In your life, you will see many things live — and some things die. They will die from a number of different causes. It would be pointless to wish that this not happen to you, because it will, and because it is an important part of life. That does not make it more fun.
Consider a person infected with a fatal disease. Diseases are parasites — did you know that? — which take nutrients from the host and use it to fuel their reproductive process, at which they find a new host. It is no different than what a mosquito, flea or tapeworm does. All are parasites.
(Some parasites have even figured out how to turn the host against itself, in the case of cancers and auto-immune diseases like AIDS. This may have advantages in that these infections are nearly impossible to displace and spread silently, enabling the reproduction of the parasite.)
When a parasite kills its host, it is usually the result of the parasite having gone the way of yeast and reproduced excessively, thus the parasite dies with its host — but has reproduced, so other parasites are carrying on its message in the form of its DNA. Thus it is content to die, or at least cannot stop its own reproduction, and enters a terminal phase.
The victim takes time to die. Generally this is a cycle of staggered rises and falls, culminating in a big crash and a sudden, unpredictable exit. As the host sickens, it grows weak, but then uses its natural strength to fight back and rises again, but this guarantees a crash, because each time the host improves, so does the parasite.
Such situations are called death spirals because to win is to lose. If the patient gets healthier, the parasite gets healthier, and then the patient gets sicker; if the patient gets worse, the parasite also gets worse, but it is very hard to get to the point where the parasite is destroyed before the host is. This creates a Catch-22 situation.
Over time, the crashes may not increase in frequency so much as they will in intensity. The highs stay about the same, but the lows get lower. At some point, the body enters an unstable state where it is clear it will not extract itself, but might cruise at this level for some time. Randomly, usually at some inconvenient hour, one bodily system fails and starts a domino effect.
Humanity has a parasite. That parasite is our pretense, which says that we are all important, and we can be whatever we want to be, despite being limited in our abilities. It says that we do not need a natural order, formed of a human hierarchy in balance with nature, logic and the supernatural, but that instead we have an order of individuals. This notion flatters us and is socially popular, leading to a social takeover of our individual brains.
As this cresting wave of illusion — called “Crowdism,” for its collectivized individualistic nature — gains power, it throws civilizations into a death spiral. As they gain wealth and power, they gain more parasites, and those together form an echo chamber that amplifies their message, brainwashing more. And then the end is certain.
Leftism is a neurosis. Neurosis is a form of superstition. In superstition, people assign the wrong cause to an event. If it rains one day when people do a certain dance, that becomes the dance to invoke the rain. The superstition in Leftism is that success arises from universal inclusion.
Picture your typical small tribe or town. People are kept in line by rewards for doing good, and the threat of exclusion from a social group or society itself for doing bad. This contradicts the order before civilization, which was “everybody do whatever they want.”
Humans have an in-built engineering flaw: they see the world through their powerful brains, but in doing so, elevate themselves above reality. They share this viewpoint with other humans and, if left alone, will create a social construct of reality based on human desires, judgments and feelings based in the ego.
This creates conflict between the needs of society as an organic whole and the impulses of individuals. Eventually the individualists form a collective to demand “everybody do whatever they want” and create friction. Leftism occurs when the people back at home in armchairs decide that it is more important to eliminate conflict than resolve it.
The problem with this thinking is that it requires us to invert our method of perceiving the world. Instead of observing what is, and then constructing a thesis based on that, we must construct the socially-appropriate thesis and then look for data to support it — and exclude the rest. This simple idea breaks our thinking. This is parallel to our mental dysfunction of opting to eliminate conflict rather than achieve cooperative goals, which requires conflict with the in-built human engineering flaw (which the Greeks refer to as “hubris” and the Christians, “evil”).
Think of ancient examples of evil: Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden deciding that they want to be gods by eating the forbidden fruit, or Satan deciding to rebel against the order of God because it does not flatter Satan’s ego, or even the crowd before Pontius Pilate demanding the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a scapegoat. It is the same psychology, and the same pathology, in each case: the ego wants to be in control of reality.
Humans have a default type of entropy within us. Much as every object in the world seems to desire to return to a state of chaos, humans desire returning to the “everybody do whatever they want” that existed before civilization. However, they also want the benefits of civilization, so they must find a way to compel others to provide them.
They do this with guilt. Instead of using direct compulsion through threat of exclusion, they invert this process too, and create a fake positive reward for doing good that casts those who refuse it into a bad light. Sort of like asking people if they are “for” peace, and if they say no, saying “So why do you love war?”
