Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

(~2500 Words)

1) The origins of the uniqueness of western civilization are something we have known for nearly a century. On the steppes of Ukraine, (now southern Russia), our ancestors led verbal, contractual, historical, tradition, focused on listening to testimony (story telling), possessing myths, but lacking authoritarian symbolism, idols, or mysticism. They were typical of the indo european people.

2) With the unification of the horse, wheel, and bronze, these pig, sheep, and goat herders, turned to raiding and dropped the peaceful and cooperative mythology and adopted the aggressive warrior mythology. thus dividing the indo-european peoples. The heroic age was born. The other tribes responded by creating ‘religion’ from mythology as a *resistance movement*. Some groups later used religion as the first legal system, and then later, for greater ‘precision’ in homogenizing punishments and crimes, created more precise ‘law’.

3) These conquerors spread in all directions, forced by tribal competition to adopt the new technologies just as all other military technologies have since been adopted out of necessity.

4) Each of the three major branches, northern and western aryans (Europeans), southern aryans (Iranians), and eastern aryans(Indians), (we do not know what happened to those people in the far east yet other than that they appear to be gone), used the new technology to rule their own people, and if possible or necessary to gain good territory, to conquer and rule other peoples, and then extract taxation to pay for the high cost of bronze, horse, and wheel.

5) This ruling caste succeeded in conquering everything within the european and asian plains from Asia to Spain, and as far south as Egypt.

6) They used manorialism, and serfdom to cause upward redistribution of reproduction from the underclasses to the middle and upper classes – if we can somehow stretch the meaning of middle class back into those eras. And they used war, winters, taxation, and aggressive punishment to cull troublemakers – even enforcing late marriage. The consequence was a reduction in the ratio of the unproductive underclasses to the productive classes. We call this ‘domestication’ when we refer to plants and animals, but we call it ‘oppression’ when we do it to humans. But these people applied domestication to man with the same passion that they did to their herds.

7) In those places where they were most successful because of less territorial competition (Europe), they maintained the contractualism between the peerage (aristocracy) and maintained egalitarian meritocracy(those who fight earned rights), and the prohibition on the concentration of power in any of them.

8) The Greeks, Hittites, Romans, and Celts all practiced this same contractualism, sovereignty, heroic ethic, and aristocratic egalitarianism by merit. Conversely the fertile crescent did not since their chief problem was using propaganda to organize large populations in concert with the flood cycle. And by the time the Axial Age hit China, the aristocracy and peasantry were already formed, and ritual developed as a means of controlling the tendency of the aristocracy to exhaust production for their feasts. So they maintained authority, and the Crescent maintained authority. while the european branch of the aryans maintained contratualism meritoratic egalitarianism, and personal, heroic, sovereignty.

9) When martial men, members of an initiatic brotherhood of warriors, whether normative, legal, or ritualistic, must negotiate they rely upon martial epistemology (empiricism) and hold to the sacredness of truth (testimony) and contract if for no other reason than in battle one can bear very high costs of error, optimism, betrayal and dishonesty. These men negotiate and argue their positions and the headman (general, chieftain, or king) judges and chooses from the different arguments presented. It is this testimonial, argumentative, debate, from which reason and eventually aristotelian ‘science’ takes it’s origins.

10) The Romans adopted greek thinking, but not greek rhetoric since they thought it full of what we would consider to day ‘weasel words’ and so they favored ‘plain speech’. So they adopted stoic natural law as their inspiration, not greek politicized speech. Moving man closer to empiricism.

