Amerika

To someone from a saner time, modern people would seem retarded. They are incapable of following even basic logic, view the world as visual categories of one dimension, and toddle around chasing trends and fleeing from controversy while trying to be edgy and compassionate at the same time.

In the eyes of a functional human being, modern humans would appear as the mass-produced product of an obedience factory determined by the lowest common denominator, namely whoever is offended, victimized, failing, damaged, defective, or simply resentful. They would probably back away slowly from us.

As Plato noted, the crisis of democracy is not so much the bad governance — although that is clear — but that it drives people insane through autodomestication. Democracy replaces nature; only those who flatter the herd survive; therefore, you get sociopathic sycophants motivated by greed and novelty.

We can understand this through another angle. “Work” is the technical term for moving objects according to the formula work equals force times distance. For us to function, we need to be moving things, not just shifting their positions while inertia carries us toward the brick wall that we know is ahead.

This does not mean “progress,” which has always been a euphemism for the destruction of hard necessary things by easy unnecessary ones. It means that we must be moving toward a goal, and this goal must be consistent with reality, or we dissipating energy while avoiding the need for a goal.

Work can be negative if the force and distance are not in the same direction, such as when we push a cart with broken wheels and it turns in a circle without going anywhere. Force, energy, and money by themselves are not sufficient as goals because they are not affirmative, ascendant directions.

By themselves, money and energy are static. They accumulate for their own purpose, which is to exist. They serve no goal until force intervenes and applies them toward that goal. When force and distance are at ninety degree angles, they cancel each other out.

This means that under democracy in the West we have been staying in stasis, and as a result, have achieved nothing other than moving in circles like a cart with a broken wheel. That means that over time, space for us to move has decreased into a repetitive cycle.

To make space, we need to have a goal and be moving toward it, at which point our range of motion increases and efficiency of our force over distance increases as well. We grow in quality instead of merely in quantity as we cycle around by repeating methods for which we have long forgotten the reason.

For a society to have a goal, it needs to have culture, and that requires a single ethnic group. With culture, it can have affirmative values, or things toward which it strives even if they will never be fully realized, something categorized as virtu:

In a speech he gave in December 1979 he dealt with the question of how a society could acquire and harness virtu, understood in Machiavelli’s sense of virtuous qualities such as pride, bravery, skill, forcefulness, and ruthlessness that enabled one to master a situation. Virtu was needed by a society in order to deal with the economic, social, cultural, political, and technological forces that were plunging it into the future, in the face of which the failure to act would result in its decline.

Rajaratnam noted that Ibn Khaldun’s key concept ‘asabiyya, the feeling of group solidarity, primarily among tribes, villages, and pioneer settlements, was what made nomadic society more resilient, tough, brave, and self-reliant in comparison with people who lived in cities. It was the binding ties of ‘asabiyya that enabled these nomads to conquer cities and form new dynasties. Rajaratnam’s insight led him to suggest that Ibn Khaldun’s ‘asabiyya was Machiavelli’s virtu.

On the other hand, it is possible to be physically close without having social contact. In this case, physical proximity coexists with social distance. Take, for example, two people crossing the road at a zebra crossing. They are strangers to each other even though they may be physically close. Their actions or behavior are not oriented towards each other and there is no social contact between them. Another example would be purchasing an item in the grocery store. There is physical proximity but the social contact is limited to a short monetary transaction.

People who are physically close without having social contact happens when culture dies. No one has anything in common, so we go from our jobs to shopping to our homes, then lock the doors and do our best to ignore the chaos raging outside.

When you have culture, shots ringing out in the night means that something is wrong and if everyone mobilizes, it can be fixed before it gets worse. Without culture, shots in the night means it is time to double-lock the door and turn up the television.

It has become brutally clear that democracy has entered its final stage. At first, democracy promises freedom and tolerance; as time goes on, it must defend itself, and becomes thoroughly repressive, with contested elections, censorship, deplatforming, and violent prole riots becoming the norm.

Already we can see the fracturing of democracy at its less-stable edges, where stolen elections are now common:

Guatemala’s highest court has suspended the release of official election results, granting a temporary injunction to 10 parties that challenged the results of the June 25 vote.

Essentially, the court wants to compare the tallies that were put into the electoral system with the ones from the polling places themselves to make sure they match. If necessary, the court said that it would order a new count of challenged ballots.

Constitutional lawyer Alejandro Balsells said a recount should be avoided for the good of the process. The temporarily formed panels that count the votes at each polling station on election day are the ones who count should matter.

Every American election since 2000 has been contested in some way, with accusations of vote fraud and manipulation being common. However, this tells us that the country is close to evenly divided, so much so that cheating becomes the “edge” a party might seek.

More importantly we do not see a resounding chorus of voices telling us that our elections are in fact fair and good. Most people refrain from commenting, but a large number of them consistently think some form of cheating is going on, and a small number think it has been going on for a long time.

As the old saying goes, statistics will fool you because they weight every vote equally, when in fact some people know more than others and therefore are more accurate. Those who are in the know are planning for a post-democracy future.

It makes it only too easy when we see how democracy has inverted itself and become an oppressive regime that is trying to control minds to keep people from noticing that democracy is dying:

In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from government censorship.

The judge’s injunction came in a lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana who alleged that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise.” The federal government, the lawsuit claimed, pressured social-media platforms to scrub away disfavored views about Covid-19 health policies, the origins of the pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election security and other sensitive topics.

“[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” wrote Judge Doughty. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

When we have national culture, we can agree that certain things are simply not fair play and do not deserve goodwill. America had a strong independent streak against censorship and self-censorship until political correctness hit.

Our lack of virtu means that all of our beliefs are negative. We fear things and run away from them. But what do we aspire to? Since our current methods are failing, but the system controls methods and therefore will not change, we have only fears because the goal will never change.

Some are beginning to think outside the box, aiming for functionalism or the idea that making things work is the highest morality. It is the next stage after “might is right,” generally paraphrased as “quality in reality is right.” Function is right; dysfunction is bad, evil, failure, etc.

As democracy winds down, people are realizing that it always was a negative system, defined by its opposition to hierarchy, most notably aristocracy. However, we are rediscovering aristocracy because it is the only way to maintain affirmative forward positive direction instead of getting enmired in negative moralism and ideology:

Deneen’s proposed solution to liberalism’s seemingly self-evident failures is an “aristopopulism” led by the newly-minted “self-conscious aristoi who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, and an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.”

Perhaps he overstates it: we need less securing of foundational goods, and more securing of functional order based in reality and maximizing quality of life. This goes against the quest of ideology, which is to try to make everyone equal out of fear of inequality, a phantom made of misplaced algebra.

Tags: aristopopulism, collapse, democracy, vote fraud