Amerika

Horseshoe theory states that all political systems converge on the same state, which is another way of saying that politics itself runs an arc from hopeful liberation to embittered control. Politics, because it is a control method, starts by removing its precursors and ends by replicating them.

This means that we are living in an inferior substitute to kingdoms, caste, sacred reverence, and culture. We are living in a simulation that is inferior both because it is narrowed from the wider perspective of reality and because it shaved half off the top to fund a massive bureaucracy and its dependents.

In fact, many would say that our society resembles a simulation. We have fake versions of all of the things a real society would have, but ours are filtered to include the pretense of equality. That means that we get a heavily adjusted and simplified version of reality to work with.

As our political system heads into its end-state, it is taking our economic systems with it, since they are used to fund the political system. If you wonder why prices are high and you work all the time, it is the result of high taxes for entitlements, since stimulus payments always kick up inflation.

Luckily, some are trying to get us away from the economic model of politics that uses the economy to fuel the political system, and suggests that we consider nature and other intangibles as real value instead:

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new research proposes a transformative approach to economics — one that recognizes nature not merely as a resource, but as a living system deeply intertwined with human identity, culture, and well-being.

The new paper highlights the importance of relational values — such as heritage, stewardship, and spiritual connection — in shaping how people interact with and care for the natural world.

This new way of thinking provides a different, more socially inclusive way to assess complex trade-offs, such as balancing land use for food production, housing, carbon storage, and nature conservation.

Wait, they mentioned heritage… and spiritual connection? This sounds a lot like “blood and soil,” which existed long before the twentieth century nationalists, since the various pagan religions saw the necessity of creating shrines in unique natural places which their people visited regularly.

But linking heritage, spiritual connection, and ecology shows the world rediscovering ancient wisdom. The ancients believed that culture was “from the blood” (genetic/biology) and that each group was tied to its land, which is how you got ancient monuments like Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt.

The challenge to the postmodern blood-and-soil types will be finding a way to make an appealing alternative and substitute to modern lifestyles, since in order for change to be widely adopted, it must be a replacement with similar advantages to what it displaces:

The Peru study didn’t ban salt, it replaced it. When supermarkets phased out plastic bags, biodegradable or paper ones were provided instead. People trying to drink less can buy non-alcoholic alternatives.

For broad restrictions to be effective, there needs to be, among other things, an alternative: something that actually fulfills the deep, underlying human needs that were fueling use in the first place.

This is a central challenge to the social media ban. If the desired replacement is real social connection, there needs to be a clear way to achieve it.

How do we achieve a “real social connection”? Apparently not through current institutions, which tend to be alienating because they are based on procedure and precedent, not goals relevant to the individual:

A new Flinders University study published in Critical Studies in Education is challenging the idea that schools are always safe and social spaces for young people, suggesting instead that they can be emotionally isolating environments where loneliness is shaped by harmful social dynamics.

Rather than being caused by a lack of connection, lead author, Dr. Ben Lohmeyer, says loneliness can often stem from the presence of undesirable peers.

Drawing on the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu — a French sociologist — the study introduces the concept of “affective violence,” which is emotional harm that emerges from social systems, rather than just individual behavior.

You can connect to culture or the land but not an institution or system. Throwing people together in groups without any real connection results in nasty little “crab buckets” where they abuse each other and the worst are given free reign because no one else wants to deal with the conflict.

It turns out that connection comes from similarity, which will turn out to be genetic similarity because neural activity patterns are determined by genetics:

Researchers at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Dartmouth College recently carried out a study exploring the possibility that people who end up becoming friends exhibit similar neural activity patterns. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that people are in fact drawn to others who exhibit similar emotional and mental responses to their surroundings.

The researchers subsequently compared the brain imaging data collected at the beginning of their experiment with information that participants had provided months later in a friendship-related survey. This allowed them to determine the extent to which the participants’ neural responses when watching videos resembled those of other students who they did not yet know, but with whom they later became friends.

“The most striking finding of our study is that brain-to-brain similarity can predict future friendship,” said Parkinson.

People who see the world similarly and have similar goals tend to make friends. Extend this to a civilization; genetic similarity means tighter bonds than ideology or money can deliver. When people want the same things and have similar behavior, culture emerges.

Culture means a certain aesthetics and way of doing things related to what that group values, which is genetically-determined because intelligence and other factors determine how much an individual can perceive, thus increasingly

It turns out that feeling that we are all pulling in the same direction, and have the same basic outlook on life, reduces feelings of unfairness brought about by not knowing what will succeed in a game:

Researchers found exclusion was unfair when a player made a neutral comment like, “This game is good,” but was left out for the rest of the game, and fair when a player made a rude comment such as, “You guys are throwing the ball like a girl,” and was excluded in response.

Participants felt schadenfreude when the ostracizer later faced misfortunes, but not when the excluder’s actions were seen as justified, such as excluding the rude player.

“We didn’t expect to discover glückschmerz, but we did,” Hales said. “When one of the ostracizers had a good weekend, people actually felt worse; they thought this bad person should have had a bad weekend, and that was enough to put them in a bad mood.”

Diversity divides us and everyone feels oppressed and victimized. When this feeling finally reached White people, it became clear that diversity was not good, but in fact was turning our societies into little war zones of resentment and retaliation.

Everyone now knows that diversity is not our strength. We want mono-ethnic societies, where people like us engage in things we find important, working toward a collaborative (not coerced) goal. This returns culture, instead of bureaucracy and commerce, and is our only hope of bonding to the land again.

Luckily the land is ready to help us out by digesting pollutants and restoring natural balance:

Using advanced electrochemical tests, quantification methods, and correlation analysis, the team proved that biochar actively breaks down organic pollutants through direct electron transfer — without needing extra chemicals.

To humanity, the path lies clear: we stop doing all the stupid stuff we have been doing, and instead aspire toward a homestead-based lifestyle in line with nature, and everything gets better. If we do not, doom awaits and we will have selected it by our inaction.

Tags: blood and soil, ecology, environmentalism, loneliness, neural activity, social capital, social connection