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Consumerism Arises From A “Circular Ponzi Scheme”

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

Very few understand the roots of consumerism and assume that it is a natural outgrowth of capitalism. In actuality, consumerism occurs when government regulates capitalism, and is done to create economic growth so that government becomes more powerful. Witness this intense video by Asher Edelman, a famed businessman:

He argues that giving tax breaks to the wealthy results in them spending only 5-10% of the money they are able to conserve, but that giving that money to the underclasses ensures that they will spend all of it and then some, “pump priming” the economy with an infusion of cash.

Government took this further and realized that it could borrow to find this money, then pay off the debt with the resulting increase in the value of its currency based on greater demand for that currency caused by its increased valuation based on perceived greater demand because of higher consumer spending.

This creates a circular Ponzi scheme: government pays citizens, who then buy tons of stuff, at which point the value of currency goes up; government borrows against that currency value, dumps more money on the citizens, then taxes everyone to make government more powerful; finally, it uses that tax money to pay off the loans — in theory — and then repeats the cycle again.

Growth powered by consumerism is responsible for globalism, most of the environmental damage that we have done, and overpopulation. In the name of making government powerful, capitalism and a permanent minority underclass have been employed as weapons of growth, which has resulted in an out-of-control spiral which will eventually crash, and come down hard.

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Third Worldism

Saturday, June 10th, 2017

Most people exist in a comfortable bubble created by their ability to ignore long-term problems. This enables them to live in the midst of insanity and incompetence and still function, mainly because to them, events farther away than the next paycheck are as mystical as Zeus and as distant as Mars.

As a result, few of them recognize that their society has already collapsed, and that we are living in the stage after a social system breaks, where it slowly declines into third world status through disorder, corruption and incompetence.

If one understands history to be cyclic, it becomes clear that a cycle only arises when there is some starting point of sanity, from which events diverge, ultimately bottoming out and forcing a return to the start of that cycle. We know what works in the West:

  1. Ascendancy. We aspire to what is both realistic and “good,” in the sense of ongoing immutable goals like the transcendentals (“the good, the beautiful, and the true” plus “excellence”). Instead of looking backward and seeing what is convenient, popular and profitable, we look forward to what we can achieve, as seen by the best natural leaders among us. We put the intelligent and morally good on top instead of allowing the herd to rule through its numbers, because the herd always chooses short-term thinking. This prioritizes inner thought, such as moral and realistic reasoning, over external thought, or deference to what is already succeeding on a social and economic level.
  2. Tradition. The traditional society consists of a few core principles instead of a single idea like “equality.” It features a caste system, so that the best among us command culture; an aristocracy, so we have leaders instead of salesmen and actors; a hierarchy with internal competition, including open markets without a subsidy system based in government or a command economy; and finally, rule by culture itself, which requires strong nationalism or ethnic tribalism.

Those are the conditions of a Golden Age, and as we have deviated from them, our fortunes have waned. It has taken many centuries to fully visualize this mainly because we were cruising on the inertia of the past, most notably the vast number of talented and morally good people among us, but also our technology and military might.

Until we start heading back in that direction, not necessarily fully achieving it but moving toward it our hearts and minds and therefore gradually implementing it, we will head in the other direction, which is toward the bottom of the cycle, or a third world mentality that produces a society known for low levels of social order, hygiene, principles, wisdom, integrity and efficacy.

We can glimpse the nature of a third world society by observing attributes of it in already fallen societies:

Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare13—what T. E. Lawrence termed “winning wars without battles.”

…The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington’s notion of a “clash of civilizations” in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications.

Third world cultures reward those who are individualistic, or concerned with themselves first before others or principles. This leads to a mentality that pervades all levels of their activity:

In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates.

In an individualistic culture, there is no reason to share information because the goal is not to win the war, but for the individual to retain or expand his position of power. Comparisons to tyranny are apt here: the goal of power is power itself when power is not directed toward purpose and principle.

Through natural selection, this creates a population who excel at tasks that are defined for them, but are unable to reason:

Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles.

For this reason, third world societies tend to be “crab buckets” where people scramble for positions of power and wealth, and then treat these as sinecures, or entitlements through status, and ignore the task at hand. This leads them to use other people as means-to-an-end of not a goal, but of personal power, a condition known as “control” that is the mental state of tyranny.

Because of that, social order is impossible:

This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army’s catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their officers.

We see similar conditions in third world politics and policing. Politicians make promises and enrich themselves through corruption instead of delivering on those; police forces tend to view their role as a chance for bribes rather than a function in itself. Government and companies fall apart because of lack of cohesion, and quality is low across the board, mirroring the problems seen in their militaries.

This creates a society of obedient and conformist people who are oblivious to the consequences of their actions or the possible benefits to be obtained for society at large through fulfillment of their roles:

Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with authority hardly ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal—and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to make unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conformism is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom; they are not to be reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.

I have excerpted the portions of this article that reflect widespread third world behaviors, and left out some specifics which belong to Arab cultures.

