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by Umair Haque from Eudaimonia Website
How the Dunces of Modern History
ended up Being
Us...
They don't learn history's lessons. They don't progress - they stagnate, and then regress, clinging desperately to failing ideologies, grasping at dead, obsolete ideas like a drowning person grasps at flotsam. But history's tide is unforgiving.
It cares little for the
fool who clings to the driftwood, instead of swims for the shore.
Our societies are not
looking like they are going to make it.
Let's do a quick reality check about the state of Anglo societies.
Britain and America are the only two societies in the world where the following things are true.
I could go on...
The point is very simple.
Outside perhaps North Korea, these three things are true nowhere
else in the world.
The world is laughing in astonishment, glee, horror, and satisfaction. ("Build that wall!" Hey, dummy - don't you need healthcare...?)
Very well...
Anglo societies are also the ones,
That is because Anglo societies were the only ones cutting investment in themselves.
But at least Britain spent a few decades investing in itself.
America never did - and the ruinous results are all too plain to see. America is a "rich" country in name only.
Americans will never have the following things:
Just travel across an imaginary border to Canada and see how much better life is, in every imaginable way, from less crime, to no "medical bankruptcy", to a distinct lack of fascists in media and politics.
It's no surprise, then, that Anglo societies are also the ones in which extremism has raged to the very top of democracy, rendering it not really democracy at all anymore.
Of course they are not...
They are crude majoritarianism, self-inflicted catastrophe, the undoing of the pillars of democracy, as the enraged cry:
But why did Anglo
societies make this mistake - austerity, nobody investing in
anyone else - which then led to vicious extremism surging to the
very top, destabilizing society?
Now, this is the point at which I probably lose you.
Anglos are trained to be so dumb, so uneducated, so dispirited, so Soviet, that by now, all that they can talk about is money. Shift to the ideas behind it, and bang...! The Anglo mind shuts down...
Hey, did you know Uber's about to go public!! 111... No dollar signs - help!
I don't know how to
think! So I encourage you to read on - if only to challenge
yourself. You can judge for yourself if anything I have to say
matters.
But you, like me, are in a distinct minority.
You see, if Anglo
societies genuinely understood that democracy is me liberating you
to achieve more happiness, security, meaning - more
eudaimonia, in short, more of a
truly good life - they wouldn't have denied each other precisely
that.
Their logic is as brutal as it is foolish as it is backwards.
In other words, Anglo societies see eudaimonia itself as zero-sum - for me to have a good life, I must take it away from you.
Where do we see that happening?
Where don't we see it happening is the better question. Why else would a rich country close... schools and hospitals? Every aspect of Anglo life is shaped by the moral illogic of zero-sum gain now. That is why the crudest forms of social climbing have come to dominate culture wholesale - think of the false smile of the professional Instagrammer.
It's the perfect example. I must establish my superiority. Look at my perfect life! But for me to feel the thrill of dominance in this way, I must make you depressed, envious, unhappy.
Who is better off this
way? Precisely no one is the answer - which is why depression has
spiraled out of control in Anglo societies.
So what?
They are hardly making great discoveries. They are selling ads. The only goal of this grim charade of progress is to pile up profit in fewer and fewer hands, by taking it, looting, extracting it from others.
Hence, the Yale or
Harvard graduate soon enough finds himself "raiding" pension funds,
which is a polite way of saying: stealing peoples' life savings.
Because precisely the same moral illogic is at work.
Where does this insane, bizarre, upside down illogic come from?
I'll answer that in just
a moment. First let me spell it out a little more clearly at root,
and then its roots will naturally reveal themselves.
Now see the flip side of this moral logic, which is where collapse comes from.
If I do not dominate you, I myself am weak. You have dominated me. Life is either dominate or be dominated, predator or prey, control or be controlled, have power over or be powerless.
Only the strong
survive...
But that is not democracy, my friends.
It is something just a
shade away from the hatred that has come to rule these broken
societies of idiots. It is tribalism and authoritarianism by any
other name.
