How conservatives differ from liberals

May 20th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
14 comments

northern_lights_over_restful_fjordIn 1789, a movement was launched within the West to destroy the West. This ideology was designed not to cause an effect in the world, but to cause an effect in the mind, so that those who adopted it could pretend they were doing good things and living a great life while in fact they were conspiring to destroy the society that nurtured them.

This ideology, which we call leftism, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, anarchism, communism or even liberal democracy (these are all degrees of the same idea), unites people based on a common interest in selfishness and a lack of common standards that might hold back their selfishness. Its ultimate idea is egalitarianism, or people being “equal,” an ill-defined term which leads naturally to its next demand, “pluralism,” which is a demand for non-judgment of their unrealistic ideas so that they can be equal in reality despite being unequal mentally.

The power of this ideology is that it spreads through a social virus, which is that people want to be seen as “nice” by others. The best way to do this is to be self-effacing, or even better, altruistic; this is an active way of being non-aggressive, or smiling in submission to others. You claim you’re harmless, and yet at the same time, you advance your objectives by making people like you, thus more willing to help you.

When one person identifies something as a “nice” idea, they’ve taken the initiative. Now everyone else must conform, or they get tagged as being not-nice, because people usually assume the term is right before assessing it. This linguistic and social trick is how most societies unravel, because once a few people start down the leftist path, others feel obligated to follow.

Naturally, these newcomers haven’t really thought out their actions. They just want to be part of the group! Unfortunately for all of us, they’ve taking on ideas that reverse cognition from cause-effect to appearance-effect, and also, have started accepting group “opinion” as more important than their own souls. This amounts to a mental disorder, but it can be cured.

The cure isn’t easy however. The primary problem is that leftists, because their war is against reality itself, start by changing the definitions of common words, and creating “talking points” and “issues” that are unrelated to reality, but which they demand must be debated because… because leftists care about them. As a result, extracting someone from the neurotic zombie hypnosis of liberalism requires first showing them how conservatism is different.

This distills down to a few basic differences:

Conservatives don’t trust coercive social order. When a man cuts your hair, or fixes your car, there needs to be some force that keeps him from screwing it up. After all, there are thousands of little shortcuts he could make that you might not discover in time to correctly blame him. He could slit your neck with that razor, or slash your brake line. How to stop him from doing that? The liberal answer is to have coercive order: (1) police to arrest him and courts to try him; (2) other people to scorn and boycott him; (3) a culture of guilt to brand him an outsider, ostracize him, and choke off his business. What do these have in common? They are all threats. They are necessary, but they are not the whole answer. A conservative sees these as incomplete, because there’s no positive motivation for these people to do a good job. A conservative’s answer is that we need a positive motivation, like a feeling we’re on the same team and share the same values, for the good people; for bad people, we need negative action like police and jails not to deter them from doing a bad job, but to filter them out of society. They’re broken animals and bad people and need to go away from good people, so that we don’t let bad destroy good. Good is always more important than bad. As the “broken windows” theory shows us, you can pollute a good environment with relatively small numbers of bad people. Thus if you want your society to survive, you want to separate the good from the bad and keep them separate.

We recognize that popularity is not reality. Most people do their learning through social interaction. They talk to others, figure out the gist of a situation, then go into it knowing that if they get in trouble they can ask others. The problem is that this makes them dependent on socialization to find their way through life. Soon they have deferred entirely to the judgment not of others, but of the perceived group. This leads to a group that manipulates itself based on whatever opinions people have at the moment. These tend to be negative, since only a reaction to a victimization is going to motivate a group. Either way, the group has abandoned the principle of looking to reality, comparing our desired result to results of actions in the past, and then selecting the action that got the results closest to what is desired. Instead, you get backward thinking, which consists of thinking of what is desired, finding something the group will like that corresponds to the effects intended, and then using that to justify actions which will not result in those effects, then lying about it or blaming others when it fails. Groupthink is not just a temporary phenomenon, but can be a state of mind.

Humanity’s problem is stupidity and moral cowardice, not institutions. The conventional wisdom among the oversocialized is that all people are basically good, and “therefore” our problems lie in unequal treatment by leadership or social institutions. The more plausible reality is that our institutions are shaped by what is expected from them, and when enough people are inattentive, oblivious, thoughtless, in a stupor, stupid, deceptive, criminal, etc., institutions become ineffective or corrupt. Instead of trying to find others to blame for our problems, we should look toward the people around us and select those that do not have these negative traits to be our leaders. An institution, composed of rules and procedures, cannot compensate for the bad judgment of its workers and it cannot fix the bad intent of the people it’s trying to manage. Our institutions reflect us, and they also induce us to rely on them, which incentivizes us to stop paying attention to our own behavior. We should instead focus on making each person behave well, such that institutions can work, and so that society does not have a high degree of internal friction which makes it self-destruction.

Conservatives believe each should reap what he or she sows. In the conservative worldview, our spirits are shaped by our discipline in studying our world, and responding to it. If we respond with reasonable actions, we should get reasonable results on the whole, and thus move ahead; if we respond irrationally or with bad faith, we should get bad results, and thus move downward. This is the same principle behind the scientific method, natural selection and even religious selection of the righteous, which holds that we pick those who have done good works by studying the world and responding to it intelligently. This is different from the “work hard” doctrine of our modern time, which believes that good little slaves should be advanced for their loyalty. The conservative view rewards effectiveness, and measures consequences not intentions. It is both a negative, in that it suggests punishment for the bad, and a positive, in that it espouses proportional reward for the good. With this system of incentive in place, we gradually discipline ourselves and squeeze out the bad people, who need to go to failing societies where such behaviors are tolerated.

The above are foreign, alien and even shocking to liberals. They exist in a worldview where there is one right Ideology which leads to Progress, and society should as a group replace institutions with those that impose this Ideology, based in egalitarianism, on the population to move them toward a new Utopia. The problem with this is that it’s entirely external, and doesn’t take into account people making their own choices and advancing as a result, but instead tries to advance them merely through ideology. However, for liberals to understand conservative, working their way past these major points will bring them the clarity they need to understand the rest of the conservative canon.

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Groups

May 18th, 2013
by Ted Swanson.
13 comments

political_groupsAll my life I have been confused by “groups.” How does one form a “group?” What motivates people to form groups? When is a group officially a “group?” What do groups do? When I was a kid I assumed this would all make sense when I was grown up, but my mind still reels.

They say that the Eskimos have many different words for snow; the modern West might be in the same situation with the word “group.” There are organizations, boards, committees, institutes, foundations, assemblies, councils, bodies, companies, leagues, societies, and so on. Where does one group end and another begin?

A tribe, a battalion, a posse, the cavemen hunting a wooly mammoth, even a country that defines itself by a border is still on a human scale. You were in that group either by birthright or in order to accomplish a goal by playing a role amongst your equals. There was most likely something along the lines of an initiation, oath or pact.

