Amerika

As the world wakes up from history, we see that we are living in a time when just about everyone is driven by illusions and a pathological need to destroy anything good around them.

Our mistake, as real human beings, is to assume that the others are “thinking.” You see, thinking is a process of analysis, imagination, and a loop between the two.

What most people do not do is thinking. Instead, they rationalize reasons why they do not have to understand important things by refusing to understand them or deliberately misunderstanding them.

Their goal is to maintain their own mental state. This requires excluding any information from the wider world that will upset their mental state. That means that they reject all complex and difficult questions and instead pursue “easy answers” simplistic questions.

This is the nature of socializing: you manage everyone else’s mental state for them. By interacting and being pleasant, you bring them feelings of joy or at least a loss of boredom, and this makes them happy for a time.

As social creatures, they rely on the social group to maintain their mental state, which requires that among other things, the group avoids disturbing imagery or thoughts. This creates a need to “not mention” certain things.

You will note of course that this is also the root of political correctness, censorship, deplatforming, and even political executions.

All of humanity’s failures come back to an unwillingness to see things as they are and to take appropriate action. People fear certain things, so they ban the methods related to those, and thus you get a means-over-ends society which avoids having ends that utilize feared means.

In other words, we become terrified of war, so we declare ourselves pacifists. At that point, we will do anything to avoid a war, including paying a fee or surrendering. The means (pacifism) has become more important than the ends (goal of having a thriving civilization).

Other forms are easy to find. People are afraid of noticing the differences between people in terms of ability. They are afraid to talk about aging and dying. They do not want to mention that civilization is collapsing. On and on, South of Heaven.

Rationalizing is addictive. Once you say that a method is taboo, you have to rationalize the results, consequences, and ends that came about by using the other methods. If you oppose war, you have to rationalize being conquered.

It also provides a handy way to ignore disturbing questions. You can rationalize that the question is bad, therefore talking about it is bad, and therefore you should talk about something else instead.

Rationalization also leads to deranged thoughts like metaphysical dualism and egalitarianism. We are afraid of no-afterlife or being unequal, so we rationalize that there must be an afterlife and equality. Religions and ideologies share this pathology.

But all of this tells you something important: very, very few people think in the sense of analyzing a situation, creatively imagining an adaptive response, then testing it against the whole of reality and refining it based on what is learned.

You can do a lot of this in your head. “If I were to become a serial killer, what would the world likely do in response?” It usually does not require much thinking; it is not quantum physics, rocket science, or epic poetry. It is some wisdom and some creative and analytical thinking.

You might observe that most people now are crazy. Were they always crazy? I do not know, because I was not there in the distant past. Could it be solar rays in advance of a coming ice age? Maybe, but more likely, it is what happens when the pathological people take over.

We have been ruled, since the end of the Victorian Age, by democratic passions. Whatever makes people happy is good! If it garners votes, sells products, and makes someone popular, then it must be the path to success, at least in the bourgeois world.

Now our societies are waking up out of this dream. It turns to disaster because most people are thoughtless. They are more concerned with running away from things that scare them than achieving anything positive, and this is the root of civilization decline.

People have been running around for centuries now trying to destroy scapegoats. They do this so that their own mental state feels better. In the process, they destroy civilization and themselves, purely for the pursuit of feeling good about life.

At this point, we are entering an Age of Function. All the money is gone and all of the illusions have collapsed. People want to see what works, not what feels good, because they have realized something about markets.

Other than utilities, no product or service has 100% purchase rates. It is bought by a relatively small group, and that group does not represent the whole population. Markets are easily skewed by small groups.

For the past two centuries or more, we have been pandering to the thoughtless people by offering them comforting lies so that they will vote for us, buy our products, and befriend us. The price of this is that our civilization became thoughtless.

This is an ancient illness, by the way. It is what killed every great empire and probably every civilization. You know a civilization is dead when you have sociable but unintelligent people living near ruins they do not understand how to build.

When civilizations reach a certain point of organization, they invert because they start trying to find jobs for people instead of people for jobs. They become dedicated to supporting everyone, purely because of the peer pressure mentioned in this article, and rationalization follows.

Our escape from this trap involves rejecting peer pressure and the thoughtless people, therefore escaping the mental state of rationalization. This way, we can avoid joining the thoughtless zombie horde and instead, look clearly at our future.

Tags: collapse, crowdism, demotism, rationalization