These guilt-based philosophies work through the notion of using “false opposites.” A false opposite exists when a binary state is imposed on a more varied field of data. For example, if you want people to do something, you define compliance as “good” and by implication, through the converse principle, everything else becomes bad.
The classic false binary is egalitarianism. It sounds good: make everyone equal, which is another way of saying “accept everyone” without regard to their contribution. This makes it more efficient to not-contribute but reap benefits than to struggle to contribute, which adds an unrewarded burden.
Naturally the problem with this approach is that it removes any sense of cooperation. People are now acting as free agents against society itself. This requires society to bribe the to participate, which they then do with less zeal for accuracy, leading to higher costs and lower quality for everyone.
As time goes on, the society expands into a pyramid shape, with many people at the bottom who need to be bribed and a few at the top who try to keep things together. This creates a form of legal parasitism that weakens the most productive and expands the population of low contribution individuals.
The people who give in to this impulse constitute a motley lot of civilization-eroders. Con men, snake oil salesman, pornographers, criminals, perverts, drug addicts, prostitutes, personal injury lawyers, glad-handing priests, politicians, carnies, canny salesmen, grifters, image consultants, lawyers, Communists…
All of them preach a simple message: reality is not what it is. Instead, what matters is the human world of good feelings. If you feel good, it is good, and you can ignore the consequences tomorrow of what you do today. There is another way, other than reality, and it consists of social approval for what you do.
This is why Leftism is hard to unpack. Its root is egalitarianism, which is a collective philosophy based in individualism. That individualism creates conflict, which gives rise to a superstition of pacifism. That in turn leads to an obsessive, pathological mindset that tolerates no dissent and grows like a cancer because it is socially unpopular to oppose it.
The opposite of egalitarianism is an insistence on order, through hierarchy, standards/values, goals, and aesthetics. This allows us to construct a tree of beliefs that shows the difference between egalitarianism and realism.
Put it to a vote. The “wisdom of crowds” will prevail.
People are unequal. Only some will be able to make this decision. The rest will outnumber them and a poor decision will be made.
We can educate the poor and make them normal middle class citizens.
Ability is genetic in nature. Every person is competent for only certain roles. Advancing them above these creates incompetence and devalues the economy.
“What we need is a system…”
Systems presuppose that people are equal objects on which rules work equally. A better way is to choose the best people and put them in power, allowing them more leeway so that they are not constricted by a maze of rules.
This object or idea is the most popular/best-seller/voted-for, therefore the best.
Most people are self-deluding and not really thinking about the consequences of their decisions. Therefore, they make unthreatening (shallow) illusions popular.
As these brief examples illustrate, the gap between human intentions (and the individualistic ego) and what actually shakes out in reality is quite vast. We live in a world of illusion, a consensual reality formed of individual desires as to what “should” be true, but based in the ego and not reality, and for that reason, everything we do fails — it just takes centuries to see how vast the failure is.
An insightful author wrote a letter to the editor of an antiwork publication, Processed News, describing how the standard Left-influenced approach to reforming work is insufficient:
Too many groups in the past have been unable to move past the point PW is at now. Instead they’ve ended up liberal or doctrinaire or just burned-out. All the activism of the ’60s and ’70s has ended in apathy and disappointment with political movements that have assimilated to the mainstream.
This apathy, even though an obstacle to the goals of PW, is a valid feeling and we should accept it. Within the apathy is a potential for a genuinely radical position. That is, people are apathetic because they realize how much is wrong with society. Old political formulas aren’t good enough anymore. The potential is for this feeling to become a willingness to consider new alternatives, to question one’s stake in the system.
PW has done a good job of tapping into this feeling among office workers. But can this alienation be translated into a desire to resist social control and to work for something better? The issue of how to relate to the labor movement and unionism is a good example. Can unions address the alienation office workers feel today?
I don’t think so. Unions always assume that we accept our roles as workers. But we don’t! And that’s what PW has been pointing out. Even if the wages were better, we’d still hate office work.
But unions, by definition, limit their scope to the workplace and issues of workers. For those of us who’d like to see work itself redefined, to unionize is almost a contradiction in terms.
Is there an alternative? A way to move beyond the worker role, to address the socio-economic control that jobs exercise over our daily lives?
