by Vijay Prozak on August 31, 2005

History may run in cycles, but each era has its distinctive flavor, and those form the methods by which its part in the process of history is fulfilled. In our modern time, we have uniquely united the world through centralized media, by which someone in one location produces what comes to be known as the official “truth,” and it is then distributed throughout the globe almost instantly. The people of earth, conditioned to require the absolute “truth” from central agencies on matters of commerce and governmental regulation, promptly extend the same courtesy to political and social truth as conveyed by the “official” media.

The result of this is that a small group of people create our public perceptions of events; the events happen, and the rest of us, who are fated to find out about them second-hand in any case, rely on the descriptions of those events relayed to us by this centralized source. In such a climate, it is not surprising that there are errors in our perception of reality, as all that is required is for those in the “official” truth-telling capacity to miss a detail or, more likely, be convinced for social reasons that they need to hush that detail. It will put people out of jobs; it will make people feel bad; they don’t need to know what they can do nothing about; it will not benefit your (you, personally, the guy responsible for putting out the news) career.

Who Owns Truth?

Another way of saying this is that if fifteen people witness an event and give roughly similar testimony, barring any prior agreement to collusion among them, it’s a lot more accurate than if there’s only one eye-witness who also has a vested interest in how the outcome is viewed. If the landlord of a building is the one person to witness its burning, and he claims it was the reckless conduct of the tenants and not shoddy construction that allowed the blaze to devour the complex entirely, how likely are we to wholly believe him? After all, he has a reason to lie that directly benefits his livelihood. The same can be said of our media, who eat based not on the degree of truth to their stories, but the degree of human interest. They sell drama, but not difficult truths, as those will make one unpopular enough to be bankrupt.

For this reason, it has been very slowly that discontent has built in our society, because for most people, there was never any reason to trust the official version of events until now. We were told foreign dictators were bad, so we all banded together and crushed them. We were told that we needed to buy certain products, so we did, hoping to keep our families safe and futures secure. We were told that it was important to believe certain things, as they were ideologies of the future, and through this “progress” we got to a better life; who doesn’t want that? Most of us live in small worlds, focused around family and friends and local social community, and we don’t want more than that. Nothing is more admirable, since this is a view of life that negates fear of death and embraces what life offers the individual outside of social and monetary absolutes. It’s a healthy, normal existence.

Yet these small worlds have been shattered, as despite our armies of scientists and reporters and researchers, these problems crept up on us: global warming, terrorism, mass immigration, economic collapse. It’s well and fine to have missed a few fragments of information here and there, and to be surprised by a shortfall in a government program or a new population trend, but how does something as big as global warming sneak up on us? That’s like getting ambushed by a glacier. Undoubtedly, the thought that hit many minds when after years of fighting the story, our news media and politicians finally gave in and said, “Aw shucks, this global warming thing is real,” was quite simply that either we’re being told a partial story or, more ominously, that these people do not care enough about reality to get the whole story. This puts an image in our minds of, instead of diligent and honest guardians, profiteers running the show who leave it to us to survive as we can.

With this sudden distrust of the “truth” upon which our society is based comes another sobering thought: for things to get this out of control, where we are controlled by predators who seem oblivious to our future, something must be fundamentally wrong about the way we’re governing ourselves. As said before, most people are content to lead local lives, but our world is now so interconnected that government rarely stops at the town, city, parish or county. If people in distant nations screw up and dump uranium into our oceans, we get the cancers here just as fatally as anywhere else. Should negotiations fail and nuclear war rain death upon us, our localities – which have been quietly going about life – are no longer autonomous, but targets belonging to whatever political entity incurred ire. Our lives are bound up in the fortunes of the collective, and when it errs, we are the ones who pay. How do you hold a government, or a corporation, or a world governing body responsible? You can haul out the people in office and shoot them, but that is little recompense for the vast amounts of good things destroyed by the errors of such leadership entities.

If we follow this chain of thought to its logical conclusion, then we are – as a species – ruled by distant forces who have little accountability for the decisions that affect us, and may be motivated by self-interest more than the best interests of the species as a whole. Modern people are so used to long strings of words that mean nothing, so this is restated in the vernacular: you are under the control of people who are leading you to their profit, not yours. Even more, if you resist, other people – well-meaning, normal, healthy people – will do their best to kill you, believing that they are destroying a dangerous deviant and not someone with a rational objection to the system as a whole. In other words, the world is turned upside down; truth has become a fabrication, the predators are in control, and dissent is not tolerated in any way that will have actual effect. If one were paranoiac, it would suggest an evil force in control of this world.