The broader point is that in highly individualistic societies, external factors matter more than internal factors. This is how they got to a third world state: their society advanced to the point where playing the game and working the system became more important than efficacy in the real world. All civilizations create these false targets and die by them.

We can see similar things happening in the postwar West:

Buchanan’s assessment of the impact of the defeat in Vietnam on American society has real power to it: “The American establishment that led us to victory in World War II … would never recover from Vietnam, never regain the confidence of the nation. For Vietnam was not an unwinnable war for a country that had reduced the Japanese empire to smoldering ruins in four years. … The simple truth is the American establishment lost the war in Vietnam because it lacked the will to win it.”

This is where Buchanan’s philosophy begins. The country that Nixon inherited in 1969 was “no longer one nation and one people, but a land divided by war and race and culture and politics.” The Establishment was feckless, guilt-driven, hypocritical.

In third world systems, this domination by external thought creates people more interested in advancing themselves within the system than in achieving results in the world outside of the system. This is why the Americans lacked the will to fight complex wars: there was too much infighting as individuals tried to rise above others by using the existing (false) hierarchy.

The doorway to third worldism begins with the creation of a system that prioritizes the individual over purpose, and therefore, incentivizes people to work against each other, eventually destroying the idea of purpose and goal itself. This mentality exists within a cluster of traits and methods: democracy, egalitarianism, Crowdism, solipsism, Leftism, individualism (DECSLI).

In the grips of these, the West collapsed. World War Two was its last attempt to solve its problems before giving in to the inertia of the philosophies which had become socially popular in a wave starting with The Enlightenment™ and formalized during the French Revolution.

While Hollywood spins us collapse fantasies based on single terrifying events, like nuclear war or giant storms, the reality is that collapse of the West is easy to predict: we will become Brazil.

Collapse means the loss of higher civilization and the return to the natural default state of humanity, which is third world style subsistence living while being ruled by self-interested (individualistic) overlords.

There will be strong corporations, limited by their ability to find talented people among the new pool of mixed race, beige, mid-90s average IQ people. These will thus be profitable but bloated and ineffective, hampered by corruption which will take 30% of every deal right off the top.

That will eliminate the ability to invest in the future, and so innovation will stagnate and basically die off.

The rich will have enclaves protected by private security. This will usually work, until someone figures out how to bribe private security and then kill the rich and take their wealth. Governments will do their best to milk the rich until they run into crisis, at which point they will liquidate them and take their stuff as happened during the French Revolution and its Terror, which will leave the civilization with fewer capable people and continue the slow grind into irrelevance.

Places like Brazil are eternal. Everything always gets worse, but at such a low level, this has little effect on daily life. People will still have jobs. Most of them will not lose their lives in violent crime, but all will be victimized. As a result, people will become extraordinarily selfish, and the grinding will continue.

Societies like this can continue indefinitely. If a stronger force comes along, they will be conquered. Otherwise, they will exist in mediocrity and steadily breed out anyone who can tell the difference, creating a vast population of selfish oblivious incompetents whose only salvation is that they are not mentally equipped to notice how bad things are or how much easily they could be better.

Third worlding is part of the civilization cycle, and the only stable points of this cycle are at the top in a Golden Age or at the bottom in the default state of humankind, which is selfish mediocrity.

Leftism is a rationalization of decline that also furthers decline. Like most diseases, it is both its own cause and the force that makes it grow in power. It shapes people to make them ready for existing in a third world state where they will spend all of their energy focused on themselves, and be unaware of what goes on around them. People revert to a yeastlike state of mind.

These societies are the most individualistic places on earth. Individuals have jobs and almost no other obligations. Most of them will report being happy with life, until told that they can have more through redistribution. Then they enthusiastically vote Leftist, furthering the hold that mediocrity has on the society.

If the West is to resist this process, it must accept that it is already well on this path, and needs to fundamentally change from its egalitarian assumptions if it is to restore itself.

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Democracy Became Obsolete And Is Now Being Replaced

Friday, June 9th, 2017

More than simply those on the Left, the people who have an interest in our society continuing as it is are warning of a threat to democracy via gradual dismantling:

Post–Cold War populists such as Chávez, Putin, and Erdogan took a slow and steady approach to dismantling democracy. These leaders first come to power through democratic elections and subsequently harness widespread discontent to gradually undermine institutional constraints on their rule, marginalize the opposition, and erode civil society. The playbook is consistent and straightforward: deliberately install loyalists in key positions of power (particularly in the judiciary and security services) and neutralize the media by buying it, legislating against it, and enforcing censorship. This strategy makes it hard to discern when the break with democracy actually occurs, and its insidiousness poses one of the most significant threats to democracy in the twenty-first century.

While it is dubious to link socialists like Chavez with anti-Leftists like Putin and possibly Erdogan, the methods used in the twenty-first century respond to the new reality of democracy: it is enforced by a herd of people who are orchestrated by media and well-funded NGOs, so the only way to avoid being taken over by those groups is to dismantle democracy from the ground up.