I emphasize the idea of daily life because I think we’ve been asked too often to give energy to movements on the basis of abstract or theoretical goals. We’re always talking about the “workplace” or the “voting booths” or even the “streets”. But these are abstract metaphors for political processes and not concrete situations in our daily lives. We may demonstrate for the human rights of people in a country we’ve never been to. But we often don’t even know the people who live in the apartment next door. This contradiction ultimately tends to negate our political work.
My point is that these abstract political arenas can never help us achieve our goals. Processes based on the use of power (that is, coercion), from the marketplace to the halls of Congress, are what creates alienation. We can’t use them to end alienation!
…We need to think about political change in a whole new way. We can’t accept issues in the terms that corporations define them. They want to talk about productivity and wages. But we’re concerned about the value of work and the quality of life. They want us to define our needs in terms of salaries and benefits. We want to meet human needs without money.
Our concerns today are not as workers or producers (which has always been the basic premise of the labor movement). We want freedom from work that is useless and alienating. But what forces us to remain workers is our role as consumers. Despite all the abundance and over-production of our economic system, we’re still forced to pay money for basic survival needs, as if these things were scarce. And as long as we need money to survive, we’re forced to sell our labor.
…But today, the corporations are determined to co-opt all our needs into the cash economy. If we don’t address these needs ourselves, they will soon have a price tag on them and we will be all the more dependent on the economy. Dropping out of the cash economy, its laws and its values, is a genuine act of resistance.
The whole thing is worth reading, but these excerpts provide the clearest insights. The Left-influenced mass culture tends to look toward making work better by passing more laws/regulations and by providing direct subsidies, with both efforts amounting to subsidies for the workers, at the expense of high overhead. Perhaps a more direct approach is needed.
Our entire way of life is inhuman and illogical. It is based on the idea that we can control people, or shape equal units into little droids that we command by our intentions, instead of looking at how people quality — moral, intellectual, character and inclinations — matters, and how our intentions are often unrealistic both as individuals (evil) and as groups (collective insanity).
Jobs are the effect; the cause is a civilization without purpose that is caught in the grips of dangerous illusions. These illusions arose because they flatter something within us that we want to give in to, because it is more mentally convenient, despite it contradicting many known aspects of reality.
Conservative antiwork activists tend to focus on this existential, or quality of life in the soul, aspect to modern life. It is soulless and soul-crushing. The herd rushes toward distractions, but is afraid to face the core problem, because it indicts our individualism which becomes selfishness and insanity in groups.
The old saying about putting the cart before the horse is one of those eternal human profundities that is so practically useful that its philosophical importance gets overlooked. When used correctly, a tool becomes an extension of the mind; when this does not happen, the tool becomes the master and the mind alters itself to balance.
This rule even applies to the mind itself. In theory, the mind is a tool for the survival of the organism and the experience of life. Both of these seem to be important, since even wild animals who fall into miserable circumstances seem to be able to will themselves to death.
However, the cart comes before the horse — and the tool becomes the master — if not explicitly resisted. Our minds favor stronger signals over weaker ones, and gravitate toward explanations instead of mysteries because mysteries are threats. This creates an inherent bias toward simpler and broader ideas over granular and open-ended ones.
One example of this concerns time. When an event is in the news, it seems like either the apocalypse of the gateway to Utopia, and not just because our journalists are rodents. Present things are fully accessible and comprehensible to our minds, and therefore, we prioritize the new over the old and the eternal.
As a side effect, this creates a type of paranoia: fear of risk amplified by a need to stay current. This manifests in an obsessive “fear of missing out” which reflects not an intensity, but underlying emptiness to life. When there are no signals stronger than what is present-tense but trivial, it is a sign that people have found few things of actual importance in life.
“FOMO is especially rampant in the millennial community because they see a peer achieving something they want, and somehow in their mind, that achievement means something is being ‘taken away’ from them,” said Darlene McLaughlin, M.D., assistant professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a psychiatry and behavioral health specialist with Texas A&M Physicians.
…In fact, recent studies have shown that FOMO is linked to feelings of dissatisfaction. “The problem with FOMO is the individuals it impacts are looking outward instead of inward,” McLaughlin said. “When you’re so tuned in to the ‘other,’ or the ‘better’ (in your mind), you lose your authentic sense of self. This constant fear of missing out means you are not participating as a real person in your own world.”
