Amerika

Late at night, when the lights burn low and the world recedes to a distant hum of pointless thymos, the shadows seem to take on a life of their own. At first this is scary, but later one sees it as part of the beauty of life.

It requires a balance of good and bad to make a whole life, and that result which never stops moving and evolving proves better than a world of merely good, which would be static. Thus we find ourselves attracted to the dark, ambiguous, demonic, tragic, and terrifying.

The night provides after all a sense of limitless potential, when all the rules and boundaries of the daytime are gone. Not in some horrible context, perhaps, but more so that without the psychic burden of humanity around, the mind can return to its feral and atavistic state.

What it does depends on the construction of the mind. Morons pursue pointless excess, gorging on sex, drink, drugs, and over-salted greasy restaurant food. For those who walk alone, the mind cuts free to conjecture and fantasy, the world where imagination and knowledge joins in dream.

We have to admit, in such moments, that part of the appeal of the night comes from what it hides, including predators and what we call evil, which generally means things which do harm for no reason.

Predators by contrast kill to eat, but evil harms for maintenance of its own psychological state. Someone who is evil will rule a nation simply to have power, and through that to feel better about himself, or kill merely to feel a sense of superiority.

Our modern world is filled with what Immanuel Kant called “radical evil,” which means nearly universally-accepted everyday acts that nonetheless have bad consequences. For example, we have no (functional) recycling in most areas, which means that we are all indirectly littering.

Barring the appearance of some supernatural force, like demons or devils, we are left with human evil, which takes on a conscious form in addition to the simple conformity of radical evil (and the civilizational failings which create it).

Evil might be seen in its purest form as disorder. If we believe that our world is either good or tends toward good, and is highly ordered, then any interruptions of this order — harmony, balance, cycle, depth, duration, union of detail and structure — would be evil, of a sort.

Unrealism might provide the purest form of this evil in that those who deny the existence of an order to life and its tendency toward good, and therefore see life as disordered or evil, must begin that path by first denying a need to pay attention to external reality.

Good, on the other hand, comes from that which thrives, which means that it has recognized and adapted to the order of reality. It may even go further and become transcendent, or appreciate life for its form and not its unassociated detail.

For example, we all face suffering, death, loss, doubt, fear, and unpleasant everyday events, whether disappointments in others, failures, or simply eating too much Taco Bell. A transcendent view helps us see these as necessary and logical in order to maintain the order of the whole.

When people feel alien to the good and especially the transcendent, they turn toward evil. They reject any order other than themselves and become possessed of an urge to destroy any order they find, replacing it only with their own intentions and desires.

These are separate from Will, by the way. A will in the individual expresses itself through union with the world and using the ability of the individual to add to the beauty and joy of life. A stunted or obstructed will leads to rage, and an increasing zeal for power and control.

Choosing evil will always be popular because it makes the individual feel better “in the moment.” Especially for people who believe that life has left them behind, being able to feel a sense of power and control — much as drugs make us feel centered — takes precedence over long-term thinking.

In order to turn from evil, one needs a reason to reach out again and connect to something larger than the self. This proves a hard sell to people who believe that they are victims or victimized. It fails to appeal to those who have little to offer the world, since it will not work for them.

Right now, the West finds itself making a hard choice between realism and feeling good. Realism forces us to mature as a species, realize that we cannot make everyone happy, and that there is no one standard for everyone. Instead, we will form a tiered social hierarchy.

That goes against the founding idea of the Left, class warfare, expressed as a desire for “equality” by those in the lower echelons. Since crowds unite on the lowest common denominator, groups adore the notion of equality, which is really “me first” disguised as altruism.

We find ourselves in the midst of a massive shift. Ideology, or that which makes us feel good by denying nature, finds itself giving way to realism, or the idea that we should pay attention to what works best in terms of its end results, no matter what people “think” about it.

This has come about as people migrate from worrying about what is “politically correct” to what is actually, in reality, correct. They can do this because the Leftists have been revealed as self-interested just like any other group.

For example, Leftists told us that we needed civil rights and diversity to right historical wrongs. But it turns out that Leftists merely wanted a permanent Left-wing voting bloc, and it had nothing to do with “social justice” or other airy notions.

Now, people are interested simply in what works, since they know that diversity and Leftism do not work. They know that minority groups and special interests will always vote Leftist, and that therefore, we cannot compromise with them; we must defeat, disenfranchise, and relocate them.

To counter that, we have invented populism, which is the notion that there are “champions of the people” who do what is right despite coming across as offensive. They exist to challenge the dominant herd mentality, which turns out to be always wrong. We need experts and naturally talented people, not actors and salesmen who preach what the herd wants to hear.

We have spent our lives in sacrifice to try to raise up the lesser, appease the proles, pacify other races with gifts of welfare and citizenship, and pay off the neurotic and insane among us. We now realize that this does not work; instead, we are going to try hard realism and exclude all who cannot follow that vision.

Now that this is rejected, we are again looking toward bigger things than ourselves. These include: civilization, heritage, faith, and the duty to make humanity better instead of sitting around bickering and dickering over dividing up the wealth.