A top-down approach would be to seize power, replace democratic decision-making, and then sort out the little details. The new method involves attacking the details first, removing the infrastructure that democracy uses to keep a mental stranglehold on the population and constantly push them Leftward. Without that structure, democracy does not so much fall as stand revealed as already fallen.

One thing we should keep in mind is that democracy was always an illusion. It was kept afloat by the wealth, power and inventions of the past, plus a rising tide of industrialization. As our technology seems to have mostly peaked, and government has expanded to absorb the extra income from industry, our societies are mostly paralyzed, and the bad decisions made by democracy can finally really hurt us.

Any political system takes years to manifest its disadvantages, and rises on what was before it, so it is a gradual process of its adoption followed by an even slower process as consequences distinguish themselves from longstanding problems. With democracy, it has become clear that the herd is not to be trusted, and has made an utter mess of things.

You will find that all the “good thinker” citizens are in total denial of this. For them, things have never been better, or at least this is what they insist, because the psychological alternative is to accept that their lives are being wasted on a dead-end system. They are financially, socially and most importantly psychologically vested in the system.

At the same time, rising generations and drop-outs from older generations like Generation X — most of whom seem to be languishing in slacker jobs in smaller cities — are not vested in the system and see their only chance of future happiness in its replacement. Since they realize that most people, when given the vote, will vote for something like this system, they are turning on democracy.

Perhaps this is why more than populist leaders, it is this cutting edge of popular cultural revolt that is turning against democracy and toward a “fash wave” of pre-modern thought and ideals:

People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup.

That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne. The remit of their study, which the Journal of Democracy will publish in January, analyzes historical data on attitudes toward government that spans various generations in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. They find that, across the board, citizens of stable liberal democracies have grown jaded about their government, say Mounk and Foa—and worse.

“[T]hey have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy,” they write in a previous article on their research (pdf) published in Jul. 2016, “and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.

People recognize that systems do not work because systems are self-serving.

All creatures, genes, ideas and groups act in self-interest. This varies with their degree of awareness, which since we are no longer under the thrall of egalitarianism we can admit varies widely between individuals and groups. In most cases, their awareness is short term, which means they act for themselves at the expense of civilization, principles and the future.

This is what a prole revolt does: it equalizes short-term thinking with long-term thinking, and so short-term thinking wins out every time. This is why democracy drifts leftward and self-destructs after a handful of centuries. Much as Athens and Rome self-destructed through democracy, the postwar West — the ruins of the Old West — is currently self-destructing, and people want off that path.

As the saying goes, “The West is dead; long live the West!” We are remnants of a once-great people scattered among the detritus of its fall, and we wish to rise to power, throw out the walking dead and restore what once made us great, which is our genetic stock and our principle of social order and future orientation.

Part of the cultural wave that includes the Alt Right, the anti-democratic sentiment sweeping the West consists of a single revelation: we cannot fix ourselves so long as we rely on mass opinion systems like democracy and consumerism. A few do know better than the rest, and if left up to their own devices, people will act in self-interest at the expense of our future.

Even more, people are seeing that democracy has brought misery. It shapes people into wimpy nebbishes and inculcates us in learned helplessness. It spreads existential despair as it becomes obvious that nothing will change if left up to the herd. It distills everything — art, architecture, culture — down to a lowest common denominator, which like all things herd-chosen is ugly.

The solution is not to swing toward dictatorship and purge the weak. It is to restore the order that has always produced golden ages, which is a society based on doing what the best see as right, instead of what is already popular or profitable. When we orient ourselves toward the future, we see the value of the inconvenient, and sidestep decay by aspiring to greatness.

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Update: Introduction to Dark Organizations

Thursday, June 8th, 2017

The original Introduction to Dark Organizations now requires an update as part of my ongoing effort to apply management consulting and risk management solutions to human civilization, through the lens of the Alt Right.

The emergence of “toxicity” in its organizational, rather than individual sense became quite noticeable recently. The term “toxic” is used in an attempt to indicate an extractive “darkness,” because dark characteristics imply defensive organizations while “toxic” refers to an extraction of the last gasp of wealth and power from the host organization that encloses the dark organization.

However, it is the “dark” dead body that is toxic, causing new employees to unknowingly abuse the defensive system they inherited by extracting its last gasp for self-benefit. After all, the smell of death has a strange effect on man and animal.

In other words, the old guard that worked hard but then became unknowingly defensive, due to modernity, is now being replaced by younger flag-carriers who recognize a staggering organization only able to provide that last gasp of opportunity for wealth before it falls over. This “last straw” is not an attempt to “salvage” the organization, it’s about using the “dead horse” as a step to access a higher personal objective of “class”. This class is available in the after-dinner-club

It is like kicking (your own) dog while he is down, only in an unknowing manner. In a psychological sense that might be viewed as contempt, because you are working with people you respect only to find out they can’t handle modern pressures and there is nothing they can do about it. So you don’t react by confronting them, you react by beating them at grasping for the last remaining straws of wealth, while positioning to join a class devoid of moralistic limits. After all, it is about survival of the fittest (or so it is motivated).

