Amerika

Leftism is confusing because to those who are not Leftists, the tendency is to take it seriously. It has the first mover advantage both now and throughout history because it appears as an alternative to the status quo, and because it is unknown unlike the current state of things, it is presumed to be better.

To this date, no one has undertaken a scientific analysis of Leftism, meaning systematic, comparative and analytical inspection of it. Some have come close — Plato, Nietzsche, Burroughs, Kaczynski, Houellebecq and de Tocqueville are leading that pack — but none have gotten to its roots as a human behavior, instead of ideas that humans invent to explain their behavior.

If instead of treating Leftism as a logical reaction by human groups to their environment, we look at it as a behavior of individuals seeking to achieve personal life states, we can see it as a pathology. When an animal acts for internal, finite impulses instead of in response to external conditions or internal principles, that is a pathology.

Think of a dog compulsively scratching when it is scared, or how squirrels hoard nuts obsessively, or how dolphins are compelled to play with already-dead fish. This is the internal reminder that a behavior is good compensating for a lack of understanding of the immediate external world, with the supposition that a behavior that is ordinarily good will be a benefit.

This works for us, generally, as creatures adapting to a world of normally repetitive stimulus: it is never bad to eat, until you get fat; it is never bad to try to reproduce, until you produce too many offspring or mate unwisely and produce low quality offspring; it is never bad to fight or flee, until you cannot recognize actual threats and react to false ones.

Pathologies are a last-ditch attempt by nature to start over from square one. If there is a nuclear war, the dog must eat and reproduce, and if it starts out mixing a German Shepherd and Bichon Frise, that is not ideal, but gives nature a starting point. It will then apply 30,000 years of evolution and make something like a wolf again.

Speaking of wolves, we can see the pathology of Leftism in the economics of a wolf pack. Wolf1 is the leader of the pack, and Wolf2 has challenged him before and lost. Wolf2 turns to wolves three through nine and offers a simple proposition: come with me and be equal wolves under my leadership, and we can get rid of the hierarchy that gives each of you a rank from three through nine.

The target in that case is not the head of the wolf pack, but the ranking that illustrates that Wolf9 is smaller and slower than Wolf7. Wolf9 seeks a pacifism: he no longer wants to fight with Wolf7, nor serve under him, because this way, Wolf9 can feel better about himself. He is also less at risk of losing his rank if Wolf10 enters the pack and decides he wants to be the new number nine.

For Wolf9, there is a chance to remove the obligations to him that ultimately serve to maintain the pack, and this allows him to spend less time on that and more time on what he wants for himself. This is individualism: the individual acting for themselves contra the interests of intangibles like the group as an organic whole, its culture, history and values.

Once one wolf adopts individualism, others will follow. When Wolf3 sees that everyone else is allied against him and Wolf1, he can either try to maintain his current position or, in the time-honored practice of the middle class, agree to equality and then spend more of his time hunting for kills which he will not share with the group. He might get clever and dine exclusively on rabbits, not deer, leaving the rest of the pack to fend for itself.

The wolf behavior described above is a pathology because it shows the wolves acting reflexively in self-interest without considering the consequences of their actions on intangibles like the pack. A pack is made of invisible bonds; while these are important in the actions of the pack, they are not tangible and are assumed rather than observed. It is no different than a wolf eating compulsively.

We might view this pathology as a built-in limit on the power of any species. Once it reaches a certain level of dominion over its environment, the self-destruct process begins. In the pack scenario, it might mean that Wolf1 and Wolf3 go it alone; that type of classical liberal or libertarian outlook only works when two wolves can be as effective as a pack.

This wolf behavior analogizes to The Human Problem, or why all of our civilizations eventually fail, corporations go bad, and even friend groups succumb to entropy. The temptation for us is to say that we will do away with social order, and instead just decide as a group, because that way everyone feels good. Humans love the inherent pacifism of saying that we will no longer struggle to have hierarchy and instead will just accept each other, because that sounds to us like individualism: everyone wants to do whatever they want and the group has to support them. Eventually this becomes something like “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” which always translates into the idea that whoever is neediest gets the most and everyone else takes care of them, much as their families did when they were infants. Explaining order is a hard sell because the only people who understand it are those who would be in command anyway. When there are external threats, the group clings together and demands leaders; when there is no threat, people forget about any future time beyond the time until the next pay check, and indulge in the eternal human conceit that each of us is godlike and should have 100% control of his own future, forgetting that most of us are inept at doing that. When wolves one through three work together, they can keep the rest in check, but if the pack is unusually prosperous, there is no need for leadership and so the pack begins the slow process of self-destructing. In another few generations, the wolf cubs will be chubby with blue hair and tattoos, and demand equal rights for all because (obviously) no leaders are needed.

