Amerika

Plato described how the problem with democracy was not only that it makes terrible decisions, but that because it both coddles people and requires them to accept an unstable situation as their only option, it slowly drives people insane while making them narcissistic.

If viewed without human emotion, democracy seems like an elaborate form of suicide: give up on yourself to engage in the consensual hallucination of the herd which assumes that the world can be handled through human means of socializing and emoting, thus becoming committed to reality-denial.

We can see “normies” as simply rationalizers of the bourgeois ideal that the citizen owes nothing to anyone but taxes and obedience to the laws, eliminating the need for culture and community. We are all islands in rented homes with zero obligations, in this view.

When we hit the fast-forward button however, it becomes clear that eventually this leads to isolated people with nothing in common, which will produce an outbreak of mental health problems. This only gets worse when democracy inevitably adds socialism and diversity to the mix.

As Robert Putnam noted and subsequent research has shown, diversity causes people to become atomized and give up on organic culture and shared social life:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

This research followed what some of us have been ranting about since the early 1990s, namely that diversity is paradoxical because it turns your national culture into an envelope for all other cultures, which expands until it has no meaning and is replaced by commerce, law, and ideology.

Much of the modern whining about billionaires, capitalism, and jobs actually points to how democracy replaced sanity with ideology, diversity replaced culture with alienation, and socialism raised costs to the point where no one can thrive.

Living under a paradoxical regime — diversity, socialism, equality, and democracy all contradict the mathematics and structure of reality — people become wedged between denying obvious reality for social acclaim, and balancing their minds by accepting obvious reality.

This has resulted in an outbreak of mental health issues:

Lead author Professor McGrath said the results demonstrate the high prevalence of mental health disorders, with 50 per cent of the population developing at least one disorder by the age of 75.

“The most common were mood disorders such as major depression or anxiety,” Professor McGrath said.

Late Stage Democracy shares this result with Communism: if to get ahead, people must recite lies, their minds become enmeshed in cognitive dissonance between the lies and observable truths, resulting in extensive anxiety disorders.

That in turn leads to self-medication with the one drug that governments cannot ban, following the failure of Prohibition in the US:

Binge drinking and AUD symptoms were higher among women in recent than in older cohorts. Women from the 2018–19 cohort had increased odds of binge drinking [odds ratio (OR) = 1.73, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.41–2.12] and AUD symptoms (OR = 1.51, CI = 1.27–1.80) relative to women from the 1993–97 cohort. Throughout cohorts, there was an inverse association between transition to parenthood and excessive drinking outcomes (e.g. range for ORs for binge drinking among those without children compared with those who had had children between the ages of 18 and 24: 1.22–1.55). Simultaneously, there was a population shift towards delaying parenting in recent cohorts (i.e. 54% of women in the 1993–97 cohort had children before age 30 compared with 39% in the two recent cohorts), increasing the size of the group at highest risk for excessive drinking.

When you see people binge drinking on a regular basis, it means that they are trying to scrub their minds of the paradox of cognitive dissonance in which they are trying to consider two incompatible things true, with one determining short-term survival and the latter, long-term survival.

The most alarming aspect here might be the female side of alcoholism, which shows a steady rise in reckless and self-destructive drinking as if these women no longer want to exist in our present timeline:

In this cross-sectional study of 605 948 alcohol-attributed deaths, male individuals had a significantly higher burden of alcohol-involved mortality than did female individuals, with a male to female ratio of 2.88. Temporal trends revealed an increase in alcohol-related deaths among both sexes, with a significantly higher rate of increase observed for female individuals than for male individuals.

Interestingly, this parallels adoption of Leftism by female voters across the West:

In the 1950s and 1960s, women inclined to vote more conservatively than men. In the 1970s and 1980s, gender differences were small. Since the 2000s, gender differences in voting behavior have been increasing. However, the preferences of women and men in their voting decisions initially did not follow a clear left-right political divide. For example, the Greens and the Left are both in the left-wing part of the party constellation, but the Greens were initially much more popular with women than with men, while the Left was the other way around. It was only since the 2017 Bundestag election (German general election) that women have increasingly been voting for the left compared to men.

When you bring the illusion into your mind, reality becomes unknowable, and this creates anxiety and neurosis provoking a crisis that not even alcohol can erase. Instead, it results in unstable people who quest for distractions in order to obscure their burgeoning mental health issues.

As Plato reminds us, people in the grips of democracy are not just arbitrary and capricious but manic in their need for constant distraction from the failure around them:

Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.

With this rise in mental health issues, we are seeing an absolute collapse of mental health among citizens because they are miserable from living in neurosis owing to the paradox of having to deny reality and affirm the antirealistic in order to succeed within “The System.”

As usual, the press embark on a “wet streets make rain” campaign to invert causality, seeing “hyper-individualism” as the result of our alienation and not the cause, although the atomization created by individualism through democracy explains the loneliness and feelings of powerlessness that blight moderns:

In May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sounded the alarm about what he called “the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country.” Under Murthy’s direction, the Department of Health and Human Services released a surprisingly frank exposition of America’s social problems, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. Marriage rates, fertility, and household sizes have all declined dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, the report finds. Social networks are getting smaller. Time spent alone is rising. Three in ten households consist of one person. Only 30 percent of Americans think that they can reliably trust one another. And 16 percent of Americans feel strongly attached to their local community.

These are all alarming statistics, but they are part of a longer-running trend. A kind of loneliness grew over the course of the twentieth century in the West, worsening toward its end. Robert Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone showed that participation in clubs or civic societies had declined over the course of the last century. The number of men with no close friends has increased fivefold since 1990. Suicides have increased in the United States since the end of the twentieth century, as have deaths of despair. In 2016, Europe was found to be the most suicidal region in the world by gross rate. Average life expectancy in America has begun to decline. According to a recent Gallup survey, only 31 percent of respondents said that they had attended a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple within the past seven days. This represents a noteworthy decline of about 10 percent from the late-twentieth century up to about 2012.

Ideology has not saved us. Religion has not saved us. Even commerce did not save us. Only culture can protect us and give us a chance to have sanity, because unlike democracy and diversity, culture does not require that we deny what we see plainly before us.

Tags: atomization, democracy, diversity, mental health