Amerika

Civilization, like mitochondria, is powered by what slowly kills it. The oxidation process that gives energy also introduces entropy of the “you cannot unscramble an egg” variety, leading to the eventual failure of the organelle.

When humans get together and can get along, they can agree on a goal and form a civilization around it. But once civilization is one step removed from that moment, people are reacting to other people, and social pressures become toxic like free radicals and oxidants in the cell.

Over the course of the life of a civilization, it changes from being a society united by shared goals to being a social group that enforces unity through punishing dissidence. At that point, it inverts its original goals by making them into methods that support the social group.

Consider “freedom.” Originally it meant that you had to subsidize no one, could do what you wanted that was not destructive, and had no obligation to believe any ideology or religion. When the social group takes over, “freedom” becomes the method of enforcing the social group.

When the social group takes over, you have “freedom” to do what the group approves; anything else is punished. You have “freedom” to believe what they believe. Your “freedom” involves being taxed to subsidize the rest of the group, to make sure everyone has “freedom.”

This group rules through peer pressure to conform. If everyone else is talking about “freedom” and you are not, you get ostracized. You will not get a good job. You will not have competent friends. You will not marry the attractive and intelligent spouse you desire.

More effective than direct totalitarianism, this indirect totalitarianism uses social pressure instead of government to enforce compliance. It does this by demonizing anything other than what it wants. Instead of arguing for what it wants, it argues against everything else.

This negative outlook arises from its idea of “liberation,” or setting the individual free from history, culture, politeness, nature, and the divine. Its philosophy is individualism, or the idea that the individual comes first before all of these other things.

Individualists love to argue for a “bottom-up order,” or a self-organizing civilization that emerges from markets or socializing. They cannot think of a world outside the individual, so to them, “civilization” means a facilitative society or support system for individuals.

Culture, international relations, political order, legal systems, and the like they discount because after all, they personally do not care about these things. To an individualist, this is considered a sensible argument.

Individualists exist in a perpetual twilight of rationalization. Because they reject the world, its workings are a mystery to them, and because they assert themselves as more important than the world, they must always invent a narrative or explanation that justifies and validates that. They always seek to rationalize what they want as being a subset of the values that the group already shares, namely equality of everyone in the group.

These stories, called the fiction-absolute, present a method of living for the individualist: whatever happens must be explained as their own choice and victory, and if it cannot be, it must be styled as oppression (the opposite of liberalization).

They also exist in the Devil’s Bargain of externalization: in order to be able to be individualistic, they must extend the same ability to all others, which creates an egalitarian committee geared toward compromise and pacifism.

That in turn guarantees that they will never get the results they want, only a loyalty-based regime where they dish out a little something to everyone, ensuring that there is never a plan. But, everyone gets to vandalize the other groups and people they fear.

In this way, human civilizations alter themselves from being oriented toward the good, to actively seeking destruction! After all, destruction is liberation, too, and it makes all of the individuals involved “feel good,” so in the morality of the social group, it is good.

Individualists treat the world like another person and attempt to manipulate it through loyalty-buying and passive-aggression.

They exist in a constant victimhood-retaliation loop where they discover the world has not given them what they want, this insults their fiction-absolute and ego, thus they style themselves as victims and retaliate.

All of democracy is rotten with this: to start a war, it must have innocent victims, to pass a bill, it must help “the poor” or another disadvantaged group. Democracy inherently seeks diversity because in democracy, only the victims are owed something.

Their fundamental approach is social. They negotiate with the world in their minds for what they want by rationalizing it as good. If they want a new car, they explain that in some way that increases equality or benefits the poor.

This individualism arises from the psychology of jobs. A jobber exists in a duality: (1) he will submit because he needs the paycheck, and (2) he will fight back passively by wasting time because he feels oppressed by having to go to work in the first place (here he is often right).

The jobber therefore must invent a fiction-absolute where his life is the best possible version of itself, but there must be a “bad guy” who keeps him from having what he really wants. The human tendency toward a talisman-scapegoat symbolic cycle and the Abrahamic good/evil dichotomy fit right into this, and both are secularized into equality versus inequalists.

How do you win at your average job? Smash down anyone who might rise above you, and promote only loyalists. To people who are clever and thintelligent but not well-rounded and intelligent, this seems like a Good Idea. It is also the morality of the third world.

This approach however makes you blind to input you might need, since loyalists do not pass along bad news. This is why civilizations using this philosophy of Control tend to run into “unhandled exceptions” or unanticipated problems (unknown unknowns) causing them to crash and self-destruct.

It also gets the jobber only so far. Those who rise do so through productivity, creativity, or nurturing the good from the past, and those who do not do this are good at the activity of the job but not at producing results.

Because their gambits only get them so far, they rapidly invert the victimhood-retaliation cycle and style themselves as victims of the fat wealthy fatuous owners, therefore “justifying” and “validating” forming a union and destroying everything until more money appears.

The best people at any job do not want or need unions, but everyone else will not win at the system of real life and instead opt for an individualistic solution, namely claiming that they are all victims and using guilt to extract more money from their betters.

This is individualism: “things only matter to the degree that they make me feel good.” The individualist wants to feel good about himself and his fiction-absolute, so anything which does not conform to that vision must be destroyed.

That shows us the basis of the psychology of narcissism as well as political correctness. A narcissist does not argue for what he wants, but against everything but what he wants; political correctness makes taboo certain ideas so that people pick from what is left.

A society or individual in the grips of this thinking adopts a pretense of “morality,” or judgments about life in lieu of producing physical results in life, in order to justify what is obviously a defective and self-destructive behavior.

Then again, as part of the victimhood-retaliation cycle, the individualist embraces self-destruction. If the world rejects his manipulations, he will self-destruct in order to continue the psychology of victimhood.

A social takeover of civilization creates many layers of opaque glass over reality like this. If reality demonstrates a need, the individualists react to it with contrarian ironism, or rejecting it because it competes with their need for self-expression and ego-validation.

That causes people to in turn react to the reaction, or judge the judgments, and through this Hegelian Stepladder, the human society moves toward reacting to itself in an inward-looking way, and becomes less focused on obvious reality, common sense, and consequences in reality.

Over time, through individualism leading to a social takeover, societies not just drift farther from reality, but actively reject it because it competes with the self-image of the individualists who power the social group.

Eventually the individualists discover socialism and tyranny, which are part of the third-world system. To an individualist, having society pay them a subsidy to be individualistic is the highest good, because their individualism is now unimpeded.

This fits with what every criminal desires, which is to be able to parasitize others, to have them know it, and to have them be unable to do anything about it. This is the retaliation section of the victimhood-retaliation cycle.

Societies rise when they have a transcendental, or positive and ongoing goal, like creating beauty, function, sanity, health, wisdom, and goodness. They fall when they give up on that and become individualists rationalizing the mediocre as good because it makes them feel good.

Every human society to date has died of this necrotic individualism, and it constitutes the challenge we now must defeat in order for the West to rise again.

Tags: civilization collapse, crowdism, externalization, individualism, rationalization