11) There are only three ways of coercing man, and we evolved all three of them: religious inclusion or exclusion, legal punishment and liberty, credit consumption or deprivation. We can control people through religion, law, and credit. Religion is a loose method of control, law a precise but limited, and credit an individualistic method of control. But each also has different cost structure. Religion is cheap, law requires a tax structure to finance it, and credit requires elaborate institutions and high trust between credit issuers. The same is true for education: literacy is expensive, numbers more so, law more so, and philosophy even more so. So the combination of resisting the germanic migrations, the exhaustion of the slave economy, the Justinian plague, the loss of the north african grains to the muslims, and centuries of raiding against the mediterranean, the Agaean/Mediterranian civilization could not compete any more than the prior dark age could compete against the sea peoples who are most likely a migrating wave of our ancestors. So the church was able to govern, but only by imposing christianity by force, closing the stoic and greek schools, and allowing the empire to devolve into thousands of regional manors each defending what it could, with its own resources. Religion is cheap if imprecise government. The church ruled with literacy, and diplomacy, and superstition, where Rome had ruled with force, religious liberty, law, and credit.

12) The Europeans try to resurrect Roman law once they rediscovered it. The Templars come along and develop the first system of international credit but the Pope, knowing his brother was deeply in debt to the Templars, framed them in the hope of rescuing his brother from the debt, and possibly claiming the Templar holdings for the church. However, the Pope didn’t understand banking: money is always at work or it is useless and he destroyed the Templars and banking, leaving the Jews – who unlike the Templars – were weak, to fill the void in the market for credit. But as we know now, there was no gold not working in Templar hands.

13) About the same time two things occur: the British lawyer Bacon, arrived with his invention of empiricism – a novel invention over Aristotelian near-science. And the formation of the Hanseatic civilization we refer to by many names (Germanic, Protestant, Northern European), but was caused by the adoption by the Frisians of bipartite manorialism, which was the most eugenic economic system in the history of man. This spread throughout northern Europe, starting in about 700, and by 1200 had changed the genetics culture, and economy of what we think of as northern Europe. The Hansa bridged the mediterranean trade overland, and by sea, and the north sea then replaced the Aegean/mediterranean economy as the dominant economic force in Europe until the colonies were discovered, and like the alliance between Sparta(Germany), Athens (Britain) and Rome(America) the atlantic became the mediterranean of the ancient world. And the balance of power shifted from the Hansa to the west, while than Hansa continued to spread German genes, culture, and economy to the east. Each carrying with them the ancient aryan tradition of contractualism we think of as the tales of George Washington’s honesty here in America. A character more underrated in history than nearly any man but Bacon.

14) When Jefferson put pen to paper he did not know that he almost succeeded in developing strictly constructed law from the first principle of the natural law of contractualism. Had he, we would have seen the birth of scientific government: natural, judge discovered, strictly constructed, operationally testable, common law. Had he done so the Enlightenment might have been completed. Not having done so we had to endure the French, Russian, German, and Cosmopolitan enlightenments, and like waves of disasters each caused catastrophic damage to the west. English empiricism was correct, but the theory of man as an oppressed potential aristocracy of everyone was false. French moralism was incorrect and merely an excuse to replace one set of rulers with another, creating the terrors, and ending France’s contribution to western civilization. The German reaction to Napolean destroyed the heart of Europe by unifying princedoms that preserved our martial and oath traditions. The cosmopolitan Enlightenment was terrified by the Darwinian an capitalist revolutions, and created the pseudosciences of Boazian anthropology, marxist economics and sociology, and freudian psychology, and Frankfurtian cultural critique – even Cantorian mathematical platonism. The Russian took the french and the german and the cosmopolitan (Jews) and created the horrors of bolshevism, trotskyism, and the soviets, and ended the Russian Enlightenment which prior, had been literary and orthodox, and made it pseudoscientific. This movement, threatened in europe moved to New York and was funded by Columbia University, resulting the adoption of these pseudosciences by the academy newly willing to sell them to new underclasses finally having access to education. Not knowing they were being taught the same deceitful resistance movement to aristocracy and truth using pseudoscience and pseudorationalism and fabricated history and cultural criticism that their ancestors had been taught as ‘religion’.

