The West has fallen apart. For years, possibly even centuries, this fact has been hidden by compliant “intellectuals” who distract, deflect and conceal whenever cracks appear in the façade of our Potemkin village.
Since The Renaissance™ and The Enlightenment™, it has been common for truthful thinkers to die paupers and be resurrected only later, slowly and with much resistance.
For some time the balancing factor of the many genetically- and morally-good people in the West has kept the decay at bay, which ironically, has made the infection stronger. With the demographic change starting in the 1970s, this balance began to slip.
This culminate in 2008 in the election of our least-qualified president ever, Barack Obama, who like Bill Clinton before him was elected mostly to try to make racial problems go away. People wanted an appeaser, because appeasement is always easier than conflict, and the scared media sheep want easy answers.
In doing so however the voters handed the henhouse keys to the fox and then went into eight years of oblivion. As they wake up, they see a ruined world which is nearly covered up by counter-propaganda telling us how good it is and how competent our leaders are.
The most recent sign of the collapse is that not only is our leading presidential candidate lying about how she attempted to hide her emails from oversight, but our president is lying about his own participation in this activity.
In an April 5, 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin was shown an email exchange between Clinton and Obama, but the longtime Clinton aide did not recognize the name of the sender.
“Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
Use of a pseudonym shows not only that he knew the server was designed to hide evidence, but that he wanted to hide his own communications in the same way by using an unofficial (read: unmonitored) address. Contrast this to Obama’s own statements about the scandal, in which he claims not to have known about it until the media broke the story:
President Obama only learned of Hillary Clinton’s private email address use for official State Department business after a New York Times report, he told CBS News in an interview.
Then look toward the proof that Clinton intended to conceal her identity and remove emails when she moved her email to her private server:
Assuming that “Stonetear” was discussing Hillary Clinton’s emails, these finds appear to be the smoking gun in the Clinton email scandal. The posts prove intent to obstruct the production of evidence to Congress, either through deception or deletion, and that these events took place after the evidence was requested. There is no legitimate reason for anyone to act this way if the emails merely contained information about yoga poses and wedding invitations.
Now we know that our democratic leaders are liars who intend to deceive us. This has always been a tendency of democracy, apparently held in check by a steady stream of genetically-qualified leaders in the past, and possibly better quality of political writers and artists.
With the replacement of that group with another, we are getting the dregs of our tribe as candidates and they are being elected by ersatz media, an affirmative action administrative hierarchy, and an electorate which has no better angels to guide it and nothing in common, so lunges for illusions.
This condition is consistent across the West, with the rest of the world following, as we can see when we realize that our leaders have barely any knowledge of what is going on out there.
Heads of state and government representing the world’s largest economies used words like “fear,” “uncertainty,” “risk,” and “terror” 87 percent more often on average than during last year’s gathering, according to an analysis by Adam Tiouririne, a leadership communication adviser at Logos Consulting Group.
The people who are supposed to be leading us are expressing their fears for the future, as if admitting that they cannot control the situation, which for a leader is tantamount to affirming his own incompetence. They watch these problems arise, and either their hands are tied or they have no ability to come up with a plan, so they emote instead of taking action.
They have created a global economy which is itself fake, based on the willingness of others to purchase debt as an asset:
In the U.S. alone, there’s more than $63 trillion in combined public and private debt. In stark contrast, there are only $3.8 trillion total dollars in circulation, and each of these dollars has been lent and borrowed more than 16 times. The amount of leverage continues to climb.
This debt-driven approach mirrors the Clinton years theory, which “worked” because it allowed us to sell houses to those who could not afford them, and by outsourcing our labor to China, lower costs. The problem with that approach is the hangover, which happens when all that fake money cannot perform under duress as well as it did under easy boom markets, so there is a massive crash such as the one we have been living through since 2000 (right after the Clinton 90s ended and when the results of their policies became manifest).
Not only that, but our fake economy is propped up by fake value, namely the internet advertising industry, which has been steadily paying less per ad over the years and has resulted in a web that is coated in advertising, as if the spammers went legit and took over. As predicted here before, the dot-com collapse that is coming will occur because of market recognition that internet advertising is fake and mostly useless for reaching actual customers:
Revelations that Facebook Inc. overestimated by up to 80% the average time people spent watching video ads on its platform shocked the media and marketing world.
Meanwhile, Japanese ad giant Dentsu Inc. admitted on Friday it overcharged at least 111 companies for internet ads. The mea culpa was prompted by a complaint from Toyota Motor Corp. that its internet ads weren’t having the promised impact.
In saner times, we would call this what it is: fraud. Businesses that make false promises that cause other people to experience loss are fraudulent, and schemes which rely on a one-step-removed version of that approach are also fraud, even if no one in our apparently also fake law enforcement apparatus seems to think so.
More importantly however, this means that the basis of our future is also fraudulent. The internet economy is based on false activity, and this fits into a larger pattern of advertising collapse as the consumers who care about the differences between products are replaced by the thoughtless. You cannot have an economy when most people buy randomly.
The future of America seems based on the hope that Google, Amazon, Apple and Twitter can keep selling ads and overhyped products long enough to keep the dot-com “circular Ponzi scheme” going, where we create activity and use that to claim value, and then sell interest in that activity to others. This parallels our monetary debt-selling scheme, which is also fraudulent.
The West has become a fraud. Our presumed value is based on deeds long in the past, our leaders are inept and apathetic, the voters are clueless and every aspect of public life is corrupt and fake. This is somewhat typical of democracy, which requires that complex problems be twisted into easy slogans so the masses — which cannot understand those problems — feel empowered. As a result, everything must be fraudulent. But the bill is coming due.
The mainstream right directs its energy toward preserving what is left of the status quo; the alternative right recognizes that our society is not only a sinking ship, but is built on false assumptions starting with the delusion idea that equality can replace hierarchy.
No right wing movement has succeeded in resisting this decay in part because it cannot be resisted; Western civilization needs someone to pound the RESET button and start over. Everything we think we know is tainted with assumptions brought in from the ideas and people infected with the delusion of equality.
While the new right seeks to rebuild from within a liberal framework of the welfare state, and neoreaction seeks exit by small groups who will then be inevitably re-absorbed, the alternative right — an out-of-focus coalition of those united more by a feeling of dread and distrust of all Leftist ideas — recognizes that not only is the ship sinking, but that it must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.
This may seem extreme. After all, if Western societies just aborted any changes made after 1945, things would return to stability. But this is where the alternative right rises above the rest: it recognizes that just going back is not enough. We must renew, because even back then the seeds were sown, and the path will not change on instant replay.
