Amerika

Modern thought processes defer to institutions and other external forces like bureaucracies; these are the entities we see applying laws and programs, therefore we assume that they are the cause of those, when really most are simply carrying out legal precedent, political trends, or the results of votes.

But what controls the votes? In our ludicrous system, we assume that the average person has many hours to read about the issues and planned solutions from all sides, as well as recognize all of the candidates. In reality, people are most concerned with what will feed their families today and tend to blow off politics until the last minute.

This leads us to look into media power, NGOs, lobbying groups, and industries but this is only part of the story. If we view humans as biology — transgressing the sociability contract which states that we all have free will and create ourselves, therefore biology does not matter — we have to look at human social divisions.

You are familiar with social class, or the tendency of society to separate into IQ bands by wealth, but there is also the difference between personality types and the coping strategies each tends to adopt. Humans separate out into groups that each serve a role in the ecosystem of human social interaction:

• Bullies: these people rule society because they make themselves unreasonable and then demand people concede in order to make them go away. They get what they want, then live isolated lives because people want to avoid them after that first experience, but eventually money solves that problem too.
• Scatters: a large chunk of the population consists of people with no direction, no consistent purpose, and essentially no memory. They hang around until something looks interesting and then get onboard the trend hoping for “their share.”
• Kulaks: sometimes called the bourgeois, these are the people in the middle by intelligence and wealth. They are concerned with nothing besides career, wealth, and comfort, and for this reason have no firm bonds or attachments to anything or anyone.
• Ragers: some must live for being hated because they hate the world around them, and these outrage-driven types exist on the fringe of social interaction, essentially forming social bonds only with those who have already rejected the world, and therefore exist in a cloud of their own mythos.
• Omegas: the group with perhaps the highest personal strength, these people exist to be unnoticed, amuse themselves, and deliberately discard any connection as soon as it becomes an obligation. They live disposable lives but are also not tied to anything, even more so than the kulaks.

With all the discussion of social contracts, we forget about how society is composed, and it is formed of different personality types that serve different roles. The bullies steal all they can, the kulaks run in fear, while the ragers and omegas counterbalance them and the scatters float around leaving a trail of unrelated purchases.

Once you see how the soup is made in this sense, it becomes hard to support anything but social hierarchy, which sequesters power with the capable, and restrains the rest of these groups from tearing apart the fragile but necessary bonds of culture and common sense that make civilizations operable.

Tags: personality types, social contract