Amerika

A provocative article in The Telegraph discusses the replacement of Western values with a globalist universal type of society, and begins by quoting Francis Fukuyama whose influential The End Of History presaged the globalist era back in the early 1990s:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Fukuyama looked ahead and saw that with the fall of the Soviets, all of the enemies of liberal democracy had been defeated. The monarchs, fascists, national socialists, and communists were all gone; what was left was the combination of democracy and civil rights.

In order to advance the civil rights agenda, free market economic systems had merged with socialism, in part to compete with the rising force of the Left since the late 1700s. These systems generated vast wealth, taxed it heavily, and paid out social benefits to keep strong consumer economies going.

This has created over time a convergence on third-world style governments: democracies run by Leftists who rule with an iron hand through a corrupt press and vast gangs of true believers. As the article points out:

Emerging economies today may be in love with Apple and McDonald’s, and are often more pro-capitalist than us, but they – or at least their ruling classes – have proved immune to our political values. In fact, we no longer believe in many of them ourselves, such has been the extent of our philosophical decay.

The shocking reality is that the great democracies, including, tragically, Britain, are becoming steadily less libertarian and less democratic; at the same time, the rising Asian powers are becoming less oppressive overall, primarily thanks to their partial embrace of economic freedoms.

The two models are meeting in the middle, and the result is terrifying. Political systems are becoming less distinct and the old ideological power blocs (such as “the West”) are blurring or even gradually merging into one uniform mush (Bruno Maçães, a former Portuguese minister, talks of the rise of a “Eurasia” dominated by the EU, China and Russia, three entities that share a distrust of liberal democracy).

In a brilliant article for Quillette, the political scientist Clay Fuller calls this new consensus “authoritarian liberalism”.

Leftism proved to be unstable and so the only way to make it work is for it to shift toward centralized power. This however shows us a larger event in progress: we are shifting from decentralized systems, which are too chaotic, to strong power across the board.

Ultimately this spells doom for democracy, and has set up a conflict where strong power Leftists increasing resemble Communists, while strong power Rightists tend toward either monarchism or 1930s hybrid systems like national socialism or fascism.

Look how quickly Communism lite is spreading through the USA as propelled by minority votes and millennials who are fulfilling the desires of their hippie-era instructors:

There are 42 people running for offices at the federal, state and local levels this year with the formal endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization says. They span 20 states, including Florida, Hawaii, Kansas and Michigan.

The most ambitious Democrats in Washington have been reluctant to embrace the label, even as they embrace the policies defining modern-day democratic socialism: Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and the abolition of the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congress’ only self-identified democratic socialist, campaigned Friday with the movement’s newest star, New York City congressional candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former bartender who defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats last month.

These people support the idea of taking from the successful to give to the unsuccessful. They have dedicated millions of man-hours to hiding this simple fact because it sounds bad, but the reality is that as in nature, some organisms thrive while some are barely making it by.

We all benefit when we follow the behavior model of those that thrive. When we imitate those who are not thriving, suddenly no one is thriving. This is the lesson of Darwin, and also what we have learned from Communism and the French Revolution, watching egalitarian societies collapse.

Egalitarianism is a third-world model. When no one is thriving, having more people means a greater likelihood that one will survive, so giving everyone a small amount of food makes sense. However, you never get high-performers this way, only subsistence living; every society which has become great has done so by giving more to those who do more, so that more of those are produced. That, too, is Darwinism.

For egalitarians, then, advancing their ideas requires having others who are also in denial of this reality. They like “consensus” because it enables them to obscure knowledge that reality is contrary to the theory of egalitarianism; they want compliance precisely because their ideology denies reality.

This arises from their fundamental individualism. They want to be able to throw mud in a tin pot and call it art, instead of having someone impose a standard higher than the individual as to what “art” is. They want also to be able to do what they want and call it “good” and “right” instead of looking to the obvious, larger meaning of those terms.

Naturally, this causes a problem for the egalitarians. How much consensus do they need? When news travels slowly and societies are localized, they need a local consensus; in the age of radio, television, and internet, they need to conquer the whole world in order to suppress knowledge of how unrealistic their ideas are.

Ironically, they conquered the world using an economic system. They did this by creating a cycle where capitalism produces income, government taxes it, money gets redistributed, and then the lowest echelons of society have buying power, which enables the creation of consumerism and thus a vapid, disposable society.

In order to make their ideology a cornerstone of this, they have made capitalism addicted to consumerism since it keeps the flow of money going. Consumers “work hard” at cubicle jobs, spend money, and receive money if they are not successful; the unsuccessful horde then spends its money, allowing an economy to be built on nonsense like entertainment and other “service industry” notions: luxuries, fads, trends, irrelevancies.

