Amerika

The eternal strength of humanity is its ability to model the world in its mind and choose outcomes based on that prediction. Its weakness is the same: by mirroring the world, it confuses the mirror with the world, and its superstition and symbolism lead it astray.

Part of that involves treating the world like another person. To our minds, the world as a whole and its parts feel like other human beings. So when we say “democracy did this to me,” we are thinking of a dude named Democracy who just decided to do something awful to us.

Some of this involves the way things have personality. Democracy, for example, is a neurotic and vengeful system, so if you imagine an entitled Karen with a black belt in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and a massive cocaine habit but a tendency to cry during romantic movies, it would not be inconsistent.

What democracy does not have, however, is agency: we think of it as a deliberate process, but it is first and foremost a workplace where people “go through the motions” (means-over-ends) so that their careers advance, their kids go to college, and they can retire in style.

It produces compromises at every level. First, in choices; it panders to everyone so no one gets what they want, a miserable outcome that pleases everyone because the other guy gets screwed more.

Second, in delivery it offers compromises, since papers pass from desk to desk, details are forgotten, and the bargaining process to get anything done destroys any consistency to whatever idea is being advanced at the time.

Third, and most importantly, democracy is about democracy and not your future. The constant struggle for power between individuals consumes much of its activity, and so you get whatever individual rises to the top and whatever stamp they put on things.

Democracy does not have a personality, but it consists of personalities, and through the magic of Crowdism these together converge on whatever is left when you avoid all the scary stuff and focus only on the emotionally-symbolic flashy stuff.

Similarly your local grocery store does not have a personality. The service you get depends on who is on duty, who is the manager du jour, how stressful the day has been, and how long until lunch or the next cigarette break.

It always cracks me up when people talk about The Jews™ as having agency. Now, you could describe them as a plague of locusts, basically every individual seeking to eat as much as possible, and that has no agency, just tendencies. But the Protocols? Paranoid fantasy.

In the same way it is comedic to talk about The Rich™ as having agency. The club of rich people is like a country club, meaning that if you have the money, you buy a membership, and after that you do what you want and pay people to cover up your oopsies.

I suspect that most wealthy people have fewer oopsies than the average person but are under ten thousand times the scrutiny, so minor squabbles and tiffs become scandal unless covered up by a platoon of lawyers and PIs.

In short, people are different, and it is a lottery to see who you get in any government, organization, or business. The aggregate of their decisions wins, so the entity could be said to have anti-agency — no one is responsible for consequences, or even making clear choices — more than agency. It is the destroyer of will-to-outcome and replaces it with obedience to method, procedure, optics, precedent, symbol, and emotion.

Will-to-outcome might require some explanation. Consequentialism is the theory that all actions are measured by outcomes in reality, not opinions about those (utilitarianism). Sane people therefore target an end goal and figure out how to get there as they go (ends-over-means).

If you are a consequentialist, compromise is your enemy because compromise is means-over-ends, which interrupts your ability to seek an outcome (ends-over-means). Compromise leads to applying averages as absolutes and denying the complex texture of life. That denial tends toward a psychology of seeing groups as having agency instead of being internally variegated.

Agency of groups however has a great symbolism to it. You get to avoid the complex knotty and gritty reality stuff like noticing that diversity will make enemies of all the different groups thrown together. Instead, you conjure up a mysterious agency like “systemic racism” or “oppression” of the poor by the rich (definitionally, a crime without incentive).

Humanity has done okay on lots of things like hot showers and flush toilets. But underneath, we are the same demon-haunted superstitious hominids who did rain dances and sacrificed fruit to idols, except now our rain dance is democracy and our idols are ourselves.

Tags: agency, consequentialism, crowdism, ends-over-means, neurosis, utilitarianism