Amerika

Watching any human group shows you how easily people are manipulated. The Talisman-Scapegoat Dichotomy asserts itself early on: there are some things that people like, which they believe in like gods, and the opposites of those, which they fear like silent contemplation.

If you are speaking to a group, you manipulate them by appealing to what they want. “You guys like free beer, am I right?” This is the first step.

Then you bring in the idea of something open-ended as a category, like the idea of Free Beer Forever. “If we pool our resources, we can have free beer — forever!” The crowd cheers.

But the appeal of the scapegoat is that it is reality-denial. It rejects the limits we experience every day and therefore, makes us happy. This is the basis of the ironist contrarian psychology: deny reality so that we feel powerful so that we escape fear and frustration.

I mean, in our heads, we have escaped those things. Not in reality, of course, but that bill is due and paid much later.

To make your manipulation work, you have to then style reality as a form of enemy, inconvenience, or evil. “But you know what stops Free Beer Forever? The need to pay for labor, hops, barley, water, and time.”

Here reality itself — the fact that everything must be limited or it cannot have an opposite, and therefore exists in a state of stasis and cannot renew itself — becomes the enemy. But you will get laughed at if you say that reality is bad, so instead you find a target symbol: the Rich, Satan, atheists, White people, Jews, Muslims, infidels, etc.

Find someone who is small enough or does not exist so that you can beat up on this person and the herd will not freak out.

There are only a handful of rich people out there. If you kill them and eat them, society will go on, at least in terms of numbers. If you blame Satanists, well who knows if these even exist, outside of a handful of mental health cases and an even smaller group of esoteric occultists that no one understands? Go ahead and make them a target.

If your manipulation is successful, you have power. But this introduces another problem: your power then becomes vulnerable; you are The Establishment™ now. And so your thoughts turn toward having total power, more even than the kings who did not interfere in most of daily life, so that your manipulation is safe.

In this way, every ideology — in the words of a 1980s song — “everybody wants to rule the world” — seeks to gain power, keep power, and smash down all competitors by styling them as evil ideological enemies. There are no exceptions.

When the Left talks about Donald J. Trump aspiring to “fascism” or as they did in the wake of the recent SCOTUS decisions, being a “king,” they are projecting.

The Left wants totalitarianism.

If you leave it up to the fundamentalists on the Right, you will get a theocratic state which is totalitarian in many aspects.

Even the libertarians eventually default to the idea of some immovable force that will enforce the few rules they need.

The anarchists want a society that murders anyone who is not an anarchist. This too is totalitarian.

This means that we can dispense with worrying about which ideology leads to totalitarianism, and focus on paths outside of the cycle of decay that leads to tyranny (rule for its own sake) through manipulation. These rulers then defensively adopt totalitarianism in order to maintain their power.

Of course the oldest story for humans, older even than the Garden of Eden, is the capture of fire. First you need to figure out how to make fire, and then you have to figure out how to keep it without it burning down everything around you. This parallels biology and the capture of oxygen as an energy source despite its propensity for oxidation in tissues.

The only actual way out of the totalitarian cycle is realism. That is, you measure all actions by their results on the longest possible time-scale. This gets rid of the manipulation at the start; there is no “free beer forever” nor can there be by logic. If beer became free forever, people would stop valuing it.

With that, however, there is a wrinkle. Only a few out of every hundred thousand understand these concepts and have the generosity and hard-mindedness to apply them. A sensible system would place these people in positions of duty, sequester wealth with them, and breed them like cattle to continue the process between the generations.

Tags: contrarianism, fascism, ironist contrarianism, monarchism, totalitarianism, tyranny