Amerika

The most controversial idea on this site, other than all the others, may be that collectivism is what happens when individualists gather in groups. They agree to exploit the civilization for their own benefit and demand subsidies, like a union or warlord-state.

You can see how this is the case because “collectivist” societies have higher rates of “narcissism,” which is the normie keyword euphemism for “individualism,” explaining how collectivism=individualism, just crowdsourced:

In psychology, the most commonly studied dark personality traits belong to a group known as the dark triad. This group of traits includes narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Narcissism involves a grandiose sense of self-importance, a deep need for admiration, and a tendency to act with entitlement. Machiavellianism is characterized by a cynical disregard for morality and a focus on manipulating others for personal gain. Psychopathy involves a lack of empathy, impulsive behavior, and a tendency to ignore the rights and feelings of others.

The researchers found that people from countries with a higher gross domestic product tended to report higher levels of narcissism. This suggests that wealthier societies reward environments where self-promotion and individual achievement are highly valued. Interestingly, Miscikowski and colleagues also found that individuals from more collectivistic cultures reported higher narcissism.

“One of the more surprising findings was that people from more collectivistic countries sometimes reported higher, not lower, levels of narcissism — particularly on the more agentic, admiration side,” Chopik noted. “This challenges the common assumption that narcissism is mainly a product of highly individualistic cultures. It suggests that narcissistic traits may serve different functions in different cultural contexts, such as navigating social hierarchies rather than standing out as unique.”

In other words, “narcissism” emerges in “collectivist” cultures more than “individualist” ones. You think this would make them realize that their definitions are a false dichotomy, but that is a million miles away.

You can see why the mainstream model is wrong. In their view, “narcissists” worship themselves, but in actuality, individualists act only for their own bourgeois mental comfort, wealth, power, and status.

In the third world this is most rampant because anyone capable of forming functional social institutions was driven off or bred out long ago. This is why the third world is what it is: genetically, it has selected for individualists, erasing anyone who cares about larger things.

If you view it properly, the third world is the default state of humankind. Everyone does whatever makes them feel good. No one spends time on things like wisdom, institutions, culture, and learning. They just make themselves feel good in the moment.

The first world is the anomaly, where people set aside their immediate desires in order to build something greater than themselves or any other human individuals, basically worshiping nature by making something to complement it that strove toward excellence.

No wonder the third world is so individualistic. Not surprisingly, the people in low-income third-world countries are connected to less, and despite having more personal power, report more loneliness because they have fewer strong connections to anything outside of themselves:

In high-income countries, 15.7% of people reported loneliness, including 16.2% in New Zealand and 17.8% in Australia. In low-income countries, by contrast, nearly one in three people (31.3%) reported feeling lonely.

Across the data we analyzed, one factor consistently stood out: the importance of social capital, or the presence of trust and reliable support networks. People who report having others they can depend on are far less likely to feel lonely in every region of the world.

While reported rates of loneliness rose significantly in low-income countries, they remained broadly unchanged in middle-income countries and declined in high-income countries.

There is no more individualistic place than the third world. You do whatever you want, avoiding a few basic taboos, and then throw your trash in the river and defecate on the street. You have very few rules constraining you and even fewer (and lower) standards.

However, the painful flipside so that freedom is that you are lonely because you do not share behaviors with others except in certain public holidays. You are adrift in a world of people in their own little worlds, and no one cares enough about the world outside the self to share values-oriented behaviors. You get conformity, sure, but everything is a social event and no meaning can be found in these.

The principle of Crowdism is that human groups, if not directed otherwise, tend to ignore what they fear and overstate what they like and feel safe around. This is the scapegoat-talisman cycle, in that instead of identifying the causes of what they fear and avoiding them, they are morally judging and censoring mention of what they fear. It is like cutting out your eyes to avoid seeing ugliness, and in groups, it becomes a trend, gang, fad, clique, mania, mob, panic, or horde of people acting in ways contrarian to reality but conformist to social pressure.

For this reason, the wisdom of crowds can be discounted as a fiction:

Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest “garbage.”

Curtis acknowledged the success of other crowd-sourced endeavors like YouTube or Wikipedia, but said those sites are successful because they have strong leadership and rely on a team of editors to sift the content.

“You need structure, also known as editing,” he said.

Without leaders/editors, what you get from the crowd is gibberish and randomness. The “bottom-up” organization in nature only occurs because natural selection is enforced; in that case, the editors/leaders are logical rules of survival.

Humans are not just social creatures, but solipsists who act out their thinking in the world instead of doing it tidily in their heads, then choosing the right course of action. The herd imitate each other and accelerate the escape from realism.

This leads to people moving as if herds, flocks, or crowds: everyone reacts emotionally to events so that the group is forced to deal with those events.

Each event contains its inverse. With emotional reactions, the other side of the arc is that external events cause mental instability among oversocialized people:

Mass shooting incidents and car crashes may seem like two unrelated incidents, but a recent study has uncovered that there might be an unexpected link. Every year, more than a hundred mass shootings take place across the United States, many leaving behind four or more lives lost. In the aftermath, the tragedy quickly spreads across every avenue of media, from newspaper headlines and TV news to social media feeds and even online searches. This constant stream of coverage can leave people feeling anxious, distracted, and emotionally overwhelmed.

A recent study explored whether this psychological impact could have real-world consequences beyond emotional distress, such as people’s ability to drive.

They examined whether major mass shootings were followed by an increase in fatal car crashes across the country. They found that the day after 8 out of the 10 deadliest shootings showed a temporary increase in fatal traffic crashes nationwide. As people turned to the internet for updates and information about the tragedy, traffic deaths increased by an average of 14.3% or roughly 20 additional deaths across the country in a single day.

The externalized person becomes oversocialized because he depends on manipulating others with emotions in order to get things done and, in turn, he internalizes responses to the external when there is not a social solution for the problem at hand.

A mass shooting for example can be prosecuted but it cannot be undone. Social pressure will do nothing to fix the actual problem.

The problem with inverted relationships is that they are weak ties, which means that they do not orient the group toward a goal, but instead toward conformity to what everyone expects the rest of the group will desire.

These weak ties form the basis of democracy and other demotist systems:

“We believe polarized groups allow for the formation of divided opinions,” Macy said. “Simply put, most people do not join ideologically opposed groups that align with their opinions; rather, they acquire opinions that align with ideologically opposed groups. That is how deep structural divisions can be ideologically shallow.”

Their findings suggest a plausible pathway to polarization: As weaker ties become more prevalent, status-related mechanisms gain importance, reinforcing social divisions. Not every additional social connection has the same effect: Whether a relationship represents a close friendship or a weaker acquaintance may determine which social mechanisms dominate the evolution of society.

In other words, appeasing the herd inevitably leads to group mental conformity. The individualists, claiming to be individualistic, instead abolish the individual so that it can get along with the group in the name of mutual individualism.

Human societies come undone not because of evil, Hitlers, demons, or ancient curses. They pull themselves apart by doing what seems right to the group, but in fact reflects individual motivations, which pulls society in as many directions as it has people, making order impossible.

With many things, you can take them at face value; with individualism, a second layer exists. The more people try to avoid forming a collective, the more they form a permanent one that is both conformist and so chaotic that civilizational function is impossible.

Tags: collectivism, crowdism, diversity, individualism, narcissism, oversocialization, wisdom of crowds