This mentality might be seen as a desire to be the “center of attention,” an idea which implies a supremacy of the social group. Whoever is receiving the attention is winning; whoever is not has been victimized and had that victory taken away from them. This mentality reflects the inability of people for whom little of actual importance exists to judge value and purpose on their own; instead, they defer to the group, having no experience with actual choice-making.
With this center of attention, the basis of collectivized individualism or Crowdism is born. People are no longer motivated by inner choices — duty, honor, pride, creativity, wisdom — but by what the rest of the herd is doing. For this reason, they are losing out if they do not get in there and force others to pay attention to them, which creates the stunts-based attention whoring that is the basis for radicalism and thus, liberalism itself.
The present-tense bias of our time reveals a disconnection from the inner world through which we notice the details and thus the whole “big picture” of our physical world. Our minds grasp what is easy, but like scapegoats or Utopias, these easy thoughts are a way of avoiding the necessary larger action, and by distracting us, ensure our failure.
When a civilization is new, it is formed by collaboration toward a goal, which enforces both hierarchy and quality standards. In such a civilization, people are known by their acts.
If that civilization survives, it then enters middle age. At this point, the goal is to be good at what it already is, and people are rewarded for allegiance and obedience rather than initiative.
After that, every human civilization so far created has entered old age. There, the goal is to participate only, or to do what others tell you to do and avoid offending taboo. This rewards people for obliviousness to results.
Sane people consider civilization survival the question of human philosophy. Since most civilizations fail, there is something not-obvious about how to avoid failing and, conversely, the way to failure looks like the way to success.
Civilization itself works like a kind of Ponzi scheme. The more people are created, the more the existing things that people own are worth, and so civilizations tend to grow through internal encouragement. But with that, a focus on quality is lost, and is replaced by the idea of mass manipulation, or convincing many equal people to swarm toward a goal through emotional fears and desires.
At that point, it becomes important to keep the group together because this is a prerequisite for it acting as a swarm. This is where the kindergarten teacher logic comes out: what is most important is that everyone gets along, which requires beating back conflict and enforcing identical participation in activities designed around an average. This is the utilitarian, managerial and “nanny” state that ushers itself into extinction.
From this comes the mythos of control, which is that it is more important to defend the power structure than to ensure that its authority is directed at reasonable ends. That amplifies an ancient monkey-level fear in humanity, which is of the group turning on the individual.
Out of that fear comes the human desire for “we are all one” thinking, which is a type of pacifism designed to appease the rest of the troupe of simians by extending universal inclusion in exchange for non-aggression. Instead of fighting internally to create a hierarchy, this group pathology aims to simply accept everyone.
What it denies is the need for internal conflict to keep civilizations in their early and early middle stages. With constant internal conflict, the civilization is constantly rediscovering its roots and goals, and pushing the more competent above the rest. Without it, it slides into senescence.
“We are all one” sounds like peace but in fact it is war against the quality of the civilization, which results in its slow decay. The death spiral is caused by each individual deciding to take advantage of the situation and pass the disaster on to the next generation.
There is great social fear of not joining the “we are all one” surge. It is effective salesmanship to insist that all people are accepted, which is what equality actually means: equal acceptance. It is also a powerful manipulation tool because it projects all conflict as outside of the group, which enables the group to feel like it is perfect in its current state.
No one seems to ask the vital question, which is “One what?” Are we all one civilization, species, or merely united in fear of risk and possible personal insufficiency? This remains a mystery because the we-are-all-one people do not want to delve into such divisive topics.
In the meantime, we-are-all-one serves the same purpose as pro forma tasks at a job. If you do those, you will be promoted, even if you fail to achieve anything of real-world, practical and goal-oriented value. The higher-ups like those who are obedient more than those who are effective but might be a threat.
In this way, the Ponzi scheme of civilization beats itself to death once it gets powerful enough to have people who are not ruling toward a goal, but in maintenance of the status quo through pacifism. Like most human errors, it looks innocent and positive at first, and only far later does its fatal nature emerge.
From an in-depth look at runaway universalism:
In most societies across the world (i.e., clannish ones), there are weak and highly conditional attitudes towards reciprocity. The primary targets of altruism are kin. Prosociality is maintained through various forms of social honor and shame or at worst, fear of reprisal from the aggrieved or by the state. Dealings between non-kin typically take place warily and with many measures to ensure honesty by all participants. Trust is very low and is not given freely.