However, things become monstrous when the group grows nebulous like the Hydra. These groups are not exclusive, but inclusive, and the goal of the group is merely to perpetuate itself. A person might join a group like this so that they can include it on their résumé.

The group grows “arms” or subsidiaries and adjuncts; there are oversight councils, subcommittees, “watchdog groups,” and review boards. It is akin to the assignment notebook for the assignment notebook. The group was not able to keep itself in check; therefore we have created another group with the express purpose of keeping an eye on the original group. There are so many checks and balances perhaps we need a check and balance hedged against the checks and balances.

Groups inevitably have vague names and/or vague mission statements: The Research Institute of Policy Research, The National Foundation of America, The Human Council, The Society of Women Citizens, The Organization of Non-Profit Organizations, The Decision Making Review Board, and The Ministry of Silly Walks.

What do these groups do? Well, they get together and have meetings. They elect each other to various positions within the group. They work with other groups. They raise money and “raise awareness.” They give money to some people and receive money from other people. They advise and they are advised. They read reports. They look at pieces of paper with statistics and data. They prepare reports with their own statistics and data. They distribute information, give grants, shake hands, and smile for the camera.

I now call to order The International Council of Humans. Since we last met The International Council of Humans has taken great strides to raise awareness in the international community of our mission. I am pleased to announce our new collaboration with The Society of Women Citizens. Women are humans and citizens are also humans, therefore it is a natural alliance with The International Council of Humans. The motto of The Society of Women Citizens is “Not all citizens are women, but all women are citizens.” This is a motto we officially endorse. To this I might add that not all humans are women, but all citizens are human, and some humans are both citizens and women.

We shall endeavor to work with The Society of Women Citizens by creating a special committee comprised of members from our group and from theirs. We will gather data and create reports to be distributed amongst other groups so that they may better understand the status of whatever the report may pertain to. It is my hope that this alliance will only strengthen our reputation as an authority in our particular field of expertise.

The bureaucracy’s strength is in its ability to replicate itself. But therein is also its weakness. If something becomes stretched thin, it is all the weaker at any one point. Through sheer use of synonyms, repetition, and vague language one sees clearly that there is no substance underneath. It is akin to incantation or sorcery.

Let us understand the bureaucratic structure for what it is. This is an excerpt from a real newsletter I have on my desk. I have taken out the names for anonymity and it conveniently reveals itself as the fluff that it is.

Grant from the X Foundation, a component fund of the Y Foundation. Shortly after Person A, our newest board member, attended her first board meeting last December, she arranged a meeting on our behalf with Person B, president of the Y Foundation. The Y Foundation staff members, with their deep commitment to the future of Z, were glad to learn more about M and its services. This meeting quickly resulted in a visit to M in late December by Person B and Person Q, the foundation’s vice president for grant making and community initiatives. During the visit, we had a chance to describe the important role the X Foundation had played when Organization M began in the early 1990s. That first donation helped make our organization a reality. Person B and Person Q invited us to apply for a new grant from the X Foundation, which is now a component fund of the Y Foundation.

I mentioned The Ministry of Silly Walks. Consider also the “Spam” bit by Monty Python. For those of us who want a different angle of resistance and challenge to the “system,” we might call this the Flying Circus strategy. Rather than explaining things through rational analysis, we raise the stakes using the bureaucracy’s own language and way of thinking. This goes hand in hand with the technique of anamorphosis, civil disobedience, and parallels my hypothesis that reality is best understood as mystery. This is how confusion, madness, and the absurd, far from being defects and wrong turns on our path to supposed quintessential knowledge, reveal reality for what it truly is.

Posted in: Politics.

Movements in the forest

May 16th, 2013
by Robert Wilson.
40 comments

ratko_arrivedI started out sort of middle left. For a while, when I was too young to understand the implications of communism, I was sort of semi-leftist.

Come to think of it, that was quite a while ago.

Now, I am fairly hard right. Many people would say that I’m far right. Many of these people have only themselves to thank for that, to whatever extent it’s true. Every time I am told what to say, what to think, how to be correct, what guns I can buy, how I can view people who use systematic terrorism as a weapon, who I should vote for, how I should view tides of foreigners being welcomed into my country, how I should view the rapists, murderers, dealers and thugs lionized by the same media that tells me all this — every time I am admonished by latte-house liberal Salon writers — I go farther away from the latte house, to areas of town that aren’t quite so gaily painted. Where the discontent and rising rage are quite unlike the atmosphere of fern bars and remind me more and more of gasthauses in the Weimar. And beer halls.

There are many of these places. More than the latte leftists would ever believe.

Leftists are accomplished artists of self deception. They view the world through rose-colored glasses, seeing only what they want to see. Not only that, they’ve become very effective at manufacturing consensus with things like the Alinsky Method and the Delphi Technique. That’s a fancy way of saying that they shut up people who disagree with them.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil.

I understand that there was a thriving latte house culture in Belgrade. A hotbed of liberal ferment, while the USSR was beginning to fall apart. The latte house is a bubble, and the people who lived in the latte house were insulated. Isolated from what was going on.

Something profound that I began to understand only in the last few years, is that most– not all– of these people are not actually tolerant. They claim to be tolerant, and they preach tolerance, but when it comes time for them to tolerate views that differ from the views that they themselves hold, tolerance goes out the window and they begin shrilling like the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Podscreams. These haters of labels begin throwing labels, generalizing those they demonize for generalizing others. Bigot. Racist. Fascist.

Often, they do not tolerate diversity of thought in the slightest respect. Even slight deviation from the party line of the Frankfurt School Marxists is to invite derision.

And why not?

Nobody could be intelligent and disagree with a leftist. Nobody could be well-educated. Nobody could even be a good person.

Nobody could possibly disagree with a leftist without being a racist, the second most evil thing possible.

For many people, this generalization isn’t true. In my case, it absolutely is. In the lights of the left I am a dyed in the wool racist.

Why? Because I am proud of western genetic heritage. They labeled me and I wore the label. I will view certain others with extreme contempt until such time as they are able to cease murdering and gang-raping in vast numbers completely disproportionate to their small percentage of the US population.

“These things are cultural,” the leftists cry, when they are not busily blaming the victims of the murders and gangrapes of the violent crimes that have been visited upon them with such gusto. I do agree, these things are at least partly cultural.

Sometimes the victims blame themselves: such is the extent of the brainwashing, the self-critique.

These things have come to such a pass that those who feel wounded or oppressed by my views on the all the robberies, murders and gangrapes will need to prove me wrong on a case by case basis, whereupon I will welcome them with open arms to the Human Race.

“But there’s no genetic difference,” comes the chanted refrain.

What If I told you that culture is the extended phenotype? That it flows forth from the genome the way the anthill, the beehive and the termite mound flow forth. That it is no more wonder that hominid habitations and societies are different than it is that the behavior and reproductive strategies of army ants and mud dauber wasps aren’t the same?

