by Brett Stevens on August 27, 2009

As humans we learn to distrust early. First we are told that there is a process, and so we go along with it. Then we figure out that while the process has a goal, some people have changed their goal to be the process itself, which lets them have other more selfish goals.

For instance, rules about discipline. You’re not supposed to cause conflict. So some kid starts whispering nasty things about your mom until you finally turn around and tell him to shut up. Then his hand goes up. The teacher, distracted and barely in control of 30 students, needs to make an example of someone to keep the herd in line. He sees the raised hand. You’re the bad guy now.

This is where Americans and Europeans especially split: Americans have learned to fear bureaucracy more, because in a “melting pot” society we cannot rely on common reference points, so everything must be done with very specific rules.

And rules, which work as absolutes without any consideration of context, tend to be overreactions in their mechanical blindness. A central body decides what is “right,” and then forces us all to comply. Do this or you face bad consequences. Rules also reflect the utilitarian error of assuming that what most people think they want is what is best for us all.

Even worse, rules are administered by governments. If you want an unchallenging career where you can almost never be fired, and where you’ll be valued because you are from a group that traditionally has not succeeded in business, government is a good place to be. As a result, although not all government workers are this way, many are incompetents bristling with revenge — and rules give them the ability to tell more successful people to STFU.

This is why many of us distrust government. We don’t like bureaucracies, and we don’t trust the rest of you. We know that most of you are like the kid who insults our mother and then informs on us to the teacher-bureaucracy. If most of you weren’t this way, humanity would not require so many rules, regulations, legal debates, and oversight. But it does because when we remove these things, situations really get out of control.

Those of us who have accepted reality have also accepted that most of you have changed your goal to be the process itself, because you have no goal except yourself. You are irresponsible. You don’t care about your effect on others, nature, or the world at large. You want whatever it is that has popped in your little heads, and you don’t care what you have to do to get it. If you get caught, you’ll blame the person who caught you. You’ll blame anyone but yourself. It’s never your fault, and we should always pay for your mistake.

That’s the root of our hatred of socialism — the idea of equality in schools, the welfare state, the nanny state, socialized medicine, no child left behind, you name it — we see how socialism makes more bureaucracy necessary and gives more power to the people without goals who take over the process, instead of having a goal like those of us who are more realistic.

Instead of life being a game where finding the right federal agency or right social policy is the way to win, people like me would argue, life is a game of picking the good people and promoting them, and kicking out the bad, lazy, criminal, irresponsible, opportunist, stupid, etc. That’s an analogue to natural selection, and natural selection is the only reason we’re not still covered in hair, flinging poo and living in trees.

It’s funny how people are so quick to freak out about someone who denies the theory of evolution, but if you bring up the other part of natural selection — that we’re not equal, and that for us to improve, we need to weed out the stupid and reward the best — they freak out because, tautologically, that doesn’t support equality and they equate equality and tolerance for all people with The One True Moral Path.

Here’s why we hate bureaucracy:

A County Londonderry pensioner who has lived without electricity for 27 years has been told NIE will charge him Â£67,000 to link his home to the grid. John McCarter, 74, has no central heating at his Downhill home and uses bottled gas and candles for light. The electricity company said the cost was so high because cables would have to go underground because he lives in an area of special scientific interest. BBC

“Special scientific interest” shows there was clearly once a reason for what’s happening here. But in the hands of a bureaucracy, it becomes a knee-jerk absolute reason that cannot be argued with except by, of course, getting public attention to it. Yet what about the people without the luxury of so much time they can devote themselves to fighting this one aspect of thousands in life? That’s right: they just STFU while the bureaucracy gloats.

We don’t want this to happen to our health care. We don’t want this to happen to our society. We also don’t want it to become part of our values system.

Now look at who’s cheering for socialized health care. Big media, as you know, reports what it can but also must make its advertisers happy. So some stories are “news” and others are basically advertising. They can easily fool us by re-districting categories to include unrelated things with one thing in common, in order to prove a point. See this in action here:

Critics of President Obamaâ€™s push for health care reform have been whipping up fear that proposed changes will destroy our â€œworldâ€™s bestâ€ medical system and make it like supposedly inferior systems elsewhere. The emptiness of those claims became apparent recently when researchers from the Urban Institute released a report analyzing studies that have compared the clinical effectiveness and quality of care in the United States with the care dispensed in other advanced nations. They found a mixed bag, with the United States doing better in some areas, like cancer care, and worse in others, like preventing deaths from treatable and preventable conditions. The bottom line was unmistakable. The analysts found no support for the claim routinely made by politicians that American health care is the best in the world and no hard evidence of any particular area in which American health care is truly exceptional. NYT

What a lovely sleight-of-hand! First they tell us we’re doing better in some areas; then, they say that we’re not doing enough to “prevent deaths from treatable and preventable conditions.” But they don’t assess whether the patients have done enough to help themselves in that category. After all, a patient has to ask a doctor for help, but if we believe these Urban Institute geniuses, the doctor should be prescient and find patients with treatable conditions and force them to get treatment — to keep our numbers up, of course.

