Amerika

From the twenty-thousand foot view, humanity is comedy: a civilization forms and functions, then lots of individuals show up with their many specific demands, and soon the civilization becomes facilitative and addresses those which causes it to lose any direction of its own.

At that point, civilization is helpless; it exists only to dish out money in order to buy off complaints. Because of that lack of direction, it becomes self-interested, and soon tends toward totalitarian for-profit order, which the citizens do not notice.

They do not care, as individuals, as long as their specific individual demands have been met. This is why the third world operates on a loyalty system: nothing works, so you find a patron who will protect you and give you money, and in exchange, you support him absolutely.

The single mother does not care who is in power so long as she gets an extra cheque for the baby; the elderly want their cheques, too. Religious people want special protections, minorities want special exceptions. On and on, South of Heaven.

In an individualist society, which is based on loyalty and not goal, the pretense and entitlement expands. Each person expects something in return for their loyalty, and have no loyalty outside of it, so they let institutions rot unless they need them personally.

Someone might want independence from third world existence.

That, however, requires independence for civilization from the individual.

Individuals who are exclusively self-interested (individualists) exist in a talisman-scapegoat dichotomy where what they want is good and everything else is bad, including nature and reality itself, which is why individualism is against transcendentals like excellence, beauty, and realist.

They also exist in a victim-entitlement loop where if they do not get what they specifically want or need, they become a victim, and this enables them to use the Crowd to attack those in power to extract what the individualist wants.

“Entitlement” refers to the pretense of victimhood and of a “right” to something provided by the facilitative society. We call government payouts to citizens “entitlements,” but entitlement is also an attitude that comes along with equality, civil rights, and the socialist welfare state. Further, it is a stage in civilization decay.

“Pretense” is the attitude of deserving something by virtue of having complied with another order. You went to school and got a job, so society owes you respect and should recognize your superior intelligence. This is how normal people think.

Translating this over time, the loss of independence (for civilization) means a rise in pretense, entitlement, and the ugly competition which sees people telling other people to just get a job and work hard and everything will turn out okay (spoiler: no).

Many years ago, a Christian told me that nature was evil and that “good” exists to correct that. This of course made no sense; nature is brilliant and the source of all the good we experience, or at the very least is the method of a brilliant divine force.

It makes one wonder what “evil” is. Advocates for the sinister path describe evil as a type of independence like Darwinism: in evil, every thing does its own function alone, and it does not concern itself with the impacts on others.

“Good,” on the other hand, is based like all human thinking on a committee which listens to the specific needs of everyone and doles out money. “Evil” doles out no money and does not care about your specific needs; it is independent from the individual and uncorruptible as a result.

The root of every social group is compromise because that is the way you form and hold together a social group. This means that instead of having a goal, your goal becomes a method, and you make compromises to that goal to make everyone feel included.

The method takes over from the goal this way. This creates means-over-ends thinking in which the effect is treated as the cause because any intent is gone, doing away with the corresponding cause it was attempting to bring into being.

Repetitive, inflexible behavior results. There is no goal, only the pretense of a goal, so the method is adhered to and compromised away into something far different from the original, which means the de facto goal is simply holding the group together with loyalty bribes in the form of compromise. This method is inherently dishonest.

The social nature to human thinking arises with the transition to permanent civilization and repetitive jobs. Instead of being independent herders, hunters, and foragers who could simply ride away from any conflict, people must “get along” above all else.

Jobs make this intensely horrible because they are based on optics from the bosses and pretenses of equality from the coworkers. The bosses like to see people at work, even if there is no work to be done, and the workers hate that anyone might rise above them or even get an extra hour off here and there.

(And really: what actual currency do we humans have, except time? Every hour is an hour closer to death; life is finite. Yet it is what people trade away the easiest, mostly because doing so removes the tension of having to make the decision about what to do with the hour.)

When jobs are the norm, entitlement results as each person becomes both a victim and an aggressor. They never have exactly what they want, so they play the victim to demand it, and in doing so, they have to take from others, whether by socialism or theocracy or just whining.

