by Brett Stevens on November 9, 2011

When we go looking for solutions, we must sure we have correctly identified the cause of the problem we want to fix. Although that sounds obvious, most people confuse a problem for its cause.

Every problem that appears such that we recognize it has a cause and until we find that cause, we are treating symptoms but not curing the patient. To make matters difficult, these causes are often removed by time and distance from the point of impact.

As you wander through politics, you will eventually find that there is only one issue: the health or lack thereof of the civilization. Everything else is a method to that end. However, most of these end up being misdiagnosed causes and so even radical fixes do not in actuality fix anything.

For the heretical, a few examples:

Banks are not the cause of bankruptcy; bad regulation and mass irresponsibility are.

Bad government is not the cause of bad government; a clueless population that elects liars and demands unrealistic benefits is.

Crime is not the cause of crime, for example; degenerates plus tolerance for degeneracy causes crime.

Drug abuse is not the cause of drug abuse; misery, boredom and permissiveness causes drug abuse.

Degeneracy is not the cause of degeneracy; lack of will to make moral decisions plus lack of strong social standards is.

Pornography is not the cause of rape; a stultified desire for power over other human beings is the cause of both.

Note that cause/effect reasoning is abused in another way, also, which is the liberal tendency to blame social institutions and culture values for the failings of the individual. If Johnny drinks his way through life and ends up impoverished, the banks did it to him, in this view.

We have no shortage of mis-diagnosed causes of our decline, but here’s one example of a talented writer who has picked an intermediate cause and claimed it as the primary cause (in his defense, he never claims to have found a root cause).

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality of Black Run America; a nation where every institution is entirely devoted to protecting and promoting the interests of Black people above all others. – SBPDL

He has noticed something true, but it’s not the root cause. The truth of race in America is that all of our diversity-mania, anti-discrimination hysteria and perfervid rage for an egalitarian order is actually a method. This method aims to achieve something else, which is Total Equality (TE).

Since 1789, when the French Revolution overthrew the monarchy and created a republic based on equality, we have been living in an era without leaders. Instead, we are led by the People themselves, which by statistics means we are led by the most numerous group, the proles.

Today, we are living in Prole-Run America (PRA). It is run by proles, who vote, buy products and create social trends. Those votes, purchases and trends in turn determine what the power structure accomodates. The People are the focus of the society and its leaders, and the rest follow their lead.

Then, in order that we may see clearly what we are doing, let us imagine democracy to be divided, as indeed it is, into three classes; for in the first place freedom creates rather more proles in the democratic than there were in the oligarchical State. That is true. And in the democracy they are certainly more intensified. How so? Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost everything is managed by the proles. – Plato, The Republic

When you hear about an “evil” corporation, realize that this corporation is selling products the proles demand. An evil bank is writing the policies that government commands and the People desire. Our evil politicians are in office because most of our people voted for them, even if on the basis of lies.

The problem is not our institutions, our leaders, or diversity. Those are intermediate causes. The root cause is that we have handed power to the group least suited to wield it, which is the average (meaning not distinguished by any superior performance) citizen.

The average citizen is oblivious to anything outside his little world. He is selfish, and doesn’t really care about the consequences to others. He litters, and drives too big of a car, and watches too much TV. He’s not suited for anything, except buying products and voting for manipulative politicians.

Prole-Run America (PRA) is what happens when we put all these gullible proles in charge of the most powerful nation-state on earth. They vote for pleasant illusions, and they get angry when unpleasant truths are mentioned, and do their best to bury them and drive away the truth-tellers.

In large groups, they band together and decide to take money from other people, or to make war on other nations like Libya whose only sin is not being a liberal democracy like us. The proles swarm and make trends, turning our culture from forward-looking to inward-looking.

They insist that every concept in politics, economics or the news be super-simplified until it barely explains itself. They will make you rich for pandering to their urges, making excuses for their failings, and offering them whatever venal act or product they desire.

As a result, everyone follows the proles. We need their votes, purchases and trends. Why have Beethoven when the proles want Lady Gaga? Why have filet mignon when the proles want cheeseburgers? Why have sensible politics when the proles want more free handouts, welfare and entitlements?

Prole-Run America (PRA) is the downfall of America. It is a once-powerful country destroying itself from within. Just as the evil corporations are not our problem, the evil Vandals are not our problem. They are just the coup de grace which will come after we destroy ourselves.

