Amerika

Some metal message board member offers a challenge.

Assumption: we often discuss politics and this domain has its own definite views.

But we are taught democracy, capitalism and liberal civil/women’s rights together comprise “freedom,” and that anything but freedom is “bad.” So what can we do? We shrug and watch the ongoing travesty, certain we cannot with these hands and these minds do anything to reverse the course toward total destruction. After all, this path to death runs parallel with “progress” and “freedom,” which are bringing us an enlightened time, free of wars and want — or is that too illusion? We wonder, and do nothing. There is nothing we can do …or is there?

Environmentalism Contra Democracy

Query: if our own regime was in power, what policies would it implement?

Parameter 1: be an essentially environmentalist regime.

Parameter 2: avoid extreme measures to attain radical goals.

Solution: create a radical social reconstruction of human self-image.

If this reconstruction were directly made policy, it would constitute an extreme measure. Citizen, understand you are a delusional primate or get tasered in the face. This is a breach of parameter 2. Instead, we would need policy change directed at the cause of human self-image today that undermines our naturalist and traditionalist goals.

For the individual, early in life we explain to them they are human beings, not beautiful butterflies. Just human. They are going to make big mistakes. The important part is not to find all sorts of ways to feel better after failure, but instead to learn. By learning, similar to evolution, error is weeded out so that what works prevails.

For groups, self-expression has been dumbed down to its simplest form. Where in the past, body art would symbolize real meaning, today piercings are personality accessories marketed everywhere like any other consumer product.

In the past, a high seas sailor might have gotten piercings or tattoos after completion of a particularly memorable journey that might have been harrowing or otherwise extraordinary.

Other body art might serve as a lifelong mark of affiliation with some organization. Branding might have been used to indicate those in society who have been marked for disdain like a criminal or slave.

Self-expression today is another effect of humanism taken to ludicrous extremes of meaningless fantasy: anyone can be anything as everything is now accessible and thus nothing has real value for us.

To summarize so far, if modern people are encouraged to seek comfort rather than improvement and everything has been dumbed down to products with price tags, but still have no meaningful value, we have much work ahead of us.

Mere non-intrusive, or seamless policy changes are not going to be enough. Similarly, having every school kid take an ecology class or having a department of consumer affairs isn’t making a non-destructive population, the majority of whom care about the parts of the world that aren’t just pockets of their own social reality.

It is small wonder that a term as broadly allusive as humanism should be subject to a wide variety of applications. Of these (excepting the historical movement described above) there are three basic types: humanism as Classicism, humanism as referring to the modern concept of the humanities, and humanism as human-centredness.

britannica

Like so many terms in use today that could mean just about anything, or nothing in particular, we’ll need to specify our use of humanism as anthropocentricity; our prevailing human-centredness. Because it is the simplest, requiring the least intelligence and character to comprehend and apply, it is also arguably the most frequent type of humanism found among people today, hence our emphasis on anthropocentric.

So, if anything needs to change, it is the modern humanism. Individualism and rampant consumerism work to reinforce the culture of selfishness that consequently operates against whatever environmental policy our hypothetical regime may have.

In other words, there would be a constant state of conflict arising from the contradiction between ruling policy and ordinary public life the people are accustomed to.

But we are taught democracy, capitalism and liberal civil/women’s rights together comprise “freedom,” and that anything but freedom is “bad.”

A regime that began to tamper with the individual pursuit of comfort would be short-lived because it would soon be voted out of power by the humanist majority crowd. Therefore, any policies such a regime implemented would likely find themselves replaced by a more crowd pleasing, liberal administration.

Since only an elected democratic government has the authority to create and apply public policy, we would instead need to work on public culture and public perception. A new set of values would have to get generally accepted.

There would need to be peer pressure, ridicule, or ostracism directed at the old backward humanists that are running our civilization into a dead end: the poseurs, the hipsters, the crowd.

But, the friendlier side of coercion is persuasion and reward. If we work together to lock the humanism vampire in its tomb, you get to be a part of a future that has something to look forward to.

Tags: crowdism, democracy, humanism, liberalism, progressivism