by Brett Stevens on January 2, 2017

Neoreaction gained an audience because it spoke a simple truth: governments are businesses, so there is no point having government be a business with special privileges. In this way it took after a long tradition of Rightist thought about government and its self-interest. In fact, we might call Neoreaction “space age paleoconservatism” and be correct.

Its formula possessed the advantage of raw realism in diagnosis, but not so much in prescription. Neoreaction tells us the truth about government, but where a dark enlightenment conservative would then argue for government without interest in harming its citizens, or the abolition of government in favor of aristocracy, Neoreaction argues for more government, just of a for-profit type. This self-defeats because this ultimately creates “economic democracy” and will succumb to the same problems as regular democracy since it is unclear that most people understand the relationship between their actions and the consequences that arrive afterwards.

However, Neoreaction gives us a powerful analytical tool for understanding the cultural shift afoot in the West with Brexit and the election of Donald J. Trump. In this view, government is not just a business, but a business hired for purposes by the consumers at every election. The voters delegate function to the business, and if it fails, they sever the contract created by that election because of non-performance.

This is what has happened to the postwar Left. Since The Enlightenment,™ a narrative has existed in the West: people are good because human reason is universal, and therefore, our only problem is unreasonable people, who we can tell are unreasonable because they do not accept that people are good because human reason is universal, and therefore, that our only problem is unreasonable people. Circular reasoning? Yes.

For this reason, the democratic West goes to war against anyone who wants hierarchy. The Confederate States, Germany and Soviet Union were all attacked on this basis. For the most part, the voters were content to go along with this, because since everything else seemed to be going well, it made sense that removal of the non-conformists would allow the unobstructed good to continue.

History however occurs at a time scale much larger than a human lifespan. This means that centuries go by before we see the effect of any action we have taken. And so, seventy years after the end of WWII, we are beginning to see the results of our policy of smashing down the strong and elevating the weak, which is a third world society caused by social breakdown and unlimited immigration attracted by our welfare states.

During the WWII era and afterwards, the voters hired politicians to get rid of problems that they saw as originating with those evil strong people: racial discontent, class warfare, union strikes, poverty, dictatorship, social decay and censorship. People did not want to go to the extremes that had been taken by the most visible instances of the strong-over-weak societies that contrasted the weak-over-strong democracies.

As time went on, it became clear that — as Neoreaction predicts — government took on a life of its own. It had been given a blank check, so in order to justify growth, all it had to do was connect its proposed plan to one of those fears that the voters had expressed. In this way, government grew under you-cannot-say-no illusions like anti-poverty, anti-discrimination, the war on drugs, the war on drunk driving and finally, the war on terror.

Taking its power to its ultimate extreme, governments on all sides of the ocean then began scheming to unite the world into a single open market. This enabled them to continue their plan of taxing and spending, and using that spending to “prime the pump” in perpetuity. This circular Ponzi scheme enabled governments to combine social welfare programs with aggressive consumerism, adding “wealth” to the economy in each cycle.

Leftism tells us that we should use demand-side economics which hold that if people seek money, it has value, instead of conservative supply-side economics which state that value is created only by the production of goods. Taken to the extreme, demand-side economics tend toward the circular Ponzi scheme, which uses Leftist social welfare as a means of enhancing the value of the currency.

With the “success” of these plans, which amounted to little more than inflating currency but making it plentiful, the Left found itself unopposed because no one else had experienced similar success. In actuality, a series of recessions, first small and later growing in size, hit the West because demand-side economics inevitably falters, causing the markets to devalue false gains or shrink.

At this point, the Left stood for a few things: the welfare state, globalism, diversity and political correctness. Each was necessary to achieve the ultimate end goal, which was a combination of Leftist ideology with the circular Ponzi scheme to fund it in perpetuity, while importing new people to use as permanent Leftist voters. This also gave the state new cheap labor upon which it could lavish welfare, driving the demand-side economy.

In the new millennium, reactions to this plan soured. Dumping more labor into the market devalued the wages of existing citizens, and the high taxes required to keep the circular Ponzi scheme afloat hurt them at the same time that they found their currency could buy less. But even more, people had become existentially miserable, just as they had in the former Soviet Union. There was no point working for a civilization that was obviously in decline and being carved up to be sold piecemeal, there was no unity between citizens, and most of all, no goal. For this reason, the smartest and best “checked out” or emotionally disconnected during the 1990s, allowing the mentally unstable to take over all aspects of society. These changes, the failure of Leftist economies and the increasing destabilization caused by Leftist policies all came home in the late 2000s, as the troublesome rein of the neoconservatives — Leftists in motivation but conservatives in method, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush — wound down and those leaders were replaced by more radical Leftists.

