Amerika

Societies die because they grow and then become dedicated to managing people. This creates a tragedy of the commons that sacrifices intangibles like nature and civilization, and focuses instead of people, which creates a society driven by over-socialized behavior.

From that comes Control, or the idea of means-over-ends thinking that rejects goal-orientation and replaces it with an attempt to make mediocre people behave like good people. This follows the social idea that we are all the same, only with different circumstances or inputs like “education.”

This means-over-ends thinking reverses thinking itself. Instead of thinking toward goals, we rationalized based on acceptable methods, and since we never get what we want, we rationalize the mediocre compromise as “good” instead of pointing out that it is unrealistic.

We also reject the transcendental, which is a viewpoint that takes nature and existence as a whole and finds a way to understand how their imperfections are in fact perfection, since the cosmos is a perpetual motion machine that brings us things like intelligence and death metal.

The transcendent is the acceptance of imperfection as necessary for the continuation and resilience of life. When we are able to see life as logical and not random, then we can see how that relentless logic produces great beauty, even if it also means scary stuff like death and aging.

That tells us something about the creative force behind all of this. It is here to produce beauty, pleasure, and joy. But if it mandates that directly — like Leftists giving money to the homeless — it forms a closed loop and collapses through lack of transaction. There is no reason for independent data to exist at that point and heat-death takes over.

The point of the transcendental is separating method (impure) from goal (pure) and realizing that they are mutually necessary. The universe is not how it is arbitrarily. Transcendence is the quieting of human fear so that we can appreciate the beauty of existence.

It also enables us to see how life is in fact infinite and therefore, our fears about death and aging are probably just nonsense like our fears about being uncool were in middle school. The demon of doubt always lurks among us, but he is a bully and like all bullies, he is bluffing.

The transcendent cannot coexist with individualism. The me-first people never understand their role in the larger order, therefore reject the order, therefore can never see its logic and appreciate its wisdom.

Socializing however is based on individualism. Each person is important, and each wants their share, so we redistribute and compromise until everyone is happy. That never lasts, so socializing becomes a self-consuming vortex of decline.

The social mind also tends toward the “fiction-absolute,” which is the rationalization of its present position as the best possible option. This requires playing the victim, since anything not-great about that position has to be explained as an external influence.

Generally, socializing portrays all differences between humans as external influences because this is the only way that the individual can be blameless. That is why they call the psychology “individualism.”

Individualism allows us to scapegoat external influences for everything bad in ourselves and successful in others, while ignoring our dependence on external reality:

[H]ard work is seen as a good reason to receive rewards, while being gifted them — due to birth, systemic advantage or the “generosity” of the state — is viewed less positively.

So common is this view, that people are often uncomfortable recognizing how their backgrounds have helped them in their own lives. They also respond negatively when they feel that their statuses are under threat. This can lead to support for radical political parties as a way to protect their social positions, especially where they feel that others are being unfairly advantaged.

Taken together, we see that twice as many people ranked “hard work” as the most important reason for their own position, than for differences in social position more generally. By contrast, when considering “background,” twice as many people ranked it as the most important reason for general differences in social position than for their own social position.

It would be interesting if people ranked “competence” as the reason for their position because the only legitimate reason for someone to have power is that they will use it well. That is ends-over-means thinking.

Taking this outside of mere job-fixation, however, the bigger point is that people attribute successes to themselves and failures to the universe. This is the essence of individualism: scapegoat reality in order to build up the individual.

Jobs teach dishonesty. Not only do we have to promote ourselves, but we must explain away failures as some evil demonic external influence, and then we start treating life passively as a compromise between inevitable entropy and our own desires.

It turns out that the dishonest seek power because they have a need to conceal their fundamental incompetence:

4. Rhetorical overstatement: Findings are presented using overly confident language, portraying claims as indisputable and leaving little room for uncertainty or alternative interpretations.

5. Terminological distortion: Key concepts and technical terms are used incorrectly or inconsistently, creating conceptual confusion and potentially misleading the reader about what the study actually shows.

