Why The Downfall of Democracy Will Liberate Us From This Insane Time

We live in a time of invisible insanity. On the surface, we have wealth, power, and technology; underneath, we see how a lack of social order has made people revert to the cruder ways of existence and become manipulative. There is very little trust because people do not share values in common, an identity, or even a sense of purpose; everyone exists for himself alone and denies any order larger than the human individual.

Individualists hate social order because as soon as you have standards, you have a hierarchy based on who meets those standards. This means that social order tells people NO! in response to some actions they might contemplate, and they hate that, because the individualist in humanity resents any order -- even nature, logic, and fact -- above that of their own intentions.

People have an inbuilt backdoor to their minds. We are self-pitying because we are aware of mortality and the smallness of our existence, including the limited amount of effect that we can have on the world going forward. In our self-pity, we desire power, because then we feel that our lives are important for their own sake, instead of merely in relation to what we accomplish in the world.

When that self-pity wins out, people become individualists, or "me first at the expense of everything else" as a mentality. This creates a "you cannot tell me 'no'" outlook which leads individualists to become crusaders against standards, social order, hierarchy, values, wisdom, and even obvious facts of logic and nature. Those who thrive in life are less self-pitying than others.

Most people do not thrive. Even when they have money, they live in a state of existential confusion brought on by difficulty understanding their basic purpose and what they should do to live a good life. As a result they are defensive, and through that, envious of others who may be living a good life. They retaliate by endorsing individualism, thinking that freedom from rules leaves only what they want to do, even though they are unsure what that is.

Every human group and society has fallen so far to this trap of thinking. People cannot resist the siren call of power without responsibility, which is what individualism promises -- anarchy with grocery stores and maybe a welfare state safety net -- and so they force society to become more "safe," creating a mesh network of rules and incentives that eventually becomes suffocating. At that point, decay has free rein.

This is why everything good that humans do is torn down by the crowd that forms around it. If it succeeds, suddenly there are many greedy greasy fingers reaching in to take what they want. If they are resisted, they come up with some reason why they "deserve" what is there, and then take it anyway. In an attempt to eliminate violence, societies tend to remove the protections against this parasitic behavior.

For this reason, all human societies distill down to two types:

1. Realist. The goal is larger than the individual: it consists of a human order of transcendental goodness which fits within the framework of what is known to work and the order of life -- an intangible, abstract series of patterns based in reality -- which creates existence itself. In this view, humans gain the good life by the meaningful life which means union with the order of life.
2. Individualist. The goal is the individual because the order of life is seen as bad, and so the individual must take revenge and assert his desires against the need for acts to be compatible underlying reasoning of how the world came to be. Individualists take pride in denying obvious fact and pattern because they gain a sense of power for doing so; the individual is the goal, and anything else -- including the whole world -- can be sacrificed for that end.

When a society it is healthy, it tends to be realist, because those who can achieve important things are being rewarded. Once it gets established, it tends to lose direction because its initial direction was already accomplished. At that point, it turns inward, and focuses on people instead of achievement, and so begins the decay process.

The focus on people has two stages. The first, which we might analogize to The Renaissance™ in the West, is one of rugged individualism where "man is the measure of all things" and we celebrate exceptional people striving against nature, the herd, and the usual human follies. After that, however, because the guiding principle is equality, that same praise becomes extended to all other individuals.

During this process, it becomes necessary to adopt a utilitarian outlook. Utilitarianism is, in theory, "what is best for the most," but in reality distills to whatever most people think will be good for them, because otherwise it requires wise guardians with absolute power because most people choose incorrectly. We want dessert, not our vegetables, but then make ourselves sick, if that serves as useful metaphor.

In political form, utilitarianism takes up the mantle of democracy because if we are all equal, it makes no sense to point to some people with natural talent and give them absolute power over others, which is what is actually required for leadership. A leader who has to bribe and coerce others to behave does not have power; even more, then the herd chooses its favorite illusions (dessert) and then kills off the leader when those illusions produce bad results.

In this way democracy becomes the cornerstone, mascot, and leading edge of the movement for human equality. It subjugates its political foes as we did during the world wars, is proposed as the solution to every problem, and stands as a symbol of the triumph of the herd over those with the natural talent and inborn moral character to "know better" than the illusions that most people blindly and repetitively choose.

The herd consists of two things. The first is that people in groups defer to the group in order to succeed within the group, and so reality is forgotten; the second is that intelligence is unequally distributed, and so most of the group cannot understand what those of exceptional talent see. The Dunning-Kruger effect gave this a name, but it has been known since the dawn of time: crowds are dumb but self-confident, mainly because through a crowd an individual can demand his own interests -- but granted to everyone, and therefore "fair" -- with zero accountability because it will be remembered that "the crowd demanded this" instead of that he wanted it.

