Amerika

We talk about Crowdism here a lot, which is the grim fact that human groups emphasize getting along with the group, which prioritizes mutual individualism at the expense of group interests, so the group always pursues simplistic, short-term illusions over long-term realistic solutions.

Our ancestral culture, inherited from the Greeks and ancient Nords, emphasized avoiding hybris or individualism, placing the individual above his “station” or role in the larger drama of civilization, humanity, nature, and the divine. Somehow conservatives forgot this because it is a hard problem, which Crowds avoid.

Individualists hate hard problems. You do not succeed in life — after the rise of The Job and its bureaucracy — by taking on hard problems. In fact, avoid any real problems if you can; you can fail at those. Go after nonsensical hobgoblins, trends, and gold rushes (manias) and you will advance your personal career.

Conservatives do the same. The conservatives you see in public are stupid. They are stupid because the voters have selected out anyone who will tackle real problems. This is why you get a lot of talk about abortion, Jesus/Israel, flag burning, and why industry needs cheap imported labor. These are easy answers and no one is paying attention to consequences.

Public conservatives want to lose. Their career arc and business model involves raising donations from a shrinking group of people with more of a clue than average. This requires that they take bold, vivid, and simplistic stands and then get shot down so they can cry out at the hypocrisy in outrage and raise more funds.

When you view Conservatism Inc as a business, its utter failure to achieve much of anything except scaring abortion fans makes perfect sense. If they win, they have to tackle problems and can fail at doing that. If they lose, they get more money and can go on speaking tours at churches and Walmarts across the land.

It is far easier to play the morally righteous victim and avoid any real work or real challenges than it is to fix things. Conservatives gave up on that long ago. Now they just want to have yachts, so they preach unrealistic solutions fixated on religion and patriotism instead of doing what gets them elected, namely fixing stuff.

Crowdism infiltrates every ideology, group, society, and social setting. It is simply what people do in groups. When people form committees, even large ones like an electorate, they run away from hard problems and race toward inconsequential issues.

In general, human brains seek first and foremost to rationalize their situation so that they feel good about it. To fix problems, you have to be able to tolerate ambiguity while you work on the problem. This upsets most people so much that they cannot function, so they avoid it.

Rationalization means a variety of pragmatism where you accept what is on offer, and even though it is not what you need or want, you find some way to tell yourself a little story that makes it seem like it is the best possible outcome. This allows your ego to function even in bad circumstances.

The problem with rationalization is that it leads away from goal-orientation. That path also goes the opposite direction from a transcendental understanding of life, which is an appreciation for why things must be as they are in nature and the world beyond our little human moral kiosk of individual desires, judgments, and feelings.

Humans can handle other individuals, since they speak the same language, but they have trouble with the world outside humans. They are troubled by nature and mortality, confused by their own lack of power, and they revert back into a social circle of individuals who share the same fears and therefore make considering them taboo.

A sane person considers themselves, of course, but not before anything else (the definition of individualism is the self and other selves first, and reality second unless it clashes with individual desires, at which point it is discarded). The sane person considers nature, civilization, humanity, history, and knowledge as higher than any self.

To be sane involves accepting that civilization is more important than most realize; most take it for granted in the first world and have given up on it being functional in the third world. Sane people realize that individual goals, the way the world works, and civilization are the same question viewed from different angles.

In a sane society, genetic health is the primary goal because gene drift or random mutation over time can destroy populations. To constrain gene drift, we follow natural selection: reward the good, punish the bad, leave everyone else alone.

Suppression of bad behaviors makes a society thrive. Even more, removal of those prone to bad behaviors creates genetic health, or at least is half of the equation (the other half is breeding more of the smartest, strongest, healthiest, sanest, and noblest). Permissive societies decay into third world ruins.

As part of that, a sane civilization aims to be contiguous from its founding to its future. It wants to preserve the genetic frameworks of its founders, but through natural selection, improve (not change!) all of those traits. This is how one builds culture, and culture is how knowledge is shared, through understanding goals and paths to them.

Preservation of genetic frameworks means excluding all foreign ethnics, but also, in rewarding what has always worked for that society since its origin. This reduces both randomness and repetition, and emphasizes Darwinistic success over selfish gene choice, which happens in permissive societies when useless combinations advance themselves.

