AN ALTERNATE NARRATIVE

by Brett Stevens

They tell me that when people wake up in the middle of the night randomly, it usually means they are going through great change. Their brains have been processing this for the first five hours of sleep and now have conclusions.

Somehow this manifests first in disturbing dreams but then in sudden waking. This leaves the person in the state of having left sleep but in a fully alert state, looking at the darkness around them and wondering if they are safe.

In this way, our highest intellectual faculties engage with our primal animal ones; our big brains have identified that a threat exists around us, but since it is abstract and removed in time, we have no way to react.

Thus we lie awake, pondering the meaning of it all and the direction of things, then conclude that there is nothing we can do anyway, so we might as well just wait for the apocalypse to conclude and see if we survive.

If this worked, people would not find themselves waking up night after night.

The Left took over the West by advancing a simple narrative:

1. Now that civilization is established, there is no purpose, so you do not want any restrictions on your behavior or penalties for your selfishness.
2. If you extend the same liberalization of the rules to others, you can interact in a solely social context, and there is no need for conflict.
3. This returns humanity to its golden age, when everyone was accepted without demanding that they change so that their behavior produces civilization or excellence.
4. However, universal acceptance — equality — is threatened by those who want to oppress you, which explains why your positions in life are not in fact equal.
5. Remove those bad guys, who you know because they have more power, wealth, and status than you, and you will have a new Utopia of equality and peace.

In other words, according to this viewpoint, we came from a Garden of Eden where there was equality, but someone ruined it by introducing inequality. So now we can reclaim Utopia by just forcing everyone to be equal.

If you wonder why people accept all of the crazy stuff coming down from Washington and Hollywood, look to the popularity of this narrative. People like it. If you support it, you get popular, rich, and famous too (in theory).

We might call this “the shopkeeper” morality. A good shopkeeper offends none, but is edgy enough to get people motivated to come into his shop to see what the drama is. Our shopkeeper mentality is one half of the bourgeois or city-dweller attitude.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

The other half consists of believing that people have no obligation except to themselves, that working and paying taxes is all one must do, and the notion that there are no real evils or illusions in life, only choices (with prices).

This bourgeois mentality allows people to ignore the decay of their civilization while endorsing notions that further promote that decay, simply because they do not care about the consequences of their actions, only the perception of those actions in a social context.

When you see people wandering around on the streets wearing three masks, a face shield, and gloves, you are seeing runaway aspirational status signaling. They want to join the hip group of shopkeepers who are “in the know” and socially powerful.

They are just inept at it, so you get comedic responses.

Face nappy vs. chin bra.

For those of us who want to live in a civilization that is not in a terminal dive toward third world status, reversing this narrative proves our most important task. We can only reverse it by having a better narrative.

To counter, out-compete, and abolish the shopkeeper bourgeois Leftist narrative, we need something that explains the world as an ongoing human triumph where we all come out ahead.

I suggest this one: there are good people and bad people, but almost everything humans do ends badly anyway, so we are just sticking with what works and getting rid of everything else so we can at least be free of the bad people.

In other words, swap the Leftist revolutionary narrative — “us inequal people are trying to overthrow the rich, powerful, intelligent, and healthy in order to have equality” — with a new one based on morality and eugenics.

The good people are removing the bad ideas and this is removing the bad people, after which we have (if not Utopia, since no one realistically believes in that) a society that is rising, not falling.

Only this counters the inherent solipsism of the human mind, made easier by egalitarian shopkeepers. They say everyone is good, important, and equal; we say that only some are good, and the rest need to go elsewhere.

The Enlightenment,™ after all, was part of the rise of the middle class, made prosperous by the kings, that then overthrew the kings, culture, traditions, and nature in favor of a world based around human socialization and peer pressure, as is described in Crowdism.

This social-only outlook replaced accumulated wisdom and hierarchy with a mob dedicated only to flattering each other so that it can sell each other products. Like a runaway chain reaction it ends up at Communism because if you flatter everyone, you end up accepting their excuses for their failures and scapegoating those in power for “inequality,” at which point you naturally head straight toward the far Left, whose philosophy of subsidized egalitarianism addresses all of these concerns.

