Amerika

Crowdism tells us that our problem as a species is not that we are victims of evil manipulators, but that we select those evil manipulators through the committee mentality, which rewards avoiding risky important decisions and pursuit of symbolic ones that make us feel powerful and therefore have heavy emotional load, instead.

The path to decay begins when a civilization loses a sense of purpose and therefore begins parasitizing itself. This is what we call The Human Problem because it consistently destroys our most promising hopes and replaces them with third-world wastelands. Until we beat it, humanity remains a species on the edge of ruin.

We enslave ourselves with our own perceptions. In the name of feeling good, we avoid the complex big questions that make us feel powerless, and instead seek symbolic acts and gestures that make us feel as if we are in control. That requires explaining our failures, so we invent scapegoats.

In order to feel good about ourselves, most people endorse a system of tolerance, pluralism, anarchy, or benevolent neglect. This avoids conflict; conflict is a form of risk so we avoid it if possible. Instead, the committee dodges the big issues and focuses instead on happy activities like distributing money.

But anarchy does not work so well. Consider the case of the naked elderly in the public park:

Suspect, 68, would jog around soccer pitch at housing estate exposing his buttocks and then remove shorts completely in public park, residents say.

Our anarchist side says let him do whatever he wants; after all, he is enjoying his life. Others may point out that this behavior decreases their enjoyment of the park or belief that they should bring their children there. His taxes are returning value, but their taxes are being taken from them and given, effectively, to him and those like him.

On the other hand, if we tell him to knock it off, everyone else benefits at the expense of his freedom to be his naked floppy weird self. We can invent all sorts of categories to explain our decision, like classifying him as insane or perverse, or even coming up with a morality of public parks which says nudity is verboten.

Ironically, whenever anarchist-types are confronted with such a scenario, they are the first to shout “think of the children” and support rules and police to fix the problem. They have the most to lose; if people see that anarchy in action involves dongs flopping past when you want a nice day in the park with the kids, anarchy will become less popular.

Similarly, consider the problem of permissiveness when exposed to the general public:

The increasing number of brand ads and paid placement by influencers, as well as polarized public posts on various issues, is forcing more users to opt for private chats and groups, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Pranav Malhotra, assistant professor of communication and media, said what is appealing about these places, especially compared to more public and visible social media spaces, is that algorithms typically do not determine what is shown. Instead, messages and posts show up in chronological order.

“This leads to people feeling like they are in control over the information they see. It also allows people to have ongoing, real-time conversations,” said Malhotra, the study’s author.

If you let the guy from the park on social media, he is going to post his floppy dong very quickly. Therefore, we have a situation analogous to that of the public park, where for most to enjoy it, there must be rules and rule-enforcers. Social media took it too far, so now people are going to anarchy spaces but with a twist.

In these private chats and groups, the user who sets them up is the tyrant. He makes and enforces the rules. The social media sites will not do it for him because the posts are not public, but also imposes no restraints on his rule. He can be as abusive as he wants, or just post pictures of his dong until everyone else flees.

Through this process, tolerance and pluralism quickly lead to intolerance, which allows people to define their standards (floppy dong in park, or no) in opposition to other behaviors, a paradox of tolerance based in mutual exclusion:

To take one example, during Poland’s late-medieval and early modern expansion, the need for mobile, literate managers with commercial experience (and preferably few political demands) led the Polish nobility and the Crown to welcome Jews to Poland to fulfil important socioeconomic roles. Some towns in the 14th century wrote charters for the Jews, outlining explicitly their freedom to organise their autonomous religious and communal life for the benefit of mutual Jewish and Christian prosperity. Yet this prosperity also brought increased competition between Jews and Christian burghers, to whom, by the 16th century, the Crown granted in some towns the Privilegium de non tolerandis Judaeis (the right not to tolerate Jews). The town of Lublin received such a privilege in 1535, but then the Jews, who formed a Jewish town at the foot of the castle walls (on the outside) received a parallel privilege, de non tolerandis Christianis in 1568. These arrangements successfully created a stable society with co-dependent and reciprocal relationships between groups, even while the goal of tolerance for all parties remained the greatest possible isolation, or perhaps insulation, from one another.

A society with clear standards about what is wanted makes for clear purpose and understanding: the park is designed for all ages to have an innocent outside experience.

Then there is what I call “the problem of permissive societies.” Permissive societies cannot have a positive goal; they ban a few things (murder, assault, theft usually) and leave everything else up to anarchy. This works until a guy gets naked in the park and suddenly conflicts between “rights” emerge.

After all, the families have a right to have a day in the park without floppy dongs. They pay for it with their taxes, after all. But floppy dong man also pays taxes. At that point, we either become bourgeois liberals who want freedom with standards, or ideological liberals who will favor whoever seems to be the bigger victim.

Ideological liberals desire egalitarianism, which since you cannot lift up the lower, requires taking from the higher to subsidize the lower. For this reason, ideological liberals create systems where whoever is the most victimized gets everything and whoever is not victimized gets nothing.

Through this example we can see the utility of culture. Culture is not permissive, but is normative. It states aims and purposes more than enumerating specifics, but that is often enough to know the heuristic that parks are for the general public and therefore getting naked in them is just not done.

Anarchy on the other hand is permissive, which means that it must always accumulate rules and exceptions in order to keep itself in power. The idea of anarchy more than the system it creates enforces a type of totalitarianism or at least the lead-up to it. As always, things create their opposites unless a middle path is found.

Tags: civilization decay, crowdism, middle path, the committee mentality, the human problem