Amerika

Here, we recognize a simple truth: you choose either yourself or the world. You cannot choose both. If you choose the world, you seek to understand it and thrive in it; if you choose yourself, you sit in judgment on the world and expect it to adapt to you.

There is no middle ground.

Individualists seek to manage their own mental state by avoiding observation of unsettling hard realities. They simply cherry-pick reality for things that flatter their self-concept. To them, reality is a drug they use to maintain their minds.

We could see them as simply unbalanced in favor of the habitual system instead of the goal-directed one:

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 both methodological and egotistical; a person has a certain set of default responses and stimulus pursuits that define them, at least to themselves, and they adopt these as a means of reflexive navigation of the world.

One explanation for this: they are not so much embracing the habitual system as avoiding the goal-oriented ones, because setting goals puts them at the mercy of the world which may fulfill or reject their goals.

Another is that individualists are simply neurotics who are looking to justify, validate, and excuse their own lack of coherent mental state:

Among people high in the personality trait neuroticism, exclusion easily triggers feelings of vulnerability and neediness. The social support hypothesis translates this to politics. Concerned with their own vulnerability, we find that neurotic people prefer policies of care – social welfare and redistribution – but not other left-wing policies. Specifically, it is anxiety – the facet of neuroticism tapping sensitivity to social threats – that drives this link. And it is only for people experiencing exclusion that anxiety predicts support for social welfare.

The important part here is the anxiety. The anxious person fears reality and therefore, becomes an individualist who seeks to use the world to maintain his own mental state instead of vice-versa. Therefore they tend to care-based policies, thinking most of themselves.

But as is true in all human affairs, if you want something, the fastest way to get it is to offer it to everyone else too.

Neurosis and individualism both rely on filtering reality to keep the scary parts out. This ends up creating emotion suppression because the person does not fully engage with their own lives:

Emotion suppression involves intentionally avoiding distressing feelings by thinking of other things or holding things in, while emotion repression is defined by lack of conscious awareness of negative emotion.

This sounds a lot like our definition of individualism above: “manage their own mental state by avoiding observation of unsettling hard realities” (this is the same way Political Correctness, organized religion, and patriotism work).

Emotion suppression allows people to avoid things they fear, which would be on the goal-oriented side or reductionist realism as an alternative, but in turn, it makes them less of a whole person, so they lose individuality while gaining power through the magic of the Crowd.

Along with the loss of individuality, loneliness results from the cherry-picking of reality, gradually making the person antisocial in their refusal to interact with others except to use them:

The hypersensitivity to negative social information and the diminished pleasure derived from positive social stimuli might be expected to shape social expectations and motivations and contribute to a downward spiraling of negative affect and depressive symptomatology. Indeed, loneliness is related to stronger expectations of and motivations to avoid bad social outcomes and weaker expectations of and motivations to approach good social outcomes.

They seek “positive social stimuli” because they seek “positive stimuli” generally in order to avoid having to confront negative stimuli, like the things they fear, which disrupt their mental state and thrust them into a mentality of having to face a world they fear.

For that reason, they also fear any principle of reality, hierarchy, or productivity, since this can shatter their mental bubble and reveal that they are not as important in the world as they are in their own heads.

This fear causes them to pursue individualizing values exclusively and reject binding values which lead to civilization, culture, and the accumulation of knowledge:

Research suggests moral values may be divided into two types: binding values, which govern behavior in groups, and individualizing values, which promote personal rights and freedoms.

Results show people rate moral values as more important when in the presence of close
others, and this effect is stronger for binding than individualizing values—an effect that
replicates in a large preregistered online sample (n = 2016). A lab study (n=390) and two
preregistered online experiments (n = 580 and n=752) provide convergent evidence that
people afford binding, but not individualizing, values more importance when in the real or
imagined presence of close others. Our results suggest people selectively activate different
moral values according to the demands of the situation, and show how the mere presence of
others can affect moral thinking.

Binding values connect the individual to results in reality, therefore are inherently realist. This breaks the individual out of the loop of their own thinking, and this requires them to modify their thinking according to external reality, which would break individualism.

Therefore, they avoid this whenever possible.

Not shockingly, the breakdown of binding values accompanies diversity which leads to “moral relativism” which simply means the individual believes whatever is convenient in order to maintain their self-image (italics are mine):

Relativistic views of morality first found expression in 5th century B.C.E. Greece, but they remained largely dormant until the 19th and 20th centuries. During this time, a number of factors converged to make moral relativism appear plausible. These included a new appreciation of cultural diversity prompted by anthropological discoveries; the declining importance of religion in modernized societies; an increasingly critical attitude toward colonialism and its assumption of moral superiority over the colonized societies; and growing skepticism toward any form of moral objectivism, given the difficulty of proving value judgments the way one proves factual claims.

For some, moral relativism, which relativizes the truth of moral claims, follows logically from a broader cognitive relativism that relativizes truth in general. Many moral relativists, however, take the fact-value distinction to be fundamental. A common, albeit negative, reason for embracing moral relativism is simply the perceived untenability of moral objectivism: every attempt to establish a single, objectively valid and universally binding set of moral principles runs up against formidable objections.

If you wonder why late stage societies seem to go insane and everyone in them seems self-destructive, this is why: they have made reality anathema in order to get along with the individualists, and this means that group thinking drifts farther from anything real.

“Moral relativism” should probably be read not so much as relativity but a tendency to make exceptions for well-known historical success stories so that individualists can do what they want and force everyone else to pay for it.

Democracy accelerates this process. People vote for whatever makes them feel in control. For that reason, they develop private “truths” which reflect what helps them manage their emotionally-dysregulated minds. Not surprisingly they soon suppress any realistic thought.

We are at this stage now, where the individualists have taken over from the realists, and are running everything off the rail. To survive, we will have to get realists back in power and then send the individualists somewhere else so they can make failing civilizations there instead.

Tags: anxiety, habitual system, individualism, neuroticism