Amerika

What Plato understood, before anyone else, was that the problem with democracy was not just that it destroyed civilizations, but that it destroyed minds.

To live in a democracy is to live in constant terror of what the lottery of the vote will choose, because it relies on mass opinion and that is almost always dedicated to avoiding difficult thoughts and embracing easy symbolic illusions.

Humanity always converges on this same failed thought process, called Crowdism, where it favors illusions over holistic realities. It is behind everyday failures as well as political destruction like Communism, Tammany Hall, and the various failed fascist movements.

People, left to their own devices, make compromises with their social group so that everyone can get along, and this means that illusions are not challenged, but rolled into what is already known through the Hegelian Stepladder.

Writings on this site about this topic concerned observations made by your author in the 1980s, namely that despite the divide between Capitalist Democracy and Communism, the two were powered by public choices which reflected “easy answers” thinking.

Simplistic, unrealistic thinking of this nature drives us away from learning about reality and adapting to it, which is our goal as biological creatures. Biology, like economics, is a high-level form of logic that focuses on function more than psychology.

When this observation was formalized, it gave us the understanding that Crowdism is the pathology of human groups, much like self-pity leading to individualism is that of individuals, and in groups, individuals form aggregate individualism which is anti-realistic and therefore destructive in the long term:

Yet it is the demonic nature of this process alone that provides us a clue to its origin. No human organization in history has been so well-managed that it could pull off a conspiracy of this nature without revealing itself or collapsing in infighting. Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

The dirty little secret of the West’s collapse is that it has come from within. The extent of our modern disease is revealed by the fact that when we think this, we immediately try to blame either everyone, or no one. We are afraid to blame a process and implicate certain people as its methods. And why not? We’re not passing moral judgment, claiming them to be the spawn of Satan, as our leaders do to enemies during wartime. All we are saying is that they, by what they do, have caused a massive problem. The real social taboo broken here is the unstated obvious: in order to fix the problem, we have to limit their sainted “freedom.” Nevermind that few people actually need freedom. What they want are normal, comfortable lives, without other people intruding in upon them and telling them what to think. That’s not freedom; it’s common sense and common decency. People like to conceive of “freedom,” however, as a limitless absolute.

It is a belief system based on appearances: emotions come before logic, personal boundaries come before the necessity of doing what is right for all, and abstract divisions of “good” and “evil” regarding intent come before a realization of the effect of any action. In short, this is a belief system which manipulates by preventing certain actions rather than by recommending others, and it attacks before any action is ever committed.

It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them. These sort of people might be described as passive criminals, then, since what they do is not outright criminal, but by being what is done instead of pursuing a healthy goal, and by requiring a morality that prevents others from interrupting it, it supplants the seeking of a healthy goal.

What reveals its nature the most however is understanding the type of mentality that produces it. To do this, we must go to folk wisdom, in which it is recognized that what people would not do as individuals they will do as a mob. Under social pressure, people will take drugs, torture one another, steal, lie, cheat and delude themselves. If they internalize that social pressure, they will do these things without the presence of others because they are aware of the eventuality of having to interact with those others. In this sense, the mob mentality can extend to those who are alone, because in their minds the rest of the mob is always there.

The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature. They argue for greater “freedom.” They want more wealth. Anything they see they feel should be divided up among the crowd.

Crowdism strikes anyone who values individual comfort and wealth more than doing what is right.

You can see the last thirty years of writing here in that document because it touches all the big points. Without a transcendental goal, people become individualistic, and their desire for individual comfort and wealth more than doing right leads them to form mobs that pursue the lowest common denominator of means-over-ends thinking. The nature of not having a goal leads to a pathology that infects the group, and then it does the same thing in every system, which is to destroy the most realistic and replace them with people selected by peer pressure who specialize in symbols (talismans/scapegoats) instead of making stuff work. You can have peer selection or natural selection, but not both!

In short, a crowd does not exist except where underconfidence unites people who, being unable to lead on their own, find solace in the leadership and power of others. They want to be in control, but they are afraid to lead, and thus each person in the crowd delegates his authority to others. The crowd therefore moves not by choices, but by lowest common denominator, assessing each decision in terms of what all people in the crowd have in common. Predictably, this makes its decisions of such a base nature they can be guessed in advance. A crowd derives its momentum from the need of its members coupled with their fear of their own judgment. Taking impetus from the need, it asserts itself violently, but because its only mechanism of decision-making is radical compromise, it moves passively toward predictable resolutions.