By contrast, NW Europeans have evolved a sense of reciprocal altruism and can deal much more readily with non-related individuals. Trust is extended. The other party is presumed to act honestly. Indeed, favors will be extended to others because the recipient may one day return the favor (or at the very least, the helping individual may earn a reputation for generosity that may parlay into favors from others).
…Having a sense of reciprocal altruism (which actively seeks targets with which to trade favors) – along with a suite of other traits that co-evolved with this (such as a sense of fairness and a belief in the equality of all in-group members) – there is little to prevent extending the (soft) cognitive barrier those presently in an outgroup when new information serves to humanize this outgroup (by appealing to affective empathy). And since no outgroup is really any different from any other (being effectively equally unrelated), there’s nothing to stop this process from repeating once new outgroups become humanized. Runaway universalism was thus inevitable.
Universalism, or the idea that every person is equal and therefore the same methods can be used on all people, seems like it would arise from this reciprocal altruism turned into promiscuous altruism. However, there is an elephant in the room.
All human civilizations so far have gone out after achieving success. With this success came primary factors of Progress, like industry and universalism. Secondary factors like diversity and instability were both symptoms and direct causes of the disintegration.
Universalism arises from socializing. When you hang out with other people, the correct way to make them happy is to emphasize a sense of group togetherness. This requires including all of these people without looking too deeply into their failings. This is why successful societies develop universalism: what we call bourgeois values are in fact commercial values, which are social values, and demand equal inclusion which produces universalism.
From this comes the altruism we see, because altruism is a virtue signal for universalism.
Not to ruin an excellent analysis by Jayman, but if we look at the psychology involved, we can see he has the causality backward. The societies that succeed adopt a commercial/social mentality and it is what kills them. As we are starting to see, Progress and formalization are a death-trap, and these arise from the same impulse.
Unsurprisingly it also brings altruistic universalism that pervasively infiltrates our minds, starting with the smartest. This explains why civilizations succeed and then self-destruct, not the other way around.
If you had to encapsulate your learning in a short text, such as one that might fit on a 3×5 card, what highest level of understanding would you communicate there?
To my mind, something like this:
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Notions like pacifism and equality make us feel good because we personally are not at risk. When many feel good together, it creates a self-reinforcing and -amplifying collective mania. This then creates a society which is toxic, in that its mentality spreads by contact and people are forced to be immersed in it, because it is obsessively reality-denying and makes all other choices a means to that end. This creates endless unintended consequences that are prompted denied.
Our modern world is toxic. If you want to know why people are manic about wanting to send you to school or a job for as close to twelve hours a day as possible, this is it: they want you to absorb the toxic propaganda from others. Misery loves company, and people are at some level aware that our civilization is built on lies, but to confront those lies means to realize how much of their own time is wasted, so they would rather spread the lies; this is the path of least resistance.
The message is lost in translation because of our tendency to view our mental models of reality as more real than reality. This is not done deliberately, but occurs because we rely on those mental representations and work our thinking process on them. This in turn creates a world in our head which is perfectly logically sound and consistent among its own parts, but may be improperly “sampled” or perceived from reality. We have a tendency to make mental models which are convenient to remember and manipulate, but this also makes them less accurate and therefore, three or four calculations down the line, error has crept into our thinking in a non-trivial amount.
The problem with communicating this message is that we have a tendency to put it into handy mental containers like politics and science. This zooms in on the details, but loses the big picture, and then because the focus is on the details, our mental model of the larger picture becomes distorted. This is identical to the process by which we arrived at this confusion in the first place, which is that we adapt our model of reality to what is easy for us, instead of adapting our thinking to what is real. Only some can do this, and only with self-discipline.
“But what if we created a system to force everyone to think intelligently…”
There you go again. Always thinking in terms of how to control others and reality. Instead, choose those who think intelligently and let them run the show.
“The essence of our quest is this singular political or religious command…”
There is only one command: adapt to reality. When you put that into an ideology or something that behaves like one, you have already gone down the path that leads to where we are now.
“I don’t see why you are so discontented. I have a good life…”
You are rationalizing. We can always find the best version of bad in a bad situation, but that does not take away from the fact that the situation is moribund and thus, savages our souls.
“The real problem is that we use language, symbols and logic…”
There you go again. If the problem is denial of reality, focusing on the means used to deny reality is to avoid the actual problem: the pretense and hubris that the world adapts to our minds, not the other way around!
