Amerika

Humans possess a simple drive: to continue the belief that their decisions so far have led up to the best possible outcome for them in their lives.

Without that belief, the existential pains gnaw at them from within and they feel inferior. Consequently, humans will do just about anything to keep that good feeling flowing, and this is why goodthink is so prevalent.

Goodthink lets you feel superior to others because you are making good decisions while they are not. It lets you believe that everything is going well and you are part of this process. You feel like a winner.

This is why goodthinkers did not mind the masks, vaccinations, vaccine deaths, lockdowns, and vaccine proof cards. It made them feel better because they were able to re-envision themselves as defenders of the weak.

They may not have wanted to be enmeshed in all this quasi-scientific medical lifestyle alteration, but they rationalize it as good because the primary commandment of goodthink is to be egalitarian.

If you are egalitarian and act toward the equality of all, in the present time you are appealing to the closest thing we have to a union of religion, politics, and learning. Equality is the highest goal and value of this society.

Consequently, anything that advances equality makes goodthinkers feel important for having engaged in the behavior, and also offers them a fresh shot of the sensation of existential contentment and freedom from fear.

On the other hand, anyone who avoids goodthink is perceived as a critic of goodthink. Unlike realistic things, goodthink things cannot be proven to be good; their goodness is conjectural, based on an anticipated Utopia in the future.

This means that repeating the goodthink seems essential for those who want to get ahead. Other goodthinkers will only promote them if they join in the shared illusion, so people adopt goodthink in order to be popular.

That creates a form of gatekeeping, or regulating who gets into the higher echelons of any part of our system. You must have goodthink to be promoted by the goodthinkers, and this filters out everyone but goodthinkers.

Gatekeeping has a long history with the human species. It forms the basis of our present system since it allows us to filter out the obedient from the disobedient. The people who demonstrate obedience can be manipulated and therefore are trusted.

Systems like meritocracy gatekeep by forcing people to engage in proxies for real-world performance, like test-taking and hours worked, so that those who are not willing to sacrifice their lives for a meaningless objective are removed.

Your average human boss does not want people who are good at their jobs. He wants people who are loyal and make him look good, so he assigns them nonsense to do and keeps the ones who do not even question it for a minute.

In this sense, all human systems are fascist in a lowercase-f sense. They set up a single path through which citizens must go to join the elite and use this to enforce ideological conformity or at least the appearance of it.

Education takes this form. So does credentialism, which rewards those who have the right certifications and experience. The endless speech codes in universities and online form yet another gatekeeping barrier.

The whole point is to keep out those who are not part of the dogmatic group, and to replace reality and questions of adapting to it with a singular question, namely that of conformity to the ideology of the age.

This reality-substitute forms the basis for both political correctness and nepotism. You promote only those from your group, who you recognize because they say the “correct” thing, even when — especially when — it clashes with observable reality.

The goal is to have obedience so that you can have centralized command. With one path to power, at the core of the group will be the true believers or at least those who purport to be, so the group is united by standardized belief driven by conformist behavior.

Such groups specialize in embracing behavior that seems non-conformist because it is illogical. This group will never emphasize health, ethnic unity, sanity, normalcy, wisdom, and chastity, but their opposites.

The further the individual personality breaks down, the more they give themselves to the machine.

Almost no one has figured out how to diagnose what keeps going wrong with human groups including civilizations because it is a pathology arising from our need to join the group with the right opinion so that we do not suffer existential fear.

As people look toward what has gone wrong with humanity, we find ourselves distrusting the gatekeeping and the centralized ideals (“trust the science!”) that make it powerful.

We like the more naturalistic method of not having standardized methods, but instead rewarding performance. If you must get a torch up the hill, do it however works for you, instead of how the manual says you must.

In this way, gatekeeping and meritocracy go away and are replaced by reward for performance. This terrifies most people because they can fail at it and lose their position, which brings them back to existential fear.

Tags: conformity, existential fear, gatekeeping