Amerika

In life, one can struggle against the current or be borne backwards by it. Using a metaphor of wind, this creates two groupings of people: “headwind” people who walk into the wind, and “downwind” people who walk with the wind behind them.

Downwind people are less likely to exert the effort required for performance above the norm. This creates a power struggle: underperforming people are more likely to grab for “superpowers” when in close proximity to over-performing people.

This arises from the “mutuality” principle whereby just being in the same “space” of an over-performer gives the under-performer the “moral right” to “engage” as it were. If we assume people are equal in a zero-sum game, then those who over-perform are taking something from those who under-perform.

This psychological “mutuality right” is exacerbated by a “stupid society” creating and perpetuating the simulacrum of fantasy by developing and even expanding on a whole range of super powers. Downwind children grow up believing in binary justice and the use of extreme force to subjugate others in its name.

In the modern era, Western Civilization marginalizes over-performers in favor of under-performers in order to avoid this problem. Our flawed societal approach to “the downwind children” is akin to pacifism or appeasement, but in actuality creates a pathological loop which becomes a death spiral as we then try to purge over-performers in order to make under-performers feel good, forgetting that over-performance is relative to the norm, which is performance in a group always fits into a mathematical standard distribution.

This craziness comes not from parents, but originates in the “fantasy” ideology the West lives in today. Fantasy ideology creates an illusory vision where the wind will blow fantasy children downhill into the hands of an enemy climbing up against that same wind.

This problem affects all countries which have reached first-world status or something like it, and may be the common ground for civilizational cooperation between East and West, something everybody wants and nobody does.

Introduction

Imagine being a child, going to the movie where little animals beat down on big animals. Or, imagine playing a computer game where you can select any “cheat” from a range of cheats in order to beat the “game.” These are downwind conditions and are inherently egalitarian.

Have you ever seen how a “protestor” walks right up to a policeman, literally spitting (sorry I meant screaming) in his face? That was a downwind child.

A headwind condition is exemplified by the story of a real dog called “Jock” described in the film Jock of the Bushveld. He was a born small and being part of a large litter Jock had to fight for his food, growing up to be a strong persistent, trustworthy, creative animal.

The popular current narrative is to say that “Jock” has overcome “adversity.” This is generally a hoax (and there are many hoaxes these days) because society secretly gives superpowers to downwind children through the social pressure of egalitarianism. These work to make the downwind children win so that it looks like those happy ending fantasies Hollywood dreams are made of.

There are actually people/children overcoming real adversity, but unless they get the Olympic Medal, nobody will talk about them. The real warrior is completely ignored and is in fact wholly expendable as was illustrated in the film 13 Hours but also identified here in T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”. In my interpretation, death’s dream kingdom is a condition where the warrior dies without knowing that it has happened.

Recent discussions highlighted how democracy or “demos” is a bad thing, even evil. But there is “bad” in all of us and before anyone else says it, the degree of evil is not equally shared between people. Calvinism gets a bad rap because it is right, in other words; some are born to darkness, and some to light, and like genetics, this orientation toward good and evil is essentially immutable. When it comes to children, education could be redesigned to maximized the “good” and control or isolate the “bad.”

This may have helped in previous generations, but for some reason it became inverted in recent memory, perhaps because of all of those stories and movies of nasty, racist honor students beating up virtuous, tolerant nerds. Nowadays the “good” gets beaten up while the “bad” gets promoted.  This inversion did not take place overnight, it slowly accelerated in a sort of unconscious manner over the last century. Our society now has a new list of people and things it will not tolerate because they offend the downwind people; this is our democracy blacklist.

There is an entire “scare” history where politics-of-fear is used to manipulate voters ranging from “the Russians are coming,” “Axis of Evil” and Hillary Clinton’s “Deplorables.” Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, stated unequivocally that in order to combat fear politics, the political opposition can only win by creating a “worse” fear. The “superpowers” therefore are those able to “scare” people. This made me think of the classic horror movies I used to rent from the video store and show to groups of friends. Women liked those the most, almost drugged by the experience, always asking for the next scarier video.

Horror videos not only identify “bad” people, but separate humans into two groups: those who can accept the new reality that has evil in it, and those who refuse to accept it because it conflicts with their personal drama. Video games do the opposite, and give downwind children superpowers to “fight” those fantasized as bad. The point of the blacklist is to create a mythology of good versus evil which rationalizes downwind status by deprecating headwind status.

The mere fact that people can be banned means that having both equality and diversity at the same time is not possible. Throughout human history, those who could not be assimilated have always been banned from societies; in the West, we tried to minimize this because we saw it unfair, and demonized its practice such as incarceration, stop-and-frisk and rehabilitative education.

In a sense, this led to a funny twist: because we cannot re-educate the bad, we must re-educate the good in order to accommodate unassimilable “bad” people and their fear of “good” people noticing the bad. This creates inversion, which is what we see now: the downwind children are celebrated at the expense of the headwind children, who are sacrificed for the feelings and fantasies of downwind children.

Headwinds

We can let our metaphor speak to us by observing the following things about adversity in life in general:

• Walking against the wind makes your muscles stronger. It is bad in the short term but good in the long term.
• Swimming is a sport where friction emulates wind resistance to improve body and mind.

It is possible to imagine that organizations also encounter headwinds as sometimes described by economists. It is also something that entrepreneurs are quite familiar with and is described as the requirement to overcome “barriers to entry.” But apparently civilizations do not have “winds” (which require more scrutiny) because they don’t seem to get stronger (because of successfully overcoming “adversity”). I don’t think adversity for civilizations has even been defined.

However, what we do have is some form of rebelliousness.  It appears for different reasons over generations but on the whole it is actually seen as a good thing.  It is a natural sort of “test” of formalism and wise leaders welcome “outside the box” ideas that will improve the organization in some way and it is the creative part of the change management mantra.

A rebel with a creative idea can be rewarded but since not everyone is an over-performer, the allocation of rewards became a problem. This resulted in everyone getting a reward, from a young age already. Where a headwind child would have created a “better idea” because he thought his parents were a little “behind,” the downwind child will despise his parents because he can give them “any idea” and even tell them what reward he wants. He despises them because he is actually bored with this game, which he continues playing, because there is nothing else to do.

Now imagine that this downwind child becomes an adult. He obviously has serious manipulative skills and will find work where those skills can be applied. Depending on the influence of his parents, he will maximize that, getting himself into a position where he can manipulate others. You know, something like dynastic politics.

Essentially, with downwind politicians on board, one can imagine that the Rule of Law becomes the Law of Rule where society is despised and subverted to the point that wealth is simply transferred (not even extracted any more). The civilization will decline of course and these downwind children will live their borderless fantasies.

But somewhere some headwind children will also grow up, and they will approach these dazed politicians, overthrow their civilization and start anew. And yet the problem recurs, because the new headwind children will literally have their own children riding the downwind to their destruction. Nature always returns.

Tags: adversity, downwind children, education, headwind children