“What we have to do is motivate people. That requires an ideology…”
You are right, but also wrong. When you adopt an ideology, the message gets diluted, and so you achieve victory in a social sense but not in terms of solving the problem, and so you become what you fight against.
A knotty problem this is, indeed. This is why all successful ventures begin with a strong hierarchy that puts those with the best leadership skills — in civilization this is generally moral character and tendency toward reverent excellence — on top and sorts out everyone else according to what role they serve best. To do this requires crushing the dominant illusion of our time, the Enlightenment and the last four thousand years: equality.
Most people who encounter this blog are confused by its mild-mannered appearance. This occurs because our writers tend to believe in using the most natural, gentlest and sanest methods possible. However, this does not mean we are not extremists — or something even better: realists.
A realist lives in a constant state of the Zen master slap that forces us to recognize that reality is indeed real, and that our continued consciousness — the inner world in which all of our thoughts, judgments and feelings exist — requires us to manage physical reality through an intangible knowledge of how reality as a whole works. That alone is too complex for ninety-nine out of one hundred people.
Against this, the realist can only summon discoveries, or events of noticing what is true in reality and how it applies to how we plan our future actions. What thwarts this is the usual human tendency to use philosophy as a categorical weapon: by giving an idea a name, and making its contents something that appeals to people as a scapegoat, it can become popular and then something can be done. But in the process, this adulterates the idea.
And so, this blog floats in a sea of people gaining money and popularity for creating popular fictions. For example, the white nationalist pitches racial exclusion and believes everything else will be just fine; the Leftist preaches equality and imagines a Utopia achieved through removal of causes for conflict. All of these are human notions where the underlying meaning has been altered by the desire to communicate and be popular.
Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDARE, wrote about his political quest (via Outside In):
So I said, look, I’m involved in an anti-Communist faction in journalism and we’re going to lose. I think there’s a real serious possibility that we’re all going to end up in a Gulag.
And, besides that, it’s crippling to our careers.
This leads anyone who is not Left-aligned to ask themselves the question: what is the root of my outlook?
For some, it is race; for others, anti-communism; for some others, like Michel Houellebecq, it is the simple recognition that liberal — egalitarian — ideas do not work and because they are paradoxical, create human disasters in their wake.
At this blog, we are looking at an even more basic level: how to save civilization from self-destruction, because all civilizations so far have self-destructed. That means that we (humans) do not yet have our design for civilization correct, or perhaps there is some flaw in the human design.
If we combat this flaw, we can have an enduring and thriving civilization, and gradually remove from our genetic profile the tendency toward whatever illusion causes us to self-destruct. If we do not, we face a future of permanent Brazil 2.0 status: a disorganized society where our good acts go ignored and nothing we does has permanence.
What opposes us is social practicality:
Maggy was a Canadian and wasn’t particularly political. She listened to this and said she’d not thought about it before, but, now that I’d explained it, she could see it was true.
So, she asked with female practicality, why didn’t I change sides?
Human societies unravel because what is socially successful is the opposite of what must be done. Illusions are popular with groups, and individuals are in ninety-nine out of one hundred cases not looking at the consequences of potential actions over time, but at individual emotions, desires, feelings and judgments.
How many times have you heard “I’m sick of…” or “I want…” or “What matters to me is…” when talking about some issue or another? The pathology of individualism has people value what they believe they want right now over the consequences of that action in reality.
Amerika the blog is dedicated to the idea of avoiding civilization collapse, starting in America. Here, a thriving nation has been replaced by a multicultural zombie apocalypse that has no culture, no values and increasingly, no competence. We call that “Amerika” and it is a replacement for the America that did great things in the past.
Avoiding decline is easy: find the actions based on illusions, and stop doing them. With very few exceptions, popular human thinkers are those who distract from this logical and evident truth, because people want to believe that nothing is wrong and they can keep pursuing selfish ends at the expense of self-interest, which includes having a thriving civilization.
For this reason, you will note little support for Amerika on the Right. People fear our message, which is about half old school religion, and a quarter Nietzsche with maybe another quarter for a Deep Ecology style idea of human coexistence with through conservation of nature. They want simple “truths”: scapegoat the Negroes, Jews or bankers; restore popular democracy; use libertarianism as orthodoxy.
In order to pursue those narrow beliefs, they must embrace a fatalistic outlook. Civilization has failed, so prepare for the end, which usually involves activities that make you feel good while ignoring how easily this can be fixed.
