Amerika

A new wave is sweeping the West, and this time it is a change in psychology more than ideas. People are breathing a sigh of wistful relief, letting go of the past in a mixture of fear and hope, and wondering what the future will bring.

As someone who has spent the last couple decades defending roots conservatism — the belief in conserving the best of the past throughout all of history — your author finds this appealing, and realizes that it is time to launch beyond the orbit of conservatism.

There is nothing wrong with conservatism, since it is simply one part rebranded realism and one part a search for aesthetic, moral, and civilizational excellence. In fact, it is a sane belief system, unlike all the others. But we need to go further, now.

Since our society has become ruined, and forgotten what is good about each of its parts, we will have to discard politics entirely and instead focus on a psychology that I call More. Through this, we can interpret anything.

More consists of a simple concept: we aspire to more than adaptation; we demand the most intense and excellent experience possible.

Instead of looking at life as a series of problems to be solved, More looks at life as a question, and the answer is that we must experience a constant state of elation, awe, gratitude, and wonder at the state of existence we make for ourselves.

Its model comes from nature, which somehow manages reliability, efficiency, and breath-taking beauty in the same package.

The philosophy of More says that our most recent adaptation, socializing and specialization of labor, prompted us to take a wrong decision and justify ourselves to each other with the idea of necessity and service to others.

More says that we ignore others unless they have some relevance to what we find beautiful and inspiring. We participate in a cooperative goal, which is the creation of More, and anything else simply has zero relevance for us.

Ten thousand years ago, humans began the process of creating permanent civilization, leaving behind their nomadic state. This required specialization of labor, which stuck us into “jobs” where we labored on the same things out of perceived necessity.

With this came socialization, in that we had to make others like us in order to keep them in line, so instead of each person doing what was necessary to survive, we set up a system where we had to convince or control others to get them to do the many things that we need.

Since that time, we have been attempting to make various permutations of the specialization-socialization system work, and all have fallen under the assault of egalitarianism. In order to make others like us, we have to consider them equal, or at least their needs as such.

This has caused us to confuse civilization with the methods necessary for socialization and specialization of labor, which in turn has made us hate civilization. In order for those methods to work, we have to see civilization as one big thing which must be controlled.

That in turn requires us to bribe, cajole, influence, coerce, manipulate, and seduce others into doing what is perceived as necessary. This inverts society: instead of working on the goals of civilization, we spend all of our time keeping civilization from falling apart.

To an engineer, the solution is obvious: develop a civilization which is based on the idea that it falls apart frequently. This mirrors what happened when we were nomads, where groups broke away or left some members behind all the time.

In a More civilization, instead of being concerned with keeping the group together, people simply reward those who are making things closer to the ideal. Those who fall through the cracks are left to their own devices, probably to wander off somewhere else.

We cannot view More as a political system, but more of a cultural one. Direct power as used in politics does not work; having a constant, living discussion over how to achieve More and uniting all of those who can work toward that end provides indirect power.

Instead of trying to force people to behave, we simply acknowledge that those who are achieving More are wanted, and so we include them. If someone is both a contributor and has some behavioral issues, they are welcome so long as the balance is positive.

Consider two stoners. One is wasted all of the time, but achieves something of note, and works with others to make life more beautiful. The other is simply wasted all the time, goes to his job, and then lapses into a state of total unconcern for anything.

The former fits within More. He has some downsides, like constant smoking and snacking, but since he gives back as well, he becomes part of the ad hoc group that comprises the More civilization.

The second, on the other hand, has no inner motivation toward contributing to More. He simply exists and does what he is told because he has to. There is no inner spark, no inspiration to cooperation, no sense of the goal. He would be left behind.

In the same way, a More civilization does not deal with the homeless directly. If someone is homeless, and starts contributing, he quickly becomes woven into the social fabric. If he is just a homeless bum, no one will deal with him.

Further, if someone is a problem, whoever removes him is seen as contributing to More. The day is brighter without drunk homeless people, criminals, parasites, perverts, and idiots/retards wandering around and making life ugly.

In a More civilization, job titles reflect the fact that everyone is moving up. There will be no permanent entry-level workers. If someone finds something to do that needs doing, they get promoted for as long as that need lasts.

People have greater job security because as long as they are doing what they need to be, and doing it well, no opportunity exists for someone else to take their place. Even if one did, that person would take on a new place, and if it became more useful, old places would go away.

Society would be infinitely simpler. As long as you were a net contributor to the achievement of More, people would interact with you and help you. If you were not, they would see no need to interact with you, and shun you.

Law enforcement would be easier. Removing threats and parasites contributes to More; saving fools from themselves does not.

We deserve More than simply conserving the past; we want to build on it, and reach ever-greater heights. Perhaps of even greater importance: we need to know that every day, what we are doing is making life better, not just maintaining something unstable.

Think about housework. When you do it just because you have to, it is usually a bit of a drag. When you are cleaning your house because you are going to throw a party, or have over guests, or even just take selfies, the labor feels… inspired.

Humanity had to wait for some old ideas — dating back to our earliest experiments in socialization-specialization from ancient Athens — to fully fail. Now that the environment, society, government finances, culture, and institutions are in ruins, we can start again!

The foundation of our new era rests in the ludic, or that which is spontaneously playful and fills us with enjoyment of life:

ludic (adj.)