Liberalism is the rationalization of this decay. It is a product that exists to serve a market. The product is warm feelings, and the market is people who are afraid their civilization is in decay. Liberalism rationalizes decline (DEADS) as “progress.” That is the product and it produces momentary warm feelings of safety and comfort, sort of like heroin or beer, or even religion, and then fades rapidly so the users need another hit.

Entitled people become passive-aggressive because they must play the victim while acting the aggressor. This creates the entitlement: in order to complete the scam, they need to come up with some reason why other people “owe” them something specific. Victimhood fills the role.

Social groups exist through mutual validation of weakness (MVOW). You accept others, including their flaws, in exchange for them accepting you. This erodes standards and obliterates goals as the group grows because you must compromise more in order to include more varied people.

The more variation, the less stability. The less stability, the more loyalty-buying must occur. MVOW means that you expand the group to fit the audience (The Metallica Problem) and redefine it in the process, erasing the original intent. We also call this “inversion” and it goes anywhere individualism goes.

In a society with this problem, passivity takes over because to stand up to the decay means to be attacked by all the crazies who are dependent on the decay. Worse, ordinary people who should know better fall back into bourgeois apathy and just buy off the crazies.

A biologist or an economist would see what is happening here: society has become a market for crazies, because if you show up and act crazy, they assume that you are a victim and hand you a check. You are rewarded only when you are dysfunctional and therefore, a victim.

Sometimes people describe a dying civilization as jackals feasting on a corpse. More likely, they are seeing perverse incentives created by the subsidy market opened when the first loyalty payments (or welfare payments) started.

Nevertheless, this creates situations like in the movie High Noon or the book Moby-Dick where people allow themselves to be bullied, even to great detriment, rather than take on the risk of taking on the bullies and possibly having the herd attack them for rocking the boat.

In dying civilizations, every mundane activity has to be restyled into a victim-oppressor cycle. If your baby needs new shoes, you have to catastrophize the situation in order to dramatize your victim-status so that you can use your sense of entitlement to demand free stuff.

The passivity is the core of decay: jobs make people passive, socializing makes them passive, and means-over-ends thinking such as agricultural technology makes them passive. Stop thinking, start planting, and so on.

In this way, any egalitarian system starts destroying the ability of humans to think independently. It however rewards those who are compliant but participate in the talisman-scapegoat dichotomy and corresponding victimhood-aggressor cycle.

This means that once you create a system that rewards weaklings and crazies, it produces more weaklings and crazies until they are numerous enough to take over. Then you decay and decline into third-world status.

An import part of combatting this is to note that the crazies, weaklings, and incompetents are “the decay.” This might even make you reconsider charity. Whatever you subsidize, you get more of, and even if you mean well, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

As Plato noted, democracies do democracy stuff, which means selecting the most obedient and pacifistic. You will get a society of weaklings. You will not be able to discriminate against crazies, including sociopaths, because they are equal too.

We are at the end of that cycle. Democracy has killed off most of the smart and strong and left behind a giant swarming horde of the weak and crazy. For us to be reborn, we need a positive goal that we can conquer, at least partially:

He credits his encounter with classicist Allan Bloom for instilling in him the passion to pursue the big questions: “What is the best way to live, what makes for the highest form of human happiness, what is the nature of justice, what is natural and what is conventional in human affairs.”

Fukuyama’s argument that humanity had reached the end of history rested on his reading of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who argued that the mainspring of history is humanity’s drive for recognition, dignity, and respect. In his interpretation of Kojève, Fukuyama adapted Plato’s tripartite division of the human soul into logos (reason), eros (desire) and thymos (spiritedness). Fukuyama contends that thymos is the true psychological driver of history, distinct from basic physical survival or economic calculation. Human beings, he noted, are the only creatures that willingly risk death in the service of abstract ideals.

The “end of history,” for Fukuyama, is achieved with the universal recognition of the equal dignity of all human beings as the foundational ideal of liberal democracies. Liberal societies, he explains in Realm, provide “universal recognition by granting citizens equal rights; the rights to speak, to associate, to believe, and to have a share of political power through the vote.”

Please direct your attention here:

Fukuyama contends that thymos is the true psychological driver of history, distinct from basic physical survival or economic calculation.

