Amerika

Everything follows a cycle in life, and the part we see is the life-cycle: it appears, stabilizes, matures to peak efficiency, and then starts slowly to decay before it ceases to exist. We only see what it really is once it matures and often get insight into its structure only when it decays enough to reveal the bones beneath the flesh.

Modernity, the stage of civilization after it succeeds, consists of attempts to suppress problems rather than focus on goals. The assumption inevitably seems to be that with the success of civilization, no more goals exist, so all that remains to do is to increase efficiency, reduce risks, and centralize control.

A really healthy civilization obviously finds a way to stay adolescent. That is, it never fully matures into the safety/efficiency/control stage but remains somewhat lawless and semi-impoverished, such that it has enough wealth but not the excess which attracts parasites of all types.

This means that the way to succeed is not to entirely succeed. Smart civilizations do this by sequestering wealth in order to avoid a runaway economic chain reaction, where the middle classes gain too much power and take over leadership, at which point decay and bureaucracy follow.

If a civilization allows itself to be taken over by the shopkeepers of the world, it will enter into its declining stages, at which point the raw mechanics of the process will become revealed as the flesh over them erodes. Democracy stands revealed as the type of manipulation which it is.

When looked at critically, Late Stage Democracy of this type resembles the characteristics of a cult, when we realize that the leader and religion are one, the ideology of democracy itself:

• The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
• Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
• Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
• The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
• The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
• The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
• The leader is not accountable to any authorities.
• The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
• The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
• Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.
• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
• The group is preoccupied with making money.
• Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
• Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
• The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

In this case, the ideology of democracy is both egalitarian altruism and bourgeois me-firsting; both of these are forms of individualism. It represents to people the notion that all is going well, in fact progress is being made, and things are not as they seem, namely that civilization is declining and with it our fortunes.

Starting with The Enlightenment,™ the people of the West legitimized individualism, which is a desire for putting the self before social order, natural order, history, culture, biology, and logic. The Enlightenment™ said that the individual was the ideal and came before all other forms of social order.

Of course, this is the opposite of unity and leads to the breakdown of civilization, so they had to come up with a theory that what is apparently real is in fact not real in order to justify this behavior. They invented ideology, or the idea that through Equality we will achieve Progress on the path to Utopia, replacing physical reality with a symbolic one.

Almost no one actually believes this. What they see is an opportunity to deflect criticism from themselves, misdirect others on a false quest, then manipulate rules so they can engage in me-first behavior, all while hiding behind the aegis of the optics of being altruistic.

It was never anything but a scam. In any successful organization, the roots of a scam form as soon as order is formalized, or removed from ends-over-means thinking like goals and turned into an authority question involving procedure, process, and method (means-over-ends). This gives rise to those who exploit the system.

When the state of nature exists, everyone thinks in ends-over-means terms. You must gain food or you die; do this however you can. With the rise of early civilization, this is tempered by prohibiting gaining food at the expense of others. You can still think ends-over-means, but you have a list of no-nos that harm others.

That gives the inherently criminal among us an idea. If they can extend these no-nos to include anything that would reveal the ineptitude or criminality of another, they get the holy grail of the parasite: all of the benefit with none of the responsibility while hiding the fact behind a veil of good intentions.

The middle classes always support this Revolution because to them it means more customers and fewer restrictions. If you could not sell hard liquor, sex toys, and crack cocaine straight on the steps of a preschool before, you were being held back by oppressive authority, and now you can profit freely.

In fact, if you look at Anti-Semitic™ caricatures since the middle ages, almost all of them apply to the middle class shopkeeper, as if he had cast his own bad traits into a Jew-shaped scapegoat. Money-grubbing, manipulative, immoral, and predatory are good ways to make profit off the herd.

Traditionally, the middle class detests the lower classes as well as the higher. Caught between those who know better and those who know almost nothing, the middle classes feel oppressed by rules and standards that keep them from selling crack cocaine directly to preschoolers and tossing their garbage into national forests.

They come up with a Robin Hood style story for themselves about taking from their evil overlords to give to the virtuous poor, when in fact the poor are far from virtuous, the middle classes are merely opportunistic profiteers, and the “evil” overlords are mostly trying to restrain the worst of human behavior.

With democracy, the middle class gains its Roman holiday. They can eat the seed corn, or even better distill it into liquor and make a tidy profit, then flee to spend their money in a foreign country where they no longer have to deal with the messy question of civilization.

The kings held back Western Civilization from consuming itself, but with The Enlightenment,™ the neurotic “intellectuals” and self-pitying middle classes had a new argument: reality is not as it seems, so we must live for the symbol of equality, and we will all get rich instead of obeying the obvious, logical, and salubrious rules.

