Amerika

Civilization destroys itself by creating a “consensual reality” formed of social and moral ideals that, while couched in terms of the collective, are actually defense of the individual against a need to rise to higher standards than what he personally desires. Over time this process erodes and then destroys society.

In the social-moral cloud, what matters is “justice.” Justice is administered by assuming that each person is perfectly the same, and judging them only on that basis. Our conception of justice depends entirely on each of us as individuals seeing ourselves in the situation of another, and wanting to restrict what could happen to us. In other words, justice is a fancy name for “fear.”

For example, an upper middle class white suburban housewife is driving her BMW SUV down the freeway. At a light by the feeder, she sees a homeless man dressed in rags with his sign asking for change. A police car stops and the officers begin to usher the vagrant on to other parts. Going through her head is as follows:

• Oh, that poor man. I feel good about the fact that I am affluent and removed from this.
• He’s being oppressed. If I were confronted by those police officers, I would be very angry at being told I could not ask for money here.
• He’s just like me. The only reason I am affluent and he is not is chance. I have to believe that, because otherwise I must consider that his decisions placed him there, and mine me here, which means that we are all accountable for our choices. That makes me feel terrible about my affair with the pool guy.
• I don’t want to see this. This struggle, like watching hawks eat rats and mice, is just too real. I want to see pleasant things, like at the mall. Feeling like they would do the same to me makes me upset.
• I feel good about opposing this. Next election, I am going to send a strong signal that this behavior by the police is unacceptable. When I give money to homeless people, I feel rich, generous and good. When cops remove them, I feel disturbed, mortal and frail.

The problem here is projection. The nice suburban lady projects herself into the role of another who has different abilities, a different character, and has made vastly different choices. She demands the same rule for the two even though they have different potentials and behavior patterns. As a result, police become afraid to displace vagrants, and vagrant-style behavior becomes the norm, except where nice white suburban ladies pay private security to keep it from happening.

And through this method, terms like “justice” and “liberty” become perverted from their original meaning of doing right to everyone according to what they give to society into a sense of forced tolerance of the broken so that affluent white taxpayers do not “feel” threatened.

In a true meaning of justice, we would view civilization as a purpose in itself higher than the individual. That is: individual needs do not obviate needs of society as an organic whole, which is different from society-as-a-group. The organic whole is a thing on its own terms; a group tries to protect all of its members, and ends up being egalitarian as a means of doing so, which results in the inclusion of those who do nothing for the whole. This damages the whole and eventually, all of its members, but voters will never recognize that.

Healthy people and healthy civilizations do not care about innocent victims. They care about protecting the interests of those who are working to sustain, nurture and develop civilization. In such a saner viewpoint, people do not get concerned over the fact that someone has been hurt, only the question of whether this person was a useful person or one of the other group, who are de facto enemies of civilization.

Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. In each case the cry of the innocent victim goes up, and yet in each case, we see someone who contributed nothing and who was engaged in antisocial behavior. In saner times, people would make an “ends over means” calculus and stop worrying about what happened to these people. Saner people defend the good people instead of applying the blind algorithm of equality which favors the least contributory.

Naturally, this outlook is taboo. While parts of minority communities are caught up in victim politics, the real driver of it is the affluent white voter who, like with many other problems in life, just wants to write a check and make the unpleasant scene go away.

Tags: democracy, equality, justice, liberty