In other words, people live for the sense that what they are living for is worth doing, and that there is something they can achieve that makes them relevant and important. Thymos is ego directed at reality instead of fallen-in on itself.

As another, perhaps wiser, thinker points out, thymos is tied to not race but ethnicity because that is the cultural force that determines what is relevant:

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability — within acceptable conditions for evolution — of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

Globalization involves a huge expansion in the international interactions among individuals, corporations, governments, NGOs and other entities; growth in number and size of multinational corporations investing, producing and marketing globally; and the multiplication of international organizations, regimes and regulations. The impact of these developments differs among groups and among countries. The involvement of individuals in globalizing processes varies almost directly with their socio-economic status. Elites have more and deeper transnational interests, commitments and identities than non-elites. American elites, government agencies, businesses and other organizations have been far more important in the globalization process than those of other countries. Hence there is reason for their commitments to national identities and national interests to be relatively weaker.

These developments resemble on a global basis what happened in the United States after the Civil War. As industrialization moved ahead, businesses could no longer succeed if their operations were confined to a particular locality or state….The economic approach focuses on economic globalization as a transcendent force breaking down national boundaries, merging national economies into a single global whole, and rapidly eroding the authority and functions of national governments. This view is prevalent among executives of multinational corporations, large NGOs, and comparable organizations operating on a global basis and among individuals with skills, usually of a highly technical nature, for which there is a global demand and who are thus able to pursue careers moving from country to country. The moralistic approach decries patriotism and nationalism as evil forces and argues that international law, institutions, regimes and norms are morally superior to those of individual nations. Commitment to humanity must supersede commitment to nation.

He emphasizes religion too much for my taste, but the basic point remains the same: internationalism means foreign exploitation, so after a period of painful learning, we return to an ethnicity-based nationalism.

Notice what he notices, also: elites are based in jobs created by government and are inherently oriented toward international and cosmopolitan living because their jobs are the most important things in their lives.

Also he points out that morality and commerce are one and the same. Commerce requires universal acceptance just like social groups do, but with even more vigorous exclusion of discrimination and hierarchy. You want a mob with credit cards, not a few smart consumers.

His brilliance is in noticing that the “moralistic approach” and the organic approach (“patriotism and nationalism”) are opposites; if we must quibble (o yes we must) then we could drop patriotism and religion from the equation entirely and be even more accurate.

Our most recent government in America, which is probably the best in the West right now and the best America has ever had, aims for a pagan nationalism based on thymos or desire for achievement and not morality, which is a self-censorship designed to remove “bad” methods:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech in Athens last week that deserves to be taken seriously. Against the backdrop of the Acropolis, he argued the ancient Athenians defined the core of Western civilization. “To know them is to know ourselves,” he said. He spelled out their defining characteristics: “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory,” coupled with the desire to understand the world and a rejection of boundaries and limits. The Greeks organized civic life around “contest, ambition, competition,” he added. The Greek city was “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves through struggle to be “the best, the strongest, the most beautiful.”

Mr. Rubio characterized this relentless struggle — fueled by what the Greeks called thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” — as the “heart of great civilization.” Without it, he declared, nations lose their will to fight, even to survive. In our times, he said, Europe has abandoned thumos for comfort and safety, rejecting the pursuit of excellence in the name of an egalitarianism of mediocrity. The Continent can save itself only if it can “awaken from its long slumber” and again embrace the “fire” of times past.

In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other.

Of course the Abrahamists and egalitarians are not pleased; morality is how they control the strong in order to grow the ranks of the weak who keep them in power.

We are seeing a sea change here. Christianity has taken its final form as a type of liberalism that emphasizes the equality of all souls in opposition to the achievement of thymotic ends:

What I found during my time there and a few weeks later when I attended a gathering of progressive clergy, was that quietly and then more assertively, there are signs of a renewal of progressive religious activism that seemed to have completely disappeared during the Trump years — and even before. Maine, for example, has consistently been rated among the most secular states, with many existing churches declining in membership and even closing. Until recently, any engaged and vibrant church life had generally favored Trump-friendly rural congregations north of Augusta.

