Amerika

Our species — apologies to any lizard people reading this — finds itself at the point of making a decision. It has been living as an individualist society for a long time, and it wants to move into the final stage of that mentality, collectivism. However another option exists.

In this option, the intuitive inner self, organic frameworks like tradition, and concern for hard Darwinian realism coincide. We accept that there is an option more important than the self and the group, and we look beyond humanity for our source of order.

The simplest form of this is naturalism. Instead of basing our decisions on what humans think or feel, we look at what works in nature. Like all conservatives, we see biology as the root of health and sanity as the goal of the mind. This requires looking at patterns outside what humans think and feel “should be” the case.

Religion offers us a quick path to something like this place. In all religions, there is an order above the material, but more importantly, above the human — self and others — level. It denies both individualism and its collective form. It aspires to something intangible and eternal. Unfortunately, it also imposes its own control system:

It is understandable that people would want to do practical and maybe-effective things intended to make themselves (or other people they care about) happier, or suffer less – this could be termed hedonic pragmatism.

In the Abrahamist — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — religion, the transcendental ideal is replaced by the dualistic ideal, which is a world which does not exist in our own and is hostile to it. Only by renouncing this world and living for the religion does one become enlightened and achieve grace.

When most people say they want to do good things, they mean for other people, which translates into a benefit for themselves. They get to be seen as empathic compassionate altruists, and therefore, their value in the social stock market goes up.

Similarly governments are obsessed with the poor and downtrodden. When they give money to these people, faith in the government goes up because it is giving gifts. That in turn allows government to reap more tax money and extract more power from the quivering idiotic masses.

As it turns out, this is an unhealthy psychology that results in misery for all involved:

“Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating.

“This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”

If you want to be happy, focus on something outside of yourself; the meaning we find in life is connecting to those things, not focusing on the self itself. People benefit from the transcendental, or that which makes life meaningful by accepting it as it is instead of trying to deny or reject it, because it connects them to being alive.

Their other option is to fall down the well of the self. This includes humanist activities for others, which are only done for the benefit of the self and its social standing. The individualist knows only an infinite demand for stimulus from the ego in order to avoid reality, and therefore gradually goes insane.

It turns out that socializing makes us more predictable; when we answer to others, our answers become more repetitive, and as a result, we lose more of ourselves. We become dependent on the other for stimulus, like an insect, in a codependent relationship with the Herd which conditions our responses:

The researchers found that participants who were prompted to respond were more likely to provide an answer closer to their most recent observation.

“The experiments demonstrated that the influence of serial dependence is stronger immediately after a response is requested,” said co-author Yukihiro Morimoto, a third-year doctoral student at the university.

The more socializing there is, the more we become creatures of the herd. The more we fall into the ego, the more we need validation from the herd. This is the trap of civilization: with prosperity, it becomes self-referential, and that makes it openly hostile to reality and dedicated to the ego of individualists.

Religion will not walk us out of this dark path because religion itself is subject to the same pathology. Abrahamist religions reject reality, leaving nothing but the self and its wishful thinking. (Atheists get this wrong: the wishful thinking is not about God, morality, and afterlife but that dualistic morality is anything but a projection of the ego.)

What can walk us out of it is organic culture, which focuses on the transcendental because it is a framework for the individual which limits individual concerns to those things proper to individual choice. It reduces egomania to the personal level, and dedicates the rest of the person to something larger than itself.

Organic culture comes about when groups of successful people come together and find ideas and practices that work for them. These become a framework of wisdom over time that reflects the genetics of that group; after all, high mutation load groups produce an anti-culture based on the individual, which is genetic as well.

Unfortunately successful civilization bestows its benefits on the deserving and undeserving alike. This allows the undeserving to reproduce rapidly and soon they dwarf the deserving. At that point, society becomes a fixation on the individual and the group to suppress noticing of reality that might call it all into question.

Tags: abrahamism, codependency, crowdism, individualism, metaphysical dualism