Yet until we get to the root of equality… — no, we must go even earlier to find the source of our decline. Writings on this site have targeted individualism, or the idea that the desires of the self must come before civilization and nature, as the root of our problem. The ancient Greeks called this hubris, or pursuit of power beyond one’s place in the natural hierarchy by ability and character of men and nature. Old Christians preached humility. And in the wolf pack of the steppes, an arrogant young wolf must fight his way to the top, or accept his place in the order of things.
Nothing about our time is good except our material prosperity. Everyday life is meaningless and filled with ugliness, tedium and a constant struggle for power as the lower try to keep the naturally more gifted from rising to their natural place. Our cities are war zones where we struggle for enough money to buy our way into the areas that are not blighted.
If one accepts this as normal, it is possible to find similar bargains — better values for the money — in housing, medicine, entertainment and career. However the fundamental problem remains: our time and energy are wasted, while nothing we do can have any significance, all the while the rot gets stronger around us. This society is terminal.
In the upcoming American election, we have a choice between a right-wing-ish candidate and someone who will open the floodgates further to permanent Leftist voters, because minority groups always vote against majority interests. Once that happens, there will be no chance for those who remain except revolt, and then, they are most likely to be killed by their well-meaning fellows who just want to preserve the union as it is, despite its dysfunction.
The only sensible response is fanaticism. Support nothing that is Leftist; stop linking to Wikipedia, reading Leftist news, or earning or buying anything you do not need, as the taxes support the beast. Barter among friends as much as possible, work for cash whenever possible, and every day get out there and raise a hue and cry about how this society is dying and must be restarted, because that is the ultimate taboo.
Most importantly, we need to work toward power. If 2% of Western citizens find themselves agreeing on civilization restart, a critical mass will be reached, and we will pass the threshold of no return. Never accede to the argument that we can fix the leaky ship; always insist on its replacement. Ignore the zombies and focus on reaching that 2%.
If an actual conservative party took power, the first thing to do would be to reverse the flood of new left-wing voters by removing anti-discrimination law, post-1790 immigration laws, civil rights and welfare programs. Write law to reverse the civil rights and entitlements agenda, and then do away with all the laws based upon it, and the vast reams of pro-government laws which have created the out-of-control regulatory state.
But even then, we must go further: laws themselves do not work, because they are interpreted flexibly and people avoid responsibility. Replace them with strong leaders of arbitrary power at the local level who can re-arrange their societies as needed, and not have to be deferential to tiers and layers of limiting law. Restore freedom of association, cut taxes, and begin holding the Leftist media and entertainment industry accountable.
But even then, we must push further: we can abolish most laws and replace them with culture. We can remove the tedious and unreliable democratic process and install an aristocracy. We can cut checks to the Other among us and repatriate them. All of these things are doable, and yet they are not extreme enough to save a civilization.
We must go further: remove any subsidies or other equality-based institutions, cut ourselves off from we-are-all-one initiatives like the United Nations, repossess any degenerate businesses and exile of our own people who behave badly. Stop taking responsibility for lawbreakers by putting them in jail and trying to rehabilitate them; instead, view their behavior as a Darwinian event and exile them.
Even that does not go far enough. We must go further: using our aristocratic government as a shield, we can restore a sense of culture, in values just as in the arts, and bring back the calendar and seasonal events of the past. Abolish public schools, regulations, certifications and other proxies for talent. Promote the best among us, not just in ability to memorize, but in moral character and mental clarity on the task of building a civilization.
At that point, we can go even further: in each of us who remain, we can awaken a sense of responsibility to reality, a transcendental view of nature where each of our places in its order are significant, and a belief in the possibility of good, beauty, excellence and truth in life. We can reject the false assumptions going back to individualism and to the assumption before it, which is that life is terrible and we are victims. We must be conquerors, but first of all, we must conquer ourselves.
Whew. That looks like quite a to-do list. And yet, if we do not do this, we are merely putting duct-tape on a broken bridge, plugging leaks in a boat with oil-soaked rags, or plowing around the stones in our field. History is clear: we are either headed upward, or stagnating and will immediately head downward. We must reform our hearts to want an ascendant path, and then use the power of our civilization to instill that in others.
Without this new path, we go down the same path of the old, which ends in our civilization slipping away into irrelevance as a witless void of morally bankrupt, low intelligence grey people. In the absence of radical change, that is our future, and as the years go by and the pace of events accelerate, that doom is coming sooner than anyone thinks.
W.M. Briggs asks why the Right is in constant retreat in the face of those we could easily defeat:
Why does the Left always win? Easiest answer in the world! They fight. They shoot to kill. They hang traitors. They do not retreat unless faced with overwhelming forces. They say “The hell with the rules.”
…Instead of fighting, we surrender apologetically when pushed, and as we fade we mouth words about accompanying people on their “spiritual journey” or “My Constitution guarantees free speech.”
He captures the basics. The following might be a useful expansion on his diagnosis without changing his prescription:
-
The Left is unreasonable. The Right strives for an orderly, polite and morally good society. For that reason, they tend to think that other people are inclined toward being reasonable as well. The Left on the other hand views civilization as its enemy because the Left aspires to replace civilization because it views civilization without Leftism as the antithesis of good. Rightists will try to appeal to Leftists’ better natures, make compromises and keep order, which only strengthens the Left by legitimizing them and giving them a healthier society to parasitize.
-
The Left is unrealistic. The Right cares about the consequences of its actions; the Left cares about the ideological appearance and social popularity of its actions, and this concern displaces any cares about consequences in reality. This liberates Leftists from the additional burden of knowing anything about what they are doing. Their one mode of thought is to say something that other people like to hear, and then using the power of the group, to force it to be implemented.
-
The Left appeals to monkey dynamics. Leftists ideas are more socially correct than Rightist ideas, because the ideal of the Left is equality and the Right favors hierarchy, and social situations value only universal inclusion so that the members of that social group can feel stable because there is no tension, competition or conflict. This is an illusion but one that humans can no more resist than magpies can turn away from shiny objects. The idea of everyone being included and having a share makes humans have warm happy feelings inside — this is actually their brains turning off and their bodies preparing for animal death, as if recognizing the triumph of a predator — and so they will choose it every time. This is why any social group which is not policed by a hierarchy will drift Leftward.
-
The Left recognizes no distinction between war and peace. Rightists will never understand that for the Leftist, ideology is all. It is how they socialize, organize their thinking, justify any self-esteem they have, and find other people. It is their reason for existing. Often it is the only thing that makes them feel good besides drugs, drink and sex. Since the high does not last, they pursue it compulsively. Since it must be right for them to feel good, any dissent or non-conformity is viewed as competition and rigorously pursued so the Leftist can feel good again. Therefore, the Leftist is always at war, and has no patriotism or loyalty to heritage because Leftism is organized in benefit of the individual and rejects any larger organization system, with an exception made for the herd because a crowd enforces individual rights by removing accountability.
