Amerika

Most likely you are familiar with carnies, the type of people who work at carnivals and other menial jobs who are known for being opportunistic criminals as well as hedonists. They live hand-to-mouth and take whatever they can find, regardless of the consequences to others.

Carnies make themselves unpopular because wherever they go petty crime increases. Leave anything unsecured, and it goes away. They are different from full-blown criminals because they are opportunists, not actively seeking to participate in crime (but not averse to it either!).

They distinguish themselves by their short-term thinking. They just want to have a good time. They want an easy job, opportunities to “score” extra money through gambling, part-time work, and theft. They like their wine, cigarettes, and lottery tickets.

Carnies are what happens when there is no longer any purpose to lives. People revert to lifestyles of total convenience, where there is no goal, and therefore, they just sort of float through, consuming whatever is in reach.

Carnies are the ultimate individualists. All that matters to them is what they have decided makes them happy; they edit this list in order to rationalize their position. Maybe they like fine wine, but if life gives them MD 20/20, they will convince themselves that this is what they always wanted anyway.

Most of what others tell you will be “lies” in the sense of partially accurate statements skewed to make them harmless. That is how you get along with a social group: remove scary conflict, intensify warm happy feelings. It is never more complicated than that.

Because most of what you are told are lies, most of what you recognized as “sacred truths” are in fact the biggest lies. Reality is real, but the human opinions about reality are gamed just like every corrupt small-town police force or big city mafia you can imagine.

Lies are like the taste of Coca-Cola. Does anyone actually like it? Most likely, no one cares if they like it; it is a Pavlovian trigger to good times like hanging out in the summer sun with friends. This is how advertising and politics work too.

The biggest of those gamed opinions may be the concept that most people are good, and they share some minimal level of sanity and competence, such that we can make decisions as groups or even have conversations as groups.

The reality is that there are a few people who do everything, and everyone else is in varying degrees of mental collapse. Most people are much insane. Once you realize this, carnies fit right into the spectrum as the entry-point to the third world.

Despite being products of the first world, carnies are in fact a deviation from what made the first world great: the pursuit of transcendentals like excellence, beauty, accuracy, and goodness over what is convenient for the individual in the short term.

Shocking as it seems, the path to success as a human being is simple: if you can delay gratification and figure out a long-term plan, you are able to find the most efficient, resilient, and creative solution.

If you do not? You end up with a series of hacks, patches, copes, dodges, sleights, and paste-overs. People without direction react to things, then react to their reactions, and finally, rationalize the result they get as “good,” then react to that.

People exist on a spectrum between directionless and purposeful. The best tend toward the latter, and are hard radical realist reductionists and essentialists because these philosophies are best suited to have purpose.

They also tend to be consequentialists, or people who are concerned with results in reality not human impressions of them. Note: this is the taboo of our time, the notion that human impressions are more important than what actually happens in the world out there.

Consider what the carnies of the world are doing today:

• Raoul y Julia the maids have discovered something important: the boss-lady is not home today, but has left a note asking them to do a thorough clean of the upstairs. They look at each other; the house is generally so clean, no one will notice. They do a quick brush through and leave after twenty minutes, taking their usual payment. To them, they gain another couple hours to make even more money, and no one is hurt, plus no one can tell them to do a job that in their own homes, they would not do.
• Alan Earp lives at the mouth of a long street full of homes. These homes are scheduled for drain clearing by the city that day, but Alan is renovating his kitchen and so he has a dumpster out front, two work trucks full of Mexicans parked on both sides of the street, and a giant pile of lumber. The outsized drain clearing trucks cannot get through. Alan shrugs and smiles thinly, because he has a right to do any renovations he wants, whenever he wants!
• Nguyen Wong-Li works at a loan processing office. Government will pay for certain types of loans to certain types of people; the higher-ups want him to process as many as possible. If he does the right thing and looks up each person, he will process fewer loans and reject more applicants, which induces legal risk. If he rubber-stamps all but the most fraudulently-filed forms, he processes more loans and applicants, therefore gets promoted. He is busily stamping as we speak.

Here we see the spectrum of the descent to carnie-ality. Nguyen may be a good worker, but the system works against him, so he has given up his soul and is going with the path of least resistance instead. Raoul is just a typical third world person who has zero expectation that anything will function around him, ever, so he takes whatever he can when he can get away with it. Alan on the other hand is simply embittered by years of this behavior from other people and now he is out for revenge.

This shows us how the journey from jobber to third-world is but a step! Carnies, or individualists with short-term thinking, are both selfish and short-sighted, which should alarm us because these are the defining traits of the third world (of any race: Asiatic Mexico, Caucasian Russia, and Congoid Africa are indistinguishable at this level of abstraction).

