Amerika

Humans operate by rationalization because we are basically democracies. Our conscious mind ego has to find a way to explain to itself the choices made by the id, which is essentially an angry crowd throwing out suggestions until one “sticks” more than others with what we know of the world.

Creatures who think in this way are prone to getting brain-hacked by control, which because it is a misdirection of goal to method, takes over even when people rebel against it. Whether you become a sycophant or a contrarian, you are now speaking its language and considering the world in its context.

Control — repression of certain methods in order to influence thinking through the methods that remain — occurs in civilizations when the sense of shared goal evaporates. Instead of working toward the same intangible future, people in that civilization are fighting over how to divide what they already have.

To keep order, those in power turn to control, which in its simplest form is Ten Commandments stuff that mentions methods but not positive goals: do not murder (not: conserve the good lives, remove the bad, ignore everyone else); do not dishonor your parents (but what is a good parent?); do not cheat on your wife (even if she is horrible and you want a divorce); do not have any gods other than al-Jewhovah (although those gods might reflect the same divinity); and so forth.

People under control learn to rationalize their desires, so that instead of choosing what is good, they find a way to explain how what they want can be considered “good” under certain circumstances, therefore can have membership in the category named “good,” and therefore, should be permitted if not rewarded.

For example, if I want a new BMW, I can argue that I am supporting the economy, will drive food to the poor, or earned it through hard work because hard work (not hard results) is good. If I want free stuff from the government, all I have to do is find someone who is an “exception” somewhere and fell through the cracks.

Ironist Contrarianism arises in proportion to weak authority. Strong authority rewards the good, punishes the bad, and leaves everyone else alone based on how they help or do not help achieve the goal; it is a fundamentally Darwinist system based on reward, not punishment.

Weak authority is Control. Control regulates methods instead of having a goal, since having a goal requires Controllers to bow before the goal, and people who want power for its own sake are narcissists who refuse to do this.

When societies are new, they have strong authority: the goal is to achieve balance with nature, gain hygiene and prosperity, and start improving themselves internally through culture and natural selection. This is how a civilization becomes great.

As time goes on, societies pile up lots of useless people and because they must support those, invent roles for them. These roles are not “value for time” but time spent in obedience to procedure, methods, and means. As a result, the society becomes means-over-ends and switches to weak authority.

Weak authority must constantly enforce itself in order to be noticed and accepted. Control is unstable, thus must always be controlling, and it does this by sacrificing people for stepping out of line. The line can never be clearly defined for this reason.

Crowdism is the theory that humans, who invariably portray themselves as victims of power, create weak authority by demanding subsidized individualism at the expense of having a goal, effectively excluding any potentially good leaders and choosing bad ones instead.

Crowdism operates by Age of Symbolism notions like “good” and “evil” as categories to which people rationalize “what I individualistically want” and “lack of subsidies against Darwinism that I fear” respectively. When the symbols come out, they replace the goal and anti-realism results.

Symbols naturally create scapegoats, or people with money and power blamed for all the problems of the society, and talismans, or hope-cope belief objects designed to make everything magically better. Symbolists invent ideology to rationalize their desires as “good.”

This means that whatever people talk about in public is compensatory: it is not designed to fix problems, but to enable rationalization, and therefore has given up on the hope of fixing problems and instead compensatory, or designed to make people feel better about things as they are.

As a result, we have produced a large group of ironist contrarians who will reject anything that works and embrace whatever is destructive, failing, and suicidal because they want to weaken society in order to strengthen the individual and its demands for subsidies.

This mentality looks a lot like oppositional defiant disorder, which is how spoiled children react to control in their lives:

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is a behavior condition in which your child displays a continuing pattern of uncooperative, defiant and sometimes hostile behavior toward people in authority.

Research suggests that genetics account for about 50% of the development of ODD. Many children and teens with ODD have close family members with mental health conditions, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders and personality disorders. Further, many children and teens with ODD also have other mental health conditions, such as ADHD, learning differences, or depression and anxiety disorder, which suggests a genetic link between the conditions.

ODD, like Leftism, seems to congregate mostly among those with mental health conditions. These are the result of jobs and control, which instead of rewarding the good reward the obedient. This makes people who have easy lives, but still find those lives meaningless, prompting them to rage.

They will likely find that the Dunning-Kruger Effect applies and lower-IQ people are more prone to this disorder, but that this causes higher-IQ people to emulate it in order to attract an audience of lower-IQ people.

When higher-IQ people adopt the mental health conditions of the masses, they end up with a type of xenophilia that amounts to a scapegoating tantrum against their host society and talismanization of the foreign:

Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism). Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation.

Civilizations may die from accumulated mental unwellness from mutation load. Easy living produces people who can do nothing but follow instructions, and these tend to be the first to demand Revolution because it is a symbolic easy answer to their internal problems projected onto society.

Most likely, civilizations die of a series of disorders prompted by the loss of a transcendental goal, namely the aspiration to be themselves, continuous with their founding, but ever-improving without losing what they always were. Become who you are, as a wise philosopher once hinted.

When that goal is lost, control kicks in, which produces even more instruction-followers, who because they are DKE cases, are unable to think in anything but binaries. As a result, when things do not go their way, they stage a narcissistic tantrum and demand Revolution.

After centuries of successive revolutions, any good in the civilization has declined, and what remains is merely a herd of collectivized individualists demanding that they be more important than the gods and nature, and playing the victim to guilt-shame others into subsidizing their existence.

Tags: age of symbolism, control, crowdism, dunning-kruger effect, ironist contrarianism, oppositional defiant disorder, rationalization, scapegoat