-
Leftists base their self-image on total victory, not decency. Rightists like to think that they are appreciated for their strong, sober, wise and measured moral presence. Leftists have no such illusion. They know that people respect that which they fear, and that which gives them handouts, and they achieve this by installing a struggle toward ultimate victory. This forces everyone in the group into conformity and justifies lavish lifestyles for those sacrificing their time to the war effort.
In the future, if humanity survives, volumes will be written about the psychology of Leftism. It is an individualistic genre that manifests through collectivism because collectives are built around the idea of every individual having an equal part and reward. This creates a semi-suicidal mentality because life can only be lived through external factors, denying the inner parts of the human psychology, which creates robotic, zombie-like ideological warriors for whom life is misery and the only respite is found through destroying enemies.
Vox Solis offers up an analysis of the philosophical origins of Leftism and liberalism:
The Left is described as ‘politics that supports social equality and egalitarianism, thus often rejects social hierarchy and social inequality.’ This could be summarised that they often place more importance on people and individual rights than institutions or traditions. The historical merit to this is that the terms “Left and Right” goes back to the Pre-Revolution system in France, referring to the seating in the Estates General. Those who sat on the left opposed the monarchy, supported the revolution and secularization of the State while those on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions.
…Many state that the Revolution was caused by a mixture of economic factors such as the inequality between the aristocrats and the commoners which were then further expiated by environmental disasters and the failings of King Louis XVI. I agree with another school of thought in that it was primarily the ideas of Humanism and the “Death of Divinity” that occurred during the Enlightenment that was the real fuel for this Revolt. After all if the King above you has no divine mandate for the reason he has more than you, why should you go without? This “Death of God” as Nietzsche calls it is also the reason for many of the problems not only in society, but within ourselves today.
…This Death of God meant for many thinkers that an equality of soul did exist and it is only the material factors that put some human above others, which is why many of the European monarchies began to fall after the period dubbed the Enlightenment. The most famous ideals from this are encapsulated with Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Communism as a whole. Marxism, as you should know, is a socio-economic theory which is wholly materialist: it claims that all the human animals are the same but people are still split between the Proletariat, the workers, and the Bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of productions, in Society.
It is worth looking even deeper. The above analysis identifies the core of the Lefts its egalitarianism derived from Renaissance thought, but what was that but a revolt against classicism? This came within the centuries after a rash of peasant revolts in which the aristocracy, realizing how disastrous mob rule would be, put down the mini-revolutions quickly and decisively.
Those revolts have happened in every advanced society. When life is good, but then — as is inevitable — a downturn occurs, people who have never known want will rise up in anger. For them, it is easier to blame someone else than to recognize that they took good fortune for granted and because of that, insufficiently prepared for lean years. These are the same fools who eat the seed corn during lean winters.
Contrary to the normal human perception, this is not a historical event; it is a perpetual human failing, like obesity, drug addiction or the seven sins (pretense, envy, resentment, gluttony, lust, laziness and greed). We might even tie it to cognitive perceptual issues like parallax distortion and time displacement. It is a weakness in what we are, and any society that fails to combat it will find itself heading down the path to liberalism.
This force begins to win when it changes from an inside-out order to an outside-in one; inside-our orders look to inner traits, like moral character and intelligence, instead of outer adornments like educational degrees, net worth and social popularity. The other aspect, which enables peasants to pretend to be kings, uses those outer adornments as arguments for proof of inner traits, and thus inverts the meanings of those inner traits.
Plato suggested a cycle of civilizations in which they first lost sight of this distinction, and then went through a series of outward-in manipulations in order to try to hold back order. This culminates in democracy, which leads to tyranny eventually. As Leftism changes to its modern form, where censorship and corruption are the norm, we are seeing this transition.
Social media is dying. The primary reason is not because of its censorship, but because of what its censorship portends: it has given up on getting the cutting-edge audience, and wants instead to go out like MySpace, catering to the least competent users for as long as possible, then collapsing.
As an internet service, one has a choice. The service can be designed for the power users, and the rest will tag along as best they can, or when the power users leave, it can be designed for the lowest common denominator. The latter gets a larger audience, over the short term, but the former produces growth.
This creates the “MySpace cycle”: a new hip community grows from an elite of power users and early adopters, then becomes accessible to all, at which point the modern pattern occurs and the masses alter the character of the service by doing the same stupid stuff they do everywhere else. Quality declines.
With the fall of quality, the early adopters and power users flee for greener pastures. The company providing the service has grown and added dependents — more employees, lawyers, stockholders, and advisors — and is reminded by them of its need to kick up the profits. And so, in a classic MBA move, the service slashes costs and makes itself friendlier to the broadest section of its potential audience.
When we see social media banning people for stating the obvious, this cycle is in operation. The company providing the service wants more people in, and the masses always like illusion and human groups fear anything that is not “we are all one” inclusive, so the service hires trigger-happy idiots to remove anything that generates complaints. That way, they can be a safe space and bring in more neurotics, fools, idiots, geeks and hipsters.
The use of bans and censorship shows that the service is no longer interested in being a community. In a community, people exchange conversation, and with it, points of view. They are able to handle having different points of view, including controversial ones, because there is an active dialogue and difference is respected because the issues are interesting.
A service run only for profit however has no interest in community. It is there to provide an illusion as a product, and the people who consume this product — like television watchers in a former generation — want only a reflection of themselves and their thoughts, mainly because people are solipsistic and the less intelligent ones even more so.
Twitter (for example) knows it is going to die, because MySpace died and Digg died. All social media dies when it becomes popular with the idiots and then the power users leave as a result. Twitter is just trying to squeeze as much from the lemon as it can before the end, which requires pandering to total idiots like SJWs — otherwise unemployables — and if it loses some smart people, oh well. Its new audience will not care or want them.
The point of this is what we are looking at is economic Crowdism: how audience demographic shift on the Bell Curve takes once-thriving products and converts them into the same thing as everything else, thus reducing incentive to use them and ending their life cycles.
Crowdism is terrifying because it says that our enemy is not government, economics, politics, etc. but mass thinking; with mass thinking, all things — regardless of discipline or origin — are made into the same low standard, low future-time vision social-type organization. In social organizations, people compete for attention instead of accuracy or moral goodness.
For example, Crowdism has infested the world of publishing. Most books are written on trivial topics, contain little content and have no relevance except for the first year when they are published. They are mostly surface works in that what distinguishes them is the setting of the story, the unique twist on known ideas, or a novel combination of past aesthetics and concepts. The surface changes constantly, but the content is the same, much as how a Crowd will take a new genre or discipline and quickly convert it into more of “the usual.”
