Amerika

When we were young, we used to ask our teachers why Rome fell. The immediately obvious answer is that a bunch of things went wrong at once, but then you ask why that happened, and you end up with a simpler conclusion. Everyone went insane at the same time and therefore, everything fell apart.

Most people take civilization for granted. It is always there, they think, and nothing really matters with what happens to it. It will just keep on doing its thing, being there for them when they need it. The politicians change, the slogans change, but nothing really changes.

It is more accurate to say that civilization is like any other technology: it requires maintenance or it breaks down radically. Over time entropy takes over, so it must be rebuilt in the same style but with whatever newer parts we can find. There is no escape from this cycle or the need to perform upkeep on the machine.

Civilization however takes a long time to break down, and during that process, mental stress increases with a corresponding increase in mental unwellness. After diversity kicked in during the 1990s, Americans became less sane across all ethnic groups:

Statistically significant increases in the prevalence of distress were observed across all age, gender, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment subgroups examined. Rates of serious psychological distress increased from 2.7% in 1999–2000 to 4% in 2017–2018, an increase of 1.3 percentage points (95% CI = 0.9, 1.6).

Since 1999, there has been an upward trend in reported psychological distress among working-aged adults in the United States.

As predicted by Robert Putnam, in response to diversity people of all ethnic groups tend to “hunker down” and distrust everyone, including members of their own group. Couple that with the sneaking realization that society is in decline and bad things are ahead and you have a formula for psychological distress.

After the 1990s, when diversity became the focus of American politics, mental health declined at about the same time the recession hit in 1998. All those feel-good policies from the early 1990s took awhile to make their impact known, but it turned out to be misery.

Not surprisingly, this type of instability consists of poor assumptions plus triggering events. When the poor assumptions have befuddled the mind, panic sets in as soon as the individual encounters an example of failure. This makes people and civilizations fragile:

Their part is often to provide just those local triggering conditions necessary to manifest systemic weaknesses created by fallible decisions made earlier in the organizational and managerial spheres. The challenge facing the human reliability community is to find ways of identifying and neutralizing these latent failures before they combine with local triggering events to breach the system’s defences.

Over time, this will manifest in negative biological changes. Environmental stresses select out those who are most affected, which means that the most sensitive and thoughtful people in our society will cease to exist. Eventually average intelligence will fall and what is left will be crass commercially-minded me-first people.

We can see this same situation occur in nature, since Darwinism implies a loss of traits through degeneration:

Thanks to decades’ worth of quantitative research that the wider biology community has conducted on the exact changes that the beaks of Darwin’s finches undergo due to different environmental changes, Podos realized that he could model how beaks would change into the future.

In this case, he chose drought as the ecological driver, which tends to select for thicker-beaked finches. And he also knew that he could both predict, and then simulate, the songs of the finches as they would change through successive future episodes of drought.

“We found that there were no changes in the finches’ responses to our modified calls even when the simulated songs had changed by the equivalent of three drought events,” says Katie M. Schroeder, the paper’s co-author who participated in this research during her doctoral training under Podos at UMass Amherst. “But by six drought events, they had changed so much that the finches barely responded at all.”

Diversity creates instability which in turn creates mental illness. Over time, that mental illness will become part of the makeup of the population, and they will be unable to recognize the songs of sanity or health. This explains why mixed-race societies tend to become third world ruins staffed by oblivious people with mental health difficulties.

Tags: degeneration, Idiocracy, latent failures, mental health, psychological distress