Amerika

Recently there was some talk about $20 burritos, and the usual “Christian libertarian” conservatives came back with the idea that people should stop eating out and buy groceries instead because they could afford food that way.

Like most terrible arguments, this is not wrong, but it does not address the question. The point is that the currency has lost massive value under first 0’Bama and second 0’Biden. Even if you stop ordering avocado toast every morning, you are going to be broke.

That situation has reached a crucial point. Morons introduced probably a hundred and fifty million people in this country who do not belong here, mostly to buy votes and fund taxes but also to goose the consumer economy so our “growth” looked good, and that has driven up demand for everything while reducing the quality of everything. Lawmakers in the grips of postwar liberalism, which suspiciously resembles the fatalistic idealism that came about after the previous world war, decided to be Jesus and die on the cross in order to fund the foreign underclass here and abroad, so they wrote tons of rules passing on costs to the consumers, starting with those taxes, regulations, legal protection for unions, affirmative action, and endless civil rights lawsuits. Kids today are flat-out screwed by this, even if they can find a way to make a week of burritos for $20, and that is the real issue.

But even more, to many of us this argument smacked of Boomerism (the “Me Generation” and its philosophy of “if it feels good, do it”). The basic Boomer idea is that they reject anything they do not want to hear on the basis that they are equal individuals, too, and therefore they have the right to do this. They reject hearing anything but what they want to hear, and what they want to hear is whatever justifies their fiction-absolute as the good guy victims on the cross who are just doing what is morally right even if it kills them. The ego is a death cult, really, because they are in the process of becoming viruses; per Burroughs, a virus is an organism that loses its sense of purpose and becomes means-over-ends, thus surrenders agency in order to simply react to what is around it. Boomers do the same thing. They act out being the victim, which means that they are innocent and therefore someone else is always to blame for their problems, which allows them to self-pity themselves and therefore, reject anything that does not make them feel good. Their actual motto may be something like “I don’t want to hear it” or “the world exists to make me feel good.” The Boomer does not want to hear about how expensive your burrito is; he wants to tell you how he found a new food truck where the burritos are really great and anyone who complains about the price is just too lazy to pick himself up by his boostraps.

“Christian libertarians” are a variety of liberal like all libertarians. This means that they are individualists, and in groups they demand equality so that each individual can be safe from criticism for whatever he is doing wrong.

Individualism requires that they believe the individual is more important than anything, especially people who know better and rules from history, nature, logic, culture, religion, and especially the kings.

By making the individual more important than reality, they have basically said that they will do what they want whether it is realistic or not. In fact, they tend to hate anything realistic like strength, decency, sanity, honor, and wisdom.

This means that they are not responsible for anything that happens. It is a lottery to them (early democracies were lotteries, writing names on oyster shells, and one was picked at random to be the new leader, sort of like H.L. Mencken’s riff on preferring to be ruled by two hundred names picked randomly from a phone book than whatever clown the vote compromises on).

Most of all, they are not responsible for their mental state. They have emotions, and the world must “do something” about that, so if they cry over one immigrant child, you have to let in all the immigrant children so the individualists feel better.

The Boomers were just the furthest extension of this until we got to millennials, who are basically the generation that Zombie Hitler should resurrect himself to gas. Sure, some of them are good, just like some Irishmen are not potato-munching drunkards, but do you want one in your neighborhood? The chances of them not being tools is miniscule.

When The Day of The Pillow dawns, and the Boomers are snuffed out by their offspring or healthcare workers, the Boomers will have learned nothing because they will always refuse to learn anything because it might upset their mental state.

Like all individualists, since nothing is their fault, their bad feelings are not their fault. Someone else must manage these for them because they are victims, they argue. These bad feelings were done to them.

And so they feel no shame in picking up whatever seems to make them feel better — alcohol, drugs, a lover, a new coupe, psychological torment of their children, quinoa — because the world owes it to them. They do not adapt to the world; it adapts to them, you see.

In this way, individualism is the inversion of Darwinism. Instead of us being born into a Garden of Eden where we can figure out how it works and then live out happy normal lives being in unity with our world, they see the world as bad and our desires as good proportion to how unrealistic they are. Retaliate against that world and show it you are in control.

They see themselves as not responsible for their own mental state, which justifies them going out and doing whatever they want in order to fill in that mental state so they get back to a mythical golden age of the psyche which never existed in the first place.

When the individual is not responsible for his mental state — set aside for a moment burritos, jobs, taxes, being nice to idiots, and other blights of modern adulthood viewed as “maturity” — he will demand that reality cater to him, not to the obvious needs of survival.

That is why individualists always create the same system. Call it Communism or just the “third world system,” it consists of high ideals spoken in public and then, because those fail in reality, a gradual decline of everything to low levels of function and quality.

And still, even as things get worse and stay bad, the individualists will rationalize it away and claim things are going well, just so that they can manage their own mental state.

Tags: boomers, day of the pillow, fiction absolute, me generation, mental state, responsibility