culture Archives - Free-Man's Perspective

Culture Versus Conscience

Culture has always been the antagonist of conscience.

Once we see ourselves as part of a larger entity – once we identify with it – we feel a necessity to conform to it. If we don’t, we begin to lose the existential crutch that larger entities offer us. And, partly as a result of living with that collective identification, most of us are emotionally unprepared to stand alone before the world.

You’ll notice, however, that more or less all our big steps forward have come from people who stepped out alone. Here’s just a brief listing of such people:

Abraham
Moses
Diogenes
Pythagoras
Sappho
Buddha
Jesus
Confucius
Peter Abelard
Thomas Paine

Cultures form naturally among people of similar opinions, but as they grow and continue, those opinions come to be treated as entities of themselves, which is how cultures turn to the dark side.

If we share ideas because we are individually persuaded that they are true, based upon concrete facts, we have a shared culture that does not restrict conscience.

If, however, we begin to see those who deviate from our ideas as opponents (casting our ideas as insulted entities), our culture has become a jealous god: Those who are in are great; those who are out are not; those who exit are traitors. Thus culture becomes the enemy of conscience, and thus the enemy of human progress and of human life.

The stronger the culture… the tighter the web of expectations it spins around us… the more it becomes the enemy of what is good and transcendent in us.

You can see a gut-level rage against this in George Carlin’s book, Brain Droppings:

No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

You can see it in a more philosophical form in Simone Weil’s The Great Beast:

Conscience is deceived by the social.

You can see if from psychology, as in this passage from Victor Frankl:

Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the “existential vacuum”…

You can see it drawn from hard experience by people like Charlie Chaplin:

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form a Headless Monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

You can find it from military men like Douglas MacArthur:

It’s the age-old struggle— the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.

We see it from writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Self-Reliance):

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

And certainly there are others. The truth is that as cultures and sub-cultures get thick over time, the people in them are increasingly “lived” by the culture’s expectations. Soon enough they see their culture-entity as inherently right, and all the more so as it becomes larger and more dominant. I think no one has described the effects of such development better than Jesus:

The time will come when whoever kills you will think he is doing God service.

To that we might add that the problem lies not only with the killers, but with those who cheer them on. And we’ve seen this over and over in human affairs, from the killing of Jesus’ followers to those who cheer the lynching of people like Julian Assange.

Sharing ideas with others is a pleasant thing. But if it turns into an us-versus-them impulse, your conscience is being enslaved, even though it feels like you’re being praised. In other words, it’s a trap. We are individuals and should see ourselves as individuals… fully as individuals.

And besides, patting ourselves on the back isn’t nearly as rewarding as enjoying mutual discoveries among people who accept no obligation.

* * * * *

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* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

6,000 Years on the Hamster Wheel

Modern man is trained to think in certain ways and to turn away from anything that differs… to give authority the benefit of every doubt, instinctively and forever.

Nearly all of us have been pushed (nay, shoved) in that direction, and we’ve instinctively feared to break our inertia: “But I’ll be poor.” “Girls (or boys) will think I’m weird and won’t want me.” “Only crazy people step off the path.”

That path, however, has no end and kills us by inches. It was paved by our abusers and it is, in effect, a hamster wheel we never leave.

Back to 4000 BC

Between 5400 BC and 3800 BC, the model of rulership we know formed in Mesopotamia, beginning in a city called Eridu. With a few sags, breaks, and occasional exceptions, the basic pattern has held ever since.

The pattern, as we well know, features one group of men dominating all other people. This small group orders the others around, takes a large share of their earnings, punishes them if they fail to obey, sends their children to kill people they’ve never met (or to be killed by them), and is held to be righteous while doing so.

There are other parts of the model, and they’ve been consistent over the millennia as well: mandatory accounting, state-aligned intellectuals, surveillance, monuments, and the glorification of order. (Fear has always played a major role, but mainly because it’s the best way to make people stupid.)

None of those parts are our subject for today, however. As ridiculous as they are – and as horrifying as it is that they’ve continued since the Early Bronze Age – today I want to focus on the more intimate aspects of our abuse.

Like the Sumerians Before Us

I’ve written before on the obsession with status: It’s irrational and devolutionary, but it’s encoded in human cultures and was clearly involved in the model from 4000 BC. The great assyriologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, held it to be a fundamental part of the rulership model and described it as an “ambitious, competitive… drive for pre-eminence and prestige.”

And why was it made a fundamental part of the system? Because it distracted people from the fact that they were repeatedly being robbed.

The cultivation of status was used to drive men, even as the fruits of their labors were stripped away. It trained them to strive for a cheap imitation of actual rewards.

This scam began for the Sumerians in the same way it does for us: in school. “May you rank the highest among the school graduates,” is found among Sumerian inscriptions, just as it is among ours. Kramer describes the situation:

[T]he drive for superiority and prestige deeply colored the Sumerian outlook on life and played an important role in their education, politics, and economics.

The bosses from 4000 BC built hierarchical structures, each level of which gave its occupants a certain level of status – status they fought for all their lives. They could never be as high as the ruler, but they could at least be higher than their neighbor… and they learned to trade that for actual prosperity and self-determinacy.

What This Means

This means that all the times we ignored the small group of men stealing from us… and all the times we scrambled to be better than our neighbors… we were being suckers. (Sorry, but that’s the truth.)

Sure, we were born into it and were trained in it all our lives, but no matter how much we excuse ourselves (and we can, to a large extent), we were still playing the role of the sucker.

Which is more sensible, to work endlessly to convince people that you’re better than the guy across the street or across the hill, or to actually make yourself better?