Translated to politics, Leftists emphasize the selfish gene: everyone does whatever they want, and no natural selection occurs except for compliance. Conservatives are the framework party that preserves both population genetic frameworks and the social order required for them; we are Darwinists who want to reward the good and remove the bad.

Sane societies tend to have a philosophy of coherence between reality and individual needs. They choose things in parallel: nature and heavens in parallel, individual and civilization in parallel, future and past in parallel. They demand things be compatible in all parts, and then refine them, rather than choosing different things constantly.

Conservatives try to preserve this with their preference for the time-honored and case-by-case basis thinking. This is a simplified view but captures most of the idea when presented in the context of a culture, because only culture can share enough gut instinct for concepts to convey ideas without endless flogging theory and discussion.

The philosophy of this site, parallelism, emphasizes the idea of parallels between the different parts of reality. It values structures that are repeated in parallel between time, energy, matter, and thought; it favors the idea of admitting some new ideas by their coherence with what is already known and not by novelty itself.

Parallelism emphasizes a sane university in which consistency is the dominant quality. The world operates by consistent principles; we can understand it and work with it. The greatest parallel is between cause and effect, as it is in the world, and without that continuity, nothing is consistent and therefore, nothing would make sense.

As part of this quest, it aims to reduce negative externalities which are usually the result of solipsistic human choices, themselves a biological result of high deleterious mutation load:

Negative externality, in economics, the imposition of a cost on a party as an indirect effect of the actions of another party. Negative externalities arise when one party, such as a business, makes another party worse off, yet does not bear the costs from doing so. Externalities, which can be either positive or negative to the affected parties, are a form of market failure resulting in inefficient market outcomes. Negative externalities are an important concept in environmental economics, in which pollution represents a tremendous cost borne by outside parties.

Again, suppression of known mistakes is more important than novelty; very little is truly new to us, and everything has a prior pattern we can recognize because the universe is consistent. We know what the negative externalities are likely to be, and by suppressing them, we make healthier civilizations.

A sick society socializes its negative externalities, or passes the cost on to the whole group. A sane society Darwinizies negative externalities, or in other words localizes them to whoever screwed up. This way the good rise and the bad fall, and everyone else muddles through.

Part of the reason for doing this is to reduce the selfish gene problem expressed through careerism, which is the basis of dark organization, the situation that occurs when individuals act against the group by prioritizing immediate individual advantage over long-term group advantage:

The model considers a hidden-action problem, in which the scientific community must reward discoveries in a way that encourages effort and risk-taking while simultaneously protecting researchers’ livelihoods against the unpredictability of scientific outcomes. Its challenge when doing so is that incentives to motivate effort clash with incentives to motivate risk-taking, because a failed project may be evidence of a risky undertaking but could also be the result of simple sloth. As a result, the incentives that are needed to encourage effort do actively discourage risk-taking.

Scientists respond by working on safe projects that generate evidence of effort but that don’t move science forward as rapidly as riskier projects would. A social planner who prizes scientific productivity above researchers’ well-being could remedy the problem by rewarding major discoveries richly enough to induce high-risk research, but in doing so would expose scientists to a degree of livelihood risk that ultimately leaves them worse off. Because the scientific community is approximately self-governing and constructs its own reward schedule, the incentives that researchers are willing to impose on themselves are inadequate to motivate the scientific risks that would best expedite scientific progress.

In deciding how to reward discoveries, the scientific community must contend with the fact that reward schemes that motivate effort inherently discourage scientific risk-taking, and vice versa. Because the community must motivate both effort and scientific risk-taking, and because effort is costly to investigators, the community inevitably establishes a tradition that encourages more conservative science than would be optimal for maximizing scientific progress, even when risky research is no more onerous than safer lines of inquiry.

If we leave it up to the selfish gene people, scientists and others will opt for careerism, or in other words inventing novel theories that are not relevant but are distinctive enough to be the basis for promotion. In order to do this, they will have to distort reality so that these partial truths seem like whole truths.

A sane society enforces standards of parallel knowledge. That is, anything new that is learned has to jive with what is already known and be relevant. Careerist attempts are suppressed because they are negative externalities that are socialized, draining the life of society in little tenths of percentage points that add up quickly.