The goal of any sane person is to restore the type of strong moral and intellectual people that we had in the age of Aristotle and Plato, or maybe even before, while finding a way to use our technology responsibly and conserve half of earth for nature so that its ecosystems are preserved. That is sanity; everything else is distraction, deflection, excuse-making and rationalization!
And so, the paradox is revealed. A gentle common-sense and realistic approach rapidly becomes radical not because it is extremist, but because the forces of civilization decay — individualism, Crowdism, Leftism — are so extremist. Their acts are destroying us, and to undo them is both as normal as good hygiene and as radical as any idea that humans have ever acknowledged.
A recent article at the unironically named Man Repeller covers the history of the “midi” skirt, which many of us have never heard of. It contrasts the mini-skirt and is more like a normal calf-length dress.
But, long ago, since someone found the 1960s miniskirts to be crass and immoral, and pushed the midi hard instead, the article reframes history as a social justice issue: the struggle of women to, er, find miniskirts in every store. It follows the usual French Revolution narrative:
Actual boycotts erupted and soon newspapers were calling it a “hemline war.” The length of women’s skirts became a feminist issue: how dare anyone tell them how to dress? How dare a man define decency?
Rags, a counterculture fashion magazine out of San Francisco, called the push of the midi a conspiracy in a 1970 exposé entitled, “Fashion Fascism: The Politics of Midi.”
By 1974, the forced resurgence of the midi was proclaimed a failure. The New York Times reported that “women stayed away in droves, forcing several couture houses and small manufacturers into bankruptcy and the apparel industry into a tailspin.”
In other words, some people having an unpleasant time of life scapegoated the shocking condition that there were any limits on their personal autonomy. They see limits as a personal affront, or a criticism of themselves, much as they see life itself as an affront because it does not do exactly what they want it to.
This human fantasy begins with the idea that the person having the fantasy is perfect or at least, does not need to change at all to adapt to reality or even confront their own self-discipline problems. Rather, they assume that they are perfect and, as in all fantasies, good things come to them without effort or change.
That is the essence of fantasy: reality is inverted. Instead of being a nobody, they become the focus of the fantasy and the center of attention. Other people who are famous or important come to them, instead of the other way around; perfection is redefined in their image, instead of the reality of their form being an inferior variant of human perfection.
In human minds, this kind of fantasy narrative is the norm through daydreams and sexual fantasies and escapist notions. The average person barely interacts with reality at all on an analytical level. Their job tasks are simple and repetitive, and everything else they must do to survive in life consists of ordering people around. Tell them what you want at the restaurant, choose the products at the grocery store, yell at the lazy service person or flatter the customer. In this world, individual fantasy and group behavior overlap because they are composed of the same thing, which is the idea of personal authority asserted through control as a means of reducing risk and the personal affront of otherwise ambiguous reality.
For this reason, attempts to move aside the miniskirt met with rage. Not just consumer revolt, but rage as if a moral transgression had been committed. The attempts to limit the miniskirt threatened to invert the fantasy, or remove that focus on the self at the center of all things and replace it with the more complex calculus of the relationship between the individual, civilization and world. On that level, one needs to think about principle, consequences, responsibility and the like, where in the me-at-the-center-of-the-universe fantasy, all that one needs to think about is — as when ordering at a restaurant or store — personal desires, which are inevitably used as a means to calm, placate and make confident the self.
Through this neurotic process, “I” becomes “we.” A group of neurotics, each personally offended and determined to strike back for entirely personal reasons, joins together because these individualist reasons overlap in a single task: tear down the affront to the illusion of personal perfection. This is how abstractions, universals and ideals become corrupt. Instead of operating on the level of principle, they symbolize all of us through a single mystical icon of the human individual. That in turn becomes our focus, making us robotic and monomaniacal.
That, in turn, leads to the founding idea of Leftism:
If the midi debacle of 1970 achieved anything, it proved that even the most influential voices can’t sway the public if they don’t want to be swayed.
Good news: trends and progress and freedom lie in the hands of the collective.
Ah, the collective. If we are to assume that we as individuals are good, we need to assume the same of others, or we risk disturbing our fantasy by having standards — and those can be used to judge us, or even worse rank us, so they crush the suspension of disbelief required for us to find our fantasy plausible. Instead we choose to validate everyone, and have no standards, and use that group as an example of “virtue” because it does what we want, at least for now.