“spontaneously playful,” 1940, a term in psychiatry, from French ludique, from Latin ludere “to play”

Ludists like myself seek More because every second of life should be meaningful, pleasurable, and inspire awe and reverence. Without this sense of beauty to existence itself, we become grumpy grudging drudges acting out roles without caring about the results.

With More, everything is measured by results. If it at least attempted a plausible gambit for increasing the beauty, excellence, wisdom, greatness, sanity, balance, harmony, glory, joy, and awe of everything, More adores it and those who do it.

Cooperation forms the root of the More society, not the dual extremes of extreme self-interest and control. We have no need to bribe or force people; they join us of their own free will by participating. No allegiance test required.

In order to cooperate, we need a goal, and we need to be able to exclude those who do not participate, even if their participation is small. We are not harming them by allowing them to go pursue another purpose; we are only pursuing our own.

Allowing humanity to separate itself by goal in this way is not a right; it is something more fundamental, a necessity. Logic says that it is the only functional way to organize ourselves. Common sense and philosophy unite in this vision.

True, with a permanent civilization this means that we will be sending away some people instead of including them in our social order. Then again, to be included, they only need do one thing, which is contribute according to their abilities.

Future humans will spend less time worrying about inclusion, acceptance, validity, and equality as a result. The task is simple: contribute! The methods are infinite. No one who belongs in a More society will have trouble with these things.

Perhaps there will be no safety nets and less charity, but everything will cost less as well, once we stop trying to subsidize the infinite demand of those who cannot figure out how to contribute. Imagine life without high taxes, lawsuits, and other parasitic costs.

We might even start viewing the non-contributors as dishonest, since “I don’t understand” is the oldest dodge in the world. If you know nothing else, start sweeping a street, and in a More society, this creates a job for you.

These will be funded by whoever owns whatever is producing value, since part of making a society have More consists in ensuring that everyone good — and only the good — have places and employments.

The bigger point is this: instead of fighting constantly over how to distribute wealth, we can make it voluntary by escaping the specter of authority entirely, and in doing so, encourage people to create More instead of being mired in backward-looking equality struggles.

For those of us who have seen this society fail, “tradition” does not convince us, nor does the manic desire of the Left to abolish genetics and inner character with equality. We simply want to gather up the good and make more good with it, and ignore the bad.

Our present society makes this question too complicated. Instead of looking directly at how to contribute, we filter our choices through layers of taxes, laws, finance, and politics. Imagine how much overhead we can eliminate by removing those parasitic forces!

You might think of a More civilization as conservatism turned forward. We still use tradition as our Book Of Known Working Methods, but instead of trying to conserve, we try to accelerate, increase, improve, create, and maximize existence, based on the existential need to feel we are constantly making things better and that our lives are important beyond a material or supernatural sense.

When we defer to centralized authorities — government, the herd, money, God — instead of reality itself, we turn every task of life into a job, or something that we must do instead of something inspiring.

This in turn makes us bleak inside, and is why permanent civilizations fail where nomadic civilizations did not.

When everything becomes a job, people become both depressed and careerists. The former makes them ignore the need for beauty, and the latter makes them ruthless me-firsters, whether in a socialist or capitalist system.

As ludicists, we realize that the instead we deviate from the path toward beauty and excellence, we become functionalists who see life as a duty like a prison sentence. Anything of real meaning becomes a hobby and is disregarded, which means that we miss out on the best abilities and efforts of our species.

Look at our great achievements like space travel, art, philosophy, architecture, and pioneering. People were inspired to do these things, making them more than jobs and less all-consuming than careerism. That is our path to future: More!

Our tendency is to replace a focus on reality, including the potential of what reality can be, with systems of human intention that take the place of feedback from reality. Whether egalitarian or consumerist, these take us to the same place.

We suffer under the clever. The people who work in managerial fields — shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, priests, politicians — become clever with language, but miss the ability to understand the underlying structure of reality.

These then figure out how to control others to get the managerial results they need, but in the process make society miserable, because they see only part of the picture. They reduce all of life to what they understand, which is personal power, wealth, and prestige (the bourgeois triad) achieved through votes, sales, and popularity.

We from the More future recognize that joy in life results from having power over a task, not over people, and a sense of efficacy in that task, which means that we can succeed at it while believing that we are making the world a better place.

This means that instead of focusing on specialization of labor, we are focusing on specialization of task, letting each person find something that they will enjoy because they are good at it and can do it well, not just to a minimum as occurs in a job.

Imagine a More society: small towns in which those who founded thriving businesses essentially hire everyone else. There is no overhead of government, nor intrusion. Cultural values prevail over social, economic, and political forces.

The society as a whole has leaders chosen unanimously by those who contribute the most through their judgment, leadership, wisdom, and insight. These leaders do what leaders — not managers — do: select other good people to organize militaries, roads, police, and the like.

People spend their days doing things where they feel inspired. For the lowly, these are simple tasks, but they lead to acceptance and recognition. For the more capable, the sky is the limit.

We live in a time when almost everyone remains ensconced in a consumer/ideological bubble where we see things in terms of government imposing demands and rewards equally in order to keep social order. Like a job, this turns life into drudgery.

More proposes that we escape this loop entirely, cut out the middleman of power, and focus on living in a way that makes life better than it has ever been before. It builds on the best traditions of conservatives and progressives, but goes far beyond them.

In order to make it out of the bubbleville in which we live, we need to stop reacting to things as they are, and start looking toward things as they can be. This principle guides More toward the positive, instead of of the inherently negative and, worse, boring.

Tags: more, progressivism, traditionalism