← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · neoclassical
Thread ID: 17279 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-03-13
2005-03-13 00:00 | User Profile
Mass Revolt
Thoughts move through populations like waves, transferring motion between particles and passing it along, leaving the particles in roughly the same positions. Such has it been with the phenomenon of the West, which is that of a great culture evolving and then, after several great civilizations, succumbing to internal divisiveness through the mechanism of mass revolt. Mass revolt, for the purposes of practical definition, is when those with little to their name and little of accomplishment turn on the greatest thinkers among their society, perceiving them to be "unfairly" privileged by nature or status, and by empowering themselves, drown out the voices of the few who can see more than the need to achieve mass revolt. When this happens, civilizations fall, as consensus is lost and the thinkers have been hounded out of power, so the first major threat to come along, like a flu to the elderly, carries them off.
When we speak of mass revolt, much as when speaking of a wave, we do not speak of a single group as much as an attitude that draws the like-minded together into a political force; much as no one answers for the direction that modern society has taken, no one answers for the mass revolt: it is a crowd momentum, not the work of a solitary voice. It has its champions, of course, but when the works of these are analyzed for content it seems they have cleverly found ways of repeating the same basic idea, with the conclusion coming before the investigative thought that normally leads to conclusions. In this we see that mass revolt is more of an attitude than a philosophy, in that it does not have a philosophy behind it; what it requires is that one adopt a stance of not looking at the whole, but looking at the wants of the individual, and place them before all else. By taking this narrow route to a conclusion, the mass revolt attitude bypasses the need for complex philosophy and focuses simply on the ego of each individual.
From this we can see the seeming paradox of mass revolt, which is how individualism produces a larger degree of groupthink than any kind of collectivist philosophy. This occurs by the very act of bypassing a philosophy of the whole for an assertion of "I want," which by its nature rejects any heroic or esoteric worldview. The mass revolt attitude considers acts of individual heroism to be wonderful, but it cannot stomach the day-to-day heroism required to have a worldview that places nature and humanity in a whole and places that before the immediate demands of the individual, most notably its self-image, referred to in the vernacular as "The Ego." Heroism of this day-to-day sort requires acceptance that there are greater goods than the individual, some of which involve giving up one's own life or mundane comforts for this greater good, even if it is not realized in the individual's lifetime. This heroic attitude is what defines the early philosophy of the West, both in India and Europe, and it alone is responsible for the kind of rigorous discipline and passionate idealism that founded these great civilizations.
Nothing compares to these civilizations today - it is considered polite not to mention how much the ancients knew, or how well their societies functioned, because such words cast doubt on our current existence, which most people justify through praise of our technology or our "enlightened," egalitarian moral existence. While it is true that our society has exceeded itself, we seem to lack the great thinkers of classical Rome, Greece and Europe, and instead have a popular culture that is as short-lived as it has depth. In order to believe in the supremacy of modern society, we have to consider comic books to be more important than Virgil, and hip-hop to be more impressive than Beethoven, and Tony Robbins more vital than Marcus Aurelius. The reason we must do this, in a modern time, is that qualitatively finer works are inaccessible to the mass; it is one in a thousand people who can understand Virgil or Aurelius, and one in ten thousand who will postpone the gratification of immediate emotional discharge for the contemplative passions of Beethoven. The mass prefers quantity to quality, and it suspects those have finer tastes of being enemies of the people, of the state, and of common decency.
This motion from more refined to broader tastes alone is responsible for the downfall of the West. There are many who find scapegoats, such as corporations, or Jews, or African-Americans, or the Masons, or oligarchs, but these symptoms come after the fact of a mass revolt initiated to overthrow those with refined tastes and ideas, and replace them with those with whom the crowd immediately identifies: simple ideas, grand and universal statements of little correspondence to reality, and crass tastes and instant gratification. With this wave of change, our societies dethroned their Kings and replaced them with a crowd of little Kings, each of whom thinks of nothing but his or her own comfort and personal wants. The result is a controlled anarchy which holds together only on what we have left in common, namely a desire to make a living and have families, but this fragile thread does not unify the complex mechanism of society. For this reason, decay slowly creeps in around the edges, through the details, and is unnoticed until it is too late.
This decay is evident in many things, from a media concerned only with showing the most shocking and depraved images while admonishing us toward moral abstracts like "freedom" to high schools that resemble jails and indoctrination facilities more than places of education. It can be seen in our "choice" to line our roads with giant plastic signs and disposable buildings, to eat cheap food wrapped in plastic, and to elect lying sycophants who casually sell us down the road while speaking of those same moral abstracts that seem to fascinate our media. It can be seen in the steady downbreeding of our own race, through the process by which those clever scoundrels who found a way to make a living off the backs of the rest of us get excess wealth and thus can buy themselves the prettiest wives; we have, internally, become a mongrel lot bred more for the ability to conform than the ability to think and do what is right, considering the whole as well as the personal. It can also be seen in our choice to import labor from foreign lands in order to continue our convenient lifestyles, and thus to inevitably mix our bloodlines from the bottom up. The result is a decay that has no obvious signs, but is an obvious sign in itself: a society addicted to convenience, a population bred into a grey dysfunctional race of drones, and technology and profit coming before any other ideals that we might have.
At least, it has not been obvious until now, because for the most part, those who can think and act among us form a "silent majority" who, recognizing the political situation as for the most part insalvagable, go about leading good lives and doing positive things wherever they can - hastening the decline by inches, and not miles. For the most part, this "silent majority" is apolitical except in the most dire situations, as they recognize that democratic politics belong to those with nothing better to do than fascinate over the details, although through these details they erode their opposition and over time take over, similarly to how silly people at a party eventually curb conversation to their own level. Of late, however, new signs have appeared on the horizon that puncture the illusion of our invincible modern society: a decline in oil supplies, an increase in political instability, and unprecedent change in our natural world, from climate change to depleted food animal populations, to a lack of any frontier toward which one can go when the insanity of modern life becomes too much. No, it is now clear - our backs are against the wall.