The most cruel, abusive, and violent win - and they win everything, taking more than 100% of the economy's gains, rendering life more or less unlivable for everyone else, who then rebel by wanting to burn it all down.
The supreme are the ones
who take what is theirs - and they can be no other way, because
zero-sum moral logic dictates that I must take from you to have more
for me. I must be a predator - or else I will be prey.
Anglo societies invented supremacy - which then and today we call "white supremacy." But they are being undone by the logic of supremacy applied to themselves too, now.
You see, supremacy was not just the idea that the white man was superior - it was the idea that he was superior because he was the most rational, clever, ruthless, and strong.
White supremacy, therefore, is a deeper idea in itself.
You can see supremacy very simply and clearly in two telling examples.
Brexit - in which the Brexiter cannot be equal to the German or the French person or the Spaniard - but must rise above them.
And in America's white middle class becoming a minority for the first time - and a tidal wave of racism, bigotry, and hate rising.
Why? Because the American
cannot be equal, you see. He must have someone to dominate, control,
abuse. The problem is that today, that person is his neighbor, just
as it is for Britain. Collapse - as a society eats itself.
Because the higher you rise, the less room there is on the pyramid. Supremacy therefore selects for the most ruthless, immoral, indecent - the violent, abusive, and cruel - and calls them the "best and brightest." But they are not.
They are just the most violent, abusive, and cruel. They are the "fittest", to be sure, in supremacy's terms - the ones who can do the most injury to others, and therefore reign supreme over them.
But that is all they
are...
You don't have to look
much further than the concepts Anglo society's endlessly
regurgitates - "grit", "resilience", today's latest code-words for
being able to simultaneously receive pain, and give cruelty - to
see it.
Supremacy was applied to white men, it's true.
But as an idea, it has never really left Anglo society.
They are still obsessed
with, controlled by, governed by the idea of supremacy - that
people are locked in mortal combat for meaning, purpose, happiness,
worth, value, and nobody has any worth at all if they cannot
dominate anyone else.
We end up racing to the
bottom. We end up degenerating and atrophying, socially, culturally,
politically. We end up stagnating economically, since all predators
do is take - not create, build, imagine.
Everyone in them is taught to contest everyone else for supremacy - but the result of this moral illogic, which is precisely equivalent to saying that no one has any inherent worth, no one deserves anything, everything in life is zero-sum - is that we waste our lives trying to kill one another, basically.
No, really.
The rest of the rich world has learned the great lesson of history.
That cooperative nonviolence is the hand of progress. Social democracy is based on that principle. And it's not a coincidence that social democracies are all forging ahead, whether Sweden or Canada, even in troubled times - while us Anglos are collapsing into the abyss.
The abyss of what
supremacy must lead to. Extremism, fascism, authoritarianism. All
the things that are the opposite of democracy.
They seem incapable of understanding this beautiful and vital lesson of history, so true and full of grace. They don't to give one another more eudaimonia.
They just want to give one another less, by taking it from each other, in an endless cycle of brutish, stupid violence. That is what supremacy demands, because that is how one proves one is superior.
And the result of that
can only be collapse, my friends.
We stand caught between an impossibility:
People do not respect us, nor should they.
All that is why the world is torn between two responses to the self-inflicted collapse of the Anglo world. A kind of jaw-dropped laughter, at the sheer stupidity of us.
And a kind of vengeful, satisfied gloating - after all, we are the ones who have kept them down for so long, toppling governments and poisoning their democracies.
Only now we are doing it to ourselves.
If I was them, I'd gloat,
too - and call it karma, justice, retribution.
Those Anglos have finally got theirs...!
The world is beginning to learn this.
But us...? We are still the same old stupid, stupid supremacists - only now we are fighting to dominate and demean and destroy ourselves.
That is why we are humiliated. Yet nobody has humiliated us but us.
We are the idiots of
history now, my friends...
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