Amerika

Crowdism is this: people find reality scary, fall into self-pity, and so they do what is easiest for them and their personal agendas while ignoring what is necessary. They skip the hard stuff, do what is easy, and blow off the problems it creates.

Then at some point, after many years, all of the bad stuff they blew off becomes a huge pile that falls over. They realize that they have been electing con men and liars because those people flattered them and suppressed the hard stuff.

At that point, like an airplane in a stall or a boat which has taken on too much water, they are doomed. Or rather: they have doomed themselves. Individualists — anyone self-pitying is this — ignore the whole and focus on their personal desires, then the whole bites back!

The only escape from this is the spiritual practice which built the West, which is transcendentalism, or focusing on the whole and seeing how the hard stuff and the easy stuff are in balance and together create something amazing full of choices for us.

Hard stuff would be things like figuring out what to do with the useless; you have a choice between removing them (right) and tolerating them (wrong), but the latter feels bad and individualists project themselves onto the useless.

Your typical individualist only cares about what he wants, his mental state, and his self-esteem, so he manipulates others with symbols in order to appear benevolent so that they let him do what he wants.

This means that he has to avoid controversy, or anything which might make anyone else complain or play the victim. That bonds him to compromise, or the idea of giving everyone a symbolic fraction of what they want, so that everyone feels represented and important.

Compromise however never gives direction and in fact turns the discussion away from external reality toward internal matters, like how much of what each person wants has been represented. The group gradually rationalizes itself into insanity.

The thing about Crowdism is that it strikes within any ideology, social group, religion, or type of organization. It is a social phenomenon called “peer pressure.” It is spread through humans socializing and being nice to each other.

In the USA now, we are seeing that not being Communist did not save us from the same fate the Jacobins in revolutionary France and the Soviets in the USSR experienced. Once Crowdism takes over, people follow symbols away from reality and then become useless at reality.

Eventually you get a society of people going through the motions and doing what they are told, but not being effective. This is like every job; you do the procedures that you are instructed to do, even if they achieve nothing.

For example, if you are hired to water the lawn, but the lawn is dead, you water it anyway, at least until your boss tells you differently. In the Soviet Union, everyone followed their instructions to the letter

We can see both the modern West, the Jacobins, and the Soviet Union falling because of means-over-ends being made an end-in-itself:

Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure in order to receive the reward. This can sometimes result in actions that actually reduce the effectiveness of the measured system while paradoxically improving the measurement of system performance.

Illustrative examples of Goodhart’s Law include the experience of British officials in colonial India. They offered a bounty on cobra skins to reduce the cobra population, only to have entrepreneurial citizens actually breed cobras for their skins and then turn them loose when their fraud was discovered, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, the cobra population.

When the means are more important than the goal, as is the case in all jobs and social situations, you get strategic behavior, where people follow instructions but achieve nothing because they are so busy resenting those above them.

The best system, feudalism, gives them opportunities and does not manage them. They sink or swim. The sick must die. The strong rise to the top, not by being perfect, but by keeping an eye on the goal and making it happen “by any means necessary.”

The means become more important than the ends through a process called inversion. Essentially, a system reverses direction because it becomes more concerned with managing what is has than moving forward to acquire more.

In other words, the workers sit down in the fields and fight over equal distribution of the seed corn. After that moment, a Soviet/Jacobin style collapse is inevitable. They use Goodhart’s Law to fake their way through.

For example, in the Soviet Union, the economy was centrally managed, yes, but the bigger problem was that it was bureaucratic/procedural. It rewarded farm managers for the number of beets they delivered, for example, and it mandated a minimum.

This minimum had to be met regardless of the weather, staffing situation, or most importantly, quality of staff. Most of the people working on farms were the ones who could not find better jobs. Often they were literal drunks, pathologically lazy, or nearly retarded-stupid.

As a result, when the beets arrived at the warehouse, half of the box was rotten. All that mattered was delivering a certain number of beets, and the bosses wanted their farms to look good, so they delivered as many as they could, even if inedible.