Our problem is the individual. The individual citizen, detached from responsibility or concern for consequences, follows his selfish and insular desires. In his wake, he leaves mounds of garbage and poorly-executed ideas. He doesn’t care; he’s getting what he wants.

Most of our fellow proles right now are congratulating themselves on living in the best time ever. They are blind to the fact that this country is disintegrating, and soon will be no more. They don’t notice, because they are distracted by all this free stuff, and good things to buy, and how important they feel.

Together the proles form a crowd, and unaware of the superior logic of anything more complicated than what they can understand, they join up like a lynch mob to smash down the bad ideas and replace them with “safe” ideas in which everyone is equal. The wisdom of crowds turns into brainwashing conformity:

We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures. The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner. This time, though, the subjects were given a â€œlifelineâ€: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure. – Wired

Alone, we can make reasonable estimates. Together, we fall, because we influence each other and converge on a mean. This mean isn’t one that exists in reality, but in the human mind. We become locked in the intersection of narcissism and oblivion, unaware of anything but ourselves.

Our problem is not one of the issues on the surface, like diversity, the national debt, or the wars overseas. Our problem is that those problems came about because we cannot make decisions, because our motives are corrupt, and because the People cannot lead. Proles are not competent as leaders, and are even worse in large groups.

As a result, like Rome and Greece before us, we enter the slow spiral of decline:

In “Suicide of a Superpower,” out this week, I argue that the America we grew up in is disintegrating, breaking apart along the fault lines of politics, race, ethnicity, culture and faith; that the centrifugal forces in society have now become the dominant forces. Our politics are as poisonous as they have been in our lifetimes. – Pat Buchanan, “Is America Disintegrating?”

We are falling apart because there is no center.

Instead, we have as many centers as we have people, each pulling in their own direction.

Equality does not produce leadership. It produces the destruction of leadership. Our country drifts without the ability to make firm choices. We try to be everything to everyone. When that doesn’t work, we fight even harder for universal True Equality, like cultists following a dying religion.

As we fall apart, the profiteers are always there:

Today, most authoritarian rulers prefer to keep a low profile. In any case, real power no longer belongs with the medal-wearing figure strutting in front of the crowd, but with the grey men watching from their corporate boardrooms. To multinational giants such as Glencore, the worldâ€™s biggest commodity trader, which controls 50 per cent of the global copper market, 60 per cent of zinc and a quarter of the worldâ€™s barley, sunflower and rape seed, most of these dictators must look like pygmies. – Daily Mail

They would not exist if it were not for the proles who demand their products cheaply so that we can all live like kings, or at least whatever slice of kingly life an equal king can lead. Our politicians do nothing because the voters punish inconvenience and unpleasant truths, and reward pleasant illusions.

You’d have to be a fool as a politician to do anything but lie, manipulate, cheat and steal. The voters basically told you to do that. They do not accept true answers; they demand illusions instead. As a result, they sabotage their own prole-leadership.

Add President Clinton to the long list of people who deserve a share of the blame for the housing bubble and bust. A recently re-exposed document shows that his administration went to ridiculous lengths to increase the national homeownership rate. It promoted paper-thin downpayments and pushed for ways to get lenders to give mortgage loans to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. Itâ€™s clear now that the erosion of lending standards pushed prices up by increasing demand, and later led to waves of defaults by people who never should have bought a home in the first place. – Business Week

They are only too happy to accept “free” things which are paid for with money taken from others. No one in the crowd expects to have to pay it back; they doubt that they’ll ever have much money in their lives, so nothing minus nothing is still nothing. Might as well get something for themselves, no matter the cost.

Some of the 40 million Americans currently receiving food stamps from the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program may soon be able to use them at participating fast food restaurants. Yum! Brands â€“ the parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W â€“ is lobbying to have food stamps be accepted at their restaurants. – WALB

They have trained you to see an evil corporation and blame it. But that’s as off-base as blaming black people for the fact that liberals use them as moral shields for their own wrongdoing. “I’m nice to black people, so I can’t be evil, even if you caught me red-handed!” is a familiar refrain.

What’s going on here is a study in cause and effect. The evil corporation arose because the opportunity is there and the voters are too dumb to figure it out. But what set it down that path was illusory promises and irrational policies, set into motion because those ideas sounded pleasant to 300 million proles.

Prole-Run America (PRA). It will be the last stage of America, and then we can rebuild again. The next nation will start with a simple premise, which is that leaders do what is right, and not simply what is popular, trendy or profitable as the proles would do.

Tags: collapse, crowdism, liberalism, PRA, prole-run america

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