The West degenerates anywhere the collective is active. In fact, for several thousand years, the collective has been gaining momentum. But it is essential to remember what is at the core of the collective, which is the individual. The individual wants to feel safe from harm, and to make life something it can control. From that desire we get both rebellion and tyranny.
People fear the ambiguity in life, so they try to control it by putting it into a form that the human brain finds safe. This is like a giant grid of identical boxes covered in warning labels where all food and drink are medically approved and come in hermetically-sealed containers. In their fear, the herd sucks the joy out of life. But they do it as individuals, acting as a group only from mutual convenience.
That is no basis for a society, and it explains our steady decline from perhaps the world’s most excellent society to a plastic trash consumer wasteland littered with broken dreams. But at least we — I mean, “I” — have miniskirts.
Exterminate all rational thought.1
Wherever human society goes, it creates the seeds of its own destruction. I posit that this occurs as a result of the increasing formalization of organization, meaning that instead of leaving choices to humans alone on the basis of their judgment alone, rules and structures are written down and enforced in an effort to perfect a process and also make it easy for a person of average ability. This explains why every human civilization so far has failed at the height of its power.
Formal order, or that which involves rules and procedures instead of generalized goals with latitude for the individual to succeed or fail much as they do under Darwinian nature, creates dark organization through the following methods:
- Absolutism. Rights and other one-way measures of authority take the place of choosing to approve or disapprove of actions on the basis of their likelihood of achieving the goal. In this way, authority takes the place of reality, much as in civilization social pressures replace reality as well. Both of these are subsets of the general pattern of the human ego replacing reality, and demanding that others acknowledge its reality as a means of denying possibly unpleasant aspects of existence.
- Selection bias.
- People: formal organizations select people who seek power or wealth for their own sake. Since formal organizations replace reality-based methods of selecting success, those who fulfill the needs of the formalized process are rewarded. This is simpler than making things simply work, which attracts both the less able and drives away the more able who find it tedious.
- Facts: formal organizations create a process of rationalism, or searching for some answer that fulfills a predefined objective. This objective occurs independent of the whole, or on the level of detail, which filters out noticing of that which clashes with what is being done at a lower level, which means that people robotically apply procedure to detail, and that higher-ups never hear about the inadequacies of their models.
- Careerism. Formal organizations reward doing what those above demand in preference to achieving a complete task in its own right. As a result, those who succeed are not the competent but the socially-competent, and people are driven by fear of not meeting requirements, not failing in their task. The person who produces irrelevant or wrong results which fulfill the needs of the process will be rewarded over the one who notices that something is amiss in the mental model being used, or achieves the task without doing all of the steps that please higher-ups.
- Subsets. By the nature of formalization itself, wider questions are reduced to pre-defined narrower ones. This both enables the process to work through deconstruction, or dividing big questions into many smaller ones, and through use of average people, who can obey recipes and rules but not (perhaps) ascertain what is needed and critically assess it on their own. The result is that the lost data becomes a “conspiracy of details” which although small fractions at each part of the process add up to a much larger amount on the level of the whole.
If you wonder why civilization always fails, it is because it its own worst enemy: the process of civilizing, when not stopped before it becomes formalization for its own sake, produces robotic people who are masters of details and oblivious to reality and the whole question of each task.
This manifests most in the workplace and school, but also undermines the social process. Instead of the role of being a good friend, people seek others who flatter them and meet their personal needs for objects such as people to engage in social activities with. This reverses selection for the best people, and instead creates a need for obedient ones who do not care about the consequences of their actions.
As such, formalization is a removal of responsibility. Instead of being accountable for end results, people are assessed by the fulfillment of tasks designed artificially: doing their work on homework assignments, filling out the right paperwork, saying the right thing in a political speech or social engagement.
Formalization rewards lowercase-c conservatism, or conformity to process, past successes and the opinions of others. Someone who does a task in a different way is at risk even if he succeeds, but someone who follows the process will be rewarded even if she fails.
It has long been clear to me that human “best intentions” are the cause of the decline of complex societies. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as they say, and our best intentions have us find a right way to do things, then write it down, and then to control others in order to force them to follow this one right way. From that comes a form of internal entropy, division and eventually, mediocrity and doom.
1 — William S. Burroughs, as cited in the movie Naked Lunch and derived from his early works.