Amerika

What has gone wrong with our experiment in the West? Just about everything is wrecked. No one is reproducing enough, the intelligent least of all, and almost everyone has zero faith in the future. All systems appear to be failing and yet no one will talk about it.

At the core of our problem is a crisis of faith in ourselves, or rather, the sensation that we are held hostage by our political system. We believe both that things are going badly and that we cannot change course because illusions are more popular than reality. We, the voters, are the tyrants in this case.

Almost no one will face this fact. You can blame the Jews, Negroes, Whites, Christians, Muslims, or whoever else, but at the end of the day, our voters placed us into this situation and we perceive that we cannot get out of it because most voters will not support any radical changes.

This sets us up for total division. In America and Europe, our populations are now divided into two groups:

• Denialists: these want so hard to believe that no change, adaptation, or alteration of method will be needed that they cling to the current system and its ideals. When faced with proof of its failure, they race back to the other side of the cognitive dissonance spectrum and strengthen their belief in its goodness and success. They believe that COVID-19 is a life-threatening pandemic, want the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines to continue, and view those who do not comply as unpatriotic or simply bad people. They think diversity is our strength; they believe entitlements are not just necessary but are good and helping these problems which never decrease. They think gay marriage was a step forward toward progress, that transgenders should teach in schools, and that affirmative action is necessary for America to be strong in the future.
• Remakers: do not believe in “build back better,” since they do not want to rebuild 2020s America, but pick up America before it went wrong with the civil war, and to continue from that point. They are skeptical about entitlements, diversity, homosexuality, transgenderism, big business, big cities, and COVID-19. They believe that our government, like so many before, has sold itself out to foreign powers in exchange for financial rewards to those involved with government. They realize that the other half of the country will not accept them, and want those people to get physically removed to some other place.

In a couple short centuries, America has reverse E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) to become a story of a nation fragmenting into many different lobbying, ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, despite that being typical of Late Stage Democracy.

After all, pluralism and solipsism are symptoms of Late Stage Democracy, as Plato noted 2400 years ago:

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.

In other words, making people equal and setting them free from the constraints of social and natural order makes them into little narcissists, equal parts sociopath and solipsist, who use their choices in the world as a way to adorn themselves with uniqueness, not advance any sort of goal.

This has a natural darkside: when context is removed and people live for themselves alone, they can have no goals, since they have made a perpetual pursuit of their own desires into both method and goal. Consequently, they become inconsistent, precluding them from connecting to anything outside themselves.

In the long run, this shakes out as isolation, since people who have fallen into the void of themselves find it hard to make bonds. This results in creeping isolation within the self:

A fifth of under-35s say they have one or no close friends, three times as many as a decade ago, according to research by think-tank Onward.

Millennials, those born from the 1980s to early 1990s, are also far less likely to chat to neighbours or join in group activities than previous generations.

Diversity merely amplifies this. Why go outside or interact with others when it is unclear what will be rewarded and what will be suddenly punished not only by rejection of the other, but the possible invocation of an angry mob of fellow democratic citizens punishing a transgressor?

Consistently we find that individualism promotes dystopian social currents:

What if individualism does the opposite of what we think? Rather than promote autonomy, might individualism actually stoke the accumulation of power?

Despite its counter-intuitiveness, the idea of the invisible hand seems to be supported by cross-cultural analysis. As societies industrialize, the following cultural shifts tend to occur:

1. People become more individualistic.
2. People become more skeptical of authoritarian power.
3. Norms weaken and people become more tolerant of deviant behavior.

The evidence points to a cultural shift towards individualism — exactly what economists say is required for free markets to work. But when viewed through an evolutionary lens, this cultural shift is odd. The problem is that in evolutionary terms, the interests of individuals rarely (if ever) align with the interest of the group. Your best option, as a selfish individual, isn’t to contribute to society. Your best option is to free ride. This means that the success of social species (like humans) depends crucially not on elevating self interest, but on suppressing it.

As we watch individualism consume our society, some go into denial and others suggest that, if we reject egalitarianism, we necessarily end individualism and start thinking like a culture or civilization again.

From its birth even before the Enlightenment,™ individualism appealed to those who found themselves in successful societies but lacking much success. Rather than change their methods, they scapegoated those who had achieved success by acting to advance the civilization.

The individualist motto might be summarized as “let’s eat the seed corn and slaughter the goose that laid golden eggs, because tonight is more important than forever.” They see nothing but themselves, and aspire only to power, although since they do not have a goal, they exist in a perpetual loop of having desires, achieving them, become dissatisfied, and casting them aside to pursue a new distraction.

That shows us the crucial detail about individualism: it fails those who follow it. Like drugs, promiscuity, overeating, masturbation, or television, it provides a momentary distraction from whatever is bothering them but then fades, leaving them needing to repeat the process. They never escape.

Since individualism pairs with the political philosophy of egalitarianism, this produces a zombie robot herd of parasites who worship themselves through an increasingly doctrinaire, intolerant, arrogant, and ignorant ideology:

Up to the 20th century such ghastly, disturbing and bleak visions were conjured up by individuals who the modern man is inclined to call religious fanatics, religious fundamentalists or – more scientifically – mentally deranged. It is the proverbial Middle Ages that were fraught with itinerant preachers who would scare their listeners out of their wits, who would call on them to repent and put their life to rights or else. It is by no means different nowadays. Present-day moralizers have merely changed the religion. It is no longer imaginary hell – spiritual death – but extinction of all life; it is no longer eternal salvation but comfortable existence here and now; it is no longer Satan and his devils but technology and governments; it is no longer God and his angels but humanity in its many manifestations like “ethnicity, race, class, gender, gender identity, gender presentation, sexuality, age, income, ability, education, appearance, immigration status, belief or non-belief and activist experience” (the usual string of words); it is no longer moral sin but pollution of the environment; no longer virtuous life but life dedicated to ecology; no longer God’s wrath but nature’s wrath; no longer the Mother of God but Mother Earth.