Internationalism (globalism/diversity) failed starting in 2008. It took almost a decade for people to realize what had happened, and by that point, their money bought less and their taxes were higher, all while things got worse. By the end of the Obama regime, people distrusted Leftism as much as Russians in the 1980s distrusted the Soviet Union.

The thing is, if you pitch an altruistic philosophy, at some point you have to demonstrate results. Otherwise, you are just marketing yourself, like a television commercial or ad jingle. Leftism had seventy years after WW2 to prove itself, and it simply proved that it was a failure.

With the falling of faith in globalism, people lost faith in liberal democracy as well. After two centuries, we ended up at a point of being obligated to society as surely as we would under the Soviets, but we also had crass commercialism to contend with. Humanity made another dystopia.

Many of us simply acknowledged what everyone fears to say, which is that rule by democracy always ends up this way. We are about to face a transition to something new because liberal democracy ran aground in the usual way. We might even restore the monarchs.

If we look at the historical cycle we are in, we see that we are rejecting symbolic systems. Any system where the symbol of something is more important than the reality is getting thrown on the compost heap.

These systems vary widely — democracy, Leftism, duality, commercialism — but they share a need for people to “win” by changing symbols, and in return, organizing a mob to follow those symbols like carrot and stick. They are philosophies of mass manipulation.

Consider dualism, or the idea that this world is merely a precursor to a pure secondary world where everything reflects the divine order. It sounds innocuous until you realize that it has made this world a means to an end of the promised but unseen other world.

If this world is a means to the end of another world, then everything in this world is symbolism, since it has no actual meaning but its symbolic importance will be relevant to a “pure” world of thought and intentions, mirroring the image of God/gods.

Leftism — including democracy — reflects a similar outlook, which is why many confused it with an offshoot of dualistic sects of Christianity. The symbol of equality is more important than the outcome because we assume that equality is absolute good, like a divine other world of its own.

These symbolic outlooks have ruled us for too long, and few have understood why they are destructive, blaming symbolism itself instead of the symbolic treatment of our world. The issue is not symbols, but our mentality towards them, because they are simpler and clearer than ambiguous reality and therefore, feel more powerful to us.

Symbolic philosophies have another downside which is that they emphasize negativity. If you are living for another pure world in some state inaccessible to you, everything in this world is disposable and any time spent on it is meaningless.

If we wanted to pick up Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity and apply it to Leftism, this explains why Leftists use altruism to gain power and then concern themselves little if at all with how their people are starving. Symbolic victory — an equals sign! — has been achieved, and that is all that matters to them.

Leftism creates a pathology in those who follow it. When you agree that one thing is good above all else (“equality”) you make everything else a means to that end, and feel good only when you achieve that one thing.

You will sacrifice all life on Earth, even if your own life, for this symbolic victory. Leftism succeeds because it presents a simplified version of life in which people can feel powerful, but then it drags them into insanity because it demands unrealism.

That in turn creates a bigotry against all things in this world. You want them to fail and be destroyed so that only the shining truth of equality prevails. In fact, you think, it would be better for equality to reign in Hell than to live on a pleasant Earth.

We can derive an important principle from that statement. If the disordered minds among us want power over pleasure, we should return to pleasure, but only of the long-term kind, meaning the great satisfaction in a balance, sane, and healthy life filled with the intangible joys of family, friends, culture, learning, transcendence, and knowledge of the divine.

Into the middle of that, we might drop a pipe, and perhaps a pint or two. The fruits of the leaf and vine go a long way toward warming us in moments of darkness and cold, and they remind us of the day-to-day pleasures of existence that help us through keep pulling forward.

This constitutes our hedonic imperative. We want to enjoy life in fullness, including the bodily delights of food, wine, and family-making (cough). We also like long walks through the woods with a pipe and possibly a warm well-lit pub at the end.

At the end of the day, life itself is good, so all we must worry about are pains. When those are not present, we can enjoy life as it is, and in daily events like talking to friends and playing with children, we derive a great joy.

Our species turns back toward this joy now. We have spent too long in the Soviet/Jacobin model of doing what is “correct” because we ought to and life should not be fun, since life is a means to an end and not an end in itself. That model has failed.

The new way embraces what is right in the sense of adaptation to the actual world, who is competent in the sense of seeing that where others fail, what is healthy in terms of maximizing adaptation and pleasure, and the why that explains our motivation in doing things.

Gone will soon be the strident demand to make everyone equal, give them equal rights and funding, and otherwise translate their need for joy in life into a material demand for parity of power, wealth, and prestige. Those things do not substitute for the life naturally enjoyed.

If we look at it through a cynical eye, the emphasis on material rights reduces life to questions of property and power, and disregards notions of meaning, significance, and enjoyment. That alone tells you that it is not right in the head.

Going even further, we can see how the symbolic world treats all of existence like a series of properties in our heads. We want to feel good, so each of those must be made equal, in other words reducing their influence so that only our whims remain.

We had to come through this time in order to learn the important lesson of how symbolism, including language, can become a philosophy in itself and made us ill in the head. Now that we have learned, we can leave all of this behind and move on to something more exciting.

Tags: dualism, evil, good, leftism, symbolic reality, symbolism