When people in the last century referred to something as “typical” or “common,” this was what they were alluding to. Once you let in the Crowd, they make everything into the same thing, a vast field comprised of equal — because that is the social measurement, equal inclusion — actors doing roughly the same stuff and struggling desperately to make their own variant look different. It is like an IQ test: the people who cannot see through the surface get trapped at this level, which we might describe as Sudra or Thrall to use the old Indo-European caste terms.
Therein is the problem: we cannot say that social media is the problem, only that it is conducive to the problem. The same conditions and pathological behaviors can arise anywhere, as they have in blogs and before that, in dial-up systems.
Your average 1980s BBS, once it became popular, shifted Left because Leftism is the socially appropriate answer to any question, and most people do not care about the question or the consequences of action taken in its name, but how they look to others. Boys and girls want to hook up. Middle aged people want business connections. Lonely people just need someone to talk to. Drug addicts and neurotics want far-out stuff to talk about that makes their failed lives seem meaningful. The result is constant activity, and that requires an abolition of eternal standards so that there can always be “new” (old, recombined) theories and topics.
The prevalence of Crowdism in the blogosphere leads to noticings or observations like the following:
Time out gives a man room to think. It is why vacation is an important part of a work-life balance. It is why male only spaces were so crucial to the continued survival of Western Civilization – you had to get away from the nagging wife to concentrate on the bigger picture.
Since I posted my ‘Exit’ post I have maintained relationships with allies, talking to many on a daily basis. In recent weeks I have also kept one eye open on those still blogging. What I see is sad and disappointing.
The more popular publications in this ‘sphere’ are still publishing nonsense articles about topics we already discussed years ago…The masturbatory self indulgence that many crave is happening for them, they rehash the same dead topics, they continue to abyss gaze with the same sick fascination.
Bypassing the excellent observation about “male only spaces” which can be expanded to the ideas of solitude and leisure, essential to any cogent antiwork argument as well as the right side of the Bell Curve in any health society, we see an excellent point being made: the blogosphere rewards those who write about the obvious as if it were mindblowingly complex, which makes people with nothing to contribute feel important and gives writers a way to advance themselves at the expense of others.
Begging your indulgence, perhaps we can review the writings on this site which have covered this topic in the past:
<blast beat>
-
“Neoreaction hits choppy waters” (April 4, 2015):
The same writers who gave Neoreaction its early strength pulled it apart as they competed for audience with blogs, books and YouTube videos. To differentiate their product, they had to each invent unique theories and viewpoints. These in turn created confusion about the core of Neoreaction, and drifted farther away, which meant they lost their conservative core and as a result became increasingly liberalized.
If we listened to the liberals at the outset, Neoreaction was doomed because it was not liberal enough. As it turns out, it was too liberal, but not by ideology but rather by the behavior of human individuals seeking to profit from it. All those blog hits, video watches, and book sales became a goal in and of themselves, and the idea of Neoreaction got lost in the muddle.
Thus the movement became moribund in the same way a civilization does: it becomes a vehicle for individuals to express their own self-importance, not a cooperation toward a qualitative end. Neoreaction became assimilated by liberalism because it adopted the methods of commerce and popularity, part of the demotism that makes up modernism.
-
“Neoreaction in reverse” (April 17, 2015):
That essay raises the question of goals. If the goal is to be Neoreactionary, that should be done, in full. When that goal gets supplanted by another goal, like money or power, then the goal of Neoreaction is inescapably lost.
Endure a metaphor, if you will: when an artist writes a book to tell a truth, he creates a story, characters, metaphors and setting to express that truth. However, if the same artist realizes that people look forward to confirmation of their existing ideas, and writes books to that end, the method of making money has replaced the goal.
We are all familiar with this process. It explains why a brand that produced good solid products a decade ago now makes flimsy plastic crap, banking on its good name. It explains why every rock band goes to a terrible place after three albums. It explains why promising political candidates, once they get into office, suddenly turn their backs on their own beliefs.
This is the nature of politics: it reverses our thought from acting toward a goal, to acting toward the reward that normally comes from achieving the goal. This means that instead of acting from cause to effect, we are acting from effect (money) and inventing a cause (the book) to match. It is a form of corruption of will.
This is what has happened to Neoreaction. In the struggle for individuals to differentiate themselves and gain an audience, they have moved from writing about relevant topics to writing about that which they know will cultivate an audience, and for that concern alone. This has distorted their message and created entryism by demotism.
-
“Neoreactionary fragmentation” (April 11, 2015):
[I]n an effort to attract a popular audience, [Neoreaction] reduced itself to a form of individualism. This happens to all internet movements as people want to join so they can appear “edgy,” but fear getting too far from socially acceptable ideas.
-
“The Neoreaction/Dark Enlightenment tantrum” (March 27, 2014):
My point to the DE/NeR was basically that if your philosophy is functionally similar to conservatism, and you don’t admit it, you’re avoiding the truth out of some personal pretense. Further, this confines your thinking based on the taboos of liberalism, which means you’ll end up back at liberalism. Then I pointed out many of the liberal aspects of the DE, namely that its crusade against the Cathedral is a liberal-style revolution, e.g. an attack against the institution and its replacement with people power. What we actually need is an idea of what we want and thus a competing vision to the current set of pretenses held by our new elite.
-
“Exceeded By The Alternative Right, ‘Official’ Neoreaction Struggles” (July 7, 2016):
Most of Neoreaction and many of the Right choose to ignore my 20-plus year history of writing on the same topics they now approach. This is not solely because I am obnoxious, but because I threaten them. If someone else wrote it before, and possibly better, others become irrelevant. In turn, I find it hard to link to much of “Neoreactionary” writing because it is simply going over old ground and often, doing so with more of a robotic outlook.
-
“Neoreaction Goes Off The Rails Just Like White Nationalism Did” (June 29, 2016):
In the past, I have warned Neoreaction that it veers too close to become a Leftist-style ideology because Neoreaction has come to include the principles of collectivized individualism. Any time you find yourself arguing that there is a “system” which will manage people and come to good results, you have left behind the fundamental distinction of Dark Enlightenment societies: they believe in hierarchies and moral codes, and therefore, they select the morally best as leaders.
-
“What is Neoreaction?” (April 15, 2015):
What is subverting Neoreaction is what Neoreaction was designed to avoid: “demotism,” or a substitute for leadership where whatever idea is most popular is chosen. Demotism occurs in politics through democracy, in economics through consumerism, and in socializing through flattery. Neoreaction has been subverted by its inability to purge its opposite from itself, because when emerging from a political system the most common tendency is to carry over unseen elements of that system into the post-revolutionary future society.