Deflection

Yet it is the demonic nature of this process alone that provides us a clue to its origin. No human organization in history has been so well-managed that it could pull off a conspiracy of this nature without revealing itself or collapsing in infighting. Whatever engendered this particular mess did not have a leader, or a central organizing principle, although it has manifested itself in centralized authority. A systematic change to this kind of order comes through a shared assumption, much like when a group of friends, upon perceiving their favorite bar is closed, meet at the next most likely place without having to communicate the name amongst themselves. More than a leaderless revolution, it was an unconscious one: those who brought it about had no idea they shared an ideology, or no idea what its name might be, or even why they did it. They simply did it because it was natural to do, and because nothing has since opposed it, it continues to this day in grossly simplified form.

We are tempted by the opposite conclusion, because if we were able to find a single easy cause, like removing a jam from a machine we could yank it out, and by mathematical simplicity, would have all of the good in society with the negative removed, thus an all-good society. When was the last time life was that simple? Any infection on the level of our assumptions has pervaded our society at its lowest level, that of its values and worldview. We could blame language, or x=y thinking, or sin waves of emotion, or any of the other detours that have absorbed our best liberal thinkers looking for a symbological fix to our problem, but really, these are just the devil’s messengers. What’s wrong isn’t us; it’s what we think we believe, and even if we say we want to fix it, our minds have become mesmerized by a certain outlook on the world and are unwilling to leave it. Thus our disease remains, since even when trying to excise it, we re-affirm the infection by assuming the necessity of its component parts.

It’s like the mafia boss who’s determined to root out the informer in his organization. He and his personal secretary interview all of his department heads, and after some theorizing, they put the worst of them into the bay. But the next time a bust happens, the boss realizes he’s still infected. He goes after every person he can think of, but can’t ever clear himself of the informant, until one day he’s put into jail. You can imagine his shock when the star witness comes out to confront him: his personal secretary! In our case, as moderns, the disease is worse than an informing secretary; it’s within us. There is no clearer evidence of this than our mania for deflection. Is it the Communists? Then the other side whispers: it’s the Capitalists. Is it the drug-users? The hackers? The terrorists? The Nazis? Who else can we blame – what do we do when we finally run out of people to blame? (It’s not fair to let the right off the hook either: it’s not the Negroes or the Jews that are the root of your problem, although their presence can be argued to be a symptom!)

All of these futile attempts have failed, since even when these demons have been exorcised, the disease has remained. That is not to say that these attempts have not improved the situation, only that they haven’t gotten to the core of it. Think for a moment: what sort of problem is it that one cannot identify and root out? The simple answer: one you cannot tell to another person, and therefore, even if you know it, no one else can work on the problem – and in modern society, every problem is too big for one man. Imagine working with another police inspector on this case. You can tell the guy everything except that which might potentially hurt his feelings. So the investigation goes on, and despite your partner being slower than you are, he puts his heart into it. At the end you have no answers, because both of you don’t know the answer, even though it’s in your knowledge.

The dirty little secret of the West’s collapse is that it has come from within. The extent of our modern disease is revealed by the fact that when we think this, we immediately try to blame either everyone, or no one. We are afraid to blame a process and implicate certain people as its methods. And why not? We’re not passing moral judgment, claiming them to be the spawn of Satan, as our leaders do to enemies during wartime. All we are saying is that they, by what they do, have caused a massive problem. The real social taboo broken here is the unstated obvious: in order to fix the problem, we have to limit their sainted “freedom.” Nevermind that few people actually need freedom. What they want are normal, comfortable lives, without other people intruding in upon them and telling them what to think. That’s not freedom; it’s common sense and common decency. People like to conceive of “freedom,” however, as a limitless absolute. “I can do anything I want,” they say, forgetting that most of what they actually want falls within the narrow sphere of what benefits them in a practical sense. You could make sculptures out of your own mucus… but do you need that “freedom”?

