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SolipsismEvery age has taboos, just like it has ideals. These are the stick and the carrot, respectively. If you want to succeed, find some way to justify what you're doing in terms of the ideals; if you want to knock out some competition, bully them and accuse them of being the taboo. One of the big ones for this age, like calling someone a pedophile, is the term racist, which has dangerous political implications. And no matter what we do, the problem never seems to go away, and may not go away until we're all a uniform grey color and have no ancestry line to speak of. The roots of this logic go back to the Enlightenment, which itself was a secularization of Christianity. As soon as it became apparent that religion, itself a type of philosophy, was powerful because it made people hope and so act in predictable ways based on calling things "good" or "evil," others wanted in. The decentralization of Christianity began with the fall of Rome, picked up with Protestantism and fully exploded with secularization. The Christian doctrine was a simplification of the Greek idea that in reality, idealized "forms" repeat themselves and that we must distinguish appearance from discernible reality, or the abstract similarity between repeated structures and their derivation as responses to the same needs. In Greek logic, a chair was a design response to a need to sit; it did not exist as abstraction, nor was invented -- it was simply the easiest logical response to the need. As this doctrine filtered through politics, or the need to motivate people for earthly ends, it got simplified. Instead of forms being patterns emerging from the forces of nature interacting, and having an informational basis, they were presumed to be derived from a God and Heaven which was perfect and existed outside of this world, and were real, perfect, pure things. Part of this simplification was the idea that the soul was separate from the body, and that the body was an inferior form, so we should be judged on our souls, which are in the eyes of God equal because they come from this imperfect world and not the perfect other one. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth," Christ said, reminding us that all souls were equal in the eyes of God.
In this new view, there was no discernible reality in which the abstract traits and abilities of humans placed them in a role; this was replaced entirely by the equality of souls. In this way, appearance and abstraction were joined using the simplest possible device, which replaced the idea of cause and effect (person is good at math, so becomes a mathematician) with humans as cause of all things (if you want to, be a mathematician). Like most revolutions, this new idea first gained ground among those with leisure time but no pressing conflicts, who used it as a way to advance themselves socially. If you tell a crowd of people something they enjoy hearing, you will become popular and gain power you might not otherwise have had. The Enlightenment consisted of wealthy artists telling others about the beauty of human equality. Since all ideas decay into their simplest possible form, the circle of equalization kept expanding. From equal souls, to presumed equal abilities, to the revolution of 1789 in France which triggered a spate of similar revolutions across Europe. Within two hundred years, liberalism -- the presumed equality of all people as souls -- dominated politics worldwide. To a historian, this might not be surprising. Like people, civilizations have a life cycle. When they are young, people work together for a common goal. As they grow richer, and specialization of labor disconnects individuals from the cause/effect process necessary to life, individuals in these civilizations become solipsistic or unaware of any cause but themselves. This atomization, where individuals limit their awareness and filter out most of reality, causes a sense of entitlement. If I'm equal, then I'm going to pursue only my personal wants, the reasoning goes. And from that I get a sense of entitlement because it is my divine right to be equal, and I am the cause of this equality, so if someone interrupts me, it's a personal attack and I can retaliate. People went into themselves and shut out the world. People who found this appealing began using the technique of deconstruction, or removing the idea of connection between different objects or events, to claim further lack of connection to the world. All that mattered was that the soul was able to seek its own pleasures. If those pleasures were formerly connected to bad results, why, that was our imagination -- we deconstructed that! All of this heavy thinking was converging on an idea where context no longer mattered. Objects were seen as having properties in themselves, and not being caused by a response to conditions of life. People were seen as absolute in their choices and beyond criticism. Deconstruction enabled us to replace cause and effect with human whim, which we could band together socially and declare more important than consequences. However, this movement at every stage met resistance. Those who were responsible for making results happen found its logic broken. If someone had an above average ability, they were no longer equal when it came time to choose them for a role. If someone wanted something known to cause destructive results, they should be limited. Modern people came to resent these realists because they impede the absolute freedom of the equal individual. Observers even pointed out that absolute freedom, like all absolute powers with no correspondence to reality, created small tyrants. They wanted no obligation to do anything but fulfill their own comfort and excessive pleasures. Critics pointed out that living for oneself caused a loneliness and emptiness that manifested itself in vapid behavior like hedonism, consumerism, death denial and obliviousness to life around the individual. The Crowd -- those who wanted solipsism, or lack of obligation to anything but the whims of their personalities -- retaliated by dividing politics into the "progressive" (pro-solipsist) and "reactionary" (realists). They called anyone fascist if they did not affirm the absolute, secular God-given right of the individual to secede from reality into their own world of desires -- solipsism, or the idea that only the self exists. Clearly, the Crowd needed a way to break the power of this group. Extreme deconstruction was their first step, as the resulting chaos made individuals feel they were hidden in a crowd, and free from the judgments of others. Their next step was to target culture, religion and traditional learning because without a cultural basis, there was no way a group could form and agree to prefer reality to solipsism. Part of their technique was to claim moral right, much as the Christians did. How can we be making a grab for power, if we are offering freedom to every person equally and thus treating them all as we'd treat good friends at a Christmas party? This gambit, called competitive altruism, enabled people to gain the favor of the Crowd by making increasingly outlandish demands for rights, freedoms, and other ill-defined absolutes. The final stage of this technique is the demand for diversity. Where formerly nations had a culture and heritage, those could now be replaced by a motley mixture of religions, cultures, ethnicities and ideologies, so that no consensus could be formed. Without consensus, the solipsists were immune to judgment, because there would be no agreed-upon standard of what reality was. Deconstruction triumphed. If we look at diversity critically, we can see that like competitive altruism its goal is not the liberation of people, but to make those who champion diversity look like "the bigger people" who have more open hearts, more adventurous lives, greater intelligence, etc. than those who insist on reality. With deconstruction, they liberated cause from effect; with diversity, they attempted to smash any consensus as to what cause and effect are. What people call "racism" -- as a way to bully others by associating them with Hitler and the like -- is pride in what you are. Every ethnic group wants to be its own group. If you mix others into that, you destroy it. So the real racism is those who insist every square inch of earth must be "diverse," even though (if we're all equal) diversity would be equally found among even a "homogenous" ethnic group. It's time to take a stand against the taboo where one angry jerk calls someone else a "racist," and we're all expected to beat up on that person for having a different opinion that our own. It's like the worst days of Christianity, where blasphemy was a sin punishable by exile; the new blasphemy is "racism," based on the secular version of the Christian ideal that all people are equal and the same. There is more at stake than diversity itself. The diversity-mongers do not want to help the other races of the world; they want to make themselves look important and gain power as they smash any knowledge of reality that could make them look foolish. They are using social pressures to dominate those with more wisdom, and like all paths to death, this one starts by discoordinating the internal organs of a civilization. In other words, diversity is a means to an end, and that is the solipsism of individuals who, given the wealth of civilization, do not want the obligation involved to understand reality and make realistic choices. Using their big brains, they have convinced a large mass of people to deny reality, using tools like diversity. And that is how civilizations die, and why people like you -- dear reader -- are preparing to re-birth civilization once the Crowd brings it fully into its death cycle, reducing it to third-world levels of disorganization and corruption. That in turn allows people, as was the case when civilization first started, to come together on the consensus that maybe we can do something better, away from these solipsists.
July 1, 2009
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