The same conflict that crushed Napoleon crushes Neoreaction. He wanted to be a King, but with the revolutionary ideology of egalitarianism behind him. These two ideas conflicted, and so he became a tyrant, using the advertising of the ideology of altruism to justify his seizure of power and wars to enforce these ideas on others.
Neoreaction has stopped moving in a linear direction toward a goal, and instead is circling itself, trying to rid itself of an entryist it cannot identity.
</blast beat>
I came from another tradition of writing about these topics: European philosophy, starting in the late 1980s, with a somewhat idiosyncratic take — as is appropriate for any philosophical exploration, to avoid the confinement of crowd-defined language — on society. I posted rants to hacker bulletin boards, published an ezine, raged across USENET, then began distributing my writings through an early underground website, the American Nihilist Underground Society, then CORRUPT which pre-dated the “alternative right” idea with a similar concept, many web bulletin boards back in the day, and finally transitioned to Amerika.
My influences were Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophical and literary canon, underground (heavy) metal, and life experience. In addition, newer writers like Michel Houellebecq and Ted Kaczynski were massively influential, as well as the rants and outlook of outsider communities like the hacker underground and the heavy metal underground.
Others from the same era picked up the pen and began waging war — words are bullets — through increasingly clarifying statements. One of these, Bruce Charlton, recently penned a pointed critique of the Alternative Right (a silo in which he includes Neoreaction, probably because Neoreaction has been absorbed by it) which was widely ignored by online reactionaries because it hit too close to home:
The (online) excitement among the Alt-Right since they were mentioned in a speech by Hillary Clinton – and since it becomes clear that Donald Trump is (de facto) running unopposed – is palpable.
And it is natural; since the secular Right always sells-out, and opportunities for the secular Right intellectuals to be bought-off, co-opted and in general sell-out (for power, status, cash, sexual opportunity etc.) are looking very good, just at present.
No wonder the leading Alt-Right bloggers are so cheerful!
His point is that political movements default to a focus on people and material concerns when they do not have some transcendental goal, which we can observe happening in Neoreaction and the Alternative Right because to succeed as a blogger there, one must dumb down the message and tell the Crowd that it is the victim. This re-starts the liberal cycle under a new name, in a classic Crowdist gambit, and is not deliberate but is even more destructive than if it were, because the people who now think they are solving a problem are in fact bearing a mental infection that will reproduce the problem.
Inversion, in other terms.
Earlier on, this post mentioned how the threat of censorship and bans on social media services like Twitter destroys the prospect of community. To last, a community requires a transcendental goal, such as the idea of accuracy in information itself, or that problems can be beaten and beauty, goodness, truth and excellence restored through realism plus a gumption that demands a higher aesthetic quality of life; pleasure, even.
When dissident movements become inverted, they lose this sense of community and replace it with a false sense of community based on universal inclusion. At that point, they become Leftist in all but name, and many of the recent attempts to control the narrative are done solely in this aim, even if they state otherwise.
As one writer recently noted:
Any incoherence or challenges must then be met, unless they present such a challenge that the model proves wrong. As a result, strict and active management of new ideas must be enacted, prior held ideas which are incompatible must be dismissed, strong discipline must be maintained intellectually to such a degree that those who undermine the tradition are made aware of this issue and encouraged to correct, or stop claiming to be part of the tradition. Relaxing of intellectual rigour and doctrine for mere social requirements should be dismissed as rank stupidity.
…Much of what gets released under the neoreaction banner is intellectually incoherent.
Crowdism has infested social media, but it will infest any platform, and it has infested Alt Right and Neoreactionary blogging. The solution is simple: return the focus to ideas and action, not people. But that will never be as popular as social thinking, so instead, focus on the quality blogs like New Alternative Right, Atavisionary and many of the others listed in our blog list.
In the meantime, all of social media is having a sort of MySpace moment, as we see first and foremost in the backlash against using cell phones to constantly “stay in touch” (appeasing Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO) with social media:
Last week, superstar Kanye West tweeted: “I got rid of my phone so I can have air to create.” Singer Katy Perry replied: “unplug to connect.”
Stand-up comedian Brett Kline got so frustrated with smartphone selfie sticks that he made a video of him snipping them with bolt cutters all over New York. It turned out to be a prank, with fake phones and actors as the victims, but the video has more than 1.3 million views on YouTube since Sept. 1.
“Technology is making people sociopaths,” says Buddy Bolton, a comedian who recorded the selfie-stick clip-and-run incidents with Mr. Kline.
These people do not mean they literally got rid of their phones, but that they are using their phones as phones again instead of small portable computers ideally suited for social media.
In fact, widespread support for exit from social media has been gaining steam.
This is a result of the Myspace cycle described above, but applied not just to the aging big social media services (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit) but to social media and the internet itself. Once, it was a new frontier, because the Crowd had not arrived. Then Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft made it brain-dead easy to get on and use it, and then social media arose. At first, that was a new space, but then all the people that the people on social media were trying to flee showed up there as well.
Now, it is a bother where most of what is being posted is the same brainless drama that is spoken of at the water cooler, at family dinners or shown on daytime television. People want out as a result. The exact same phenomenon is happening to Neoreaction and Alternative Right, and those who care about the power of those movements should flee the dying zone and head toward a higher level of behavior immediately.
Looking back on this time, historians will see Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump as parallel movements. As if an answer to Fukuyama’s “end of history,” these show the highwater point of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy, or the system of democracy plus civil rights including diversity, reached dominance with the defeat of the axis powers in WWII, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, absorbed the aspects of socialist theory that had previously been considered untenable because of their similarity to Soviet policies.
However, liberal democracy is a “system,” or a set of rules designed to guide interchangeable people toward the right results by algorithm. In this case, we measure governance by popularity. Like all other systems, liberal democracy has proven to be unable to restrain its repetitive use of past successful techniques, which is an inversion of thought. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; increasing equality is our hammer.
This has created a situation where our faux elites, or Cathedral, have dictated to us from behind the mantle of the presumed ultimate good of liberal democratic theory, but because they are pursuing an ideology and a system instead of realistic goals, have created a nightmare, as one disappoint liberal writes in Politico:
[T]he people of the United States have perhaps stood silent for too long. The elites of opinion and government have not hesitated to offer us instruction, from the heights of their power and eminence. These are the people who have led us into useless foreign war and limitless domestic disaster.
People turned to liberal democracy in order to avoid useless wars and domestic disasters. It was perceived as a more stable system because it limited the power of centralized forces like government, business and special interest groups. Instead, it has become ruled by them, but only the ones who are fanatical ideologues or at least pretend to be them.