Yet any person who advocates breeching that “freedom” is portrayed to be a bad guy, which is interesting, since in times without freedom, there was not such widespread deception where a few people could control “truth” for an entire planet, even if through the quasi-voluntarily methods of television and entertainment media. To a thinking person, the fear of losing “freedom” is another type of deflection: finding something irrelevant to the cause to blame. It’s psychologically very easy, actually: to blame something external divides the world into two segments, the desired and the undesired. In actuality, it makes no sense to divide things that already exist into desired/undesired, because the only thing that can be desired is an outcome and by definition anything but that outcome is undesired – yet outcomes usually occur in partial degrees, or with modifications, so that kneejerk response makes little sense. When manipulating the masses, however, it makes sense to tell them that the world is divided into “freedom” and those who hate freedom, as they react more quickly to the positive feelings associated with “freedom” and only more slowly to the logic trap into which they fall. Heart first, then brain – even with very smart people.

Crowdism

This emotional process of trying to solve logical issues is obviously paradoxical, but it is the foundation of our modern morality, which is derived in part from Christianity but has previous antecedents; this means that while Christianity (as practiced by most, not the happy few who’ve made a real religion of it!) embraces this ambient quasi-ideology we are describing, it is not the sole origin of it. Rather, morality of this type has been with the world since its earliest days; it is not a new invention, merely a less successful one, thus one that was until recently alien to our societies because many generations ago we transcended it. It is a belief system based on appearances: emotions come before logic, personal boundaries come before the necessity of doing what is right for all, and abstract divisions of “good” and “evil” regarding intent come before a realization of the effect of any action. In short, this is a belief system which manipulates by preventing certain actions rather than by recommending others, and it attacks before any action is ever committed.

When we remove all the irrelevant theory, what becomes clear is that this is a belief system designed to protect a type of person; that is why its negative, preemptive assessment. It does not have a goal. It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them. These sort of people might be described as passive criminals, then, since what they do is not outright criminal, but by being what is done instead of pursuing a healthy goal, and by requiring a morality that prevents others from interrupting it, it supplants the seeking of a healthy goal. It is thus a crime of omission if nothing else.

Another way to look at it is from this angle: imagine that something needs to be done for the good an entire community. Healthy people are willing to make sacrifices for this. But some would prefer to rigidly negate that proposal because it interferes with their personal fortunes or convenience. By doing this, they are dooming the community in the long run, even if it means they get to keep whatever it was they desired in the short term. These people need some kind of protection that, no matter what the overall goal is, justifies their selfishness. Even better, it should eliminate the concept of overall goal, and focus only on the individual. To do that, a morality was created which banned actions and not goals, effectively hobbling any goal-setting because any real change will always infringe upon someone’s little world. Morality is the assertion of personal reality as a higher value that physical, this-is-the-real-world-pay-attention reality.

We can diagnose it: solipsism, or perhaps a low grade sociopathy, or even in the simplest terms, selfishness. It could even be described with fancy academic terms like materialism, meaning a focus on material comfort that places all ideological concerns at distant second, or absolutism, meaning a creation of a false abstraction that governs how we see reality. What reveals its nature the most however is understanding the type of mentality that produces it. To do this, we must go to folk wisdom, in which it is recognized that what people would not do as individuals they will do as a mob. Under social pressure, people will take drugs, torture one another, steal, lie, cheat and delude themselves. If they internalize that social pressure, they will do these things without the presence of others because they are aware of the eventuality of having to interact with those others. In this sense, the mob mentality can extend to those who are alone, because in their minds the rest of the mob is always there.

This behavior transcends ideology. One can as easily assume the identity of a Green, or a modern Republican, or a radical neo-Nazi, or a harmless Democrat, and still wield this belief system. It can strike any social class, any intelligence, at any age, although it tends to be supported among the lower middle class young of moderate but not genius intelligence. It does not require awareness of its own presence; those who are its carriers never would know it by name, and most commonly believe they are fighting for something else when they strike out with it: justice, “freedom,” equality, love, peace, happiness, wealth. Even more tenacious, it is based in the emotions of the individual, so it does not succumb to rational argument. It is there because it is the intersection of a person’s emotional need and their lack of higher reasoning to keep it in check. In this sense, it is part ideology — and part pathology, or disease.