You see these goodthinker denialists everywhere in the West. Generally they simply look for some reason to be superior to others, since they hate the people around them in their miserable lives, and they have chosen Leftism as their means of being “smarter” since it has been validated by others.

In other words, it is popular. Like other fallacies, this logical fallacy relies on the idea that humans are equally intelligent and therefore in groups make good decisions, when in fact history shows us that groups are prone to panics, fads, manias, witch hunts, apathy, and every other ill of our species.

These people display a pathological obsession with ideology because their beliefs are symbolic. To them, achieving equality will solve all problems, when in reality nothing solves every problem, and in fact most problems are insoluble because they reflect individual human decisions.

A society that really wanted to “solve” problems would do so by removing morally corrupt, idiotic, insane, and sociopathic people. After a few generations of that, the problems would still remain, on a smaller scale. Every generation has some mutants and moral defectives.

Human history records many societies, and all of them report the same problems, because all problems stem from individual behavior and, when enough broken individuals accumulate, morph into pop culture and bureaucracy and then become the norm.

People whose beliefs are not symbolic do not have the same mania as the goodthinkers/denialists. If you base your beliefs on something other than symbolism, for example realism and a transcendental ideal of excellence, then you have no need to be fanatical; your beliefs correspond to reality.

The weakness of symbolic beliefs is that by definition, they do not relate to reality, therefore rely on their popularity to prop them up. Any defection from the perception that they are popular threatens them, which is why those who follow symbolic beliefs tend to be pathological.

Since our society currently has a surplus of such people, we can see how democracy degrades a population over time, both mentally and physically. People go insane trying to stay in denial, since it is obvious that the system makes bad decisions; over time, the good die out and the lunatics take over simply by breeding profligately.

If we can take any lesson away from Election 2020 and its aftermath, it is that we have a lot of people caught up in the pathology of popular opinion. They are afraid to stand up for reality, and instead like other denialists, are interested only in themselves and how to get ahead in the System.

The various courts, politicians, media figures, scientists, academics, and others who joined in the perpetuation of a lie — that Joe Biden won this election — shows us conformity in action. They want to do what is popular, so they imitate others they think are popular.

This also extends to their support of egalitarianism. They do it because it gives them a chance to overlook all of the other crises in their lives. They can make everything right, just by conforming to what others see is right.

Having done that, they become revengeful, since they no longer own themselves. They retaliate against anyone who deviates from the agenda, even if innocently, since defections threaten the illusion that they are doing what is popular and therefore successful.

The worst people in any circumstance are not the winners, but the losers who want to be winners, because they will emulate what they think — and remember, they’re losers, so they get it wrong — is popular, smart, brave, and iconoclastic.

How else do we explain a country full of people repeating slogans from the 1960s, endorsing a political system from the 1780s, and expounding on theories which failed over two thousand years ago and many times since?

There are people out there who think they are wise for endorsing Communism, a system which is only slightly less destructive to anywhere that adopts it than a nuclear attack. They proudly and, they think, bravely endorse diversity, despite seeing it fail around them and worldwide.

They consider themselves clever for controlling perception by demonizing anything but what leads to their point of view. They know that most people, following the sunk cost fallacy, will obey and then rationalize everything else as good because they do not want to admit they made an error.

Our current vaccine mania reflects this desire to dominate, humiliate, subjugate, control, and manipulate others. If they get you to take the vaccine, you have branded yourself a goodthinker or at least their vassal, and now you will fall into line and behave as they want you to.

The people wailing on about this pandemic do not care about you. They want to feel as if they are powerful; they want to be right, wise, and cleverer than you, which will reinforce their vision of themselves as being in control of their lives and above nature and the gods.

Such people will tell you things like, “we are all one,” when what they really mean in their solipsistic delirium is “we are all me.” They want to be God. They want to be the only thing in the universe, and that requires beating you into compliance with their illusions.

Anyone who rejects the idea that the current system is good will be exiled from the goodthinker camp. Such people will be viewed by denialists as dangerous, and called nasty names like White Supremacist, terrorist, and bigot.

Yet what really bothers the denialists is this: the system is failing, not just here but worldwide. All those democracies are making bad decisions, and their people are failing to reproduce, behaving in self-destructive ways, and generally looking miserable.

Only one path to escape presents itself. If we find a goal outside and beyond the self, like reality and transcendental excellence, we have something to aim for that lifts us up above where we are. We actually change, adapt, and improve ourselves internally.

This terrifies the denialists. They fear change because then they have to admit that they have spent their lives serving a lie. The more that lie is revealed, and the sillier it looks, the worse they feel about themselves.

Humanity has hit a crossroads. We have spent the last thousand years screwing around with the debate over equality and how to implement it, only to find out that like heroin or overeating, it is killing us. We either accept that reality, stop blaming the Jews and Negroes, and change, or we die out.

If we choose to change, we can simply discard all of what we previously worried about. Instead of focusing on equality, we can focus on its opposite, quality, and make our own lives the best that they can be. Sanity returns, and we no longer live for others, but to improve ourselves.

If we fail to change, we face more of the same slow grinding oblivion that wears away everything good and consumes all hope. That does not bother the denialists; they would rather destroy everything than admit that the universe is larger, wiser, and more beautiful than they are.

Tags: crowdism, denialists, realists