That leads to decay because in order to make things equal, you take from the strong to give to the weak, at which point, just like how corruption takes a third of every deal, government takes half of everything. The overhead of any action rises, and so people stop doing anything but keeping the churn going. Then you have an inefficient social machine that refuses to change in response to changing economic, political, social, or environmental conditions.

Humanity is self-deceiving, and piles up people who reinforce the illusion to each other, and once there are enough of them, like an infection, they take over with a philosophy of pacifism.

Most people fear inner change more than anything else. It requires that they understand the world around them, adapt to it, and then find a way to make it good.

That means that they have to adjust their thinking instead of simply demanding that what they want is right and the world is bad for not doing it, so anyone who wants to be their friend will believe in their illusions.

Shopkeeper morality.

People want what is bad for them: inaction. They crave to be “free” from the need to interact with the world, learn how it works, and discipline their thinking. They reject any “new” data simply because they think it destabilizes them.

Pacifism translates to something like “the only reason people fight is that they have different amounts of stuff, so if we give away our stuff, then no one will fight.” Absolutely no human means this seriously when they say it.

To the canny shopkeeper, “pacifism” means that he endorses peace, happiness, love, compassion, equality, and empathy and then hires private security. He gives away some of his stuff to government so it can give away the money to people who will buy more of his products.

The shopkeeper is always a few steps ahead because his thinking is narrow channel. He thinks solely in terms of what is popular among others that leads to him selling more product. He does not care about anything else, except as a tool to that end.

For example, a shopkeeper may be a big supporter of Greta Thunberg and the environmental movement. For him, this translate to more taxes, more payouts to citizens, therefore he can sell more “green” products but also, more of the usual junk to idiots. You will notice that none of these environmental groups call for limiting iPhones, Nikes, Coca-Cola, fast food, or delivery food.

If you leave it up to the shopkeeper, you get a circular consumer economy. We all make products that are sold to consumers, and are good consumers ourselves, so we stop making things for export and focus on shilling luxury goods and services to people who have extra money because government gives it out.

As we enter the twenty-first century at the meaningful point of it being almost a quarter gone, at which point we start to see its real character. Our narrative should include the idea that we are leaving behind a dying system and moving to a new idea, one that combines the best of the near-past with the past before that.

We can see that democracy, equality, socialism, diversity, consumerism, bureaucracy, and technology are all failing us. This says that our “solutions” to the problem of nature — inequality, bullying, criminality, tyranny — are in fact not solutions, and that instead we have to pay more attention to why nature is the way it is.

It makes sense to call this approach “naturalism” because it is based in natural order more than human individual autonomy. In doing so, it rejects The Enlightenment,™ but it takes something from the modern time as well: a desire to stop trying to force people to obey moral codes.

When you speak nature does
not necessarily take notes.

In the bigger loop of history, we have learned that genetic characteristics are innate and control much of what we do, so some people are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in the middle. We cannot force people to behave, only rank them by their quality.

The old narrative said that we all had to obey the same dogma to be equal, and whoever was most slavish in reciting the propaganda and exhibiting the signal behaviors won. The new narrative says that those who instinctively achieve good rise above the rest, so we should pay attention to reality and see how to be good.

This rejects the idea of equality, which is that we have to be nice to everyone even if these people are parasitic douchebags. Shopkeepers loved this rule because it meant more customers; religion wanted to mold these people into perfect moral agents; democracy wanted to make these interchangeable cogs into identically-stamped robots who would enforce the narrative of democracy.

Humanity is changing. We are — as often is the case — losing sight of old illusions, and entering a new age with what we now know. We realize now that we are on a quest for our own sanity instead of obedience, and that we need a working form of civilization instead of the moribund one in which we find ourselves.

Our new narrative says that our goal is not social, as in “socializing with friends and influencing potential customers,” at all, but within. We need to become sane, adapt to reality, and strive for the good. Those who do this win and everyone benefits from having them in power.

In this way, our new narrative makes society into a game that people can win, instead of what is basically a negative goal, in that you obeyed in order to not lose but other than a few billionaires, no one really “wins.”

History will quickly turn as the continuing failure of democracy, market socialism, civil rights, and consumerism becomes too obvious to ignore. We, those who woke up first, need to be there with a new story that people can follow to guide them out of this abyss.

Also published at Amerika.org