It makes the most sense however to give it a unique identification, since it is so prevalent that any other reference would be ambiguous: Crowdism. The belief, whether known in language to its bearer or not, that the individual should predominate over all other concerns is Crowdism. We name it according to the crowd because crowds are the fastest to defend individual autonomy; if any of its members are singled out, and doubt thrown upon their activities or intentions, the crowd is fragmented and loses its power. What makes crowds strong is an inability of any to criticize their members, or to suggest any kind of goal that unites people, because what makes for the best crowds is a lack of goal. Without a higher vision or ideal, crowds rapidly degenerate into raiding parties, although of a passive nature. They argue for greater “freedom.” They want more wealth. Anything they see they feel should be divided up among the crowd.

Crowdism strikes anyone who values individual comfort and wealth more than doing what is right. People of a higher mindset leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. This requires that people form an abstraction describing how organization works, and create in themselves the moral will to do right, and thus embark on a path that is not accessible to everyone: the smarter and more clearsighted one is, the greater likelihood exists that one is realizing things that an audience of average people have not yet comprehended. For this reason, Crowdists hate people who leave situations in a higher state of order than when they were found. These people threaten to rise above the crowd, and thus fragment the crowd by revealing individual deficiencies again, and that steals the only method of power the crowd has: superior numbers and the illusion that everyone in the crowd is in agreement as to what must be done.

In short, a crowd does not exist except where underconfidence unites people who, being unable to lead on their own, find solace in the leadership and power of others. They want to be in control, but they are afraid to lead, and thus each person in the crowd delegates his authority to others. The crowd therefore moves not by choices, but by lowest common denominator, assessing each decision in terms of what all people in the crowd have in common. Predictably, this makes its decisions of such a base nature they can be guessed in advance. A crowd derives its momentum from the need of its members coupled with their fear of their own judgment. Taking impetus from the need, it asserts itself violently, but because its only mechanism of decision-making is radical compromise, it moves passively toward predictable resolutions.

Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assess the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.

Of course, since the crowd has disclaimed all true idealism, its only ideology is that of personal gain. It is by nature opposed to culture, since culture establishes a values system against which one can refer any potential choice to determine its viability in the community’s preference. Crowdists like to replace culture with the grandfather of multiculture, which is the idea of a facilitative society, or one in which the only goal is to satisfy its members. In this vision, a common goal or even standard of society is not needed. Society exists for its members to fulfil their personal needs, and it explicitly disclaims the ability or need to oversee those, unless they violate the basic tenets of Crowdism, of course. Crowdists naturally embrace both internationalism, which denies local culture in favor of an international culture of novelty, and multiculture, which mixes cultures with nothing in common and claims to be satisfied with any result. Crowdism is not a decision any more than cancer is a design for a new organism; it is the lack of decision, of goal, of design. It is not random, however, so unlike chaos, it is a predictable and rarely-changing order. Some would call it entropy.

Any ideology is automatically dominated by Crowdists. They were at home as Marxist radicals, but equally happy as conservative American capitalists. Crowdism is not an ideology, but an emotional response. They view any ideology as a means to an end, and that end is Crowdism itself, although Crowdists cannot put this in words – they’re part of a Crowd, remember, which means they don’t make choices as much as force compromise, and by the nature of something akin to dialectical materialism, compromises always move “forward” although toward eternally the same goals. They will dominate any democracy, and turn it away from encouraging excellence toward subsidizing weakness. They will dominate a totalitarian state, humbling it by making its appeals to its proletariat and winning their allegiance through unreasonable concessions. They will use corporations to dominate a culture, producing products that reward those of a Crowdist mentality, while ignoring the needs and desires of those of a higher mentality. Even a non-ideology will be dominated, as Crowdists will use social pressure where there is a lack of decision-making.