This type of social order causes a large game of “follow the leader.” People follow social trends because this makes them feel good; since there is no hierarchy, any participation is the same as success, and they are grateful to simply be included, and therefore spend most of their time trying to be part of the group, which effectively makes them blind to reality. They exist in a human-only world where opinions, judgments, feelings, conversations, appearances and emotions matter more than what the consequences of their actions will be. They are now acting according to internal behaviors, compulsively trying to be part of the group much like someone over-eating seeks the safety of food, and this puts their energy into behaving as others do, while noticing that paying attention to the truths of how our world works, natural order and logic, or the results of our actions does not make anyone more popular. The mob has become a runaway chain reaction.

Once you dedicate yourself to avoiding the natural hierarchy of the group, you are dependent upon public opinion, social feelings and consensus — a measure of the lowest common denominator interpretation of any issue that the group will accept — for what is right and true. This makes you pathological, or prone to do the same things independent of the changing external reality.

This transition to consensus-based reasoning breaks the feedback loop between individual and world. Normally, an individual perceives the world and reacts to it, then enters a cycle of assessing the results of that reaction and then fine-tuning the behavior until they reach a balance. When the individual is reacting to the group, there is no fine-tuning, only paying attention to what is trending at the moment.

Leftism creates this game of follow the leader. Clever human monkeys found a way around dealing with their lower social status, but in doing so, they made a devil’s bargain, because now they are dependent on what the rest of the herd thinks, since their leader (“Wolf2” in analogue) will not live forever.

From pack animals, they become herd animals, and eventually reach an order like that of insects where a single dictator presides over the rest. Ants are hated for a reason, namely that insects are almost entirely pathology. They have no brain circuits for reflection, only rote ceaseless behaviors coded in their genetics because they worked enough and so adapt to a minimal level of function.

Humans should decide whether we want to be wolves, sheep or ants, and recognize that the pressure of time and our own bad decisions is striving to make us into ants.

Given the vote, any group of humans will choose illusions over reality and society will begin its way down the path to Communism or something like it. In social terms, it is always right to vote for whatever makes people happy in the short term; it is always wrong to strive for long-term positives as a result, because these involve sacrifice of those short-term happy thoughts.

When you find yourself in a society where it is socially impossible to make accurate observations about your world, you are already in the grips of this decline. People have decided to filter out reality and replace it with what makes other people feel warm and fuzzy about the universe. This eliminates any negative or dark thoughts, resulting only in positive ones and a bias against negativity, which is interpreted in a paranoid fashion where humans assume that anything which will have a negative impact on them is in fact fact negative, when frequently, the negativity is a predictable response to their own unrealistic actions. This creates a feedback loop that systematically eliminates the realistic and replaces it with what humans wish were true. This is why civilizations exist on a spectrum from strong social order to weak social order: over time, people inevitably remove social order and in so doing, destroy the parts of the civilization that they share, resulting in dysfunction and alienation.

In follow-the-leader stages of civilization, trends rule the social and thus political, artistic, academic, and cultural scenes. Most people follow whatever trend they think will make them popular; it is like playing the stock market, but by using conversational and behavioral tropes instead of potential investments. Those who choose well become more popular.

That in turn creates a market for pretense. When everyone is equal, and they are all competing for attention through trends, the question becomes “who are you better than?” and questions of consequences of reality are ignored in favor of posturing, preening and posing. At that point, human social success is determined entirely by symbols and zero percent by reality including the consequences of our actions.

In the West, egalitarianism takes the form of Leftism. If you are egalitarian, you are a Leftist; if you support any order larger than the individual, you are the antithesis of a Leftist. Classical liberals or libertarians are simply a mild version of Leftist that insists on a lack of order and a competition by individuals for the approval of others which is called a “meritocracy,” and never is based on the actual merit of internal traits like intelligence, wisdom, and moral character, but on ability to be obedient in fulfilling the demands of a system designed to regulate all those equal individuals. If you are thinking of the average high school here, with its memorization-based tests and rewards for those who flatter their teachers, that is exactly the order that is produced, and it specializes in churning out people who are obedient to the existing way of doing things and unable to think of any other way that things could be done. It is prized specifically because it alienates thinkers with any depth to them, as those are the ones who discover unpopular and unsociable truths.

The Leftist approach is to take all sides of an issue, then eliminate whichever ones are closest to emphasizing social order. If a new park is proposed, the Leftist pretends to go into deep contemplation and consider all of the issues, but then seizes on the first complaint and uses it to sabotage the proposed plan. If any one person is inconvenienced, the Leftist leaps to their defense, mainly because they are following the trend of egalitarianism itself and expect social reward for it.

Leftism always opposes orders larger than the individual like culture/heritage, morals/religion, and markets because these create hierarchy. Hidden behind this is the Leftist desire to oppose inner traits entirely. Any contest which selects for natural ability or character is bad, and will be replaced by a competition for who does the Leftist version of the original task. For example, debaters are ranked not by who argued well, but by who argued the right thing, much as students are given high grades for repeating what the teacher told them.

