Amerika

History occurs in layers, with each replacing the previous enough to redefine it in terms of the new. This has always been the problem with conservatism: in a desire to conserve the near-past, it obliterates the continuity of ancient past to infinite future.

When The Enlightenment™ occurred, it immediately became our raison d’etre and history, replacing what came before, much as Christianity had replaced the folkloric religions of the aeons before it.

But the inversion destroyed what we were. Before that, we were a people who believed in the transcendent, and this allowed us to work together toward wisdom, beauty, and civilization. We were geared toward the intangible but realistic even if ambitious.

Transcendence requires a reverence for reality. Not just nature, but natural law and logic itself, especially cause-effect relationships. In this mindset, we can see how the world functions according to immutable laws that make sense when you understand them.

That in turn allows us to accept the scary parts of life as necessary in the bigger scheme of things and therefore beneficial to us; we get the experience of life, even with its scary parts, because the whole thing works instead of stalling out from repetition.

Humans would make a world without fear and death but this would rapidly become a static place of decline and decomposition. Nature renews itself through a cycle of constant creation and destruction so that it does not lose momentum and stall.

With Christianity and The Enlightenment™ we instead embraced an idea, individualism, that says that whatever humans want is good and should be given to them through the efforts of the collective. We left the transcendent and went into the static world of human-centric thought.

Thinking in the individualistic way conceives the self as separate from culture, nature, and the divine. There are as many perspectives as there are individuals, and no common ground like a goal of accepting reality and optimizing it ambitiously.

When you think about it, this is breakdown. There is no longer agreement, only a series of compromises, which means half-measures and laundry lists of contradictory choices. No civilization can order itself this way.

Instead of thinking about reality and how to make it beautiful, or reverence for the experience of life, the human thinks in terms of “I want” and since they have no idea, they backfill with urges, desires, envy, greed, resentment, and other neurotic sentiments.

If you find yourself wondering why your society is oriented toward pathological self-destruction, consider that everyone is demanding what they want from the shared experience, tearing it to little shreds.

Worse still, because they are implicitly promised that “I want” is important, people are always bitter about what they have not received and do not appreciate what they have. They become viciously self-interested, beyond all sense, at the same time they have a sense of victimhood.

Because the individual is more important than reality, anything which smacks down reality and replaces it with a human plan is prized. This ironist contrarianism leads us not just to ignore common sense but to obsessively violate it.

Even more, we have become islands of ourselves. We have no reverence for culture, nature, or wisdom. We live entirely externally because we are backfilling wants instead of thinking of goals. And while we are distracted, things fall apart.

Tags: collapse, crowdism, the enlightenment