In short, liberal democracy is behaving like any other system, making us think that the factor in common behind the failure of systems is systems themselves, and not the variety of system. Systems are an artifact of modernity, itself a creation of egalitarianism. People are enraged not just at the callous pedantry of the faux elites, but the reversal of promises — liberal democracy has become the opposite of what it promised, as noted in the Free Beacon:
“This is the paradox that defines our world today,” Obama told the U.N. “A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before, and yet our societies are filled with uncertainty, and unease, and strife.”
We are indeed richer, fatter, and more peaceful. We have more toys. So why is it that we are also anxious, polarized, dismayed? No answer is offered. The paradox is not resolved. Instead we are admonished to “press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration” rather than “retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.”
Why? “The principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundations for progress in this century.” But this is a non sequitur. One second he’s saying a world constructed under liberal democratic principles has also brought social disintegration and unhappiness, and the next second he says the answer is—more liberal democracy.
What is the core of Brexit and the Trump Revolution? Existential misery. People have doubts about life itself because despite all of our wealth and power, we lack purpose and feel that we have been hijacked toward ideological goals that do not in fact make a better world.
Even worse, as illustrated above, this ideology is like all ideologies a great filter. It eliminates consideration of any options it does not understand. It refuses to understand any possibility that does not affirm the ideology. And so it is a death spiral, a train out of control, always doubling-down on its own agenda as that agenda fails.
In other words, it has become pathological and destructive, like Communism and National Socialism (mostly) before it.
Brexit and Trump are attempts to dismantle this pathological mental loop, as described in the Financial Times:
The bigger danger lies in Mr Trump’s promise to withdraw — to tear up trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, throw up trade barriers against China, repudiate the Paris climate change agreement and the nuclear deal with Iran, and abdicate responsibility for the security of east Asia and Europe. Mr Trump’s policies are shot through with contradictions but one constant drumbeat is his belligerent isolationism. America will go it alone. Hyper-realism, some call it. Dangerous is a better word.
The present global order — the liberal, rules-based system established in 1945 and expanded after the end of the cold war — is under unprecedented strain. Globalisation is in retreat.
This is a revolution against globalization, which is the ultimate end of liberal democracy, because as an ideology it cannot tolerate competition and therefore must rule the world. If an ideology asserts that something is true, and a contrary example exists, the ideology appears debunked, which is why Leftists worldwide are engaged in fanatical campaigns to smash, censor, disenfranchise, disemploy, ostracize, impoverish and imprison those who are not consciously ideological adversaries, but are certainly ideological non-conformists.
Liberal democracy tied itself to globalism, and has made globalization its fundamental issue. Those who oppose free trade, world federalism and diversity will find themselves demonized. This has already happened, starting with Hillary Clinton’s hilarious “Alt Right” speech, because the Left is re-organized against this revolution, and will claim that it is in violation of civil rights ideals, or possibly, simply Un-Constitutional as in the case of this virtue signaling in The Atlantic:
Trumpism is the symptom, not the cause, of the malaise. I think we have for some time been living in the post-Constitution era. America’s fundamental law remains and will remain important as a source of litigation. But the nation seems to have turned away from a search of values in the Constitution, regarding it instead as a set of annoying rules.
…Trump’s most consistent and serious commitment is to the destruction of free expression. (Note that his response to the bombings in New York and New Jersey was to call for a rollback of the free press, on the grounds that “magazines” are somehow instructing the bombers.) In other areas, his program is torture, hostage taking, murder of innocent civilians, treaty repudiation, militarized borders, official embrace of Christianity, exclusion and surveillance of non-favored religious groups, an end to birthright citizenship, racial and religious profiling, violent and unrestrained law enforcement, and mass roundups and deportation.
The people living in what remains of Western Civilization were induced to support liberal democracy as a way of ending what they perceived as unwarranted class and racial warfare that seemed to be exploding around them. The second World War made this too easy, with an Axis formed of Nationalist (or, “one ethnic group = one nation”) powers opposing an Alliance of liberal democratic regimes.
When our media elites refer to Brexit and the Trump Revolution as “populism,” they are trying to disguise the revolutionary nature of this dissent. It is not any more populist than any other political movement; it simply did not originate with the elites, and therefore they are counter-signaling with the term “populism,” which calls to mind the Know-Nothings, Joe McCarthy, the Scopes Monkey trial and other over-stated kerfuffles from the past. This is a revolt against the dominant paradigm of our age, and those in power — across industry, government, academia and media — stand to lose big.
As The Atlantic signals, their tactic will be to fall back on values that people agree on such as civil rights and free expression, and to try to use those to invalidate elections or criminalize the revolution. This is typical for those in power, because it combines populism with their presumed ideological advantage as they turn to their citizens and say, “But we agree on these good things, and those other guys do not support them, so you are with us, the safe and responsible government, not those ruffians, you hear?”
While this will cow and cuck most of the population, a sizeable portion have refused to bow because they see the writing on the wall. Any proposed idea has a clear goal it aims to establish, and if it fails to achieve that goal or does so at too high of a cost, it is discarded. That is just part of life. Liberalism has now failed to achieve its goals, and brought on an empire of misery, doubt, boredom and uncertainty, and so it has become obsolete.
This leads to the question of what comes next. The sane people are thinking about Lord of the Rings plus spaceflight, where the neurotics and parasites are waxing on about universal basic income and world peace. The sane way to visualize this is that we must first save civilization from immediate threats, and then find a better way than this system, or any system, so that in the future we rise to new heights instead of simply fighting demons.
Some like to characterize the West as “Faustian,” a term inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust who metaphorically sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power beyond what he could otherwise obtain
This story, based in medieval myths, re-envisions the classic morality tale as one with another dimension. In the classic tale, the anti-hero sells his soul to evil for power, then becomes destructive, and eventually either returns to good or self-destructs through hubris. In Goethe’s re-styling of it, the anti-hero rebels against the categorization of good and evil, which are actually proxies for realistic versus dysfunctional.
For Western Europeans — up until the 1960s this was the group we meant when we said “white people” — the idea of Faustian has appealed because we have for a long time wanted to reach beyond the nu-Christian “good and evil” toward reality, and since that has been demonized by the herd, we see ourselves as wanting to reject morality itself. However, the Faustian legend points us toward something else: perhaps evil is merely misidentified.
The Western Europeans might be more properly referred to as Infaustian, or that which is the inversion of Faust: we do not seek power, but we seek order. We require a transcendental goal in order to motivate us to live, and this is only found in the type of order that is both natural and extends into human society. We need something more than proxies for what is real, such as truth or morality, because we need an understanding of the real itself.
