by Brett Stevens on July 10, 2019

I am starting to see the world in terms of two competing models, “standardization” and “homeostasis.” Standardization says that someone should provide universal direction and demand that all obey; homeostasis sees parts with different roles and abilities in a complex system.

If the Left has a great evil, it is that its individualistic quest for no boundaries to anything leads to the formation of an amorphous mass of people keyed to lowest common denominator universal ideals. It standardizes in the name of empowering non-conformity.

If you are thinking of your average high school here, where all the “non-conformists” and “iconoclasts” gather together in one corner every morning, wearing the same stuff and listening to the same music, you have the idea.

Homeostasis requires a “whole” view of a situation instead of choosing a lens and making that interpretation stand for all necessary measurements, like a symbol. Your average American thinks that if someone gets a job, pays taxes, and waves the flag, that is a good citizen.

In contrast homeostasis looks toward the role of this person. Does he uphold our culture, meaning our actual culture, not the “political culture” that Republicans bloviate on about with the Constitution and support for capitalism? Does he have a unique role that is more than financial, contributing to the life of a place? Does he work to further our original founding morality, customs, and beliefs? Is he genetically compatible? Is he part of the stream of life, influencing the character of a place, and making it closer to the aesthetic and moral ideal? Is he connected to the “spirit” of that civilization, place, and its people?

In the same way, we have to question policies. Are they consistent with the continuity of the best of the past toward our best possible future? Are they in parallel with other elements of society, like culture and genetics, and do they represent a change which can work for all of our institutions? Do they uphold our sense of aesthetics which underlies our notions of order and goodness, and do they further the development and self-actualization of our people? Somehow no one seems to ask these things.

Standardization consists of simplifying everything to the bare minimum according to one axis of consideration, usually power. When Leftists offer free stuff in exchange for votes, they are acting toward power, and ignoring economy, culture, beliefs, aesthetics, and continuity with past and future. This simplified version is then applied like an assembly line to all people, making them interchangeable parts to serve not just the system, but the idea behind the system.

It appeals to those who want to eliminate risk in life; its basic method of breaking down order and replacing it with uniformity makes it at least easier to see outliers. In a social sense, outliers are those who do not buy into the default rule of the hive, which is that no one may hurt anyone else because all are equal.

Predictably, this creates destruction — breaking down order usually does — that is invisible to those in the system. To them, it seems like they are winning and then everything falls apart. To avoid that problem, the herd enforces its rule by ostracizing all who fail to enthusiastically affirm it, and it buys off the rest with subsidies, even though those decline in value as the economy eats itself.

These socialist-style reforms can be adopted by any type of government. The great illusion is that Right and Left are absolutes in application; a Right-wing government can adopt Left-wing policies, and vice-versa. However, the simpler idea always wins out, so hybrids like Libertarians, Neoconservatives, and National Socialists always go further Leftward.

Witness the great success of environmental regulations (via Future of Capitalism):

Stringent fuel economy regulations imposed on cars in the 1970s had made it practically impossible for automakers to keep selling big station wagons. Yet many Americans still wanted roomy vehicles. The answer, Mr. Sperlich and Mr. Iacocca realized, was to make family vehicles that were regulated as light trucks, a category of vehicles that includes pickups. The government had placed far more lenient fuel economy rules on light trucks, as well as more lenient safety and air pollution standards. When Chrysler introduced the minivan in 1983, fewer than 3 percent of them were configured as cargo vehicles, with just a couple of seats in the front and a long, flat bed in the back. But that was enough for Mr. Iacocca to persuade federal regulators to label all minivans as light trucks.

A well-intentioned regulation, demanding less pollution, quickly backfires as people are unable to get the cars they want for their families: roomy, but also large, since your rate of survival on the roads is increased by being in a solid and larger vehicle.

Instead of getting fewer fuel hogs on the roads, this regulation ended up predictably forcing a workaround to accommodate the market, and now the roads are almost exclusively dominated by what are essentially trucks.

Another consumerist bungle came to us from socialist limitations imposed on capitalism in the medical field, resulting in the destruction of charity care, necessitating further laws:

Before the 1980s, private hospitals charged patients according to their ability to pay, and this “cost shifting” allowed them to deliver a small amount of charity care. Over the years, this amount dwindled. Recent Internal Revenue Service reports found that 45 percent of private hospitals spend 4.8 percent or less of their revenues on uncompensated care. In contrast, public hospitals spend more than four times that amount (18.1 percent) on uncompensated care. In 1983 the federal government established through Medicare a system that placed caps on how much hospitals could charge for treating patients with given diagnoses. This system, with charges tied to diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), made cost-shifting impossible, and, after its implementation, hospitals lost financial support for charity care. As changes in the economic climate made it more difficult for hospital EDs to care for indigent patients, reports surfaced that uninsured and publicly insured patients were either unable to access emergency care or were redirected from private EDs to public EDs.

In fact, the followup legislation was also a disaster:

Commentators who imply a causal relationship between EMTALA’s enactment and the nation’s health care crisis cite the surge in ED use from 85 million to almost 115 million visits per year, the closing of more than 560 hospitals and 1,200 EDs, and the shuttering of many trauma centers, maternity wards, and tertiary referral centers. In 90 percent of larger hospitals, the capacity to treat patients is saturated, primarily because of the lack of money to support inpatient critical care beds and nurses to staff them. The emergency care capability that does exist is plagued by rampant emergency medical services diversion and ED overcrowding, which alone accounts for 33 percent increases in wait times and has tripled the number of individuals who leave the ED before being seen.

Standardization backfired, as it always does, by failing to take into account the larger pattern afoot, which was that Americans were reacting to the increasingly chaotic roads by wanting cars that would protect their families.