These new leaders were hired by the population to end the crises of those years, notably race relations and foreign wars, much as Bill Clinton had been elected in the 1990s to pacify the consequences of the Reagan years, which were only more volatile because they were spent un-doing the insane Leftist policies of the 1960s. Barack Obama, in particular, was elected to end the racial fracture that had become evident during the Bush years, and to restore the “good” economy under Clinton, which was really a result of the changes made during the Reagan years.

Given leadership in several countries — Sarkozy/Hollande in France, Merkel in Germany, Obama in the USA and Cameron in the UK — the globalist Leftists believed they could not fail. Instead, their ideology failed for them. Racial appeasement brought out more conflict as each group realized that it could not rule as long as other groups were present. The demand-side economy inflated currency and produced frivolous “service economy” businesses like social media instead of hard value. And most tellingly, diversity caused social fracture substantial enough to require foreign wars to keep dissent focused there instead of at home. All at once, the pillars of the Leftist Utopia began to crumble.

At this point, the voters fired their delegate leaders, although it has not yet occurred to those leaders and their allies in the propagandist media that this is the case. They also fired not just the previous seventy years of the postwar Leftist drift, but the very idea of The Enlightenment™ which states that all people are equal because they have universal reason. People rejected ideology entirely, and wanted instead to focus on time-proven solutions in the conservative manner, which has always been the tendency of people in the West.

Many became aware that, in addition to the circular Ponzi scheme, another government scam was ongoing: government specialized in inventing problems which it then claimed to solve, and when those solutions failed, it scapegoated a convenient target — right wing terrorists, third world dictators, the rich — and then broadened the failing programs as a means of giving itself power. This is a political counterpart to planned obsolescence, or the nasty habit of late-stage businesses to design products to fail so that they must be replaced.

This policy fits within the general pattern of Leftism, which is to rise in a dying civilization by offering distraction from the decline by rationalizing the decline as victory. In the Leftist view, a failure of culture and standards is “tolerance”; invasion by other nations is “diversity”; selling the nation by the pound is “globalism” and is presumed to bring wealth and happiness. This directly contradicted what the voters had hired their Leftist overlords to do, and in fact, made those concern areas worse.

However, Leftists had always had the support of intellectuals including those in the media because for these people, signaling “progressive” values was a way to adorn their personal myth with the appearance of good, much like they also liked to buy up-market products like BMW and Apple. The double strategy of distracting from the decline, and scapegoating non-threats as “the real problem,” enabled Leftists to give citizens a “game” they could win, instead of the hard work of fixing deep-seated mental, social and emotional problems that are the source of decline.

For this reason, it took many years for the cracks to appear on the facade of Leftist rule. Once they did, the wave pushed back at a cultural level as people recognized that the promised results had not been achieved. Further, the specific problems that concerned voters had worsened. This fits a typical pattern that we have seen with Leftist takeovers in Athens, Rome, France, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela.

This leads us to the question that is most important of all questions for human beings: what led to the source of our decline? Some offer analyses based on external corruption, as from this highly literate and insightful source:

If there was a breakthrough in 2016 – if there was some kind of awakening, and potential turning point; it was a realisation that the major long-term problems of The West are not accidental, nor are they due to incompetence, nor a consequence of well-meaning but short-sighted and selective self-interest; but they are because The West is ultimately ruled by an evil-motivated ‘conspiracy’. In other words, at the highest or deepest level of global affairs, there is a dominant grouping that are primarily and strategically aiming to harm the world and its peoples.

Nothing here is incorrect, but it describes a symptom and not cause. Parasites harm their hosts. They also behave in a conspiratorial way in human societies because they can recognize each other, and will advance each other because they share a cause, which is the legitimization of parasitism. What conservatives call “moral relativism” is a symptom of equality, in which the presumption of universal human reason leads us to, by the converse, accept any ideas and results as products of the intent of people, and by the principle of equality, worthy of equal inclusion in civilization. The basic formula of this thinking is Good = Bad, meaning that “good” and “bad” are equal, seen only as preferences of the individual, and when enough individuals prefer bad, it is presumed to be good that they are able to achieve it.

This however is merely the mechanism of the parasite. The motivation of the parasite is found elsewhere. For the sake of new readers, it makes sense to offer another explanation, which is internal corruption.

Civilizations begin with inherent purpose, which is self-referential: create a thriving civilization. Once they achieve this, they enter a period of rent-seeking behavior by citizens, caused by the acceptance of many who would not have participated in the founding, but want to take part in what has been created. This arises from two factors: tool-making and genetics.

When someone observes another person using a tool, the observer adjusts the equation of why that tool is used. In the original equation, a goal exists as a cause, and the tool is used as a means to that end, or effect; in the replacement, the tool is the cause and the effect is social acceptance for having been seen doing what others have done successfully. Results are replaced by conformity.