Characteristics

Among all human phenomena, Crowdism is unique in that it turns timorous individuals into a dangerously assertive group. Crowdism appeals to those who are underconfident. They’re unsure of their abilities and fear that, in a competition like that of evolution, where many factors at once must be measured and one’s judgment and character are essential, they might not come out ahead. In fact, they have a sneaking suspicion they’ll come out behind. This is only logical, since those with such abilities have no need of a crowd, and therefore only very rarely become Crowdists (usually in cases of: drug addiction, child abuse, mental illness). The average Crowdist needs a crowd to do what he or she could not do alone, including not in the least the process of making decisions. The crowd provides anonymity and the illusion of a cause. Crowdists are underconfident, thus incapable of the kind of assertive and creative action by which one glances at a situation and calls the shots; therefore, all of their modes of action are passive. They cannot strike without first having been struck, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to provoke others with a thousand small irritations until the other responds, then to retaliate with full force. Notice how America has entered her wars: placing ships within range of Spanish saboteurs, sending passenger liners full of weapons to be torpedoed, cancelling steel shipments while giving a fortune in weapons to an enemy. It is a brilliant strategy, in that one never has to make a decision: one is always the injured party and therefore justified in responding, even if it ends up being to one’s advantage.

Crowdists have a great fear of mortality, which is linked to their fear of evolution. They do not have a value higher than their own lives; there is nothing for which, unbidden, they will give their lives (although they will gladly give them, in anger, when having provoked an enemy, they are able to embark upon their “justified” response). This shirking personality and lack of self-confidence manifests itself in a form of cognitive dissonance that creates an inverse response to the failings of confidence: the less the person feels confident, the more egomaniacal they are, at the expense of being able to accurately perceive external reality. As a result of their need to supplant underconfidence with ego, they turn off any external feedback which could prove critical of their selves, and therefore lock themselves into a world composed entirely of the self. This creates a crowd of little queens. They demand “proof” – someone must hold up something tangible and show it to them, and have it be simple enough that everyone in the crowd yes even the deaf mute hunchback can appreciate its significance; this is why crowds do well with butchered babies, torpedoed ocean linears, gas chambers and gassing Kurds, but do poorly with concerns about global warming, genetic fragmentation, or pervasive ignorance. In fact, they seem to treasure their ignorance in the same way that higher people treasure their innocence. Crowdists like to keep things simple so as not to distract from the basic focus (themselves).

The term “lowest common denominator” has almost become a cliche in our society in that it explains so much. A group of people – an electorate, a committee, a mob – gets together, and soon a once-promising idea has through compromise and censorship (the removal of that which might offend, or shock, or be contrary to already-well-established tastes) become distilled down to something completely acceptable to every member of the crowd. The only problem is that, in the process, it has come to resemble every other action that the crowd has been known to take. No matter – the same old thing dressed up as something new serves a dual function, in that it both provides novelty and, by virtue of being essentially similar to everything else, avoids presenting people with stimulus they cannot recognize and thus immediately know they can handle. Low self-confidence reveals itself in situations where the unexpected occurs. Crowdists like to minimize that by dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator, at which point they feel they dominate it and in that state of control are no longer threatened by it.

The paradox of crowdism is that because these people refuse to have a long term vision, they have nothing worth dying for, and therefore their lives are empty of meaning and they respond with the hollow attempts to control that comprise Crowdism. It is as a pathology much like overeating, in which case one confuses the signal for being full, which eliminates psychological doubt, with the process of eating, and hopes that by eating again and again to banish doubt (which increasing doubt in direct proportion to girth!). If they had faith, or belief in doing something which does not immediately reward them, or the vision to see the benefit in doing things which help the community as a whole but in the distant future, they would not have this gnawing emptiness. Civilizations in the past saw fit to make such people into serfs and servants, such that others could give them causes, and they could both be kept from being destructive and given a raison d’etre which would sustain them for their natural lives. Crowdists will never admit it, but secretly, they have a desire to submit to authority because they do not trust their own judgment.

Indeed, there is somewhat of a sadomasochistic nature to Crowdism. For every crowd that exists, there will be some who manipulate it expertly; as in a microprocessor, most of the circuits do the mechanical work of computation while a few are responsible for at key moments switching the flow of data. Such is it that some of the voices who shout out at opportune times are to redirect the crowd, such as the classic “He’s getting away!” screamed by an anonymous crowd member and provoking a stampede to bring down the suspect. Others simply profit from the crowd. By far the best way to profit from a crowd is to pretend to be its servant, as its memory is short and being underconfident it loves to be flattered, and therefore rarely notices that its servants are robbing it blind until it is too late for anything but revenge; the thief is killed, yes, but the money has been spent, and the crowd feels even less confident when its blunder comes to life, so it rages on to the next event in a search for something of substance to occupy it. Always eating and never full. But the manipulators of a crowd eat well.