This is necessary because the average person cannot distinguish actual knowledge from glitzy nonsense:

Researchers examined the underlying principles guiding who we perceive as wise in political leadership, science, and daily life. Across different cultures, participants’ judgements converged on two dimensions: reflective orientation and socio-emotional awareness. Reflective orientation includes characteristics such as thinking logically, emotion control and application of knowledge. Socio-emotional awareness includes characteristics like care for other’s feelings and attention to social context.

“To our surprise, the two dimensions emerged across all cultural regions we studied, and both were associated with explicit attribution of wisdom,” said Dr. Maksim Rudnev, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology at Waterloo and lead author.

If you want to know why your society is ruled by narcissists, here is half of the answer: people like self-confident people who are capable of manipulating the emotions of others while using altruism, pacifism, and spirituality — these are things so “good” they cannot be criticized — as their camouflage and shield.

The other half is that narcissists are truth-optional people. The essence of Crowdism is the human brain avoiding controversial or risky ideas, and removing those methods from consideration, like banning research into the cosmos lest it disrupt our idea of God.

Narcissists have no problem avoiding necessary and important ideas because those can lead to loss. Instead, they come up with emotionally-reactive and “new” ideas, which appeals to the Crowd, and so the narcissist builds his career at the expense of civilization, which because of this both loses knowledge and promotes the insane.

Natural selection is in force in human societies; humans however decide what is rewarded, not nature deciding. This causes problems when humans choose careerist narcissists because winner-loser effects convince everyone else that truth is taboo and lies win:

In nonhumans and humans, winner and loser effects may guide individuals to behave according to their apparent social rank, with winners adopting assertive postures and losers becoming submissive.

While physical formidability is the dominant dimension determining social rank in nonhuman species, in adult humans, social conventions, physical attractiveness, competence in complex skills, and social competence are more important for social rank.

Recent studies have explored winner and loser effects in humans competing in sports. Smith and Dukas tested winner and loser effects using first-person shooter video games and a reading comprehension assignment. Randomly assigned video game winners performed significantly better in the second phase than did randomly assigned first-phase losers, and first-phase high scorers had higher reading scores in the second phase than first-phase low scorers.

This demoralizing pathology can be seen in all collapsing civilizations.

An additional problem arises from leadership ambition, which is another filter where those who want power are often the worst at wielding it in any context except careerism:

The authors found, as expected, that leadership ambition increases self-ratings of effectiveness in a leadership role. That is, leaders with high self-reported ambition also rated themselves as highly-effective leaders. However, the authors found no relationship between leadership ambition and third-party ratings of leadership effectiveness; highly ambitious executives, compared to less ambitious executives, were rated as no more effective in their leadership roles by their managers, peers, or direct reports.

These results suggest that the pool of people striving for leadership roles may be filled with ambitious people who seek extrinsic rewards, such as high salaries and social status, and regard themselves more positively than others do.

In other words, the people who most consistently seek power are the narcissists, and those who simply want to achieve something to advance civilization and be consistent with reality are less likely to step up when they see narcissists being rewarded.

Sane people view power as a means-to-an-end. That is, they want power so they can fix something, and otherwise, they have no interest in power. As long as those above them are competent, they are content to go along with the flow, but when their leaders are incompetent, they might step up to fix things, unless convinced that this is a path to failure.

Even worse, human groups tend to misunderstand dissent because individuals understand dissent through the filter of their own abilities and beliefs, and have trouble seeing the reasons why the dissent exists:

Analysis of the data found that, even though participants were prepared to seek out as much—and often more—information about someone they disagreed with, their predictions were consistently incorrect, even after receiving further information about them.

Participants demonstrated a high degree of confidence in their answers, suggesting that participants thought they had a good understanding of the people in their out-group, despite this not being the case. In comparison, participants could consistently make accurate predictions about those in their in-group with less information.

This proves consistent with seeing narcissism as a compensatory philosophy. Burroughs tells us that parasites and viruses are species which have lost their sense of purpose, so instead they settle for living off of others, imposing negative externalities in the process.