I support Western nations. I support Western culture. I support much of the Western enlightenment that is now used by our enemies to bully, bludgeon and shame the West.

Enemies who are themselves lackeys, dhimmis and quislings — never courageous enough to be janissaries — of tinpot dictators in third-world desert police states and crumbling Stalinist nightmares. Useful idiots who incessantly bite the hand that feeds them, engaging in stated, overt cultural warfare against the very Western prosperity sphere, the civil society that gave them life and tolerates their drivel. The Western philosophical structure that they so crudely misinterpret and pervert.

I do not support the enemies of the West. I do not support those who would diminish and destroy Western nation states. I do not support the enemies of the white homelands in Britain and Scandinavia, people who would deny us the very lands our forefathers fought and died for. Not only selling these lands to immigrants from foreign climes, but paying the people to live there in state housing and on the dole at the financial expense of the indigenous peoples of Europe. I fail to see how taxation for this purpose is different from robbery at gunpoint. Because it is. It is robbery at gunpoint.

I do not support the fatally flawed founding precept of the left: equality without merit.

I do not support or respect third-world religions and cultures, holdovers from the Bronze Age that still practice widespread torture, abuse and rape of children, for whom oppression of women through physical violence and rape is just business as usual.

I do not support third-world cultures that arise because of third-world levels of behavior. You’re not equal; you’re behind. Want my support? Deserve it.

The leftists tell me that unless I support all of these things, I am wicked. Yet at the same time I must abase myself in shame before women. After all, they tell me, all men are rapists. They tell me that if I don’t believe as they do, if I don’t want to coddle those who are murdering and gangraping the leftists, if I like the idea of killing the Taliban who like beating liberal leftists to death with heavy wooden canes, I must be stupid, wrong-thinking, poorly educated.

These people are the victims of what’s known as an analytic pathology, a systemic cognitive slip leading to systemic errors in analysis. In their self-satisfied hubris, time and time again, they underestimate those who disagree with them. They don’t seem to learn from experience. All this has happened before.

For my part, I am done with the left. There are many like me. Our numbers are growing.

You know, intelligent, well-read, well-armed guys who are tired of being mocked and belittled and shrilled at by their intellectual, moral and almost always physical inferiors. Guys who are increasingly political.

There was a latte house culture in Belgrade. The people there sipped their drinks in cozy salons. They lived in their bubble like the eponymous immuno-depressed little boy, free from contamination from nasty things that were blowing on the wind. Not so far from the city, armored vehicles were moving in the forest, but the latte liberals were listening to soft music. When people disagreed with the leftist party line, they sneered down their educated noses. After all, they were morally superior. They were the ones who were reading Sartre and Steinem, forbidden fruitcakes that had been denied them by the Soviets. Sheltered hothouse flowers, they fancied themselves great worldly sophisticates.

It was a total surprise when Ratko arrived.

Posted in: Politics.
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All I Really Needed to Know to Avoid I Learned in Kindergarten

May 15th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
12 comments

kindergarten_crushes_soulsBack in the 1980s, before memes were memes, a popular meme circulated on mimeographed sheets called “All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It later became a best-selling book.

It was a list of a dozen or more rules based on the teachings of kindergarten classrooms. The gist of these were that you should share, play fair, don’t hit people, and some Hallmark moments. The point of the meme was that people had forgotten how to behave toward one another and the solution was, essentially, “sharing” and avoiding conflict.

The meme caught on for two reasons. First, our society had become horribly crass and financially-motivated, which had obliterated culture and replaced it with a kind of universal productization and emptiness. Second, people generally melt for simplistic answers to complex problems, and the “just treat everyone nicely” meme was picked up by the assorted discontented as well as by suburban moms who just “meant well.”

The list belonged uniquely to kindergarten because it comprised a series of techniques for learning to get along with people. It oozed with well-meaning and social helpfulness. Its proponents would like you to believe that these simple answers would save the world, and they’re ignored because we’re selfish.

The truth is simpler: “getting along” has very negative consequences.

Kindergarten teachers instill in us bad knowledge because it makes their job easier and makes them look better. If a parent — and the distracted, casual, but panicked demands of parents are the bane of education — looks into a classroom and sees a mass of kids fighting or tossing each other around, they’ll freak out and complain. But if they look in and see kids in perfect harmony, sharing and caring and all that, they think they’re getting the most of their education dollar.

As a result, these teachers have a vested interest in having everyone “get along.” Even more, it makes their jobs easier. Why try to get to the bottom of disputes and squabbles when you can just demand they go away? Why pay attention to who started the fight, when you can merely punish the kid who hit back? That way, he’ll think twice, and order will resume and you’ll look good, get favorable treatment from administrators and parents, etc.

Authoritarianism begins in kindergarten, but it’s a kind of “individualistic authoritarianism,” where the goal is to keep each person happy and safe and comfortable so that the system as a whole looks good to all individuals, and thus is not subject to criticism. More like Nurse Ratched than Josef Stalin, this system is based on the accountability of teachers. But it’s that same accountability that makes them act quickly to suppress things that look bad, instead of fixing the underlying problems.

The “get along” policy has a number of negative consequences.

  1. Inability to make decisions. Compromise as a goal is based on the notion that it’s better to have a resolution that does not involve conflict, than to reap the rewards of conflict. Looking at history, we can see that conflict is good. It forces one side to prove supremacy over the other, whether by direct means (strength) or through proof of concept. However, when the goal becomes “getting along,” compromise takes precedent over finding the better solution. As a result, it creates a situation where decisions are not made, but people gather in committees and talk out issues until boredom forces compromise. In kindergarten, this means that nothing changes for these kids since change requires strife. If little Johnny decides it might be more interesting to play soccer, the wise all-knowing teacher will sweep in and crush that impulse quickly because it might cause conflict.
  2. Victimization by the manipulative. Angry and/or stupid people have a major advantage in society in that they stand for nothing. Their goal is to see what smarter people value, which is obvious, and then attack it indirectly. Because they’re delusional and/or stupid, they think this is a brilliant move because it works in the short-term. When teachers punish people for hitting back, as is inevitable in kindergartens across the world, the teachers are in effect giving those who provoke — the stupider, more delusional, etc. people — a free pass and a privilege. The kindergarten teacher mentality makes the aggressors into victims, and punishes those who would restore order by punching the lights out of the angry idiot so that normal people could go on enjoying life.
  3. Learned helplessness. The sum total effect on smart children is a sense of learned helplessness. It’s not a stretch to imagine that kindergarten teachers, not all of whom were at the top of their classes, might enjoy a certain revenge through this process. Nobody likes a smart kid except other smart kids. Everybody likes a kid who is below average, because he’s not a threat. He’s a pet, or someone you pity and help along who makes you look like a good guy because you’re caring for the demi-retarded person. Learned helplessness occurs when smart kids realize that if they try to do anything different, if they defend themselves, or if they have any ideas other than what Dear Teacher wants, they’ll be squashed like bugs and demonized as troublemakers. Thus, as in the Soviet Union, the best policy is to keep your mouth shut and just do what everyone else is doing. This encourages you to see dysfunction and a lack of planning as the norm.
  4. No attention span. The problem with “get along” as a theory is that it relies on interrupting things. Suppose that little Sara has the blocks, and is using them to build a castle. Along comes little Donna who wants to build a series of huts. What’s the rule? “Share everything.” Like, now. Sara has to stop building her castle and start using the blocks to build huts. Soon they will need more blocks; where to get them? Why, from the castle of course, because it’s not finished. Share everything. In reality, this means that whoever shows up late or clueless will get to sabotage those who started early and had bigger plans. It legitimizes the short attention span and demonizes those who wish for something more than the average.

