Amerika

History does not arc, it winds. It twists and turns so that it can return to the eternal principles that keep it operating, mostly because humans — if unsupervised! — want to avoid those principles and embrace subsidized anarchy with grocery stores.

We are coming out of a utilitarian age. Utilitarianism means “the best for the most” which is only measurable through user input, therefore means “whatever most people think they want.” It is similar to democracy, committees, focus groups, and social scenes in this way.

Humanity ventured into utilitarianism in order to avoid the conflict inherent in getting anything done right. Instead, since we had wealth, we figured we would do what made most people happy. The bourgeois middle class always makes this mistake.

In all human interactions, the most important questions are disturbing, like other things we deny such as death and entropy. Therefore, they are pushed aside, and people instead opt for “symbolic” issues that create warm emotional feelings or strong patriotic passions.

The utilitarians came up with a libertarian compromise: whatever makes the most people feel happier is the new consensus. Nothing needs to be decided ever again, since that could bring on social censure. Instead, you just let the numbers have it.

Most probably civilization decline came about with the rise of the middle classes. The nobles had wealth but it was tied to responsibility through land ownership and obligation to tenants; the poor had no wealth nor responsibility, but also no freedom.

With the rise of trade however some people left the farms and became traders and sellers in the cities. They had wealth but no responsibility, and also a lot of freedom, mainly because commerce demanded it.

Arguably, the kings should have beheaded them all and replaced them with a Walmart. The middle classes argued for “bourgeois” complacency which meant avoiding complex ideas and controversial issues, making society milktoast and prosaic.

Over the centuries, they rose in importance and took over, mainly because job-workers needed easy products and as they detached from the running of homesteads and farms, became increasingly lazy and dedicated to convenience.

This reached its peak in the Victorian age, then took over completely and displaced everything else through two disastrous world wars. In this light, democracy and consumerism are the same entity, a tendency toward utilitarianism instead of clear answers from culture and nature.

However, this situation ran itself into Soviet- or Jacobin-style “long collapse.” It took centuries, but eventually the habit of bestowing social acceptance on the habit of avoiding real issues caused people to completely give up on anything but their personal retirement accounts.

Utilitarianism got us the notion of welfare; if you can seize all the money and redistribute it so that everyone is funded, then you have increased the sum total of happiness! It brought us diversity and feminism as well. All of these focused on people not structures like institutions.

It is likely that the middle class, bureaucracy, jobs, individualism, and Christianity arose from the same impulse, which is a utilitarian desire to pacify the herd so that commerce can take place. It is a great way to create people unaware of anything but their small social circles.

These may have all come from jobs themselves. A freeholder with his homestead has crops, animals, and tools to produce most of what he needs. But a guy working in a factory has only an apartment and has to pay others to do everything for him.

Similarly people in city houses do not have acreage for tilling. They buy everything. Their staffs of servants do the same. Perhaps jobs arose from servant status, or the other way around, but both converge on the person who depends on merchants.

However, this vision of the future has died. For decades society has been inventing jobs, subsidized by the consumers and taxpayers, to keep people employed. The more jobs we add, the more jobs are needed, somehow. Women, then foreigners, filled in the workforce.

The model does not work. The more we pass on costs to society, the higher costs go, and so despite everyone having jobs, no one has enough money to live safe from worry. The ouroboros that is society has fed off itself and bankrupted itself in the process, like the Soviets and Jacobins.

Instead we are seeing a model designed to counter human overgrowth: value for money, or functionalism, in which those who contribute are rewarded and those who can merely attend jobs and do exactly what they are told to do — not affirmatively adding value — are deprecated.

The functionalist future involves keeping what works and tossing all the stuff that adds no actual value, productivity, creativity, or stewardship of what we have. The people who can only attend jobs and do the bare minimum are not important to our future.

We recognize that we have too many people and too few useful ones. Utilitarianism would suggest we subsidize them all. Practical thinking says that instead we see how many we can lose so that we can move upward (not forward, not “progress”) on the path toward greater knowledge and productivity.

In addition, jobs are likely to be less important; people are going to want homesteads where they can produce most of their own food. To do that, we have to cut property taxes, but those became a runaway train long ago anyway.

The ideal of the past was everyone having a job and living in managed housing. The future is people living free on homesteads, with some kind of business or calling for each family, and the great filtering of those who merely participate and offer nothing affirmatively adding value.

Tags: functionalism, realism, utilitarianism