Amerika

Modern society begins with individualism, or the idea that the desires of the individual are more important than tradition and natural order. Because they want to hold on to their construct of reality, most modern humans will deny and oppose this, burying it under thousands of pages of theory and rhetoric.

Individualism relies on victimhood, or the idea that the world is bad and must be replaced with a human order based on our social activities, not things that only some people can understand like leadership, which is a skill based on talent just like classical composer, brain surgeon, or mathematician.

The basic idea of individualism is that no one needs to change. There cannot be wrong and right any longer, only the social standard of every choice being arbitrary and for personal comfort and convenience, because that way no one is ever wrong, no one loses social status, and no one has to change their thinking.

In its essence, individualism seeks to banish realism because noticing reality makes us perceive where our thinking is wrong, and that in turn rejects whatever we have been doing. The first guy to invent irrigation was killed instantly because he made all the other farmers look stupid for not figuring it out for years.

Individualists focus on exceptions. They want to think that the way things normally work does not apply to them. They look for ways to rationalize their behavior: “Normally when someone commits murder, we assume that they are crazy, but what if this person had good reasons for slaughtering a dozen preschoolers?”

In other words, they believe that they as individuals are the fundamental exception; the rules do not apply to them. This allows them to rationalize their actions as good because they were not intended as they ended up, therefore in their minds, these should not be viewed as negative.

Not surprisingly, individualists in groups — when collectivized, they become egalitarians, since that way everyone can be an individualist and the group supports them — tend toward minoritarianism:

In a civilized liberal democracy, majorities owe certain things to harmless minorities: tolerance, civility, and the rights affirmed in the Constitution — freedom of speech, assembly, etc. However, it seems to me that minorities owe something to the majority in return: mainly, a proper respect for their tastes, beliefs and sensibilities, and a decent restraint in challenging them, if there are some reasonable grounds for challenging them. This contract imposes some costs on minorities, of course, but I think they should look on those costs as the price of the tolerance they enjoy.

When minorities view themselves as separate from the society around them, they take revenge on it through a motivation of victimhood, in exact parallel to how individualists use society for their own ends and pass on costs to others because of perceived victimhood, mainly because minorities are following the individualist model.

In the West, we formally adopted the minoritarian model in 1789 with the French Revolution. Where previously people tried to understand an order of nature and tradition and find a place within it, now all of that was scrapped and the only order was the individual ego: what I want right now that others owe me because I am a victim and an exception.

Ironically, the supposed opposite to minoritarianism, majoritarianism, quickly reverts to minoritarianism because most people want to see themselves as victims, and so these individualists collectivize into a plurality that then takes over:

majoritarianism, n.: the philosophy or practice according to which decisions of an organized group should be made by a numerical majority of its members

We might call them Utopians, but really these are individualists. They adore the idea of Utopia because as the name implies, it exists nowhere and never can, but it provides an excuse for them. If the world was more like Utopia, they would not feel like victims, so until it attains that impossible state they will continue to act like victims.

When they gain enough power, they decide to make their Utopian perspective mandatory, and then the majoritarian rule turned into minority rule quickly becomes soft totalitarianism or anarcho-tyranny:

Seventy years ago, in a little-remembered lecture at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, titled “Democracy, Oligarchy and Freedom,” Burnham warned that the United States was drifting toward “democratic despotism,” the key symptoms of which were the centralization of power both in the presidency and in the bureaucracies of the executive branch and the weakening of “intermediary institutions” that stand between the people and the executive. Burnham argued that if we continued down this path, the end result would be Caesarism, where the executive in the name of the “popular will” suffocates liberty.

They achieve this goal by weaponizing minority groups. As long as they can point to groups who suffer, they can style the system as it is as bad, and therefore can argue for its replacement by Utopia or at least steps toward that end. This provides an excuse, justification, and rationalization for their behavior which would otherwise be recognized as criminal, antisocial, incompetent, and most of all, selfish.

The goal of all con men is to achieve the tripartite:

• Hide their own bad acts by misdirecting others toward symbolic non-issues.
• Neutralize everyone else by sending them off in pursuit of these non-issues.
• Conceal what they are actually doing by posturing as altruists and visionaries.

Individualism after all is a kissing cousin to narcissism, itself linearly related to solipsism. Humans with big brains see enough of the world to fear it and therefore reject it, playing the victim in order to justify this. However, they realize that others will recognize this as selfish and illogical.

For that reason, they come up with a rationalization for it: the insanity is not anti-realistic, but something better than reality, progress (toward that mythical Utopia). They are not selfish narcissists, but really the guardians of this progress that will end all strife and make everyone happy forever.

In doing so they discover how collectivized individualism is a Devil’s Bargain: by manipulating the crowd, they also enmesh themselves in those manipulations. They even become alienated from happiness itself because to become happy is to relinquish the role of victim and therefore, in an individualistic society, to have no power.

The egalitarian narcissism will not decompensate from his mental loop. He believes that he is a victim, therefore he deserves things from society, and if he is not given those, he is justified in taking revenge. Whether that is a Revolution, stealing from his job, or cruelly manipulating others, he will find an outlet for these feelings.

His society is inherently minoritarian. Instead of focusing on those who like all successful organisms have adapted to their environment and are thriving, he looks at the failing and sad, since if they are accepted, he will be accepted for his lesser sins. This extends to minority groups too.

If he were serious about his Utopian ideals, he would become a prioritarian or one who seeks to improve the well-being of people, rather than trying to make them equal:

The prioritarian gives priority to getting benefits to those whose well-being level is low, so will favor helping the miserable rather than the lucky person even if the well-being aggregate is thereby reduced a bit, compared to what it would have been if the resource had been channeled to the blissful person.

A prioritarian avoids the false target of equality and advocates for improving lives. Conservative prioritarians view well-being as low under egalitarianism, so focus instead on improving the quality of civilization, such that those who can improve well-being will find it easy to do so on their own.

Minoritarianism clashes with prioritarianism because the minoritarian does not seek to improve life at all; he seeks to make it “equal.” This means taking from the strong and giving to the weak, as is the case in all egalitarian systems, but because only the strong can make strength, results merely in equal weakness.

A prioritarian gives aid where needed, but if of the conservative form chooses indirect methods, where the Leftist variety choose direct methods which are more immediate but do not last. The conservative form improves life for all in order to give the weakest the best possible option for happiness.

At the end of the day, minoritarianism is egalitarianism is individualism. We cannot escape this calculus and therefore have to see them as the same thing: a legitimization of social failure so that individuals can manipulate the system for their own profit.

Tags: anarcho-tyranny, egalitarianism, minoritarianism, prioritarianism, soft totalitarianism