The people who wrote “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” were probably right, but not in the way they intended. The kindergarten teacher policy of get along has sowed the roots of a destructive and pervasive mentality that is both against nature, and every bit as brain-numbingly conformist as that mental palsy which gripped the French Revolution and Bolsheviks as they guided their respective countries into irrelevance.

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A news round-up (05-13-13)

May 13th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
11 comments

pipe_armchair_and_newsWhere normally I write free-form based on the values of philosophy and culture, since I prefer such organic understanding to the linearization that occurs with science and politics, sometimes it’s best to remember my roots: I’m a news junkie.

And even though most of the media is moose drool that leans toward the left only because (a) they lean toward polite egalitarianism as a social means of making people like them and (b) most of them are “underpaid” liberal arts students who are leftists through the cognitive dissonance process of finding someone to blame for their failure and that of their civilization, sometimes the media hits the nail right on the head.

These moments lead to rare insights but often require elaboration. Writers rarely state the topic on which they’re writing if it’s a new area. They may not know, or they may be hiding it so they can get published at all. So if you can imagine a fireside, perhaps Brahms wafting up from the Victorola, cups of tea at the ready, maybe a pipe smouldering on the chairside table, and a discussion of the news…

  • Why are right-wingers so angry? (Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany). The original author confines this to the secular right blogosphere, but I think it applies to the entire right. We are defending a single thing, civilization, against many complaints about its details by the left. They have no unified plan; we are defending a unified plan. Their ideas are unproven; ours are, but are interdependent. And then the kicker: their ideas always “sound better,” like the words of Satan in the garden of Eden and/or the words of the car salesman who sold you that minivan, because they flatter the social ego. They say that everyone is important and ergo, you’re important. They make you feel like an opulent king for helping the downtrodden, which makes you forget for a moment that you owe a house on a credit card and your job still bores you into a stupor. In short, they get all the breaks and we’re left defending a complex, inter-connected, and long-range plan that requires insight and experience to defend. It’s a hopeless task! That is, if we expect them to get it. As a result, most rightists are paranoid and defensive and lash out with anger. If we’re going to succeed, it begins by translating that anger into an attack on the real enemy, which is liberalism. Not its “issues” (which are all transient and the liberals don’t even believe in them) or its proxies, but liberalism itself. Liberalism is a mental health condition that is the only thing that can destroy a civilization because like a cancer it rots them from within. Stop getting frustrated, and start getting angry at the real culprit.
  • So they crucified Jason Richwine (VDARE). As others have pointed out, there are two types of people who defy unanimous social convention: idiots who are oblivious, and intelligent honest people who realize what liberals fear, which is that denial is always self-destruction, and that while you can get away with it for awhile, it will always come home to roost and destroy what you need most. Richwine said something un-PC, but the bigger question is why conservatives don’t simply defend his right to say it. You don’t need to endorse free speech, but you can’t buy into the leftist binary of “correct”/”incorrect” that is the basis of PC. You can say, “I don’t agree” or “I have no idea what I think about that,” but your next move should be to go right to free speech and freedom of association. It’s not our job to police our ranks. Even more, we’re going to have to own up to the reality principle at some point. It’s mathematical and biological nonsense to insist that all ethnic groups are equal; we developed differently, and have different abilities. It’s political nonsense to insist that diversity is anything more than a struggle and probably a fatal internal fracture leading to doom, whether that diversity be of any type, including religious, ethnic, cultural, social and values-based. We’ll have to own up to — at some point — the realization that it’s conservative to defend monarchy, and to defend the right of populations to be united by culture, calendar, language, cuisine, heritage and values. In fact, we should just admit that we don’t like the modern state at all, and that we prefer cultures unified by some organic means. That doesn’t mean we’re insisting that everyone share that view. In fact, we should acknowledge that we want “sloughing off” of people who don’t get it. We’ll always have kind words for those who need to be raised up with a bit of knowledge, but for those who can’t figure it out because in a state of hubris they refuse to, we should hope they go elsewhere. That includes those who want to orchestrate witch-hunts based on people not agreeing with the dominant paradigm.
  • The actual way to win the war on drugs (The New Republic). The liberal hive-mind is buzzing crazily about the idea of marijuana legalization, which many states are starting to flirt with. Never mind that the overwhelming evidence throughout history shows that when societies have more escape valves, they’re more likely to deny their internal problems. Wine in Biblical times was bad enough! But people do enjoy their little brain-warps and some can handle it without problems. This article on the Georgian approach to opiate addiction shows one method of accomplishing a war on drugs, which is zero tolerance on a new level. It might wipe out a long-lasting social blight, but it seems extreme. Liberals want us to rush the other way and endorse everything by legalizing it. Many among us have proposed an intermediate, which is (a) have certain areas where drug use, making and selling are legal and make sure they have the ability to do it cleanly and (b) make sure none of the rest of us have to support these people with our dollars, hire them, rent to them, etc. In other words, as long as they can make a druggie society that works well on its own, we support them being able to do it but we equally support our right to say they can’t do it around us and can’t live near us. They have to go it alone. I don’t see much support for this from the left because it crushes the dream by forcing it to be responsible, and we all know that people guided solely by their own pleasures tend to fail at collective activities. The right is afraid of it, because they think we’d be endorsing drugs. But then I’d ask how “Go form your own isolated society to try that experiment” is in any way endorsement?
  • Total carbon panic (New York Times). Those on the left seem to assume the right is blind to this issue. We’re not; however, we see it as part of a larger issue, and we have a different solution. What causes excess carbon? Excessive numbers of people. What is the solution? Change the ratio of people to trees. How do we do that? Traditionally, we had a concentration of wealth among the intelligent in the aristocracy who would then prevent that land from being developed. We could easily incentivize private citizens to do the same. We could also stop the flood of people into our country, because this flood creates a new person here, and in the former host country, a new person is born to replace the person who left; that means each immigrant creates two new citizens from a population standpoint. We could also stop subsidizing so many people who contribute little, which would stop encouraging them from making more little people. Finally, we could incentivize American manufacturing. Our factories do abide by environmental rules, and we have facilities for disposal of the waste produced without it re-entering the environment. We could also create a cause of action for private citizens to sue and win big from polluters, which would create a financial incentive for them to profit from the bad acts of others, a sort of environmental “bounty hunter” if you will.
  • Is safety the enemy of enjoying life? (The Huffington Post). According to this article, American parents spend their time trying to save their kids from unsafe situations. The point the article makes is that kids need to encounter danger so they know how to handle themselves, and they need to fail in order to find self-reliance; they need less time in school and more time at play, and they need to be treated like adults at the dinner table so they learn how to be adults. All of these are immensely agreeable, but the immediate question is, Why not for adults as well? We’ve wrapped our people in safety nets, removed all the threats to existence, drafted rules for every possible occurrence, and as a result we’ve made life unutterably tedious and adventureless. People need more time to play. Even more, our goal should be to enjoy life and experience it to the fullest. We can’t do that while we’re all at work, living in gated communities, reading articles about whether this or that will kill us dead if we eat it, and so on. As this article hints but is afraid to say, our safety-mania may be the opposite of life itself.
  • Demystifying paganism (Hindu Human Rights). We have all experienced pagans who carry around crystals and bundles of sage and other props. All religious however are philosophies, albeit metaphysical ones, so the question is, what is paganism? This article answers that question by saying paganism is polytheism and then argues for caution with the monotheism of the West. While it’s hard to not have sympathies along these lines, it’s also an unfortunate reading of spirituality. The fact is that all spirituality has a single root, which is a belief in an “alive-ness” to life itself, and through this animism it picks its gods to represent reality. It’s unclear whether Christianity is even really monotheistic, since its oldest doctrines involve armies of seraphs who shape the earth according to the commands of an invisible deity. Perhaps a more pragmatic reading is to see that all religions describe the same thing, and thus on some level, they’re the same. Then it becomes merely a question of reality and how to use a realist principle to shape a religion that is both inspiring and true.

