Amerika

Take a human group, let it fester for awhile, and then thrust a crisis upon it, and you will see entropy in action: each person will adopt a different viewpoint in order to stand out from the Crowd in the belief that this is the only way for his viewpoint to succeed.

That impulse, both natural and hideously neurotic, misses the need for some tentative solution to the crisis, even if a heuristic that will be refined over the coming days. When the focus is kept on reality, the possibility of survival remains.

Most of our conservatives these days seem to be looking for some root of the decline but none of them will go far and deep enough to see that the basis of our system, egalitarianism, has made us all go neurotic while driving us away from real solutions toward symbolic activities.

Hair-splitting between different types of egalitarianism produces nothing of value. Classical liberals endorse a system that will make its way to Communism as surely as anarchy or “democratic socialism,” so there is no point championing the partially-poisoned cup over the full draught.

For an example of people looking for a recent root to our problems, we can consider the internet-popular screed from judge Keith Alber:

I am a student of law whose age is 85. My first year of college was 68 years ago. One class I took was political science. A half-page of my textbook essentially outlined a few steps to overturn a democracy:

• Divide the nation philosophically.
• Foment racial strife.
• Cause distrust of police authority.
• Swarm the nation’s borders indiscriminately and unconstitutionally.
• Engender the military strength to weaken it.
• Overburden citizens with more unfair taxation.
• Encourage civil rioting and discourage accountability for all crime.
• Control all balloting.
• Control all media.

What was printed in 1954 as a possible diabolic nightmare has become an emerging reality. I hope that Americans will unite enough to pen a good finish.

This textbook is simply describing how democracy breaks down because egalitarianism drives people insane.

The nation becomes divided philosophically because pluralism emphasizes everyone having an independent opinion, which means that in the marketplace for social attention, people must come up with “unique” takes in order to be recognized, so soon, everyone does.

Even more, many people are going to want limits on the egalitarian explosion, which creates socially-acceptable conservatives (limited egalitarianism) and Leftists (as close to full Communism as they dare speak in public) and divides the nation into these two general camps.

The sad SACs think that ideology can be limited, but because it is messianic, conjectural, and Utopian, ideology always proceeds toward its furthest extreme. It is by nature extremist.

Properly understood, ideology is a replacement of culture with political mechanisms. When foreign cultures invade, the weak and malcontent adopt the new way simply because they hate the old so much, and this abolishes culture, which means that rules become more important than folkways or social capital.

Even more, as society becomes complex, disconnection occurs between labor and results. This means that people respond to authority — a means-over-ends, or “do it because I say so, not for any other reason, and do not ask why” type of system — more than real-world consequences.

Symbols, money, authority, jobs, and morality separate us from reality.

When this gets to the point of replacing culture, ideology and commerce take over from more organic ways of life, and people start to divide philosophically. From that, other errors are made, all of which are part of egalitarianism:

• Divide the nation philosophically: it separates egalitarians from realists and tries to exclude the latter.
• Foment racial strife: egalitarian societies, based on Utopian thinking, always desire a “brotherhood of humankind” and therefore tend toward diversity, something encouraged by socialist leaders because it abolishes culture and therefore, makes ideology more important.
• Cause distrust of police authority: egalitarianism is fundamentally ironist and pacifist, meaning that it rejects the idea of authority itself and embraces tolerance and pluralism instead.
• Swarm the nation’s borders indiscriminately and unconstitutionally: once you have socialist free stuff (entitlements) and diversity, more come to partake of the free stuff.
• Engender the military strength to weaken it: to an egalitarian, all genders belong in the military, and therefore the military cannot remain in its masculine/aggressive form.
• Overburden citizens with more unfair taxation: all egalitarian systems take from the strong to give to the weak through socialist-style entitlements and subsidies, therefore taxes are always high.
• Encourage civil rioting and discourage accountability for all crime: this was a well-known part of the French Revolution and Bolshevik playbook, namely inflaming the crowd and getting a revolt going.
• Control all balloting: every democracy known to humanity has done this at some point. He who counts the ballot is more important than whoever is elected.
• Control all media: speech codes have always been part of egalitarianism because as a conjectural philosophy, it can be shown to be unnecessary, therefore it must control the narrative.

In other words, we are seeing a neo-Communist takeover, but it is a natural outgrowth of democracy — an egalitarian system — itself.

Tags: 1950s, collapse, democracy, egalitarianism, keith alber