Where Humanity Stalled
Societies have at least two layers. On the surface, we see prosperity in material terms; underneath, there is the mental and emotional health of the citizens, and the latter relates to trust in the future. A society that is unstable produces unstable people who make decisions impulsively.
Organized agriculture made the West wealthy in ways that other nations were not. We had less of the gold and jewels, but more of the functional societies that could compile learning and start to leverage it through technology. Eventually iron and steel became more significant than gold and diamonds in the West.
The surface of our society remains wealthy thanks to this technology and agriculture, but the core has become rotted and people no longer have faith in the future. They are dying deaths of depression, not reproducing at replacement levels, and generally making neurotic and destructive decisions. This is a death spiral.
Just like humanity had to learn that what produced wealth was more important than valuable things in themselves, our species has another lesson coming up: we are abandoning linear thought because it makes symbols more important than reality and inverts meaning, and turning to viewing patterns of events as significant.
In the old way, you received “wisdom” from above like everyone else, and everyone acted on it to their profit, at least in theory. This worked well for basic science and technology, but broke down once political systems took over and started manipulating us with symbols like compassion for the poor, patriotism, and following social trends.
To build a fire in nature, you assemble dry wood, tinder, and stones in a form that is likely to ignite, and then produce a spark. In symbolic society, you find the right method such as lighter fluid and matches, then apply to whatever you want; the method and technology have replaced the cause-effect analysis of how to make a fire.
This becomes more significant when it involves political decisions. Instead of setting up a situation such that a fire can take hold, we believe in “magic methods” (means-over-ends thinking) which can be used to hammer anything into shape. If people are poor, blast money at them until they become rich. This makes humans feel godlike.
At this point, however, we have squandered our birthright. The life of low labor and high enjoyment that technology has promised has evaporated, since the “extra” money gets routed through government toward egalitarian concerns like anti-poverty and anti-“racism” programs.
We got there by following symbols, with equality serving as the precedent and all others descending from that, since following the trend of doing what is popular leads us inevitably to a demand for equality, since that flatters the individuals in a group and makes them feel “safe.”
Humanity will find a new path that accepts both hard realism and relativity. Hard realism means that we measure what we do by results, not by intentions or methods; relativity leads us to accept that there are no universal truths, values, or communications, only reality which we each interpret as best we know how.
Our groups are manipulated because they demand things that do not confront the darkness and fear in life, which leaves them with only the irrelevant, which is then applied in ways that end up being destructive because they are unrealistic, however well they were intended or how fully they fulfill symbols like equality.
When its efforts fail, the group unites only in self-pity. Some get sad, most get bitter, and this serves as an excuse for further bourgeois denial of anything but individualism. Everyone works for his own pile of money, house, and social importance, and ignores the effects on civilization or others.
After all, when one feels like a victim, retaliation against the group, nature, and world is justified and necessary. It hurt you; you should hurt it back. In this way, everyone converges on bitterness, fear, and anger as the society ages.
That type of “feeling” is the basis of moralism, which involves the treatment of individuals in a decontextualized sense. The individualist considers himself without considering nature, the divine, culture, or civilization, and only judges whether he has more or less than the other guy.
This, too, is symbolism, and symbolism is failing. Humanity is moving beyond it as our various centralized symbolic systems like DEADS — democracy, equality, atomization, diversity, and socialism — break down because people have lost faith in the symbols. We are finally ready for something new.
