Amerika

Since the dawn of time, many human civilizations have existed, even great ones, but all have perished. If humanity wants a future, we have to figure out how this is happening.

As Plato noted, civilization moves in cycles from an internally-motivated youth when it seeks to do good, to a cynical middle age which is “just show me the money,” to an insane old age when it does anything possible to draw attention.

Like suicidal lemmings, they all march toward this cliff. Once a society becomes organized, it starts consuming itself through little bites from many sources, then eventually goes insane out of the futility of existence.

Could it be that, like so many other things in life, civilization has a trap in it that must be dodged? Much as grain needed to be domesticated, fire tamed, milk sickness avoided, and water cleansed, society itself needs oversight?

Every civilization dies because it repeats past successful methods while forgetting why they were applied. Like the severed tail of a lizard, it thrashes around as it always does, but as context shifts, this becomes useless.

As soon as this happens people go into denial — the easiest psychological response to the hopeless — and use each other as tools to keep the denial afloat. They want to remain happily oblivious until sweet death takes them.

The denialists now have strong power here in the West because they control the means of earning a living. You either join them in denial, or you become an outsider who will probably starve living in a van down by the river.

This qualifies us for Late Stage Democracy, or the point at which it is clear that democracy has failed, but so many people are vested in the system that they use their denial as a weapon to keep the sane ones from fixing it.

If you ask me, the root of much of the resentment against Baby Boomers is that they entered the world before it was ruined, profited off of it pre-collapse, but now want nothing to change that might endanger their retirement.

Since they are about to hit their eighties, one supposes that the advice to just wait a few years may apply. Soon the bodies will be cooling, and current generations can screw up the same way the Boomers did.

Most modern activities exist to affirm denialism. All those television shows? They are showing us a functional social order where one does not exist. The news, Uniparty, and political debates? Fictions portraying a working society.

I remember reading Thomas Pynchon and realizing that few people are deliberate. Rather, we sort of stumble through life. Opportunities appear, and we take them. Dangers loom, so we avoid them. We seek pleasure and dodge pain.

Most of all, we are rationalizers. Since we are not deliberate, we end up in some situation or another mostly by chance, and then find ways to dupe our brains into thinking that it is what we wanted all along.

That works until a better option comes along. Denialists rage most of all at anyone who has gotten free from this diseased society, and therefore, makes the denialists look like morons suffering unnecessarily.

If you wonder why we have political correctness, cancel culture, and elites who turn toward the Left, consider that democracy is inherently egalitarian — every person gets the same vote — therefore, very Leftist.

As a democracy ages, it moves steadily Leftward because otherwise, it has to admit that something has gone wrong with this idea of equality. That upsets the denialists, who are basically bourgeois city McJob dwellers who are terrified of change.

Currently, hundreds of millions of people find themselves in a situation where while they dislike the modern life, they also fear seeing any alternatives because that will prove that they have wasted most of their lives on nonsense and garbage.

The denialists therefore hit us with hard authoritarian activity. The populist/nativist revolt of Donald Trump, for example, made everyone look like idiots and interrupted the cozy profits and collusion of those in power.

To keep things on an even keel, an international coalition joined hands to produce a media blitz, mass panic, and consequent takeover. Only now do we see that the whole thing was mostly fake.

The World Health Organization (WHO) just published mortality estimates for COVID-19:

With the latest COVID-19 deaths reported to WHO now exceeding 3.3 million, based on the excess mortality estimates produced for 2020, we are likely facing a significant undercount of total deaths directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19.

Out of a population of nearly eight billion, even eight million deaths is a flu season that may have been prolonged by weird global weather caused by having too many people living in urban “heat islands.”

For the amount of panic involved, we should expect something like a half-billion people dead, but instead very few have died, and the places which have gotten out of the insane lockdown-vaccination-and-masks routine seem to be doing best.

In the meantime, the resulting crisis of Great Depression II is slowly manifesting:

Shortages, transportation bottlenecks and price spikes are nearing the highest levels in recent memory, raising concern that a supercharged global economy will stoke inflation.

Several things are about to converge. First, these shortages are going to produce something worse than inflation; they are going to shut down production, which means an absolute economic crash.

Second, democracy has finally gone too far with its spending, and if you add up present obligations to entitlements programs, future obligations to infrastructure, and the kindling of the global debt bomb, and it becomes clear that Western economies are headed for default, at which point your currency will be worth a tenth what it is now.

Third, we are headed toward war, since that seems to be the only way to end global depressions. Biden, Merkel, and the other clowns are following the FDR-style program of Keynesianism, which means a circular Ponzi scheme in which we spend entitlements money in order to stimulate the economy so that we can tax it and keep the whole sick show operating (and denialists happily, or unhappily, in denial).

COVID-19 like most events in the post-Trump era has served one role: to reveal us. It showed us inept leaders, power-hungry mask Karens, greedy TikTok twerk nurses, stolen elections, dubious statistics, manipulated “science,” and an unstable and tottering empire.

Instead of the nice stable society that denialists insist we have, we see a species in denial, living in misery, failing to reproduce at replacement rates, and generally sliding into incompetence and corruption.

Democracy has become inverted because it created a system, and systems like any other procedure, method, or tool can be re-contexted by following the rules and not working toward the ostensible goal. They get gamed.

A sane person would look at democracy and say that such a system will work until people figure out that they can sell their votes, and oligarchs figure out that they can buy them.

In this case, our nü-elites discovered that they could not just buy votes, but do it with taxpayer money, profiting from that nice pocket between spending the cash and the bill coming due.

They continue the process. To them, being in government is simply a career, and you succeed at a career by doing what your bosses want and getting along with your other workers. Competence barely even factors in, if at all.

Consequently the Right has begun doing what it usually does, which is to remove controversial ideas and plow ahead with what innocuous things are left. This enforces denialism by making us think that these trivial problems are in fact a Big Deal and that the real big deals — namely civilization collapse, genocide, ecocide, and the failure of our species — are not problems at all!

Denial inverts every system from achieving its ends into distracting from them, simply because humans in groups prefer to “feel good” about their current situation instead of thinking toward where they need to be.

Consequently, the issue that your Republican representatives are talking about most turns out to be abortion. They can fight abortion, win at first, then lose in the long term, but still collect those donations and work with their Leftist peers.

In Late Stage Democracy, your audience consists of denialists, but politicians and other elites know the real score. Another society has rotted. The only rational response is to pile up enough money to move somewhere else and be rich there.

As a result, they sell us lies. The Left talks about infrastructure while paying out trillions to the group that keeps it in power, the minority voters. The Right talks about abortion while supporting its corporate donors who want immigrant labor.

This shows us a typical scenario for Late Stage Democracy: everything is on fire, everyone is in denial, and no one will tackle the difficult problems. No wonder every human society suicides this way.

Tags: covid-19, democracy, immigration, late stage democracy