by Brett Stevens on July 13, 2012

The modern religion that says we are all equal carries with it many costs, not the least of which is the idea of universal participation.

Like some cretinous plan of a grade school teacher, the modern state aims for stability and order imposed externally on its citizens. It doesn’t want them to work together, agree on values or even like each other; it wants to force them into line, to force them to share toys, and to force them to be deferential and pacifistic so that “everyone just gets along.”

The laziest teacher can appreciate this the most. When the students are conditioned to respond to external responses, the action of the teacher must be Boolean at best: yes, they conformed, pass them along, or no, they fought back, now they’re a threat so get them into The System.

Moronic as it is, this quasi-utopian plan takes advantage of the fear of people. They fear not being included, or violence, or instability. Civilization provides no shortage of people to provide the illusion of that stability at the price of having a society that is organized through external control, instead of internal (willpower, intention, values, morality) collaboration.

The goal of such a system is retardation. I mean that in the sense of flame retardant clothing, or parachute-retarded race cars. The goal is to slow everyone down and make any action other than conforming into a difficult, boring and error-prone process.

Like an assembly line, it forces people into categories, stamps the mold of approval over them, and then fails when they deviate at all from that course. Society is designed for the convenience of its bureaucrats, not for effectiveness or humane interaction.

One of the best ways of retarding a population is to force universal inclusiveness to an extreme degree. No one can eat lunch until everyone is seated and has their sandwich out; this forces the hungry people to make sure the slow people get their act together.

We can see this horrible mentation in public policy. Government needs to slow everyone down, so it insists on helping the most helpless cases first. The clueless, drug-addicted, impoverished by incompetence, criminal and foolish come first.

Naturally this makes the process perpetual. That is convenient for bureaucrats, who would like to be employed on the same schedule, so they can get in their 25 years of service and get out with a fat pension.

As a result, a kind of antisocial Darwinism occurs. Society favors the broken at the expense of the fixed. The result isn’t so much that the fixed are crushed, but that the broken proliferate and become permanent dependents of the state.

Eventually, that produces enough of a load on the productive that those stop producing because it is futile to do so; it doesn’t get them a better life, or change a broken system for the better.

At that point, society collapses, and we are forced to re-examine its path. Was the road to hell paved with good intentions? Yes, because good intentions are a substitute for studying reality enough to ensure good results.

The antisocial Darwinists will insist on huge transfers of money to inner city art clinics, homeless shelters, drug abuse resistance through disco dancing, and the like. They specialize in creating programs that fix no problems and cost a lot of money, because those programs accomplish their goal of retarding society.

In contrast, a social Darwinist system exists when a meritocracy is set up that rewards the good, intelligent, hard-working, competent and organized. At that point, nothing more must be done. The people who are most capable at the tasks required of people at the top are then the people who move to the top.

Alternatively, we could pursue the antisocial Darwinist regime, which promotes those who are dysfunctional so that those take care of the more dysfunctional. It amounts to a funneling of money from the competent to the incompetent.

For the past 200 years or so, the West has been in the grips of antisocial Darwinism. During this time we have seen our cultural output plummet from Beethoven to Justin Bieber, from Shakespeare to 50 Shades of Grey, from da Vinci to Thomas Kinkade.

Our society is shaking itself apart by the paradoxical futility of our approach. Luckily as the years wear on, it becomes clear that it takes two centuries or more to see the effects of a political act, and so we’re finally getting around to rejecting the assumptions that created antisocial Darwinism.

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