Amerika

What has gone wrong with humanity? No one seems happy and everywhere voices cry out for change, yet no one seems to know what to do except adopting more of the same. We are in a well and have no firm ground on which to climb to get out.

This pattern repeats throughout history except that now, with a linked globalized world, we are all going to go down together in the most spectacular mass suicide ever created. A species-wide extinction… how novel.

People have trouble with the limitations of our knowledge, especially our knowledge in groups, including committees and constituencies. If you leave a group of people to decide, you get wishful thinking and projection.

In other words, unless directed otherwise, the human need for individual significance creates a reality-erasing machine. Each person must stand out, so they all have different opinions, which makes agreement to anything but the lowest common denominator impossible, and that LCD consists of the usual wishful thinking and fear-denial.

If you gave a bickering horde of egotistical monkeys modern technology, you would find yourself at the same place humans are now. The same behavior behind herding, schools of fish, and bird migrations works against us as we race toward illusion.

Because we are social animals, in the process of achieving our Utopian illusions, we also neuter ourselves by smashing down anyone who knows better than the illusions that the Crowd desires.

When you have tyrannical leaders, it means that your population is so crazy that it requires babysitter middle managers to crack the whip and keep basic production flowing. They limit the illusion, but also exploit it because that is how they stay in power. Anyone unwilling to lie and manipulate never gets into power in the first place.

This shows us the basic math of groups of creatures: if you ask a group of humans what they want, they will tell you that they are afraid of strong and powerful people. They will neuter themselves out of fear, then be ruled by wimpy and incompetent but manipulative and controlling tyrants.

Every human society has gone out this way.

Our society venerates the weak, victims, and pacifists because we all fear being victims therefore want some kind of insurance that no matter how weak we get, we will not be attacked by those who know better.

If we are in the gutter shooting heroin and engaging in risky sex for cash, we want to be taken to a treatment program and given free stuff, not told to knock it off or we will get exiled.

That is the basic social fear: fear of being downranked and eventually removed by those stronger — smarter, wiser, healthier, saner — than us. In a group, this fear is the lowest common denominator, although with the illusions it produces, almost all of which consist of some formulation of “reality is not real, but this new idea that we can all be tolerated regardless of our dysfunction is real.”

Humans provide comedy because almost all of our ideas start out grandiose and then run out of our control because, out of social fear, we are unwilling to do unpopular things required to nip the bad idea in the bud.

Consider the parable of the Escobar hippos as an instructive case in point.

A group of hippos originally imported by Escobar to his private zoo decades ago has multiplied and, according to scientists, is now spreading through one of the country’s main waterways – the River Magdalena. Last month, a study published in the Biological Conservation journal said culling the animals was the only way to mitigate their environmental impact.

“It is obvious that we feel sorry for these animals, but as scientists we need to be honest,” Colombian biologist Nataly Castelblanco, one of the study’s authors, told the BBC. “Hippos are an invasive species in Colombia and if we do not kill a part of their population now, the situation could be out of control in just 10 or 20 years.”

The weather also helps: in Africa, the population is in part controlled by droughts that do not take place in Colombia. Indeed, conditions in their South American home seem so ideal for the hippos that studies show they start reproducing at earlier ages, she said.

A wealthy man — his criminal status does not matter, in this case — out of the pursuit of his own egotistic grandiose wishful thinking, decides to import creatures from far away.

Society, reacting to his criminal acts, even if the people buying his product were the ones really culpable, takes him out. But then it proves expensive to move the hippos, so they do not, and nature takes its course.

Invasive species destroy new environments because these invaders are not optimized for a niche. Instead, they consume whatever they can and because of these lower standards, thrive at the expense of the highly-adapted and specialized local creatures.

A sane human would have relocated the Escobar hippos after removing the drug lord, but someone probably wanted that money to go to anti-poverty programs with a ten percent kickback to the big guy instead.

