Amerika

If our era has any symbol, it may be the idea of over. We have gone over the bounds of nature and are paying for that mistake. With the power granted to us by permanent civilization, humanity decided to erase commonsense understanding of the informational structure of the world, focusing on the material instead, and led itself to ruin.

What does one mean by “informational structure”? The world has certain patterns that we describe through physics, economics, mathematics, and observe through history. It works in certain ways that are more than physical; they are patterns of interaction that allow it to manifest the physical reality we know.

These get formulated every now and then in ideas like gravity, relativity, standard distributions, power laws, and laws of attraction. Similar patterns beget similar results; make the right pattern, apply the right inputs, and you can change parts of reality, although never reprogram its basic rules.

That recurring knowledge — both ancient and future, as well as known to some in our time — was the target of The Enlightenment.™ A group of humans decided that the human individual was more important than the rules of reality because humans in groups could enforce their beliefs on others and defer the consequences until much later.

All of modernity has fit within this rubric. They liberalize, democratize, and modernize, all of which mean a contrarian approach where the individual is seen as more important than reality. In that view, our environment adapts to us rather than the other way around, and all of our problems come from this.

People like to point the finger at technology or even agricultural permanent civilization, but really the finger needs to point at human socializing. When we socialize, we use others as substitutes for inner knowledge, and by so doing, gain power through denying reality. We treat each other as means-over-ends methods of making the self more important.

At first, society can fight this off, but as centuries slip by, its resistance fails because the why behind it is forgotten. Thus begins the Dark Arc through the bottom of the cycle, which when it hits rock bottom allows us to rediscover the why yet again. You are at the beginnings of this point now.

This era shows an inability to find solutions because the necessary steps have already been discounted. Instead, it applies the remaining theories with extra force, based on its idea of the individual being more important than the world, leading to a type of of excess that strangles the civilization:

• Overmedication: as health problems proliferate, authorities are unwilling to look at the causes of these diseases, most of which are dietary or pollution related, and instead depend on socialized medicine to hand out increasing numbers of medications. In addition, medications are used for depression, alcoholism, and other factors that should be the domain of the individual but instead are blamed on the external world.
• Oversocialization: societies learn that they can control people through social pressures, so they quickly abolish culture so that politics can control these influences, at which point they make social pressures the only factor in who wins and who loses, which causes people to lose any inner compass they have and replace it with a judgment only of what is popular.
• Overfinancialized: instead of producing things of value, most of our income comes from reselling properties and investments, applying increasingly complex financial calculations to include debt as assets, and adding value with layers of insurance. Any attempts to limit this end up destroying value on paper, so the only solution acceptable seems to be more subsidies.
• Overpopulation: almost no one will admit this, but there are too many humans, since our world has a carrying capacity that will accept only a billion or so without also kicking off an ecocide. Nature needs more space than we are willing to grant it, but to tell people that they cannot have children is a human rights violation, so we double down on having more people and instead simply cut their quality of life.
• Overurbanization: perhaps the city itself is the root of all evils because of its anonymity and socialist-style acceptance of externalized costs as the burden of the taxpayers, but people flock to cities for the easy jobs and simple living, which produces a huge number of people who want government to solve all of their problems with money from someone else.

Humanity has gone overboard with its application of all of these excesses of failed programs because to do otherwise is to admit that we have gone too far down the wrong path to patch up our failing system, and must have both regime change and regime-type change, meaning that democracy has burnt itself out just like Communism and National Socialism.

In the broader sense, since ideas drive history by motivating groups of people, this means that The Enlightenment™ itself has failed: the idea of a society comprised of autonomous individuals, instead of society as a culture in which everyone has a role dictated by tradition, nature, and the divine, has not turned out as was promised.

Slowly we are peeling the onion of egalitarian beliefs. Diversity has obviously failed, socialism has spent the West into bankruptcy, and now democracy will reveal its failure because it cannot fix its persistent problems and refuses to use any methods which have a hope of doing so.

This leads us to the final “over”: modern society is over. It failed to deliver what it promised, and made a wasteland of ineptitude and corruption instead. It is time for us to admit that we took a wrong path, to back up, and try again in a different direction.