Amerika

While everyone else went looking for which variety of modernity they preferred, around here we saw that modernity was just an instance of crowdism: the inversion that happens when a group of humans gains enough power to selectively deny reality by rationalizing their thought through symbols that manipulate others.

With the recent 9-0 Supreme Court decision that held that insurrection has to be determined by Congress, not arbitrary bureaucrats at the state level, the usual neurotics were out there calling for either the Court to be expanded or destroyed. It offended them, thus it must be smashed.

This shows us an insight into the pathology of the Crowdist, which is individualism. The individualist wants his desires to come first before the rest of the known universe. Therefore, any deviation from that puts him into a defensive attack mode, since it threatens his sense of well-being.

Get a group of these together and they tend toward the type of hysteria that we associate with mentally ill people. They cannot see the Supreme Court as anything but a binary of two categories, Good and Evil. If it does what they want, it is Good; if not, it is Evil and must be eradicated.

We can call them ugly names like narcissist, solipsist, egotist, or contrarian, but more realistically they are in the grip of a pathology because like a cargo cult it seems to be working. Get together enough monkeys and have them howl at the same time, and The Powers That Be give them free stuff or relax the rules.

The essence of Crowdism is control, or using means-over-ends thinking to restrict certain methods, hoping to then force everyone into a state of pluralism and compromise instead of accepting reality as it is and working with it. That keeps society in flux so that whenever the monkey horde howls, it gets what it wants.

Its thinking is exclusively short-term for this reason. It replaces goals with obedience to the system, which is formed to remove discussion about what people fear, and is not created by itself, but by the collective fear of the group. It seizes power with pleasant illusions and then acts to remove any mention of anything else.

We might describe these people as caught in a pathology of hysteria. Their ideals are not derived from reality, but from crowd opinion, therefore they fear being proven wrong; the “culture of critique” in late stage advanced societies arises from defending illusions against creeping realism.

Our civilization has been caught in this late state for centuries because in civilization, every role is a job, and all one has to do in a job is keep the level of management above happy in the short term. This causes the incompetent and obedient to outbreed the spirited and capable, and then mass opinion turns toward lazy analyses and easy answers.

Those of us who want to get out of this cycle need to stop arguing about what flavor of modernism we prefer. All modernism is based in individualism and promotes equality, so the first step is to look toward something more than ourselves or others, and to reject the notion of equality as the counter-factual pleasant illusion it is.

Tags: crowdism, means over ends, modernity