At that point, inertia takes over. We neuter ourselves from social fear, and then instead of opposing the viral pathology of equality created by that fear, we wallow in it and therefore, refuse to stop the precedent cascade where from one bad decision, by rationalizing from it in order to offer the popular illusion that everything is going well, we keep repeating the same stupid methods that failed previously because anything else is socially taboo. Human inertia consists of not doing the sane because the insane has become popular.

When you neuter yourselves, you use the same method that was employed against Socrates and Jesus Christ. If all of the monkeys are bickering, find the ones who actually said something of relevance and kill them so that the rest of the monkeys do not gain a coherent thought of what must be done to get out of the well of inertia.

This is why our civilization has become an incoherent buzzword salad of pidgin equality-speak that has no idea who it is, what it wants, or why it wants to survive:

Far from consolidating “the free world,” the war has underscored its fundamental incoherence.

That incoherence means that your world is ruled by buzzwords, or current incarnations of old bad ideas relating to the inertia. Almost all of them mean some form of “equality,” which really means “no social structure.”

Civilization decay acts like a mental virus by rationalizing from the precedent of making everyone happy instead of having a goal, because that way the social fear of being downranked and rejected is pacified.

All of civilization comes to this idea — the bad and good are equal, no one can rise above you because they are smarter or better as people — and manifests in many buzzwords and forms which are just the same old devil in disguise:

• No social hierarchy: equality of rank means no reward for those who are better, we accept the bad as well as the good, everyone can do what they want, and society pays for the externalized social cost.
• No culture: organic culture, including disorganized religion of the pagan, hermeticism, transcendentalist, and naturalist variety, creates a form of social order that competes with popular illusions. This is why your society demands diversity: with multiple cultures in a place, you have no culture.
• Rewards the stupid and bad: socialism in all of its many forms, including unions, means that you reward the bad as well as the good so that no one is downranked for ineptitude, laziness, incompetence, or lack of diligence.
• Rewards the weak: a society that praises neutered, domesticated, and infantilized people appears to be “in control” because it has enforced obedience through pacifism.

Our illusion drives us off course, social fear makes us rationalize this mistake as “progress,” and then inertia and the fear of peer pressure and unpopularity causes us to continue the path to oblivion.

Since each person must stand out, because in an egalitarian society we are all equally anonymous and irrelevant until we draw attention to ourselves, this creates a free market for lies which rewards performers with popularity, votes, and product sales.

That in turn creates an impetus toward goodthink, or rationalizing our decay as victory by embracing the insane and explaining it as compassion, progress, morality, and the opposite of the decline that it is.

Goodthinkers compete for who can have the biggest and craziest illusions because that extremity signals the greatest obedience to the precedent cascade starting with the Big Lie of equality.

If you speak up against the lies, you have created an opportunity for some goodthinker to show his obedience by taking you down. Therefore, the dissidents and the conformists feed off each other and become codependent.

Like every bad family structure ever witnessed in nature, our society has become a true collective, a mutual dependency based on how much of the lies we are willing to accept. Most want mostly lie with a little realism for garnish.

The only way out of our self-neutering is to start with the Big Lie, equality, and point out that we need a society where the good get rewarded and the bad ejected, with those in the grey area in the middle left alone.

Most of us are in the grey area and will be happiest there.

Our people have trained themselves to fear this because it means social hierarchy, or recognition that some are born to higher roles than others. This is one of the difficult facts of life, like death and defecation, that we simply must accept.

Denying a fact of life means that you have made yourself a slave to the illusions that are required to keep it from being mentioned. If it is mentioned, you are revealed as a liar and weak, and then you face tenfold the problems you tried to escape in the first place.

Like a heroin addict, you are then dependent on fresh infusions of the lie. This means that those who control the lies own you. We have neutered ourselves through this process, and will not rise again until we escape.

Tags: domesticated, equality, escobar hippos, infantilized, neutered