Amerika

The last millennium was shaped by a steady movement from tradition, including reverence for nature, to a human-centered world of individuals acting out their desires. Religion aided in this by replacing national cultures with a universal internationalist morality.

This world ended with the twenty-first century when it became clear that diversity did 9/11 and we were never going to be stable until it ended. The voters had a tantrum and elected diversity instead, bringing about a crisis that brought new leaders to the West.

Our past was based on symbolism because this is how you manipulate herds of individualists. Our future will be based upon function, or a Darwinistic rewarding of what produces good results over that which produces none or poor quality results.

As part of this, we are recognizing that there are too many humans on Earth and we will all soon die of preventable diseases brought on by pollution unless we stop subsidizing every last human being.

That thinking will develop along the lines of wondering which people we really need, and which we can lose. Many people have no known function, even if they are “technically” functional with jobs and mortgages.

Even more, we are recognizing that at least a fifth of our population are simply assholes. These are individualists who want only to avoid changing their thinking, and to regulate their mental state, they will sacrifice everything else.

They are not narcissists, since they are technically not self-worshiping, only unwilling to change their thinking to adapt to reality. They are not egotists, since they are not particularly self-obsessed, but they are driven only by their own desires.

Not only that, they are not sociopaths. They recognize that others exist and have feelings; this is why they enjoy squashing those hopes and dreams, for the sensation of power that comes from having drawn blood.

We cannot even call them selfish. As mentioned above, most of them have jobs and pay taxes. They even go to church like Dennis Rader. They are every manager who prioritized his career over getting anything useful done, every coworker who did highly visible projects that gave nothing but passed on regular work to the rest of the office drones.

The best way to describe them is as individualists. They care about not changing their thinking because they are altering their perception of external reality to regulate their emotions, and they rely on a human-only world of socializing, money, sex, food, and rules to force others to be unable to force them to alter their thinking.

I remember the first time someone referred to any incompetent as an “asshole.” It shocked me; was it his fault he was incompetent? In the court of morality, where Jesus and Buddha look down, is not compassion our guide?

Except then you notice that everyone else needs to work around this guy. If he is on the road, they have to drive carefully around him because they know he is incompetent. In an apartment building, he is the guy who is so unreasonable or willfully oblivious that no one dare cross him. At a job, he is always the slowup and he always has good justifications, but everyone else needs to drop what they are doing to fix his ineptitude.

These assholes tear down society. There is no logical reason for their behavior except the assertion of individualism and sabotage of everything else. They are there to passively sabotage, thwart, interrupt, and delay so that they get what they want.

A strategy of willful oblivion works for them. They learned early on in life that if they repeat “I just don’t understand that” enough times, someone with scoff and sigh and then do it for them. Why spend their precious individualist time on something, when someone lesser can do it for them?

Permanent civilization rewards assholes because there is no way to remove them. Our nomadic ancestors traveled between places because they got together their wagon trains by invite. They simply did not invite the assholes and left them behind or sent them off on their own wagon trains to be eaten by wild goats.

Individualism seeks to equalize all inputs. Normal people aim toward the transcendent, which is a holistic sense of reality and our intent to not just adapt but thrive by pursuing excellence, beauty, wisdom, and mental balance. Assholes equalize inputs so reality is only one voice in the many they pay attention to, and they can easily ignore it because it will dysregulate their emotions by forcing them to change their thinking.

Somehow conservatives got trolled into seeing our belief system as preserving the past, when really, our belief system is to endorse changing of our thinking in order to uphold the knowledge and folkways that are useful for adaptation in past, present, and future.

We preserve the time-honored not because it is old but because it works and has worked continuously despite the changes in time; as liberals are fond of saying, the only constant is change, but the conservative feedback is to say that what endures is resilient and adaptable so we should keep doing it, not from repeating method but from repeated ends/goals.

For example, we know we need to have irrigation systems. In dry times, we use different methods, but the same basic end, which is getting water to crops. In wet times, we change again The principle and goals remain the same even if methods have to be altered.

Assholes want no goal because they want to regulate methods so that they do not have to change their thinking. Their perpetual MO is to make some methods — like killing killers, exiling criminals, demoting incompetents — taboo so that they as individuals are safe from having to change their thinking.

Societies die because they cannot filter assholes simply for being incompetent and an impediment the way our nomadic ancestors did. Instead, we give them jobs and “use” them, but at the same time, they are using us.

As societies age, every task becomes more onerous because there are more details, exceptions, rules, and pretenses in order to protect the assholes, since they make up a lot of the worker pool and use the Heckler’s Veto to shut down an attempts at change.

If you demand performance, they form a union and create equality, so that the worst workers are protected as well as the best. Costs go up, these are passed to customers, so customers raise their salary demands and prices. Inflation kicks in!

Over time, they start demanding that society subsidize and babysit those who are incompetent at caring for themselves. This means a welfare state, which means taxes, and since that money is chucked into the economy at random, it raises the money value while decreasing what it can buy.

Jobs become daycare for incompetents and assholes because otherwise these people will starve. We need the appearance of unity or the civilization might fracture, we are told, even if this fracture might serve us by driving away the assholes and incompetents.

Things like tradition, republican forms of government, time-honored principles, a case-by-case basis, hierarchy, and accumulated wisdom threaten them, so they always demand that society “liberalize” and become “progressive,” even though that is the path of the weakening.

Humans have great potential, but we are going nowhere until we find a way to beat this civilization disease based in Crowdism, or the triumph of the individualists over the transcendent. It will follow us wherever we go and doom us there just as it did here.

Tags: crowdism, egotism, equality, heckler's veto, individualism, liberalism, narcissism, sociopathy