Narcissists similarly are people in crisis who are parasitizing others. They are muddled because of deleterious mutation load (DML) and therefore, cannot find purpose and meaning in life. Instead, they victimize others with cruel manipulation in order to build up their own self-esteem:

People with narcissistic personality disorder have unstable self-esteem and underlying shame and worthlessness. They depend on other people to give them the external validation they need to feel confident and special.

As a result of their dependence on external validation and their value on their public image, narcissists can experience a debilitating narcissistic collapse when they anticipate a humiliating public failure. The anxiety associated with the idea of being exposed as flawed can interfere with their mustering enough defensive grandiosity to support their self-esteem. Without the prop of their grandiosity, they can sink into a shame-based depression in which they are afraid of the future and can no longer function in the present.

They fear one thing, namely reality itself. Reality emphasizes cause-effect relationships which make it implicit in human choices to selected goal-oriented actions. Those in turn create hierarchy and reveal the irrelevance of narcissists, which threatens them.

Their defense against this is equality. Instead of allowing for natural selection, which rewards the functional, the narcissists want functional and dysfunctional to be rewarded alike in order to hide the dysfunction of the narcissists. Consequently they demonize noticing of natural inequality:

Bronze Age Pervert speaks to disaffected right-wingers who have not attained what they thought they would, but also to those rising through the ranks of elite conservative institutions for a similar reason: “Natural inequalities exist” and “certain men are naturally more fit to rule than others,” as the former Trump staffer Michael Anton summarizes what he calls “the most reasonable of BAP’s premisses.” In other words, we are rising through the ranks of the elite because it is our natural right to.

Nature chooses inequality in order to constantly reduce negative externalities. In nature, species respond to positive opportunity; those who take advantage go furthest, those who go the opposite way get eaten, and everyone in the middle lives by chaos and hopes for the best.

In this way, both competence and efficiency are preserved. Nothing goes to waste because anything is an opportunity, and by refining species for competence, nature ensures that they find and exploit opportunities, even waste energy and matter, in order to make efficient use of everything and keep the system functional.

Nature sees externalities as related directly to efficiency, and rewarding efficiency as essential to the health of an ecosystem:

Externalities occur in an economy when the production or consumption of a specific good or service impacts a third party that is not directly related to the production or consumption of that good or service.

Almost all externalities are considered to be technical externalities. Technical externalities have an impact on the consumption and production opportunities of unrelated third parties, but the price of consumption does not include the externalities. This exclusion creates a gap between the gain or loss of private individuals and the aggregate gain or loss of society as a whole.

These affect all areas of life, including mating since love is only possible when competence at reality is rewarded more than competence at social manipulation:

Attachment is also more likely to evolve when individuals can directly assess the quality of their reproductive opportunity (as opposed to relying on imperfect information from reproductive success), when the quality of the reproductive opportunity has adult survival ramifications, and when divorce coevolves with attachment.

This shows us how very quickly deleterious mutation load can take over a population and change its breeding, converting first-world independent populations into third-world level dependent ones. In the process, these populations choose Control systems, or method-banning peer pressure designed to neuter anyone who is not in the inner Party, in the hopes of changing the thinking of the people around them, even demoralizing them.

The children of Boomers know this pathology well. Parents want children that are easily managed, so they break them down. Same thing governments do to citizens, jobs do to workers, schools do to kids, and so on. Control means that only compliance is rewarded and the system thrives on breaking people so they fit into its rubric.

Again, people rationalize from what makes them feel good: simple, short-term, and emotional judgments. They do not want to confront the difficult aspects of life, even though only doing that results in natural selection that benefits the civilization and thus the individual. To protect their rationalization, they break dissenters, even innocent ones.

Especially innocent ones.

Control runs rife in the final stages of collapsing civilizations. Europe has been in collapse since at least the late medieval era, when Mongol, Hun, and Muslim invasions competed with plagues and famines for the most destructive forces simultaneously visited upon us.

Our task is to rebuild, and for us to rebuild, we must reject individualism/Crowdism and choose transcendent realism. Luckily, once this decision is made, all other tasks immediately become obvious and can be easily achieved, but first we must develop the will to survive, thrive, and overcome ourselves.

Tags: collapse, control, crowdism, dark organization, deleterious mutation load, parallelism, psychology, rationalization