You will find that all of these third-world and carnie groups share a self-image culture, sometimes called an “honour” culture, based on carnie ethics of convenience, also known as individualism: focus only on what you personally want, and filter out everything else.

Luckily, the Muslims in India gave this a name, Izzat:

1: personal dignity or respect : honor
is against my izzat
—Rudyard Kipling

2: power to command admiration : prestige
afraid of losing izzat

Trust Rudyard Kipling to get in there early and document this one! However, the important definition is the second one, “power to command admiration.” Translation: this is about social importance in replacement of actual competence, goodness, and all that other copybook headings stuff.

It turns out that Izzat is not specific to India, but a shared pathology across the third world, basically individualism in societies where trust is rare because most people have carnie ethics of convenience:

I didn’t see this term mentioned in the thread, so I wanted to share this all with you. It’s about Izzat. Some posts have mentioned ‘saving face,’ which is Izzat, but I wanted to elaborate on it. Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as ‘honour’ or ‘reputation’ or ‘face.’ Izzat is so much more than that. It’s a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously.

A system like this isn’t just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I’d argue it’s antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith. Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who wins and who loses.

This means it’s a zero-sum game where just about any action is justified (including murder) to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game of Izzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything (murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing). The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group’s collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Izzat is attacked is the complete destruction of whoever insulted it.

Two people get into an argument. They might escalate, but chances are it won’t be that bad i.e. ‘Sorry I broke your garden gnome.’ With two Indians in an argument, the stakes are always deadly thanks to Izzat. Neither of them can back down, nor can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Izzat is shared, you are shaming everyone who shares your Izzat. So, admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide. This means even if the dispute was over something completely fucking stupid or trivial (like a broken garden gnome), it could spiral into a decades-long honour feud.

Izzat is also the reason why police are reluctant to get involved in disputes. Because Izzat is a zero-sum game, all participants are involved in the game. If a policeman sides with one family over another in an Izzat dispute, this means that he’s deliberately taking the side of that family and dishonouring the other. This marks him for retribution by the offending party. Without being able to be impartial, then centralized authority cannot effectively function.

Let’s say someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official responsible for the water pipe denies it’s a problem and counterattacks him instead, because daring to question his efficacy in his role was challenging his Izzat. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed.

Izzat is also the reason why Indian managers are so infamous for hiring more Indians. It’s because from the manager’s perspective, he’s using his position to gain an invisible social currency. Merit and actual qualifications come second to that idea. If he hired a westerner, he would not gain [and could] even lose Izzat by doing so. He has a very strong cultural incentive not to be impartial. Meanwhile, if he can strong-arm dozens of Indians into a company, he is gaining huge quantities of Izzat and conspirators who owe an absolute debt to him.

It’s not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the west. And yes, Izzat is very much a system that enables short term success. But the fundamental reality is the prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn’t exist if the west practiced something similar to Izzat. Our systems can only exist on the assumption of good faith, and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he can just go back to India with his plunder. He has no stakes in the long-term prosperity, functionality or stability of these systems.

The stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian’s favour.

You all know about that infamous video of that Indian scamming a food bank. Once again, winning is righteous. Losing is not. By employing ‘clever’ means (jugaad), he successfully extracted more resources for himself and his family. From the perspective of jugaad, a rule is not something to respect, but merely an obstacle to the Indian’s own gain. Since he cheated the system and wasn’t caught, he is seen as a righteous and dignified man in the Izzat framework.

I read a story in India about a man offering to pay another man to use a public toilet instead of defecating openly. The latter left and came back with several friends and beat the former to death. The problem was not that he was defecating openly, but that he was criticised for doing so. And with Izzat, it’s not an eye-for-an-eye. Izzat is often an eye-for-a-whole-head. Disproportionately and brutally annihilating your enemies is the correct move to make because you take back your lost Izzat and then some. This kind of vindictiveness would be rightly seen as horrifying and disgusting in most of the world.

There was a greentext from 4chan: Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn’t believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.

So, without Izzat, this looks like an utterly insane and pointless sequence of events. But with Izzat? The Indian’s actions suddenly make sense. He was boasting to increase his Izzat, and when Anon simply stated his disbelief, it was seen as a vicious attack on his Izzat. The Indian escalated the situation to restore the lost Izzat. When the police got involved, the dispute had become public, so the Indian’s shame had increased to unbearable levels. He committed suicide in order to save his remaining Izzat. Anon had no idea what Izzat was, or if he did, he didn’t mention it, yet the Indian’s actions perfectly align with this framework. This is what makes me believe the green text was genuine.

The western idea of merit is competence in a role. Merit in Izzat is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal, with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path, as printing a degree that says you’re qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Izzat. In other words, Izzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality.

