Amerika

Humanity will leave the Age of Symbolism just like it departed from previous ages of idols. Our language and science have seduced us into mistaking the flag for the territory, the map for the topography, and the ikon for the personal connection to the self-renewing eternal.

As part of the symbolist approach, we must believe in binaries. This lets us do “internal” A/B tests on everything; the process has become more important than the result. Instead of worrying about how something will play out, we place it into one category or the other and decide on that basis.

This cannot be separated from commerce. We think of potential purchases as good or bad based on their prices relative to previous examples, and we look for things to buy that meet our needs. They then define our relationship with the task; if you need to clear a sewer line, the salesman says an auger is the best option, so the task becomes augering instead of the broader, more nebulous, and more frightengly potentially failure-prone drain-clearing.

When our brains switch to means-over-ends thinking, where we select the methods we want and infer the goal from that, then rationalize our result as “good” because we used “good” methods, we become unable of thinking without the externalized technology of whatever method we are using.

Eventually you get guys who use an auger for every plumbing problem.

Civilizations die from this. They become too orderly, and that leads to dominance by methods instead of goals, at which point people forget how to adapt to their environment (realism) and how to be oriented toward health (transcendentalism). Instead you get rule-followers, bourgeois wage-bandits, and bean-counters.

Some say instead that our problem is evil, a perpetually popular notion with the “talking monkeys with car keys” that make up the human species:

There has been for many years, and it is still increasing, a repetitive trope about how dumb, stupid, and all-round incompetent are the Western leadership class.

The problem is evil motivations.

The problem is what the ruling class want; not their inability to achieve it!

If the ruling class were more able and intelligent (and less corrupt) then they would be using their competence to do more evil.

People like to believe in “evil,” or the intention to do bad. We assume that people who do bad intend to do bad and miss out on how much narcissism, incompetence, insanity, and stupidity play a role in their behavior. These reflect people who are missing parts of a whole human being, or in other words, a biological and genetic problem.

Were Dennis Rader and Ted Bundy evil? They were mistaken: they believed that tormenting others would make them whole. Something was wrong with them. More specifically, they lacked some of the parts that normal functional people have, and as a result they did insane things. They were mental defectives.

In the same way, our leadership class are sophomoric because they lack the intelligence to do otherwise. They are System People who know how to use means-over-ends to manipulate for what they want, but lack the ability to focus on actual goals because ultimately, these are very selfish or self-centered people.

Making things worse, the voters are the same way. People reliably vote for a party today and a cleanup tomorrow, or some other tomorrow. The politicians are filtered by natural selection: those who promise easy lies remain, and those who bring up difficult truths get voted out.

Soon you have an echo chamber of selfish incompetence.

Our elites — in America, generally Hwites: Southern, Eastern, Irish, or Mediterranean Europeans — got to positions of power by being good at education and working within bureaucracies. They are products of the committees, and committees are driven by the goal of compromise in order to avoid the twin risks of irate minority positions and majorities who perceive no one is “doing something” about the issues presented in the press.

They do not intend bad. They are not evil. Worse, they are simply what happens when humanity refuses to have actual leaders and demands to settle everything with a vote instead.

Tags: bad, democracy, evil, mental defectives