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There are various aspects to human nature. They can be approached in terms of Good and Evil, Body and Soul, Light and Darkness, Yin and Yang, and so on. What goes for human nature goes also for social/political values. One should be wary of anyone who defines himself/herself as entirely ‘rightist’ or ‘leftist’. While some people naturally lean more right than left or vice versa, ideological monomania is a fool’s game. Everyone needs to adjust his/her own worldview or values according to the changing realities.
While it’s easier to go with than against the flow, when people go blindly in one direction, they could run off the cliff like lemmings. Even a self-designated rightist should lean somewhat leftist in a world that is overly rightist, and vice versa. A coat is essential in wintertime but not in summertime. Good advice in one context can be ill-advised in another, yet what is obvious often goes ignored in political debates where the so-called ‘left’ has ONE solution for ALL problems NO MATTER WHAT and the so-called ‘right’ has its own version of the ONE solution plan.
In the Current Year, both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ are ideologically agreed on the blind conviction that all human groups are equal in ability/temperament, and therefore, what works for Swedes will work for Somalis(and if things don’t pan out, the ‘left’ blames ‘racism’ while the ‘right’ blames ‘socialism’ while both overlook the reality of race).
Anyway, without some counterbalance, society could dangerously lean one way(like the Tower in Pisa)… to the point where it just collapses from the weight of its bias. Consider how ideological purity ravaged Russia under Bolshevism. For sure, the mindless Jew-Worship, a kind of new religion in the West, has led to woeful imbalances in life, values, perceptions, and policies. (Granted, Shlomomania has more to do with ethno-idolatry than ideology, i.e. we must revere and serve Jews REGARDLESS of their ideology: We must favor Liberal Jews over Rightist Goyim, but we must also favor Conservative Jews over Leftist Goyim, such as progressives who support BDS, a movement for Palestinian justice.)
We need a National Humanist form of Neo-Fascism as fascism understands the need to balance the right and the left. Instead of the simple dichotomy of reaction vs revolution or capitalism vs communism, fascists understood the need to draw inspiration from all manner of views and modes of thought, weighing the duality of tradition & modernity, individual will & collective action, spirituality/mythology & materialism, and culture & nature.
While fascism was ultimately more rightist than leftist, it appreciated both the animating spirit and the leveling influence of leftism in a mass modern movement. Most people are right-handed but still find the left hand/arm invaluable in life. And of course, both sides of the brain are essential. This is why all the political debates about ‘right’ vs ‘left’ miss the point. Even radical communist Josef Stalin realized it simply wouldn’t do to wipe out all vestiges of conservatism if the Soviet Union were to stabilize into a functional and meaningful society. And the good side of Adolf Hitler was his fusion of nationalism with socialism because an order captured by capitalists would only care about profits and the power of the globalist elite class.
Hitler’s ultimate doom owed to an intoxication with the Wagnerian prophecy of a future decided by the war between the Aryan and the Semite. While Wagner’s NIBELUNGEN operas were indeed prophetic in envisioning the twilight battle between the crypto-Aryan gods and crypto-Semitic dwarfs(presented as ‘spiritual’ proxies of Jewish Nature) — several of David Cronenberg’s films have also fixated on the fascinatingly fertile, feverish, and ultimately fatal friction between the Aryans and the Semites — , Hitler would have been wiser to treat the prophecy as a cautionary tale than as a blueprint that, in the end, incinerated the German Castle, exhausted the German soul, and castrated German manhood, what with the tragic but triumphant Jews towering over all. (But then, even if Germany had avoided war, it’s possible that Jews would have gained dominance over Anglos and Anglo-Americans in the UK & US and become masters of the world just the same. On the other hand, minus the WWII & Shoah Narratives, Jews would have had fewer cards to play, especially as the Bolshevik bloodbath, in which they played a part, could well have been remembered as the worst crime of the 20th century.)
There is more than one side to human nature(or any kind of nature). A cat-owner knows the cat prizes the home as a place of security. Yet, there is more to cat-nature. Cats are natural hunters with intelligence and curiosity. This is no less true of dogs. Cats are eager to venture outdoors, often demanding to be let out to stalk mice, birds, and other small animals. Or, their acute senses are tantalized by sights, sounds, and scents. They feel most intensely alive in such forays.
It would be simplistic to say that Cat Nature is purely home-centric or purely wander-centric. Cat Nature is both in a complementary way, like defense and offense in a military(or a sports game). An effective military needs both a solid base of operations, defense, & security — a castle, fortress, or encampment — AND a means to mobilize, maneuver, & attack swiftly.
As is said of the Takeda Clan in Akira Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA: “Swift as the wind, quiet as a forest, fierce as fire, immovable as a mountain.”
