Amerika

Life took a dark turn early for the intelligent of my generation when our parents, in some “teachable moment,” insisted in making us participate in democracy. They wanted to show us the glories of the people’s revolution, but instead, they put us in permanent shock.

Recall the first election at your school. Maybe it was to name the mascot, or what snacks to have at the cafeteria. In any case, people voted for what they thought other people would vote for, which creates downward pressure to the dumbest possible option.

Maybe at one of your jobs, hobbies, or volunteer orgs you sat on a committee. This is how humans make decisions in groups. Committees specialize in pursuing unimportant and hopeless issues. They do this to avoid having to tackle importand and consequential ones.

This reflects the psychology of human groups in general. They avoid confrontation, since that involves risk, and they make concessions in order to compromise, which ends with a solution that addresses no problem and satisfies no one, but offends no one either.

As we might observe, most human interactions involve choosing what is terrible for everyone but slightly less terrible for whoever is voting or in charge. They like spreading the pain to others in order to punish them for being outside of the shared misery that snares the average person.

Most people vote for what hurts everyone, but hurts the voter the least. This is a brutal strategy, but it works through simple logic: depress all activity, but give me a chance to rebuild, and I will rise among the others.

It is analogous to a monkey who grabs a branch on fire from a lighting strike and burns down the jungle so that all other monkeys starve, but he, he has found a tree with fruit. All the females come to him, he has endless offspring, and everyone who ever showed him up loses.

That is the human mentality in a nutshell. It is a form of entropy, and societies succeed by repressing and redirecting it. Otherwise, humans form groups based on envy and use them to tear down others.

Democracy makes dysfunction by legitimizing this human mentality, which leads to a society where everyone uses each other to sell stuff to, to con of tax dollars, or simply as backdrop in their own quest for sating the fears of their egos.

It has created a world of symbols and feelings, which allow individualists to feel good about their positions in life, which has generated a hollowed-out forgery of civilization:

• Voters are being asked to make decisions they cannot understand, and therefore, they vote with emotions and optics. This leads to everyone trying to screw everyone else with their own money, so now we have two centuries of terrible laws.
• Taxes create a market distortion so strong that it re-routes the entire economy through government, and because it distributes money, this empowers speculators and drives the value of the currency downward not through competition (“inflation”) but having the government payments be the new zero, meaning that the more money you spread around instead of having it be generated by productivity, the less any unit of that money is worth.
• Environment if anyone could still think — this is very rare — they would look past climate change to realize that Earth is in the grips of “The Ecocide,” or the total destruction of the natural world, which requires killing off enough of it that the rest perishes from genetic collapse, leaving us with rats, squirrels, and sparrows but little else. The only solution is fewer cities and fewer people, reversing habitat loss for plants and animals.
• Stupidity the driving force behind democracy, individualism, asserts that individuals have no goals except themselves; its opposite, transcendentalism, says that we find purpose through labor, struggle, and suffering within the world because we are then aimed at a goal of beauty to be created in perpetuity. Individualists know nothing but the self, therefore indulge in contrarianism where they reject any authority over them, including nature, culture, spirituality, and common sense. This requires that they do the opposite of what is sane, so they make everything ugly and do their best to exclude anyone with any brainpower, even if it costs them more.

Where Crowdism applies is in showing that we suffer tyranny from within. Jobs produce people who are reactive and therefore focus on the self to retaliate against the world, including others and authority figures. These then become focused on producing ugliness, which produces a world of vast incompetence.

Committees and voters behave like social groups. To be sociable, you have to accept everyone and avoid controversy, since this allows each individualist to feel represented and validates their fiction-absolute, or the story they tell themselves to rationalize their decisions and lot in life as the best possible outcome.

In these groups, problems are not hidden so much as ignored because the incentives to do so are strong. The group punishes those who step out of line, so everyone sees the problem but all try to avoid it, since confronting it will involve risk of social exclusion and, worse, a change in mental state that could threaten the fiction-absolute.

We live in dysfunctional times not because the bad guys came in and took over, but because through the behavioral changes required to become part of the Crowd, we all went insane with ideas that are essentially all symbol, emotion, and optics.

As the world comes out of this mass insanity, we will be disoriented because we are awakening from a long schizophrenic sleep brought on by this pathology. When we become clear in our minds about what we need, it will happen naturally because history has already turned in its direction.

Tags: crowdism, fiction absolute, tyranny