Posted in: Politics.

Scapegoat ritual

May 12th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
1 comment

stampede_as_a_metaphor_for_democratic_politicsModern politics forces people into polarity. This is not an issue of left-right, but really a question of “what issue will decide the election?”

We tend to pick politicians, and vote for plans, based on a single consideration at a time. This is part of the way group dynamics work: in order to get change, we need to get a lot of people to be repeating the same idea at once, and to do that, we need to distill all of politics down to a single yes/no question.

Politicians in democracies live “by the issues” as a result, knowing that for each yes or no they gain or lose a certain percentage of the electorate (and it’s unclear how many of those will actually show up to vote). For them to succeed, they have to find enough of these to win.

However, it still means that one issue will most likely be decisive. Each politician will have some guaranteed wins, but then there will be one issue that is in contention that will complete the majority they need to win.

This makes voting useless because at this point, the choice of the issues is defined by what the politicians need to talk about, not what’s relevant. Depending on which issues they focus on, voters will be forced to choose between one or the other of these decisive issues.

In turn, that means the election is swung by the issues. In other words, it is won or lost for each side before it begins, based on which issues end up being chosen as the battleground. Not surprisingly, democratic politicians quickly develop a strategy for this.

This strategy is a human analogue to a stampede. In a stampede, animals panic because of a threat and run away from it; in the human world, our panic causes us to join together into a mob and rush at the threat with torches, pitchforks, shotguns and baseball bats.

What politicians like to do is create a “hive mind,” or huge group of people “buzzing” the same message or idea, so that these people identify a certain issue as one they need in the election. If the politician picks correctly, this issue becomes an election winner.

The hive-mind stirs up panic, rage and righteous indignation in people and so not only gives them a feeling of purpose, but by playing into their anger, creates an addictive cycle of retribution and injury. Like sadomasochism, this cycle starts with an injury and then allows retribution for that injury which conveys power, which soon makes the powerless addicted to being injured. The victimhood mania grows.

Hive-minds are most effective when the issue involves an individual or group of individuals who have been victimized for this reason. It works even better if they’re able to attribute the reason for this injury not to a sensible policy, but to some form of vendetta, personal dislike or bigotry on the part of the other side.

For example, if the other side wants to build a new sewage-treatment plant, you can try to fight it on cost, but it’s more effective to argue that it “harms the poor” and/or has disproportionate effect on recognized minority groups. This is more electable than the actual reason people might oppose it, which is that the money doesn’t go to their constituents or they’re afraid it will lower their housing values.

When a hive-mind gets mobilized, the resulting ceremony is not unlike the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984. The group assembles and they talk about how evil the enemy is, how horrible they are, and how they must be crushed, and then they do something fascinating. They slowly equalize their speech. They might have come in using different words, rhythms and phrases to describe the enemy, but when they leave, their chanting roughly the same thing in synchronization.

Hive-minds are massively effective because they are deconstructive. They require zero knowledge of politics, or anything really. All you must do is be outraged by some effect. You don’t need to know how to do something better; you just need a “plausible” (and that term is flexible) alternative to what’s being done. You don’t need to think through how it would work in conjunction with the rest of the social order, or long-term effects. It’s an outrage right now. It’s like a child screaming that something isn’t fair, the rage of a barroom drunk, or the panic of a herd.

Interestingly, hive-minds do not benefit one group, which is the majority. A majority is not based upon issues, but a single issue, which is maintenance of the type of society that has traditionally benefited them. Since such a society is based on the learning of the past, they’re defending a whole thing, or a compilation of interrelated knowledge. Deconstruction attacks that interrelation and replaces it with social chaos.

Then again, that’s the point. The hive-mind is a therapy session for the under-confident and possibly self-hating. It gives them a purpose, and meaning, for long enough to accomplish its goal. Like all good circular logic, it involves people coming together to beat down the token enemy and drown them out with greater volume, so that everyone can look around and claim that no one sensible could disagree. Then they go out to make it happen.

Democracy’s originators probably never envisioned this type of end result for that political system, but by removing any focal point above the average (the “equality line”), they have reduced society to a circular self-reference. As a result, hive-minds rule the day and any longer-term perspective is conveniently forgotten.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · · · ·

Esoteric conservatism

May 10th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

esoteric_conservatismLike entropy itself, language builds up many potential meanings over time. At some point, choosing between them becomes too huge of a task, and the society reverts to using many small imprecise words and being governed entirely by context.

In our time, the word “esoteric” has lost much of its meaning in day-to-day use. For most, the meaning is somewhere between “eclectic” and “ethereal,” meaning something bizarre or of another world. The real meaning of esoteric is itself esoteric.

