Human beings typically construct mental models to help make sense of the world around them. By their nature models are simplifications of real life, designed to make some concept or observation easier to understand and manage.
For example, a two-dimensional map can represent terrain, but is a crude facsimile of the real world it represents. Nonetheless it works, and human beings have a remarkable facility for this kind of symbolic representation of complex phenomena.
Some can become entranced with their internal representation of the world to an extent they exclude reality itself. Models by their nature are simplifications. Because of this a model is easy to grasp and comprehend. It lacks the complexity of reality, including detail we may wish to overlook. We can become lost in this cleaner, more pristine view of life because it is appealingly uncomplicated compared with the chaos of concrete reality.
We see things around us that reinforce our mental models. If you are a radical feminist and are convinced institutional sexism exists at your workplace then plenty of evidence will seem to present itself while contrary evidence will be tuned out. Every promotion of a male, however qualified, will add to the sensation there must be something to the theory after all.
This makes models, frameworks and theories attractive. They appear to endorse every bad idea we like and can efficiently filter out unwanted or uncomfortable contrary ideas. This can create a comforting little world of its own.
Who wants unsustainable living?
Today we see increasing evidence whole layers of society are entranced by the simple theories and frameworks they create in their heads.
A popular example is sustainable living. An offshoot of recycling, it fetishizes the notion of reuse by ignoring the hassle of “sustainable” schemes as well as the costs.
Sustainability is a broad enough concept it can be applied to everything from food to architecture. It feels like a great idea. Who would want unsustainable living?
Everything about the notion sounds appealing. But serious economic calculation is often absent from discussion because it is both complex, negating the benefit of a simple model, and contradicts the stated aims. Some proposed sustainable farming initiatives, for instance, would bankrupt farmers, reduce overall food production and may trigger famines.
That is how models work. They ignore complexity and are pleasingly easy to grasp. As a result, they begin to seem obvious to the point those who object are perceived as ignorant or backward in their understanding.
Equality between the sexes, treating illegal immigrants like native citizens, and providing help for the downtrodden are all positive-sounding initiatives. Who would oppose such decency? But all encourage ineffective policies based on the artificial clarity of theoretical models that cannot accommodate the detail of reality. Consequently, these high-minded policies rarely work as intended.
Many such initiatives exist. Western nations have become a laughingstock around the world for our seemingly endless concerns about problems most of the world ignores and accepts as part of life.
Many of the models driving bad policy can be easily disproven. Yet those who cling to utopian schemes seem impervious to facts or information. That is because the models are a manifestation of something much more sinister lurking just out of sight.
Everything must be equal
Many decision makers driving today’s public policies have become infected with the mind virus of egalitarianism. An irrational drive to enforce equality of outcomes. A horrific notion we once thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history.
The drive behind this has one deranged source, the belief that inequality is unnatural.
It is a fantasy that every imbalance in outcome we see is somehow wrong and must be corrected. This ignores the ubiquity of differences and the inequality they produce. Nothing in life can be equal. Height, weight, intelligence, aptitude, ability to focus, or self-discipline. We differ from each other in a myriad of ways.
Yet these differences must be overlooked. The egalitarian model claims we are equal, and all inequality is false, the result of some unfair or biased process that prevents the natural equalness of people to come to the fore.
An irrational belief in the wrongness of inequality drives many of the initiatives damaging the West. Job and education quotas for women or ethnic minorities are explicitly about equality. The model tells policy makers white men have unfair advantages that require us to artificially promote others.
But the mistaken belief in equality underpins much more than quotas. It has infused the very soul of Western intelligentsia for decades.
Facts often become irrelevant because the obsession with inequality is what is being attended to. Mental models are developed and embraced to manage the unsupportable belief that unequal outcomes are unnatural and should be corrected. These are fictions that capture the imaginations of the weak-minded among us. And they work.
If you have ever wondered why the continued existence of the polar ice caps is doing nothing to trigger a consideration of ruinous climate policies, it is because you are looking at the wrong target.
Climate initiatives now encompass almost all human activity. There is a war against cars, how we heat our homes and where we source our clothes. Even the cosmetics and toiletries we use are under scrutiny. Everything in fact that makes life comfortable and bearable.
Eating meat is also killing the planet despite cattle having evolved alongside us to provide sustenance. We watch too much TV, read too many expensive printed books and our kids have too much stuff.
Even having children is frowned upon with the joy of parenthood being replaced with charts and graphs calculating the expense of children and how much more they cost here rather than the poorer parts of the world. The blessing of new life reduced to a carbon footprint.
This incessant urge to control and reshape every aspect of our lives comes from a series of mental models about climate, food production, family dynamics and more.
But underlying these simple models is the one stark observation that haunts the West, our relative success compared to all others. It is this that challenges the egalitarian notions our decision makers deeply believe. It is their religion, and it is constantly under attack from reality.
The first world nations are the top dogs. The world has been run by us for centuries, particularly the Anglosphere where these disastrous ideas run amok.
The astonishing litany of successes produced by Northern European cultures in both Europe and North America makes uncomfortable reading for those with the egalitarian disease. We cannot easily explain our success considering the almost total failure of other cultures to keep up.
Our relative wealth stems directly from the same impulse that invented the modern world and all its conveniences that we are now determined to ration.
Egalitarianism says we are all the same. No one can get ahead except by cheating. Experience tells us otherwise. We are the ones who got ahead so we must be brought low to satisfy the equality calculus. We can be made equal through our ruin.
