by Brett Stevens on October 31, 2018

What is modernity? It is the time of external forces attempting to change internal forces: since The Enlightenment,™ when we decided that each human individual was important, we have eliminated any consider of inner experience or differences from our vocabularies. As a result, we treat people like programmable robots, not individuals.

This would not be the first time that a human desire achieved the opposite effect of its intent. Individualists want to celebrate the individual, but they do so by assuming that focus on the individual and not the context in which it thrives makes the individual stand out, but that focus instead forces the individual into debt to the group because it must support all individuals in that quest and therefore can never choose a right way of doing things. With individualism, individuality is destroyed and replaced by politics.

Modernity consists of this external force. If modernity has a symbol, it would be control: the use of regulation of the methods that others use in order to influence their internal thinking. We like to control each other, mainly because so much of our history has consisted of lower class revolts, mass panics, and other instances of human herd behavior.

Control makes people weak by removing agency from them as well as context. They follow what the group determines is importance, forgetting the “why” behind those choices and eventually, having their ability to choose atrophy. They act for themselves alone, removing context, but forgetting that context bestows meaning.

Eventually this meaningless life destroys them, and we are seeing this in effect within the modern West. People are not reproducing at replacement rates; they are addicted to antidepressants, drugs, and alcohol just to make it through the average day; they seem to exist in a brain fog of confusion, depression, and distraction.

A life without some sense of purpose other than simply material survival has no meaning and no interest for people above a certain level of intelligence. It simply crushes them to live this way. Miserable and alienated, they self-destruct through many minor acts and end up bitter, old, and unwilling to commit to anything but their own pleasure. This does not help them either.

Keep that in mind when you realize that hopelessness causes people to die:

On April 30th 1954, Major Henry A. Segal, a medical officer in the US Army authored a report to a describing a strange “syndrome” that plagued the prisoner of war camps during the Korean War. The men stopped eating, would only consume cold water, and stopped talking about the future. They were simply waiting to die. “With the passage of time, they withdrew more and more from all contacts and became mute and motionless,” the report read. “Finally they ‘turned their faces to the wall’ and died. From the onset of first symptom to demise took a period of three weeks, ‘almost to the day’.”

Our society induces this despair by denying all things which are appreciated by the more intelligent, stronger, wiser, better, more insightful, or more sensitive. For equality to exist, we must invert the natural power structure; this creates a society where the hive/horde rules over their betters. The good are punished and the bad are rewarded, and that way everyone feels safe from the threat of criticism, revealing their own incompetence, or losing social status (virtue signaling points).

That in turn produces a problem: people are rewarded for obedience and being inoffensive, not for being effective in ways that the system did not anticipate. It is the ultimate closed mind; such a system knows what it wants, and rewards that, but anything outside of what its bureaucrats intend gets punished, and so over the generations it goes further into itself and people realize that actual achievement is not rewarded at all.

People need to feel that they will be rewarded for doing good. Otherwise, doing good becomes inefficient, and being bad becomes optimal. When that happens, all the good people die out or at least stop reproducing, and the horde of greedy morons rushes in because its selfishness has been legitimized.

We know that healthy, strong, and intelligent people expect to rise:

Men with large upper bodies have a tendency to favour inequality in society and a limited redistribution of resources. “This logic was adaptive under the conditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as stronger men here would have been able to secure resources on their own. But it’s an irrational way of dealing with modern day political resource conflicts. Today, physical strength is highly unlikely to affect how big a share of society’s resources you are able to acquire. However, our data shows that physical strength nonetheless continues to affect men’s political attitudes toward redistribution,” says Lasse Laustsen. According to the researchers, the new results may explain the paradox of why some men with limited financial resources still favour financial inequality although they would, in fact, benefit from a greater redistribution of resources. “Our analysis suggests that these men expect to be able to rise in the hierarchy on their own. And once they reach the top of the hierarchy, an unequal society will increase their chances of maintaining that position,” says Laustsen.

Those who are capable do not want redistribution; they know that they can achieve what they need on their own. This angers those in society who either cannot or do not want to achieve the same, and so they crusade to invert the society and punish those who are self-sufficient.

In this inverted society, the strong are penalized for being above-average. The weaker gain an advantage because they are protected and they are more efficient, since they get the same reward for less risk and expenditure of energy. Over time, this creates a society where the good — moral, strong, intelligent, healthy, beautiful, wise — finish last.

This society where good people finish last convinces any given group of the futility of its task and makes them moribund with depression:

Nice people may be at greater risk of bankruptcy and other financial hardships compared with their less agreeable peers, not because they are more cooperative, but because they don’t value money as much, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Interestingly, the researchers were surprised to find that even when agreeableness was measured in childhood, it still predicted greater financial hardship later in life. The research included survey data from a cohort study, following the same individuals over more than 25 years.

Reading between the lines, this means that the greedy succeed while the normal — people who are not particularly motivated by money — are squeezed out. If you wanted a formula for making an entire society into a Der Sturmer characterization of Jews or Stalin-era satire of kulaks, this will do it.

In other words, only the money-obsessed get ahead, which means that those who have some purpose in life other than money, such as actually being good at something, are not getting ahead either. That is the nature of an inverted society: it destroys the strong in order to subsidize the weak, a parasitic rather than symbiotic relationship.

This makes people ragingly depressed but also ensures that they cannot express that depression, since they will simply be run over by everyone else for noticing that our human system is — like other doomed civilizations before it — experiencing collapse and will soon consume itself.

We can add to our falling reproduction rates, high incidence of suicide, and other self-destructive behaviors the revelation that people in the West use a lot of drugs:

New York City employers are squarely blaming a raging drug epidemic for much of the trouble they have filling jobs in one of the tightest labor markets in a generation. …Many jobs in New York City now take 60 days or more to fill. Thirty percent of the openings in New York City for registered nurses, bartenders, delivery drivers, program managers and machine operators that are posted on professional job Web sites go unfilled for 60 days or more, according to the employment portals.

Happy people do not use drugs, in contrast to what the media shows you. Happy people may down some beers on a weekend, or even puff the devil’s salad from time to time, but they are not consistently wasted. Now consider that the people they catch are the unwary, which means many more get away with it, and that there are legal avenues of abuse as well.

If you examine the dumpster or recycling behind any block of luxury housing, you will find a lot of bottles. Wine, beer, and hard liquor are consumed in high frequency by those who are by any metric “successful” in this society. This is not a sign of the good life, but of anaesthetic applied in order that these people can carry on.

Jobs are jails. Cities are ugly, filthy, and dangerous. Pop culture is a horror. Government is a parasite. People have become greedy, mean, cruel, and manipulative, which means that they embrace you with words of love while plotting your downfall. Misery is endemic just under the surface, but above that surface in the happy thought-bubble of modern programming, no one will notice.

Modernity terminates populations by rewarding the bad among them, causing the good to stop breeding and die out. When enough greedy morons exist, it can simply outvote the rest, which gives power to the head greedy morons and sets society on a course for collapse, which is what you would expect would happen if greedy morons took over.

Only by reversing this course and removing equality can it survive, but at that stage, most of its citizens are so afraid of anything other than what is known that they will fight this tooth and nail, actively participating joyfully in their own destruction. This is how empires die, and how races of humans leave this Earth.

Tags: atomization, hopelessness, meaninglessness, self-destruction, suicide

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