Amerika

When we started using the term individualism around here, the usual zombies came out of the mainstream media closet to tell us nuh-uh, collectivism is the enemy, individualism is the salvation.

Like almost anyone in a suicide loop, they have embraced the cause of their own doom because that is easier than trying to do something about it. Individualism means choosing the individual over the world in order to make the emotions of the individual feel better by avoiding the need to change thinking.

Its opposite, transcendentalism, means accepting the world as it is and finding a wisdom in it because it allows us to pursue power by achieving excellence. This is what apex predators, geniuses, and everyday heroes do.

Over the intervening years, science has caught up, and now understands that individualism=Leftism as we did years ago:

To test these ideas, the scientists drew upon a psychological framework that divides human moral judgments into two main categories: individualizing values and binding values. Individualizing values focus on fairness, equality, and preventing harm to individuals. Binding values emphasize group loyalty, respect for authority, and protecting purity or sanctity. Past research indicates that liberals tend to prioritize individualizing values almost exclusively, while conservatives tend to endorse both individualizing and binding values more equally.

These categories build on the work of Jonathan Haidt, who discovered the types of political belief and clarified them into six categories that can be easily measured.

In the big picture, however, Leftism reflects the individualist desire to have the group support him and therefore, acknowledge his importance. This shows an over-reliance on habitual thinking and therefore, a deprecation of goal-oriented thinking:

Psychologists often study behavioral addictions through a dual-system framework. This model suggests that human behavior is guided by a balance between a goal-directed system and a habitual system. The goal-directed system involves conscious planning and mental flexibility. The habitual system relies on automatic responses that often persist even when they conflict with a person’s goals.

The habitual system is inertia that protects the individual from having to change their thinking; they want to preserve their emotional state by refusing any input from anything but themselves, which makes goal-orientation impossible.

Consistent with Crowdism, they engage in the manipulation of others in order to preserve their static mental state which avoids jostling their fragile emotional state, making them manipulative:

People who manipulate social circles through gossip or exclusion are largely driven by dark personality traits, and possessing positive traits generally fails to stop this behavior. Researchers found that while acting kindly toward others can slightly reduce the likelihood of engaging in social sabotage, it does not erase the influence of underlying malevolence.

Relational aggression involves intentionally harming someone’s relationships or social standing instead of using physical violence. Examples include spreading malicious rumors, giving the silent treatment, or organizing a group to purposely exclude a specific person. Because it is subtle, individuals seeking to avoid open conflict often prefer it over direct confrontation. This dynamic frequently plays out in adult environments like workplaces, community groups, and extended friend circles.

Victims of this type of aggression frequently face serious mental health consequences. Being targeted can lead to increased depression, hopelessness, and extreme loneliness. The individuals who dish out this aggression also experience difficulties. Perpetrators frequently report their own struggles with anxiety, risky habits, and trouble managing their emotions.

Crowdists (including all Leftists) rule by social guilt, which is the notion that you owe the Crowd a duty to avoid disturbing their fragile mental states. Manipulation requires this sense of obligation to work, so Crowdists install it before anything else.

As their addiction to this psychology accelerates, it converges on something a lot like borderline personality disorder in effect:

Borderline personality disorder is a mental health condition marked by ongoing problems with emotional regulation, self-image, behavior, and relationships. People with it frequently experience very intense emotions that can shift quickly, sometimes over hours or days.

Common features of this disorder include fear of abandonment, unstable or intense relationships, impulsive behavior, and a changing or uncertain sense of self. Some people also feel chronic emptiness, anger that is hard to control, or suspiciousness and stress-related changes in perception.

The condition often begins by late adolescence or early adulthood. Borderline personality disorder can occur together with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use problems, eating disorders, or bipolar disorder, which can make diagnosis more complicated.

Naturally, these people end up feeling terrible about life because they keep making their mental state more and more fragile.

At its core, this pathology may arise from fear of loss which is mostly a response to authority, and how it conditions people to hide their mistakes and promote their successes:

A Virginia Tech researcher and his colleagues discovered that when managers frame work problems as a potential loss, employees are more likely to take action than when those problems are framed as potential gains. The research also revealed that when the potential loss impacts a larger group, employees are more likely to take action in the form of speaking up to a supervisor in hopes of finding a solution.

We can see how this is an eternal pitfall of being human, much like gambling, where we stake all that we have on what we know and filter out the unknown, including that which has potential to be excellent and raise us up above where we were.

At its end, then, Leftism is a philosophy of fatalism: it does not believe the world is good, nor that something better than the status quo exists, so it decays to a malevolent individualism which leads to self-destruction or at least an impulse to destroy.

Tags: binding values, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, crowdism, individualism, individualizing values, jonathan haidt, leftism, relational aggression