Amerika

Those on the Right frequently find themselves wondering how everything could go so wrong, and why it seems like the bad always triumph while the good are beaten into submission. It turns out that these things are related.

We could view the years since 1789 as a competition between replacements for the monarchy, which true to life functions not by picking winners, but by knocking out failures. System after system has collapsed, leaving only the one which has endured the longest in the greatest state of mediocrity.

That sounds cynical, but consider that most of Earth lives in mediocrity: subsistence existence, corrupt institutions, high crime and disorder, mass culture based on bodily urges, and so forth. Humanity rose above the apes only to regress and hover just slightly higher than the primal state.

This means that while it is miserable, mediocrity is stable, in that if there is no wealth or power to be fought over, infighting decreases. People suffer not so much because their quality of life is bad but because they lack a number of options that most of us would want, like the chance to produce things of value that outlast the individual lifespan.

After all, we might say that the defining feature of the third world is that people there cannot recognize things of higher quality, therefore always choose lower quality, thus consigning anything great to the dustbin while repeating the same semi-failing-but-definitely-not-succeeding pathologies.

This shows us a competition that one can only win by losing. The decay half of the civilization cycle tends to be like this… whatever wins will be mediocre, and therefore have destroyed all the wealth and power before the infighting over wealth and power destroys the civilization.

We find ourselves in the midst of a civilization cycle. Human groups emerge, adapt, and then maximize that position by creating a stable permanent civilization; over time, however, they forget the why behind the things they do, so stop doing what made them successful, and people chase their own self-importance, vanity, and popularity. Things decay. During that decay cycle, nothing realistic and good will win much favor, so people en masse emulate and celebrate the decline. As with all trends, this fad for decay has a social origin, and consists of people doing what leads to immediate personal reward instead of paying attention to what succeeds in any context.

In the postwar years, Leftism has taken over the West not so much for its goodness, but for its mediocrity. When you have a great history and legacy of learning to build upon, mediocrity seems like a good idea, because you essentially neuter society so that individuals can go ahead and do the great things in technology, science, mathematics, physics, industry, and agriculture that make a civilization powerful and wealthy. This is resistance to the decay part of the cycle struggling against inertia.

However, at some point, the mediocrity wave catches up. The cost of paying off the parasites goes up each year because whatever you tolerate, focus on, or subsidize increases; the competence of institutions decreases as bad decisions hamstring them with paradoxical instructions and fill them with increasingly incompetent bean-counters. Mediocrity only goes in one direction, further down. Once the cycle is fully dominant, only mediocrity will be rewarded.

Currently, our society finds itself divided not by social media — the current scapegoat — but by the almost-universal dominance of the Left, which has caused the Left to become more extreme because it has nowhere else to expand. That, in turn, has marginalized all non-Leftists and placed them in a defensive and iconoclastic position.

This means however that in public, gang warfare of a social type predominates, which means that those who fail to go along with the Leftist trend will be attacked. Consequently, no one will speak up. Correspondingly, those who chase trends in order to cash in on what is popular will emulate the “woke” and “progressive,” out-doing each other by being more extreme than the previous public signal.

You can see this with corporations. Two menswear companies are going broke because they were trends in the 1990s and, having become hide-bound and calcified by hiring middle managers and MBAs, they have been unable to take the risk of trying new designs not created by committee, and therefore, are no longer relevant.

At the first company, the fat guys in suits come up with a new vision: we will brand ourselves as youthy, relevant, happening, and important by cashing in on this new hippie movement, this new political trend, by proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” on our athletic socks.

Company B sees this and thinks, whoah, we cannot let them get away with this. We will go even further and emblazon “White Babies Are White Supremacy” on our jockstraps. This should place us at the forefront of this new social trend, and get over the fact that our products suck because we are ruled by committees.

Each one of these has made a democracy-style decision: extend certain tokens in exchange for x amount of publicity. The media dutifully reports on their decision, then the Leftoids (The Guardian and The New York Times, usually) praise these companies for their exertion but, in order to avoid appearing like the corporate shills that they are, chide them for not going further. This spurs on the Right-wing media, who make their money from outrage porn just like the NeverTrump Right specializes in losing gracefully while shaking fingers at those Leftists and minorities who just need Jesus, to run a series of incoherently condemnatory pieces about how this right here is the problem with society.