The same thing is happening in the West, except now it is your car that barely works and requires five subscription services. Your food is soy. Mail goes undelivered, the streets are full of holes, and the cops arrest random people to get the statistics up.

The problem of second-level reactions, or even of succession, follow’s Goodhart’s Law: once a society is established, then it becomes invested in managing what it has, and as a result, loses sight of its goal.

Plato expressed this via the metal races:

In the succeeding generation rulers will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of your different races, which, like Hesiod’s, are of gold and silver and brass and iron. And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and irregularity, which always and in all places are causes of hatred and war. This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung, wherever arising; and this is their answer to us.

…When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things. There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them.

The original races were those who oriented toward transcendental goals. They were not obsessed with methods, like money and power, but what could be done with those things that improved excellence and quality of existence in physical reality.

When society gets established, however, its focus turns internal toward managing itself and finding compromises between the different factions and individuals who are playing the victim, complaining, and jockeying for power.

At that point, it stops producing for the sake of quality and excellence, and starts the endless obsessive discussion over how to divide what it has. The people become opportunistic criminals in mindset, and it ceases trying to achieve anything great.

This creates an endless cycle of wealth redistribution

Built-in inflation occurs when workers demand higher wages to keep up with rising living costs. This, in turn, leads businesses to raise their prices in order to offset their rising wage burden, leading to a self-reinforcing loop of wage and price increases. Because of this, built-in inflation is sometimes referred to as a wage-price spiral.

Biflation occurs when inflation and deflation happen simultaneously in different parts of the economy, often as a result of expansionary monetary policy.

It reflects the Cantillon effect, where an increase in money supply affects asset classes unevenly, boosting prices of commodities and hard assets while suppressing those of debt-based financial assets.

In any society that loses transcendental direction, its opposite — individualism — takes over, which means that people prioritize the demands of themselves and other individuals over the requirements of nature.

At that point, the only question becomes one of mechanics, namely how to adopt a compromise that fits within the budget and leverage claims of inequality and procedure to extract more money from the system.

These societies are experiencing a type of averaging called Crowdism, which is the idea that humans in groups pick the ideas that manage their mental state instead of what they need to do to achieve positive consequences in external reality.

Crowdism is individualism, and individualism is the human individual filtering the world into the things it fears (“evil”) and the things it desires (“good”), and then projecting those onto others as universal values so that the group stands aside or subsidizes the individual in its quest for what it desires:

Modern people are so used to long strings of words that mean nothing, so this is restated in the vernacular: you are under the control of people who are leading you to their profit, not yours. Even more, if you resist, other people – well-meaning, normal, healthy people – will do their best to kill you, believing that they are destroying a dangerous deviant and not someone with a rational objection to the system as a whole. In other words, the world is turned upside down; truth has become a fabrication, the predators are in control, and dissent is not tolerated in any way that will have actual effect.

Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

It is a belief system based on appearances: emotions come before logic, personal boundaries come before the necessity of doing what is right for all, and abstract divisions of “good” and “evil” regarding intent come before a realization of the effect of any action. In short, this is a belief system which manipulates by preventing certain actions rather than by recommending others, and it attacks before any action is ever committed.

It does not have a goal. It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them.

In other words, this arises from humanity itself: we choose the things that are not “destabilizing to those who find it important,” which “replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong” and in doing so abolish “any sort of goal.”

It is known as political correctness, DEI, ESG, and many other names, but it is the basic human approach of not hearing or accepting aspects of reality that destabilize our mental states. People want easy answers, not complex questions, and this leads them to deny complex parts of reality.

We know Communism is failure, yes. We know democracies always blow up after two centuries. What we are now seeing is that the type of system does not matter so much as the binary question of whether or not it suppresses the Crowd.

Whenever you have humans together without a social hierarchy of aristocrats, you get Crowdism because people default to bowing to peer pressure and seeking compromises, which then finds the intersection between all people, which is the pursuit of illusion.

This is part of a process of averaging. Every society over time fragments, and because people are not working toward a shared goal, the average becomes more universal and vague and less focused, so you get a mediocre norm based on human weakness not strength.

