Amerika

When a civilization starts, people agree about two things: first, the immediate need, and second the character of that society. This character generally takes the form of an intangible purpose, for example the ancient Greeks pursuing “excellence” and the ancient Maya wanting to share the knowledge of the sun-god.

This parallels — all of the really true things in life are parallel between macrocosm and microcosm, physics and metaphysics, future and past, thought and matter, energy and pattern — the quest of individual humans. People either develop character and find a purpose in life or they begin the process of internal decay.

As soon as dissent spreads in the ranks, a civilization begins dying. No longer does everyone agree on the purpose. They no longer have a goal. Like any organism without purpose, they become parasitic, and they consume the civilization. Centuries later only ruins and low-IQ mixed-race people remain.

Everything you see in the contemporary political discourse is contemporary behavior. People see that our civilization is in decline and have no idea how to reverse it, so they start going on about Christianity, the billionaires, Illuminati, the Jews,™ chemtrails, or some other scapegoat. They want a tangible enemy to throttle.

They are scared out of their minds because in their guts they know that fixing civilization is a really hard problem. If it has happened in the past, we have scant record of it, and the people who lived through it probably had no idea it was happening. You get a slow panic in response where everyone tries to invent a story where things turn out OK.

Hint: things will not turn out OK. If you save your civilization, it will be in part by losing most of your citizens who are by now ruined people without purpose. They are biologically wrecked and cannot be saved. You will need to cut off the dead tissue in order to save the living flesh.

For civilization to die, hubris must come into play; we know it by the modern term individualism, which means no duty to anything but the self. The individualist is a byproduct of cities, since he works a job and resents society for forcing him to do this, so he retaliates with both selfishness and pretense.

An individualist will never admit his individualism. For him, there is always a “higher” goal like spirituality, peace, love, art, or science. He hides his motivations behind this aegis. He rationalizes what he wants as being necessary to advance these ideals and symbols.

Hubris occurs when the person decides he is more important than the world. Hubris is an inversion of Darwinism: instead of adapting to the world, the individual decides that the world must adapt to him through the magic of peer pressure. Using his aegis, he convinces others that his actions are moral.

Modern narcissism takes this form in both individual and society (in parallel!). People give up on having shared purpose, and therefore lose a sense of individual purpose since it has no context in which to exist, so they live for the moment. History and eternity are forgotten.

The modern narcissist instead exemplifies the worst of the bourgeois behavior of the city-dweller. He wants big government to take care of problems so he has an excuse not to think about them. He likes giving money to special interest groups so that everyone seems to be getting along just fine.

He believes whatever the latest metonymy from the media and government is; these tropes are talking points that make him feel as if society is succeeding instead of failing as it obviously is. He lives for his shopping, sexual pleasure, wine, and possessions. He believes in nothing but his comfort right now.

Narcissists share a trait in common that derives from hubris and it is a type of palliative individualism. The individualist sees only a duty to himself, but mostly, to his mental state. In the bourgeois mindset, he wants to feel good, and he manipulates others to manipulate reality so he can maintain this oblivious delusion.

This is the end result of individualism: a person who will believe anything and approve any symbolic action that makes him feel better about living in a dying age. To him, reality is a means-to-an-end that is there to be manipulated to make his mental state feel better.

Voters routinely approve foreign wars, bankruptcy-inducing benefits, and pointless red tape in the pursuit of feeling good about things. The bureaucracy never solves any problems, but the voters took action and now they feel more powerful for having done so. They assume the problems are sorted because something has been done.

This furthers the human hubris and, because it is shared among the group, no is accountable or responsible. The group can indulge its illusions, feel better, and leave a mess of collateral damage for someone else to fix. In fact, they feel more powerful for forcing someone else to clean up after them.

A disturbing codependency arises from this. The members of the group are me-first individualists who think about nothing except what makes them feel better, but they need the mutual approval of the herd to keep the scam going. This makes them both need and resent each other.

Not surprisingly, dying societies are characterized by being scammy, needy, and resentful. Most of the societies on this Earth are in the process of decay, although the final stage lingers on for centuries as subsistence living in corrupt societies with no functional institutions.

This is what a species dying out looks like.

You can build an organization around one of two principles. Either there is a shared goal, both practical and transcendent, or it is just a job and everyone does whatever they have to do to convince others that they deserve their share of the wealth. The hubris mentality arises from the scammy nature of manipulating others.

At the root of human failure, then, we find peer pressure motivated by individualism. This harms the people caught in its grasp and over time, genetically selects for only dishonest and incompetent people. Hubris arises from the loss of purpose and manifests as a defensive, compensatory, and palliative parasitism.

Healthy people have a sense of purpose. As Fred Nietzsche notes, all organisms seek power, but to have power, one must have a goal, and that requires an overall purpose. To have a purpose requires realism, or understanding of the world. Together those form an intangible and transcendent sense of meaning of existence and reason to live.

Those who live well seek power to fulfill their transcendent purpose. This gives their lives meaning, and is dependent on having a functional civilization, which is why people become incredibly demoralized once it becomes obvious that their civilization is in decline.

However those who do not have purpose fall into hubris and as a result need control to enforce the codependency of individualists on others. Control regulates methods in order to change thinking, and the goal is to make anarchy mandatory except for the bare minimum of civilization; this is basically the “third world way.”

As William S Burroughs wrote, bureaucracy creates democracy. Bureaucracy arises to deal with the problems of civilization decay when there are not enough intelligent people to keep the jobbers from turning every task into a mixture of greed and resentment. From democracy comes an egalitarian spiral of more freedom, less duty and thus, less function.

We say around here frequently that what scares our enemies is how easily civilization decline can be reversed. However, for that to happen, we have to first articulate what happened to us instead of chasing scapegoats and talismans, and with that out of the way, rediscover our sense of purpose.

Tags: bourgeois, civilization decay, crowdism, hubris, hybris, individualism, jobbers, narcissism, solipsism