Amerika

We are in the midst of the Big Flip: everything that we trusted about the post-WW2 order has turned out to become not just oppressive but destined to take us to third world levels of failure, and therefore, we are rejecting the symbols that were used to manipulate us.

The order that came during WW2 and was born of Allied propaganda was based around the idea that we were free and not anti-Semitic, therefore we were good, and for that reason, we deserved to rule the world not because we won the war and used nuclear weapons, but because we offered a moral humanistic order based in civil rights.

Using civil rights, our governments and organizations broke down every barrier and removed any vestiges of culture, heritage, faith, and common sense from our daily existence.

They did in this pursuit of a symbol, namely equality, which does not relate to reality directly but makes humans feel good because it is a comforting notion in our minds. In the name of equality, from 980 AD onward, we systematically dismantled our civilization.

As this process accelerated, its effects because worse, and we started to feel ill as a society. This created a situation known as brokenism where many simply defended the status quo on the basis of its moral superiority and ignored the fact that it was, well, broken:

At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay—sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Which is why many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenism seems to be an endorsement of another popular internet trope, enshittification, which happens when people cut corners in products and institutions in order to save money and possibly promote themselves:

Enshittification is an informal word used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time, due to an increase in advertisements, costs, or features. It can also refer more generally to any state of deterioration, especially in politics or society.

More accurately, enshittification describes what happens when brokenism must be applied: the system is broken, it taxing and regulating business to death, and to make that work, business and institutions have to cut corners and become more manipulative in order to squeeze every last cent out of the herd.

Brokenism defends the post-WW2 order in the West where civil rights becomes the basis of government, therefore government becomes a support system for individualists, which requires massive subsidies paid for by the few remaining productive people. This depletes society to feed its least likely to survive.

When you take that much money out of the economy, corners must be cut, thus “enshittification” is a product of consumerism which is the product of the mixed economic system which mixes socialism with capitalism through the magic of the Keynesian circular Ponzi scheme.

Capitalism does not enshittify; socialism added to capitalism makes enshittification normal. Similarly, brokenism comes from those who want to hang on to socialism and diversity and not admit that these have failed and worse, have created civilization-ending inertia despite being favorites of the system.

Consumerism, the result of economic stimulus and the mixed economic system, hybridizes capitalism to socialism and imports the problems of socialism into capitalism. Those shoddy Soviet goods? Now they are cheap plastic Chinese goods. Lack of food? Munch on seed oils, soy, and glyphosate grain.

Our current backlash against government recognizes that “everything government touches turns to crap,” as a rocker once opined, and even more, that socialist subsidies of any kind are like the bureaucracy itself a type of parasite that ruins our future.

For this reason, the Tea Party morphed into populism and aims to remove the System by ripping out its funding and infrastructure.

For the progressive left in both the US and EU, bureaucracy is their everything because it has ushered in its cultural revolution on an unwilling public: Open borders, race preferences, and quotas achieved through standard-lowering, gender-transition surgeries for minors, EV mandates that are killing German automakers and undermining those in the US.

The problem for progressives is the bureaucracy is increasingly counter-majoritarian: voters on both sides of the pond do not approve of the cultural revolution or the layers of bloat and waste that accompany it.

In other words, the cultural revolution — a shift to the Left under the civil rights banner, including Keynesian socialism in mixed economic systems within liberal democracies — has become associated with the bureaucracy that is the Establishment or Deep State, and that, with dead economies.

Not surprisingly, socialism even in trace form killed prosperity in the West just like it did in Jacobin and Soviet eras. Not surprisingly, diversity has destroyed social order in the West just like it did in Rwanda, Northern Ireland, or even prewar Germany where Jews disproportionately owned banks, media, and industry.

History repeats itself. We are seeing how doing the same stupid thing in different places and times leads to the same result, even if we try to limit it with rules and laws. The only solution is to starve the beast or cut off its funding, whether it is welfare or Chinese industry or anything in-between.

Leftists are dealing with the fact that the agenda of freedom and individualism became an institution in itself, and that institution has now become as repressive as the Soviets or Nazis, even if it uses soft methods, causing people to oppose The liberal Establishment because it is a wrecking ball to prosperity and having a future:

As Yglesias has pointed out before, liberals are seen as The Establishment these days, which partly explains why it’s no longer cool to be a liberal.

After all, Biden reprised Carter, himself reprising FDR who was trying to be a second Lincoln. Those wanted to be leaders of political machines, or behind-the-scenes Deep States which used government money to buy favors and therefore, maintain control to do the “morally right” thing.

Stimulus spending causes the economy to slow down because money has been taken out and funneled through government, which wastes much of it through incompetence, inaccuracy, and graft. This effectively hamstrings the economy which then underperforms, resulting in fewer good jobs and wages, further stalling the economy.

