Amerika

Human beings if left unguided will revert to Bonobos. Any time a society is created, it divides into Independent Realists and Average Humans, but the latter breed faster because they are less vested in anything but themselves. They are mostly mentally deranged by their individualism, and eventually they take over and the crazies win.

Right now, the crazies have been in a position of power for a long time, to the point that crazy notions seem good to us because they are better than some of the other crazy ideas. Consider what we might call the standard bourgeois view of subsidized anarchy with grocery stores, expressed here by Ray {{{ Dalio }}}:

I prefer almost any way one chooses to live one’s life as long as it doesn’t hurt other people, and I would fight for these values because my study of history has taught me that they make the world a much healthier and happier place than the alternatives.

Human herds settle on this idea: I do what I want, you do what you want, and someone else worries about the road ahead and cleaning up the road behind; in other words, nothing is my fault, everything is owed to me, and I have to do only what is convenient for me. This is individualism.

A sane individual realizes that we need to make choices about political, economic, social, and cultural issues. We either choose ascendent things or we select the path of decline, degeneration, and otherwise loss of our ability to act in a realistic manner toward any transcendental good.

What {{{ Dalio }}} suggests is giving up on everything but your personal profit. Not surprisingly, he elaborates with the usual laundry list of policies which do not connect into any coherent social order, which is his goal. He wants anarchy in which he can make money and everyone else is neutralized.

What I value most is civility over disorder, a strong bipartisan middle over uncompromising extremism, respect for law and order, respect for different approaches to life including not getting involved in other countries’ internal affairs, peace over war, strength over weakness, and thoughtful disagreement and radical truthfulness. I respect all different cultures and religions and prefer the freedom of people to choose the ones that suit them best.

If we look at this psychologically, what {{{ Dalio }}} wants is a disconnection from life itself. He wants to disengage from everything but his own convenience, and to stop thinking so hard. He wants someone else to manage everything in a way that, sure, leads to collapse, but in the meantime lets him do whatever he wants.

Human groups fail this way because individual humans are this way. We have a void within which consists of a lack of direction, manifesting in a lack of ability to see any transcendent beauty in life that makes it worth living. This is not nihilism, but fatalism, something far worse, and it is a consequence of individualism.

Individual humans always tend toward individualism because it creates an external world in which they can invest their minds and avoid inner self thoughts which upset them:

In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.

Every time a human society ends, people should put up an Ozymandias-style grave marker that says “Crazies Win Again.” So far, the crazies have won out for most of history, but this occurs because people make functional societies that breed lots of crazies by making life too easy and too thoughtless, so the traits for actual thought die out.

A sane society would have few rules and would not try to save anyone from himself. It would have no subsidy programs, although it would have charity for those temporarily hit by misfortune. It would do everything it could to reduce the number of crazies and reduce costs to the sane so they would breed more.

Instead we got the great enstupidification: someone decided that fighting failure and insanity was too hard, so we should embrace it and make it a part of our world. Not surprisingly this led to it taking over, and now we are here waiting for society to hit rock bottom so we can burn it down and try again.

Tags: average human, bourgeois, crazies, enstupidification, individualism