Amerika

Loneliness will finish off the people not already dying from demoralization and despair — a lack of hope that things will change for the better ever — in what is left of the West. Before you think this is more fatalism porn, it helps to remember that this can all be turned around very quickly once we summon the will.

But if we do not change course, diversity alienates us and makes us withdraw from public life. Socialist-style entitlements and high taxes make it impossible to live. Unions guarantee foreigners among us and business going offshore. Life is getting bleak in these formerly-prosperous places.

Without culture, we are born lonely, with few connections to others. Most of the people around us share very little with us in terms of their genetically-determined inclinations and preferences. This has caused an outbreak of loneliness that is depleting hopes and dreams but can slowly kill us.

Lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking daily, according to the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, who one year ago called for action to address America’s loneliness epidemic.

The study found individuals with higher persistent loneliness were disproportionately women, more isolated, less educated, had lower income, had more functional limitations, were divorced or widowed, were smokers, or had poorer cognitive, physical or mental health.

“We do have evidence that married people tend to be less lonely, so for older adults who are not married, finding ongoing points of meaningful social contact will likely help mitigate the risk of persistent loneliness.”

Imagine having a social group of two to five people. Between close coworkers, spouses, and a few friends from school, this is all that most people have. Married people are less lonely because they at least have each other, but those without many social options tend to become total alienated shut-ins.

It turns out that in addition to loneliness, comfort makes us weak because we are unable to form flexible responses to challenges in life:

Philip Riris and colleagues have quantified patterns of prehistoric population resistance to environmental or cultural disturbances. Their meta-analysis spans a 30,000-year time period and draws data from 16 locations across the globe.

They find that the frequency of downturns increases the ability of populations to withstand and recover from disturbances. The effect is strongly modulated by land-use patterns: farming and herding societies are more vulnerable to population-reducing crises, but they are also more resilient overall.

The study has parallels with ecology, in which frequent natural disturbances are thought to enhance the long-term resilience of key ecosystem services.

This process parallels the immune system. When you are out there in the world exposed to all sorts of germs, your body becomes familiar with them at low doses, sort of like a vaccine, so when you encounter them at full doses later your body can make a few adjustments and then fight them off.

However, if like kids during COVID-19 the body is shut up inside and exposed to nothing, it gains no immune resistance and therefore is weak to whatever comes its way. In the same way, a civilization living in comfort consists of people who have no idea how to response to adversity or make their own affirmative choices like life direction.

The root of our addiction to comfort and loneliness seems to be individualism. That is a philosophical term, and the “ism” means that it prioritizes the individual above all else, including culture, race, nature, history, wisdom, and even reality itself. All individualism is “me-first” egotism that borders on sociopathic narcissism.

Individualism is materialism. The mentality known as bourgeois arose from the cities. When the bureaucracy takes over, all a citizen must pay attention to is his job, taxes, and shopping. Literally everything else is optional. As a result, he becomes self-fixated and also unable to make decisions.

You probably know people who exist under authority. They both quickly obey whatever the rules are and rebel against them whenever convenient. They will always be caught in a loop of resenting the authority above them but dependent on it nonetheless. This makes people resentful and prone to cruelty.

Such people become ensnared in the talisman-scapegoat dichotomy. They look for some thing on which they can blame all their failings, and another thing on which they can pin all their hopes, even though doing so reduces their own agency or ability to perceive, analyze, and make affirmative choices.

We know many scapegoats: the rich, the White, the Jew, the Satanist, the corporation. We also know talismans: diversity, the government, deus ex machina, and xenophilia, or the belief that some foreign force — diversity workers, Russian orthodox “conservatives,” or the Chinese — will save us from ourselves.

None of these work out. They are symbols designed to manage our mental state, but they offer nothing of practical value, and can in fact lead us to self-destruction.

The only way out of the individualism trap is to accept transcendental thought, or aspiration to the excellence, good, real, beautiful, and rare as a means of accepting that our world has both good and bad methods in it, but the interplay of them results in an amazing opportunity to be conscious, make choices, and rise above ourselves.

This however requires that we give up our morality based in the individual. Instead, we need a morality of neither the self nor what it produces, the Crowd, but this scares people because it means that we are not protected from the need to face brutal truths as well as timeless beauties inherent to life.

Tags: anomie, atomization, ennui, isolation, loneliness, nihilism, xenophilia