Effectively these new entrants to the “game” are infected to become toxic hyenas in the same organization, but not necessarily the same industry. For example, the Prime Minister of Hungary does not have this problem.

One global example can be used as circumstantial evidence (other examples are possible):

It is contained in an article by VDARE describing how Angela Merkel may have been bribed to accept migrants. Angela Merkel may have been the German Chancellor for ten years, but in terms of the global “after-dinner-club” she is a newcomer. Since their official reigns ended, Cameron and Obama have been working feverishly to get into this club. Clearly Merkel wants to join them after her dog’s demise, i.e. the collapse of Germany.

Based on this article (and the same type of article can be written for Cameron and Obama and indeed was written about Blair), Merkel is feeding off German society by making them pay for migrants, which makes her look good in the eyes of Soros and others. This may seem simplistic, but more in-depth arguments would require an entirely separate book, similar to the 600 page version written on Tony Blair’s Broken Vows.

However, the term “toxic”, as applied to a single, decomposed body, anticipates that multiple hyenas are gathered for the feast, meaning that Merkel is not the only one, there are many and they are from all party political persuasions, such as Jean-Claude Juncker and Jeremy Corbyn. The victim of this hyena mob is European civilization, which these dog-kickers apparently view with considerable contempt. But what would activate these newcomers to become so ferocious? In terms of this article, they were bribed, but what grand vision could possibly bribe them?

It appears to be the promised carbon tax regime pushed via the global warming scam that is worth an estimated $100 trillion.

In summary, organizations tend to be healthy until “pressures” causes the original structure to become defensive in an unknowing (to those employees) fashion. One could say that the organization protect itself causing its wealth to deteriorate to about 20% of its original ability. This takes time, meaning that a new wave of employees will enter the organization not knowing about the 20% effect.

However, they will eventually pick-up that the organization “is going nowhere” causing them to cast their eyes towards external opportunities. These do appear, but with the proviso that assets under their control be brought with. (Salesmen are always asked to bring clients “over”) In this case these employees become hyenas without knowing it, trampling on a dead organization in order to gain access to the after-dinner-club (in this global case).

This organization is therefore “toxic” because its dead corpse serves only to infect every newcomer touching it. Discussions regarding a possible revival will however have ended, when the dark stage was reached i.e. when value dropped below 20%. Darkness (from its original structure) can be maintained for a long while, but as the new generation enters the “game”, decline is accelerated and bankruptcy encouraged, grabbing the last remaining assets.

Metaphorically, it could be said that the body shrinks in its old age, only to be devoured by hyenas (of all shapes and sizes), opening space for the next lion. Or in reality, a dark organization will eventually become toxic thereby affecting everything around it. In Rome it took hundreds of years, in modern society, it may accelerate to fifty (or within this lifetime).

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Fallen Angels

Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

My generation inherited not a world ablaze, but the smoking embers. We knew from as soon as we could walk that we were doomed.

The first clue was the fear and trembling. Adults lived in fear of death and each other. It was obvious that the weak ate the strong, because the smartest and wisest people were always in hiding somewhere, not in positions of authority which seemed to always be filled with round-headed people who were both idiotic and very, very careful to flatter their audience.

Next was the fact that we were living in upside-down world. Nothing meant what it should.

We were the ones who went to church with atheist parents, bought sale items at the price the item should have been, saw peace demonstrations get violent, witnessed kids get awards for having the average time of those running a race instead of winning it, watched unions and minority groups always get their way, and saw the old ways of our communities — small stores, independent businesses, elegant architecture, moral standards, a sense of decency — give way to a new culture of t-shirts and television, big corporations and endless laws that seemed to benefit whoever was in the wrong, not the normal person trying to do right.

We observed the Great Retreat as normal middle class people fled the cities and gave up on public life, allowing it to go to the new group of bearded and long-haired angry people. We were subjected to the first generation of children’s books to always have a political message, just like children’s television, in which Sesame Street characters told us that what was true were the same ideas that came from political speeches on one side of the screen.

We knew we were doomed when a country on the other side of the globe was threatening us with nuclear weapons, and all we saw was internal division among the people speaking in public. Every person had to have a unique opinion that seemed to also serve as their reason for existing, and so there was no agreement, only many different directions pulling the center apart.

Our time coincided with the replacement of home cooking with fast food, the death of the family through divorce, the cheapening of products into disposable junk with expensive advertising, the single mother and the latch-key kid, the rise of casual drug use, the flight from churches which seemed to favor emotional statements over realistic ones, the erasure of the countryside through factory farms and the constant expansion of suburbs, the end of a national culture and the rise of commonplace immigration.

Before we were born, Communism won, but it won a slow victory instead of an immediate one. We could tell because when we went to school, the emphasis was on sharing at all costs, not allowing students to be free from the interruptions of others. If you were playing with something, and another student wanted it, you had to give it up right then, or the teacher would send you to the school psychologist. You had to give other students your paper or pencils when they asked. The kids who got praise were the ones who did a mediocre job but made it look professional, and then involved others in their mediocrity.

