Amerika

For the past thousand years, Western Society has turned from the transcendent toward the individualistic. Metaphysical dualism and peer pressure worked it into the usual state of human narcissism, a condition it previously beat in order to rise to higher average IQ and much higher civilizational function.

We should probably consider ourselves lucky that mainstream politics runs in fear of anything that resembles a coherent idea. Politics likes to confuse the methods used to achieve an idea with the idea itself, and then combine those with the explanation or advertising of the methods, so you get a bundle instead of a clear path.

This is the same thing your cable company does (or did, before everyone bailed on them). You want HBO, but to get HBO, you have to order basic cable and then another package of ten channels. Instead of paying five bucks a month for HBO, you are paying a hundred dollars a month for some other stuff.

In the same way, politics gloms together concept, implementation, and goal. You want a secure nation, but that gets combined with the notion of an empire, wars for democracy, and the diversity programs that we are told will enhance this. You either vote for security or against it.

Gluing things together in this way erases the choice of goals and replaces it with loosely associated methods because statistically, they are most likely to find an audience to support them. Politics is a market, and a market needs consumers who will purchase specific products.

You can see the same in your store. There will be a detergent that works, and a green non-toxic detergent that does not work as well. You choose by your priorities, but you get a bunch of other stuff stuck in there, like weird scents and preservatives in the detergent that works and hippie slogans with the one that does not.

All of this serves like everything else in the decay of Western Civilization to alter our awareness and perception in a way that separates cause and effect.

Western Civilization rose because it had a transcendent goal, but transcendence has two parts: a ruthless realism to identify what is actual, and an intangible and unreachable goal of excellence (arete). The realism meant it looked into cause-effect relationships.

These involve the simple question: I observe a change in my reality; which event created this? We look back at events and find the one which if absent would not allow the change to take place:

cause -> effect

Such as:

boy kicks ball -> ball sails into window

Plato observed this and said it was good, but there was something else: prior to the cause, conditions had to exist that made the cause occur, usually because it is an opportunity. Some of this is economics, some biology, and large portions of it involve the aspiration of all animals, plants, and ideas for self-sufficiency (a.k.a. “power”).

In the Platonic formulation:

need for soccer balls, and boys to kick them, as well as lawns and gravity -> boy kicks ball -> ball sails into window

The Platonic form of life is one where kicking a soccer ball is fun (until maturity hits and the kid realizes soccer makes watching paint dry seem interesting), there are backyards, and windows within near reach. That form includes the need for creatures to be active and explore their world, including through boring sports.

Where humans go wrong is effect-as-cause, which looks like this:

boy kicking ball -> boy kicking ball

This has an implicit form:

human intention -> boy kicking ball -> boy kicking ball

Humans are by nature solipsistic because we navigate the world through our own minds and therefore assume that the world is a little diorama that exists in our minds. This is most common when we have expectations for a form that events will take and details have shifted, meaning we are reacting to a reality-scene that is not actual.

The solipsistic human first cuts out the transcendent, and with it necessarily the realistic. He replaces those with symbols which are talismans or scapegoats; talismans are superstitions that will give him what he wants, and scapegoats are what he blames when his plans do not work out so well.

This represents a form of externalization: his ability to perceive, analyze, create, and measure have been replaced by a method, the symbol. As long as he pursues the talisman and bashes the scapegoat, all is well. Symbols can be religious or ideologies like egalitarianism.

Another way to understand the traditional approach of realistic future-oriented traditionalism is to notice that historical precedents arise from reasons why they are precedents. People make chairs to fit the human body; boys kick balls for fun, exercise, and learning to calibrate their reflexes to the world.

Externalization gives rise to control, or regulation of action to eliminate methods which might show alternatives to the symbolism, in the hope of controlling thinking. Those who desire control first do it to limit what their own minds might see.

Most humans exist as mental systems designed to explain reality in such a way that the balance of the mental state is not threatened. When reality is so alien that the human feels a lack of purpose, it must be controlled. Like viruses, control-oriented humans are life forms which have lost purpose and can only live off others.

Because of this parasitic co-dependent relationship, the control-oriented must constantly exercise their power over others in order to make it tangible to them. Only then do they feel safe. This is the opposite of actual leaders, who exercise power only to achieve a goal, part of their sense of transcendental purpose.

Committees, jobs, elections, categorical thinking, and bureaucracy are all forms of symbols. In their grasp, the individual aims for a symbolic target instead of a result in reality and the purpose that is attached to it much as cause is to effect.

To a Platonist, the modern world is backward. We rationalize what we want in terms of talismans and scapegoats, which strengthens the hold over us those have, replacing our sense of purpose. We ignore reality in order to manage our internal mental state.

As Plato notes, this rationalization arises from a lack of purpose caused by lack of agreement, like a committee giving up on finding unanimous accord and deciding instead to have a lottery or vote:

When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things.

The “true riches in their own nature, inclined toward virtue and the ancient order of things” refers to a pursuit of the transcendent, which brings with it hard realism and the question of excellence.

This is not an argument for the libertarian pathology which like the psychology of the anarchist refuses to accept the need for hierarchy, even of nature. This is basically a normalized form of sociopathic ideation and shows why nobody trusts the libertarians.

Our path branches in two directions. Either we bring forth our true nature, or we go further into rationalizing decay.

Tags: arete, cause-effect, plato, socrates, transcendence