bad, or at least apathetic, than to strive.

Manipulation prizes enforced unity not independent transcendent unitivity. A person in spiritual freedom finds that there is only good because anything else leads to bad results and these do not reward the ego with achievement, causing the ego to become overdominant as it seeks to assert itself on its own recognizance instead of by works.

Unity wants to control people who otherwise have terrible solipsistic impulses so that it can use them to keep the system afloat, where unitivity separates people into bands across the Bell Curve, with the wisest and noblest rising above the rest. That ensures that you get quality leaders who care about the consequences of their actions.

Some call this responsibility. Whatever it is, most of humanity seeks to avoid it, and they really have no moral choice or free will in the matter because they do not have the wiring to do anything but pursue their own desires and impulses.

Unity eschews responsibility for obedience. Do the same method as others, and everyone feels safe and that warm buzz of togetherness, and therefore the system can go on. This induces passivity in people on a moral level much as Communism did, by making them wait for instructions to which they reply with the minimum effort.

All forms of non-prioritarian — that means people who like hierarchy based on those who achieve goals of good — society fall into this same deathtrap. Meritocracy, democracy, consumerism, and red tape all create passivity, feelings of resentment, and lower performance in all areas not micromanaged by those above.

Plebes like micromanagement because it tells them exactly what to do and expects they will do the minimum, leaving them the rest of the time to fall into the abyss of personality, which produces a constant stream of desires and whims, distracting them from reality entirely, which they like because they secretly suspect reality is bad.

From individualism comes means-over-ends, since this way no one is threatened because all “dangerous” methods have been proscribed, and from means-over-ends comes control, from that passivity, and from that vengefulness. This takes the form of passive-aggressive doing the minimum and following the letter not spirit of the law or task.

The bitterness of our time is this vengefulness. We have no way to demonstrate our inner goodness, and those who avoid goodness and do the minimum while drawing attention to themselves succeed over all others, so it seems like there is no hope and no point.

To escape bitterness, a society must orient itself again toward rewarding the good and demoting the bad. This offends all modern people, since they are terrified that anyone or reality itself might be above them and their whims, so people oppose the one chance at salvation they have for the temporary and fleeting pleasures of the ego.

Tags: bitterness, egotism, narcissism, resentment, revengefulness, solipsism