On the genetic front, a healthy civilization improves hygiene, learning, food supply and stability. From this come conditions where more people are able to survive who would not be able to otherwise. As a result, genetic detritus accumulates in the form of incompetent and parasitic people, including criminals, perverts and grifters, with the latter group being the most destructive. These unwanted people become adept at conformity, turning civilization into a “game” where one wins by conforming and flattering others, instead of by achieving results.

Leaders at this point face an ugly conundrum. If they expel the unwanted, every person will fear for himself that he too might be exiled. If they tolerate the unwanted, they will get more of them, and bad results will occur. Thus they invent control, or the idea of applying rules to everyone to shepherd them toward goals they do not understand. This further entrenches the problem of unwanted people who are able to conform.

These unwanted conformists quickly realize an opportunity. Their leaders are afraid to act against them, so they act against these weakened leaders by forming a cult and a gang — called a Crowd — dedicated to the principle of Bad = Good, because that way, no person can be excluded on the basis of their behavior, especially the failure to achieve results. This group offers other citizens a simple choice: join us, and repeat our dogma, or have us act against you. This essentially holds the population hostage to social attack, and so over the years, the Crowd gains power and size.

As part of its campaign to take over, the Crowd must eliminate all standards which compete with its own non-standard. This places culture, heritage, religion, philosophy and values on the cutting block, but because of its nature as subversive conformist, the Crowd does not eliminate them but merely subverts them by changing the definition of terms and goals to fit the new ideal, “egalitarianism,” or the idea that since every person is presumed equal because they possess reason, all ideas and behaviors must be accepted as equal.

Crowdism takes centuries to fully gain power, but is an eternal temptation like other forms of evil, which are error rationalized in the human mind by dishonesty, specifically by denial of obvious reality. This creates a force in people that seems demonic, and may well be, because it arises from the same emptiness and need for control and affirmation that drives mythical figures of evil such as Satan.

Although we are familiar with Leftism as the source of this evil, and that view is not wrong, there is a greater source, which is the weakness in every person which threatens to overwhelm their ability to perceive any degree of reality. This weakness is individualism, which rapidly becomes solipsism, or the denial of reality as anything but an aspect of the self. Because we perceive the world through our minds, we can choose to believe our minds are the world, and this comforts people who are unwanted and need a justification for their parasitic actions. They use self-pity, or the belief that the order of nature is bad and the world is bad, to convince themselves that they are victims, and with their resentment for this perceived treatment, they rationalize their negative behavior.

Leftism is one form of Crowdism. Any belief system can be infected with Crowdism using the simple idea that everyone should be included, which is a form of self-pity projected onto other people so they can be used as a means to the end of achieving egalitarianism, which is ultimately desired by the individual in an individualistic context because it guarantees the individual inclusion without having to possibly sacrifice for it. This creates the pathology of Leftism as a series of contradictions created by the division between public statements, which manipulate others through egalitarianism, and private motivations, which are parasitic:

In particular, the most idealistic anti-Establishment cultural critics fail to perceive that Leftism is at the very root of that which they most deplore in modern life: the pervasive dishonesty and manipulation of public discourse; the iron cage of bureaucracy; the international global elite; the pacifist warmongers; the pseudo-egalitarianism of exploitative corporate power; state propaganda’ bribery and soft-terror, the corruption of education; the systematic inculcation of fear and resentment between sexes, races, nations; anti-environment fake environmentalism, and so on.

Crowdism forces its way into any organization — business, church, friend group, family, nation — by being socially powerful. It does this by manipulating appearance. In social terms, it is impossible to reject the idea that “everyone should be included” without appearing mean-spirited to others, who fear for themselves that they will not be included. Leftist tropes like equality, diversity, sexual equality and tolerance for sexual non-conformity use this method, but these are not the actual goal of Leftism; its goal is control, and it uses pleasant fictions as a means to that end.

The demonic nature of Crowdism comes from this power. It is difficult to resist, both in the individual and in the group, unless one explicitly affirms natural hierarchy and a purpose to civilization, both of which are taboo to the Crowd. These in turn require that we think by deciding on goals that are logical given their cause-effect relationships in history, or in other words, to desire time-proven ideas instead of conjectural ones like egalitarianism.

As the West looks to reverse its decline, it must heed this warning: we need a sense of natural order, a purpose for our civilization, and the will to be unsociable in order to resist Crowdism. Religion aids in this quest, as does strong national culture, which is why these are two things in Leftist crosshairs as they attempt to seize the remaining power denied to them. For now, the voters have rejected the Leftist business model, but will they reject its soul?

Tags: crowdism, leftism, neoreaction

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