The general trend towards apathy in western societies, which has reached profound depths in the USA, can be explained as being due to multiple environmental effects working in unison.
The primary environmental effect is that of overpopulation which has made popular equalitarian, altruistic conformist ideologies promising harmony and stability, a social necessity.
The ideals of Democracy and Christianity, as well as a slew of other ideological/religious dogmas (memes) preaching tolerance,love, non-violence and non-discrimination, are directly linked to population pressures that allowed for them to spread within populations fatigued and fed up with constant strifeand dominated by weakness and need.
Inclusion became the new way of maintaining peace and stability, as systems sought methods of making themselves viable within a world of constantly changing circumstances.
This ‘leveling of mankind’ into a mass of undifferentiated “individuality”, is what is called Domestication or what I call Feminization and is currently described as the ‘dumbing-down’ of man.
Dumbing-down is a systemic necessity when one needs to integrate creatures, with the intelligence of man, into coherent and stable groups of thousands, millions, or in some cases, billions of minds.
Termite colonies are successful because its members lack any form of individuality or intelligence that would make their assimilation difficult.
To accomplish any form of systemic stability each part of the group must be made to feel a part of it, safe within it and desirable (helpful) to the group, so a common denominator becomes the core of group cohesion.
In small groups the sense of tribalism or of gang psychology is created by finding common attitudes and interests or ideals or myths to rally behind.
As groups grow in size common denominators are harder to find and to maintain due to the fact that a multiplicity of minds creates a multiplicity of diverging,and often conflicting, desires, personalities, backgrounds and interest, especially in species such as man.
The force of population pressure causes a focus on averageness or on a more and more superficial and simplistic common denominator which the majority will be able to relate to and find their interests and hopes answered by it.
In this case complicated concepts or involved arguments are detrimental to group cohesion, since they require a level of awareness and knowledge and participation not all are willing and capable of providing.
What occurs is that ideologies are simplified and watered down, by eliminating all concepts of division or of exclusion.
Race, sex, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, intellect, physicality are minimized and/or ignored as being significant or even real.
All and everything must be made to seem similar to everything else and all that causes the mind to categorize, label or divide by discriminating becomes a source of derision that must be eliminated.
Intelligence is ridiculed, caricatured and made to seem shameful or inferior with concepts of ‘nerdiness’ and social mockery.
Sex must be defamed and debased as being a natural phenomenon with a particular procreative purpose forcing particular sexual strategies - making gender a social phenomenon with no natural foundations, making sex a matter of entertainment or bonding or life-style or some other social need, which will eliminate the implications of natural selection - making beauty a matter of taste where aesthetics are reinterpreted to include more and more people within its premises so as to not make most feel insecure or inadequate or inferior - making anything that determines quality, within the context of natural selection, a remnant of a primitive past which we must ‘correct’ by inventing ideals which will reinterpret the human condition to make it more digestible by the average mind.
We can witness this strategy on this very forum where Buddha1 reinvents sexuality to make him self more acceptable or proud of his particular genetic mutation with no natural purpose. All memes use genetic predispositions to accomplish their own ends.
In the case of memes with no procreative method of its own it becomes parasitical on others to reproduce. It recruits from the pool of genetically fit individuals and indoctrinates minds that it cannot reproduce on its own.
In the US this trend towards social cohesion has reached a technological sophistication unparalleled in history.
It’s population is indoctrinated within an ideology where no current human mind can find comfort, because it has evolved for more austere and demanding natural environments, and so escapes into Television and pop culture fantasies where the imagined ideal is projected in all its idealized glory in artificial environments that the observer is to replicate or imitate in his/her own life.
Socrates was condemned to death for spreading skepticism amongst the young and forcing the system to take severe measures against his effects.
His challenge to his fellow Athenians to explore their own motives and beliefs and to find arguments in support of their life-styles was a great threat against Athenian stability and had to be stopped.
In the US this group cohesion is maintained by making any self-exploration and thinking into something shameful or evil.
The ideal citizen follows and believes with little thought and doubt.
How this unthinking environment is created is a topic of great interest to me and it requires the analysis of media, marketing, sexuality, entertainment, economy, religion and a variety of other elements to fully explain.
How they interact is what establishes the systemic identity, as Mutarana and Varela tell us that all systems are organized in this way in their book ‘Autopoiesis and Cognition’.
The system is always interested in its own continuance, acquiring the dynamics of a living organism. You, yourself, are a self-contained system of relationships interested in maintaining stability and cohesion.
In the case of large social groups, intelligence, thought, identity, superiority/inferiority, are all aspects of human nature that make group cohesion difficult to maintain.
In response the system promotes imitation through common ideals and ambitions, and altruism and tolerance and conformity as a way of eliminating any remnant of past human psychology that will threaten harmony.
Intelligence is the greatest threat of all to group dynamics, since it is challenging, questioning, curious and unyielding. For this reason it must be curtailed, distracted or subdued.
Why don’t Americans take to the street to protest when in other nations they do for far less reason?
Because the USA is one of the dumbest nation that has ever existed on Earth since the dawn of time. It is a system dedicated to distracting, diverting, subduing, redirecting, defaming and controlling intellect through a variety of very sophisticated methods.