When society has a shared goal, the average is found within that range, and therefore it stays on goal; once the fragmentation occurs, the average is summarizing an essentially arbitrary range of options, and this means that the lowest common denominator of fear rules over us.

Most people select their opinions through rationalization. They think about what will influence others to think positively of them, come up with a unique reason to believe in that, and use their opinions as advertising much like flowers have color and scent.

What this means is that people advocate things they do not actually believe, merely so that they can stand out. Much like they cherry-pick what they notice in reality to find the things that allow them to maintain their mental state of individualism, they look for distinctive opinions.

If you wonder why society gets increasingly bizarre, consider that you are viewing the Hegelian stepladder in which humanity reacts to reality, but then humanity becomes an inward-facing echo chamber that comments on those reactions, and reactions to those reactions, without ever returning to the original event or the whole.

Through this method, society steadily moves away from observing and adapting to reality and focuses solely on an inward focus on what is popular, what rationalizes what it wants, and what pacifies others so that this selfishness is not noticed.

In the long term, it does not matter whether your society is burned down by “collectivist” oriented Communists or profit-oriented individualists; the end result is the same. Humanity loses sight of everything but itself and converges on ideas that are popular with humans.

As it turns out, most of these ideas are illusory partial truths that become discussion points in themselves, obscuring any concern for real-world activities. People do what makes them popular, but this leads away from what is real and actual.

We can call what results the Talisman-Scapegoat Dichotomy, where people separate the world into good/evil based on what helps them achieve their goals (good) and what they fear (evil).

In this mode of addressing the world, the symbol matters more than what it refers to, and so people naturally retreat into a fantasy world made of symbols, ego impulses, and peer pressure. People pursue what rewards them and this is social, or accessible by everyone, not realistic, since perception of external reality is esoteric and inequal, rewarding those with the ability and gumption to pursue it.

This weird symbolic world produces talismans, or symbols of “good,” which are means-over-ends methods which are trusted as if a religion, and scapegoats, or symbols for all that it fears projected onto Satan, inequality, the Illuminati, or other vague and intangible things referenced by easily-understood symbols.

Through this method, humanity regularly misleads itself, both as individuals and groups, but the latter has killed every society known to history. It manifests ultimately in class warfare, which is a demand that those who know better accept the personal “realities” of those who do not.

In other words… class warfare is basically IQ warfare. The clueless want the less-clueless to stop noticing that the arbitrary rationalizations of individualistic symbolism are in fact anti-realistic and therefore dangerous, and they can only achieve this by killing off the higher-IQ people.

Take a look at the third world. People there have low average IQ but higher-than-average verbal and social abilities. They are what is left over when we let oversocialization and not productivity/creativity/nurturing choose the winners in natural selection.

Every third world society is superstition and mystical. They believe in things that will help them regardless of what they have been doing (equality) as well as in demonic forces that seek to harm them from some inscrutable nature toward enjoying harm.

Naturally, all of this is flamingly ridiculous. Nothing does “evil” for the sake of doing “evil”; all things act to their own advantage. Satan is merely the force onto which we project all of our fears, mostly for our own bad decisions and mental frailty.

By the same token, for these people “good” means playing the lottery. They pray to the right gods and maybe fame, fortune, and popularity will come their way. “Good” symbolizes all that individuals desire whether deserved or not.

The most intelligent of our theologists and economists agree on one thing: instead of pursuing lotteries and fear, we should look toward that which produces value, including quality of life. This pursues opportunity instead of risk.

When Jesus or the Buddha talk about the necessity of pursuing “love,” what they mean is that we must look outside ourselves toward affirmative goals in reality that give something to the world, instead of recoiling from risk or fear.

However, as the wise say, what matters with any philosophy is what happens when it is in the hands of morons, and any philosophy of “love” quickly becomes love everyone, we are all one, we are equal, etc. and serves as a cover for the individualism of the cynical.

The scary fact of Crowdism is that it is decentralized and not orchestrated by some evil force. Instead, it is merely what happens when we fail to aim for something higher than the individual; when we deny the transcendental, we fall into voids of ourselves.

