Amerika

When humans form a group, they share a purpose; when that fails, they enforce unity through external means, usually religion, money, and politics.

Politics follows the Hegelian stepladder. That is, someone states an idea, someone else opposes it, and someone else opposes that, in a cascade of terraces away from reality.

Reality is consequences. It is all that goes on outside human heads, and how that turns out when applied in the physical world. It also is the knowledge of how things work, a type of “ultimate reality” that consists of understanding the structure and operations of the world.

Human politics thus always takes an odious form of denying reality and asserting instead symbolic issues, which simplify the world to categories based on our emotions of fear and desire regarding their contents. Symbolism replaces reality.

False unity can only be enforced via symbolism, since most people navigate the world through emotional and thus social — shared feelings! — methods.

Similarly, the instant external forms of unity are applied, people see these as properties that can be seized, or at least parts of them are. The incentive is to find a unique position and use it to exclude all others, not to try to find a realistic position.

Those that get ahead do so by staking out their terrain and defending it. This requires that their beliefs be distinctive more than accurate. If someone says that salamanders made the world and want us to sacrifice ginger-haired people, it may be ludicrous but it will not be confused with any other belief.

That means that we who want to find a realistic answer to anything are navigating between opposite poles which are forever defining themselves in terms of the other, and in order to do so, must react to the other, instead of moving toward an affirmative and positive goal.

We have not only rejected reality, but become anti-realist, and through our process of rationalization, have also become opposed to the idea of goals in themselves beyond a shuffling of methods available within the status quo system.

Politics means discussing opinions about reality, not plans for making reality work for us.

The best notion from Buddhism, on par with Christian “forgiveness,” is the idea of the “middle path.” That is, the majority of the bell curve will choose one extreme or another, but between them — although not in the mathematical middle or mean — is some option that leads to a new path.

People like myself, who believe in realist consequentialism, or measuring our actions by consequences in reality and not emotional/social judgment of them, have no place in either side of politics because we have no place in politics.

We do not agree with mass revolt by labor as the foundation of a society, so we cannot be Left.

We like the nature of preserving time-honored tradition of conservatives, but we do not want to be backward-looking; we wish to look forward and exceed the past.

Organized religion emphasizes the equality of all souls, which demands that the rules of Heaven be different than the rules for Earth, which strikes us as another form of symbolism/superstition that rejects reality so that the human feels a contented mental state.

Every con job in the world starts with “nothing is as it seems” and moves on to denying the need for conflict, striving, and overcoming as the basis of life. But without those things, life would have no purpose or meaning.

As a wise philosopher once said, “there are no easy answers to the problems that we face; history is a lesson, let us learn by our mistakes.” That fundamentally conservative view pairs up well with a futuristic look toward what could be if we got our act together.

We are culturally liberal but conservatives in every other way.

We favor leaving people alone if they are doing no harm. We like culture rather than bureaucracy, hierarchy instead of anarchy, and natural selection — including social Darwinism! — instead of subsidized mediocrity like the Communists and Jacobins want.

We acknowledge that humanity is its own worst enemy. In groups, humans settle on the lowest common denominator, which is resentment. From that they construct scapegoats and, in the Hegelian fashion, create symbols or superstitious talismans to worship instead.

No one is thinking about reality and its possibilities; they are reacting to phantoms in their own minds.

A sane approach aims to minimize government. Use authority well where needed, but let culture settle everything else. Of course, this requires mono-ethnic societies, and endorsing that slots one into the “far-Right” category.

However, a lack of rules about personal choices puts us closer to “far-Left.” We think homosexuals should be left alone, drugs should be decriminalized, sin taxes should end, and all the regulations must die replaced by recommendations by experts in the applied area of each field.

Since we are Social Darwinists, we might be seen as libertarians, but no one sane believes in anarchy. Strong leaders are needed, and that ability is mostly genetic, so we support aristocracy: finding the best people, entrusting them with money and power, and breeding them like horses.

Our primary goal is to provide better living for the ordinary person which means reducing cost and raising quality. Shrinking government, implementing rigorous capitalism, and encouraging culture addresses this need.

We recognize however that easy living makes lazy, alienated people and so we like the idea of having a purpose to everyone and no one living on the dole. In fact, we like flat taxes and the idea of zero easy jobs where all one must do is conform.

Here we differ from the “conservatives”: we do not worship work. We see the goal as leisure and growth of personal wisdom, and to that end, people need more spare time to get bored and discover themselves.

This can only be achieved when there are no unions and no rubber-stamp corporate jobs. Each person must stand on his or her own to accomplish something tangible, and no one can just go through the motions.

Similarly we are skeptical of commerce as a goal. Capitalism is a means to an end, and that end is life itself, which has an elliptical meaning (“the meaning of life is to live… well”), which in turn points to the big questions like wisdom and faith.

We distrust easy answers. These are always manipulative. Similarly we recognize that APE (altruism, pacifism, empathy) are always manipulations. People act in their own interest, including the desire for life to be beautiful, and from that honest charity comes.

We are not Utopians. We do not want to save everyone. We recognize that life will never be perfect; its basis is conflict producing evolution. Therefore, there will always be poverty, crime, violence, marital discord, addiction, and insanity.

Our goal is to keep those away from the good people and remove through exile those who are retarded, perverse, insane, promiscuous, stupid, incompetent, or criminal. Every society should emulate nature and lose its least valuable members every generation.

We do not bleieve in enforced unity. We believe in people working together toward a similar goal. Culture is the first step, but it is not a goal in itself; the goal of culture is to make a civilization so that it can rise further.

There is no upper limit to how much we can rise.

We do not believe in means-over-ends policy, which tries to force bad people to behave as if they are good. We want the bad filtered out and the good promoted so that we get more of the good.

We do not have resentment for wealth. We recognize wealth inequality as a condition of life, and therefore our only question is whether the people who have the wealth are the right ones to wield that power.

Our goal regarding nature is to leave enough of it around without our intervention so that it can heal itself and continue to exist as it has been. This requires setting aside half of land and sea for nature alone.

We are not interested in religion except as a subset of philosophy. We believe in faith, but not systems of faith.

We are oriented toward the future, namely in improving whatever we have and maintaining whatever is doing well enough that improvements are not obvious.

We recognize the Bell Curve applies to all traits, and therefore most people are unable to make political decisions, and need others to do it for them. We want simply to provide them with security, safety, sanity, and balance for them to discover themselves in.

Our goal is to enjoy life. We are oriented toward enjoying the whole experience of life. This cannot be made into a method, like alcohol, but involves a good many things, and cannot be enforced, only facilitated.

Those of us who think this way have no home in politics. We are forever scattered among the different sides and the bigger questions that they all avoid. However, as politics and democracy show their weakness, we are ready for a new era in which humanity gets braver about these things.

Tags: conservatism, crowdism, leftism, liberalism, politics