by Brett Stevens on June 3, 2017

We know it makes sense to escape modernity because it is a path to doom, like any form of “success” which does not include a plan beyond achieving power. Our civilization lacks purpose, and so we have only power and wealth for their own sake, which fascinates for long no one who is worth knowing.

Competitiveness also proves a problem. In high-IQ societies, someone who is not hacking it in that society is seen as a failure, and only secondarily — very distantly — do people worry if this person’s critique was correct. This is why Japan produces hikikomori and Finland has so many suicides; when your society or species is broken, no one will hear that, but they will call you a failure, so you might as well remain in the basement or further underground.

This means that people are afraid to dissent because they will simply lose out by doing so. Who wants to be a loser? This is why humans are herd animals: we will march right over that cliff, each following the other, because we are afraid to fall out of line and lose what we already have, even if there is much more to gain by not committing suicide.

People fantasize about apocalyptic events because then the social order — a degraded form of a once-functional decentralized institution — will be suspended, and people can act on the basis of what needs to be done in reality again. When a great storm hits, you are worried about shelter, food, defense and medicine, not water cooler talking, keeping up with the Joneses, which indie band is hip right now, where the happening night club is, or other pretenses and adornments of the human ego.

But in the meantime, we are stuck with a social order that will destroy everything we work for and eventually terminate our descendants through miscegenation. This is the end. On top of that, it is killing us with an everyday life dedicated to pointless frenzy to keep us too busy to notice that everything has failed, is dying, and has no purpose.

This modern world will first kill you with loneliness, which triggers biological changes that lead to early termination:

Now researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California have discovered that loneliness actually triggers physical responses in the body which make people sick. It appears to trigger the â€˜fight or flightâ€™ stress signal which affects the production of white blood cells. It also increases activity in genes which produce inflammation in the body while lowering activity in genes which fight off illness, promoting high levels of inflammation in the body. Essentially, lonely people had a less effective immune response and more inflammation than non-lonely people. They feel socially threatened which has an enormous impact on health.

As the linked articles in these excerpts demonstrate, loneliness is a hidden epidemic in the West. How would it not be? With diversity, we no longer have a culture in common, so going out into the world becomes a social risk because what you say or do might turn out to be wrong to any of the ten thousand groups — ethnic, cultural, racial, religious, elective — that now are wandering around, looking for an excuse to be offended because the victimhood-and-backlash script grants them greater power.

It turns out that loneliness puts you in a perpetual state of alienation and defensiveness, which stresses your immune system:

The study examined loneliness in both humans and rhesus macaques, a highly social primate species. Why are we all so lonely? Even when surrounded by people we love They found that loneliness predicted how active the CTRA gene was, even a year later and vice versa. People who had high gene activity were still lonely after 12 months. They also showed higher levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter, norepinephrine.

From the same researcher, an insight into the biological purpose of loneliness:

As social animals we survived because we form bonds, which provide mutual aid. Humans donâ€™t do well if theyâ€™re alone. If they got ostracized from the group, they were likely to perish. At the same time, weâ€™ve exploited each other across human history. If a group excludes me [an evolutionary tool adapted to enforce social norms] and I try to break my way back in, the group may not try as subtle an exclusionary behavior the next time. The easiest way to exclude me is to kill me or to injure me. So the brain goes into self-preservation mode to promote short-term survival. Itâ€™s better to not make a friend now and survive than it is to try and make that friend, it turns out that friendâ€™s a foe and perish in the service of trying to form a connection. Loneliness is not designed to be chronic; instead, itâ€™s very much like physical pain or hunger. Itâ€™s an aversive cue that alerts you to pay attention. It can also lead to depression, and we think that adapted along the same linesâ€”depression reduces your desire to try to break back into the group. Instead, it sends a passive signal to the group that anyone who cares about you should come to your aid and reconnect. Depression can be adaptive in that sense.

In a modern society, it is difficult to form bonds. Diversity increases this tension because the level of foes has risen. So does class warfare, feminism, and any other form of adversarial politics. It is as if Leftists are lonely and want to spread the alienation… on the other hand, having a society unified around one culture/ethne and with a single path to power through an aristocracy, and thus a lowered reliance on “red tape” style procedural and managerial thinking, leads to lower loneliness. People can reach out more.

Keep in mind that there are no Utopias. Human life is by its nature lonely; there will always be some who are lonely and die alone in misery because this is part of how natural selection works. Just like some people will always find a way to kill themselves in accidents, some will always find a way to die through isolation. But right now, the majority are lonely; that is the sign of a failing system, and one that will kill you.

Paradoxically, the state of loneliness does not come from the condition of being alone, which is necessary. It comes from an inability to form bonds, which is related to failing social order as people have increasingly less in common, which is why up to half of people in Western societies think loneliness is increasing. The more we have in common as far as inner traits and the practices that reinforce those like rituals and religion, the less lonely we are.

In fact, we can end up lonely despite having high frequency and breadth of contact with others. This is why some refer to loneliness as the “hidden epidemic” in modern society, and definitely a staple of literary fiction from the 1920s through the present. Modern life makes us lonely. The rhythms, traditions, customs, calendar, cuisine, values, folk wisdom, sayings, philosophies and familiar landmarks of the past have faded away, replaced by interchangeable parts: boxy architecture, disposable plastic products, constant television that is all the same under the skin, graffiti and vandalism, chain stores, fast food, casual sex, cubicle McJobs, traffic, droning city noises, and people afraid to speak their real minds about real ideas who thus rely on vapid conversation about sports, television and shopping. People seek validation but find only emptiness, because compulsory universal inclusion (“equality”) means that no one is valued for who they are, only what they are in their external roles in society. You are your job title, your zip code, your wardrobe, your media library and your social group, but not your personality, spirit or soul.

