Amerika

Some years ago, it became clear that humanity had a dark center formed of both conformity and individualism. This center arises in any human group through social behavior, since social behavior consists of making others feel validated through the following mechanisms:

1. The committee effect. People in groups like to win, which means that they will bet on what they think is the winning horse. They do this by adjusting their desires to what they think the group supports. This targets the lowest common denominator through compromise and, with each iteration, pushes that line even lower.
2. Careerism. Each person wants to make a name for himself, so he invents some “new” idea out of hacked-together older ones, and then promotes this in order to promote himself. This creates a constant stream of chaotic trends and chatter unrelated to the big goal.
3. Mutuality. People do not make decisions; they stumble upon them and rationalize outcomes. Therefore, they always seek the validation of others, which is how people socialize, by validating each other. This creates a self-referential group dedicated to confirming the validity of its members in a social context, not staying focused on ideas or reality.

In this way, the tail wags the dog: organizations devoted to a task become inverted and do the opposite of that task in order to support the members of those organizations. This is a variety of dark organization, in which members of a group use the authority conferred upon them by that group to advance their own personal interests at the expense of the group.

This both affirms and reverses the old notion “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Where libertarians are correct is in noticing that when something is not owned by its leaders, meaning that their fortunes rise and fall with its fortunes, many of them tend to exploit it.

Of course, human history shows us many good people who did not become corrupt even at great personal risk. This tells us that people are not equal, and some are fit to lead while most would be toxic in leadership positions (and usually are, if middle management is any guide).

Years ago, I described this phenomenon as Crowdism or the tendency of a group to focus on the people in the group instead of the goal, and posited that all human groups and civilizations self-destruct by this mechanism.

European-descended people hate themselves because they are in the grip of Crowdism, and the more intelligent the group, the more profound the corruption becomes. We out-smarted ourselves by forming little groups in which we manipulated each other.

Every civilization so far has gone through a death process based in this individualistic cleverness; whichever society finds a way to beat it will make it to the stars and become the future of humanity.

If none do, humanity will degrade to third world levels and eventually, back to hominid status. We will be furry little bipeds who run around bashing each other with bones and stones, and we will die out on this planet where we were born.

The civilization death process consists of these steps:

1. The most competent members of a larger group break away and take those that they also recognize as competent.
2. This new group sets up camp and finds itself facing immediate threats: wild animals, lack of food, new diseases, natural disasters, and enemies.
3. Being competent, this group organizes itself and defeats its enemies, although it may have to make alliances and bring non-invitees into the fold.
4. Once it conquers nature as well, the group loses focus because it has achieved its goals. Here the crucial mistake is made: no new goal is declared, and people instead substitute methods like religion, ideology, commerce, and socializing — all of these are based on popularity — in place of a goal.
5. Simultaneously, this group will have bred profligately since it finally has stable nutrition and fewer deaths from disease. This produces many who could not create civilization but depend upon it for survival.
6. Without constant struggle, human social forces — including pretense and sentiment — take over from daily concern for what is functional and realistic. This creates an elite of talking heads who advance symbol over reality.
7. Crowds of people who have nothing in common unite over symbols because they are simple to understand and seem to address all problems and questions of direction, then social forces cause them to validate each other and become a self-confirming force of conformity, and then the zombie group decides to exclude anyone who disagrees because such people are a threat to the fragile unity that holds it together.
8. These groups seek power on the basis of their symbols being “good,” and therefore anyone who opposes them is “bad,” which creates an atmosphere of moral superiority similar to a cult religion. This enables the group to seize power, at which point its crazy ideas fail and civilization collapses.

(Right now, we are in the last stage.)

When a human group has a goal, it can transcend individualism (“me first” and “my world is the world” thinking) so that people stop thinking about other people in the here and now and think instead of the long-term view, including qualitative assessments like excellence (arete) which is the root of all human rising above the lowest common denominator.

With individualism, each individual wants to be protected against all others, so he demands equality and soon the mob — collectivized individualism — demands the same. This creates a situation where the focus is always on people, not goals or reality.

Here we see the paradox of egalitarianism: individualism in groups breaks down into raw individualism when power is attained. As soon as society is stable, the same self-interest that compelled people to work together turns them on each other.

They advance other paradoxes as well, such as the “paradox of tolerance”: be tolerant of everyone who supports egalitarianism, but crush the others because they are “not tolerant.” They endorse paradoxical programs like diversity, socialism, and bureaucratic regulation.

All of these follow the fundamental idea of the dying civilization, which is paradox itself. It exists as a civilization, but has given up on that goal to facilitate the dreams and desires of its citizens, despite most of those being unrealistic and destructive.

Crowdism ruins societies to a point where a large mass of toxic individuals pursuing toxic trends has gathered. There is nothing to do with this human waste but to remove it; no one wants to break the “eugenics barrier,” but at some point, we must admit that we have too many garbage people around.

The rioters in the cities, the Antifa vandalizing everything they encounter, and the sick people in industry, government, media, and academia who guide them on are all paradoxical people. They want power so much, and want to be correct so powerfully, that they are possessed of an impulse to destroy.

This reminds us of Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick: he wants to prove that he is better than the white whale, despite having no real incentive to do so. There are other whales, but Ahab wants his will to rise above the parameters of reality, a condition we commonly call hubris.

Our society has too many Ahabs. We will need to remove the twin threats of Leftism and diversity by reparations-with-repatriation for the diversity, and physical removal (boats to Venezuela) for the Leftists and other mental and moral defectives.

Tags: collectivized individualism, crowdism, eugenics, leftism, paradox of tolerance