Amerika

The voters choose losers. When the Biden presidency started, around here you found him being compared to Jimmy Carter. Both liked increasing the welfare state and then using the regulatory state to pass on the costs to big business, resulting in a kind of permanent malaise, not just economic but spiritual, leaving a demoralized population.

Guys like that show us the pitfalls of leadership. Leaders either aim for the group as an organism to rise, or they try to buy off every special interest by ostentatiously addressing its demands and passing on the costs to the group. This neutralizes the group while letting those leaders swan about like gift-giving gurus in their cult communes.

Did Jimmy Carter intend to utterly trash America? In his eyes, he was doing the right thing; he addressed the complaints of special interests and the downtrodden and conned everyone else into paying for it. In his eyes, this was a great success because he had done the moral thing, and even if everyone suffered, it was for a good cause.

The “good cause” people take over anything they can because your average human group will let them. If you assemble a group of humans, the malcontents and miserable people will dominate the discourse with their victimhood narrative which they need in order to feel better about their personal lack of purpose.

Try this experiment. Start a non-profit group and do something good. You will get popular. Soon new people will come in, and they will start to talk about how, in addition to your goal, your should start helping “the poor” or “the marginalized.” If you let it, that will take over everything you do.

A good leader stays on course for the goal. If you are running a nature preserve, for example, your goal is to protect and nurture the ecosystems under your control. The neurotics will want to tack on their agenda to your agenda, but because their agenda is simpler, it will dominate.

The same applies on any committee. Staying on the goal is hard: it requires making lots of difficult and risky decisions while telling people “no.” Appeasing special interests is easy; you just divide up the money and time and parcel it out, so they stop complaining and give you loyalty.

Your average committee is formed for a goal, but that goal rapidly becomes doing the same few token acts in order to make it seem like something is being done. This is why societies cannot solve problems without aristocrats or dictators; the committees they form perpetuate the problem by repeating uncontroversial but ineffective methods.

Within any committee, cliques will form. These are comprised of lesser people who want power but lack purpose, so they figure they will steal power by finding some signal issue and harping on it until it takes over from the actual goal. This is their method of seizing power, and they will then start buying loyalty.

At your nature preserve, for example, one clique will form that is certain that the big problem is that the bathrooms are not multigender. They will interrupt every proceeding with this complaint and waste your time and money on legal conflicts. Eventually the committee gives in and then, surprise, the clique takes over.

When they look at their budget, they will see that there is money, but not enough to accomplish the real goal. Everyone loves the moment that comes next: everyone throws up their hands, concludes the goal cannot be met, and therefore they might as well go back to buying off special interest.

Real leaders never come about in committees, democracy, and mobs because the voters or committee members select against real leaders. Real leaders tackle actual problems with direct methods; the clique makes direct methods taboo and then, having sabotaged the ability to do anything real, redirects the committee to its pet issues.

This week unions and FEMA hit the airwaves for this kind of behavior. The unions decided that they would sabotage industry in order to get more money out of it; the politicians were willing to give it to them, buying off another special interest. Nevermind that this will force industry to replace longshoremen with robots!

FEMA of course is a classic case of clique capture. At first, FEMA was there to manage industries; then, the clique loaded in a whole bunch of nonsense about the poor and marginalized. Now FEMA is arresting people for giving out aid because it might not be going to the poor and marginalized first.

A society needs a purpose to survive. This is more than just survival and prosperity; it involves a sense of something that the society exists to do or achieve. For example, the ancients aspired to excellence, beauty, and realism. Does our society have any purpose on this level? No, we are shuffling money around.

When people cannot agree on a purpose, society begins its long slow lugubrious decay. It settles on methods like earning money and keeping the system operating instead of having a goal. Culture gets subdued by the bureaucracy and democracy demoralizes everyone who remains.

This produces the “job mentality,” or bourgeois morality: in a form of cystic individualism, people focus on their own personal comfort and ability to pursue hobbies and forget about the goals of civilization or even improvement. They want to do their thirty years and then retire and not care about anything.

We are in advanced stages of this cystic individualism. Technology makes it worse; few are more job-enslaved or self-focused than the technicians, nerds, geeks, and bureaucrats of a large system. However, its roots are in the loss of purpose.

It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter. — Naked Lunch, p. 67

If you ever want to start understanding William Gibson or Thomas Pynchon, begin your analysis with William S. Burroughs since they borrowed all of their themes from him. Michel Houellebecq of course took the ball further and combined it with a little Aldous Huxley to make a truly terrifying vision of a dying civilization.

When we lose purpose, we stop focusing on achieving anything and instead spend our time buying off special interest cliques with the wealth of the group. At that point, the group becomes steadily impoverished and demoralized, at which point we get “late stage capitalism” where everyone is rent-seeking simply so they can escape some day.

Carter was a bigger screwup than most realize. At the point where the Cold War was getting hottest, he did his part for Communism by weakening the West through its system so that Communism was not actually all that much worse. You remember the late 70s: shabby houses, taped-together cars, dead-eyed people, and a death of art and music.

We need to regain our transcendent purpose in the West. What makes purpose transcendent is that it is holistic, or accepting of all reality and understanding its wisdom and why it must be as it is, and also intangible. The transcendent goal is one we can never achieve, only forever reach for as it slides farther from our grasp.

Goals like that are actually the most common ones in everyday life. You try to be the best person you can be (hopefully in a non-dualistic context). You try to love your wife better than anyone else could. You aim for brewing the best beer, building the best furniture, or maybe writing the most effective and efficient code.

What you do not do is give up on having a goal, and instead focus on putting in the hours at your job, at least if you read this site. Just accumulating cash and trying to escape to a boring retirement is not enough for you. You want to live and take life by the balls, and for that you need to aim higher than placating the herd.

Tags: civilization decay, crowdism, cystic individualism, jimmy carter, joe biden, thomas pynchon, william gibson, william s. burroughs