Amerika

Some wonder aloud what went wrong with the Boomers. After all the Boomers were not just hippies and 68ers, but also the “Me Generation,” an entire group dedicated to individualism and willing to use anything else toward the means of their own mental comfort.

One puzzles about how that could come about. It was probably the collision of postwar wealth with prewar notions that were formed in despair at the hopelessness of WW1, or even earlier when the Victorian Era gave way to middle-class rule across the West.

Boomers grew up with input from both “scientific management” and the Dale Carnegie school of winning friends and influencing people; basically the Willy Loman-era salesman culture ran straight into the idea that humanity was in control of its world, and worldwide human rights was the scientific approach to government.

The scientific management and salesmanship approach allowed them to knit together the founding myth of American freedom and the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” with the legal regime established after the end of the Civil War and also the wartime propaganda against Hitler and later the Soviets. Freedom = civil rights, they agreed, following similar declarations from Victorian-era “thinkers” who aspired to Utopia.

Power hint: the Utopians are always not only wrong, but on a path to destruction… yet they will escape while you will not. They are pied pipers leading you to your own end while they skip away gaily. Plan your allegiances accordingly!

Think about every bad teenage story. The instigator says that you should do the bad thing while he keeps watch, and suddenly he is gone while the cops roll up. You go to jail, he gets the bragging rights. This is how Utopians operate.

They are contrarians, or those who are bigoted against life itself because it does not mirror their own dependencies, stuff like beliefs in their own goodness despite doing nothing of note. Whenever a rule or fact arises, they do the exact opposite and demand others do the same.

This follows the nature of committees, which is to avoid controversy and instead focus on ineffectual but symbolic things that unify the group. Committees, like democracies, systematically avoid important stuff and pursue pleasant symbols instead.

Behavior like this creates a system of Control, which is more like BDSM than real power. They want people to torture and a reason that they can get away with being awful to these people, so that those seeking Control feel comfortable not changing their own thinking.

Societies age and die because the founding group does stuff, but then the people they hire to do the menial stuff increase in number and take over. Through this you get bureaucracy, democracy, diversity, and socialism, just like what killed Rome and Athens.

In this way, groups consume themselves over time unless social and political hierarchy restrains the mob from itself. This resembles less the “yin-yang” or balanced good/evil of the Asiatics, and more the Ouroboros or snake eating its own tail of the Nordics.

We are not in a war against evil. We are in a war against our own stupidity. We have met the enemy, and he is us, or rather our pretenses of “good” that conceal our desire to avoid controversy so we can manipulate the group with symbols.

More than politics, this is a pathology. Civilizations rise with independent pioneers and fall into third-world level collapse when the jobbers and sycophants take over. The only solution is to have hierarchy that actively removes such influences.

While most people fear external bad guys imposing tyranny, the more likely outcome is internal decay of meaning brought on by the individualism of each member of the Crowd, which when it gains critical mass takes over and destroys civilization.

Tags: civilization, collapse, crowdism, ouroboros, yin-yang