Amerika

As Plato pointed out, systems invert once they get reduced to methods and people choose the easy answers methods, which are both convenient and do not challenge human individualistic mentation. Humans hate to alter their thinking based on external input and resist that with all of their might.

People like to get into ruts of means-over-ends thinking. Some method works, so they replace the goal with that method, and get defensive, saying that they are doing the indubitably right thing and everyone else is wrong. This is the mentality of people at jobs.

This extends to politics. Leftists are contrarians. They object to whatever is working because it minimizes their importance. They are individualists or narcissists who want to be the most important thing in the world, or at least their world, and they resent organic things like goals, culture, logic, and nature.

From this comes a mentality of detachment. The individualists want what is convenient, so they want total solutions that require them to do nothing, like government programs or laws. They want easy answers. They filter out anything difficult, and are left with the ineffective and dangerous.

Over time the group declines because it has prohibited to itself any useful answers, and insists on easy non-solutions which are destructive. Fanatics win because they offer easy answers and push them hard. People in a hurry win because they dominate the debate and people sign off on an easy answer just to get rid of them.

That approach demoralizes the population over time because it realizes that it will not simply be left alone, and will always be subject to terrifyingly insane decisions made by the herd. The stupid always wins. This makes people despair because anything good will be destroyed.

In its final stages this society approaches binary thinking. The dogma insists that the prohibition on useful but difficult answers is good, and the celebration of destructive but easy answers is necessary. They systematically work to exclude the intelligent and realistic.

Not surprisingly, at that point the group has inverted itself. What it needs to do to achieve its goal is prohibited, so it makes the easy answers into a type of religion or superstition. The dogma must be upheld: you can oppose it or support it, but you cannot see it as irrelevant or off-topic.

You may find yourself wondering why your fellow citizens are so demoralized these days. They believe that their future will always involve rule by easy answers, and therefore failure, so they have given up and seek distractions instead. It is hard to blame them.

Tags: binary thinking, democracy, easy answers