Amerika

Your kindergarten teacher, neighborhood priest, and government officials all emphasize “togetherness.” This is the idea that we share a common goal, despite being different in caste, race, ethnicity, and political alignment.

They like this idea because it keeps the group together, and they manipulate this group with symbols. To have togetherness, one must have manipulation, which requires compromise instead of allowing conflict, just like the rules for being on a job or committee.

Specifically, we must manage the emotional state of others, which is based on their fiction-absolute or the story they tell themselves in which their past choices make sense and their present life is the best possible option for them. N.B. these stories usually involve victimhood or lottery/chance to explain away failures or lower status.

Togetherness thus creates a tragic comedy of dysfunction based on emotional symbolism that people use to regulate their mental state through an artificially subsidized self-image. No wonder their political answers as well tend toward subsidies, regulations, and symbolism that lead unsurprisingly to dysfunction!

To maintain togetherness is to manage others and specifically, manage their complaints and “needs.” If they can portray themselves as victims, they can accuse you of violating togetherness, and then the togetherness attacks. So you pander, compromise, subsidize.

This makes togetherness a utilitarian prospect (the best for the most, as told by the most). The idea that if there are few complaints and no conflict or controversy, all is going well, is the root of democracy and an illusion because most people avoid noticing actual problems and focus on the trivial. This is why the instant people start voting, a pervasive and accelerating drift away from realism begins, eventually to culminate in some tyranny like Mafia-rule or Communism.

Rule by symbols enables togetherness. When you see superlatives — good/evil, freedom, liberty, equality, patriotism — you know that the herd is trying to maintain togetherness by forcing people to obey symbols. This falls into bickering about what the correct symbols really are. Eventually talk about the symbols eclipses any thought of reality.

But people love togetherness as an idea, or rather, a mental image. They like the thought of pacifism because it calms their fears of being defeated or out-competed. They want everyone held back by red tape, jobs, stupidity winning in politics, and other forms of passive sabotage. They want to force everyone to get along so that no one will attack them.

To them, society should be in loco parentis where it assumes the role of babysitter, mall cop, psychologist, and free money ATM.

They have fallen into the grips of individualism, an idea in which humans prioritize themselves and other individuals above any kind of goal. (The opposite view, transcendentalism, says that when we find a goal and bond with laboring toward it, we become more aware of who we are and have greater life satisfaction, in addition of course to doing good things).

Societies at their inception are not individualistic. They are hard realist. You plant the crops, fight off the bears and Indians, be there when the horses foal, or you starve and natural selection takes over.

But as societies expand, jobs arrived. Jobs are tasks where the goal is to satisfy a human, the boss, not necessarily do the job as it needs to be done. This brings out means-over-ends thinking and makes people oriented toward procedure, at which point they retaliate with a legalistic approach based in rights and ownership. They forget that society provides them jobs, and retaliate against the society for having power over them. Resentment becomes a normal phase of life, where back when people had their own farms and businesses, there was no one to resent. They could curse the lack of rain or wolves eating the livestock, but there was no person to whom they reported against whom they could become embittered.

In order to avoid being disadvantaged by the system, they come up with “togetherness” like a committee or a union: everyone is important, controversy must be avoided, keep the peace and simply “go along to get along.” This allows them to become prosperous by leeching wealth from the core of society, setting off an unending cascade of taxes, laws, revolutions, and other forms of decay.

Togetherness is a false goal. So is the individual. The only real goal worth pursuing is the idea of making our people, civilization, nature, and the divine constantly improving through striving for things we can never fully do, like the transcendentals: the good, the beautiful, and the real.

When you have a goal to share, you no longer need togetherness; you just work together to get things done and then feel good because, by the lights of your people, you have done good and you can take comfort in the fact that your life now has meaning, purpose, and value. But you will not get that with togetherness.