The Faust story could be viewed as a re-statement of the Garden of Eden mythos from the Bible. The serpent offers power without wisdom, or in other words, power beyond our state in the golden chain of hierarchy which constitutes the actual natural order. However, this has always been the antithesis of the West; our method is to make ourselves powerful not through fantasy, but by understanding reality.
Infaustians have both Faustian and anti-Faustian characteristics. They are unconstrained by good and evil, because they view reality as good and any deviation from it as evil, so they do not need the proxies. Instead they seek power through knowledge, including the knowledge of how to apply it, so that power becomes a means to an end and increases power in the future, rather than having it now.
The story of Faust is that of an ingenue who stumbles into the world of supernatural evil by wanting more than he should have according to natural order. The Infaustian mythos is one in which a potential Faust instead makes himself the source of power by negating himself, and discovering reality, and through it finding a way to perpetuate power by making it the cause of itself, instead of a cause in itself.
As with any rising society, Infaustian societies seek not the Soviet-style legitimization of hubris through personal power, but the source of power, which is found in understanding the invisible portions of reality, namely the methods that work in any situation because they appeal to an underlying mathematics and structure to our universe. This will always be the opposite of the Faustian as well as the insect-like standards of the third world, where people seek neither power nor knowledge.
Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word hoard…
Brett Stevens does not resemble the hero you want. He is not a seven-foot-tall Viking with fire in his eyes, a sword in his hand and a lust for blood. Instead he is only a man writing about history and the future, basing his knowledge only on reading and decades of thought.
Most people now “feel” that something is wrong; they are aware that things are out of place, but do not know how, and more importantly, have no idea what they want instead. They identify certain problems that they want to go away, but this is not satisfying, because these problems did not arise by themselves. They are consequences of the direction of our civilization.
The FBI informant and Hollywood Nazi alike want you to think that race war is the answer. The Christians tell you that we need a mass revival, not that those have ever happened without become New Age style nonsense. The mainstream Republicans want to salvage the economy and military and duck the rest behind gated communities.
Very few people are focused on the real task: reversing the decline of our civilization.
Civilizations are living things. They are not abstractions. They are composed of people who share an ideal. Together, they take different roles — not equal ones — and put their effort toward maintaining a state of life. This gives people comfort and safety, but more importantly, pride. They are part of something they can believe in.
This is the most important aspect of life: pride. It has two parts. We must believe in what we are doing, and be driven to make it go further and be better than ever before. This is what keeps people going, when food is low and sleep is nonexistent. It is what nurtures life, even more than food, sleep, water and sex.
The West suffers from a lack of pride, except in the transient, because it has a lack of purpose. Our goal has become — well, nothing — and so we have made ourselves into servants of others, forgetting our own potential and the greatness that can come of it.
There remains no task except to restore this. It does not come to us through a single point of focus — race, religion, culture, values, God — but through a desire to have those things, and a will to use each one to balance the other.
Some among us advocate for these single points of focus. They mean well; however, they are not extreme enough. This is a fight for survival, and even more than living or dying, a struggle for our souls. We must dream not furtively but boldly of what we want to be, and then make ourselves into it.
This task will take all of those things. It must happen by any means necessary, with relentless extremity. That is not as simple as killing or genociding, but it requires a stronger version of the same impulse. There is no deviation. There cannot be any compromise.
We have grown up and lived in the shadow of our decline. We have sabotaged our expectations and eviscerated our hopes just to remain in this world. What Brett Stevens calls for is not to remain in this world, but to burn from within it the deceptions and conveniences, and to instead give ourselves in sacrifice to its future greatness.
This does not sound extreme in comparison to what the Hollywood neo-Nazis and raging radicals among us suggest. It seems mild-mannered, mundane, and almost bourgeois in its call for vigilant common sense. And yet, it calls us to something greater than mere radicalism.
Our task is not to remove a few bad things from amongst us, but to remake our civilization by recrafting ourselves, so that we can be not just functional, but thriving, and aspire to the excellence which defined classical civilization.
Open your eyes to the situation: the corruption, the incompetence, the broken spirits of those around you. Scan those graveyards which stretch toward the sun over the horizon, look to the ruins of our cities. Touch with your heart the emptiness in our books and art. There are only two paths, and one leads to the same, another away.
We cannot salvage any part of the current system, starting with the idea that we can choose what is right based on what exists, physically, in the present time. We must look toward the future and understand what will fulfill our dreams, restore our pride, and make us want to be more than what we are.
Some call for total war, or race war, and others want us to end the immediate travesties. These are temporary goals; our goal must be eternity. We seek what will make us greet the rising sun with joy and a lust for existence, a desire to exceed ourselves in every way, and to become something new.
The last few thousand years have been misery in slow doses. Each year is worse than the one before, but because this is invisible to most, the good people among us shrug it off and do their best to slow it down. It can no longer be slowed. It must be defeated, banished, and replaced with something so much better that it drives the darkness away.
On paper, what Brett Stevens and those like him advocate seems mild. If you let it into your imagination however, you see that it is a scream of rage for the establishment of the wonderful instead of the adequate, the powerful instead of the convenient.
Neo-Nazism will not do this for you, nor will Anarcho-Capitalism. No “System” can help us. Systems are an artifact of the idea of equality, where each person gets treated like an interchangeable part of uniform value, and by mass motion we “solve” problems while ignoring the big problem, the elephant in the room.
Brett Stevens may not be the writer or the candidate that you desire. That is fine; there are others. What matters is the ideas, the framing of our situation so that we can see clearly, instead of muddling our way through definitions and assumptions created by those who control. What matters is the goal.
Western Civilization is worth defending. It is our future; without it, all that we do vanishes in dissipation and erosion like all the good of the last seventy years. The only extreme position is to tackle the whole of the task, and to set aside emotion and personal concerns, so that we can join hands and rise out of this fallen time.
We knew something had fundamentally changed in America when the trucks showed up and workers installed bollards in front of the old bank. In the 1970s, people did not drive cars into banks in any great numbers, but now, this was the new normal.
This began a decade of slow retreat from what we knew to be necessary and real. Graffiti covered everything. Stores installed anti-shoplifting precautions. Airports added layers of security. Crudity and obscenity became the norm in movies, which now showed sex scenes in every film. Schools put in metal detectors and got even more boring.
Generation X citizens were born into the last grasp of a world where everything made sense, and watched as it was gradually eroded in front of them. Adults were crazy, with a few exceptions, their eyes glowing at the thought of jobs, our obedience and politics, but blind to how mundane and pointless everyday life was.
