Amerika

In the 1980s, someone came up with the concept of “cheese food,” essentially a legal fiction that enabled them to mark flavored vegetable fats as cheese. Most of us saw this on packages in the grocery store and immediately knew that we were in a bad time because no one sane would attempt to make more money by causing food to be fake.

And yet, fakery is an old American tradition. When the Founding Fathers were setting up America 2.0 in 1789, coincidentally the same year that the French Revolution began its murderfest, democracy was the de rigueur theory of government. The kings had to go, because the rising middle class demanded it. Oligarchy was passé. Timarchy was terrifying. So that left… democracy.

Those founders were clever however. “Democracy? Heck, no. This is here’s a Republic. It means that we keep mob rule contained, like the fire in a boiler under a steam engine, by all these rules and laws and procedures, and stuff.” Two hundred years later, the same rationale would be used with cheese food, which otherwise would have been waste product for the compōst heap.

And so liberal democracy took over the world. The American version was generally regarded as being more conservative than the European version, which quickly undertook social benefits as a way to replicate the cradle-to-grave system experienced by serfs there, but not by Americans, whose equivalent system “sharecropping” presented itself a financial relationship and not an in loco parentis stewardship.

228 years after the French Revolution, however, liberal democracy has entered its endgame. The problems which have piled up over the years are too big to be solved; the citizens lack anything in common, and care nothing for anything; everything is ridden with crass commercialism and legal corruption; environmental destruction has reached peak insanity; terms and institutions have become inverted; daily life is existentially miserable and morally bleak; and as world population explodes out of control, it is clear that soon this will all detonate in our faces.

In other words, we are the doomed.

Liberal democracy has already died in the hearts and minds of the citizens of Earth. It promised a Utopia and delivered a dystopia, so it not only failed but did worse than other means of governing ourselves. Perhaps even less forgivably, it also expanded humanity to the point of crisis for nature and humankind alike. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Worst of all is its tendency to make dark organizations within every human institution by setting up a “meritocracy” based on external traits, instead of looking at who people are, because recognizing differences between people is taboo since it contradicts the notion of equality. Everywhere democracy goes, it sets up games, and those who win the games take the prize.

This has manifested in citizens who are zombie narcissists specialized toward test-taking but alien to real life:

The blame doesn’t lie entirely with digital technology. How we educate young people could also be behind the dwindling priority placed on life skills.

Teaching students how to pass exams and standardised tests is favoured more and more.

“As a result, we’ve created a generation of doctors, lawyers and accountants who don’t know how to cook dinner. The disconnect is stark — minds capable of advanced calculus that are unfamiliar with creating a monthly budget,” the Huffington Post noted.

This process has been going on for some time. Instead of having good leaders, who want someone who can get the most votes, we get charming liars who give us what we want without letting us know that, like most humans, we are mildly delusional as individuals and ravingly delusional as groups. Instead of geniuses, we get expert test-takers. Instead of real human beings, we get people who specialize in obedience, not breaking laws, and socializing with each other.

School is just one aspect of this. It is ironic that our solipsism has manifested itself in such an evident form, because solipsism is the root of democracy. Individuals do not want to have to adapt to the world, because they might end up getting it wrong; therefore, they become individualists, and demand that what they want or feel be more important than its consequences in external reality, which puts them into a solipsistic state of mind; to avoid being penalized for this unrealistic perspective, they form cultlike gangs or “collectives” of other individualists, who gain power and then make unreality into official reality, making society solipsistic; these cause the specifically human form of entropy, a “me too” type of behavior, where anything good gets mobbed by people who use it for their own purposes and not its natural purpose, effectively destroying it from within as it adapts to this new need.

As the consequences of this individualism manifest themselves, liberal democracy is disintegrating around us. Individualism causes unrealistic decisions, and under democracy, we have been engaging in a centuries-long prole party which has culminated in such unrealistic actions that our governments are now going broke, a crisis which will precipitate the end of liberal democracy.

For starters, state governments are spending themselves into oblivion on pensions, entitlements and other benefits to citizens:

Government workers marched outside the State House here chanting, “Do your job!” on Monday as Maine kept children’s caseworkers at home and shut down other offices deemed nonessential, and lawmakers worked on a deal late into the night.

A standoff over a tax increase left Illinois teetering on the edge of a potentially devastating credit downgrade. And a deadlock over a raid on the funds of New Jersey’s largest health insurer kept the state’s parks and beaches closed for a third straight day, though lawmakers reached a settlement late Monday.

Stalled negotiations have left at least eight states without budgets several days into a new fiscal year.

This has reached the point where almost a dozen states are near shutdown because their only option is to raise taxes or cut programs, and the voters — never wise — do not wish to cut all those positive-sounding benefits.

Even more, the entrenched industry which is government has become parasitic, leading to a mass of entitlement debt to pay for pensions for public servants, mainly because society could never afford these insanely high costs and as a result, politicians refused to fund them because doing so would have shut down every other activity of government. The voters however seem not to care.

Police pensions are among the worst-funded in the nation. Retirement systems for police and firefighters have just a median 71 cents for every dollar needed to cover future liabilities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data provided by Merritt Research Services for cities of 30,000 or more.

The combined shortfall in the plans, which are the responsibility of municipal governments, is more than $80 billion, nearly equal to New York City’s annual budget.

Broader municipal pension plans have a median 78 cents of every dollar needed to cover future liabilities, according to data from Merritt.

Some will say we could have funded these plans adequately before the Recession, or otherwise could have made it all work. But there is a pattern here. The federal government is deep in debt. The consumers are deep in debt. The states and localities are all deep in debt. Clearly, we vote for more than we can pay for.

On to another aspect: there is no longer any sense of national unity. Under liberal democracy, we have lost the sense of what defines a nation:

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…”

If such are the elements of nationhood and peoplehood, can we still speak of Americans as one nation and one people?

A multicultural mishmash of people is not a nation; it is at best a financial arrangement, sort of like Homeowners Associations (HOAs) make lots of really annoying rules for homeowners but do not actually lead them toward any direction. We coexist because we have jobs and own property, but other than an overblown patriotism from the useless mainstream Right, there is no sense of unity.

This is what happens when democracy takes over. But democracy itself is an agent of decline, just like Leftism, the Renaissance™ and The Enlightenment.™ All of these prioritize the individual over the order of civilization, nature or the divine. They are the takeover of reality by the crowd of individualists, and they form a permanent dark organization within civilization that consumes it voraciously.

At the root of it is the idea that the individual human being deserves to be more important than the order of nature, and should be protected against anyone else telling him that his actions, ideas or desires are bad, even if their consequences are bad. It is the human ego rising above the world, like a new bizarre moon, exerting the sway of its gravity on the tides of history, covering the world in human-ness.

Tags: debt, leftism, liberalism, nationhood, pensions, the enlightenment, the renaissance