The secret here is that humanity is insane. Individuals may achieve sanity in varying degrees, but groups do not, because they are referential to one another and not to the underlying reality or goal of their task. Egalitarianism is hostile to purpose, because that creates an order to implement it, and prefer a society where we all live in apartments, spend hours in rote jobs, and then engage in licentious and self-destructive behavior so that we are equally debased.

For this reason, human society needs order very strongly. We either have good leadership and a social hierarchy which keeps the natural human insanity at bay, or the craziness takes over and the follow-the-leader game ensures that the only voices which will be heard are those which affirm and promote the insanity. Societies play follow-the-leader to their doom, brazenly denying the obvious until it is too late.

People right now are looking for scapegoats for the failure of Western civilization. They would like to blame capitalism, agriculture, technology, ((( The Eternal Jew™ ))), fascism, Christianity, paganism, atheism, or even chance. The truth is that all societies die the same way, which is by revolt of the lower classes, and that this revolt is based in a desire for equality, which consists of the lower social echelons wanting to avoid competition among themselves and therefore insisting on a removal of social order.

While technology did improve conditions, and thus allow the decay to last longer than one would hope, technology is inherent to civilization. Once people start farming or hunting and making complex tools, they will begin to accrue knowledge that will eventually lead to high technology. Every society that rises becomes as technologically more advanced than its neighbors as we are to two thousand years ago.

Egalitarianism however removes the forces that can restrain free markets, technology and the flood of humanity, and in their place create a system of uncontrolled growth and increasingly chaotic behavior which flowers into brutal failure. The most advanced societies are the ones that die out, leaving a humanity of perpetually primitive people in third world conditions as the only “survivors.”

In the West, we have a pretense that the solution is “freedom,” meaning that the good people coexist with the bad and by using their independence, avoid engaging in the same behaviors. What this refuses to take into account is that behaviors have consequences, and when most people are engaged in insane behavior, the sane are reduced to a role of supporting civilization so that the insane can continue.

Freedom is not a goal in itself; given freedom, any group of people will inevitably recreate Communism because humans are inwardly wired for individualism. In one of the cruel paradoxes of nature, this impulse ironically leads to a reduction of their freedom, because when everyone behaves this way, we end up with a society of ants, each acting robotically in order to maintain the “freedom” of others.

The grim truth that none want to face is that we need order, and to have that we need to constantly raise our best people up and task them solely with maintaining that order. They must be lazy, spending most of their days in the type of leisure that forces them to confront boredom and through it, find purpose in understanding their world. They also need to beat down those among them who fall short of this standard.

Western Civilization rose because it produced a disproportionate amount of people of genius and inner strength who were able to create and maintain this order. That backfired, to some degree, because the order allowed lesser people to grow more numerous and begin their agitation. When we do not find a replacement for natural selection, we slowly poison ourselves with excessive genetic waste products, and this is what European aristocrats failed to take into account, mainly because of their noble, generous and tolerant nature.

For the last two centuries and change, we have been indulging in an experiment in not having that kind of order because it requires power and power makes a hierarchy, which trickles down to the lower echelons, where they find themselves competing for minor increases in rank much like gang members constantly fight to see who can be the next big thing. We have made ourselves hostile to the notion that any person can have inherent power and rank in our society, and in so doing, we have opened the door to people who want to use power for their own purposes, a variety of human which was in ancient times referred to as a type of tyrant.

Ancient societies avoided this internal competition by setting up caste systems where everyone had a role appropriate to his intelligence, and the only way to rise was to succeed at that role. This eliminated the infighting and also gave people a sense of purpose.

The bigger principle is that we cannot abolish power: no matter what we do, someone will have power, and so that someone must be someone good, and they must use it according to principles that are realistic not humanistic, which I mean to indicate those ideas which are focused on the idea of self and social group, or what humans prefer to believe about reality versus what it is.

Follow-the-leader is a game of temporary power. Whoever is most popular at the moment, or whatever is trending, takes over our minds as we all compete to gain status by following it, mainly because once we are equal, we are all equally not worth noticing, and so the only path to power is to compete for attention.

A saner approach will be to adopt a pattern of order and purpose. Individuals need to be ranked approximately, so that they are grouped with those like them. There needs to be a goal, so that those who fall short can be exiled or otherwise removed. And there must be constant upward pressure to make our best people — by internal traits — rise above the rest.

It is a fascinating privilege to watch a civilization die. If one were to explain it to a child, the answer would be that everyone goes insane, but the finer nuance is that they follow each other in going insane, creating a feedback loop of illusion. The simple answer of how to avoid this is to note that civilizations, like animals, require an order of the pack and a goal, or things fall apart and no one thrives.

Tags: civilization, individualism, order, principle, purpose