As children, we could see what adults could not, which was that the same propaganda that was blatant in the Soviet Union — painted on walls, splashed out in parades, broadcast by their news services — was here as well, just in a subtler and more professional way. Television news had a nasty witch-hunt feel to it, as if they were out to squash anyone who disagreed with the sacred cow of equality. Politicians always talked about equality. We knew we could get out of any trouble by donating our allowances to the poor, just like we could make any room full of adults get misty-eyed by mentioning that we believed in freedom or wealth for all people. You had to emphasis the word “all,” like you were saying the name of God, and then no one could oppose you.

We intuited the role of equality. It had two parts. First, it defended the individual against the world, something we exploited. We had a right to do anything we wanted, and if it was against the rules, then we could prove the rules were unfair if we found some reason that they favored one group over the others. Second, equality reduced humanity to an easily controlled mass, like a strong leader might do if he got sick of the bickering, lack of cooperation and constant attention-getting. A group of equal humans is a fungible, controllable herd. Like plastic explosive, you just squeeze off as much as you need and shape it to whatever the task requires.

On some level, we also realized that we had lost both tribal rights and any sense of working together in a group. It was only a generation past the Second World War, and we still heard constantly how bad Hitler was, yet to every child his sense of tribal unity and desire to push back against the fungible herd was appealing. In history classes, we heard about the Civil War and how it was about slavery and the horrible racism of the South, with no other reason. The meaning behind this was clear to us: in this society, those who want a group larger than the family but less artificial than government would be taboo, and so we kept our mouths shut. We learned that “fighting racism” was like “fighting poverty” or “all,” a magic phrase that made adults do whatever we wanted.

It also became clear that we had no future. Jobs, which were once a way for people to earn a living without losing their souls, had become the primary method of losing souls. Our dads all worked too long and drank too much afterwards. Most of our moms worked too, which meant that we came home to empty houses, TV dinners and later, a frustrated and angry parent or parents. We were accustomed to being scarce after parents got home from their jobs, because after tolerating the bad behavior of other people all day, they were liable to take it out on us. It was better to stay in our rooms and amuse ourselves as we could, a pattern that later manifested in the “drop out” and “slacker” nature of our generation.

No adult thought that government was doing anything good. No person thought their job was really good, although they used pleasant words about the job to praise themselves to others. No one believed that social security would be there for us, that the country would hold together, or that things would improve. The only reason we won the Cold War was because the other side was even more shocking incompetent, and it seemed that once we won, all the Communists came here and got famous. The news was baffling, equal parts distraction and lies.

We knew from shortly after birth that our civilization had crashed and that there would be nothing left for us. Our parents and grandparents were greedily sucking up whatever they could, as if based on a knowledge that there would not be more and if they did not do so, “some other guy” who was probably an idiot who had nothing in common with them would suck it all up. It was a race to a finish line that ended in apocalypse, and yet, the apocalypse never seemed to fully come. Just a long slow descent into a state where nothing would ever change or improve, just re-arrange itself slightly, devoid of energy and hope.

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What Is Civilization?

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017

In the modern era, every term has been redefined to mean what is comfortable for those in control, namely the herd of individualistic voters who want to believe human individuals do no wrong. In reality, human individuals are usually wrong, and we need to restrain ourselves or face decline. But first, we must learn what terms mean.

We use the term “civilization” in many contexts. Someone who just arrived from a very rural area might see toilets, air conditioning and electricity as civilization. A person fleeing a war zone may arrive in a town with relatively non-corrupt police and think that is civilization. For others, it means a good symphony or excellent restaurants.

At its root, civilization is a simple thing: people learning to cooperate toward a goal that benefits everyone unequally.

If my nephew and his friends run away to the hills, as they have threatened to do, and start growing and hunting their own food and making their own tools and shelter, they will have created a civilization. It may not be a long-lasting one, but nonetheless, they will have learned to work together.

The primary form of civilization involves trade, military-style hierarchy, familial social order, shared customs and cuisine, and a founding myth or philosophy. With that, every group can get started. The founding myth explains the purpose of this civilization. It can be as simple as “we wanted to get away from others, so we are on our own to form the best civilization we can.”

Over the years, people have tampered with the formula for civilization. In most cases, this leads to the same result: a sudden rise in power followed by a slow collapse into irrelevance, leaving behind a third world ruin. Every civilization somehow confuses its internal mechanisms of power with achieving its goals, loses sight of what holds it together, and dissolves in a flurry of special interests and individualism.

Bruce Charlton laments the fact that civilization reaches its apex and after that, becomes a form of mental and physical slavery:

I certainly appreciate the benefits of civilisation (indeed I once wrote a book-length ‘hymn’ to the advantages of the post-industrial revolution); but ultimately the degree of compulsion and distortion of human life (by specialization, partiality, repetition – the need to treat the world as raw material; the need to treat people as ‘human resources'[)]… is probably not possible to justify; and – really – we shouldn’t even try.

