Amerika

Humanity resembles a wide-open plain with a few mountains poking above the relatively consistent but not uniform grasses and scrub brush. From those high places, much can be seen, but most ignore them, since their concerns lie in the nice equally short bushes.

One of the mountaintops came to us from Jamaican-American thinker Marcus Garvey who, as a nationalist and integralist, intuited that no tribe can coexist with others, even geographically, because they will then be inherently in conflict and will use each other as scapegoats. He spoke of a condition called fatalism to describe those who find such long-term goals inconvenient and prefer the “pragmatic” short-term goals that end in certain (but delayed) failure:

Some of us seem to accept the fatalist position, the fatalist attitude, that God accorded to us a certain position and condition, and therefore there is no need trying to be otherwise. The moment you accept such an attitude, the moment you accept such an opinion, the moment you harbor such an idea, you hurl an insult at the great God who created you, because you question Him for His love; you question Him for His mercy.
― Marcus Garvey, Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey

Fatalism takes many forms; the simplest occurs when people decide that their choices have no impact. They look at a much larger structure above them and induce in themselves the belief that what they do has no relevance because it is smaller in scale. They are both right and wrong.

The individual cannot have direct effect on the scope at which the mountain exists. We cannot, as individuals, kick out our feet and level the mountain. And yet, our choices have consequences. They influence others, and push back against certain ideas, which is where they are most effective. By driving out delusional ideas, we can not only subvert the mountain but change its fundamental nature. We also stop the spread of those delusional ideas by not passing them on to others as if they were true.

The biggest impediment to us having effect is not others, but ourselves. Humans are half-computer, half-monkey, and since the monkey half is simpler it is what we default to as we mature. Any human who wants to have an effect on the world must first grow past his monkey, and then defeat the various illusions that inherent to the early stages of thinking about an issue.

What follows is not popular, because it affirms the idea of us conquering ourselves instead of choosing an external option — God, democracy, drugs, love, money — that will do it for us. This is the philosophical version of the old joke: a traveler rolls down his window and asks a man on the curb, “Do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?” to which the cynical bystander replies, Practice!

Indeed: analysis does not happen without practice. If you are stepping onto the floor with philosophical, political or social issues, analysis is what you are doing and the only method by which you will succeed. Sometimes called critical thinking, before the 1968ers ruined that term, analysis refers to the act of logically breaking down a problem, figuring out how it works, and then testing the solution as a whole to see what is a sensible answer.

Most people — about 80% — are biologically incapable of this level of thinking, and most of the remaining 20% are either too immature, too obsessive or too dishonest to do it. It falls to about 1% of the population who are both capable and of the moral character to make themselves receptive to the process. This is why almost everything in society is blockheaded: most people can repeat what succeeded for others, but not understand why, which creates an insect pathology of repetition which ignores context and situation.

If you are wondering why the internet is awash in conspiracy theories, liberals and white nationalists, the reason lies above. People are incapable of the analysis necessary and so they default to monkey behaviors like scapegoating, group identity, victimhood/revenge and projection. These theories are in fact the most popular because they are understood by the most, and people recognize truth up to their cognitive limits and assume anything above that is voodoo or a typing error.

On the right, for example, there are those who blame The Jewâ„¢ or The Negroâ„¢ while on the left they blame White Men or The Richâ„¢ apparently without realizing the irony of “We’re the victims, so let’s victimize someone else!” In fact, this pattern repeats in both monkey tribes and human groups, which is that any party which is failing or troubled will immediately seek out a weaker party to clobber, raising its own group status to having someone to bully.

We need to turn to our logical side and point the finger where it belongs: at democracy, altruism, equality, tolerance and other illusions which cause civilization collapse. These are the cause of our decline, and we know this both through history and through the logical fact that if we remove them, our society rises out of its misery and neurosis.

This requires us to be mature and accept that we did this to ourselves. We made a bad choice, basing it on what flattered us emotionally instead of what was obviously true, and since then our society has thrashed in helpless decline. We hide that decline behind wealth, prestige and the even greater incompetence of other societies, but the mirth and power has left us. We are falling.

Why are our leaders so bad? They are chosen by voters, and (1) most people cannot make this decision with any realistic basis and (2) in groups, humans choose compromises that make the group happy instead of addressing complex real-world issues. We The Peopleâ„¢ chose these leaders. Even if the media, entertainment and intellectuals misled us, we pulled the levers and made the choice when we should have known better to be capable of making those decisions.

Why do we suffer under degeneracy, diversity and relativism? Once you start with an idea like “equality,” the assumption that people are equal means that in every situation where someone fails, there is a scapegoat. People always blame those with higher standards for the failings of those with lower standards. Through this process, a rule of having no standards spreads through all of society.

Why is our society incompetent? We insist on altruism, which measures external characteristics like obedience through schooling and attendance, and ignore internal ones like character and intellectual traits. As a result, we promote the shallowest people for having the “right” ideology and then watch them flounder when confronted with complex problems off the beaten track.

Is the problem Jews, Africans, or even whites? Much more complex, and yet simpler: the problem is an idea. This idea flatters us. It says we are all equal. This causes us to act mechanically and treat all people as identical cogs in a big machine, which in turn much like Communism robs them of their will toward excellence, doing good and planning toward the long term.

Democracy misleads us. In the name of a kind of pacifism — the idea that we can control others by considering them “equal” — we have made our society into hell. Under the surface, it is a miserable place. People act with a “committee mindset,” taking no unpopular risks to affirm what is right, and we enable millions of parasites to take from the good. Until we fix this outlook, everything else is just a scapegoat, which is why we have failed to reverse our decline so far.

Tags: altruism, decline, democracy, downfall, egalitarianism, equality, tolerance