Democracy crushes everything good through a steady pressure toward the lowest common denominator because of these two attributes of the herd. Since it becomes the guiding principle of its society, and like most ideologies that principle is both method and goal, it becomes used as a way to exclude dissent as being incompatible with what has already been chosen, namely democracy.

In societies controlled by democracy, then, discourse quickly becomes an echo chamber because of its tendency to exclude those who do not affirm democracy. This methodology extends to other forms of control, or regulating the methods that others use so that they achieve the will of those in power instead of general principles or traditions, such as "no platforming" and eventually, outright censorship.

Democracy also drives its citizens insane by telling them that meaning is found within themselves when in fact, meaning consists of finding connections to the world and a reason to do what is right according to that order, so that people sense they have "the good life" through something that is not material and therefore stays with them even when times are bad. Until there are bad times, they do not notice the need for meaning, but at that point are too busy focusing on survival to make much of what they have learned.

For citizens of dying societies which have switched to democracy -- and with it economic democracy (socialism), racial democracy (diversity), and sexual democracy (feminism) -- life becomes a pursuit of escape from the decaying social order while trying to find meaning in pleasures, distractions, and striving for power, none of which make them more self-actualized and thus able to appreciate life itself.

Many of us growing up in Generation X noticed this at work on the generation of our parents. They were always questing, but never finding, the good life. They gained money and power, but still remained hollow within, eaten away by a need for something more significant than what they had, despite having few material concerns or lack of comfort.

We were dismayed by the fact that our parents relayed to us the dogma of our time. "Life is whatever you want it to be," they would say, not realizing that we were longing for both social order and meaning. We wanted a tribe with a strong identity so we knew what was right, and we wanted a social order instead of the constant internal conflict, special interest groups, and jockeying for power and influence that made society so chaotic.

Even more, we were set adrift by the inability of our parents to frame life in a realistic and yet meaningful way. We needed to hear that we were living in a dying time, so we needed to set ourselves apart from the madness in order to be happy; we needed to hear that some things were not universal but eternal and transcendent. We wanted the good life on a non-material level, more like good souls and hard truths we could trust in any age.

This upset our parents, who faced the same conflict that everyone does in this time, which is that going with the flow is both easier and more profitable than standing against the decline. At the same time, endorsing the decline makes us sick in our souls and drives us insane as we try to rationalize decay as some kind of victory.

We realized the truth: you either fight insanity, or it takes over because by not resisting, you accept it and then take it into yourself.

Our future current involves a struggle for the present. This takes the form of individualism-versus-realism. The individualists want a world where the largest unit considered is the individual; the realists want reality itself to be the largest unit, and for us to adapt to it. That causes a split between realists and individualists that cannot be resolved:

On one side is a traditionalist vision that holds truth to be “rooted in an authority outside of the self,” Mr. Hunter says, be it Nature or “the Bible, the Magisteria [he meant “Magisterium,” the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church — RD], the Torah.” Thus this view’s emphasis on maintaining “continuities with the truths of the past.” On the other side is a “post-Enlightenment” vision that rejects “transcendent and authoritative traditions.” In the progressive view, “freedom is predominant”—especially freedom for groups seen as oppressed by tradition.

We have two visions: the self as all, or the order above the self. That order can be nature, the gods, or even logic itself. An individualist admits nothing greater than "I want" and this essentially invalidates everything else. They hear only "I want" and filter the rest out. Consequently, they make disaster as their fond visions collide with reality and reality, being much bigger, wins.

As we try to come out of this horrible time in which all that is true is false and all that is false is true, our focus must fixate on something that can be defeated to send the symbolic message that the time of the herd running wild is over. That sacrificial lamb is democracy; when we debunk it, and reject it, then our minds will turn to the options and invalidate a complex weaving of ideas like diversity, pluralism, feminism, and equality.

When that framework dies, the future will open itself to the possibility of something outside of democracy, and through that, we will experience a new space: a human existence in which the lowest common denominator does not always win. We can restore standards, and through them hierarchy, and through that a sense of social order. We can rebuild civilization despite its slow death over the past few centuries.

We must crush the symbol of what oppresses us: equality, individualism, democracy. When it dies, possibilities reveal themselves that we would otherwise not consider, including the traditional society where there is no State, only the rule of culture, a social hierarchy, an aristocracy, and a social order based on the principles of society as having a purpose.

Democracy has led us astray as part of the series of illusions we have chosen because we did not have the heart to refuse them, starting with the equality of all people. When democracy dies, we will cast aside these other illusions, and finally look to options outside the prison in which we find ourselves, constrained by the need to include every opinion when only some voices matter.