“The fact that these patterns recur across multiple retracted articles suggests that research misconduct and serious errors are often accompanied by similar rhetorical strategies. By recognizing these warning signals, reviewers and readers can identify potential problems in a study at an earlier stage,” says Khuder.

In any social group, there will be some who are competent and some who are not. This entire society has become a jobs program for the incompetents, which requires us to legitimize taking from the productive to subsidize the passively destructive.

Unfortunately, we do so by using social morality, which might be better described as mutual individualism or collectivized individualism. Social morality is concerned with the individual, and that everyone gets heard (compromise) and that everyone gets a share (fairness).

It turns out this social morality is the root of our psychosis in democracyland:

Arguments that tend to move liberals in a more liberal direction also persuade conservatives, whereas arguments that tend to move conservatives in a more conservative direction do not persuade liberals.

At the same time, surveys show that moral values in many countries have, over time, shifted in a more socially progressive and liberal direction, including in the United States, where this study was conducted. The findings help explain why such change can occur even in an increasingly polarized public debate.

The results suggest that care and fairness function as shared moral foundations across political divides, meaning that different groups can—to some extent—be swayed by the same kinds of moral appeals.

It helps to understand the parts of the Moral Foundations Theory:

The study builds on a particular result from Moral Foundations Theory, which distinguishes between individualizing foundations (care/harm and fairness/cheating) and so-called binding foundations (loyalty, authority and sanctity).

Individualizing foundations are individualist; they focus on the individual. Care/harm and fairness/cheating both exist for individualism to prevail, such that each individual is considered important and included whether they contribute or not.

The “cheating” side of fairness/cheating is probably more on the conservative ticket because it looks at freeloaders and free riders, but this leaves the system open to attack by those who simply conform and obey but do not affirmatively contribute anything.

Ironically, the only thing that protects this uniparty pathology is that it is not recognized. People are open to controversial ideas if they are analytical:

The study shows that people who are open to those with different opinions tend to think more analytically and have a general need to get to the bottom of things. “People who tend to think in black and white and rely more on their gut feeling, however, are less willing to engage in dialog,” reports Jauch.

The social psychologist was surprised to find that, according to the studies, it does not matter whether a topic is politically controversial when it comes to people’s willingness to engage in dialog. “We assumed that differing opinions would tend to be avoided when it came to controversial topics. This did not prove to be the case; on the contrary, according to one study, people are more willing to engage with other opinions when it comes to controversial issues.”

The only way to induce people to think analytically is to introduce analysis that shows cleanly, clearly, and simply how things happen. This is why you get shorter pieces with reductionist language on this site and not the long-form discursive airy discussions that the big conservative sites embrace.

The uniparty individualists want you see to the analytical as a category, not a method, which is why they redefine their dogma as analytical, by inference making anything else irrational:

The results of the study support the authors’ hypothesis that people who think more analytically, rather than intuitively, are less likely to believe in the “great replacement” conspiracy. This association remained when individual differences in political ideology and education were statistically controlled in the analyses.

On the other hand, left-wing political views and higher education proved to be associated with less endorsement of the conspiracy theory.

They tip their hand in the second paragraph where they discuss how exposure to — and being graded on — propaganda makes people more “analytical.” The Leftists decide what is true and what is analysis, and the rest of us must either conform or be unpersoned.

At the core however their categorization divides that which supports individualism from everything else, merely to promote individualism, which is a form of Control that regulates method in order to influence thinking. It is thought control through social influences.

The scary thing you will read here is that Leftists are not an external influence; Leftism is the natural result of human socializing, itself a response to the need to prove oneself loyal as a worker in a System.

When people have roles that fit them, there is no need for social behavior around those, and social interaction takes the form of an innocent desire to know people instead of a self-promoting, self-rationalizing pathology.

But humans live in the void created by doubt, and fill it with distractions, so when they become prosperous enough to have jobs and social groups, they replace the goal of civilization with its methods and promptly lose all sight of reality.

Tags: care, control, harm, moral foundations, morality