That means that to understand what esoteric means, you must experience it. An example from life: the growing of oregano in the Texas heat. The first batch of plants are sickly, and so you assume they need fertilizer. This leads to a dead second batch. What does this mean? Something’s wrong with the soil? Then you discover drainage issues, and plants essentially floating in water that doesn’t penetrate the ground layer of clay. The next batch starts with a deep pit, lined with rocks and filled not with commercial (“water retainers added”) potting soil but real soil, stuff you dug up in the woods or got in bulk from a garden supply store. Now you’re thinking like a plant, about the flow of soil and water and sun, instead of thinking like a human manipulating machines.

Esoteric knowledge is like this as well. A little bit of it hangs out over the door lintel, and so if you get down on your hands and knees and tug, you can see more. But you won’t understand it. You’ll dig into more and more, and as time passes, you will eventually learn that all you knew was wrong, and you’re starting from a new place. Then you will look at the same data with “new eyes,” and you will learn its language for itself, then its structure, and only finally its surface.

This is in contrast to the opposite of esotericism, which is exotericism. The exoteric, like the extravert, is defined by its face value, which coincidentally describes it well. It achieves this magic by being essentially identical to everything else under the skin, thus the skin is all the data it has to offer. A good example of exoteric systems would be things like cellular phones. They have different interfaces, brand names, etc. but they function at essentially the same level using the same principles. Another example would be laws. Although legal theoreticians make a big deal about laws having different meanings, the actuality is that they have different topics, but apply the same versions of the same principle, such as rights/property in the modern time, over and over again. Once you understand the surface, there is nothing left to sort out.

All systems of ideology are exoteric. In them you show up, learn some dogma, and you are accepted. If it fails, the solution is more dogma. In order to keep it all the same except for the surface, these ideologies tend to be messianic and proselytize. That way, they make everything in their image and thus it all plays by the same rules.

Esotericism on the other hand is learn as you go; your readiness for the learning dictates what you can learn. This isn’t very egalitarian, as it means that some learn more based on who they are, and some never make it very far at all. We are known by what we can know.

One other attribute of exotericism is that it is based in facts, but not in reality. That is to say we look at reality, make conclusions about it in words or figures, and then we act on those, without ever again referring to reality itself to make sure we have the right idea.

Ideology and blind faith assumptions fit the exoteric pattern which makes them perfect methods of control. I’m not talking about state control. I’m talking about self-control. They enable us to go into a binary mode of questioning whether we’re following the agenda or not, and if we are, of writing everything else off and sallying forth in oblivion. With such mental control, we can forget the instability of our situation and pursue instead a certain type of brainwashed dedication.

Esotericism is a big word that means learning from reality. We learn in little bits, until we know enough to get to the next level, in a series of ramps and plateaus. There is no “one stop shopping” or “one singular truth,” only greater depth as we enmesh ourselves into understanding our world.

I’m fine with that. It promises nothing it cannot deliver. It rewards not those who “work hard” (translation: give up life to become dutiful) or “are good” (translation: obeys rules of the herd) but those who make the effort to actually understand the relationship between humans, truth and reality. Esotericism is the essence of conservatism, all honest religious experience, and the more complex forms of science and philosophy. Without it, we are merely projecting, and it’s no surprise that as a result much of what we do fails.

Posted in: Politics.

How Crowdism destroys all good things

May 7th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
23 comments

radical_individualismThe first secret of Crowdism is that it is never unique. It is a universal human tendency that ruins things, like laziness or narcissism. It does not require anyone to invent it, because it is invented in all of us. It is an inherent pitfall to intelligence. Some might call it hubris.

Crowdism is what happens when individuals, deciding to act in their own interests, band together to make any rule other than “the individual does what the individual wants” taboo. This occurs in gradual stages, and can happen at any level of politics, family, society, culture or any other form of decisionmaking.

The key to this is that it’s a paradox. “Anarchists unite!” makes no sense to most people (it always made sense to me; if you want to change the world, you’re going to do it in a group, even if advocating no group control). Crowdists are radical individualists who are in a group only to use guilt to compel others to yield to them.

“Everyone agrees” is one of the most powerful statements in any language. It is paired with the individualist’s notion of being victimized by my inability to act out my individualistic desires. Both of these are passive-aggressive motions designed to put you into the defensive for opposing an illogical idea.

Suppose I and ten friends decide that we like dessert better than the main course, and want to switch the two. That is, you get half a cake for dinner, and then a tiny dab of steak and potatoes for dessert. We begin eating like this on a regular basis in public. Someone from out of town comes into our community and sees us at the local diner eating this way. “That’s terrible for you!” she exclaims. One of us stands up and asks her why she’s oppressing him. He only wants to eat cake for dinner, see? What’s wrong with that? Prove that it’s so bad. Another stands up and tells her that everyone here does this and it makes perfect sense. Now she’s on the defensive; the burden of proof is on her to prove that what is normal is somehow right. This is how crowdism works. (I’ve omitted the part where we hand a dipsomaniac doctor and two scraggle-bearded researchers a huge chunk of cash in order to have “science” declare cake-for-dinner as not just legitimate, but “surprisingly” healthy.)

There’s a reason that Crowdism overlaps with ironism. It is the tendency to pick that which is not normal, with normal being defined as “what generally works,” for reasons which have nothing to do with practicality. The radical individualist doesn’t care at all about the consequences of his actions on society at large. He wants what he wants; end of story.

Crowdism begins to work through several general principles: first, in order to make itself accepted by everyone, it wages war against standards themselves. That means it demands radical equality of all people, which attracts to it an audience starting from the bottom of society’s people: the lost, the chemical cases, the confused, the perverse. They might be wealthy or not, but what unites them is degeneracy and shame. So they make war on the standards that allow degeneracy to be noticed and shame to be felt. Their goal is pluralism: to legalize all behaviors without any standards, and enforce them through the notion that pluralism and equality are a higher justice than standards.

Here’s where things get tricky: the Crowdist’s goal is to replace all of social function with its new ideology. This requires that organic institutions like family, aristocracy, caste, religion, and even the rites of childhood get replaced with the Crowd itself. Because the Crowd has no voice, it creates a proxy through representative government, which is any government that bows to a large number of people who are agitating for or against something. This is the key to democracy; it’s not about “majority wins” but the fact that any outrage can unite enough people to swing a vote for or against something. When enough members of the Crowd become agitated about an issue, they form a “hive mind” which true to its name generates an internal buzz or droning sound that re-inforces the views of its members until they’re all repeating the exact same meme or mantra.

Representative government is receptive to hive-minds because it fears the votes that tip the balance. For a democracy, business as usual is when the two sides — realists versus idealists — are in balance. This creates an equilibrium of compromise which is totally unresponsive to real issues, but allows government to grow and solidify its position, which makes sense because government is a business and thus does what any business seeks to do, which is strengthen, diversify, build up revenue clusters, etc. The problem with business as usual is that even a small group can tip the balance if a hive-mind is formed, so government ends up being a servant not to the feelings of the majority, but to the activity of the determined (or, for realists: obsessive) few.