People are realizing that government spending is not good as we were told, but the opposite:

Jason Furman, the former top economist for then-President Barack Obama, wrote in a lengthy Foreign Affairs piece that inflation was principally caused by too much government spending.

The more you spend, the less the currency is worth because you are literally giving it away which stimulates speculation but reduces value, essentially taking from the productive to give to those who just want to make a few trades, grab the profit, and flee.

Not surprisingly, governments run by speculators initially produce lots of good results because their demand-side economics stimulate the economy, but then that stimulus runs out, and repeated stimulus devalues the currency to the point where the stimulus itself does not work.

For this reason, political machines always run into collapse just like the third-world governments that they are patterned after. Much as in nature, parasite load eventually kills individuals, societies that allow wealth transfer — time, energy, money, genius — to the collective herd of the poor or victimized self-destruct.

Absolute power does not corrupt, absolutely or otherwise, but power attracts parasites, and the aegis of altruism allows them to operate beyond criticism, so all of them endorse peace, freedom, love, money, promiscuity, symbolic gods, and tolerance.

However, it should surprise no one when the empathetic altruists behave like incompetent criminals instead because their goal is to remain in power by bribing the herd, not fix anything or preserve anything:

As prices skyrocketed, illegal immigrants streamed into the country and the Biden administration caused fiascos like our withdrawal from Afghanistan, people could not just sit back and ignore politics.

Civil rights changed America. Natural rights made the most sense because they kept government from interfering with non-harmful acts, but this only worked in a mono-ethnic Anglo-Saxon society. As soon as people who were genetically from outside Western Europe arrived, things fell apart.

Like most dying civilizations, ours began its decline through prosperity, which created a huge number of people who could only follow instructions and therefore, created a need for a power structure to manage them, instead of a reward system which mimicking markets, Darwinism, and our own minds rewarded better solutions amd deprecated failures, leaving everyone else alone.

This followed the split from Pagan naturalistic morality (“good to the good, bad to the bad”) to Abrahamist social morality (“good to the good, good also to the bad”) which tried to fix society by making everyone behave as if they were good, introducing means-over-ends thinking and therefore, deprecating unity through mutual goals.

Over the centuries, this approach has been popular however and therefore, has beaten down all other options, including the nationalists in the 1940s and the Communists in the 1990s, but now we see a threat from a third front, the bureaucracy that wants to make us all the same so we behave identically.

Acting through social engineering and the theory of behaviorism, this approach assumes that all people are identical except for situation, and attempts through a reward and punishment scheme to make everyone behave at a minimum similar level, effectively rewarding conformity and obedience to abstract symbols.

Not surprisingly, the more this has spread, the less people have trusted government because they see it as another self-interested corporation engineering its audience into perfect consumers:

In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five.

On top of that, diversity via civil rights destroyed behavioral standards and ideals held in common, leaving only government and markets to give us guidance. This has created a society of emptiness in which each person is an island.

Arguably this most recent outbreak of eternal insanity of humanity — solipsism becoming individualism that is collectivized into egalitarianism and through it, parasitism of the productive to subsidize the less-productive — emerged out of Civil War, WW1, and WW2 propaganda from the Americans.

Perhaps WW2 has never ended, since we seem to still be fighting Hitler in our minds, even if greater threats have accumulated in the years since. We are still attempting to mobilize a population through militarism, although now it is militarism against ideas instead of actual enemies.

The rise of behaviorism as a way to manipulate equal conformists into “correct” behavior mirrors the rise of early control systems related to employment and correct procedures like irrigation, hygiene, and fire safety. From our best intentions come our worst manipulations which follow a military or bureaucratic model:

One textbook defines H.R. as “a largely behavioral science approach to the study of nonunion work situations, with particular emphasis on the practice and organization of management.” This is a pithy way of saying that H.R. sees bosses as economic actors and workers as psychological ones. From the beginning, H.R. has been the discipline addressed not so much to workers’ welfare as to their feelings.

As soon as the field of human resources was isolated from the rest of management, extravagant claims started to be made on its behalf. Henry Ford II said in 1946 that “solving the problem of human relations in production” could be as big a revolution as the assembly line. “Our task is nothing less than to rehumanize industry,” one psychologist declared in 1919.

Modern people have figured out that we do not want to become Brazil, and that well-intentioned altruism, free stuff, and tolerance lead to a Brazil-like state as all of the world’s lost and loose people show up for the easy jobs and free money.

What we call “brokenism” and “enshiffication” represent respectively people rationalizing the decline, and people making the decline affordable by cutting corners. At its core the decline however comes from our support of individualism instead of having a transcendent goal and unified culture.

We trusted in the social engineering system for a long time but as with all conjectural symbolic ventures, it is only as good as any one of its parts, and when one fails, the whole thing goes down. The brokenists are merely defending the liberal system which is dying of its own instutional enshittification.

Tags: behaviorism, brokenism, decline, enshittification, social engineering