Perhaps it was acceptable and spiritually advantageous for Man to have a period of this kind of thinking, knowing, being… but any such advantages were exhausted long before the end of the 19th century. Since then we have just been digging deeper and deeper into error and desolation.

At some point, every tool becomes a quest in itself. Money, which is meant to convey freedom, becomes an obligation; work, which should produce results, is done instead for the sake of itself; power, which means the ability to do good things, becomes a replacement for those good things. Inversion occurs when we replace purpose with our short-term desires and defensive need to feel justified in our choices.

This shows us that civilization — like capitalism, authority, sex, reading, eating or any other powerful human activity — can reverse our thinking. Instead of trying to achieve the goal, we do what is familiar, and then justify whatever goal it achieves as what we intended. The cart comes before the horse, the tail wags the dog, the kingdom is lost for a twopenny nail.

To the reflective mind, this means that we need civilization to a certain degree in order to avoid tipping over to the downward part of a ballistic trajectory. In addition, that civilization needs a purpose which is qualitative, or able to be achieved in relative degrees with an immutable core but never can be realized in full.

If the coming fashwave has any core idea, it is the rejection of equality, which makes us the goal instead of that form of transcendental purpose which allows us to have civilization without being consumed by it. Much as stomach acid enables us to live but would kill us if it escaped the stomach, civilization is essential to human life but must be guarded — and disciplined — carefully.

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Q: What Is The Goal Of Politics? A: The Organic Nation

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017

Politics fools us because it erects a false target within the political system itself. That way, instead of trying to do what is right, we do what the system allows.

That includes the voters, who require every topic to be distilled to a simplistic level and converted into an emotional contest. They like anger, but they also love a soft-hearted story. And so, soon all ideas converge on the same few concepts that voters like and politicians can implement within the system.

One of the ways politics fools us is by having us direct our attention toward government instead of nation, and then confuses the concept of nation to mean the nation-state — the institutional entity joined by economic and political systems — instead of the intersection of founding heritage, culture and values that created the nation.

We can find our way around this question by looking into the related query of what “we” should possess as the object of our purpose:

From Donald Trump’s inauguration address:

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.

I wonder how many politicians in the political class believe anything at all like that? Hardly any, I imagine.

For most of them, as far as I can see, government is just a gravy train for their own enrichment. And that was what Trump was accusing most of the people standing behind him on the Capitol of having done: enrich themselves.

And if any of those people actually had any deep political convictions, it’s quite likely that they would have been almost exactly the opposite of Trump’s: that the citizens exist to serve the nation, that the citizens must be bent to serve the national will.

By “nation,” Trump means government and citizens united, which means that citizens compromise their interests with those of government. That leads to the question of what their interests are.

Most people think in exclusively short-term bursts, and so they define their interests as a retirement plan, a solid job, lower taxes and more benefits (a paradoxical combination) and a nebulous sense of having “good feelings” about the direction the nation is taking. That last need runs contrary to all the ones previous to it.

A nation does not find itself on a positive direction through the acts of government. It also will not find itself moving in a positive way through paying attention to what “most people” claim to “want.” These things are at odds just like lower taxes and higher benefits. No group of voters has ever seen their way out of this paradox.

The above is correct in its assessment of politicians: they are paid actors who deliver warm fuzzy feelings to voters in exchange for access to nearly limitless wealth. Even if they do not personally own the wealth directly, they can create lucrative consulting firms, build up portfolios through those, and, once out of office, pay themselves massive salaries for life.

But this leads us back to the question of what we should be acting toward, and whether it is a false target or a realistic goal.

There are three basic options:

  1. Self. In nature, all things are self-interested. In the human world, we depend on civilization. Thus self-interest is bound up with civilization, much as it is with our neighbors and intangibles, like life being good, beautiful and true. However, many live only for the self, and choose as their goals those things which reward them at the expense of others, the organic nation, government, society, nature, history, heritage, future…
  2. Group. We can live for the group, meaning that we sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of others. However, the group is bound with an intangible thing which is the order and organization that holds the group together and keeps nurturing it toward health. By nature, all things decay. Something must counteract that, and this is usually a mélange of culture, laws and leadership.
  3. Organic. In any list, one thing is the hardest to define, and this is it. The organic nation is the intersection of past, present and future in which the individual and group both work toward the perpetuation of an idea through its physical counterpart, namely “a people” and the order and organization that holds them together and nurtures them toward health.

Modern society is very happy if you choose options one or two. These present no challenge to authority; the selfish person is easily manipulated, and those who give themselves to the group effectively neutralize themselves, presenting no challenge to power and no brakes on the decline.

The organic nation on the other hand requires us to think of a goal higher than self, government or group; it implicitly requires us to think of the long term view, maybe in the range of ten thousand years, and to view civilization through a qualitatively filter, namely asking ourselves how good, beautiful and true everything is.