Products began to get mediocre. I remember my neighbor holding on to his old shovel as long as he could. “The wood in the new ones is no good,” he said, “if they don’t use plastic instead, which is worse. And the metal is thin because they could save a buck. Guess some MBA got rich off that idea.”
Government had become comedy too. Talking heads came onto the television, promised impossible things, and women voted for them. The women swung the vote every time, so they were treated like girlfriends by the politicians, who told them pleasant fictions and watched them scurry to the voting booths.
At this point in time it became popular to talk about how bad corporations were. After that, we talked about how bad technology was. Every now and then someone blamed bureaucracy. No one would talk about the issue beneath it all, which is that people had gone crazy and our political system was spiraling out of control as a result.
Every now and then you encounter a real person. They generally have a furtive look, as if they were foreign agents in a hostile land, which they are. Nothing they care about will be understood by the masses. Nothing they see can be shared. Nothing they know is true will be perceived as anything but irrelevant or worse, a self-serving lie.
The real people have been holding on to the idea of civilization for the past four thousand years as lies have piled on lies. The first idea was that there were no people who were better than others; this meant that those who told lies were seen as being as good as those who were truthful. This meant that everyone was safe from judgment, or in other words, safe from reality.
Since then society has been ruled by a series of proxies. Since we cannot choose the best to lead us, we set up some hoops for them to jump through, and reverse logic to conclude that those who jump through the hoops are the best. Real logic: find our best people. Fake logic: the people who do best at this trivial task are our best. The part stands for the whole, the moment supplants the lifespan.
And so we, Generation X, woke up: marooned explorers in a ruined world. No social institution could be trusted. Anyone who was vested or enfranchised in the system was suspect. Every day, the television blarted lies and distractions and almost everyone paid attention so they could signal how obedient they were.
School was like a jail, only more boring. Jobs were more of the same, being interchangeable cogs so that we could be replaced, which meant that everyone did very little real work — involving thinking — and spent most of their time putting repetitive stuff in the right form. Wealth was everywhere, but almost never enough to escape.
We knew that not only was this civilization dying, but it had died, and now our parents and grandparents had left us as a the sacrifice to the Moloch of failure and decay. We were worse than slaves; slaves are valuable. We were the products of our parents’ lust and denial.
And now, thirty years later, we watch the clock tick down in the West. The obviously corrupt, criminal and incompetent candidate Hillary Clinton may or may not have Parkinson’s; that’s a proxy for what we want to talk about, which is that she is vile and possibly evil and in any case, inept and soulless.
No one in public office or a public-facing role in business is competent. They are also all not-good. They follow the trends like the rest, hoping to cash in on the latest mass mania that has obsessed the Crowd because they need it to distract themselves from the yawning abyss, and with their dollars grasped in grubby hands, they control society.
We know — and we have known — that no society can exist by mass rule. Most people, including most with college degrees who think they are super-geniuses, have no ability to make those decisions. But our pretense of being nice guys so our neighbors will buy our stuff demands that we pretend that all of these idiots are Kings and geniuses.
In most ways, our generation has been playing the waiting game. We are waiting for it all to crash. When disorder hits, we can take up weapons without the well-meaning but vapid cops taking us out, or the military acting. We can kill those who need to be killed and put all the fools on planes to Brazil. But not until then. So we wait.
Responsibility will be the death of us — or rather, the second type of responsibility will. The original type is responsibility for one’s actions, which means that the person is obligated to use self-discipline to make sure their actions will have the desired results in reality, and then is estimated based on the success or failure of an action and all actions by that person before it. We call that reputation and it is highly important.
The second type of responsibility involves a proto-subsidy for those who are not thriving. In this responsibility, the weak eat the strong, because the strong are compelled to take care of the weak. This is the fundamental security hole in society itself: anyone who chooses to become parasitic can simply not succeed, and then all the “good, decent and prosperous” people will try to help them, which enables those who are not actually failing use society as a host for their own sustenance and progeny.
Back when humanity was small, parasitic people could be denied property within the boundaries of the town or city, and had to go live in the wilderness. Now that the wilderness is the minority, this cannot be done, and they would have to be formally exiled to the many third-world nations whose population dwarfs that of the first world. Instead, the productive people fear being seen as threatening by others, and include the parasites in society by giving them unnecessary jobs, subsidies/welfare and political voice.
Every successful civilization to date has destroyed itself with some variant of this method. They cannot summon the will to replace natural selection and the hierarchy of the wolf-pack with a social equivalent, and so those who could not survive without civilization increase, while those who could survive under any circumstance are destroyed by the miserable life that is created: constant obligation to work to support the parasites, incessant ineptitude and delaying tactics by the non-thriving, and waiting around while the simpler bungle their way through non-complex transactions — and then have their lives complicated and slowed down by the bureaucracy that springs up to address the bungling.
What humanity instead needs is a mandate for leisure: people need more hours a day not working at jobs, sleeping or doing the other work-like tasks of survival than they spend on those pursuits. Leisure does more than give us rest; it allows our thoughts to wander, so that we have more options in our mind than the robotic ten or so responses that are called for by jobs, bureaucracy and socializing. We need to discover ourselves. Leisure — loafing, wandering, woolgathering, daydreaming — this is the core of the human soul.
The Kraftwerk song “The Robots” tells us all we need to know about modern humanity:
We are programmed just to do
anything you want us to
we are the robots
We’re functioning automatic
and we are dancing mechanic
we are the robots
Ja tvoi sluga (I’m your slave)
Ja tvoi rabotnik (I’m your worker)
This is a mechanical time, not from technology, but from its basis in binary assumptions. If we assume equality, anything which is seen as anti-equality must be destroyed. If we assume democracy, then anyone who speaks against democracy must also be destroyed. This is why our modern society moves forward like a machine: discarding the bad, enforcing obedience, and never contemplating its own programming.
What the constant pressure from society achieves is this robotic mentality. We are engaged in repetitive tasks, even when disguised as high-level diagnoses like those used in the professions (medicine, law, architecture). This narrows our ability to see anything other than our assumptions, and programs us to apply them reflexively because this leads to success. In this way, we become zombies who cannot consider the outcomes in reality of their choices.
The more that this plagues us, the more the demands rise. Now people spend very little time alone, or without obligations, and as a result they become even more robotic and defensive. We have reduced our big brains to the level of reflex and rote, missing out on the point that we should carefully consider all that we do in terms of its consequences, not its appearance to others.
As historians of the future look through the ruins to figure out why the most promising human societies self-destructed, they will find this robotic tendency: social pressures enforce assumptions and discourage questioning them, which creates a death spiral where societies obsessively attempt to force failed ideas onto reality. Once that happens, it is time to raise the headstone and move on.
|
