Amerika

People like to idealize non-solutions because those do not impact anyone directly, therefore are non-controversial.

One such non-solution is “compromise.” People want to fence-sit, not make a decision, and instead dole out little favors here and there to all sides, essentially buying loyalty. However, this means society has no direction but inward!

When you focus on means-over-ends, such as “compromise,” you end up cutting off any aspiration to a goal. Instead, your goal is to maintain The System. This means doling out favors, following procedure, and getting further into little details so that you can avoid the big picture.

Do you wonder why you live in a society of billions of lines of law, endless red tape, and extensive procedures that are always gamed? This is what happens when people avoid taking a direction: they look inward and create internal complexity as a form of insulation against the missing choices.

Compromise is a substitute for having a goal. So is centrism. Ironically, so is pacifism. All of these are means-over-ends, meaning more focused on procedure than achievement. If your goal is to avoid war, then you have to abandon any goal that might eventually require war.

To have a goal is to be ends-over-means: you will achieve your goal by any means necessary. This does not mean immediately selecting the most extreme goal you can, but that you will select the methods/procedures you used based on what will achieve the goal.

This is the opposite of passive, inward/backward-looking philosophies like pacifism and centrism. It avoids “compromise,” which means doing a little of everything in order to choose nothing. Like all cowardice, it ends with mediocre results and neurosis.

Our current mess shows us what happens with compromise: the voters choose no direction, therefore we add a little bit of everything, so the parts do not work together and require constant fiddling, resulting in legions of laws and reams of rules spilling out from Washington.

Even more, since The System is now designed not to do anything in particular, it swells as people patch it to try to take care of the infinite incompatibilities that pop up. This is how political systems collapse, and it is why the world is turning toward stronger authority than moderate centrist compromisers.

Tags: centrism, compromise, means over ends, moderates