Refining this thought, people in groups are driven by the need to compromise with others in order to hold the group together, which leads to the lottery mentality where no one is responsible for getting the right answer, only finding something that gives a little bit of power and wealth to everyone. No one gets what they want; everyone gets a utilitarian solution that is shaped by the fact that most people do not complain about it. This is democracy, Christianity, Communism, and nation-state patriotism, but it also infests any decisions made by humans including a group of office workers trying to figure out where to go for lunch.

You have been here. The project is done, time for the team to go out to lunch. If you have a wise aristocrat in charge, he picks a place that is of good quality and affordable. But each person wants to project a personality so that they stand out and can compete socially, so every person names an option to reflect their personalities, most of which are unrealistically expensive, far away, or unpalatable to most in the group. Finally, a compromise is reached… and you end up at Olive Garden (again). It seems to be edgy because it is foreign Italian food, but it is very familiar to most and almost tasteless, so no one can complain about the flavor. Most people are glad not to get roped into something really expensive and prettily disgusting.

The individualist, ironically, argues for equality because it bonds the group to him and him to it. With a group, humans can agree to deny obvious reality, and the other members of the group will defend them. It is no different than a gang, clique, mob, flock, herd, cadre, or mafia. The whole point is mutual validation of illusions, and this makes people co-dependent and therefore militarized against outsiders. All of these are egalitarian because they need other people for their power; they are the job-workers and shopkeepers who depend on the social goodwill of others, a form of peer pressure. For this reason, they endorse egalitarianism on the surface but in private, tend to be much more libertarian with their own money. Humans conning humans to join them in conning other humans makes society unravel, but it starts in humble self-interest coupled with a lack of purpose.

Once you accept the Big Lie that says equality is achievable and good, all other beliefs have to be reconciled (similar to compromise) with the notion of equality. This drives people insane over time because equality is obviously unrealistic. Crowdists love to make you agree to insane stuff because they know it is breaking down your mind and they can dominate it, sort of the way a fly vomits stomach acid onto its prey to break it down before slurping up the resulting liquid.

Individualism impedes individuation. We grow as individuals by accepting reality and finding meaning in some form of struggle in it, where we overcome what we fear and achieve something that strikes us as beautiful. Individualism rejects this process and forces a retreat into the world of human individuals, which is both solipsism and oversocialization. It keeps people in a perpetual preteen mindset of trying to please other people while standing out for performative but unique emotional self-expression. If you self-express in a way that intrigues and flatters others, they raise you up in terms of social status, which means that your sense of self-esteem has been externalized or delegated to the herd. Your development stops once you accept the Big Lie.

The Big Lie however allows you to argue that grass is blue and the sky is green. You can be a contrarian, since what you aspire to is symbolic and not literal. If the whole world burns, you can at least take comfort in the fact that you achieved equality, like Christ on the cross or Buddha in repose. The symbol won. And being a contrarian, or anti-realistic thinker, allows you to not only accept the Big Lie but to rationalize the world it has created as “good” because it achieves equality, even if we are living in a ruined world and it terrorizes us. We live with constant psychoterror because democracy makes terrible decisions, our civilization is collapsing, everything good is being destroyed, the insane are in control, and as our population surges, we come closer to The Ecocide of All Life just as we do to our own ending as a species. We live in a very sick and mentally deranged time but no one will talk about it, and the Big Lie lets us at least sleep at night.

This is why Plato argued that the problem of democracy was not simply that it destroyed everything. It also wrecked minds, forcing them to choose between comfort and clarity. By making all decisions into lotteries formed of unstable compromises, it meant that there never was security, safety, continuity, and faith that the future will be good. Instead the people live in fear of The System which may at any time destroy their lives and turn the herd against them. This is the power of Crowdism. As the prophet writes:

Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic fac;ade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D.-Total Demoralization. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture.

“I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant “provisional detention”; that is, the prisoner would be released if and when his Affidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was approved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his office, and the Affidavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities.

Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.

All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds).

No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafes and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so obtained could not be sold or given or in any way transferred to anyone else, and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor.

No one was permitted to bolt his door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone’s quarters and start “looking for it.”

The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of Vaseline, an enema, a handkerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straightjacket when they planted Vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree.

“And what is this supposed to be for?”

“It’s a pen wiper.”

“A pen wiper, he says.”

“I’ve heard everything now.”

“I guess this is all we need. Come on, you.”

After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats.
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, p. 19

It is impossible to separate individualism, collectivism, rationalization, bureaucracy, democracy, and a constant state of terror because we are held hostage by meddling bunglers and high mutation load crazies who want to take revenge on anyone more talented than they are. The nexus is Crowdism. And this explains why people in democracy go insane after years of wondering what will be left undestroyed when they awaken tomorrow.

Tags: big lie, crowdism, egalitarianism, externalization, individualism, rationalization