by Brett Stevens on January 21, 2018

At some point, if you have red blood, you have to ask yourself what went wrong with this world, and how on Earth could we fix it?

You know that whatever you do will be limited by the options offered in your civilization. This one offers you jobs where 90% of what you do is unnecessary and tedious, ruled by petit tyrants whose only concern is making themselves look good, as part of a circular Ponzi scheme comprised of a consumer economy and socialist welfare state, in a civilization which has not made any good decisions for at least 229 years.

I mean, the technology is great. Having a phone that beams me emails, maps, and video is amazing. The internet — a 1960s project — is also wonderful, or was, until giant monopolies swallowed it up and turned it into the pureed sweetened good that resembles those weird jars of baby food on the shelves. Now it is just 1980s daytime TV — the most inane stuff ever — in clickable form.

Many entry points to this problem present themselves. Maybe you came in because you noticed that your race or ethnic group was getting exterminated, or because you saw that industrial “progress” was eating the landscape and leaving behind zombie people. Maybe you are concerned about the ongoing ecocide, or the Darwinistic decline of humanity. All lead to the same place.

If you go out there to a bookstore or the internet, you will find as many theories as there are people about what has gone wrong and what “we” should do. This tells you exactly what the problem is: each person is competing to be noticed so that they can afford to live outside of the drudgery of jobs, and so they are coming up with theories they do not even believe in, just to be noticed.

This conforms to what you will see in social settings as well. The people who become active personalities known to all are the ones who get the power and the money, and this keeps them both out of the ghetto and ahead of the curve relative to their neighbors. It is not the marketplace, but the social marketplace that defines success.

And then you can look at our “leadership.” Anyone who does not follow the established pattern gets filtered out, with rare exceptions for billionaires like Donald Trump who enter the system late and win big on the basis of what they did outside of it. Politicians make their careers by saying what most people want to hear, and people in groups are usually delusional.

With this in mind, we can start to see our political problem as one form of The Human Problem, which is our tendency to self-destruct after organizing ourselves in groups, with the most brilliant plans failing harder even than the primitive ones. Civilization is like a series of rocket tests where all of the prototypes keep blowing up on the launch pad.

In a nutshell, humans form groups and then adjust their goal to what pleases the group, instead of their purpose in forming the group. Purpose, after all, is transcendent or something we aspire to that is intangible and never fully realized; it also requires an understanding of how reality works. This means that only very few in a group know what is going on.

As a group grows, the number of people who are willing to trade loss of purpose in exchange for temporary power also increases. These are individualists who want to be able to rise in the ranks for social reasons, instead of by contributing toward achievement of the purpose of the group. They band together around a single principle: that no one can make them less important for being individualistic.

When this band forms, it acts like a cancer or parasite on the larger group, turning it away from its actual goals toward the social goal of making everyone — or at least most — feel comfortable, safe, happy, and accepted. This causes a process known as inversion, where anything that does not make people feel safe and equal becomes taboo.

That taboo in turn limits what can be discussed to only that which flatters the pretense of the group that they are all good and important, because that way no one is not good and important, which appeals to the individualist who fears being penalized for his selfish behavior. The inverted group becomes ruled by its worst, and not its best.

This process than cannibalizes the group by becoming a “mental virus” that infects all areas of thought and excludes anything but itself. Soon the group becomes delusional, and it chases symbolic victories instead of pursuing transcendent success in reality, dooming itself by becoming unresponsive to actual threats.

During those years of delusion before the crash, society moves further toward what is destroying it because, through inversion, it has removed the possibility of talking about anything else. Death taboos and political correctness are both examples of inversion.

As it approaches the end, the society resembles a game of “follow-the-leader” in that most people pursue whatever is trendy at the moment — usually a variant of the egalitarian narrative of the noble many ganging up on the authoritarian few — because to fail to do so is to become irrelevant, and therefore see social, economic, and political fortunes waver.

This follow-the-leader game becomes tiresome because it ensures that society only moves further in the direction of egalitarian thought, which is actually disguised individualism, or “everybody do whatever they want without consequences and no one can penalize them for doing so, no matter what the outcome is.”

If you wonder why the last days of Rome seemed like a mixture of hedonism, desperation, insanity, and narcissism, the individualist arc explains this. Every group that has been taken over first seems to pursue rugged individualism, then infighting over power and wealth, and finally a giant conformist herd rushing from one fascinating to the next, having been made thoroughly neurotic by the process.

We can see this tendency in our financial elites, who are playing follow-the-leader and are completely oblivious to actual risks and needs:

Financiers, industrialists and regulators at Davos on any given year are generally success stories under current policies, and see near-term concerns as threats to their position, and arguably ignore larger systemic problems on the horizon. Elites, by definition, have done well out of the status quo. They have wealth and power that they seek to preserve. It should not surprise us then to see the World Economic Forum now pushes articles about how to “deal” with supposed populism. Conventional elite wisdom worldwide is social democratic â€” that political fissures have arisen because of economic anxieties and inequalities. So the lazy “solution” is for more government investment or more redistribution to keep the populists at bay. It just so happens bigger government will inevitably mean politicians dealing with and buying goods and services from existing major businesses â€” the very sort that appear at the World Economic Forum every January.

