Amerika

Hunter-gatherers and early agricultural societies have a simple rule: you keep what you produce. If you have extra, you trade it, or maybe give it away in anticipation of future rewards from others when their hunts turn out better than yours.

However, what you do not have is a System. People exist in a society because their goals overlap and they are similar enough to understand each other, so they can work together, and over time they share enough intuitive impulses to form a culture.

In this world, you have no need to convince others of your value; any value you have is demonstrated by your abilities, and those contribute to the duty/privilege pairs which go unchallenged by others because you obviously deserve them.

The man who plants his own acres and tills them, yet somehow produces more yield than others, leads the farmers in the natural hierarchy of ability. Primitive societies kill him; rising societies gather ’round to see what wisdom he has to offer.

Once you get a System, you have laws, jobs, and rights. This naturally causes a drive toward egalitarianism because people become terrified that someone else is getting away with something they are not, and since these privileges are granted by the System and not nature, they are negotiable…

When privileges are granted by nature, there is no debate. Either you made the crops grow or you did not; you can blame the gods, demons, or bad luck if you want, but no one cares. You failed and no one has to pass judgment on you to see that.

But when you have a System, the fault lies with the System, every time. It is not that you did wrong; it is that the System failed to recognize you! For a System to work, everyone must be able to participate, so the fiction of equality becomes a secular religion.

As soon as you introduce the idea of equality, your society is divided against itself because results are never equal; they result from the testing of different approaches and to avoid total uniformity, they must have different results.

This creates the start of decay. Once Systems and equality are floating around, your society is a dead man walking, awaiting only a certain amount of time for the fatality to become obvious. People either deny this or accept it, and the latter group generally seeks “easy answers.”

An easy answer must be first, psychologically easy. As a concept it must be simple and seem comprehensive. This makes it feel like a one-strike end to the problem, preserving the solipsism of the armchair bourgeois audience.

Next, it must involve very little from the participants. They must show up to a political rally or religious service and repeat the same symbol, the one idea that is both method and goal, and in theory solves all problems at once with little effort by most of us.

You may recognize these easy answers:

• Christians: forget the world, focus on your soul, and you will win by losing.
• Libertarians: forget the world, focus on your wealth and hobbies, and you win by not caring.
• National Socialists: embrace a messianic apocalyptic struggle for a system which can force everyone to behave through militarization, awaiting a final race war.
• Liberals: ignore reality and focus on your own ego and your social group, making everyone feel warm and fuzzy in the process.
• Survivalists: purchase guns, build bunkers, and wait for the final war that will destroy society so you can emerge and take over.
• Antisemites: like demons, Jews control the world, and so if you dedicate yourself to killing Jews, you are the real good guy.
• Civic nationalists: avoid noticing genetics, pretend we can all be educated and bribed into being good tricorner hat types even if we are not native at all.

All of these are lies because they are partial “truths” which offer incomplete plans. Instead of hard answers, which involve complex patterns over time, you can just do this one crucial thing and make everything better.

Sane societies reward the good, punish the bad, and leave everyone else alone. Insane societies try to standardize behavior to hide the inequality between people. This means-over-ends method, known as Control, hopes to enforce intellectual conformity.

All of these easy answers are attempts to standardize, involving evil scapegoats and sacred talismans, which shows how these are more about regular your own mental state to avoid being afraid than in any way focused on fixing the problem.

As modern people hoping for an exit from a dystopian time of dysgenics and collapse, we really have only one issue, namely how to create and maintain civilization. Easy answers duck this one, which shows that they are anaesthesia for a dying patient not medicine for a recovering one.

Tags: christianity, easy answers, libertarianism, national socialism, survivalism