Amerika

People in the West are starting to realize that we live in a bubble caused by our success and our poor choices in leadership in response to it. We replaced the kings, who led us in war and cultural events, with a managerial/administrative State based on the idea of equality so that it can herd us together toward ideological goals, presumably in our best interests.

This has created a wasteland of confusion. Government does the illogical, making a mess, and everyone works around it, which means that government is the main driver of events, supported by industry which fixes the mistakes of government. When government demands equality, industry offers a market for non-equality, because inequality is the state of nature and the only way human society can survive.

Because of this situation, Western people are fundamentally neurotic at this point in time. This is what causes us to be Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.):

They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies — who represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world’s population — are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures they’re outliers.

In one illustrative study from the 1966 book “The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception,” researchers found that U.S. college students perceive some visual illusions to a much greater degree than people from many other cultures, including the San foragers of the Kalahari. In fact, people from some cultures were completely unaffected by certain illusions. If such seemingly basic processes as visual perception can differ across cultures, says Henrich, it makes sense that others do, too.

In other words, we exist in a world that is at odds with the rest of the world, and it skews our perspective of basically everything. This is why Leftism has taken root here not as a simplistic form of government for simple people, but as a mania for self-destruction, because in our W.E.I.R.D. world social influences are more important than practical reality.

Getting over our W.E.I.R.D.-ness may require losing the “Democratic” aspect of the current West because that way, the basic assumptions of Leftism are not part of our de facto over-culture, and we can think clearly again not in the quasi-moral sense that Democracy uses to turn social opinion into policy, but in the realistic, results-based, time-proven way that works best for humanity wherever it is applied.

Tags: bubble, democratic, educated, industrialized, rich, W.E.I.R.D., western, western civilization