Amerika

Those who want Utopia are talking about intermediate results, not end results.

“I don’t want anyone to die, or any wars to occur,” presupposes that all people are rational and thus both sides can agree to argue their cases rationally.

It also presupposes that rationality should decide the issue. If two populations both need the same resource, who should have it? If they share, neither gets enough to do anything with it, and so that energy is dissipated. War decides. Struggle decides. Conflict decides.

On the lighter side, innocent and wholesomeness also decide. If you decide to be selective in your activities, that’s a type of war against all other possibilities; if you pick one woman to love, raise a family, build a position in a city instead of flitting around pursuing empty pleasures, you have made a solid warlike choice.

Our modernist Utopia is based on the idea that we can regulate end results through intermediate results.

• Peace. We can stop war by stopping conflict by enforcing equality among all people. What if two have a claim to the same thing? Then we stall in endless cycles of debate, studies, neurosis and palaver.
• Universality. We love the idea of a single rule that is the Scientific^TM Absolute Truth^SM but then we are applying radically different standards between North and South, East and West, agrarian and urban, middle class and ghetto.
• Equality. We demand everyone be equal! And if they’re not, we’re going to trim off the extra that doesn’t fit into our tiny little boxes. If they resist, we will crush them. They are not fitting the plan and are thwarting our will.
• Choice. It’s a world of choices. It would make more sense if people chose not to litter, drive giant cars or buy huge homes they cannot afford to keep maintained. But they can do those things, so we’ll encourage them, and socialize the cost.
• Education. Our grand plan for all ills is “education.” If you give people the truth, they’ll act rationally, we think. Yet they’re generally in bad situations from an inability to act rationally in the first place.

By focusing on methods, and not values and goals, our society has created a hell out of Utopia. It just isn’t working. Its design is fundamentally flawed: it works on the wrong part of the process. You have to get to those end results, and the values and goals that motivated them, instead of regulating the intermediate.

A new Marist College poll shows that 36% of New Yorkers under the age of 30 are planning to leave New York within the next five years – and more than a quarter of all adults are planning to bolt the Empire State.

The New York City suburbs, with their high property values and taxes, are leading the exodus, the poll found.

Of those preparing to leave, 62% cite economic reasons like cost of living, taxes – and a lack of jobs.

“A lot of people are questioning the affordability of the state,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

An additional 38% cite climate, quality of life, overcrowding, a desire to be closer to family, retirement or schools. – NYD

We made a city; we made it a huge center of money; we invited everyone in; now it’s a hell on earth. It’s cramped, dirty, stinky, noisy, criminal and corrupt.

Why is it that all human plans end this way? A new idea is found to be good, then it gets popular, then it “jumps the shark” and becomes corrupted.

Maybe it has something to do with the illusion that the good part of the city existed in the city, not the people who created it. Maybe it also has something to do with our false Utopia, where we make everything permissible and then try to regulate methods, so people find alternate methods to the same bad values and goals, thus end results.

If our problem is people getting distracted at work, and the method is that some people show up in swimsuits, our standard response of banning swimsuits won’t work — they’ll just show up naked or in revealing evening dresses. You cannot regulate end results through method.

Permissiveness is the most intense form of regulation of all. It says that everything is accepted, but — there’s always a but — there are just a few things that we don’t want you to do. Starting with not being permissive. But permissiveness, in turn, cheapens the value of life by making choices arbitrary and non-binding.

Is it any wonder the sexual revolution destroyed marriage by teaching us away from fidelity into disposable relationships?

4. She waits to have sex. Yes, the sexual revolution arrived long ago and few people expect a “pure white bride” nowadays. But sex is still a pretty big step for couples. Daily says that many women don’t even realize just how much sex changes the dynamics of a relationship. When women have sex, they release a hormone called oxytocin (also referred to as “the cuddle hormone”), which some scientific researchers believe makes women feel extra warm and fuzzy for their sex partners. Daily warns that if women do the deed too soon, they might make too much of a relationship that barely ever existed outside of the bedroom. When you inflate the significance of a relationship, the man often bolts. Daily’s advice is to wait at least one month into the relationship before having sex with your new man. – iVillage

The above paragraph is perfectly neurotic modern propaganda: everything is permitted, but that’s destructive, so here’s the exception you follow in order to succeed. Oh, but it’s only a halfway exception, so you won’t actually escape the doom trap we’ve laid for you.

Our Utopia that regulates methods causes a new kind of speech control — using permissiveness, or a lack of desire to pay attention to the results of our actions, to encourage people to ignore uncomfortable facts:

As I have come to learn firsthand, the anti-journalist does not seek to report the news. The anti-journalist attacks the people who do report the news or, just as likely, ignores them completely. When in attack mode, the anti-journalist disregards the facts and dismisses the fact finder as partisan, whacko, reckless, and inevitably, in regard to Obama, racist. – American Thinker

In theory, we would want to discover truths and then discuss them rationally.

In reality, it’s open warfare — pick what you want to believe, ignore the rest, and run them over.

With permissiveness as part of our Utopia’s regulation of methods, we have enabled journalists and readers alike to simply deny unfortunate aspects of reality.

As a result, our news is not news but opinion: spin, taint, shading, implication and innuendo.