Even better, the egalitarians keep the system going through resentment and scapegoating. Witness this first-class propaganda from The New York Times in which they both status signal, demand compliance, and gaslight the average citizen in order to force them into the victimhood-scapegoat cycle:

Yes, my father is angry at someone. But it is not his co-worker Gem, a Filipino immigrant with whom he has split a room to pocket some of the per diem from their employer, or Francisco, a Hispanic crew member with whom he recently built a Wendy’s north of Memphis. His anger, rather, is directed at bosses who exploit labor and governments that punish the working poor — two sides of a capitalist democracy that bleeds people like him dry.

“Corporations,” Dad said. “That’s it. That’s the point of the sword that’s killing us.”

Among white workers, this negative energy has been manipulated to great political effect by a conservative trifecta in media, private interest and celebrity that we might call Fox, Koch and Trump.

Scapegoating consists of blaming others for the lack of success an individual experiences; if someone else is doing better, and is wealthier, he can blame them for his own lack of productivity. This is similar to the corollary to affirmative action known as “disparate impact,” which says that if one group succeeds more than another, the first group is to blame and must subsidize the other group.

Victimhood comprises the mental state required to blame others and the condition of thus failing in life by perpetually seeking reasons why the individual should not change his own behavior, instead of changing behavior to be more like the successes.

The Left operates exclusively through victimhood because the only people who want equality are those who feel unequal, or that success (social, financial, political, intellectual) has left them behind. Victimhood creates a market for information and entertainment that reinforces that view of the individual as victim.

This defers authority from society to a condition where an external notion, like an ideology or a profitable idea, drives the decisions made by that society. Instead of society using ideas to advance itself, it becomes enslaved to them, and merely acts out those ideologies as a means of maintaining internal stability.

That externalization exists as part of the herd behavior of humankind, and manifests in politics, the economy, and social pressures alike. Those three areas — political, economic, and social — in egalitarian societies become dedicated to making choices by number of supporters, or quantity over quality.

Once that notion took over a single society, the idea of sovereignty was dead; the nation existed to serve the economic or political system, and not the other way around. Eventually this led to the birth of globalism, a system designed to create a permanent external control imposed on all nations and people so that markets and thus ideological progress could be stable:

Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions—the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law—to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.

Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale.

Individual nations had their own interests which conflicted with the interests of global herd behavior, which demanded docile civilizations to use as a means of fueling its coffers and keeping a social order alive in which the basement hipsters and bureaucratic yes-men could win out.

One may recall this was a dream of the Left that goes back to the French Revolution, which spawned the attempts of Napoleon to conquer Europe for democracy in a dress rehearsal for WW1 and WW2.

However, since the Tower of Babel, humans have desired a human-only order which could rival that of nature and/or the gods:

According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.

That parallels the desire of the Left. They reject the order of nature and God or gods, and want instead a utilitarian order — like a bureaucracy — based on what people wish was true or want to be true.

That bureaucratic way of life, in contrast to the organic way in which people live according to actual needs and methods of adaptation, quickly takes over the civilization. This is why consumerism and Communism converge on the same vision: a managerial-administrative state united worldwide to advance Leftism and the capitalist economy which sustains it:

The Bilderberg vision is the notion of multi-cultural, international cosmopolitanism that surpasses old-time nationalism; heralding the end of frontiers; and leading toward a US-led, ‘technocratic’, global economic and political governance. Its roots lie with figures such as James Burnham, an anti-Stalin, former Trotskyite, who, writing as early as 1941, advocated for the levers of financial and economic power being placedin the hands of a management class: an élite – which alone would be capable of running the contemporary state – thanks to this élite’s market and financial technical nous. It was, bluntly, a call for an expert, technocratic oligarchy.

…In short, (as Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have noted), “by 1947, James Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical, to New World Order American conservative was complete. His Struggle for the World, [converted into a memo for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of CIA)], had done a ‘French Turn’ on Trotsky’s permanent Communist revolution, and turned it into a permanent battle plan for a global American empire. All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy, and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive, “for generations”.

Whoever controls the money has the power, and so the international economy dominates national concerns unless it is restrained. Nationalism exists in part for this reason: if a nation does not assert its self-control, then it becomes assimilated by whatever fascinates its trading partners.

