Amerika

Almost all political discourse is based on conversation. To convince someone that you are right, you portray your solution as a talisman — a single-point cure for all problems and fears — while portraying all other options as not just unworkable but actively evil, an enemy of all good things.

This squeezes your audience. They get caught in an arc between running toward the good thing and away from the bad things, which causes them to move wildly and play right into your hands. They end up seeing the option you want as the only solution and cling to it like a savior.

While this method is effective, it also presents a problem, which is that it proves so effective that it becomes a goal in itself. The method of manipulation soon manipulates the manipulator, and then any political discourse must be framed exclusively in terms of a morally good pure underdog versus a morally evil oppressor.

This is how you get Leftist politics, by the way. If you tell a group of people that everyone has to change, they are going to overthrow you. If you tell them that they are being kept down by oppressors and we need a quest for equality, they hand you power and then you have a chance to appoint those who can make things work.

Unfortunately for us moderns, this means that not only is much of what we have been told about politics and history wrong, but that we have been trained to frame our thinking in a method that invariably defeats us. By looking for scapegoats and talismans, we miss the big picture, which is changing our thinking to be consistent.

Nature and conservatism after all both work by consistency. Human mental states are based not around change, but changing inertia. We want to be consistent, but to do that, we have to respond to the environment around us because it changes constantly as part of maintaining its homeostasis, and we have to change with it.

Most people fear that change because it requires changing their thinking to perceive what is going around them. They prefer nice tangible illusions in the mind and doing the same thing over and over because this does not force them to accept reality as something external to themselves, therefore they feel in control.

The sad case of Maximilien Robespierre shows us that we either aim for sanity, meaning consistency of approach and ability to perceive and adapt to the world, or we start to rely on methods as goals, and we end up becoming repetitive to the point of going far beyond any reasonable common sense.

Robespierre began as a good egalitarian. He simply wanted to liberate people by smashing oppressors and lifting up underdogs. However, this soon became a pathology, and then a runaway symbolic chain. He ended up killing whole families and eventually former friends and allies for not being dogmatic enough.

This shows us what goes wrong with humanity. Motivated by fear, they construe the world as an underdog and an oppressor, but then fall into a process of seeking out scapegoats while lifting up the unproductive and often criminal. They do this for psychological convenience because it makes them feel in control.

These runaway symbolic chains dominate our society now. In the interest of lifting up underdogs, we adopted equality as a goal and method, and now it is all that we do. All things have become inverted because anything contra-egalitarian has been removed from them, so they no longer reflect reality, only dogma and ideology.

Like Robespierre we have gone far afield from our original goal. Instead of liberating people, we have become murderers. Instead of making a Utopia, we have created dystopia. Even equality itself, instead of giving everyone a playing field, simply lifts up some for being victims and empowers the tyrant within us all.

Like Robespierre, we started with benevolence but created something we can no longer control. This has led us away from thinking about reality at all, and instead we have created a fake reality of symbols that occludes the real thing. Our pursuit of pure symbols has led us into insanity.

Tags: egalitarianism, maximilien robespierre