by Brett Stevens on November 25, 2011

Our society will always be divided into two groups: those who are dissatisfied, and everyone else.

Among the dissatisfied, a small minority — like one in ten thousand — will be ideologues working to fix a problem that no one else understands. Your classic mad scientist, convinced that Godzilla will attack and so laboring late into the night on a death ray, is a case in point.

The rest of the dissatisfied are hypocrites. Their position in life is bad because they are incompetent, or more likely because they have no impulse control and so are addicted to alcohol/drugs, make poor life decisions, are lazy and evasive.

Every society reaches a tipping point when it sees these people as underdogs, or victims of a superior opposing force, and not as those who defeat themselves. Once underdog politics enters your civilization, move: the place is about to fall apart.

It’s hard to oppose underdog politics for the same reason it’s hard to ignore charities: it looks good to other people if you’re helping out the people below you. It makes you look like a good person. In fact, it’s powerful advertising, which is why major corporations line up to donate to charities.

Underdogs will always pick underdog politics. The same factors that made them underdogs, namely poor impulse control and possibly incompetence, make them make another bad decision, which is to demand underdog politics. It will destroy the society upon which they depend, but they are oblivious to that.

Underdog politics always take the same form: we have conflict because we are not equal, so penalize those who are more equal, and then we will all be equal and live in peace, prosperity, brotherhood and freedom.

Except that reality is a moving target, which means that when you lunge at it, it moves in another direction. You cannot directly change it. You need to indirectly change it by altering the cause of a problem, like inequality, and not by trying to adjust the effect or symptoms of that problem directly.

For example, if you want to end inequality, you might decide to make everyone equally competent, with equal impulse control, through genetic engineering.

But for the most part, underdogs don’t want actual equality — what they want is to be treated as if they were equal, and for society to foot the bill.

This dogma has not changed since 1789 and the French Revolution, although it existed long before that. In fact, each society that grows prosperous faces this problem, because suddenly it’s easy to have people living in non-critical roles. Parasites, if you will.

1789 triggered a series of wars for power to fill in the leadership gap created by deposing the monarchy. Those in turn led to WWI, which begat WWII and the Cold War, during which time the 1789 dogma flowered as a hybrid of liberalism and consumerism in the West. That is its final and most potent form.

Do I mean to say we’re living under exactly the same regime that afflicted us 222 years ago with a reign of murder, poverty, chaos and instability? Yes: we’re repeating exactly the same dogma.

Underdogs demand it.

A Right that simply accepts, without question, the universal suffrage of all persons, including women, wards of the state, felons, persons with sub-normal intelligence, and 18 year olds, is not a serious Right. Furthermore, many destructive trends have been unleashed in the modern world by extreme notions of equality that are incompatible with a healthy and truly free social order. Here then is a proposal suggested recently by an intellectual acquaintance, the basic principle and outline of which make a great deal of sense to me. I am not embracing the specific details, since a variety of means to obtain the same ends are possible. But to me the basic idea seems compelling. The franchise, my friend said, should be limited to married men with children who are net tax payers. This means that the vote, and the ability to serve in political office, would be limited to men who are responsible contributors to society. Men who are not married, or who do not have children born in wedlock, or who are not net tax payers, do not have a sufficient material stake in the society as an ongoing enterprise to be counted on to play a responsible role in its direction. Therefore they should not have a direct voice–as voters and office holders–in its direction. – View From the Right

What most people do not — or honestly: find it convenient not to — understand is that the right and left are different in ideal. This means that even if our current “right wing” politicians are not doing a good job of upholding the right, the idea of what is rightist has not changed.

The left is the idea that we must all be equal in order to eliminate strife. In essence, we must change effect to change cause.

The right is the idea that we must adapt to the order of nature in order to personally grow. In essence, we must change cause to change effect.

They are night-and-day different, but the leftist-friendly (because that’s what sells) media establishment, commerce, government, celebrities, neurotic neighbors, chattering classes and shopgirls of the world want you to believe otherwise.

They want you to think that left and right are the same, so we should just go with what’s leftist because it’s correct and our politicians aren’t doing it right. Or something; they don’t know. What they know is that they are dissatisfied underdogs and in the very short term, more equality might feel comfortable.

â€œOverwhelmingly, the data showed that students had positive implicit and explicit associations with creativity,â€ says Jennifer Mueller of the University of Pennsylvania. But in experiments, peopleâ€™s perceptions changed. In one experiment, the researchers made some people think about uncertaintyâ€”by telling them they might get some extra money after the study based on a random lottery. Other participants went into the study without that priming. They were all given a test that shows how they group concepts together. The people who had been made to think about uncertainty were more likely to subconsciously associate words like â€œcreative,â€ â€œinventive,â€ and â€œoriginalâ€ with bad concepts like â€œhell,â€ â€œrotten,â€ and â€œpoison.â€ In the other condition people associated creativity words with things like â€œrainbow,â€ â€œcake,â€ and â€œsunshine.â€ â€œIf I ask you right now to estimate whether or not you can generate a creative idea to solve a problem, youâ€™re not going to know,â€ Mueller says. That feeling of uncertainty might be the root of the problem. When youâ€™re trying to come up with a creative solution to a problem, you worry that you canâ€™t come up with a good idea, that what you do come up with might not be practical, or that your idea might make you look stupid. – Medical Xpress

What this study is saying in a more concise form is: people dislike uncertainty. They would prefer a far more limited solution to taking a risk on uncertainty.

Underdog politics want to eliminate uncertainty through equality. But in doing so, they murder any ability to actually think, and to see reality itself, mainly because reality is less popular than an illusion because reality is more uncertain.

Because of the dissatisfied, we give up on our best hopes and instead accept mediocre solutions, so that we do not cause worries to our least productive and hopeful group. It’s a world turned upside down.

Tags: crowdism, liberalism, neurosis

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