Crowdists like this kind of government because they are radical individualists. Radical individualists want zero social standards, which means what they actually want is the ability to shoot down any proposed standards. If all that’s required is that they and a few hundred friends start buzzing like frenetic methed-out drones and thus achieve the social avalanche required to shoot down the standards, that’s optimum for them. It’s easier than anything else because there’s no reality check, no wise elders and no ability to counteract it. If anyone opposes it, they claim to be oppressed and victimized by this taboo on eating cake for dinner, and accuse their opponents of being fascists/royalists.

In order to maintain a Crowd of individualists, a religion of Ideology must be created, which is that everyone is accepted. In politics-speak this means that everyone is equal and everyone is right in pursuing whatever notion they think is right for them (pluralism) and also that all differences between people must be abolished, as these are impediments to equality. Therefore they oppose borders, gender roles, and anything else that reeks of a standard that says behavior x is accepted but behavior y is not. Ideology does not create; it destroys those who attempt to insist that reality is consistent, and thus we should adapt to it and adopt rules that reflect its consistent workings. Ideology has one goal, which is to liberate the individual from rules by using the guilt, shame, passive aggression and cognitive dissonance of the Crowd, and the relative weakness of those who use common sense to oppose it.

Why is it so hard to oppose a Crowd? You don’t have an issue. The Crowd is worried about tangible, deconstructed, and isolated bits of reality like “gay marriage” or “marinalize legaljuana.” It is not worried about “restore common sense” or “let’s try reality for a change!” or other broad, make-all-of-society-sensible projects. These are in fact its anathema because the goal of the Crowd is to deconstruct any complex thinking into small issues that it can complain are oppressions to its members, create a hive-mind, and obliterate. It never tackles the question of “what type of society do we want,” which is the question inherent to the task of reality-based informers. In other words, those who oppose the Crowd have many issues wrapped into a single question, where the Crowd always breaks apart questions to target them as issues, peeling back layers of an onion to deconstruct society itself.

As a result, Crowdism proceeds like an infection more than revolution, although its primary metaphor is revolution because it provides a healthy-sounding goal for people. First, it starts at the periphery, injecting doubt about the validity of beliefs. “Surely not all killers meant to kill,” they say, shifting the issue from how to remove threats to society to a personal judgment about the person involved. That’s how radical individualists work; for them, everything is personal, and everything is a question of victimhood by larger society and its standards. They don’t care if the murderer is a threat. They only care if they can argue for his inclusion in their group, as a victim, and thus to use his situation to argue for fewer restrictions on the group as a whole. This cancerous mentality causes the Crowd to spread as it gobbles up anyone with a dysfunction or a misfortune, because such people are often looking for someone to blame for their problems. The more people it finds, the more it expands. It argues backward from their condition to an alternate cause, which is that they’re not dysfunctional or unlucky, but that they’re victims of an organized agenda to impose standards on people, and that this process is the cause of all human suffering and failure.

By appealing to self-pity and the desire for a scapegoat, Crowdism spreads. When it peels back enough layers of the onion to reach the core of society, it creates a fatal change: it installs taboos at the heart of society that prevent people from ever enforcing reality on the Crowd. That has been its goal all along, and instead of some brilliant subterfuge, what it does is act utterly consistently. Always destroy standards. Always emphasize the individual. Stress victimhood. Blame society for our problems. And so on. When it reaches the core, it creates a series of Soviet rules: all are equal, and any other idea is haram; there are no borders, and no genders, and those who blur the line are good; if some rise above the others, it is injustice; drag everyone down to the same level, force equality on us, and we’re all the same. These usually manifest in speech and behavior codes at a social level more than official government rules.

As a way of trapping dissent, Crowdists create a series of “pet enemies”: consumerism, environmental damage, gated communities and other petty acts of rebellion. They like to create these little safe harbors because they allow you a harmless way to express discontent. If you’re pissed off at us, go buy an SUV! Yeah, that’ll show us! The joke’s on you because you’ve just committed the energy that could go to a significant act and instead put it into a useless one. It’s like that old cellophane wrap over the toilet prank. One of their biggest objections is to classism, racism, ageism and sexism. These are bad because they notice differences between people, which thwarts the Crowdist vision of universal equality for all radical individualists. However, they’re also tempting targets because they lure dissenters into socially-rejected behaviors, which marginalizes dissenters and makes them impotent. If you wonder why society loves it when the Westboro Baptist Church, Ku Klux Klan or PETA stages a demonstration, it’s because it’s the “two minutes hate” where the dissenters come out and act out the drama that official propaganda says they will, and then people yell at them and everyone goes home having cheered for their own team, but the basic gist of it, again, is that the narrative imposed by the Crowdists appears to be true from the events that transpire. Instead of creating dissent, such displays strengthen the forces against dissent.

The grand Crowdist dream of making everybody equal requires that the strong be compelled to help the weak, standards be abolished, national borders be destroyed, differences between people be erased and so on. Anyone with a whit of common sense will find this abhorrent and oppose it, but the Crowdists will defeat them by deconstructing that complex principle into many tiny issues expressed through a binary equation of oppression-victimization or its opposite. The real kicker is that they win on demographics, because for every person who knows the difference between a realistic proposition and a thumb-warmer, there are thousands of “useful idiots” who know nothing and care to know nothing, but have eyes gleaming for the thought that perhaps they can gain personal power by becoming part of the Crowd and, as it snowballs, gain what they couldn’t gain for themselves. (Usually, this is the wealth of those who by persistence, obedience, genius or luck succeeded where the Crowdist did not.)

Great societies are not conquered; they conquer themselves. In the absence of a forward goal, they look within, which encourages the kind of navel-gazing and blame-deference which incites Crowdism. However, the essence of Crowdism will always be the radical individualist, who wants the advantages of society without the obligations. A radical individualist is basically an anarchist who likes grocery stores and quick police response when his iPod gets stolen. The task upon them then is how to get such benefits without being forced to restrain their behavior to the type of behavior that makes for an orderly, values-oriented, upward (not forward) moving civilization; these are the only types of civilizations that develop higher functions like rule of law, hygiene, etc. and thus escape the third world levels of dysfunction, crime, poverty, corruption, filth and disorder that are the default state of humankind. As a result, they come up with a type of logic against logic itself, and use that to gain power and take over.

