Amerika

Over the past few decades, more of us have experienced the creeping sensation that something is not-quite-right with humanity at a level below the public choices people make, like belonging to this religion, political orientation, group, or social movement.

Increasingly it has become obvious that the same people who have internal monologues are also able to look at the world as something beyond themselves, and everyone else is an individualist who views the world either as an extension of themselves or as something to consume that has no value in its own right (these are effectively the same thing).

We see that some people are able to reflect, observe events outside their heads, then change their thinking and through that, change their behavior and understanding. People of this nature can learn and grow. The others just repeat what they have been told or what worked for them the first time.

Some years ago a factory on one of our rivers here began draining warm water into the lake. This created a little pocket where life was easy, and soon it was over-filled with fish that were docile and ate everything in sight. The same happens to humans when easy jobs (or worse, government dole) are around.

Civilization starts producing coin-operated people the minute it formalizes anything. As soon as jobs exist, a group of people spring up who are content to follow instructions and are unable to find creative solutions on their own, nor do they change opinions until instructed to do so by an authority.

Middle managers and other bureaucrats love these people because the optics are so good. If you venture into one of these offices, you will see lots of people happy to be at the job, going through the motions, and staying late whenever needed so that there are always staff to throw themselves at any problem.

Coin-operated people are stimulus-driven exclusively. If not provided with some external event, trend, or narrative they would fall into life on the sofa. When given external input, they can react to it, but they are unable to direct themselves toward anything but the baser instincts of money, food, sex, gambling, and self-promotion.

Internally-driven people on the other hand have a sense of purpose. They go to jobs to achieve something; they compile wealth so that they can do certain things. They use procedures as guidelines but if the results do not match expectations, they change what they are doing and can react to a complex situation in which the context shifts.

Individualism forms the core of modernity. It is the idea that the world is part of the individual, which means that external events are felt by that individual as if they came from within. An individualist believes that participation in external events enhances the individual, whether political rallies, rock concerts, or buying Stanley cups en masse.

To individualists, ideology — external manipulation through symbols of good and bad — is more important than organic connections like culture, race, natural order, and faith. In fact they detest those things because they affirm an order higher than the individual, which is taboo to individualists.

Our world is driven by methods and procedure, and we have been living in a scamworld based on convenience that sells us methods all the time. Why learn how to make hot cocoa when you can simply buy the little packets at the store? Why care about whether what you are doing is useful and good, when you can just get promoted for following the procedures?

A society of this nature rewards coin-operated morons and hates the intelligent. It seeks to punish anyone who can see outside the world of stimulus-procedure reactions, and systematically denies cause-effect relationships. It produces people who go through the motions and ignore the results and consequences of their actions.

Externalized people of this nature follow individualism like a religion. What matters to them is what rewards them in the moment, and they ignore everything else because they are coin-operated people who do not have the mental hardware to perform analysis of reality. It scares them, in fact.

They pursue a world of themselves through the external. We all face a choice: we either manipulate the external to make the internal feel good, or we change the internal to reflect what is consistent in the world around us, which allows us to grow by challenging ourselves and discovering what is real.

Most of our society hides in the mental ghetto of procedure-based, stimulus-response living because it allows the individual to avoid change. This is the ultimate goal of all individualists, and explains why Clown World goes into full insanity rather than admit a need to think about things and find what is actually real.

Tags: externalization, individualism