Amerika

Someday, humanity will have to recognize the unpopular truth about itself: what we think we want as individuals is usually not only not what we need but self-destructive, and what we desire as groups inevitably reflects fear and convenience more than even the basics of analysis of the issue at hand.

In other words, we are a suicidal species. I see this all the time: people convince themselves the grass is greener somewhere else, and go chasing an illusion. And so they buy sports cars in middle age instead of the things they will need over the next twenty years, escape marriages in exchange for a series of bad relationships, and demand free things from government that end up sabotaging business, making life miserable and conveying their society into a death spiral of incompetence.

Our politics reflect this: people in groups make terrible decisions and then go looking for someone to blame instead of tackling the issues head-on. This is why democracy inevitably drifts Leftward as voters chase pleasant illusions, then when their plans fail, blame whatever vestiges of social order remain.

This results in the ugly truth that the bad guys were right all along:

The current hot-button issue for Klan members — fighting immigration and closing U.S. borders — is one of the most talked-about topics in the presidential election. Klan leaders say Donald Trump’s immigration position and his ascendancy in the GOP are signs things are going their way.

“You know, we began 40 years ago saying we need to build a wall,” Arkansas-based Klan leader Thomas Robb said.

The reason for this is simple: appearance and structure differ. In fact, they tend to work in inverse, as Plato suggested. A good man will hide his good deeds, and a bad man will hide his bad deeds, leaving him looking good while the good man does not.

Bad guys understand power. They do not operate on the level of appearance, but structure, which means that they do what is necessary in order to make things work out for the best. This is seen as “means over ends” analysis by the herd, but it is more accurately known as adaptation to reality, instead of telling reality what we want it to do as if it were a food service worker or subordinate.

This brings us to the Nietzschean idea of power, which is that it flows to those who understand power. Equality-based politics — all of Leftism and its hybrids — seeks to avoid power, to diffuse it and adulterate it. Bad guys concentrate power and then make stuff happen. In the process, because they are driven by results and hence refine their own competence, they become good at ruling.

At that point, however, another problem arises: they may be good at ruling, but are the good at the game of civilization? It is for this reason that Schopenhauer suggests that more than finding simply the most aggressively competent at power, we find the best people, or those geared toward excellence on an aesthetic and transcendental level, and give them power so that they keep it from others and use it well.

This avoids the constant cycle in which we find ourselves, where our group denial bubbles over and insanity results, then the counter-reaction is too obsessive:

The fact that Hitler and his party came to power from electoral obscurity within two years should serve as a warning just how quickly society can change, how quickly the abnormal can become normal and how the frustrations of a population can change from simmering discontent to a fully-fledged inferno of rage.

In the here and now, many people feel as though the ground is shifting under their feet politically, socially and financially. It should not go unnoticed that, running alongside these perceived shifting sands, issues of racism have increasingly been dominating our airwaves.

As we head into more uncertain times after a millennia or so of them thanks to the most recent resurgence of egalitarian/individualist thought, it is important to remember this: we cannot formulate goals out of what we hate, only what we love. We love excellence and rising civilizations. Everything else is just chatter.

Tags: adolf hitler, democracy, ku klux klan, neoreaction, totalitarianism, tyranny