Amerika

In the transition from the Age of Icons to the Age of Symbolism, people became easily manipulated by visual image, token, and emotional contrast because these are symbolic. You do not have to genuflect before the king, flag, or stone idol, but you must give tribute to the idea of whatever is seen as good as powerful.

Humans screw up when they make decisions on an individualistic basis — “what is convenient for me and my self-image?” — and not on a transcendent basis, such as asking what will promote excellence, beauty, and realism as a universal maxim. Committees, democracies, cliques, fads/trends, and personal cowardice all arise from this.

Indeed a secondary layer of error exists where the justifications for individualism become attractive but addictive paths away from reality. Individualists want legitimacy, so they claim the world is bad (contrarian ironism), pursue herd consensus (crowdism), and create a morality of means-over-ends neutralization (dualism).

From this we get the mistake every committee or electorate makes which is to filter out all of the upsetting methods and to instead chase after symbols which seem like they will solve everything or at least provide a tangible enemy. We are still monkeys howling at idols, only now those are abstractions and not tangible objects.

In fact, people screw up because they are drawn to symbols that seem tangible despite being abstract. “Equality” feels really solid. So does “regulation,” as well as jingoism. The herd is drawn to illusions of power, but rejects real power because it fears the methods involved where the bad get punished and the good rewarded.

Envy factors in here, of course. The herd does not want any to rise above it, but its primary motivation is to avoid losing what it has. If hierarchy or a morality of realism kicks in, some people will be seen as having lesser or no value. Every manipulator appeals to this fear in humanity.

When they try to establish society without transcendent goals, even though those set up a hierarchy like aristocracy, humans do not end up at democracy or idiocracy; they end up with mediocracy, or rule of the mediocre, because the mediocre offends no one except very few. Each year the mediocre gets worse; this is civilization decay.

The only way out of mediocracy is to have transcendent goals: we aspire to excellence, beauty, and realism. We want to adapt to our environment and thrive. We no longer want to be reacting to crises that we have created, but to bypass that entire mess and go on to make life amazing.

To do that, however, we need to stop fearing that we are mediocre, because our fear of being judged as such causes us to pity the truly mediocre and use them as a symbol by which we gain control. Our society sacrificed itself to raise up the downtrodden and marginalized, who remain downtrodden and marginalized despite centuries of sacrifice.

It seems the first step to understanding humanity is to see that we have never changed. We are still the same monkeys that worshiped idols, but now they come in four hundred page books full of theory. We have a tendency to banish symbols of our fears by banning methods, and this savages us by making us neutered and self-sacrificing.

Human societies perish the same way. Because of a pretense of being “good” which is necessary to hide their selfishness, they adopt a fetish for helping the poor, sick, insane, sad, and otherwise doomed. This allows them to destroy themselves, but at least no one has to fear being mediocre, because now everything is that way.

Tags: democracy, egalitarianism, idiocracy, individualism, mediocracy