Amerika

Every bad relationship — work, family, dating, friendship, volunteering, online — in life offers one factor: control. One or more people seek to control the behavior of others by limiting the acceptable methods of behaving.

For example, in your friend group, one person is picked on, so it becomes prohibited to say mean things to them. This causes problems when one realizes that sometimes necessary communications could be backward-construed as “mean,” and for that reason, all non-positive communication will cease.

Other groups want to change behavior in even more elemental ways. Jobs for example love to specify process and procedure, ostensibly to focus your attention on a checklist, but also to avoid noticing of things which are not covered by those methods.

These control-based relationships share an attribute in common, which is that they rule by inconsistency. The individual never knows when he or she is doing well, or when a complaint will be raised, and this instability proliferates as rules do.

In a friend group for example, it is decided — usually by the most socially active people, usually not by the natural leaders — to avoid negativity. This means that any morning you may get up and find your friends arrayed against you because something you did was backward-construed as “negative.”

Categories fool us in this way. Since objects and ideas have multiple attributes, a behavior can be both one thing and then another, as soon as someone picks out that detail and makes it into the category used to reference that object. Control works this way: the innocent turns on a detail and becomes risk.

Control forces us to affirmatively impel ourselves to conform and avoid methods proscribed by those in control, which leaves us with only what they approve, which in turn shapes our thinking around using these methods like tools. Reality programs the mind when limited in such a way.

Right now, we find ourselves in the midst of a control event. A crisis of unknown severity emerged, and those in authority pounced on it. True to the inverted nature of our time, it was not our putative leaders, but those in the management power structure who took over here.

We live in its power through inconsistency; that is, we have no idea what an accurate assessment of the risk is, so we are forced to affirmatively take precautions in the absent of any coherent, actual, and complete information (called “whole truths” in the vernacular).

The fear spreads from person to person like contagion itself. When you see that your friend has both a mask and gloves, you experience fear until you, too, are taking the same precautions; then you see another friend with mask, gloves, and bodysuit and the traumatic cycle begins again.

As we watch our modern society which prizes its power over nature so much melt down at a light touch, even, we have to consider that the “modern miracle” is over. The things that have kept nature at bay, like industrial agriculture, antibiotics, internal combustion engines, running water, gas heat, electric lights, interchangeable parts, and assembly line manufacturing, are now failing us.

The coronavirus panicdemic brings us to see the real contagion among us, which is the notion that we can have power outside of the natural order, or the way things are when we adhere to the sensibilities of nature. Instead, we find that we are living in a prolonged fraud of a dying civilization re-branded and re-painted as a “progressive” one:

• The middle managers are in control.

  We like to think that our presidents and CEOs matter, but this pandemic showed us that they can only send out orders, and those filter to middle management, which consists of many layers of people designed to insulate each other from consequences. Basically, the “deep state” is bureaucracy itself, which at some point gains enough power to remove the mask and reveal its own self-interest, at which point it creates crises so that it may solve them and be seen as essential. The drama of the medical workers portraying themselves as superheroes comes to mind, or the many bureaucrats who filmed themselves for PSAs, or even the people who run inconsequential countries like Justin Turdeau or Jacinda Ardern who have turned this into a photo opportunity. None of these people are actually “leading” in any meaningful capacity, but they all serve to keep the system going. When having facemasks and groceries become your primary concerns, you realize that the system has expanded too much, become too specialized, and depends too much on official procedure and regulations to be flexible. The middle managers have taken over, and we all live or die on their whims. As it turns out, a tragedy averted is a tragedy ignored, but a tragedy let become unbearable then earns whoever solves it the ticket to wealth, power, and social status, so bureaucrats have an interest in making this system horrible and forever “solving” the same intractable problems like poverty, sexism, alcoholism, racism, obesity, and gambling.

• No one and nothing is competent.

