Amerika

The path of “doing right” often leads to misery. Such is the case with societies that, as they succeed, choose to try to improve on nature through government. This creates a cycle that rewards the bad and punishes the good, resulting in a place that is horrible to live on every level but the material.

On the surface, the modern West is the best place on earth to live. We have material prosperity, rule of law and relative stability on a planet where, as usual, most of humanity has studied how to best screw up and is busy beheading each other. And yet, looking under the surface, a different vision appears.

This society is ugly and dysfunctional. Our needs are different from those of the beheaders, and this falls short. Days are spent in pointless labor that achieves nothing for anyone. Everyday annoyances are a peak because most people are paying little attention at jobs and so most details are botched. This means that people spend hours every week dealing with frustration minor issues and bureaucracy.

Unfortunately for us, the basic problem is that a dying society like ours converts sanity into insanity through the principle of relativity. Relative to what we know, we make choices and pick the best option available, but the options we actually need are off the table. Even keeping the system going, a daily struggle, is insane and yet it is the only option that appears sane.

Let us look at three areas where this world breaks down:

1. “Normal.” To a healthy person, “normal” means a good person: good moral character, reasonable intelligence, healthy and sane. To an egalitarian society, “normal” means mediocre, because when you define all citizens to be equal you create a lower threshold and must design for that. This means that our laws, institutions and social interactions anticipate dealing with people who are low in every ability and character trait.
2. Hubris. The Greek principle of hubris described those who acted above their natural station in the hierarchy of life. A peasant pretending to be a king, or a hero acting as if he were a god, would fit into this definition. All of our society is based on the hubristic idea that we are in control and can force things to be as we visualize them. Egalitarianism presumes that we can take mediocre people, control their thinking through education and manipulate their behavior through laws, and make them more than mediocre. We cannot.
3. Bigotry. One form of bigotry never gets mentioned, and that is bigotry toward the smarter, stronger, more moral and more sane. It is legitimized by the egalitarian state, which acts in defense of the less capable by taking from the more capable. The result is a society that hates good people and celebrates bad ones. When its institutions fail, it always looks for some successful person to blame, instead of blaming the herd of mediocre people who — as usual — got it all wrong.

When we speak of the insanity of this time, the above is what we mean, not that iPhones are hard to use or the subway moves too fast. Sanity is destroyed and insanity encouraged. Goodness is persecuted and evil accepted. What was once normal and good has now become rare and persecuted. As a result, daily life is constant nonsense and exhausting bother for anyone with a working brain.

It is not surprising that sane people have abandoned politics, society and public institutions and instead retreat to their living rooms. They have been made irrelevant because insanity rules. Fewer of them are having children, and those that do are investing less effort in those offspring, because they recognize that as long as this society holds power, anything above the mediocre is doomed.

When most people think of “conservatives,” they think of people fighting a rearguard action against the encroachment of insanity. But insanity won. Now we need to think about dissolving our society as it is and replacing it with something that works. Anything else guarantees more of the same, time after time.

Tags: collapse, decline, egalitarianism, fall, insanity, mediocrity