Amerika (II)
The cybernetician Gregory Bateson observed that in America everything is goal-orientated—the American ideal is to have very clearly and precisely defined objectives that you pursue in order to enhance your status. By contrast, Europeans give little consideration to this idea but rather seek to maintain “normalcy”. I was always puzzled why Americans online talk about “ngmi”—“not going to make it”—and now I understand what they mean; they mean that they will not attain their goal-orientated specific objectives and garnish their status. If you want to see a practical example of this mindset just look at Jordan Peterson’s work—his whole emphasis is on specific goal-orientated objectives that will supposedly make your life meaningful.
The difference between European and American attitudes partly explains why America is Satanic. Bateson goes on to explain that the “normalcy” a European maintains constitutes deeply woven intricate patterns—his attachment to locality, history, language, race, faith, and so on. The American, by contrast, lives in an areligious racial and linguistic melting pot in which atomised individuals are trained to think in an engineering-orientated way to attain their objectives (to “make it” at any cost). It’s why America’s only philosopher, William James, adumbrates a philosophy that basically says “it’s true if it helps you achieve your objectives”—that is the philosophy of the huckster, the get-rich scheme, and an enthusiast for How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The attitude also partly explains the trans phenomenon and why it started in America—in an atomised can-do engineering society (a service-orientated culture, you might say) if you want to be a woman when you were born a man then why not? “Sure, buddy, good for you!”. After all, America is a land where you go to reinvent yourself—so why not reinvent yourself as a woman? And isn’t the only truly anti-American sentiment a refusal to accept that another guy is trying to “make it”? Isn’t that some kind of snobby aristocratic attitude—“I mean, that’s why we got rid of King George, buddy! If I want double-D implants, why not? This is America.”
Trans emerges from the elite—so it’s intra-sexual competition of some kind, albeit perverted; as noted, America is a very feminised society where women have been co-equal with men since at least the 1950s—given that it’s high-status to be a woman, it seems inevitable ambitious goal-orientated people would strive to become one. After all, isn’t a trans person ultimately a marvel of the engineering mindset—sort of an adjunct to the plastic surgery industry that once primarily catered to boob jobs and facelifts?
Of course, it is the richly textured patterns found in Europe—in other places around the world—that constitute religion. It’s because the patterns are gestalt with nature—just as Jesus came to save the bookish Jews from their detachment from nature. This explains why America is Satanic: it has embraced a goal-orientated mindset that seeks to maximise self-promotion—in other words, greed and vanity. The intricate patterns, by contrast, have no defined goal—or, “I am what I am” and “It is what it is”.
Yet nothing succeeds like success—and America succeeds so very well, so is not America the future? Only in a superficial way. It’s the case that intelligence wins against wisdom in the short-term, but wisdom wins in the long-term—hence Christ and Hitler, nature-men, lost but have won in the long-term. Consider Afghanistan: there you have a deeply-embedded pattern—a tribal warfare pattern—that striates the country. Initially, American “object-orientated” warfare prevailed; but, in the long run, it was ground down by the pattern—the pattern is, as Taleb would say, “Lindy”; and perhaps it’s anti-fragile too—whereas the engineered society, like the trans man, is an impressive artefact vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
Indeed, the Americans were drawn into Afghanistan by bin Laden—and he was another man, like Hitler and Christ, who “won by losing”. When he died, Afghanistan was occupied and America looked very secure—a decade later, America left Afghanistan in disorder and now looks on the verge of collapse. Men like bin Laden emerge from the pattern within Islam, a pattern cut by the centuries, to defend her in paradoxical ways. It’s more than the atomised engineer can deal with—they just laugh at men who would fly a plane into a building (it makes no rational sense—“ngmi”). It is not intelligent, but it is wise—it’s why bin Laden always had a beatific smile. This is why America—Satan—will ultimately lose; it can’t defeat the deep patterns—these patterns work in non-linear ways, they’re eerie and wyrd. They have no objective.