Tapeinocracy: Society

Reverse Learned Helplessness and Instil Personal Agency

Current Problems

• Nearly one century has passed with significantly increased government intervention in people’s daily lives, meaning that multiple generations have been exposed to the effects
• Whether it was unintended or the sinister ambition of authoritarian ideology, the result is a sense of learned helplessness and passive behaviour throughout the population
• When people face a problem in their lives, many of them will look to the government as a surrogate parent to provide the solution; resulting in a nation of Lost Boys in a government-created Neverland
• The consequences are truly devastating as it destroys the human spirit, erodes personal agency, diminishes individuality and leads people to believe that life is merely a series of events that happen to them; they perceive themselves as permanent victims
• Many parents offload the responsibility of raising their children to the government and the rest of society, thus removing the natural requirement for personal growth and maturity of someone that becomes a parent and instead allows him to remain as a child
• This rewards irresponsible actions as would-be parents no longer have to build a stable foundation prior to having children; meanwhile responsible would-be parents that want to accrue sufficient resources beforehand are punished by heavy taxes
• If the government is the surrogate parent that provides almost everything in someone’s personal life (currently including housing, rent, food, utilities, transport, education, childcare, entertainment, health, social care and more) then the government will want more resources
• The government can abuse its authority to create money and extort citizens in order to continue growing, while giving out free money in exchange for votes as a flawed justification of its actions
• The government is complicit in creating a destructive feedback loop as high taxes make independent life far more difficult so people are faced with two main choices: either become a child of the surrogate parent and increase the strain on the remaining independent people, or seek ways to avoid the government’s encroaching tendrils through tax avoidance or leaving the country

Tapeinocracy’s Solutions

• The government shouldn’t be a surrogate parent or create a system that punishes people for seeking independent lives; it’s immoral, impractical and creates absurd outcomes so it must be stopped
• Increasing government intervention was politically motivated by authoritarian ideologues and must be reversed; due to the flaws of human nature leading to the inevitable consolidation of power it means the constitution is the necessary entity to restrict the government
• Decentralising power through the structural shift towards local governments at the county level enhances this process of minimising the surrogate parent alongside the use of the stable land value tax that politicians can’t easily manipulate, while constitutional restrictions on the forms and magnitude of public spending also act as a strong constraint
• A constructive form of government must be limited and operate in a way that lifts a few people up rather than pull everyone down; this is achieved by limiting public services in both size and access
• Rather than the government control and provide everything in life, it operates minimally and effectively by offering a helping hand to worthwhile people to boost their own independence so they don’t need further assistance; the smothering omnipresent surrogate parent is replaced with a detached advisor that can point people in the right direction and results in a minimal constructive system that’s beneficial while keeping people independent
• People that refuse to accept personal responsibility and wish to remain as children forever are left to face the consequences of their actions rather than pull the rest of society down to their level
• Similarly, parents are automatically held liable for their children’s actions until those children reach the age of adulthood; this is sadly a necessity due to the observable erosion of parental responsibility with examples including feral children attending school and teenagers joining gangs

Resolve the Constant Denial of Reality

Current Problems

• People hold various ideological beliefs and when they’re proven to be wrong, people still cling to them rather than realise their views must be updated with new information; religion serves as the most prominent example as it necessitates a practitioner to develop cognitive dissonance
• In the context of government or economics, various ideologies exist to which people subscribe and refuse to admit their flaws; authoritarian collectivism is arguably the most broken and damaging category to the point of absurdity and yet people still believe in it to this day
• The seemingly universal nature of this phenomenon implies an evolutionary underpinning in the human mind that has to be overcome by a voluntary conscious choice, also potentially explaining why scientific rationality and subsequently the number of people that move humanity forwards is monumentally rare
• This aspect of humanity creates a major problem when systems such as legally and socially protected religions allows the Abrahamic religions to enact all manner of horrors including child mutilation, rape and abuse; while a system of democratic voting open to anyone allows backward personal beliefs and dystopian authoritarianism to negatively affect everyone else

Tapeinocracy’s Solutions

• If scientific rationality and morality in the form of the non-aggression principle are seemingly rare occurrences in the human population and if society wishes to maintain an individual’s freedom of opinion, then absolute restrictions are necessary to ensure an individual’s backward personal views can’t extend to interfere with the public
• People can’t be forced to be intelligent and moral, both ethically and practically, so rather than attempt the Sisyphean task of improving people, it’s far more realistic to create systems that minimise the destructive effects of their stupidity and immorality
• This can be achieved via three steps as part of the political process in tapeinocracy: firstly, anyone seeking political power must exceed a minimum threshold of intelligence and morality thus immediately ruling out the overwhelming majority of religious people and other authoritarian ideologues; secondly, any proposals that could affect public life must pass through an objective sanity filter in the form of the constitution; thirdly, the more significant the proposal the more stringent the protections must be, as demonstrated by the voting difference between a few local politicians for local issues and all politicians for national issues
• These can exist as elements of the constitution, to protect society as much as possible from the worst aspects of humanity found in the toxic mixture of authoritarian ideas and wilful stupidity

Return to the top of the page.