Now, a counterargument an Indian might make is ‘Izzat is a dated word’ or ‘We don’t use that word.’ I like to compare it to the word vendetta. Vendetta in Italian has a very specific meaning (a familial blood feud where revenge must be taken to restore honour etc). This word would not exist if this didn’t reflect a specific facet of Italian life. Izzat is no different. Hell, I’ve had to write several paragraphs just to explain what the hell Izzat is. Izzat isn’t an archaic term either. It’s well and truly alive in the modern Indian lexicon.

If Izzat were regularly discussed openly, this would be considered one of the greatest possible insults in the Izzat framework. Izzat is why Indians do mass reports, death threats, false flags and various other underhanded tactics when a westerner exposes something they don’t want people to see (such as the poop throwing festival). If I knew something like that existed in the west, I would say ‘wow that’s disgusting, we should stop this.’ But in India, the problem is not the point.

The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult to Izzat from exposing the problem. The water pipe never gets fixed. The one saving grace is Izzat performs awfully in the long term. Once Indians displace you, they will go back to playing this insane game among themselves. It’s what happened to companies that got hit by Izzat. This is also why there aren’t any homegrown Indian companies that have the same influence as Microsoft or Google. Whenever they start getting ahead, their companies implode from infighting, nobody doing their jobs, everybody trying to cheat each other and nobody addressing critical issues. Systems that delegate authority and work on good faith eventually win out over zero-sum honour feuding.

Izzat cannot maintain complex systems because its players are only concerned with short term gain. With the west, the issue is that it often fails to live up to its own ideals. It’s not a perfect system, but we can course correct and address problems pragmatically. With Izzat, Indians live up to those ideals very, very often. When you see the dysfunctionality of India, remember that it’s a feature of Izzat, not a bug.

That was a great mini-essay that V.S. Naipaul and Tom Wolfe might find thoroughly stimulating. Let us look at a breakdown of Izzat:

This means that if someone plays the game of Izzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything (murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing).

Izzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality.

Izzat cannot maintain complex systems because its players are only concerned with short term gain.

First, Izzat is based on suppressing the critique of others. The point is to enable “murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing” for those who are good at the game, or in other words, socially popular with other individualists.

Second, Izzat is Crowdism, or made of the mutual tolerance devil’s bargain of mobs, which holds that all people are equal so long as they support the equality of others, a means-over-ends philosophy designed to stop the higher from interrupting the lower. How we can tell: it is based on appearance to groups, not results like “authentic merit.”

Finally, Izzat is pure individualism and therefore cannot maintain complex systems. Individualism means the individual first before all else; it is as extreme as fascism or communism and as dogmatic as religious fundamentalism. When the individual comes first, he ignores anything but his personal interests, and if things go wrong in some area, he rationalizes that he does not care about those things in order to keep feeling good about his self-image and having warm feelings and a positive mental state.

Izzat functions like an autoimmune disease on societies. Its primary function is to suppress criticism of antisocial behavior so that the socially popular can rule instead of the naturally talented.

As a result, Izzat — like the carnie morality of “minding your own business” when you witness a crime — functions as a Control system to keep everyone in line, going along to get along, and playing the game:

This notion plays at two extremes with a great deal of ‘grayness’ in between: at one end , it is about upholding the good name of the family by way of caring for and protecting family members, contributing to the welfare of the wider family and the community through charity and philanthropy.

At the other end, it is played out to control, manage and manipulate family members to keep them in line for serving family egos and perceived privilege which comes from a deep rooted sense being of a nobler dynastic lineage.

Any threat to these from within or from out invoke violent rebuttal and reprisals. The dynamics of both of these extremes are very much there to be seen and experienced.
In the more immediate family context, ‘Izzat’ is about upholding and safeguarding the reputation of the family at any cost even at cost to personal well-being.

Where Izzat triumphs — and this is why there are versions of it in every failed state — is that it fashions a Control system from individual incentives. That is, you want your friends to like you, so you adopt Izzat and jugaad and engage in your own scams.

The Western version is shame-culture derived from peasant revolts. (Christianity parallels these, but that show us its origin in the same historical change resulting from people with jobs finally having enough money to cause problems).

In the Western shame culture, which we might called “Wizzat,” Control results from feeling guilty for having more than others and, through slavish obedience to “equality,” giving it all away all the time so that you are not seen as an evil oppressor.

We are literally refighting the French Revolution every microsecond in our mitonchondria and microglia as we struggle with the brain-virus of equality. It has short-circuited our ability to control ourselves much like Izzat has turned India sadly into a dysfunctional ruin.

Now this article will get a little bit “racist” for a moment. Longtime readers with eagle eyes will have spotted where this is going. The wonderful write-up about Izzat included a mention of dirty, hairy greasy wops (DHGWs) and their “vendettas.”