Once a human group becomes self-referential, all that matters is doing and saying what other people want to see and hear. That is how you succeed in such a group, and those who do not do it are not just marginalized but entirely excluded from the debate. If Donald Trump had said early in his career what he says now, he would be much less wealthy because others would shun him.

The sickening clique feeling of modern society owes its presence to this process. When a society becomes overtaken by its tumor, people spend all of their time rationalizing away the problem of the tumor by explaining its presence as good. Only those who are willing to adopt this insane attitude are accepted in its industries, government, academia, art, literature, entertainment, and social groups.

At that point, civilization is fleeing reality and those who dare point out that the emperor has no new clothes will be scapegoated and destroyed. They are sacrifices so that the group can continue living in happy oblivion to its doom, mainly because at this point, everyone is individualistic and does not want to suffer for the betterment of the group.

They will participate in non-consequential things like helping the poor, planting a few trees, fighting “racism,” or re-arranging the way government pays benefits so that people are more equal. They will not address the root of the problem, which is that their group cannot control itself because it is inverted, and it is spiraling into total dysfunction.

Since language was the first casualty of this incursion, the people involved in the group will congratulate themselves on being “good” for rationalizing the decay, and will use their fear of people who want to stop the decay — thus ending the individualism of “everybody do whatever they want” — to claim the people who are trying to fix the situation are actually bad.

We can see this in politics most clearly where the voters adore and politicians pursue increasingly suicidal policies, because to not pursue those policies would be to admit that egalitarianism — democracy, equality, diversity, and pluralism — has failed yet again. Instead we get mental gymnasts who specialize in rationalizing the bad as good for votes, purchases, and social feelings:

He urged the SPD to seize the chance to help drive deeper EU integration and counter the rise of right-wing populists across the continent. “Only a strong and united SPD can make our country and Europe stronger,” he said. The European Commission hailed the SPD’s “yes” vote, with EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici praising the “sense of responsibility” shown by the Social Democrats.

People no longer speak about what is right in terms of the effects it will have in reality; instead, they think categorically, with some things listed as good and some as bad, which enables them to sidestep the question of effects, which is how we actually measure what is good and what is bad.

These people, voters and politicians alike, are not thinking about reality at all. For them, what matters is flattering each other long enough to keep the game going so that each person can get their pile of wealth and move out, because in their minds, civilization is no longer worth believing in.

That attitude clashes with that of those on the Right, who are united by a belief in looking to history for what worked best and to use that in our pursuit of transcendental excellence, usually in the form of “the good, the beautiful, and the true” applied through “good to the good, and bad to the bad.” We believe in civilization and want it to succeed, which at this point, requires rebooting it.

Once we see the argument this way — between those who want civilization, and those who want popularity points — the impending divide across the West becomes much clearer. We are living in two different nations, Leftists and Rightists, and this guarantees that we increasingly have nothing in common:

The climate on the right had been sharpening for a few days. On Thursday evening, on Fox News, Tucker Carlson had assumed a look of urgent concern while his guest, the hard-right radio host Mark Steyn (an â€œactual thinker,â€ Carlson had noted in his introduction), warned against the â€œcultural transformationâ€ that immigration would bring. â€œA majority of grade-school children in Arizona are now Hispanic,â€ Steyn warned. â€œThe border has moved north,â€ he said, but the real line he was etching was an ethnic one, between Americansâ€”Hispanics on one side, the rest on the other. …For liberals, much of the escalating menace of the past two years has followed the same lineâ€”the Presidentâ€™s insistence that America is less an idea than a specific heritage, that a judge of â€œMexicanâ€ heritage is less than equal, that Haitian-Americans and African-Americans came from â€œshithole nations,â€ and that more Norwegian-Americans would be preferable. …Trump also tweeted, â€œ#AMERICA FIRST!â€ The question is, which #America?

To someone who pays attention to history, philosophy, civilization, and even common sense, it becomes clear that the past of mixed-ethnic and mixed-race societies has been troublesome; even mixed-religion and class conflict societies have more trouble than one where everything is in parallel: all people heading toward roughly the same purpose, religion and culture and government in unison, and a clear shared heritage — customs, beliefs, language, and genetics — pointing to a continuity between and past and a future where a people keeps improving what they have always been without altering it.

If we are in civil war conditions, it is a cold civil war. Right now, the Left controls the media and language, but those who have escaped the “mental virus” are fighting back after having seen its endgame with the rise of globalism, minority identity politics, and Leftist managerial society as the proposed solutions to perpetual problems fail time and again. We need a reboot and re-ordering.

Our future on the Right consists of more debunking of the Establishment mythos that enables people to play follow-the-leader by bleating it and attracting support from a wide audience. Every doubt that we sew which is also true helps reveal that we are living under a system every bit as controlling and inept as Soviet Communism, but its failure is happening slowly as it did in Russia.

We must also continue gently hinting at certain directions we need to take in order to survive. Democracy makes bad decisions; diversity creates instability; sexual revolutions destroy the family; lack of a caste-structure and aristocracy creates an inverted society consumed by infighting over wealth and power. Inject reality and insanity eventually flees.

In a broader sense, however, what it all means is that the mass culture mob of individualists have failed. They promised a Utopia, and delivered an abyss. It is time to not just reject our false elites, but also to refute the method — appeal to the masses, or “Crowdism” — that they used to get in power. We have no division to fear; we are already permanently divided.

Tags: crowdism, davos elites, division, false elites, follow-the-leader, Globalism

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