Amerika

Normies like symbolic emotional acts, not realistic solutions. Their sole goal is to manage their own mental state. They want to “do something” that “feels” like it solves some problem, even if not the problem that they need to solve. That way, they can go back to the sleep of interpersonal drama and desires that animates most people.

Their ultimate unconscious goal is control over what we cannot control. To be mortal is to be a cork adrift in a tempestuous ocean, with little control over its destination much less its survival. Even if our control is illusory, it “feels” better than admitting that most of life is a mystery that is beyond our influence.

Humans form little social clusters based on this desire for control, and they quickly become a collective, but what unites them is individualism: me first, reality later. Naturally because their belief is conjectural, they must retaliate against others who do not agree like an unstable tyrant suppresses dissent.

This means that these beliefs are enforced through social means like bullying, passive aggression, posturing, and peer pressure. The group removes the need of the individual to be ashamed of denying obvious reality, but this means anyone not in the group must be shamed, guilted, and clobbered if possible.

As we can see through the example of conspicuous consumption, people seek to compete on a social level and see reality beyond the human sphere as secondary to that:

“The desire to display or be seen with these products is triggered by an interaction between environmental conditions and one’s evolved biology,” said Swaffield, the study’s principal investigator. “When one is seen owning or using these products, a message or signal is sent to onlookers. These messages might signal that one has wealth, physical power, or social status.”

Swaffield explained that prior studies have correlated mild environmental harshness with increases in desire for signaling products. However, as shown in this study, as financial and physical safety conditions become acute, the desire for signaling products decreases.

What is also interesting, he said, is that there was minimal change in the desire for signaling products when participants were exposed to safe social and harsh social environmental conditions.

Conspicuous consumption was not affected so much by harsh environmental conditions as it was by safe social conditions. When people feel stable, they move up Mazlow’s pyramid toward needing social power and recognition by others. Once the lower conditions like food, water, and shelter are met, people level up and find they have new needs.

This means that people will act based on how safe they feel in a social context, and the safer they feel, the more they will agitate for power. Perhaps a species with an ancestral memory of once being prey for sabre-toothed tigers will never quite be able to adapt to safe and comfortable living.

A quick note on how markets work: consumers offer demand, markets try to match it, and whatever works the best persists, sort of like in natural selection. However, this does not occur in an idealized or universal sense; the demands that the consumers have may not reflect what one might expect!

For example, consider the paradox of cheap jeans:

Cheap clothes have outperformed more expensive garments in durability testing conducted for the discount fashion industry.

The University of Leeds has worked with retailer Primark to test items such as jeans and T-shirts to set “standards” on how long clothing should last.

The university’s school of design assessed 65 products, and found a £15 pair of women’s jeans to be more durable than their £150 equivalent.

People who are buying luxury jeans do not need them to be durable; these are clothes for going out and being seen. People buying cheap jeans are looking for something that will last in a work environment or as a primary article of clothing. If those fall apart, they will not buy the brand again, where the less-worn luxury jeans have no such problem.

In other words, once you get the functional jeans out of the way, you can move on to the conspicuous consumption jeans.

This means that herds choose badly because their members will compete with each other for social status that is unrelated to actual need. In a committee, each member speaks up in order to be heard and remembered, not to solve problems so effectively that the committee should disband.

Consequently when a nation gets into trouble, people ignore the environmental risk (in this context, that means real-world threats surrounding the organism) and focus on the social risk. The social risk involves noticing that the emperor has no new clothes, so people go into denial… and vote harder for more of the same.

People always seek control over what we cannot control and ignore what we can do to improve situations we cannot fully control. Symbolism and emotion are linked because symbols of control over what we cannot really control make people feel empowered in an ironist contrarian context.

Going outside the symbols — no one gets punished for doing what everyone else is doing, but anyone who does something different and fails risks blame — requires people to deny social risk in favor of environmental risk, but humans are not wired to do this and therefore, it makes them feel bad.

Those who want to succeed socially will rationalize whatever is currently existing as what they want, and similarly rationalize what they want as a variant of what the herd approves of already. This creates a drive to get far from reality into what people desire because they cannot (rightfully, sanely, realistically) have it (hubris).

The Left reveals how much it is motivated by hatred of those who may not be participating in its delusions, since without mass conformity its ideals cannot be reified a.k.a. enforced as social reality through peer pressure. While this pathology is dysfunctional, it merely extends normal behavior to a pathological level.

Tags: conspicuous consumption, crowdism, rationalization