A vital insight into the nature of our society:

Actually, the present state of the “international community” is a perfect reflection of bureaucratic imperatives. Bureaucracies tend to maximize their impact. They are often quite shy about expanding their authority, especially if it is formal authority – because once you take authority over something, you have essentially taken responsibility for it. Bureaucracies are not fond of responsibility. – UR

Our Utopia is not fond of responsibility, or taking charge of results.

It is fond of impact, or making sure it visibly regulates methods which (superstitiously) we assume are the only ways we end up at bad results.

How did we get here?

Lorenz and Rahut’s experiment fits between large-scale, real-world messiness and theoretical investigation. They recruited 144 students from ETH Zurich, sitting them in isolated cubicles and asking them to guess Switzerland’s population density, the length of its border with Italy, the number of new immigrants to Zurich and how many crimes were committed in 2006.

After answering, test subjects were given a small monetary reward based on their answer’s accuracy, then asked again. This proceeded for four more rounds; and while some students didn’t learn what their peers guessed, others were told.

As testing progressed, the average answers of independent test subjects became more accurate, in keeping with the wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Socially influenced test subjects, however, actually became less accurate.

The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses.

“The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment.

“Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. – WIRED

The dreaded hivemind, or groupthink, or even herd behavior — pick the term you prefer — arrived. I call this Crowdism, because it consists of a mechanism whereby the logic of the Crowd replaces the thought of our most logical individuals, and initiates a race to the lowest common denominator.

It is a symptom of modern society. Equality means permissiveness; permissiveness means truth becomes arbitrary; arbitrary truth means people behave chaotically, and then as bad results filter in, become “conservative” in the grim part of the lower-case-c sense of the word, meaning that they refuse to do anything except what works for the majority. A standardization and regression to the mean begins to gain momentum.

We spread this process like a disease, because with prosperity, industry takes over from culture — and in so doing, obliterates anything but the permissive:

For a sneak peek at what’s in store, we can look to American history. In the postwar boom of the 1950s, mass prosperity became the norm. For the first time in history, a generation of kids – the baby boomers – was raised with their material needs taken for granted. And the economy had reached new heights of complexity: By 1960, as author Todd Gitlin notes, the US became the first society with more college students than farmers.

What followed was the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s. Groups long marginalized or stigmatized – blacks, women, gays and lesbians – rose up to challenge the established order. New values – in particular, environmentalism and hedonism (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) – emerged as reflections of the new focus on quality of life and personal fulfillment.

[…]

While the details differ from country to country, the American drama is now playing out on a global scale. For evidence, there’s no better source than the World Values Survey, a worldwide effort to track changing cultural attitudes. The director of the survey, Ronald Inglehart, has found a clear pattern: As development widens the circle of people who enjoy material security and amass human capital, “survival” values wane and “self-expression” values strengthen. People start caring more about personal growth and less about mere acquisition, and they grow more tolerant and less deferential to authority. – CSM

As the article summarizes itself, “‘Survival’ values are waning and ‘self-expression’ values are gaining.” With wealth comes permissiveness, and arbitrary consequences, and thus a desire to be self-expressive instead of reality-conforming.

We might call that state of constant self-expression; it’s the opposite of survival logic. As Laura Wood states:

Their lack of thoughtfulness and their hair-trigger emotion are painful to behold. They suggest minds addled by texting and almost constant self-expression. To say that a woman’s dress may give the impression that she is promiscuous and ready for a casual encounter is not to say that most sexual assaults are a result of the woman’s behavior or that any sexual assault is only the result of the woman’s behavior. Nor is it to say that sexual assault is right.

The facts are:

1. Many women dress and act like what was once called a slut. They are not criticized at all. In fact, they are often complimented.
2. Few, if any, accused sexual assailants today are judged innocent because their victims dressed immodestly.
3. Most people don’t hold to the view that it is a woman’s behavior that causes rape.
4. Men react to the physical appearance of women and receive cues from women.

If all this is true, what are these women protesting? As I said, they are frightened. There is such a thing as rape, and they cannot process that reality. They have no way of understanding or making sense of it – and so they protest against it, hoping that outrage alone will make it go away. They want a world in which rape does not occur. Such a thing is not possible. However, there is a way to gain some measure of safety. A woman can protect herself against rape not by participating in protests, especially protests defending sluttiness, but by earning the protection of good men. Men protect women against men. The sensible path for a woman in a dangerous world – and the sensible path for women collectively – is to earn the protection of good men. Protection is not a right, but a privilege.

Women earn the protection of good men by dressing modestly, by recognizing the nature of masculinity, and by remaining faithful. Then their safety increases. – The Thinking Housewife

She describes the anti-Utopia: a society based not on regulating method, but on finding the right goals and values to produce positive end results.

You cannot force respect on people.

You need to build it into a system constructively, by forming bonds between the parts.

In the same way, you do not end war by declaring war=bad.

You realize you will never end war, but you can avoid wars but making strong underlying political systems.

In the same way, you can never end problems in society, but you can avoid most of them by designing a strong social order which rewards good behavior, and smites bad.

This is the opposite of our modern Utopia, and its sheer logicality explains why it is a rising concept as Utopia disintegrates around us.

Tags: crowdism, utilitarianism, utopia