If one were to divide up a population according to “Crowdist theory,” there would be many sheep, a few born leaders and a larger group of shrewd people who lack the capacity of a true leader, but are mentally agile enough to manipulate the crowd and make a profit from it. These are your Josef Stalins, Ken Lays, Ivan Boesky, George W. Bushes. They are cynical enough to realize that the “ideology” of the crowd is nothing but lies, and its actual agenda is power. They recognize that the crowd loves gaining power through revenge on those with more talent, intelligence, beauty and character than itself, and these manipulators create bogeymen and justifications faster than the crowd can decode them. However, to be a manipulator in a crowd is to be acutely conscious of belonging in the crowd; after all, if one did not need the crowd, something else would have been the path. Thus manipulators both love and loathe the crowd, appreciating it for being the vehicle of their own greatness, but hating it for being necessary and thus constantly forcing them into the role of gentle servant when their inner wolf-personality seeks to escape and manifest itself. Manipulators are like drug dealers: they realize too late that their profession will consume them by forcing them into a function, and thereby eliminating any hope they ever had of making decisions about their own lives. They follow the function, and therefore, all of their choices are reactions; there are no independent choices to be made.

The dominant characteristic of a crowd, as mentioned by F.W. Nietzsche, is the desire for revenge: they detest anyone gifted by nature with more than they have, whether it is wealth or natural traits. Much like ancient tribes who believed that eating the organs of an enemy would transfer his power to the eater, Crowdists believe that destroying others raises the Crowdist’s own stature. Their primary weapon is equality. By insisting on one level for all people, they have an excuse to curtail the higher abilities of those who rise above the crowd. Further, they have the ultimate weapon, in that since equality sounds good on an emotional level, it is perceived as a good, and thus anyone who resists its advance (“progress”) is automatically a bad guy who has transgressed, and thus against him or her retaliation can be launched. This is the ultimate threat of a crowd, which is expressed in a simple syllogism: I. Our way is the path of good intentions, equality. II. If you are not for our path, you are against good intentions and will attempt to destroy us. III. Because you will attempt to destroy us, we will destroy you first. It is a mental trap of epic proportions: if one joins the crowd, one has agreed to limit one’s own abilities to the lowest common denominator; if one resists the crowd, one is styled as the aggressor and destroyed by direct force. At the point when the question of with-us-or-against-us has been asked, the battle is already lost, as the Crowd have gathered behind the questioner with torches that could just as easily be applied to the dwelling of the questioned as toward a feast in her honor.

Effects

The effects of Crowdism take many generations to fully permeate a society. Indeed, Crowdism is like the effects of aging on each of us: we start aging the instant we are born, but at some point, the effects of years have piled up enough to carry us off. Crowdism exists in every society, but to varying degrees, and as societies age, it increases. Almost all societies on the brink of death are totally dominated by Crowdism, which helps carry them off as it paralyzes the decision making capability; if your population sees only its own gratification, who is going to mobilize it to fight an enemy while the enemy is still distant? By the time the Vandals reach Rome, the battle is lost, but the Crowd will never respond until directly attacked, so will blissfully ignore the assailants until the battle has begun. Disorganized, the crowd responds slowly and then panics, abandoning the empire to its lessers, who promptly destroy it. It is for this reason that everywhere a great society once stood, there is now a barely technological, semi-literate society distinguished mostly by its lack of ambition. These are people soul-weary with combat and with power, and they have opted for the stage after Crowdist, which is a form of highly granularized apathy. (There’s no point studying this in America until after the Chinese, sensing our distraction and inner weakness, invade and crush our centralized authorities, at which point those less-fortunate populations within and surrounding us will consume the spoils.)

