Amerika

As the twenty-first century expands into a flight from the assumptions of the twentieth century, inquiring minds are starting to measure political activities in terms of their psychological and biological long-term consequences.

For example, egalitarianism creates a society where victimhood is rewarded, since wealth, power, and status are transfered from the naturally successful to the naturally unsuccessful. As a result, everyone wants to become a victim, which requires dishonesty and drives them into narcissism.

Similarly, diversity abolishes culture and makes everyone a “stranger in a strange land,” alien not only to other groups but to his own, which has lost culture and become an “every man for himself” rat race.

Diverse societies encounter anomie because without standards and goals, people do not share a purpose, and therefore fall into me-first individualism:

Anomie: in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.

When a social system is in a state of anomie, common values and common meanings are no longer understood or accepted, and new values and meanings have not developed. According to Durkheim, such a society produces, in many of its members, psychological states characterized by a sense of futility, lack of purpose, and emotional emptiness and despair. Striving is considered useless, because there is no accepted definition of what is desirable.

Individualism caused the rise of egalitarianism, which in turn fostered diversity, which explains why the system replicates that founding condition. If you let individualists decide, they make a society for individualists, which requires abolishing social and natural order.

It turns out that anomie spreads through the breakdown of order.

While this critique targets industrial society, these industrial societies arose under conditions of egalitarianism and diversity, which caused them to become rootless, according to institutional anomie theory:

By anomie, we mean an imbalance between culture and social structure: the breakdown of values, understandings, or guidance for individuals to follow.

Durkheim argued that specific features of industrial society disrupt traditional norms/standards/morals leading to a state of normative deregulation. Consequently, traditional goals are not well conceived, and the social system fails to provide its members with normative limits to their desires.

In the United States, the cultural ethos is the “American Dream”: A drive for material success pursued by all members of society under open, individual competition. This ethos emphasizes monetary achievements and gains in status/prestige. However, it fails to acknowledge how goals are pursued and attained. By so doing, it creates pressure to achieve and subtly downplays that one should abide by institutional norms. Under these circumstances. Messner and Rosenfeld (1994, 1997a, 1997b) argue that individuals are likely to veer away from following prescribed normative behaviors in order to achieve the goals emphasized by the “American Dream” ethos.

This shows us the despair of the intellectuals: on some level, they recognize the decay, but it offends their personal pretenses to admit what is going on, so instead they come up with these theories to “manage” the decay.

Unfortunately for them, those theories lead to the same place, which is rationalization of egalitarianism, since egalitarianism makes every individualist feel good because his place is guaranteed and he can scapegoat the more successful while having an excuse for his failures.

Not surprisingly, most of these intellectuals come from inauspicious backgrounds and are trying to get into the wealthy educated upper echelon of society, so they all imitate each other and try to express Utopian ideas because only that sort of thinking dwarfs decay enough to feel acceptable.

If you look at post-1960s history, it becomes clear that these new intellectuals are not Anglo-Saxons of the upper quality levels, but wannabes who are faking it to get their share of government or NGO salaries.

As a result, they have taken their own theories seriously despite those being anti-realistic, and are completely out of touch with normal people and what they need:

Taken together with the trend data, this means that as Democrats have increasingly relied on white college voters, they have been adding many more ideologically consistent liberals while shedding less ideological nonwhites with mixed policy preferences. Strikingly, among the most liberal voters—those who agree with liberal positions more than 90% of the time—there are 20 times more white college-educated voters than black voters.

These “white college voters” are probably whitish people — hybrids like Southern, Eastern, Irish, and Mediterranean Europeans — who are just trying to get their share of a pie that someone else baked.

In the process, however, they further alienate us from what we need: culture, which is tied to ethnicity, and religion as a subset of that, instead of these organized internationalist religions which are more like ideologies and lifestyles than spiritual decisions.

Conservatives have no way to compete with this because if you assert culture, you get called a “racist,” so instead conservatives make do with clinging to religion, patriotism, and masculinity expressed through Social Darwinist functions like business and the military.

We can skip all of this nonsense and go back to culture, ending our alienation, and setting us up to rebuild. The lack of culture has made everyone insane and miserable, so even a chipping away at that would be a refreshing and welcome escape.

Tags: american dream, anomie, institutional anomie theory, neoliberalism