Amerika

We are about to break the solipsism barrier: humanity is emerging from the primary challenge of permanent agricultural civilization, which is that when we depend on each other instead of nature, we must convince other people of our needs instead of working with nature to produce those what we need.

During this last era, people used symbols to convince each other that everything was going well. This is the bourgeois ideal — that which people in cities eternally favor — of ignoring everything but oneself. It is individualism with a twist, in that they rely on the state to fill in for their neglect and mess.

Human groups without hierarchy always produce the same result. The system defers to the audience instead of nature, and so people drift steadily away from reality into fantasy. This produces a bureaucracy of education, careers, and knowing the right people that favors aggressive me-first manipulators who want to dedicate their time to the system.

Capitalism becomes socialism because the system defers to the audience instead of having a goal, something that hierarchy maintains. Anarchists become authoritarians as soon as there is nothing in the cupboard. Everyone ends up at tyranny of an all-powerful state.

Your average person, if asked, essentially wants anarchy with grocery stores and someone to clean up the mess. They create the bureaucracy and the state from this desire. Individualists form groups to demand it, equality becomes the new goal, and then everyone claims they are advancing equality by doing whatever they wanted to do anyway.

With the arrival of equality, each person becomes anonymous and insignificant until they work their way through the bureaucratic hierarchy of education, careers, and socializing with the right people. Once they get to a position of comfort, they become uninterested in the problems of the world and recede from it into localized private lives.

That bourgeois curve, moving from equally insignificant to vested in the system, explains the apathy that greets the slow downfall of civilization. People rationalize that they could not do anything about it, and would simply lose their position, so they ignore it and pass the crisis down to the next generation.

This means that humanity faces the worst problem: the solutions that we think are good are in fact destructive, but because these solutions neutralize the ability to act and think independently, once they are started the momentum never stops, only accelerates.

For this reason, the most important issue for all humans is stopping The Civilization Disease by doing something differently than all of the failed examples that we know so far have done. We know what does not work; we have to find something that does work, or we will keep slaughtering our best hopes.

Our societies are based on “compassion,” which generally speaking means projecting the fears of the individual onto other people and consequently demanding that these people not have to face natural selection. This allows people to continue being dysfunctional, unlike nature which constantly urges them to be dysfunctional.

It also stops societies from finding a why, a purpose, and a goal. Humanism is a proxy for a goal; instead of trying to achieve something, the society tries to keep its people happy. This creates a market for being unhappy, and soon you have a society of people making themselves miserable in order to be important.

Future societies will see “rationalism” itself as a problem. That theory says basically that if we can think something, and it is internally consistent or derived from a precedent, it must be real. If someone thinks something, it must be treated as true. In the end, society dies from being pulled in as many directions as it has people.

Actual wisdom and science come from testing things against reality and where they cannot be tested, designing theoretical models according to Occam and Kantian architectonic reasoning. Realists and consequentialists are interested in effects in reality.

We are less concerned with what might be, might not be, or can be computer modeled by reducing the number of measurable factors. When consider the question of society, we know what fails and we have a good idea of what works, but lack the political will to achieve it.

Our current society measures morality by what people want to think is true. That way leads to disaster. If we measure instead by results, we end up with a different morality, one in which compassion is a weakness that leads to allowing people to self-destruct and destroy their civilization.

Tags: compassion, equality, the civilization disease