In fact, throughout its life span, Crowdism promotes apathy by forcing inane decisions on people and threatening them with passive aggression if they refuse. This could be seen most clearly in the former Soviet Union, where people quietly worked around any number of absurd proclamations and dysfunctional government agencies. They realized that things were hopelessly broken, but that the first person to speak up about it would be torn to pieces by the crowd, thus these things had to be tolerated. And what a disgusting word “tolerance” is – it means to recognize something’s inaptitude, but to ignore it and even accept it. Accept mediocrity. Accept failure. Accept the lack of a goal. This beats people down into a state of submission which periodically polarizes itself and becomes violent, as if all of the psychological energy kept suppressed when given an outlet explodes to the surface in a form beneath rationality or even an organized emotional state. It is this form of passivity that is idealized by religions such as Judaism, which clearly arose in a civilization which had already reached this degree of apathy, and therefore was little more than a survival guide. Some would say that Asia went down this path thousands of years before the West, and thus through submission achieved the uniformity for which Asian culture is famous.

The “morality” of the Crowdists affirms the importance of the individual over doing what is right. A society based on this lack of choice, and lack of goal, is inherently frustrating, and thus breaks down all but that which Nietzsche called the “last man.” The last man is someone who cares about nothing but his own material comfort. Does he have an expensive car? Enough to watch on television? Get to go out to the clubs that others covet? And have a trophy girlfriend? — if so, he is happy. No plan for the future, and no significance to these things, other than that he owns them and therefore can construe his personality – that externalized “ego” that we insist is a social construct, a form of personal marketing – as a success as a result of them. The last man does not fight the good fight; he instead does what benefits him. He looks upon ideological conflict as silly, because he is inherently submissive to the external order and thus never thinks of changing it. His revenge upon it is to profit from it, and to consider himself smarter and better than all the others for not having been fooled by value, and possibly having given up his life or his career in some crusade to do what is “right,” instead having been more competitive and shrewd and enriched himself while others fought ideological battles. The last man is an opportunist, a profiteer. He is like a Satanic Zen monk, in that none of his energy is wasted on emotional display. It all goes toward The Bottom Line, a.k.a. making him feel better about himself (an intangible state) through an increase in tangible things like wealth, prestige, and power.

Last men are the type of people who are manipulators of the Crowd, only a more advanced version than the somewhat masochistic “leaders.” A last man simply takes and has no emotional reaction. Where a leader like G.W. Bush or Kim Jong-Il is cynical, and kleptocratic, he still has some degree of emotional response in him; in contrast, a Stalin is without emotion entirely and feels no reason to respond to his changing fortunes, as he is busy focusing on the only thing which matters, which is increasing them. When things go badly, he schemes for recovery, wasting no time on reaction or indulgent displays of emotion. A Bush might have some days of depression, or stumble in public, but a Stalin remains impassive, his iron grip unchanging, knowing that only discipline and a lack of emotions will restore his power. Over time, the last men rise in power through their lack of response, and those with emotional excess descend through an inability to stay focused on the goal. When one descends, one becomes part of the crowd. We call those who have descended Undermen, because they have viewed the challenges of life on several levels and opted to run away or take a course of profiteering, yet have not succeeded even in that through their lack of discipline, which is essentially the ability to see that events distant in time are as important as events proximate in time, because time is continuous and for plans to succeed one must unite the moments in an ongoing series of planned developments. Undermen do not plan. They do not think. They react; where the last man is deliberate, the Underman is impulsive and fired with a consumptive desire for revenge, since to an Underman the world is grossly unfair: because his reactions are out of control, he cheats himself out of everything good that comes his way, and therefore always feels that others have been gifted where he is deprived.

Undermen are sabotage incarnate. Like other Crowdists, they are passive in nature, and therefore will never directly assault an enemy. To live among them however is to constantly clean up after them, and to double-check anything they do, knowing that more often than not they will subconsciously leave things in defective and dangerous states, hoping in their inner minds that others who are more fortunate than them will be destroyed. Where true last men plan their pillaging and execute it with detail, Undermen execute clumsy and violent thefts. Undermen like to live in their own filth and keep others out of the clubhouse of their filth, associating around them others that they can dominate. Undermen exist at all stages of the Crowdist process, but it is most revelatory to point out that a successful Crowdist revolt will after many generations have converted the entire population into Undermen, and thus have plunged the civilization into disorganized, self-afflicted third world status for the next thousand or more generations. Undermen are saprophytes. They compensate for lack of higher function in themselves by destroying those who do have it, or the works of those who did, under the assumption that if it cannot be seen it will not exist to remind them of their essential spiritual hollowness.