15) At the beginning of the last century a group of thinkers understood that the world was being converted to a pseudoscientific religion of rebellion against the truth, to replace the prior era’s conversion to mysticism as a rebellion against the truth. These men unfortunately did not come to any consensus on how to solve the problem of the new mysticism masquerading as pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and mathematical platonism, Poincare raised the battle flag, then Mises in economics, Hayek in law, Popper in philosophy,

WHAT MADE US THE WEST, SO DIFFERENT FROM THE REST?

What made the west the west originated on the steppe, north and east of the black sea, where sometime after the great deluge, a group of people developed a purely empirical mind, absent the dreams and fantasies of the later ages. Throughout our history, a young man took an oath upon his maturity: “I shall not lie, or steal, or strike me dead.” This phrase in a thousand promises, a thousand oaths echoes through our history in every era.

And this ‘testimony’ this ‘oath’ is the secret of the west: by the combination of oath, sacrifice (battle), truthful (empirical) testimony, jury of peers, an independent judiciary, the sacredness of that oath as the basis for natural, judge-discovered, common law, a people small in number, against much greater numbers, and much greater wealth will innovate, and adapt to change FASTER if not first, than all other civilizations known to man. We are not always first, but where we are not first we are fastest. Because of the oath. This is why we are the origin of more art and science than all civlization in history combined, despite our youth, and small numbers.

Religions of some sort matter in every civilization. In any group of people. Rituals are required. Ceremonies, feasts, and celebrations. We must find some way to recreate the safety of the small tribe. To keep us one somehow. To invoke the pack response we call spiritualism (submission to the pack). To create bonds with those whom outside of religion we may even compete with. But it matters little what occurs in those religions other than that we come together to submit to one another, develop and preserve kinship love for one another – despite our lack of kinship.

Our church did some valuable things: (a) attempted to maintain some semblance of order as the empire collapsed (b) attempted to preserve knowledge as ignorance expanded (c) forbid cousin marriage (in an effort to break up the lands of the great families so that they could be purchased more cheaply by the church), (d) managed what little resistance to the expansion of islam (e), and created an educated and literate cult of administration over the territories despite teaching nonsense to people, failing to educate them, and leaving them in darkness for nearly a thousand years.

But given that the church mythology was constructed from a combination of those same ancient myths, not the least of which was Mithraism of the soldiery, there is very little within the church’s teachings that did not exist prior to it. And there is much if not more bad done by the the church as good. And the pope’s current campaign in favor of the third world at the expense of the first, is just the most recent example of preserving the institution instead of reforming it.

We no longer need governance by religion, only ritual, festival, ceremony and perhaps education. We do need governance by law. If only because it is more precise providing more clarity in decidability in a greater range of contexts. But the whole world is rebelling against it despite its incomprehensibiity of cause allows decadence, and against the decadent predation of governance by credit which favors a few at the expense of the many, no longer serves the family, tribe, and nation, and is no longer eugenic, but dysgenic on a scale we have never seen before in human history – a price future generations will pay for as much as the dark ages did, because as the marginal differences in knowledge and production are eradicated by global trade and communication. The favelas and slums will be unable to change, because there is no method of using incentives voluntarily organizing production of large numbers of underclasses with the productive capacity of any upper and middle class. The third world will no longer starve, but it will remain poor. There are many kinds of dark ages. And we are just as likely to enter one as exit the current crisis.

There is plenty in our history to worship, to celebrate, to feast over, to ritualize, and to ceremonialize. We can Love Jesus truthfully as a philosopher, or untruthfully as a prophet. We can love our western god as a wise father, rather than feign submission to the Jewish imitation of an Egyptian one. We can pray for wisdom to not only our gods and saints, but our scientists, philosophers, artists, craftsmen, warriors, and wise men. We can celebrate life rather than fear death. We can celebrate nature rather than heaven. We can revel in our defeats of the great darknesses of time, ignorance, poverty, disease and suffering. We can learn our great history of truth telling, and honor, the skills of parenting, the skills of life, the skills of civic duty – and our skills of war.

Because that would be telling the truth to one another.

And that’s what it means to be ‘western’.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

(Repost from Aug 22, 2016 5:29pm)