Amerika

The most oppressive word in the English language may be “the,” because it implies a singular cause of a phenomenon that may have multiple causes. We talk about the Establishment, the rich, the politicians, and so on, but there is no consistency to these roles.

Rather, they are market-created. When you offer millions in wealth for saying something that 51% of the voters like enough to vote for you, you have created a property, and people will compete for it. To do that, they need to become at least honesty-optional.

People want to rebel against “the” power, or “the” authority, but they forget that authority is a part of the world inherently; any time there is a group, someone must lead — they confuse this with the particular group that is leading at the time — and this is logically inescapable.

So we have “the authority now” and “the principle of authority,” and most people confuse them because to the lazy mind it is better to toss out the baby with the bathwater and substitute some kind of committee for any accurate understanding of reality.

Most people are passive. That is, caught in the grips of self-pity, they want the world to cater to their demands (not actual needs) and to make them feel better about having been condemned to be alive.

Since the world does not cater to their demands, they have tantrums against it and become contrarian ironists who deny that the world could have any sense to it. They rebel against reality itself, just like they rebel against authority because they do not like the current version and its most recent inconvenience to their fascinating, self-centered lifestyles.

As a result, they rebel against “the” (authority, conventional wisdom, common sense) which is a way of throwing out the essence with the instance. They do not merely want a change in authority; they want no authority!

In the human mind, the step from getting a parking ticket to wanting total anarchy is instantaneous, nearly invisible, and immensely powerful. Blaming “the authority” gives them a life-story that supports their fiction-absolute and rationalizes them as heroes in their own narrative.

They throw the baby out with the bathwater instead of admitting to making a mistake. When authority catches them doing something stupid, even if totally minor like a parking ticket, they take it personally and retaliate as if authority was directed at them.

This type of paranoia is common in societies with weak authority like democracy and dictatorships. The dictator — usually officially a president — gives out favors to anyone who approaches him, which means that he needs to keep stealing in order to give everyone what they want.

In turn, the everyday people never connect the mediocrity of institutions with the fact that the money went to individual pet peeves, vanity projects, inconveniences, and representational demands. To them, institutions failing is not a problem so long as they get what they want right now!

If you told this to visiting aliens orbiting above the planet, they would sigh and say, “We see this quite a lot in species of this maturity level. Are there any individuals that you think we should save? Because otherwise, I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Most people are passive because they are individualists; funny how the Communists get one thing right, and it is the key to understanding humanity, but they get everything else wrong. Individualism is not good. Individualism is denial of reality. It means prioritizing human emotions and judgments over what functions in a cause-effect ends-over-means way, and creates neurotic rationalization that makes us steadily less adapted to the real world.

Individualists want the world to manage their emotional state for them. When the focus is not just on the ego but on other individuals, and treating the world as an individual, any deviation from previous assumptions serves as a rebuke to the individual and therefore promotes retaliation. Consequently, individualists seek to make a world where nothing offends them so that they can continue to exist in their current mental state without undergoing any change in thinking or emotion.

Your average person is entirely passive as a result. They have reactions, feelings, judgments, emotions, and opportunism in selecting choices, but they never seek to find the full range of choices, the full facts of a model, all parts of a pattern, or a comparative look at all possible options.

It never occurs to the bourgeois media sheep that is the average person to research a topic, find all of the moving parts, and compare them to find consistent principles. After all, consistency is the basis of logic, and comparison is the basis of analysis.

Instead they throw the baby out with the bathwater. The authority they are experience “must” be how all authority is and in fact that nature of authority itself, so authority must be abolished despite being inherent to their world. It does not manage their mental state for them.

It is a magic word “the” which anchors our bad thinking. We assume that an instance is the essence, which is backward, since an instance is a copy of the essence; we assume that all individuals are equal; worst of all, we treat the world as an extension of our minds.

So far, the modern era has lasted the longest of all of the attempts at civilization. With every mistake, we must surely be learning, and our next lesson is the biggest yet: we are learning to accept only intellectual (not moral) maturity among others.

Intellectual maturity means being able to think competently and it is unequally distributed, but in the past we had almost no functional cutoff. This will likely change, and may lead to fun things like exiling Leftists, celebrities, religious fanatics, and nu-metal fans.

When we stop fighting back against “the” authority (a quantitative judgment) and start looking for the most competent version of authority (a qualitative judgment) that we can have, we will have escaped the Age of Symbolism and moved into the Age of Utility.

Tags: age of symbolism, age of utility, authority, individualism, modernity, value for money