You, the average citizen, are probably wondering, “Why the heck should I care? They’re doing their thing and I’m doing mine.” The first response is that what they’re doing will eventually obliterate your ability to do what you’re doing by wrecking the inner works of society itself, so that your society will drop from first-world-level to third-world-level and soon you’ll be fighting through a dystopia just to get a loaf of bread. The second is more abstract but more reality-based, which is that who you are responds to your environment. If you let crazies take over your environment, you’ll (slowly) go crazy too, and all of the good things in you — honesty, intelligence, honor, gentleness, compassion, wisdom — will become traits that work against you because those traits are contra-insanity. This will mean that you are nothing other than another warm body ready to follow instructions for money, and all of what makes up your personality and soul will be forgotten.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · ·

We are the robots

May 5th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
21 comments

we_are_the_robotsOur ancient societies evolved much like a species does. Over time, they tested out their hypotheses about how the wide world out there operated. They kept the ideas that worked, and pitched out the rest. From that came culture, wisdom and even religion.

Part of this original culture was that we had social castes, which were viewed as preferable to social classes, which are ranking by wealth. Social castes were ranking by ability, and wealth came later, namely because the king would gift the most useful people with large amounts of money in the theory that they would make good use of that power.

Eventually, crisis hit. A Mongol invasion, a black plague or two, even social instability caused by the wealth of new areas to colonize. However, at the same time, the wealth of the past through innovations in agriculture, hygiene and social order meant that there were more people than ever before. The population grew, from the poorest upward.

In this instability, many people became discontented. They grumbled and agitated. The rising population had outpaced its food supply and, instead of blaming the selfishness of individuals for going forward with raising larger families despite warnings about food supply, they found a scapegoat: they blamed the kings.

Naturally, they waged a type of guerrilla war. Your goal as a guerrilla is to be passive-aggressive, or to provoke your enemy into attacking you by needling them with many small but easily hidden aggressions until they finally lash out. Sabotage became common, as did petty attacks, thefts, accusations, and so on. This brought the situation to a boiling point.

At this juncture, the nature of warfare after the rifle became clear: whoever has the most people wins. The herd overran the kings, and proclaimed a new age. Since they needed to sell this to their fellow citizens, they claimed it as an age when all individuals were equal and decisions would be made by merit not inheritance.

It sounds good, on the surface. 224 years later, we’re seeing what it actually means. In reality, we have replaced an orderly system for finding leaders, in which those who actually accomplished something got ahead, with a system by which those who “play the game” well enough get ahead. In that, we have sewn the seeds of our doom.

The average person now grows up in a world of standardized tests. Since IQ is racist and assessing critical thinking is probably classist, these tests measure memorization ability. Thus school becomes a quest for those who can memorize the most details and recite them accurately. Whoever gets the most points wins.

What this creates however is a group of “merit”-selected people who are oblivious to anything but the test, and are helpless outside a world where they are told what to know and how to repeat it. If you ever look at actions by a government, or lawyers, or even doctors and think, “How can they be so stupid in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary?” you’re seeing the end result of this problem.

The bigger problem is that our society is now entirely driven by reference to its internal conclusions. It has shut reality out of the picture. We have books and rules of facts, and those tools have now become our masters. Those who master them become our leaders; those leaders in turn do not refer to facts outside of the books, but only look at reality through that filter.

Think of the many filters — this is a concept from Immanuel Kant — that we have in our lives. There’s the moral filter of good/bad, which ignores consequences of actions, where often “bad” acts are needed to get “good” consequences and vice versa. There’s the filter of what other people make popular, and thus is worth money or votes. There’s the filter of rules, “gaming the system” versus being good at something in reality.

Currently, our society is chasing its own tail into the abyss. The books give us certain rules and facts, and we follow those; when that doesn’t work out, we redouble our efforts using the same rules and facts. Like robots, we cannot deviate from our programming because we’ve eliminated the people who can think outside the box.

In fact, our current political environment is manic with the desire to achieve power over anyone who might know better. We want only people inside of the Ideology and its approved rules and facts. Anything else is a threat, and probably Hitler or Satan. We want our warm cult-like environment inside so that we can exclude the world.

This is how civilizations die. The final double-tap may come from invaders, or overpopulation/low food supply (these are the same thing). But what causes the death is our inability to make leadership decisions because our leadership is based on a robotic obedience to a filter, and ignores reality itself, eventually seeing it as “moral” to exclude reality.

Like civilizations before us, we will do what our books tell us and follow our facts and rules until we fall apart. The wall we run into isn’t that the rules were wrong, only that they were not realistic. And so we create a little in-group, a hive-mind prone to groupthink, drop out from reality, and like robots march toward the cataclysm.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · ·

Time

May 3rd, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

gateway_to_eternityWhen we think about politics, we tend to abstract away our concerns into measurable things, or at least, things that we can measure laterally. Money. Lives lost. Surveys.

These things oddly are tangible, in part because they’re intangible. Putting them in numbers renders the unknown to the known and the manipulable. That makes us feel powerful.

These things, no matter how spread out, can be grasped in an instant. We can summarize all that space into a single point or symbol. It’s different with time.

Events that occur over time are not easily summarized because they cannot be measured in singular conclusions, but must be shown to be curves. There is no way we can take time out of the equation and still be accurate; anyone who has ever blighted an A average with a failing grade can tell you about that.

As a result, we tend to forget about time. Our time, in particular. What do we do all day? We get up, and then there are things we have to do, and things we like to do. We question neither.

In part, this is because if we look too closely into the things we have to do, we will end up as total misanthropes. This is because most of what we do is wait for other people, sit in meetings and try to urge others to get along, interpret other people’s chaos, serve other people’s needs, etc. Most jobs are mostly waiting.

For another reason, we accept at face value any word handed down by society that something is necessary. We must go to jobs, to pay for our kids, etc. This is a quantitative assessment. It is binary: go to job (yes/no?). It assesses itself in terms of what is retained at the end. It does not look at qualitative concerns, like how this affects us, how it shapes our outlook on life, or how it makes us behave around our kids.

We are afraid to look at time because the more we analyze it, the more of our society falls away from the “necessary” label. In fact, looking at time would make us re-order politics entirely. We would have to stop focusing on quantitative results and have to start focusing more on the steps necessary to get those. We would start valuing efficiency again.

A large but not majority portion of our society fears the focus on efficiency. Efficiency requires we all work together. We would work less, thanks to advantages in networking and internal organization. By economies of scale, the results would be better across the board. But efficiency requires we defer our individual gratification until a goal is accomplished.

For most people, this is bothersome. They don’t mind an attendance requirement, because they’ll just move position to the place of attendance and resume doing whatever else they were doing (the rise of smart phones has aided in this grand solipsism). What they don’t like is having to give up their individual goals, even for a few moments, to participate in a group goal. That offends their sense of personhood and morality, in which the individual is always more important than the goal, nature, objectivity, reality, etc.

As a result, we pander to these people. Everything slows down. We can’t go forcing people to pay attention, can we? Instead, we must all move slowly toward goals that are written in abstract and lengthy standards. Inching forward by attendance, not accomplishment. And to pacify our fear of time, we waste our time, and then have no explanation for our sudden fervent rage.

Posted in: Socialization.
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