In the same way, human beings tend toward entropy. If not restrained, they will adopt herd behavior, which is simply every individual acting to protect himself while using the group as a shield and concealing from the group that this is what he is doing. In nature, this is called flocking behavior:

Flocking is a striking example of collective behaviour that is found in insect swarms, fish schools and mammal herds [1] . A major factor in the evolution of flocking behaviour is thought to be predation, whereby larger and/or more cohesive groups are better at detecting predators (as, for example, in the ‘many eyes theory’), and diluting the effects of predators (as in the ‘selfish-herd theory’) than are individuals in smaller and/or dispersed groups [2] . The former theory assumes that information (passively or actively transferred) can be disseminated more effectively in larger/cohesive groups, while the latter assumes that there are spatial benefits to individuals in a large group, since individuals can alter their spatial position relative to their group-mates and any potential predator, thus reducing their predation risk [3] . We used global positioning system (GPS) data to characterise the response of a group of ‘prey’ animals (a flock of sheep) to an approaching ‘predator’ (a herding dog). Analyses of relative sheep movement trajectories showed that sheep exhibit a strong attraction towards the centre of the flock under threat, a pattern that we could re-create using a simple model. These results support the long-standing assertion that individuals can respond to potential danger by moving towards the centre of a fleeing group [2]

In humans, the center is the absolute most inoffensive opinion, namely accepting everyone and believing that reality is not real and no values are important. Nothing that clashes with the choices of another individual can be permitted, and from this come doctrines like egalitarianism, diversity, Leftism, democracy, and equality.

The masters of human flocking behavior can be found among the bourgeois; think of your average shopkeeper. The customer is always right, you can offend no one, and you should “work hard” by being open as many hours as possible because someone might wander in.

At the same time, the shopkeeper has his revenge. To him, everything is a transaction. His nation? It protects his business, and is only useful for that. His community? He pays taxes, so he will do nothing else. His family? He paid to give them life and feed them, so what more do the little ungrateful wretches need?

The bourgeois mentality sees society wholly through an economic filter and as such, assumes that society continues on its present path in perpetuity, which requires believing that our actions have no effect on it. This means that the shopkeeper does not need to be politically active except in Left-wing causes, because those open up more customers, while Right-wing causes attempt to preserve civilization, and he sees no need for that.

Bourgeois mentality began afflicting the West once it became organized enough to be affluent; disorganized societies like the third world never become affluent, but with organization, efficiency arises and wealth is conserved. The Barons who forced the Magna Carta on their king were bourgeois, as were the middle classes who voted for Merkel and Obama.

The middle class excels as flocking behavior. They avoid offending anyone and accept everyone, and will tear down any barriers to the entry of more people to their stores. For years, this was assumed to be a good thing because it was tolerant and unlikely to “rock the boat” and cause friction.

In fact, people saw bourgeois dominance as the path to peace and prosperity:

The mesoi, or “middle guys,” both predated and remained somewhat at odds with contemporary radical Athenian democracy. Yet these agrarian property-owning classes were also originally responsible for the Greek city-state and thus for Western civilization itself. The Jeffersonian idea of preserving ownership of a family plot, and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws and property rights, were the themes of the constitutions of the early polis. The citizen—neither a peasant nor a subject—remained rooted to a particular plot of ground, and thereby enjoyed the tripartite rights of citizenship: military service, voting rights in the assembly, and the ability to be self-supporting and autonomous. The mesoi, then, lent stability to otherwise often volatile consensual politics.

However, as the rampage of the middle class for the past five hundred years winds down in bankrupt governments, dispirited populations, massive debt loads, environmental crises, and social collapse, the reign of the middle class is ending.

We are seeing the end of the middle class as a political agent. No further proof can be seen that the demise of faith in “weak power,” or systems like democracy that avoid concentrated power; not only have people lost faith in democracy but they now crave strong power:

The majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.

The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism, with 44 percent support. Communism and fascism received 7 percent support each.

People no longer believe they are going to win the lottery of life and have that great career and house in the suburbs. They want a guaranteed survival, rather than a chance to rise above, because they see how unstable society has become. This is why most desire socialism.

However, with that change, and the secondary data that most want one of the three managed systems, we see that people want strong power. Faith in liberal democracy has cratered. We know that the Roman Holiday is over, and we are going to have to pay for these debts and give up our extensive social welfare states.

Leftism created globalism out of the idea that there needed to be a central authority which could rule us all through control of our economies, and that this worldwide power could be used to implement the Leftist ideological agenda of egalitarian progress as a path to Utopia.

Now that we have seen what globalism looks like in practice, people are looking instead to strong national power and traditional organic structures like nation, class, and culture. The Leftist agenda has failed. We have entered a new phase in history with liberal democracy joining communism and dictatorship in the dustbin of history.

Tags: crowdism, democracy, diversity, equality, flocking, Globalism, herd behavior, internationalism, leftism