Back at the committee-huts, the teams tally their results. Each got a certain number of eyeball-minutes, adding up to a figure in the millions of dollars, and they measure their success this way. Being bean-counters, they do not hope for their products to become relevant again, only to sell slightly more of their failing products. This enables them to kick up the stats, raise the stock price, and go back to the shareholders with glowing reports of success. For this quarter, that is enough, and the fat guys in suits can go back to buying vacation homes, renovating the guest toilets, and betting on fantasy football.

This shows us Crowdism in action: in any human group, the capable create a new thing, and then the incompetents crowd in to get “their” share. To justify that, they create a social circle based on equality so that they can make a moral claim to taking what they cannot make on their own. Over time, this social group demonizes all realism because it conflicts with their moral claim. Eventually, anyone who deviates from the false reality of this group is punished and excluded.

How do we get there? Tools of two sorts. When we create a tool, we replace the “why” for a task with the method we use to do that task. Incompetents can handle the method, so they make the method the goal, at which point the actual goal is lost and the understanding of the method is lost. From this, incompetence proliferates. The second sort of tool are the incompetents; they want to replace nature, where the only judgment is success or failure at adaptation, with human measurements, known as “authority.” This authority measures only a few of the many variables that nature does, therefore values obedient incompetents over the less-tractable creators. As authority spreads, so does incompetence; the more authority predominates over nature, the more that society goes into the decay cycle.

We find ourselves deep in the cycle kicked off a thousand years ago when the religious wars, peasant revolts, and most of all, middle-class shopkeeper uprising began destroying the aristocracy and replacing it with oligarchy. This passed into democracy around 1789 in France, and since then, democracy has been going through its various permutations, rejection Communism and National Socialism but accepting a hybrid of libertarianism and socialism called “market socialism” or “neoliberalism” that is even more authoritarian — but using indirect methods, like crowdsourced mass ostracism and media deplatforming — than either of those. This shows us democracy desperate to regain control of itself, and doubling down on authority and a rejection of nature rather than admitting that it has failed to contain and control certain problems.

The big takeaway here consists of the knowledge that in the present time, being Leftist presents the “safe” option for individuals and industries. Much like one found only good Communists during the daytime in the USSR, but heard a different story in the black markets and off-licenses that were part of the landscape at night, in the USA today everyone seems Leftist in public but in private will express a far different vision.

People conform to what seems to be winning, and since the 1930s, Leftism has been winning hard. Sure, we kick it back to a Reagan every few decades so he can inject some libertarian wisdom and fix the mess, but then we go right back to the pursuit of the symbolic belief system of “equality” (the opposite of quality).

They all want to be on the winning team. We have to think Bell Curve style here, however, and realize that most people will never be cutting edge, so what we are seeing is a “long tail,” which means people who are not following the trend but picking up its results after the fact. Leftism came, peaked, and died, but most people are still imitating what they thought was winning when they were youngsters.

When the Millennials die out, the last of the people indoctrinated in Leftism who fully believed it will be gone. In the meantime, there will still be an audience for those who desperately feel a need to receive affirmation that everything will turn out OK if we just keep going on the present course.

In the meantime, those of us who are more cutting-edge, and therefore have realized that Leftism has produced a moribund society where people do not even reproduce at replacement rates, can do one big thing to stop Leftism from winning.

It makes no sense to confront it head-on, but we can subvert it. Spreading doubt about how great this society is, how its institutions are working, how it seems run by China, and how democracy and equality are based on nonsense works. No point attacking the issues directly but we can install doubt.

Much as Leftists once worked to tear down the underpinnings of a conservative society, we now work to destabilize, subvert, undermine, and deconstruct a Leftism fake worldview. For now, they seem to be winning… but in the long term, that too is illusion.

Tags: collapse, crowdism, leftism, society