Think about this: It’s more work to appear better than the other guy than it is to simply be better. So why do it the hard way? Why care about the other guy so much? Why not care about you – what’s in you, what you can develop, what makes you happy – rather than what impresses other people?

The Truth of It…

The truth of this is that all the status crap we’ve been immersed in – that we see 24/7 on Facebook and TV – is a huge, old scam. It tears us away from creating actual benefit for ourselves and our families and focuses us on the mere opinions of others… opinions that are subject to change at any time.

To work for real, concrete benefits is not only more rational than life on the hamster wheel, but it’s a far more efficient way to live.

Still, the ramp down from the hamster wheel is marked off with bright red tape, saying, “If You Cross, Everyone Will Hate You.” That can be scary.

Getting off the hamster wheel requires us to transcend our fears and even to suffer the slanders of those who remain on the wheel. In other words, it requires us to be heretics.

But if becoming a heretic sounds frightening, remember that the other choice is to yield your very life to your abusers.

Living as a heretic strikes me as far better than living as a hamster on a wheel.

* * * * *

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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

Peak Obedience

Warnings about Peak Oil have circulated widely in recent years, and if accurate, they are important. Peak oil, however, pales in comparison to something that’s happening right in front of us… and something that is a good deal more dangerous: Peak Obedience.

If that concept strikes you as odd, I can understand why: We’ve all been living inside of an obedience cult. (And I choose these words carefully.)

In our typical “scary cult” stories, we find people who have given up their own functions of choice and who then do crazy things because they are told to by some authority. While inside their cult, however, it all makes sense; it’s all self-reinforcing.

So, inside a cult of obedience, obedience would seem proper; it would seem righteous; and more than anything else, it would seem normal. And I think that very well describes the Western status quo.

Obedience, however, should not seem normal to us. Obedience holds our minds in a “child” state, and that is not fitting for any healthy person past their first few years of life. It also presupposes that the people we obey have complete and final knowledge; and in fact, they do not: politicians, central bankers, and the other lords of the age have been wrong – obviously and publicly wrong – over and over.

So, obedience is not a logical position to take. But we all know why we take it; and that reason is fear. The mass of humanity obeys because they are afraid to do otherwise. All the “philosophy of governance” explanations are merely attempts to distract us from the truth: people believe they’ll be hurt if they don’t obey.

We are taught not to think in such stark terms, of course. Those “philosophy of governance” explanations give us reasons to believe that obedience is the good and heroic thing to do. Still, we know the truth.

But that truth about fear, even though important, is not the point I’d like you to take away from this article. My primary point is this:

When we obey, we make ourselves less conscious; we make ourselves less alive.

Why Obedience Is Peaking

I covered this in far more depth in issue #40 of my subscription letter, but I would like to provide a brief explanation here.

Over the past two centuries, authority has benefitted from a perfect storm of influences. There was never such a time previously, and there probably will never be another. Briefly, here’s what happened:

Morality was broken

For better or worse, Western civilization had a consistent set of moral standards from about the 10^th century through the 17^th or 18^th century. Then, through the 20^th century, those standards were broken.

Note that I did not say morality was changed. The cultural morality of the West was not replaced, but broken. The West has endured a moral void ever since.

Previously, people routinely compared authority’s decrees to a separate standard (most often the Bible), to see if they held up. But with Western morals broken, authority was freed from restraint.

Economies of scale

Factories made it much cheaper to produce large numbers of goods than the old way, in individual workshops. Economists call this an economy of scale. Thus a cult of size began, making “obedience to the large” seem normal.

Fiat currency

Fiat currency has allowed governments to spend money without consequences. It allowed politicians to wage war and to provide free food, free education, and free medicine… all without overtly raising taxes. Fiat currency made it seem that politics was magical.

Mass conditioning

Built on the factory model, massive government institutions undertook the education of the populace. And more important than their overt curriculum (math, reading, etc.) was their invisible curriculum: obedience to authority. Here, to illustrate, is a quote from the esteemed Bertrand Russell, who is himself quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the founding father of public schooling:

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.

Mass media

Mass media turbocharged authority and obedience in the 20^th century. It was authority’s dream technology.

All of these things, and others, created an unnatural peak for authority. But now, this perfect storm is receding.

Peak Obedience Is Brittle

Through the 20^th century, the people of the West built up a very high compliance inertia. They complied with the demands of authority and taught their children to do the same, until it became automatic. People obeyed simply because they had obeyed in the past.

Authority quickly became addicted to this situation, basing their plans on receiving every benefit of the doubt.

Automatic obedience, however, is a brittle thing. Economies of scale are failing, the money cartel has been exposed, government schools have lost respect, mass media is fading away, and the game continues because the populace is distracted and afraid. And that will not last forever.

The ‘walls’ of reflexive compliance are growing thinner. Any serious break may ruin the structure.

And Then?

It has long been understood that complex systems breed more complexity, and eventually break themselves. As central authorities try to solve each problem they face, they inevitably create others. Eventually the system becomes so complex, and its costs so much, that new challenges cannot be solved. Then the system and its authority fail, as they did recently in the Soviet Union.

Sooner or later, this is going to happen here. (If that seems impossible to you, please reflect on the current state of the mighty Roman Empire.) But again, that’s not my primary point. Obedience matters to you right now: today and every other day.

Obedience turns the best parts of you off. It degrades and kills your creativity; it undercuts your effectiveness and especially your sense of satisfaction.

Don’t sign away your life, no matter how many others do. Live consciously.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com