Those who are born to the Right instinctively think of the organic whole for which they sacrifice, realizing that they are holding back the decay of time and yet, by doing so, find themselves in a state of mind more eternal than temporal, and in this they find great meaning.

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The Sun Will Set and God Will Find His Own

Tuesday, May 9th, 2017

Winter Is Coming

Climate experts are warning that the ocean circulation system – dubbed the Gulf Stream – that brings warm weather to the UK has been slowing down since 2004. Scientists believe this slowdown could have “consequences for the climates of eastern North America and Western Europe”

So the gulf stream is slowing down….

And the sun grows weary…

Research shows a natural cooling cycle that occurs every 230 years began in 2014 and will send temperatures plummeting even further by 2019. Scientists are also expecting a “huge reduction” in solar activity for 33 years between 2020 and 2053 that will cause thermometers to crash. Both cycles suggest Earth is entering a global cooling cycle that could have devastating consequences for global economy, human life and society as we know it.

And no, it isn’t Jerry Pournelle penning anti-establishmentarian sci-fi to tweak The Cult of AGW. An increasing bifurcation has beset the scientific community. Team Hockey Stick claims that there is no pause in AGW, and that only the Paris Climate Accord can stop Global Warming. Solar Physicists, survivalists and those who generally distrust anything said in the name of !SCIENCE! have a Climate Scientology Kult of their own. Winter, they warn us, is coming.

So what if it is? We get the die-off. The sorting. Demotism meets its vast and apocryphal reckoning. It will have to happen. Not when the great scientists predict it will. They are all but paid to be wrong. My favorite doomsayer warns us that none will no the hour or the day. And let not your hearts be troubled. Charles Darwin would tell you most of the ones to be culled pretty much had it coming anyway.

You cannot raise an entire infantile generation of over-protected snowflakes and not see them melted before the blow torch of unforgiving reality. Nature tends to sodomize the weak. Weak, dysgenic societies get enough of that action for Sodom, Gamorrah and all the other cities on the plain. As America continues its degeneration from an honorable Republic of civic gentlemen to a demotic democracy of mystery meat, we become ever more deserving of the coming reap. Greg Cochran blogs very slowly so that even this year’s college graddumates can get the gist…

Genetic trends can decrease IQ, and as long as we want the fruit of technological civilization, we have to care about that. There are three main ways in which IQ could decrease:

I. Selection could favor lower IQ within a group. How fast?

II. Demographic changes- groups with lower IQ could be immigrating, or differences in birth rates could mean that smarter groups are declining relative to other groups.

III. Relaxed selection. It looks as if a lot of the variance in IQ is due to rare deleterious variants generated by mutation. Over the long run, selection has eliminated those deleterious mutations as fast as they were generated (mutation-selection balance). Over the last few generations, selection has weakened: a smaller fraction of babies are dying.

We call our cubicles at work veal-fattening pens in partial jest. Yet most of what we experience in life does nothing to steel ourselves for burning in the crucible that challenges our genetic or mental fitness.

Now I can’t promise you The Sweet Meteor of Death on any date certain; even if you say “Please.” However, I can tell you that sucker will place home at some point. Fatter, dumber and with less lead in the national pencil is no way for any society to prepare for The El Guapo SHTF.

Perhaps the true measure of how badly we’ve managed our culture and society is the extent to which we’ve set ourselves up to be culled cometh the reaper. I urge you to prepare on some level for it to happen one day. Then maybe you, like the seasons, won’t fear the reaper…

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Internet Collapse May Be Consumerism Collapse

Friday, April 28th, 2017

Consumerism had a good thing going. We invented all of these cool gadgets for the home and personal care back in the 1950s, and as long as we had people, we could sell them and make a tidy profit.

But then consumerism took over the culture, as it always seems to do. Planned obsolescence became a thing; so did low-cost junk made abroad. And then people slowed down in buying because when everything is sort of worthless, why care much about what you buy?

No matter what option you choose — unless you have real luxury spending dollars like a billionaire — it will perform adequately and die within a few years, so there is no point investing much effort into the choice. Sort of like how the Soviet system faded away into heat death…

This follows a pattern we see in most business, and in fact everything in life: it starts out as a new idea that few understand, then gets accepted and the load of humans that it supports grows, which requires it to raise more money, which happens simultaneously with the acceptance of the new idea as part of normal life and thus a lowering of its margins. At that point, the business is in a death cycle.

As Plato pointed out, the same thing happens to civilizations. They start out idealistic, then deviate into materialism, at which point they cycle through aristocracy, military rule, business rule and finally democracy before self-destructing in tyranny. The point is that a new innovation cannot be expected to maintain itself, but requires an active pressure to enforce quality, in a Darwinian sense, or it bloats and self-destructs.

Consumerism has bloated and self-destructed. Refrigerators are so bad now that you need to purchase a ten-year warranty to get five years out of them; in the 1950s, they made refrigerators that lasted for decades. We have clearly degenerated, and the latest victim is the internet.