  Perhaps as a corollary to the above, we have learned that basically every level of this society has made the usual mistake of installing bureaucracy and promoting people via meritocracy, which means that they narrow the real world questions to multiple choice tests and then find themselves shocked when they get bean counters and sociopathic careerists instead of thoughtful and functional people. When society can be brought to a standstill by a few people hoarding toilet paper, you know that it was never that robust of a system anyway. When your unions are so greedy and your entitlements taxes so high that all of your gear is made overseas, and the people who buy this stuff for cities cannot tell the difference between a scam and a reasonable deal, you are doomed by the nature of those administering your system. Then again, they have good grades and impressive CVs, so who are you to object? The story of this panicdemic will be that the System failed from within, not because our leaders were inept, but because those under them had “optimized” their infrastructure to the point where it had no resilience.

• Science means grabbing headlines.

  Most of the data coming out of our scientists has proven to be wrong or, worse, both partially right and given toward drawing overbroad conclusions. Not only that, but science shows that it bows to political and economic incentives. This means that our real crisis here is that we do not know what to trust. We now have two groups, one insisting that the virus is the end of the world, and the other saying that they think it is no big deal and will kill fewer people than the flu. Which do we trust? In theory, science would remain neutral, but much of it has a tendency to swing to one side or the other. Again, our bureaucratic meritocracy has promoted incompetents in the name of social mobility.

• The goal was to take over.

  Never let a good crisis go to waste, the Left thinks, and so they have used the hysteria over this event as an excuse to adopt socialist-style programs, social monitoring, and control over the everyday lives of citizens. No one minds a quarantine or temporary prohibition on large gatherings, but when you have police hunting people down in parks to tell them to go home, you have entered a permanent state of excessive authority applied to everyday activities. They want to create a second Great Depression and possibly war because the last ones spurred us to shift from a socially conservative nation to a socially liberal one, where our intellectuals believed in Socialism and sexual liberation and other destructive ideas as good. In a crisis, people rationalize what they hope is true as what is actually true, and act on it out of desperation fanned by the flames of group circular confirmation of mutual panic. The Left was in a state of decline as populism rose, and they see this as their way to seize power now that their grand plan of demographic replacement has encountered resistance and all of Leftist policies seem to be simultaneously and visibly failing.

• Brett’s Rule applies.

  Sometimes one discovers important things by accident. Brett’s rule (for lack of a better name) states that whatever people have to tell you or show you is not actual. They are either explaining a narrative or attempting to market themselves to you so that you will do what they want. In this case, the media needed lots of explaining to make its vision of events hold together, and this required much verbiage, emotion, and imagery outside of the facts. Symbols, images, emotions, and narratives serve to centralize our thinking, so that we all do the same thing at once, which is the aspiration of the Asiatic tyrant: win by quantity, not quality. The Western vision, which relies on a hierarchy of quality, naturally shies away from this. When the coronapanic emerged, the narrative and lengthy “explanations” of facts as if we were too simple to understand them became the norm, feeding the mass compulsion to emotional expression rather than informing us.

The contagion originates in the ideal of individualism, which most call materialism, a psychological state of valuing the individual above all else, and therefore heeding its emotions, desires, fears, and need for power above all else.

This leads to control, since an individual knows nothing but himself, and therefore must force others to represent the world he sees in order to avoid encountering conflicting representations of reality. This naturally brings about a tyrannical frame of mind: affirm the narrative or be seen as an enemy.

Per Crowdism, groups that are not unified on a transcendent goal become focused on holding the group together, and limit methods to those which are universally accepting, in order to keep the group mobilized around a central authority or symbol (controlled by a hidden authority).

Once Crowdism takes over, saying or doing anything which does not conform to the narrative leads to an instant attack by the herd on the presumed usurper, which means that the group can no longer change direction. It must keep repeating what it has been doing, regardless of the results.

This insanity means that you can no longer get rid of the disease brought by the contagion; the illness has entered its final stage, where the responses of the body work against it. Now the energy will grind down, and soon exhaustion will come, after which descends the soft leaden velvet suffocation of death.

Tags: categorical thinking, control, covid-19, crowdism