Back to Now

The Crowdist dilemma puts us modern humans in a bad situation. As the reader may recall from the first paragraphs of this document, we are manipulated by centralized reality representations that are subject to the same influences Crowdism places on all other reality. The weapon of Crowdists is passivity; if they are “offended,” their retaliation is justified, because they are the blameless ones bringing us the progressive and superior doctrine of equality. Equality of course does not allow us to tolerate offense, because if anyone feels less than equal, the crowd falls apart and cannot protect equality. The logic behind crowdism is like a musical scale, in that if one starts on any note and runs through the logic, soon one has followed the scale back to its origin in a repeating, endless pattern. The crowd in its view is always right, and its goal is to remove those who would prove it be a paper tiger, e.g. only a crowd of underconfident people and not the ultimate authority on morality it would like to pretend to be.

Looking at our situation practically, we who are not yet absorbed by the Crowd are in a rough place: we cannot strike out against the crowd, and yet we cannot continue to tolerate it, or it will eventually reduce our civilization to third-world status through backhanded destruction of all things higher than its non-goal intentions. Even more, as it has crept within our society, it has spread its agenda of destruction against any higher ideas or ideals. Crowdists triumph through greater numbers, and with each generation of Crowdist control, more people submit out of exhaustion, and thus swell the numbers of Crowdists. It is not a conspiracy; it is a cancer. Since Crowdists have the purchasing power in our society, and the popularity, they ignore any higher visions. A product designed for those who are not Crowdists will not be boycotted, only bypassed. Those who speak up about the truth of the situation, or any of the details associated with the truth that can be construed as offensive (women and men are not equal, races are not equal, individuals are not equal, decisions are not all equal) will be branded a heretic and, while no overt action is taken against them, they will passively be denied opportunity until they accept their destiny as a janitor or in rage against the injustice lash out, become an aggressor and are killed. Remember, Crowdism is negative logic. It does not set out to establish an ideal as much as remove those with ideals, as those conflict with its paradoxical worldview, which is that of facilitating individuals rather than uniting individuals with a goal. Crowdism is anti-aspiration, and anti-organic. It only approves of systems where one individual is in power, or all are equally in power, and thus nothing gets decided.

Yet society continues its decline, and with the appearance of Really Bad News like global warming and economic instability, there is again chance for change. During the Great Depression, America could have easily swung into a Communist state; during the Viet Nam war, political instability led to directional changes (unfortunately, both options were and are Crowdist to the bone). We are heading toward another such nodal point in the neural net of details that determine whether our civilization heads in an ascendant way, or descends back into third world status, from which we all came and toward which all societies fall. With each failure of our trusted information sources, and with each incontrovertible proof that our “truths” are not reality, we get closer to radical alteration in course. The problem is of course that, as in most revolutions, ours is mostly likely to take with it the assumptions of its previous masters, and thus to re-create their reign with new faces. This is why accurate diagnosis of Crowdism is essential. One can switch to Communism, to Tribalism, or even to Anarchy, but as long as the assumptions of Crowdism remain, the path is barely altered and the end result is the same. If we wish to transcend Crowdism, we must first restore our heroic outlook, by which there are things for which we’re willing to die, ideals we hold more precious than life itself. By thinking in parallel, and not in terms of organizing everybody as equals to undergo the same mechanical process and thus cure us all at once, we can move the best people among us to greater heights and slowly bring the rest of us to our respective places. We can deny equality in all of its forms, as it is a crazy doctrine that ends in the norming of us all. Localizing government and turning away from single points of informational “truth” helps as well. Even more, we can finally break the taboo barrier and tell individuals that they cannot have it their way and also participate in a non-failing society.

All of these methods will help defeat the Crowdist disease, but it is not defeated by method alone. It requires that we take on a reorganization of our own minds so that we avoid falling into the underconfident, anti-heroic thoughts of Crowdist. It requires that we value actual truth above any socially convenient illusion, or friendly distortion of the truth. We must face facts and stop taking them personally. To an awakened mind, our faults and strengths are visible, and so what we think of as hidden will soon be no secret to the post-Crowdist people who will rise if we succeed. For this reason, we must transcend our personal pretense and ability to be offended. The truth will set us free – perhaps not, but the pursuit of truth for its own sake will free us from the cancerous plague of Crowdism and its millennial reign over our society.

Tags: crowdism, vijay-prozak

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