What unfortunately comes of this is the process of all revolutions in thought, namely that people widely recognize the symptoms but, being dependent on the thought-framework of the regime as it is, cannot think outside of that framework to diagnose the cause of these symptoms. In the case of the modern West, the regime is mass revolt, and its mechanisms of power are democracy, public image and the consumer economy. The individuals, as a crowd, wanted power and so it was given to them in the form of the vote; in "free enterprise" and economic competition, in place of a traditional vocation and thus greater job security than any modern form of society can offer; in a morality they could wield like a weapon to demand, "objectively," that those who transgress be exiled from society. This is the kingdom of the mass revolt, and since ideas pass like a wave, it has no permanent inhabitants, but by its nature of regulating who is allowed to succeed and thus breed, it creates its own audience. This is the cause, and all else are symptoms; for centuries our thinkers have been baffled as to how to undo this damage.
It is damage because those who are of the crowd, or see nothing but their immediate gratification and are blind to questions of the whole and of heroic thought, will never be capable of making the decisions required to steer society toward sensible goals. They lack the attention to scope of time, and they lack the willingness to think beyond their own mortal bounds and what they consider to be needs; they are literally short on the judgment skills, intelligence and character required to lead a nation. Yet we cannot find anyone successful who will proclaim that as a thesis, because to do so is to risk censure by public image police - "the people," themselves. Thus a paralysis has set in, with those who understand traditional values and the wisdom of rule by a specialized elite, being vastly outnumbered, fighting a defensive and reactionary battle to hold ground within the bounds of modern society. They are slowly realizing that this is a pipe dream; they must go on the offensive, because modern society is leaderless and based around only profit and mass revolt, thus cannot be reasoned with, and cannot be fixed with a few grand actions or statements; it must be slowly reversed, starting by replacing its core conceptions with something more thoughtful than mass revolt and individual profit.
Even worse, among those who could act, the disease of modernity - self-interest, including "The Ego" and personal profit - afflicts their ability to overcome factionalism and unite for the purposes of reconstructing society. We are divided first into political wings, and next into smaller partisan groups which each have pet issues, but none of whom have any comprehensive plan for changing the whole; this benefits both masses and corporate oligarchs, who are enjoying this neurotic political state as it enables them to continue making profit and being irresponsible, as without consensus there is no force that can check their base motivations. Lack of consensus literally holds the few that can still think in political slavery; yet, for reasons of self-image and personal wealth, they are unwilling to give up their pet issues, unwilling to see the commonality in their beliefs, and resistant to change. They empower their enemies through their own selfishness. Clearly this is why all mass revolt societies, a.k.a. democracies, collapse into authoritarianism: at some point a leader comes along who is willing to offend nearly every group through pure exercise of power, recognizing that trying to reason with this horde of screaming self-interests is futility defined.
Naturally, the masses take comfort in having "democracy" and "freedom" to defend against such things, but clearly no one has pointed out to them that the administrators of these same two mechanisms are those who are most likely to abuse them. They are further unaware that throughout history, the greatest takeovers have not occurred through a blatant show of force, but through deception, usually by pointing to an imminent evil and promising to defend against it - in exchange for absolute power in order to do so, of course. In America, the best example of this can be seen in the steady implementation of a police state, first from fear of Nazism, then from fear of communism, then from fear of drugs, then from fear of right-wing conspiracies, then from fear of terrorism - it never ends, at least until its power is asserted. The population cowers from the fear, and gratefully hands over power, and the fears increase. They have been duped into defending their "freedom" by giving it away, and yet, because they are incapable of seeing beyond the two week scope regulated by paychecks and television schedules, they remain oblivious.
The consequence of course is that along the same lines of what happened in Soviet Russia, America will collapse inward through some form of totalitarian system designed to protect "The People," and after several disastrous wars, will collapse inward, since popular revolutions, being extreme forms of mass revolt, first consume the free-thinkers and other dangerous leader material, and then try to plan their future. The Americans will probably triumph against the Chinese, when that inevitable conflict (this fact is known in China, but considered "racist" in America) comes to a head, but only after expending so much of their own human resources that the fate of America will be cast in stone. Whether they do or do not is not important, however, as they buy themselves at most another fifty years. What is important is that authoritarianism is coming to rule over the democratic masses, and for once, they will have no one to blame - although they will try - because they have brought it on themselves. Those who can recognize this fact will have it confirmed by observing that the masses will be unaware that their own actions brought about this decline, and will be equally unaware of how to reverse it, preferring to cast around blame desperately like a searchlight seeking escaped prisoners. They will have defeated themselves.
In this defeat, ironically, is the greatest hope for humanity, since it will thunder home the proof that the masses are not capable of self-government, and that an elite is needed in perpetuity to do what the hordes cannot comprehend doing. It is unclear how long it will take for this to occur, but that it will occur is certain; there are only so many natural resources, and space toward which we can expand without a thought for the whole, and we as a species grow exponentially, bringing closer the point at which decisions must be made that favor one over another - the antithesis of the "everybody can have it their own way" attitude of mass revolt cultures. The West will again change, and the cycle will reverse. For those who appreciate what the great civilizations of past had to offer, this means that the current time is one of planning and preparation for building on top of the wreckage. We cannot rebuild; the design of the present has failed, and rebuilding it will repeat the sad experience. We must build anew, looking both to past and future. If we have learned from history, the future will be based on a philosophy of the whole, and not the selfishness of mass revolt.
[url]http://www.nazi.org/nazi/policy/mass_revolt/[/url]