A surprising number of ministers and religious professionals are running as Democrats this year. Religion News Service estimates, “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year,” in contrast to only seven evangelical pastors who are running as Republicans. Among the Democrats, perhaps the most prominent is Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly strong campaign against Ken Paxton for a Texas Senate seat. But there’s also Methodist minister Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who has paused his preaching as a senior pastor at the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest United Methodist Congregation in the US.

Religious progressives have long been engines of positive social change. From the abolitionist Quakers of the 18th century to the social gospel movement in the late 19th century to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the mid- to late-20th century, Christian ethics were applied to pressing social problems such as poverty, labor exploitation, and racial injustice. During these periods of high visibility, strategic organizing, and great orators, progressive religion enjoyed enormous institutional prosperity, cultural popularity, and political influence.

Not surprisingly, this means that the old Christianity based mono-ethnic high-trust civilization has perished:

Boomers were born in the immediate aftermath of World War II. During their childhood, the view that the war was caused by a mass psychological disturbance, a runaway process of escalating fear and hate, crystallized into a consensus that has reigned ever since. If we’re to avoid such a disaster again, then the solution must be, as the philosopher Karl Popper termed it, an “open society” — a new culture where openness and tolerance would be prized, and any whiff of fascist tendencies in citizens’ thinking would be immediately suppressed.

The emergence of this open society coincided with a tremendous economic boom. On one income, a young man with a blue collar job was newly able to support a family and enjoy a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. In the world the boomers grew up in, a person who made ordinary choices could expect to live a good life. As long as you didn’t do anything disastrous — become a drug addict, go to prison — you would be OK.

Boomers grew up in a high-trust, religious and family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents. Progressive members of this generation also got to enjoy the rejection of all that once the 1960s swung into gear. They benefited from the old culture and from its destruction. This is a trick that can only be pulled once.

What you are seeing here is most likely individualism taking its final form as an opposition to reality so that the individual can be “liberated” from all constraints, except mortality and taxes of course. Liberalism opposes power and other transcendentals like excellence, health, wisdom, sanity, beauty, strength, and realism:

The same thinker who made the case for markets as dispersed power also advocated steeply progressive income taxation — because he believed that extreme inequality is, in his words, something “evil” that should be “tolerated only so far as the dictates of expediency are clear.” He supported government ownership of industries where technology required a scale incompatible with genuine competition. He called for active monetary policy to stabilize the economy. He insisted that “a merely negative, ‘hands-off’ policy of government is not sufficient to maintain the free economic order.” And he acknowledged, remarkably for a founder of Chicago economics, that socialism and libertarianism share their most fundamental concerns: “Modern socialism is avowedly concerned mainly about inequalities of wealth and power and about industrial monopoly — both major concerns of libertarians.”

If your central commitment is the dispersal of power, then you must oppose its concentration wherever you find it. In the state, yes — but also in private monopoly, in financial oligarchy, in any institution that grows powerful enough to dictate terms to those who depend on it. The classical liberal who waves away corporate concentration, or who treats every call for collective action as creeping socialism, is betraying this tradition, not defending it.

The shared enemy is not “big government” or “the free market.” The shared enemy is concentrated, unchecked power, wherever it lives. Classical liberals bring tools for understanding how power concentrates and how institutions can be designed to prevent it. Progressives bring moral urgency about the people who are harmed when power goes unchecked, and a willingness to act collectively to address real suffering. Neither tradition has the complete picture. But together, they have the resources for a liberalism that is serious about both freedom and justice — which is to say, serious about power.

So where does this leave us? Organized religion pulled a vanishing act, and we opted for Athens over Jerusalem because the Abrahamic approach is too foreign, too safety-oriented because of its death-obsession, and too close to liberalism.

We are all pagans now, and nationalists, too: those who preserve their ethnicity above all else because they see culture as the core of civilization, markets, laws, politics, and daily life. We are coming out of an age of delusion and moving into well-charted but unfamiliar waters.

Tags: control, crowdism, entitlement, high noon, individualism, inversion, pagan nationalism, pretense, talisman-scapegoat dichotomy, victim-entitlement loop