All individualists ultimately do what they want to do, not what the task requires; this tears down civilization instead of building it.

Their thought process can be described as inversion or rationalization, meaning that instead of tracking cause to effect to consequence and measuring the actions we take (causes) by what consequences are needed, they choose what they want to be true and find reasons why it should be true. They are a thesis in search for data, not data in search of a thesis; they prefer “wet streets make rain” because it lets them use correlations as arguments for an action, instead of figuring out its actual cause.

To them, “good” means “what I want right now,” not what is needed.

When they need to argue for “good,” they choose a symbol — the poor, women, minorities, bipartisanship, patriotism, religion — and use it to argue for what they want. If you can find a way to claim that what you want reduces poverty or strengthens Christianity, it is an easy sell with the crowd!

A common runaround: “we seek equality,” they say. How do we achieve equality? By forcing equality, through taking from the strong and giving to the weak. How do we know when we have achieved equality? Through equity, essentially uniform distribution, of course, and through nothing else.

Another one, common to the third world: we need to unify on our religion. How do we do that? We kill off the infidels; this will leave only the righteous. But somehow, there are always errors made, so more and more infidels must be killed. Robespierre fell prey to this also.

In the same way, in the modern West, we seek to eliminate “racists” and drug addicts and smokers, figuring that when we have removed the “evil,” Utopia will reign. This gives everyone happy feelings for the coming good times.

In their pursuit of equality-Jesus Utopia, these societies gradually kill off their most promising people and replace them with those who are good at methods but not goals. These means-over-ends people become a new electorate of weaklings:

“The Roman Empire,” says Seeley, “perished for want of men.” The dire scarcity of men is noted even by Julius Cæsar. And at the same time it is noted that there are men enough. Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a certain type were plenty, “people with guano in their composition,” to use Emerson’s striking phrase, but the self-reliant farmers, the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines, the Roman men of the early Roman days, these were fast going, and with the change in the breed came the change in Roman history.

“The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries had been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines.”

With the Antonines came “a period of sterility and barrenness in human beings.” “The human harvest was bad.” Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. “Marriage,” says Metellus, “is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge.” Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth rate, and this decline in quality and quantity of the human harvest engaged very early the attention of the wise men of Rome.

When you kill off the strong to subsidize the weak, or at least to stop them from interrupting the weak in their folly, you end up with a society of weak people who have no interest in anything but what interests them right now.

This group is the most pliable electorate, so a bureaucracy rises up around it dedicated to facilitative governance, or using government to ensure that each person can pursue their personal dreams, obsessions, pathologies, and profits.

Like the people in the third world, this type of person will cut down the last acre of open forest in order to build his fast food restaurant so that his profits increase so that he can pursue his desires. The world can burn.

The third world is in fact the most individualistic place on Earth. Throw out the trash? Just drop it in the street, and that way you do not interrupt your thoughts and pleasant mental state. Fix institutions? That requires self-sacrifice; avoid it at all costs.

Individualists are not interested in functional social institutions. Courts are only relevant when those affect them at a given moment; otherwise, they are merely an abstraction. Nature is only there to serve them. Culture and civilization are unnecessary.

The anarchists, liberals, Communists, libertarians, unions, and religious fanatics all think the same way on this issue, even if they pretend to have different philosophies. Their philosophy is: me first, you pay for it, and you know you are being victimized but can do nothing about it.

These societies all die from the same thing, anhedonia, which is a type of fatalism in which the individual believes nothing will bring them joy:

Young people who experience a diminished ability to feel pleasure often struggle to adjust their physical exertion to obtain larger rewards. A recent experiment suggests this disconnect arises from specific cognitive difficulties in learning about both rewards and the physical costs required to get them.

They will defend their “rights,” for sure, and argue toward their own advantage in any system, but they experience envy and retribution instead of pleasure or love. They are driven by a fear of risk, not a desire for excellence, and so they become bitter… and do not exert themselves.

