Amerika

Every now and then we introduce some big concepts around here like Crowdism or ends-over-means, but the majority of the pieces here serve as backfill to explain the why behind the how.

Let us look at another large theory: subpolitics. This refers to the motivations behind what we express in public as politics. Much as in postmodern theory there is text (public rationalization) and subtext (private motivation), before politics comes the impulse that drives it.

Subpolitics refers to the motivations in the human quest for power that are translated into politics in order to hide their origins. These are the actual motivations that cause people to become politically involved and are entirely separate from what is discussed on the television.

• Pacifism: humans in groups succumb to The Committee Effect which means that they avoid conflict and instead seek ways of buying off their constituents with small acts that address those concerns. This makes the members of the committee feel safe from attack and spreads warm feelings and the false unity of a thieve’s bargain among the group. Over time, these small acts aggregate and form a calcification effect, at which point the committee has wasted all of its money. In groups, humans do the same thing, repeatedly voting for expensive and ineffectual bribes to keep everyone feeling happy.
• Demoralization: if you detest another group, you want to wreck them by finding an excuse to take their stuff and have them be helpless to stop you, at which point you feel your stature will have risen above theirs. You can find many reasons: religion, equality, patriotism, public safety, think of the children, etc. but the outcome will be the same. Your goal is to smash down others so that you feel better about your own position. This one is perpetually popular among human groups.
• Revenge/Resentment: when life does not work out so well for someone, they tend to scapegoat the powerful and style themselves as the victim, which is why every criminal has a sob story about his youth. He transforms from victimizer to victim so that he has a socially-acceptable excuse to victimize others. Resentment arises when the happiness, health, sanity, success, and wisdom of others becomes offensive to those who cannot have such things or have not sought them. Instead of adjusting to their situation, they blame others for “stealing” these things from them, since if all people were equal, we would all have these things, a concept which makes the individualist feel contented and justified in his choices.
• Rationalization: people seek to avoid conflict and what it represents, which is the hard mental work of understanding reality and adapting to it, since this brings conflict because most of the species is not just in reality-denial but is actively anti-realistic because reality competes with the sense of self-importance of individuals. Consequently, they argue against having goals like adapting to reality, and demand we focus on people instead, at which point methods like pacifism and wealth redistribution (“socialism”) replace goals, and people rationalize from those methods to justify what they want as “good.”
• Smell My Ass: many people are motivated purely by destruction because they are having a temper tantrum at the world, and these people delight in doing wrong while forcing others to tolerate and adapt to it, such that everyone knows a wrong was done but no one can do anything about it. This phenomenon is called “smell my ass” after the provocations of monkeys involving similar behavior, and reflects why voters often adopt fully crazy stuff simply to humiliate another group or everyone involved in the system.

Humanity faces a massive hurdle because our stated motivations do not match up to our actual motivations, meaning that people are actively lying all of the time about why they do what they do and what they claim is true. Until we address this, we will be stranded in self-deception.

Tags: crowdism, demoralization, pacifism, rationalization, resentment, ressentiment, revenge, subpolitics