Author: Curt Doolittle

(From Another Thread:

Very Meaningful Ideas in this post)

DEMOCRATIC SECULAR HUMANISM IS A RELIGION

It is based upon false premises, and counter to observable fact.

It is no less mystical or absurd than an omniscient omnipotent, artificial deity.

It’s purpose is to accumulate power.

IT IS A WAR ON AN OLD RELIGION BY A NEW RELIGION.

The equality of man, the relativity of values, the irrelevance of norms, the equality of cultures, the permanence that technical innovation will ‘save us’, and a dozen other mythos, attribute untrue properties to man and society, in an effort to cast the extended order of human cooperation and competition as an extended family.

Humans do not act in this way. Even practitioners of the religion do not act this way. If they did, they would tolerate the old religion. But they don’t. And, in fact, they only tolerate any religion with lower status signals than their religion.

TRADING THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY FOR FALSE, FREE STATUS SIGNALS

And those free status signals are the ‘psychological device’ that provides the incentive for adopting the new democratic religion, rather than the old religion’s promise of life after death.

This is the technological innovation of democratic secular humanism: it has replaced false promise of afterlife, true status signals, true suppositions about human nature, and true economic principles, with false status signals, false suppositions about human nature, and false economic principles.

The net of this new religion has been the destruction of the nuclear family and a the slow regression away from the high trust society that the west built by local outbreeding over more than a thousand years.

Because trust in *kindness*, which is an emotionally loaded term for the human need for acceptance and positive status signals, is counterproductive to the economic requirement for trust in trade and contract. [IDEA: positive signals for mere existence versus positive signals for economic action.]

The innovation of the west that allowed it to create greater relative wealth at lower rates of corruption, and to tolerate higher risk and innovation, finally consumer credit, was the high trust society. And we can demonstrate empirically that increases in diversity of norms and culture, even race, cause accelerating decreases in trust. Our governmental conflict is just an expression of this difference.

It is NOT POSSIBLE to create a civic religion without status signals. Humans value status more than money. No civic religion will ever exist that does not. However, the question is, what actions do those signals produce in the real world?

SIGNALS OF TRUST

Absolute respect for the commons and private property, Competition, Individualism, the nuclear family, truth telling, adherence to contract, and conformity to commercial norms, were innovations adopted by the western cultures under manorialism (feudalism), as people sought to demonstrate that they were fit to rent land. Males embraced chivalry because it allowed them to achieve status signals without fighting, and in turn, it allowed them to achieve status through service. Further it did not require extraordinary wealth to do services, as did fighting.

That it takes a long time to change signaling strategies once the capture of fossile fuels permits industrialization, therefore freeing the woman from the drudgery of the home and the man from teh drudgery of the field, and gives us enough free wealth and time to afford to educate our young is certainly good reason to extend property rights to women, and to extend political enfranchise to all consumers and laborers. This is true.

But the practical reality is our goods and services may be cheaper and the least of us we may live better than nobility of the past, but that does not change the reality that we are vastly unequal in temperament and ability, and most of us require extraordinary training and reinforcement by others to maintain the high trust society that we buit by accident was counter to intuition and behaviorally expensive to maintain. People universally demonstrate a preference for the benefits of material productivity. Always. Yet they long for the behavior of the tribe and family, despite universal and inescapable tribal poverty, and despite universal and inescapable low trust in family-dominated, in-breeding-in-extended family societies.

Be careful what you wish for. You’re getting it.

Progressive ideology is a longing for a return to the tribe. It is cheap false status signals that produce negative economic consequences. Cultures are empirically demonstrable to be unequal, and democracy only works in the west because the west started out as aristocratic. Without western culture the west will be like every other barbaric low trust civilization on the planet.

Progressive ideology is to the west what christianity was to rome. There is no difference.

It is mysticism in different robes.

-Curt