Amerika

The theory of Crowdism states that people filter the world for that which does not force change on their mental state, therefore when they get together in groups, they refuse to look at difficult questions and fanatically embrace trivial ones instead.

Individualists of this nature will never understand the transcendental, which is the desire to live life for its own sake and to make it excellent and beautiful for the sake of enhancing what is ultimately a pleasurable experience:

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others. – Fred Nietzsche, The Antichrist

What Fred is alluding to here could fill several volumes, but essentially it is this: people who want easy lives are thinking only of themselves, but this is a trap, since it deprives life of meaning.

Those who think of life as a whole see it as a grand experience and aim to maximize it by working within its methods to improve the quality of everything. This is a transcendental goal, meaning that it requires accepting reality as it is and still aiming for excellence.

However, many if not most people want exactly the opposite: they crave lives of comfort and stability, without risk or ambiguity, even though this means they have nothing to strive for and consequently, no way to rise above themselves and achieve much of anything.

Crowdism infests any group, ideology, or civilization. It dovetails nicely with bourgeois thinking, which may be the decline of the West:

The term bourgeois originated in medieval France, where it denoted an inhabitant of a walled town. Its overtones became important in the 18th century, when the middle class of professionals, manufacturers, and their literary and political allies began to demand an influence in politics consistent with their economic status. Marx was one of many thinkers who treated the French Revolution as a revolution of the bourgeois.

Bourgeois thinking means individualism; you care only about your own wealth, power, and status. Society can take care of itself, and so can nature. Nihilism? You have no values beyond that which will increase your standing, so you disclaim even that.

The bourgeois person exists on an island of themselves, adrift in a sea of that which is irrelevant unless it can be used to improve their island, where nothing matters beyond personal comfort, including mental comfort, and all ideas are useful only as manipulations.

While the middle classes are associated with bourgeois thinking, its root is more properly how people with jobs in the city think, versus how people who must survive in nature think:

marked by a middle-class concern for material possessions, wealth, and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity

It is a mentality more than tied to a specific class. It means raw individualism, or concern for personal mental state more than consequences in reality, and not surprisingly, it has a nasty edge to it, since it is a form of oblivious self-centeredness.

This mentality rejected the transcendental in favor of personal status, and created a new secular religion of individualism that destroyed everything good in civilization:

But the late eighteenth century also witnessed another, equally weighty bourgeois revolution: The ascendance of a particular “middle class” mentalité and way of life that involved genuinely new attitudes toward the self, love and friendship, marriage, childrearing, and work.

At the heart of this new outlook was a rising rejection of an aristocratic set of values, emphasizing honor and deference, and the triumph of a bourgeois outlook far more complex than the word “Victorian” suggests.

There was the projection or displacement of impulses previously associated with religion onto other objects, whether love (which was recast in the religious language of reverence and redemption) or art or music. There was a heightened emphasis on the self and the emotional interior apparent in the spread of confessional diaries and personally revealing letters, including intimate love letters.

The “heightened emphasis on the self” is the core of it; to simplify: when civilization grows, people can afford to be self-centered, and at that point, they become hostile to reality and focus exclusively on their own mental comfort and economic power.

Thus they change from wagie to bourgeois, mainly because they are rebelling against their jobs upon which they depend despite hating the massive waste of time that is the average job, which produces nothing of value except obedience to corporate “culture.”

Crowdism thus flowers. The wagies, having decided that they are victims and nothing matters but their own desires, retaliate by excluding any considerations but their own power, status, and wealth. They mutually reinforce this and justify it as “equality.”

After a few generations of that nonsense, things are pretty bad. That is, actual productivity is down (but “productivity” on paper and GDP are up!) and therefore, costs rise; the self-pitying individualists now decide that the markets themselves are a Great Satan that must die.

They have nowhere left to go but the ultimate step. Instead of markets, we must all have jobs (they reason) but salaries are determined by an authority which makes all equal. They slide into Communism with unions, welfare programs, and altruism/charity outsources to government.

At this point, the wagies celebrate. They won and defeated the owners! Equality has been achieved. Everyone can be an individualist now, without consequences. But then the unrealistic ideas they depend on collapse and they end up in tyranny, baffled as to how they got there.

Tags: bourgeois, communism, crowdism, individualism