Now compare this to another failure of standardization in the hands of socialism:

One of Zedong’s first actions after collectivizing agriculture was probably intended to protect the farms. Sparrows, he was told, ate a lot of grain seeds, so Zedong ordered the people to go forth and kill all the sparrows. During the Great Sparrow Campaign, as it has been called, hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed, mostly because people chased them until the birds were so tired that they fell out of the sky. The problem with the Great Sparrow Campaign became evident in 1960. The sparrows, it seemed, didn’t only eat grain seeds. They also ate insects. With no birds to control them, insect populations boomed. Locusts, in particular, swarmed over the country, eating everything they could find — including crops intended for human food. People, on the other hand, quickly ran out of things to eat, and millions starved. Numbers vary, of course, with the official number from the Chinese government placed at 15 million. Some scholars, however, estimate that the fatalities were as high as 45 or even 78 million.

Humans err when we fail to take into account the order around us, and instead focus only on what we want to change. It resembles target fixation in that pursuit of the goal blots out all consideration of context:

Loosely defined, target fixation is a behavior in which a person becomes so focused on a singular object that they tend to ride (or drive) straight into it. This is also a major issue for cars parked or pulled over on the shoulder of highways – a simple Internet search for “crashes on the shoulder” is all it takes to see this in action. It’s especially common when police officers pull a car over, as their bright lights can be a beacon for target fixation.

Standardization focuses so intensely on what it does not want that it misses the bigger point of what it wants to achieve, which requires a method other than breaking everything down and processing those bits like a bureaucracy, factory, or scythe dropping wheat.

Negativity consumes our mindset because we fixate on what we do not want, and then treat it as a problem to be solved with human methods, which invariably consist of breaking down things into tiny parts and then addressing those systematically.

This works well for many things, but not for civilization. It destroys it, forcing it to consume itself from within.

We are reaching a threshold in our time. Civilization found out how to beat want by establishing plenty, but now we are trying to get past our impulse to replace natural order with an order based on human socializing, or making each other feel good so that we can sell each other stuff.

Socializing produces standardization because a group will unite on what it has in common, which is always a lowest common denominator like fear, lust, greed, and mental sloth (physical sloth, or the taking of rest and enjoyment, is far from a terrible thing).

This represents an attempt by our minds to reduce the world to a form that we can handle, instead of finding the inner balance and stability to be able to accept the world as it is, including the parts that we do not know, cannot know, or do not yet understand.

Humanity is going through a maturing process. There was little hope that we would rise above hominins and become a modern species, and then there was little hope that any of us would thrive and rise to greatness as Western Civilization has not once but at least three times.

Now we face the new challenge: overcoming the error of projecting ourselves upon the world, instead of looking within our inner selves to find stability, and then understanding the world on its own terms, a process called transcendence.

You will hear a great deal in the near future about how “capitalism” is bad. This makes no sense, since capitalism is simply economics. The people who argue against it, without exception, want to claim it is bad so they can rope all of us into supporting socialism.

In reality, what makes capitalism “bad” is government. We pile regulations, lawsuits, affirmative action, taxes, and bureaucracy onto business, and we come up with a hybrid of the Soviet Union and Robber Barons.

Raising costs — necessary in order to standardize — is a death cycle. The more you take from the economy, the more unstable it is, and the fewer people are able to earn decent incomes, until you wake up one day and you have a few mega-rich ruling over a vast lumpenproletariat with nothing.

Leftists hate this, but the cause of modern poverty is Leftist anti-poverty programs. If you want prosperity, you have to get government, bureaucrats, lawyers, and permanent have-nots like our rainbow underclass out of the picture. Otherwise they consume everything.

When you buy something, over half of the cost arises from these governmental intrusions. Eliminate them and prices go down, and people can have good lives on less income. Especially the property tax destroys but generally, taxes prove destructive, although only to those who rise above the median.

Once you set up your society on the basis of ideology instead of realism, you go down this path. Ideology tells us what “should” be true if left up to asking a group of humans what would make them happy, but realism tells us how the world works and how we must adapt to it.

Since ideology is inherently utilitarian — based on demotism: what most people will vote for, buy, or cheer when talking in the pub — it always tends toward the egalitarian, or the demand that we all be equal so that the individual faces the fewest barriers possible to participation in any and all aspects of society.

Recent history shows us a backlash against the ideological in favor of realism:

“We must focus on the private sector in order to get better economically,” [Tasos Stavridis] believes. “Our public sector is inefficient and lazy.” “The last time my family supported something left, it turned out to be a lot worse,” says Zoe Babaolou, a 19 year old from Thessaloniki who voted for New Democracy in the European elections. “It seems better to return to something safer.” [She] adds: “We voted for the ideology in 2015 and we didn’t see any changes. So I’m more interested in the economic measures.”

Markets reflect realism, since they have no prescriptive content, only a reflection of how people act in groups in response to the needs of resources, labor, and finance. Capitalism is simply economics. Human biodiversity is simply science. Aristocracy is simply the recognition of class differences in ability.

Ideological societies base their ideas on individualism, or the “me first” in every human, which leads them to egalitarianism, or “no one can tell me ‘no'” as a political concept.

Over the past two centuries, the West has ventured further into the idea of individualism, which when addressed to a collective like a nation, becomes “collectivism,” since you cannot have an individualist without state support, since so much is already taken in taxes.

We are now seeing that this, too, is a dead-end path. Instead of blaming capitalism, strong power, culture, and natural elites for our problems, we should criticize their bastardization, namely the hybrids of Leftism and anything, since they ruin everything.

Tags: capitalism, homeostasis, socialism, standardization, taxes

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