Amerika

Groups operate by unity and exclusion of outsiders. This is applied through rituals where a belief of the tribe is ritually challenged and then affirmed; we see this pattern in adventure movies, mystery novels and politics. The point is for everyone in the tribe to feel a sense of unity in beating back the enemy and affirming what they hold in common.

In America, however, what we have in common is nearly nothing since we left our Western European roots, and so our rituals are entirely political, such as the recurring two minutes hate against those who deny equality:

The woman was referring to Maurice’s Piggie Park, a small chain of barbecue restaurants, established in West Columbia, South Carolina, in 1953. The original restaurant occupies a barnlike building on a busy intersection and is presided over by a regionally famous electric marquee that features the boast “world’s best bar-b-q,” along with a grinning piglet named Little Joe. The Piggie Park is important in the history of barbecue, which is more or less the history of America. One reason is that its founder, Maurice Bessinger, popularized the yellow, mustard-based sauce that typifies the barbecue of South Carolina’s Midlands area. Another is that Bessinger was a white supremacist who, in 1968, went to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful fight against desegregation, and, in 1974, ran a losing gubernatorial campaign, wearing a white suit and riding a white horse.

In 2000, when the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome, Bessinger raised Confederate flags over all his restaurants. (By then, there were nine.) A king-sheet-size version went up over the West Columbia location, where he had long distributed tracts alleging, for example, that “African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America.”

If we live in a free society, what is the problem with this? Outside of the law, which obviously should tolerate it, we should ask ourselves why we are such pretentious primates that we cannot simply accept the difference of opinion, and eat there much as we eat at any other restaurant, knowing that some of the proprietor’s beliefs are alien and threatening to us.

The answer is that the panic here has nothing to do with what the fellow believes, and everything to do with people demonstrating obedience to the group. This outrage is a conversation point that allows them to affirm to everyone else how they are in fact totally obedient to the idea of equality; race is the symbol, class warfare — removal of hierarchy — is the goal that white people actually have.

And so we roll on, ignoring the fact that we are divided. We deny the obvious reality that people are different in ability and need different roles. We use the symbol of “racism” to show how we would never agree with those evil people who think that people are different, or that most people might in fact be feckless little monkeys who are exclusively self-interested.

This “virtue signaling” or “pathological altruism” is designed to offer oneself to the group as a sacrifice, in exchange for the support of the group. This is the nature of Control: the group accepts those who flatter it, instead of choosing people based on their contributions in reality. Its only goal is to make everyone obey its vision of reality, which needs obedience because it denies reality.

Our mental virus of denial serves to keep us from noticing that desegregation was a disaster for both whites and blacks, depriving each of a strong identity in their own community. It also keeps us from looking deeper to see that diversity, including slavery, is a disaster because it creates a society without a uniform standard toward which all can strive, and feel rewarded for partially attaining.

We can get out of this loop if we want, but first it requires that we view free speech as more than a rule. We need to see it is a method of living. In a sane society, people are not destroyed for their opinions, and we recognize that others always differ with us on key issues, but we can still eat their barbecue, enjoy their company and not dehumanize them like Communists do to all dissidents.

Tags: barbecue, mental virus, pathological altruism, racism, virtue signaling