If you are familiar with the wonderful play Romeo and Juliet, a comedy by Will Shakespeare, you know the honor, guilt, and shame culture that produced vendettas or blood-fueds lasting generations in Italy.

This psychology lives on even in DHGWs who have been transplanted to America, “assimilated,” and raised in a superior Anglo-Saxon culture. Witness the modern wop and his version of urban wigger poseur Izzat:

Is there no standard anymore?
What it takes, who I am, where I’ve been belong
You can’t be something you’re not
Be yourself, by yourself
Stay away from me
A lesson learned in life
Known from the dawn of time

Respect, walk, what did you say?
Respect, walk, are you talking to me?
Are you talking to me?

He would rather beat someone up for insulting his self-image than simply do the obvious and avoid the person. You challenged his wop-wigger-Izzat (Wizzat) and so now he has to retaliate, in order to convince himself, if nothing else.

The first-world version of Izzat takes the form of the fiction-absolute as described by Tom Wolfe:

I had arrived believing that, for example, Mexicans who had gone to the trouble of coming to the United States legally, going through all the prescribed steps, would resent the fact that millions of Mexicans were now coming into the United States illegally across the desert border. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I discovered that everyone who thought of himself as Latin, even people who had been in this country for two and three generations, were wholeheartedly in favor of immediate amnesty and immediate citizenship for all Mexicans who happened now to be in the United States. And this feeling had nothing to do with immigration policy itself, nothing to do with law, nothing to do with politics, for that matter. To them, this was not a debate about immigration. The very existence of the debate itself was to them a besmirching of their fiction-absolute, of their conception of themselves as Latins. Somehow the debate, simply as a debate, cast an aspersion upon all Latins, implying doubt about their fitness to be within the border of such a superior nation.

…The surprising insinuations of status concerns into every area of life must be understood if one is to understand the nature of the human beast. Consider the toxic power of humiliation. Humiliation is a wound inflicted upon the beast’s status picture of himself, upon the validity of his standing within the boundaries of his own fiction absolute. Not long ago, in New York, a drug dealer named Pappy Mason was out of prison on parole standing on the sidewalk in front of a bar with a group of his buddies, drinking a beer. A police detective happened to be driving by in an unmarked car and recognized him. He stopped, got out, and said “Mason, you know what stupid is? Stupid is what you’re doing right now, drinking in public. You get your ass back in that building — or I’m taking your ass in.” Now here was Mason, in front of his buddies. He had a terrible decision to make. Taking his ass in meant taking him to the precinct station and booking him. Drinking on the sidewalk was –a– Mickey Mouse — misdemeanor but it was enough to violate his parole and put him right back in prison. On the other hand, just caving in to some pig of a cop in front of his posse and slinking back into the bar was unthinkable . . .On the other hand, maybe it was thinkable . . .To go back to jail — so he did think . . .slinked back into the bar . . .You did what you had to do, Pappy — but the humiliation! the humiliation! A day passed, two days passed — the humiliation! Day after day it festered . . . festered . . . Eventually he found himself back in prison for an unrelated offense . . .and the same old humiliation . . .slinking back into the bar that night . . .festered . . . Finally, it became too much. He got a message out to one of his boys on the outside: “Go kill a cop.” And the guy said, “What cop?” And Mason said, “Any cop.” And so three members of his posse drove about . . . looking for a cop, any cop They came upon a young patrolman alone in a police car in front of the house of an immigrant from Guinea who, as it tuned out had been threatened by drug dealers. They had already tried to burn down his house because he had reported their activities to the police. The young cop, named Eddie Byrne, had been assigned to protect him. It was now late at night, quiet, and the three assailants came up behind the car and assassinated the young policeman. It became a cause of public outrage. It had taken the life of a young man, Eddie Byrne. Yes, but the cops . . .they had trashed Pappy Mason’s status picture of himself.

Are you talking to me?

The ego is a healthy thing, so long as it is channeled into thymos for the sake of seeking transcendentals in the world. When it becomes directionless, however, the ego becomes parasitic, and from that we get individualism, eventually the bourgeois version.

Plato would say that the distinction in human affairs is between rule for its own sake (tyranny, izzat, omerta) and rule for the sake of the society as a whole. The third world favors power for its own sake, while the first world traditionally at least, liked to have goals.

When the carnies come around, you know that there is no longer a goal because the jobbers have taken over and repurposed every system to serve them. Carnies arise from this culture, since the jobbers removed purpose, and now parasites can thrive, conveying society into third-world status.

Tags: carnies, control, ethic of convenience, individualism, izzat, jugaad, thirdworlding, thirdworldism