The disastrous schemes and ideas are there to manage this decline, to help a small number of influential people avoid facing the uncomfortable realities of life. Some people are hopeless, some become drug addicts, others yet are low IQ brutes who need supervision.
Scale this up to 7 or 8 billion people and we see huge variety. And it is this variety, a very literal diversity of ability, our social engineers cannot cope with.
This is the real drive behind globohomo, the attempted homogenization of the entire globe, an impossible dream driven by adolescent thinkers who lack the mental strength to revisit faulty belief systems and the broken models they produce.
Instead, you may find yourself stripped of your citizenship, your health and your sanity as they reduce your standard of living to assuage a guilt they can never erase. They are quite obviously the wrong people to run anything. They are insane.
And nor is this just of academic interest. Germany has already deindustrialized to achieve the incomprehensible destruction of its energy sector.
America is balkanizing and losing its place in the world as the world itself moves there and brings its dysfunction with it.
Europe is in terminal decline with unemployment figures in the millions yet social engineers insist we would collapse without the constant importation of millions of poorly educated citizens from the global south.
None of these things would happen in countries run by rational individuals with a strong grip on reality. All of this is justified with mental models around immigration, climate, gender, and any number of initiatives and schemes. The facts don’t matter only the destruction. And it is the destruction that will help deliver the equality. The mental models just grease the cognitive wheels to make it seem palatable.
The professional class live in a fantasy world
Taken at face value this is insanity. Look deeper and it all makes sense. Guilt at our relative success, and an inability to accommodate reality, also known as living in a fantasy world, are the hallmarks of today’s over socialized, over educated middle class professionals. Their retreat into fantasy is a comfort from the unavoidable harshness of real life. Those models are their safety blankets, perfectly designed to insulate them from reality.
They have been explicitly taught a preoccupation with equality, and explicit concern with inequality, is a manifestation of sophistication. All who oppose these egalitarian impulses are small-minded, bigoted racists and must be ignored or cancelled.
Models provide psychological comfort they are doing God’s work while shielding them from reality. Like a mental padded cell, they get to bounce about in there and keep themselves free from harm.
Individuals who oppose climate initiatives can be made to seem like they embrace an unsustainable polluted world based on the exploitation of resources and safely laughed at from a distance. The right model can make them look like primitives even when they quote facts and point to observations anyone can make.
That is how some can inexplicably believe failed states that were never conquered by European powers are somehow victims of imperialism. Or that Western women, the most privileged group in existence, are oppressed. All you have to do is live in your head then rely on fictions and theories to help shield you from reality.
The West is no longer characterized by our sophistication or our determination as we once were, the qualities that helped us reach the top. Our hallmark today is emotional thinking and mindless adherence to fads the rest of the world understands as fantasy.
Many educated people embrace these things. Worse, those who understand the models are falsehoods often lack the courage to challenge the initiatives.
These are the broken people who tell us they possess the solutions to the world’s problems, and much of the solution looks like managed decline in our standard of living to bring us down to the level of the developing world. That is the only way they can make us equal, and they are sufficiently deranged to really mean it.
This same impulse has animated every crackpot group over the last century and a half, a misdirected sense of outrage about what the world naturally looks like. An inability to accept the tragic reality that some fall behind no matter what we do, that unevenness, differences and inequality are part of the human condition.
We are all different, and we are all inadequates at something. A humane society finds a place for everyone who is willing and seeks to downplay obvious disparities to engender a sense of genuine inclusion.
In the hands of our emotional groupthinkers sensible ideas of including people wherever possible have become inverted. The overt obsession with “inclusivity” now causes friction instead of promoting harmony and draws attention to the very disparities we are told must not exist. There is no such thing as race, it is a social construct; we must therefore artificially promote some races over others. Such is the world created by those living in fantasyland. It cannot make sense even to them, hence their aversion to open debate or scrutiny.
It is not an accident the notion of inclusion has come to dominate public discourse. It is fear of social exclusion that defines the weak. It is the basis for almost all groupthink. Increasingly it is the preoccupation with including the unincludable that is destroying all we have built over the centuries as quotas take their inevitable toll.
Western decision makers are destroying our lives to service mental fictions that cause them discomfort. So, anyone still labouring under the illusion climate initiatives, mass immigration or feminist insanity can be curbed with a few more facts is deluding themselves.
These policies have not come about by accident, they are by design. They serve a different need than advertised. They comfort the irrationally guilty about their first world life because they cannot shake off the sentimental belief in an equality that has never existed anywhere. Unless we stop them, our world is truly lost.
Before my career even got started, while I was still in school, there were a handful of top students all competing for two internship slots at one of the auto-industry Big 3. Being a top-2 student, I was looking forward to one of the slots. Not so. It seems the funding for those available positions were for black candidates only. Another company was offering an internship for a female-only applicant. All the years of hard work and striving for excellence, and the two guys that got the slots were literally the bottom two achievers in the whole class.
I nearly quit right then. Instead, I transitioned into a related major that was still merit-based. That was over thirty years ago, a moment in time that changed my life. It was a fork in the road I didn't want, but was thrust upon me. We are surrounded by this weakest-link thinking, and my observation is that the world is very much like Ayn Rand depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Populated by mindless drones who are takers, not makers. At some point you decide to just withdraw, or forge your own path through life. The positive outcome of that experience was that it forced me to see the world the way it truly is, at the age of 25.
An excellent post, albeit depressing. Thank you, I think.