Amerika

Most of our fellow citizens operate in “not my fault, someone else fix it” mode, and so they simply go along with the trends of history, which explains why human societies are able to experience what we might call Challenger moments, namely when that things seem to be going well until they suddenly are not.

Your average human views his duty as placating others. When they have a crisis, he writes a check or comes up with a reason why it is the job of someone else. To get along with people, you must give them what they want, and this erodes any purpose into a morass of compromise and mission creep.

We see how things went really well on the space shuttle Challenger until a fatal moment crept in:

T+1:07…………PLT….. Yep, that’s what I’ve got, too.
T+1:10…………CDR….. Roger, go at throttle up.
(NASA: SSME at 104 percent.)
T+1:13…………PLT….. Uhoh.
T+1:13…………………..LOSS OF ALL DATA.

Like in the modern West, everything seems to be going swimmingly until it suddenly is not. We have built our society on a number of illusion related to bureaucracy such as equality, socialism, social engineering, and diversity; these are bad because like the boosters on the Challenger, they produce unexpected bad results.

This does not arise from a hatred of other ethnic groups or other people, simply a recognition that hierarchy and culture work better than bureaucratic government and meritocracy. The only morality consists of whether results are good or bad; if your space shuttle blows up, it does not matter if you “meant well.”

For us to get good results, we need civilization based on culture, which like most behaviors is genetic and tied to g or general intelligence, and this requires that we become a society based on the ethne and not the demos or assembled mob:

late 15c. (earlier ethnical, early 15c.) “pagan, heathen,” from Late Latin ethnicus, from Greek ethnikos “of or for a nation, national,” by some writers (Polybius, etc.) “adopted to the genius or customs of a people, peculiar to a people,” and among the grammarians “suited to the manners or language of foreigners,” from ethnos “band of people living together, nation, people, tribe, caste,” also used of swarms or flocks of animals, properly “people of one’s own kind,” from PIE *swedh-no-, suffixed form of root *s(w)e-, third person pronoun and reflexive, also forming words referring to the social group (see idiom). Earlier in English as a noun, “a heathen, pagan, one who is not a Christian or Jew” (c. 1400). In modern noun use, “member of an ethnic group,” from 1945.

In Septuagint, Greek ta ethne translates Hebrew goyim, plural of goy “nation,” especially of non-Israelites, hence especially “gentile nation, foreign nation not worshipping the true God” (see goy), and ethnikos is used by ecclesiastical writers in a sense of “savoring of the nature of pagans, alien to the worship of the true God,” and as a noun “the pagan, the gentile.” The classical sense of “peculiar to a race or nation” in English is attested from 1851, a return to the word’s original meaning; that of “different cultural groups” is 1935; and that of “racial, cultural or national minority group” is American English 1945.

The term ethne refers to a group with its own autochthonous people, or those “formed or originating in the place where found.” Only with this can we have culture, and only culture holds back the dual tides of commerce and ideology.

Our forefathers attempted to use religion as a proxy for culture and this has not worked out so well. It probably does not matter which religion is in question; the fact of religion replacing the wider culture means that culture itself is deprecated in favor of religion.

In the historical usage, ethne refers to a non-internationalized ethno-cultural group (NIEG), which means independent of religion that spans national borders as well as ideology that serves an international goal. These existed independent of the bureaucratic state, but were formalized into religion by Egyptian bureaucracy:

Adopting a theory of the Bible scholar Michael Lefebvre’s, Adler then points to a critical change that occurred in the reign of the Hellenistic Egyptian king Ptolemy II, who also controlled the Land of Israel in the 3rd century BCE. Ptolemy set up separate courts to hear the cases of different groups but, importantly, according to each group’s own laws. Lefebvre conjectures that this change “may have served as the catalyst for a recharacterization of the Pentateuch from descriptive to prescriptive law, and for the adoption of this law code as the Judean politikoì nómoi, or community laws. He finds a further impetus for the shift, again in Adler’s own words, in “Hellenistic presuppositions that prescriptive law is a necessary mark of civilization” and the felt need of Judean communities “to advance a defense of their native culture as ‘civilized’ by recharacterizing the Pentateuchal collection of laws in alignment with the Greek model of a prescriptive code of law.” Appealing to a controversial theory proposed by the University of Tel Aviv historian Sylvie Honigman, he suggests that this shift enabled the Hasmoneans in the next century to present themselves as heroic upholders of longstanding practice against the assaults of the wicked Seleucids, thus both securing their own regime and cementing the new understanding of law.

When a culture becomes distilled to law, the law in part replaces the culture and makes it legalistic. Much of the “culture of critique” theory leveled against the Jewish people (TJP) consists of noting how this legalistic, bureaucratic approach makes people neurotic and prone to backward logic.

Forward logic, as used in nature, means finding a goal and achieving it by any means necessary; this is “ends-over-means” thinking. Backward logic consists of finding an approved method and stretching it to encompass the goal, which is the rationalizing “means-over-ends” logic of modernity.

This rapidly causes people to prioritize methods, which become ideology like “equality” and “wealth redistribution,” instead of cultivating the most precious human natural resource: our people, our culture, and our abilities.

Tags: backward thinking, Culture, ethne, ethnic group, nationalism