Creed

The last fifty years have brought rapid change to humanity. Riding a wave of technology, we have almost entirely re-made our society on a principle that sounds good to us: freedom, equality and benevolence.

Now we are shocked to find we live on a planet covered in litter, increasingly polluted, with daily species extinctions, and yet for all this, most people are still lonely, and we are controlled by forces more corrupt and powerful than any in the past. Our “progress” created a regression that thanks to our technology, is even more dominant than before.

Globalization is one term for this convergence of consumerism, colonialism, and revolutionary rhetoric. The thread in common is the individual: each one of these ideas divides the individual from society, replacing the idea of “we’re all working toward a goal” with an ethic of convenience, where we do what seems comfortable to ourselves.

You might not think that capitalism (consumerism) and egalitarianism (liberalism) have anything in common, but they do. They both sound good to the individual, and unite individuals into a mob that doesn’t want any oversight. They don’t want culture, they don’t want wise elders, they don’t want kings and they don’t want definitive answers. They want a dysfunctional society so they can pursue their own pleasures.

(Image credit: KUMC)

If you look at how intelligence is distributed among our species, you will quickly see that over half of the population is probably not smart enough to think more than two weeks into the future. For that reason, they make short-term decisions — buy beer instead of putting money in the kid’s college fund — and made ideal consumers. However, their actions while not intentionally bad become destructive in the long term.

As the industrial age comes to a close, we see how globalization is its final act. We will become one giant industrial society, with individuals worth nothing more than their labor, and while we will technically be “equal” (and may even get generous welfare) we will also have nothing to live for except that ethic of convenience. We will become soulless, cultureless, interchangeable parts.

However, right now we are at a crossroads. Many of us do not want to live on a concrete-covered globe of equal but unexceptional people; we prefer the organic society with a culture, values system, hierarchy and overall goal besides personal convenience. Personal convenience makes us comfy, but it doesn’t make for a fulfilling life. Helping others, pushing ourselves and making ourselves morally better does make for a full life.

Many of us now are starting to think that our thinking has been backward for centuries. Because our technology allowed us, we did what was convenient, and then only later invented reasons why it was right. In addition, because we all became equal, our society became a constant one-upmanship: keeping up with the Joneses, acting morally superior to others, and becoming egomaniacs as we tried to look better and be more interesting than our peers.

In doing so, we as individuals became detached from awareness of our world, ignoring the patterns inherent to life. You can’t touch a pattern, which is a type of system of organization. It “emerges” or appears without having a source, based on the way objects interact in daily life. We can change matter, but we can’t change patterns, any more than we can change the eternal truths of being human.

We can fix this modern world, and make it better, without losing our technology. This requires us to “think outside the box” and make some hamburger from sacred cows:

• Individualism. The individual is nothing without a social order to back her up: family, culture, values and heritage. Even more, what makes us feel good about ourselves is when we accomplish something on a scale bigger than ourselves. The real mountains to climb in life are solitary quests, but we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for a collective effort. Instead of individualism, we should view our interaction with society as a sacred role where by doing good, we feel good about ourselves.
• Freedom. This word requires an object, as in “freedom from something,” and that creates an inherently negative outlook. In order to have freedom, you must get rid of all of those objects. Soon you have nothing but yourself. It makes sense instead to say that you desire independence, or some space in life where you have domain and can experiment, play and create. This space probably doesn’t need to be as big as you’d think, since there’s actually not much variation in what most of us do in life.
• Equality. You can have equality, or you can have quality, but not both. If we decide equality is our value, we will forever be enforcing it, which requires we lift up the lower and in order to do so, penalize those who have risen above. The result is a form of entropy where any one choice is about the same as any other. We prefer evolution, where some rise above the rest and then those abilities trickle down to the rest.
• Peace. Many people want to regulate methods, instead of looking at end results. They assume that by removing negative methods, like war or murder, they can make sure only good end results exist. The truth is that sometimes you need to fight for what you believe, or in other words, use “bad” methods to achieve “good” results. We need to grow past this paradox in our thinking. Conflict makes change.
• Acceptance. It’s a fond illusion that if we accept everyone, we live in peace and happiness. The truth is that we feel better when we get accepted not just because we’re human, but because of something we do well. That way, we can strive for beating our own best record, make ourselves better people, and have others reward us with their esteem, instead of cheapening esteem by handing it out automatically.
• Diversity. Another fond illusion is that if we mix up all cultures and ethnic groups, we end up with peace because we have eliminated our differences. As the patterns of reality show us, however, we separate into different strata no matter how mixed we are, and so conflict isn’t ended. In addition, people like to be around people like themselves, and this lets them set up a culture so they don’t need government to enforce values.
• Humanism. We like to think we are enlightened, wise beings who are all little diamonds in the rough. The reality is that we’re at one stage in evolution, barely above being chimpanzees. Without oversight, many people still do thoughtless things like litter or commit crimes. We need to evolve further, and we need to not view the world through a human-only filter; we need to include nature in its sacred role as our origin and future.

Our solution to the modern problem is the organic society. Where our modern societies are fairly random groupings of people held together by allegiance to political concepts, the organic society is composed of similar individuals who police themselves through culture and values, and therefore do not require the artificial culture (and enforcement) of a modern nation-state, its Big Media and corporate interests.

Organic societies are decentralized and not housed in any one person; nation-states have a central leadership that because it has so much power, is the inevitable target for corruption. In addition, organic societies operate by reward rather than negative feedback. Without equality as our guiding mythos, we reward those who are exceptional, and everyone wants to be like them.

Since 1789, the West has been accelerating toward a liberal extreme, which gained power with the social revolutions of 1968. These changes have not brought happiness, but misery. The fond ideals of those revolutions fail because they deal with the end results of life, not the underlying patterns. We as new conservatives embrace those underlying patterns, and as a result, don’t become out of touch with reality like liberals.

At Amerika.org, we represent a new frontier. We are conservation conservatives, or paleoconservatives informed by the European New Right who believe conservation of nature is as important as conservation of culture. We are informed by science, and distrust superstition even when it masks itself as science. We don’t look toward a new dawn of humanity; we aim to create it.