Amerika

We live in a time of muddled definitions because they all get inverted from “what is needed” to “what the group will support,” with the latter reflecting the careerist needs of those on the committee, in the workforce, or dealing with a social group.

Compromise leads to death.

Tackling our definitions requires looking into what the terms have been intended to mean over their whole history, not merely what some people argue now or a subset of the original definition, because narrowing means cherry-picking.

Cherry-picking is the root of bad committee decisions: look at a few things, not the big picture.

The nature of committees, voters, and social groups is compromise. They will figure out what most accept, make a list of those things, and apply those to whatever is needed whether or not they will fix the problem. This is inversion, caused by rationalization of thought due to externalization of self-worth by participation in the social, economic, or political.

As Crowdism reminds us, humans like to construct external bogeymen and scapegoats, but our problem is that we are self-deluding because people have no purpose and focus on themselves instead. As the Poet says:

“(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, London: Harper Perennial (2005, originally published 1959), p.113

Let us consider the words of the Prophet:

Once civil war breaks out, both the iron and bronze types pull the constitution towards money-making and the acquisition of land, houses, gold, and silver, while both the gold and silver types — not being poor, but by nature rich or rich in their souls — lead the constitution towards virtue and the old order. And thus striving and struggling with one another, they compromise on a middle way: They distribute the land and houses as private property, enslave and hold as serfs and servants those whom they previously guarded as free friends and providers of upkeep, and occupy themselves with war and with guarding against those whom they’ve enslaved. — Plato, The Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Cambridge: Hackett (1992, originally published 380 BCE), p. 217

Decay is the process of losing purpose, direction, mission, goal… ends.

Compromise is when you focus on methods, technologies, law, procedures… means.

The healthy society is ends-over-means. Like pioneers, it figures out what must be done and then achieves it no matter who is inconvenienced or dead.

A sad dying society is means-over-ends. It sets up a few taboos and chooses its options from what is left, then rationalizes that as “good” (or altruistic, empathic, and egalitarian).

These two correspond to active and passive. An active society moves aggressively toward order and goodness; a passive society shies away from things that scare it, and then justifies what is left to itself with a fiction-absolute about how it is rising when it really falling.

The difference between active and passive is like the difference between making choices and going shopping.

When you make choices, you figure out what is real, and therefore what you can do to improve the situation for your people, your world, and your self in reality, and then do that. No options are off the table; if killing all the world’s orphans makes it a better place, you do it.

When you go shopping, you find a place that looks safe, go to the shelf marked as the appropriate place, compare all the options and pick the one that you can afford and seems likely to fit your needs.

You are selecting within means or methods there; you have a goal, but you have limited your choice spectrum to what is available at your local Whole Foods, Sur La Table, Walmart, or Costco. You choose from what is on offer and then make it work as well as it can.

What you are doing is rationalizing. When you need chipotle powder or pickled capers and the store does not have it, you select the next best thing… and then you buy it the next time, too, because you have told yourself a story in which it is the best option you can find thus is the best option anyone could have.

How many times have you brought some gadget home to find that, yes, it does what is advertised, sort of, but that this does not fix the issue at hand? Some years ago a tranche of my paycheck went to a steam cleaner that, once you worked with it, clearly did a great job on tile but was terrible for rugs (what it was purchased for). And yet, nothing else was in any of the stores.

In the bourgeois mentality — the thinking of middle and working classes in the cities — you pay attention only to your little slice of the world: job, family, hobbies, restaurants, friends, shopping. You pick what is on offer for you, and then rationalize it as the best possible option, which is what a fiction-absolute is.

Actual choices are different. Making choices is our only power as human beings, and it is also the thing we tend to fear most because it requires real effort to understand the question and analyze it, risk in making one choice over others (it is zero-sum), and a ton of mental effort to do it right. People prefer shopping because there is less downside and mental grinding.

When everyone had a farm or small business without much technology, we made choices every day about how to keep it working. Now, you pick from a series of products and services, which drives up the cost but “in theory” produces better results. The actuality of this is unconfirmed.

Even more, before things were “known” to be the right method, and there was social pressure to enforce this, people made innovative choices more. Sure, most of what they did was the same; there are only so many ways to sweep a floor. But people also looked past what was on offer and homebrewed their own solutions.

In the era of the “gold and silver types,” what mattered most was finding the right goal. You figured out what needed to be done and put your effort into making those choices. In the modern time, you are limited to the products on the shelf or PC terminology, and this hobbles our thinking like having one limb tied behind our backs.

Tags: choice, ends-over-means, fiction absolute, gold and silver types, means over ends, plato, rationalization, shopping, wsb