Society under such a framework quickly destroys all of the organic order — culture, religion, family, genetics, morality — and replaces it with this linear categorical ideology of “progress.” Eventually it reaches Late Stage Democracy where it has nothing else to destroy and is running out of wealth to consume.

This civilization-stage resembles a cult, but obedience is to the idea that all-is-well which requires anti-realism or denial of reality, and those who fail to join in the cult are seen as enemies if not outright evil malefactors who are trying to steal the fading prosperity of the self-destructive middle class.

Compare to the rubric above:

• The group displays excessive zealous commitment to the idea that all is going not just well but is on the path to Utopia, protecting the ideal of Equality, itself a commitment for the idea that everyone can do whatever they want with minimal accountability to reality or duty to, in contrast to the bourgeois individualism of the cities, the notion that civilization, morality, culture, and genetics must be actively maintained. They are taken for granted.
• Any deviation from the belief in absolute truth which says that Equality is good and anti-egalitarians are bad is punished by ostracism, and any failure to preach Equality is viewed as de facto proof of subversion, so those who are insufficiently enthusiastic about Progress are open to attack at any time.
• Mind-altering practices — keeping you exhausted with constant noise, breaking your will with make-work at school, stunting your mind with moronic pop culture, starving your body with a diet of soy and carbs, conditioning you to false humility and subjugation through perpetual “struggle sessions” in the media, inducing suspended mental animation through constant panics like climate change and COVID-19, producing terror through the incessant threat of financial ruin and dwelling in the ghetto — seem to be the norm in this society.
• The leadership dictates how one should behave and appear through an endless procession of trends, mostly related to “progress,” revolution, and “breaking tradition.” You know things are bad when “revolutionary” is seen as a compliment, and products are routinely advertised as having that trait.
• Our elites consist of those with money and the right political opinions, and these constantly look down on the “deplorables” and “dirt people” who have neither. Hollywood mocks the bumpkins — who are ignorant, uneducated, crass, racist, and inbred — outside the cities. Media emphasizes cosmopolitan values and styles and portrays as weak and helpless the normal suburban Heritage American.
• The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality in that everyone who supports democracy, equality, civil rights, and diversity is seen as good, and anyone who fails to enthusiastically support that is viewed as our bogeyman in place of Emmanuel Goldstein, Adolf Hitler (or the KKK). Anti-racists are good, and everyone else is assumed to be “racist” and therefore “evil.”
• The ideology of Equality is not only not accountable to any authorities, because all of the authorities are egalitarians, and even more, is not accountable to reality. When a program fails because it is unrealistic, the response is to give it more taxpayer money and try again. Even Communists now argue that the Soviet Union, once their ideal, was not “true Communism.” At no point will anyone admit that unrealistic ideas invariably lead to bad results.
• The group takes as sacrament the idea that its exalted ends justify whatever means can be employed to achieve them, and in doing so, creates a moral inversion: only Equality is good in a symbolic sense, so whatever unrealistic and horrible things you can do to achieve Equality so that the middle class audience can continue to believe that “Progress” is successful are not only acceptable, but encouraged. Your revolutionary fervor is shown by how willing you are to break laws, burn down cities, kill people, and seize control through tyrannical means.
• The leadership constantly shames and manipulates with guilt through the assumption that only Equality is good and everything else is bad, and has weaponized not just news media but all entertainment toward this end. The real psyop is this media blitz which is so effective that even most of those who claim to be realist are in fact preaching a variety of Equality.
• Not only are participants in the cult encouraged to cut ties with family and friends who do not believe in the Equality dogma, but the idea of family itself is under attack with sexual liberation, promotion of adolescent culture as an end in itself, divorce laws that penalize fathers, legalized sex work, and a tax structure that zaps the nuclear family in order to fund single parents.
• The group is preoccupied with recruiting new believers, mostly by ruining them intellectually and morally so that they require egalitarianism as a way to feel good about themselves again. Think of the sheer weight of lies taught in the average classroom, television program, or newspaper article, and you can see how people are encouraged to make bad decisions so that they will have nothing left but their ideology.
• The group is preoccupied with taking money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive, taking its cut in the process, to the point where almost all public debate concerns how government can spend more money on anti-poverty or anti-racism programs.
• Members are expected to devote large chunks of each day in going to make-work jobs and daycare-style schools, memorizing ideology from trendy books, consuming media, and promoting “social justice.”
• Members are encouraged to cut ties with those who are not egalitarians, mostly because of the threat to themselves if they are associated with badthink.
• The most loyal members (“true believers”) feel there is no life outside of their ideology because nothing else matters. Ideology creates a symbolic world which discards the real world, therefore the real world is meaningless to these people, and they end up becoming ideological zombies greasing their way through life with sex, drugs, drink, and entertainment as they cast about for meaning that, because they refuse to believe in it, cannot exist for them except through ideology.