A person from this type of society will do the minimum at the beet farm. He will do what he is told, like any jobber, but if that fails, it is not his problem. In fact, he does not want it to succeed; he wants to be invisible, neither successful nor unsuccessful, but able to claim “his” share because he did what he was told. If something went wrong, that is the fault of someone or something else! Ideally he can blame Satan or capitalism.

People like this act from a compromise psychology. They act in self-interest by dodging the scary stuff and pursuing that which gives them warm mental feelings, and they use a mental filter to remove the scary, pursuing instead the means (as in “means-over-ends”) which they find safe, like pacifism and liberty among other rationalizations for them doing whatever they want and society having to put up with it. They compromise with others to get what they want, which is mostly camouflage through their “good guy badges” they earn for having compromised, when their actual goal is their own interests and they expect to break any rules they can toward that end.

This becomes a form of confirmation bias wherein they filter out anything but that which rationalizes what they want:

This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional, and it results in a person ignoring information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. These beliefs can include a person’s expectations in a given situation and their predictions about a particular outcome. People are especially likely to process information to support their own beliefs when an issue is highly important or self-relevant.

The primary method of confirmation bias is cherry-picking, or thesis-in-search-of-data, which means picking up on that which supports what you want and ignoring everything else. They filter reality for what they want right then and suppress the rest.

Naturally, they tend toward authoritarian societies because they want to use the power of the group to suppress everything other than what they want. This is just “peer pressure” in a politicized and oversocialized form.

They ruin everything by cherry-picking out the scary parts and leaving only the illusions humans live by.

Such people gain an audience because they tune into a fundamental aspect of human thinking, which is that we are geared more toward fear than opportunity:

People make financial choices to avoid losing money or experiencing regret, rather than simply balancing expected monetary returns with their tolerance for financial risk, according to a new study led by Lisa Posey, associate professor of risk management in the Penn State Smeal College of Business.

Fatalism — the belief that our actions cannot change reality — is what most people are blaming when they talk about nihilism or narcissism. The fatalist believes that the world is hostile and ugly, therefore he should take whatever he wants and ignore the consequences.

People like fatalism because it justifies their individualism. If life is random, anything they get for themselves is good fortune, and any time they fail, it is not their fault but the fault of evil nature or life itself which is victimizing them through bad luck.

Ironically, fatalism is debilitating:

Most important, this relationship was negative meaning that people exhibiting high fatalistic orientation show low level of cognitive ability. Present fatalism is defined as an orientation of hopelessness and helplessness, the belief of little control over one’s life and its unpredictability and that the present must be borne with resignation because humans are at the whimsical mercy of “fate”. It is possible that fatalists hold a negative view about their cognitive ability and faced with a demanding cognitive task, such as an intelligence test, they experience lack of motivation, simply because they do not believe that they can effectively cope with the encountered difficulties.

When you do not believe that your actions can influence consequences, you essentially view the world as a lottery, and therefore whatever you gain should be yours, and whatever everyone else loses is simply the luck of the draw, even if you did it to them.

This leads us back to the “wet streets make rain” reasoning of Goodhart’s Law, namely the tendency to target measurements and methods instead of goals and outcomes. Fatalism means that you do what you are told and trust luck for the rest (and if you steal something in the process, that was just you being smart and taking what is rightfully yours, which was unjustly stolen from you by bad luck, demons, or billionaires).

When a society lacks the social hierarchy of aristocracy to organize people toward productive and creative goals, it ends up with a bunch of rationalizing fatalists who adopt arbitrary perspectives in order to stand out from the crowd.

Although they manifest this in many different random behaviors, their psychology is the same, so these form a Crowd, or a mutual affirmation society for the idea that the individualists should be able to do whatever they want and have the herd sponsor it.

The West is now fading out like the Soviets and Jacobins did because like them, it chose individualism, even if in a radically different form, and with that, it has entered a period of great entropy where no one sees the point in doing anything well.

Tags: anhedonia, biflation, cantillon effect, cherry-picking, confirmation bias, crowdism, goodhart's law, hegelian stepladder, individualism, inversion, lowest common denominator, means over ends, oversocialization