Nature and Human Affairs

Call me an optimist; I think that we can come out very well on the other side of the global crises. Granted, some individuals will suffer, some groups will lose some ground as others may gain, and undoubtedly there will be some long-lasting grudges stoked here and there. All told, it’s not especially different from the kinds of situations that people deal with under current conditions. Groups now are losing ground as others gain, grudges are being stoked, and on an individual scale people are being uprooted and losing their homes and all that they have worked for. What stands to change is not that these things are happening, but the context under which they are happening, the justifications, the parties that will get blamed or praised for them, and the long-term prospects for various groups and individuals as the winds change.

I’m talking, of course, about the end of globalism, modernity and post-modernity, and the rise of tribalism, traditionalism in all its plurality, and the resurrection of actual culture. These are general trends, and the latter trends have variously risen to prominence and fallen into neglect amongst many groups over the course of the last several generations, and these trends, though not lasting in a large sense, have been invaluable in their contribution to the preservation and knowledge of ourselves and our roots which would have otherwise been lost to us. What gives me hope that the present movement is more than just a temporary trend is that hitherto the former trends, globalism and the like, have been on the ascendency, whereas now, expanding globalism seems to have exhausted itself.

The rise of globalism, modernity and post-modernity has brought with it some good things, as well as much ugliness. Many groups and individuals have gained much during this historical period, and it has brought us an unimaginable wealth in terms of technological advancement and prowess. It has also brought unimaginable destruction to many cultures and peoples, and as it continues to strive for it’s zenith it threatens to erase those distinctions that remain, as its logical conclusion would be a homogenized soup of rootless humanity. In summation, we have gained much, but nothing is gained but that something is lost, and for many of this it has been our roots and a sense of identity connected to something meaningfully related to who and what we are. For many, it has been a truly ugly road, watching everything they held dear crushed along the way. As this globalist trend falters and declines, it has left us in a position from which the road ahead will be ugly, but there is much to be gained along the way.

What’s Happening:

Environmental disasters have been spoken of for years, ongoing disasters or else disasters just over the horizon, variously downplayed or magnified, and often inserted into political agendas. These disasters are mostly grounded in reality to some extent, and are directly related to issues around population, population density, and demographics. Resource depletion and environmental degradation are issues that have been faced by our ancestors and by past civilizations around the world, straining some past civilizations past the breaking point. To whatever extent our current environmental problems are an immediate concern, they certainly warrant consideration in our long-term outlook, for our goal is not merely to eliminate those threats to our continued existence in the present, but to ensure our continued existence and thriving in the long-term.

This presents a less immediate concern than the issue of food and water, however. Some of the worst problems in the area of food and water will, expectedly, be experienced in the third-world. Media and academic commentators have stated that these problems will necessarily affect us by driving migration, and claim that it is the first world’s duty to address this by welcoming these “refugees,” because it was the first world’s exploitation of these poor countries that led to this problem. There is some grain of truth in that, in that “foreign aid” has been on the whole a negative force, supporting terrible post-colonial government regimes, undermining local economies and boosting population beyond that which those countries would have natively supported.

With that being said, it is as false to say that first-world countries owe their lands to third-worlders as it would be to say that third-world countries owe their lands to first-worlders because the first world bought them through the provision of “foreign aid.” Late 20th century geopolitical policies aside, for we know that they were and are disastrous, the base fact on the ground is that third-worlders are invading first-world countries, and ongoing environmental problems and regional conflicts will continue driving them to attempt this, particularly as this activity is being encouraged by destructive policies within the destination countries. While we can attenuate this problem by dispensing with such suicidal policies (e.g. Welfare), historically speaking, such migrations caused by environmental and social conditions are an ongoing theme, and well defended borders are necessary so as not to be overwhelmed by a population driven to seek greener pastures by their extant conditions. However much one may wish to express compassion towards other people, to sacrifice one’s own progeny for the sake of feeling good about oneself and projecting this self-image to others is traitorous and immoral.

Assuming we are able to put a stop to this third-world invasion, we have our own environmental and social issues that we will have to deal with as it is. Within our own countries we have issues of environmental degradation, deforestation and farmland depletion, water shortage and dependency on a tenuous food distribution network. There is already conflict between different groups already present within our countries, and these conflicts will potentially be exasperated by environmental concerns even without the added fuel of third-world invasion to contend with. These and other problems, such as the problem of environmental pollution (through the introduction of exotic chemicals into air, land, and water) are issues that need to be addressed for the sake of ensuring that the world that we are passing on to our descendants is the best world we can offer them.

To put our condition in perspective, consider that should we suffer a total global economic collapse, the North Koreans stand to fare better than ourselves. They are already accustomed to privation and making do with little, and they live in the context of a homogenous population that expresses a strong in-group preference and social unity. The very fact of their economic poverty combined with relatively low population density (and a high IQ population) means that they have a relatively in-tact environment in which to rebuild their livelihood in a post-collapse situation. While I am in no way suggesting that we should aim to be like the North Koreans, (nor even that a massive global economic collapse is inevitable), I am suggesting that, given our goal of ensuring the continued existence and thriving of our people in the long-term, an important part of our considerations is the building of a culture that is resilient, and responsible in responding to those environmental concerns that we will be facing in the future. In the present, we must align ourselves with the realities of nature.