The conclusion these rocket scientists draw is that our health system is not the world’s best, because — and it literally hinges on this — we don’t do enough to prevent deaths from “treatable and preventable conditions.” Like what? Smoking? They’re trying to convince us that the results of patient + medicine are entirely dependent on medicine alone.

Never mind that different countries have different people. Never mind that not every person takes a responsible attitude toward health care. We want to have someone to blame! And so they cook up this “study,” which like all things fits under that old saw (“correlation is not causation”) expanded to our new rule here at Amerika.org: “considering effects but not causes lets us blame the last visible actor in a complex situation.”

Like the kid who snaps back at the kid who repeatedly insults his mother. The (passive) aggressor is the insulter, but the blind and stupid social bureaucracy blames the snapper, and then calls it justice, and then tries to rally all of us to crush the snapper if he protests. That’s why we distrust the rest of of you: society’s problem isn’t that it’s unequal, but that it’s unjust, especially to those who insist on order that the system itself has not made a bureaucracy out of.

The Patients Association said its report showed that appalling standards were more widespread than just at that trust. Relatives described how they found their loved ones dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine, and told of problems in getting help from nurses. Ron Kirk said his father, Leslie, was admitted to hospital in October 2007 having suffered a stroke, but his treatment at the hands of some nurses amounted to cruelty. His father had been fitted with the wrong catheter, leaving him in pain, but nurses took away his bedside alarm because they thought he was “pressing it too often”, Mr Kirk said. BBC

As William S. Burroughs says, bureaucracies are a cancer. I doubt he voted Republican. My guess is that this issue should be bipartisan, but big media and social figures have convinced leftists to cowlike support anything tinged with “socialism,” even though socialism itself is a substitute for the goals of the left. If you’re the provoker, socialism is good; if you’re the independent who doesn’t want to hear his mom insulted, it’s bad.

Here’s more measuring of effects without considering causes — liberal concern over the “inequality numbers” revealing the share of our economy held by the top earners — which of course doesn’t consider the vital question: has our population changed? Well of course it has, especially dramatically since 1965.

Maybe this would have a consequence on such numbers. But we don’t want to consider that. We want a single point of blame, so we’re going to blame the rich for continuing to succeed while we flood this society with home-grown idiots, migrant day workers, college-educated fools sired of strippers by fat businessmen, and so on. We, the people, want someone to blame so we can go back to ignoring all the problems because …look what’s on TV!

The problem is not that inequality exists, or that our health care is bad. Our health care is the best in the world, for those who are willing to be alert, responsible, and proactive about finding care. Life here is better than anywhere else, if you’re willing to find a good job, work hard and effectively at it, and be responsible in your personal life. But that key concept, responsible and attentive, is what pisses wannabe socialists off. They want a bureaucracy to spoon-feed them, and even while they mew like babies about state control, they won’t mind if that state control is both free and easy.

At the end of the day, I — and many others who are now discontented in this country — are from the other group. We want to tell that kid to shut up about our mother and if he doesn’t, we’ll pound his ass and if we lose, he’ll know that next time it won’t be easy. We want to work hard on making ourselves responsible and taking care of our families, and we want the clueless and irresponsible people to die out, if possible, but at the very least we don’t want them perpetuated on our dime. We like both evolution and natural selection and don’t go into denial about them for religious or political reasons.

We are the group that has made the USA what it is. We don’t require state support. We don’t need subsidies. We don’t complain, we just do what we do to take care of what we believe in. Europe also has many of these people, but since 1789 and even more since 1917, they’ve been in decline. This is why to everyone except the Western media, it’s clear the West is in decline.

The health care debate is just a small part of our attempt to reverse that decline, not by political solutions, but by retuning our spirits and outlooks toward rugged independence and distrust of the parasitic majority, so that we can begin rewarding the excellent among us again instead of spending all of our energy trying to help those who will not and cannot help themselves.

Summary: Why we don’t want socialism — we distrust the irresponsible majority who blame us for their own problems

Tags: crowdism

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