Amerika

Nature does not have equality because equality destroys value. With inequality, there is constant striving, and this keeps quality high. When the need to adapt and struggle is gone, then people scatter like a dropped bucket of marbles, each finding his own substitute for a direction and way of drawing attention to himself.

Egalitarian civilizations have a certain way about them that reflects their means-over-ends approach. An ends-over-means approach chooses a goal and says “by any means necessary,” but a means-over-ends approach tries to incorporate the goal into which methods it refuses to accept, programming our minds with the options that are left.

In a means-over-ends approach, goals themselves are demonized; the only goal is the perpetuation of the means, which are things like democracy, equality, and bureaucracy camouflaged behind raving terms like individuality, altruism, and empathy. Egalitarian societies hate the question of goals as a result.

Without goals, you have a civilization whose only goal is to keep repeating past behaviors. They accuse conservatives of this, but Leftists are the ones flogging philosophies many thousands of years old that are known to bring decay and failure with them. They are simply repeating the past.

If you talk to an American liberal, for example, you would be forgiven for assuming that it is 1967 out there. They are still fighting the battles of sixty years ago in their slogans, imagery, and symbols. That itself was re-fighting the Civil War, itself reliving the French Revolution, and that was a revisiting the lessons of ancient Athens.

There is nothing new under the sun, just a series of choices, and people tend to make bad ones because they are less frightening to the mental state of those making choices. Big issues like goals are scary; small issues like how to weasel and manipulate to keep the system running while making a profit are not bothersome to much of anyone.

Since we exist in a society that is essentially static and therefore crumbling beneath us, people need distraction, and to that end, they always pursue trends, fads, manias, panics, cliques, cults, and gangs. They want to tap into whatever everyone else is doing so that they can feel important, relevant, and attention-worthy.

Any parent will recognize how attention might itself be the driver behind human behavior. People want power, yes, but mostly they seem to want recognition from their social group and therefore the brief inner warmth that dispells our fears of death, an absent afterlife, and insignificance.

People want that warm glow of social interaction. It makes them feel less alone in their fears, and allows them to think that if everyone else faces the same thing, it cannot all be bad. Life must have some purpose, and there must be something other than non-being after death (although most will be reincarnated as asparagus and that too is fair).

If you look over the past millennium, most of what we see are people chasing fads and trends. Even democracy might qualify; it was never proven to work, but it was popular, so everyone climbed on the bandwagon. These days, people march to the beat of the media and whatever it cares about becomes the topic of discussion for the day.

We need a word for this type of manic society driven by following trends in order to be important, and perhaps an ancient term like cacoëthes could give us a root:

cacoëthes: an insatiable desire : mania

borrowed from Latin cacoēthes “malignant tumor at an early stage, disease of character,” borrowed from Greek kakóēthes “malignancy, wickedness,” noun derivative from neuter of kakoḗthēs “ill-disposed, malicious, (of things) abominable, (of tumors, fevers, etc.) malignant,” from kako- caco- + -ēthēs, adjective derivative of êthos “custom, disposition, character”

A cacoethical society is part of the Hegelian stepladder where an unrealistic initial thesis begets unrealistic antitheses and therefore produces a compromise/synthesis which is also unrealistic. In such a society, only the next Hegelian cycle matters because nothing is real and there is no real goal.

Tags: cacoethics, cliques, cults, fads, gangs, manias, oncology, panics, trends