Nature and Human Affairs:

We are concerned with survival, with continuance, and in light of that I would like to present to you a tautological statement: That which continues, continues. That which does not, does not. That simple fact is all that is required for evolution to appear superficially as if a conscious process with direction and intent, as changes accrue over time in the context of an environment shaped by that ongoing process. This is especially true considering our tendency to generate post-hoc justifications for past events, be they actions we have just taken, or be they historical events. In the context of our present discussion, when we are talking about the continuance of our people, we are talking about a sustainable culture. Sustainability can mean any things, but in particular we are talking about the survival of our people qua our people.

As such, we can observe that much of the “window dressing” of our people has changed over the centuries, while as a group they continued as a people at least to the extent that we can say “yes, those were my ancestors and I am the inheritor of their legacy.” From this we know that what we are speaking of is something more deeply rooted than the specific details of what precisely our ancestors did. These details changed over the centuries, influenced by changing environmental and social factors. There are, however, certain underlying factors that have variously contributed to the successes of our ancestors, traditions which, whether for obvious reasons or not, kept their communities stable, cohesive, and sustainable – in the sense that their grandchildren could continue their way of life essentially as they had. These were manifest in songs, stories, dances, ceremonies – those things that we call traditional culture.

Shared songs, dance, stories and ceremonies create a sense of unity and familiarity that builds a strong, cohesive community and build a group identity. More than this, culture and its artifacts convey information on a scale that would involve a massive undertaking if we were to attempt to convey it through formal education – lessons on how to interact with members of one’s group, how to interact with strangers outside one’s group, who it is permissible to marry, how one is expected to conduct oneself based on their stage in life and role in society, and how to regard and interact with the land and it’s other life forms. A person’s life was not a process of waywardly discovering oneself in a listless world, but was informed by the totality of their environment, and this is important as we can see the devastation wrought in the lives of our people who, even when superficially successful by the standards of our prevailing mass society, are in large part failing to fulfill on that which would actually ensure for the survival of our people in the long-term, such as by failing to have children.

Traditional culture is treated as a museum piece, participated in by hobbyists, something silly, archaic, bearing no relevance to our lives today. Thus, parents do not bring their children into the fold, do not tell their stories, and leave it up to their kids to “be themselves,” all the while these kids are being indoctrinated in government schools, having the void filled by television, or increasingly by idle social media, an environment of peers subject to the same. Parents disconnected from their roots raise rootless children, and the fallout is the mess that we see before us: aimless, solipsistic people with no future. We enjoy materially wealthy and comfortable lives, but no real identity, no connection to anything greater than ourselves, no concern for the future generations of our people, and no sense of ownership over our legacy nor responsibility to preserve it and pass it on to our future generations.

For those of us struggling to revive traditional culture, this is not simply a matter of discovering and imitating those things that our ancestors did. We are engaged in a process of discovering what traditional culture is, and creating a culture to pass on to our generations going forward, based more or less on our inherited legacy, but also encoding new information relating to the realities that we live in now. If successfully rendered, this encoded information will not be merely specific lessons about particular circumstances, but general principles that will subtly guide the lives of our descendants in a way that tangibly helps them to survive in the long-term. This will entail lessons about avoiding the kinds of behaviors and attitudes which led us to our present situation, and these lessons must be encoded in the language of the culture itself. A lesson plan in a formal education setting may be useful for a specific segment of society, but will lose its importance and be forgotten by the general man. Encoded in the context of the culture itself, it will be absorbed as a way of life and transmit itself effortlessly as children grow up in that culture.

This may seem like a monumental task, requiring careful thought and design by some genius sage and prophet, but I think it is actually much simpler than that. By grounding ourselves in those principles that we can derive from our circumstances, this culture, I suspect, will largely emerge organically as we begin to enact the rituals of traditional culture in our own communities. Our principles will inform the culture that develops around us. Furthermore, these lessons and principles are informed by nature. Our past cultures were centered around nature, and our disastrous attempt to divorce ourselves from nature exposes the folly of such an endeavor. Our past traditional cultures helped to guide us through the natural cycles of life, and kept us grounded more or less in the principles of survival in the natural world in which we live. We are a product of the natural world, and to survive we must do so as a part of the natural world.

I think we shouldn’t get too “warm and fuzzy” about life, however. Nature is stark and cruel as well as beautiful and miraculous. In the harshest circumstances that people have endured, sometimes they have had to kill off their elders or their young to survive, and they owed it to their future generations to do so, that they may be alive to inherit their legacy in the first place. Just because we have managed to temporarily insulate ourselves from the full force of nature doesn’t mean that it will always be so. Sometimes the innocent have to die, no matter our principles, sentiments, or how we wish it weren’t so. There is a certain hard edge to culture, perhaps primarily, though by no means exclusively, within the purview of the men’s circle. Part of culture is enacting harsh discipline when needed for the preservation of the people, and part of manhood is the ability and willingness to do so when necessary.

Thank you for taking the time to join me on this rambling journey through my thoughts on traditional culture. I realize that this is far from my most clear and concise writing, but I do hope that you found some value in these ideas. You can let me know what you think in the comments below. Am I a thoroughly UnAmerican bullshiter, or am I drawing closer to a needed insight? If you really like where I’m going, Subscribe. I’ll be back next week with a brand new blog post, and in the meantime, until then, all the best.