When the internet was new, it gave us all these new capabilities. But over the next twenty years, it became clear that some were actually useful and the rest hype. However, the hype got the most focus from the media, because it was most like their own business model.

Now ad payments are falling because the people watching the ads are not actual consumers but cube slaves time wasting at their McJobs. As a result, the internet economy is imploding. Today, Paul Joseph Watson sees his business model collapse; tomorrow, Twitter or Facebook will.

This collapse follows the same pattern as consumerism. An initially high-value product attracted the herd, got overburdened with expenses to support all those people, and then folded inward as its relevance declined with its novelty.

We are seeing the convergence of internet and consumerism collapses already:

In March, MarketWatch estimated that Amazon will destroy 1.5 million retail jobs in the next five years. And with its push into self-driving trucks, drone delivery, automated grocery stores and more, the site said the total number of lost jobs would likely be more than 2 million, concluding, “Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It’s quite likely.”

…Critics are beginning to wonder if Amazon — with such control over retail sales, jobs, ad dollars and more — is good for America.

…“Retail always evolves and reflects society, and right now, consumers are getting more value for their money,” said Richard Kestenbaum, a partner in Triangle Capital. “That makes our society stronger and it forces other retailers to be more creative and competitive.”

In other words, Amazon has become more efficient, and so is displacing most of the rest of the market. However, this will cause collapse by crushing margins on these products, which will in turn mean that they will be of less quality in the future. Soviet-style.

The worst case scenario is that Amazon gobbles up a bunch of smaller industries and then finds its own margins falling, and then goes down with a mighty crash, leaving the consumers with no options.

Looking at this, it makes sense to advance a theory of economy inefficiency. In contrast to the idea that lower price is always better, this theory states that there is a “sweet spot” in cost where a product is cheap enough for the upper half of society to afford it, but still expensive enough that there is incentive to compete on the basis of quality.

Consumerism fails this test, and the internet has as well. In their greed to increase shareholder prices, these companies destroy more than they create, and leave behind mediocre substitutes. This cannot last, like Soviet product entropy, and will cascade in failure together, leaving a void.

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The Turning Over

Thursday, April 27th, 2017

Politics flows downstream from culture. Amerikan culture has been a lifestyle septic tank since at least the late 1960s/early 1970s. Its degeneration has been ongoing, negative monotonic and this description can be extended without loss of generality to all genres of art, music and entertainment. This is a deterministic rather than a stochastic process. It’s being driven. And yet, like a downwelling ocean current, it is leading to a great turning over.

So what do? You give it The Nickelback treatment and turn that crap off. All of it. Cut the cord. Let ESCCCP pay $100M for an NFL Wildcard game and lose $75M on the deal. Let Shia LeBeoufCake make a brave stand against Donald J. Trump. His latest movie has opened so well in the UK that he has earned Le Sobriquet “3-Ticket LeBeouf.”

Ignoring the culture of the Left drains much of its mythology. Increased levels of sophistication in homeschooling and private school attendance are killing the Leftist monopoly over the minds of young children. Anywhere opportunities exist for the alternatives to Consumerist Oligarchical Collectivism to be heard, the Left begins losing. Where parents are unable to avail themselves to these resources, they simply vote against oppression with their U-Hauls.

Breaking the monopoly colleges and universities have over social accreditation has been a slower and more quixotic process. Coding Boot Camps are offering you the chance to do it the hard way. Prior to the assertion that everyone had to go to college to be capable of advanced mental work, lawyers could “Read Laws” and pass the bar examination. Get your legal education the same way Tom Jefferson* and Abraham Lincoln did. And if none of that works out, I’ve never met a competent plumber whose kids went hungry or who couldn’t afford an ice cold bottle of beer.

If a large enough plurality takes the some version of The Benedict Option; the system gets starved and the propaganda drones on pointlessly like Nietzche’s preacherman in the trackless wilderness. It is they, not you, who exist in disconcerting isolation. What then happens? At first, not much.

HollyOrc can afford to fund LeBeouf’s reality abatement program until his current studio contract expires and then perhaps bring in someone even more insipidly vapid in its gender fluidity. The New York Times can perhaps find one more Carlos Slim to flense. The WaPo another Jeff Bezos. Faceberg and Twitleft ads eventually have to reach a user that isn’t just a bot. Social Media requires the participation of a society. Yet, absent the majority of the US Population, each of these facets of The Matrix will run out of it’s most vital source of fuel. Your attention and your wallets. It will collapse.

When it goes down, it will go down into the Marinas Trench. This will force an upwelling of something else. Be ready to seize that opportunity. It may or may not go better in the future, but that won’t be because you won’t have your turn at bat. Withdraw your support. Cut them off like a crappy Nickelback Song, but be ready. You may not be interested in the collapse, but the collapse will get very interested in you. Fixing the shambles you increasingly see around you will become your job and your duty. You don’t even have to particularly want it.

* — It’s $79,473 per year cheaper than studying law at Mr. Jefferson’s University….

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