As one other analysis of the cult pathology illustrates, people do not choose this cult, but are nudged into it with peer pressure after finding themselves lost because nothing in this civilization makes sense anymore:

No one joins a cult voluntarily; they are recruited into it. There is lack of informed consent. Everyone has vulnerabilities. Possible situational vulnerabilities include illness, the death of a loved one, breakup of an important relationship, loss of a job, or moving to another city, state or country.

Rootless modern people have none of these connections, therefore quickly turn to ideology as a kind of drug because it explains away their failures as “oppression” and newly mints them as saints for their embrace of the great quest for Utopia through Equality.

It goes on:

Destructive individuals and cults use deception and undue influence to make people dependent and obedient. A group should not be considered a cult merely because of its unorthodox beliefs. It is typically authoritarian, headed by a person or group of people with near complete control of followers. Cult influence is designed to disrupt a person’s authentic identity and replace it with a new identity.

This describes the function of the middle class ideology of individualism. It replaces authentic identity with political identity, and maintains complete control by weaponizing the group toward ostracizing non-believers.

It operates on the basis of a primal deception — the “Big Lie” — that reality is not as it seems, therefore symbolism is more important because it is popular, which means that we can throw out everything we know about reality and embrace symbolism instead and end up with the best possible outcome.

It makes people dependent and obedient primarily through the meaningless experience of jobs plus high taxes which make survival itself expensive, so that people must obey or they will end up discarded and crushed beneath the wheel of “progress.”

Almost no one can face the fact that civilizational health equates to individual mental health. In a sane society, people live sanely and have no need for symbolic compensation, but in Late Stage Democracy, ideology determines who succeeds so most people join the herd in the hopes of sharing some of the spoils.

Undue influence can present as subtle; for example, you are given the illusion of informed choice and control.

When your choices consist of several flavors of the same modernistic system and escape is impossible without dire poverty, you are given the illusion of informed choice and control, when really all roads lead to more modernism. Any who speak of ideas outside modernism are demonized, as are any who tolerate or listen to them.

Cult leaders want people who will be obedient to them and their rules. They look for ways to “break” people; they want people who will work hard and long hours for little or no pay. They want “willing” slaves.

Jobs function to break people because most of what is done at them is unnecessary and made complicated by procedure, union rules, red tape, and waiting for a group to come to consensus when most of its members are uninterested in actual achievement.

You work long hours becuase otherwise you will be replaced, obey all the rules because otherwise you will be demoted, and although you take home lots of money, never get enough to buy yourself free of the system. You are a system slave from before birth until death.

Undue Influence does NOT erase the person’s old identity but rather creates a new identity to suppress the old one. After different types of manipulation, the creation of a new identity is done step-by-step by formal indoctrination sessions and informally by members, videos, games, movies, publications, and social/digital media. Behavior modification techniques are employed, such as rewards/punishments, thought-stopping, and control of environment (isolation or restriction of access to others). And then the new identify is reinforced and the old identify suppressed.

Those who emphasize the ideology of Late Stage Democracy — the idea that all is fine, decay is in fact progress, and we are heading toward Utopia, but we must keep working and buying and paying taxes in order to keep the system afloat — are rewarded, and soon find that the identity they adopt at work and in social situations has replaced whatever individuality they retained.

Your work identity must after all follow the ideology. You have to listen to everyone, be nice especially to the soft-headed, and always follow procedure even when it is pointless and idiotic. Soon this nice artificial person replaces whatever ideas of your own that you may have.

Now we turn to the effects of cult membership:

• Extreme identity confusion
• Panic and anxiety attacks
• Depression
• Psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, backaches, asthma, skin problems)
• Anger, guilt and shame
• Decision-making dependency
• Fear and phobias
• Sleep disorders/nightmares
• Eating disorders
• Fear of intimacy and commitment
• Distrust of self and others
• Grieving loss of friends and family

Although mention of such things is suppressed, these describe the daily experience of the modern person, who lives in “analysis paralysis” with too little sleep, weird food habits, drug abuse, unawareness of who they are, and a constant low-grade depression which spurs them to make terrible (but profitable) buying decisions.

The life cycle of civilization enters its final era with Late Stage Democracy. Everything good is consumed, the few lucky ones jet on to some other place, the population becomes mixed-race and mixed-class, and nothing is produced because everyone is too busy obeying procedure at jobs.

The society after this goes into third world status. At that point, deleterious mutations, mental health problems, and low-IQ become the norm, making for an inert population that is abused and manipulated easily by its cynical leaders. At that point, the book is closed, for there is nothing more to write.

Tags: crowdism, cults, decline, indoctrination, late stage democracy, middle class