The modern world has made a permanently lonely society which is exacerbated by the corporate-style office, an archetype which seems manifested also in most social and volunteer activities at this point as well. Everyday life under modernity is lonely because its fundamental model is the individual, not shared purpose and activity, and so people recede into themselves and live in isolation despite having hollow, fake social interaction in large quantities on a daily basis. Few people discuss anything meaningful in order to avoid offending others.

Some argue that loneliness is behind the raised suicide rate, but another thought is that many do not commit suicide, but silently withdraw, leaving behind shattered families and subsequent generations who do not reproduce. In this way, loneliness may be seen as a symptom of degeneration, or loss of essential traits because civilization has taken over the function of those traits. Other signs of degeneration are evident. world average IQ is dropping and people are growing shorter. Even more, the modern lifestyle produces correlates which accelerate loneliness, such as the erasure of memory through sleep deprivation:

One type of glial cell, called an astrocyte, prunes unnecessary synapses in the brain to remodel its wiring. Another type, called a microglial cell, prowls the brain for damaged cells and debris. Bellisiâ€™s team found that after an undisturbed sleep, astrocytes appeared to be active in around 6 per cent of the synapses in the brains of the well-rested mice. But astrocytes seemed to be more active in sleep-deprived mice â€“ those that had lost eight hours of sleep showed astrocyte activity in around 8 per cent of their synapses, while the cells were active in 13.5 per cent of the synapses of the chronically sleep-deprived animals. This suggests that sleep loss can trigger astrocytes to start breaking down more of the brainâ€™s connections and their debris. â€œWe show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss,â€ says Bellesi.

Alienation consists of having disbelief in the culture around you. When that culture is anti-culture, or the “agree to disagree” compromise without synthesis model of diversity and the managerial state, there is nothing tangible to disagree with, only a sense of not belonging. Add that to the emptiness of conversation and falseness of personal interaction, and people are guaranteed to experience loneliness. This creates a sense of isolation, or having no chance of being understood while being surrounded by others who for all intents and purposes, are hostile agents bent on our subjugation as they attempt their own climb through the social status ladder of this moral and intellectual wasteland.

The lack of feeling of working together, and the resulting competition by which the individual is either a loser or a winner based on job and social status, creates an increased risk of mortality brought on by stress that is related more to the job than to the task it claims to accomplish:

Recently, economists at Purdue and the University of Copenhagen made a clever attempt to clear up the question. They looked at Danish manufacturing companies where overseas sales increased unexpectedly because of changes in foreign demand or transportation costs between 1996 and 2006. These constituted a set of natural experiments. At firms where exports spiked, there was suddenly a lot more work to do, a lot more things to sell. This put the squeeze on employees, who became measurably more productive â€” but also started to have more health problems. â€œThe medical literature typically finds that people who work longer hours have worse health outcomes â€” but we try to distinguish between causality and correlation,â€ said Chong Xiang, an economics professor at Purdue and co-author on the paper, along with David Hummels and Jakob Munch. A draft was released this week by the National Bureau for Economic Research.

Modern ideologies also breed anxiety, depression, loneliness and dysfunction through their insistence on an agenda outside of that of life itself. This has led some to posit a solution through changes in lifestyle:

In his Nicomachean Ethics, he described the idea of eudaemonic happiness, which said, essentially, that happiness was not merely a feeling, or a golden promise, but a practice. â€œItâ€™s living in a way that fulfills our purpose,â€ Helen Morales, a classicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. â€œItâ€™s flourishing. Aristotle was saying, â€˜Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.â€™Â â€ …The study indicated that people high in eudaemonic happiness were more likely to show the opposite gene profile of those suffering from social isolation: inflammation was down, while antiviral response was up. …But what, precisely, is this quasi-mythical good life? What do we mean when we talk about eudaemonia? For Aristotle, it required a combination of rationality and areteâ€”a kind of virtue, although that concept has since been polluted by Christian moralizing. â€œIt did mean goodness, but it was also about pursuing excellence,â€ Morales told me. …One of his consistent findings is that, in order to bring us happiness, a project must have two qualities: it must be meaningful in some way, and we must have efficacy over it.

But what kind of social order would create eudaemonic happiness? Plato gave us an answer: to find the best life, we must discover within ourselves virtue and order, which requires inequality and an emphasis on doing what is right by our inner study of the external world, not what is materially convenient that we can then rationalize as right.

In the interim, looking for eudaemonia through its traits — meaningful, efficacy, excellence — misses the point of practice. Practice consists of striving toward a goal, or having a purpose, which requires us to understand our world (realism) and to employ certain principles that lead to ongoing and immutable pursuits known as the transcendentals, such as “the good, the beautiful and the true” which can be found in both Plato and Aristotle.

We cannot pursue transcendentals without a stable social order, and a stable social order requires people to be moving toward roughly the same purpose and principles; this in turn requires, among other things, an end to diversity which abolishes social trust by erasing social standards and causing alienation.

Nationalism, like most conservative beliefs, is not an ideology but a folkway, or a way of life that both works (realism) and produces the best possible outcome (transcendentalism). It is not Utopian, but aims to accept life as it is and then improve it qualitatively instead of quantitatively, as egalitarian philosophies — the foundation of modernity — do. Perhaps our answer has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Tags: diversity, egalitarianism, loneliness, modernity, mortality, sleep deprivation

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