Amerika

Once upon a time, there was a dead civilization.

It lived on as a mediocre shadow of itself. Most people wanted it to simply continue on that path, although it involved a great deal of further social decay. Others resisted, seeing no point in decaying further, and hoping to someday resurrect the dead civilization and give it new life.

All of the denialists — those who wanted to continue dying — united together to remove any mention of any alternative to continuing to die. They claimed that this was in defense of morality, truth, science, and justice, when really it was the further abolition of all of those.

The renewers, who just wanted to clear out the dead and raise up the still living, thought this baffling but not inconsistent. After all, reality-denial is how you get a dead civilization in the first place.

I am avoiding the group panic this election. Whatever the group thinks is probably lowest common denominator, which means the weaker parts of every person joined up into a great group of weakness. There are bad people, and then there is the worst enemy, mediocrity, which occurs in groups because of fear.

We should ask: did anyone really like perpetual modernity? Francis Fukuyama put his finger on this one. If liberal democracy — democracy plus civil rights and market socialism — was really the last man standing among government systems, and therefore, nothing would ever change, were we really happy in a system that was half plastic consumerism and half alien, ozone-stinking perpetual ideological quest for ever-increasing “equality”?

People are looking for sources of meaning inside, instead of outside in social quests which amount mostly to distraction and compensation instead of positive goals. In response to Fukuyama, Huntington basically said as much: people want meaning, which they find in their intuition, and this bonds them to their heritage group, faith, and culture more than abstract, bureaucratic agencies like scientific consensus, academic trends, the United Nations, and ideology itself.

We are leaving behind the age of ideology, and entering an age of realism.

Plato says history cycles. If the past thousand years were the half of the cycle that culminated in democracy and equality, the next thousand years belong to the dark half of that cycle, which pushes us more toward natural selection, intuition, realism, and other “inner” sensations.

Here is what I tell normies:

I do not think anyone really likes modern life anymore. We are at the stage where the Soviets were in the 1970s, where stuff still basically works but is becoming increasingly joyless and paranoid. True, we are wealthier and have cooler technology, but even that has stalled.

I feel like the internet is stuck forever in 2007, the self-driving cars have failed totally, our spacecraft look like they’re out of the 1950s, and even genetic engineering has been becalmed after making an ear on a mouse.

We are however living in a mass panic caused by the change from denialism to renewerism. The renewers want to stop living in Fukuyama’s perpetual liberal democracy, and the denialists want to avoid change but accept our path of inevitable doom. Reality holds a little more nuance in the following ways:

1. Media: I worked for the media. It was my first love. It, like humanity, is corrupted by two forces: first, it depends on advertisers, and is censored by them; second, it needs to sell a product to any audience of a specific size, so it is always for sale in a second way as well. I went in expecting White Knights, and came out seeing salesmen. For this reason, I do not trust its view at all, no matter what the bias; its business is hype and making drama out of nothing.
2. Trump: I think the hype over this man is overblown. He told us with the campaign slogan he stole from Ronald Reagan (“make America great again”). He aims to be Ronald Reagan II, this time warring against China and not the USSR. He is not not Hitler, nor is he Clinton, and the latter is why people fear him. We are living in perpetual Bill “It Takes A Village” Clinton globalism, based on diversity and acceptance so that we can keep raking in the bucks to pay all those high taxes.

   Back in the 1980s, they told us that Ronald Reagan was going to start WWIII and kick off the Fourth Reich all in one, and they were wrong, but it got them Clinton. They want back to that because they are profiting from the decline; we want to get out of the decline so that we can have something other than bourgeois condominiums, retirement funds, and libertarian ethics. Voters might be generally described as “Libertarian Communists,” in that they want society to let them act out their broken pathologies and not interrupt them, and they will pay handsomely in taxes to keep the herd at bay.

   The psychology of people in democracy is closer to that of a serial killer: he wants to pursue his obsession, repeating the same primal trauma, and then have an endgame where he controls the manner of his self-destruction. That he dies? Does not matter. He never had any hope anyway.

3. Democracy: Generation X grew up knowing that this system not only did not work but was making adults miserable and self-destructive. Some of us blamed capitalism, but to my mind, the problem consists of the herd instinct taking over and driving us to mediocrity. We have known our whole lives that this had to end at some point. If this is it… good, let us move forward into history instead of backward. We have been caught in French Revolution and WWII thinking for too long. Those aren’t even interesting as wars, much less as historical periods.
4. Violence: people love to fear it or idolize it because it is a substitute for sex and eating/predation. Crazy Leftists engaged in pre-election violence in order to intimidate us into just giving up and voting for more of the same — the Clinton through Obama era, which includes George W. Bush who like any good Buckleyite is basically a Leftist — instead of choosing a new and different path with Donald Trump. Portland will continue to burn, but it seems like that’s some kind of local conflict more than anything else. For the most part, I think with this election, the incentive to violence ends.
5. The future: it is clear that humanity cannot keep surviving with this many people, this much pollution, and ongoing political instability. I think we are leaving behind an egalitarian past and heading into a time that rewards functional, productive, and most of all, creative individuals. This is going to be really good for people like you, who should always have been more valued by this dumbass society.

The Democrats are ultimately doomed here because they are the ones trying to restore the past (the Clinton 1990s) and not pay attention to the reality of the now and the potential of the future. No matter what we think of the past four years, there are some new topics on the table: lobbying as corruption, the “deep state,” China, the failure of democracy demographic replacement, and American civilization’s collapse as a subset of Western Civilization.

We know this is true because they are discussing these topics in Europe also. That means that the cat is out of the bag, and we finally must face the limits of the Fukuyama-Clinton-Obama system, and look toward alternatives if we want to survive, knowing that we need not just minimally functional but an ascendent and good civilization for that survival. The years of individualism are over; the age of hierarchy are just beginning.

For these reasons, I refuse to get too alarmed about this election. I’m about to score some cigars and beers, maybe slow cook a brisket, and enjoy watching the world freak out over what is ultimately both some inevitable conflict to reach necessary change, and a whole lot of drama that is not really relevant.

Tags: bill clinton, denialism, donald j. trump, francis fukuyama, george w bush, samuel huntington