Amerika

The problem with addiction is that you do not know you are addicted. You just feel like more heroin. Similarly, if you have been gaslit, you do not get indicators that what you believe is wrong until you apply it and it fails.

But even more invisible to the host is denial. When you are in denial, you have cut out from your consciousness all knowledge of some aspect of reality. You filter it out before you even register it is there, like the old couch next to the back door that you see without seeing.

When people lose their glasses only to discover them resting on top of their own heads, it is funny, but it shows how much of our experience of life relies on filters. If we did not filter out objects we regularly encounter, we would have to move a lot more slowly!

However, every physical action seems to have a psychological counterpart, and for us, that is denial, or putting some notion out of our minds so that we never notice it again. Our society is in decline, and so to function, we have to be in denial of anything worth Noticing.

This translates into erasure from public knowledge of any inconvenient facts. What was commonsense centuries ago is forgotten and replaced with partial truths carved out of what is left, the things we are not in denial of. Soon a truly fake reality emerges.

We forget, for example, that Christianity has Arab origins and is a religion from the middle east. We forget that adopting a foreign religion sends up the signal that we are conquered. It slips our minds that religions of pacifism weaken those who adopt them.

Similarly, we lose sight of the obvious history and genetic data which says that not just races, but ethnic groups and social classes, are genetically different. Diversity does not work because we are different types of animals. Not to mention the infighting for power.

We also forgot the lessons learned during the Cold War, namely that the more “equality” your government enforces, the more you are thrust into a centrally controlled economy dominated for foreigners, and prices go up while quality goes down.

We forget that ancient morality was an aesthetics of success and having an epic life, not a nagging finger judging us. The only judgment was the life as a whole; those who acted illogically tended to have miserable lives or at least empty souls.

That in turn makes us rely on the modern version of morality, which like everything else in modernity is ersatz and inferior. Morals to a modern person means emotional approval of the group and individual, and serves to weaken the individual.

We forget the importance of money. Everyone likes to signal against wealth as their way of driving you away from striving for it so they can take it. But prosperity brings a groundwork upon which happiness can be built, or at least its lack prevents that building.

We are in denial of so many things. It starts with recognizing that our civilization is in collapse. To admit that is to realize that we are miserable and depressed because everything we do will be for nought as the herd chews it up and spits it out, then forgets it.

Create a great symphony? People want pop music. Write a great novel? No one will understand it. Design great architecture? Too expensive for the shareholders. Make a healthy, thriving community? Tons of morons will read about it in Dwell and inundate it, destroying it.

We live in a hopeless time. Our denial serves to avoid Noticing the little clues that show us society is falling apart. We forget that democracy is a vulture, not an eagle. We forget that consumerism breeds complacency.

Our denial includes the common-sense and obvious. Of course culture is genetic! And of course some people are born bad, through mutation load or just bad character or bad judgment. They become victimizers and the sooner you remove them, the more of your people you protect.

We forget that our real utility is our function. People keep us around for what we do, not some airy rights or finances. But in the name of feeling powerful, we would rather force people to include us so we can be free to indulge our obsessions and desires.

In a time of denial, common sense and enduring knowledge are a foreign land. People are addicted to denial, and only want things that perpetuate the denial. This is the nature of collapse, and it is why it requires a conscious organized force to repel it.

Tags: collapse, decline, denial, depression, despair