STAMPEDE

by Brett Stevens

Reflecting on our current situation, one cannot help but think back to the Cold War, when what beat the Soviets was as much McDonald’s, blue jeans, and grocery stores full of plenty. Their system did not work; ours did, at least during that period. Somehow however we ended up, just a few decades later, in the same place they did.

THE SOUND OF THE CROWD

by Brett Stevens

About a decade ago, I identified the phenomenon of Crowdism whereby individuals demand to be freed from consequences of their actions, and band together into groups as a sort of mutual aid society that will attack anyone who doesn’t agree. This forms a hive mind that snowballs and soon creates a monolithic, paranoid Utopian groupthink.

The point of Crowdism is not that evil people exist, although they do, or that people are tempted by evil, which they are. It’s that stupid ideas exist and they sound good, and that in crowds, people bow down to the judgment of others and go along with the herd, resulting in destructive and illusory “solutions.” Socializing makes us dumb because we obey the social standard, not the reality standard.

RATIONALISM AND THE QUEST FOR A "FLAT" UNIVERSE

Easily defeated by multiplanarity.

by Brett Stevens

The modern world is based on rationalism, or the idea that we can understand our world using logic independent of direct experience. It tends to overlap with empiricism, or the idea that replicated results are the highest form of sense-experience.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., HERO OF THE SUBURBS

by Brett Stevens

Why would anyone ever say, especially in a pained voice, “Can’t we all just get along?”

All of us getting along means acceptance of whatever. It means that there is no evolution, no searching for a better answer. In practice, it means that we all retreat to our homes and ignore each other as well as ignoring what happens to our society. If it gets worse, that is not our fault.

People who ask why we cannot all get along are seeking this kind of bourgeois individualism. They want the freedom to ignore the consequences of their actions and their inaction, so that if they contribute to mass destruction of society, they can look back and say “But I was fair to everyone, and I guaranteed that we all had rights.” Yes, rights to ignore that our fate is bound together and that what determines this is not the freedom of individuals, but the health of societies.

THE ESSENCE OF LIBERALISM: THE CHEERLEADER EFFECT AND SELF-ESTEEM

by Brett Stevens

It caught everyone by surprise, how successful liberalism has been.

I should clarify: liberalism is successful at taking over societies. It is not successful at making them thrive. In fact, it tends to destroy them and leave behind burnt shells with third-world levels of social order, hygiene, corruption and morality.