To hunt, a cat in the wild is constantly on the move, but it also has a sense of territoriality. If it wanders too far, it could violate the territory of another cat. Furthermore, if the cat has kittens, it hunts not only for itself but for its litter. Its ‘meaning’ of existence comes from procuring food for its offspring.
In that sense, one could argue that human territoriality has a political basis in the behavior of male animals and an emotional basis in the behavior of female animals. Male cats defend or fight for new territory to gain more food and material advantage for themselves. It is a matter of pride and property, not of sentiment. In contrast, the female animal’s sense of ‘home’ or territory is intricately and inseparably linked to its emotional attachment to its offspring.
Both aspects of territoriality are found among humans. There is a part of us that views land and place in terms of property and product, things of utilitarian value. Such a view can operate at the local, national, or imperial level, and it’s a contest of wills as to who can gain more material(and/or military) advantage. Such a mind-set may be willing to fight long and hard over territory, but it’s not about sentimentality or a sense of home. It isn’t driven by nostalgia or memory.
Rather, like with the tycoon(John Huston) in the film CHINATOWN, it’s about The Future. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were extreme examples of this male-centric territoriality. In contrast, the female-centric view of territoriality is essentially conservative; it’s about home and hearth, the place most suited for rearing children; it’s about attachment to land and each other. In SEVEN SAMURAI, the bandits represent male-centric territoriality, and the peasants the female-centric territoriality.
Humans resemble dogs and cats in certain regards. Humans want and seek a base, shelter, sanctuary, or home-sweet-home. Even people who live outside their own nations as expatriates, businessmen, or workers need a place to which they can return after work or play, a place of rest and security accessible only to oneself through lock and key. Even birds, though masters of the sky, must descend to their nests, also the place where the new generation is hatched and raised to perpetuate the species.
Thus, wherever we may be, there is the Wander Principle and the Return Principle. Both a person with a nation but without a home and a person with a home but without a nation are not complete in their Return Principle. An Estonian in Estonian has a nation to call his own but would be a sad creature without a personal place of residence. His endless wanderings as a hobo would be draining, physically and psychologically. It’d be difficult to rest and clean oneself, and besides, the mind can rest only when the body can.
In contrast, a person with a residence outside his own nation would have a place to call his own at the legal level but would always be reminded of his foreignness. Still, there is a nation somewhere in the world for him to return to.
However, if a person has a home but no nation to call his own, he would be in a state of permanent diaspora, like the Jews before they attained(or regained) Palestine/Israel as their own homeland. The Jewish struggle to (re)gain a nation of their own illustrates the importance of a united community, the collective home for a people. Sadly, whereas Greeks needed only to gain independence(as they’d remained the inhabitants of Greek territories even under Ottoman rule), Jews had to expel a large number of Palestinians whose roots in that part of the world go as far back as those of the Jews.
The story of America is one of both wander-ment and settlement, the creation of a new homeland. In virtually all Western stories, there is the thrill of adventure & discovery but also the dream & promise of a new home. Unlike the two great stories of the Return, Exodus and Odyssey — where Hebrews and Odysseus respectively seek their way home — , the American Narrative was more about Reborn than Return. In the New World, Europeans ‘fleeing from tyrannies’ would find new homes and start new lives as ‘Americans’. There was the promise of both adventure and sanctuary. People of European descent would scramble for the vast spaces of America but ultimately to mark territory and build homes to call their own.
Thus, a person can be taken from his homeland, but the home instinct cannot be taken from him. It’s like gerbils removed from their native habitat in Mongolia went about burrowing and creating new homes wherever they were released. Even if a people cannot(or will not) return to their original homeland, they go about in accordance to the Return Principle and create an approximation of Home, one to which they can return every evening to relax, clean, sleep, and even raise a family.
We like to go out and see different things. On occasion, we want to venture to faraway places where things are alien and exotic. We’re curious that way. Or, we just want a change of scenery, like we don’t want to eat the same thing day in and day out.
That said, we would be lost without a home-base to return to. Even deracinated cosmopolitan hedonists, after a wild night out, saunter back to their abodes for relaxation and replenishment. While the cabin fever feels like imprisonment, it’s worse to never find one’s way back home. The Wander Principle and Return Principle were nicely captured in a painting by Norman Rockwell that contrasts the family eagerly embarking on a trip and wearily returning to Home-Sweet-Home.
All of us can relate to the emotional states of a family trip. Intuitively, we sense that life is like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Life is Home and Wander. It is the constant process, even a ritual, of venture and return, venture and return. Birds fly from the nest to obtain food for chicks in the nest. Parents venture from the home to make money and to buy food to feed the family. In a savage community, hunter-warriors venture from the village to make a kill to carry back to the village.
The human mind is curious and attracted to stimuli but also easily exhausted and wearied, seeking sustenance by returning home where everything is familiar, secure, and comfy. Anyone who’s been to an art museum knows the mind cannot concentrate on too many objects. It soon grows bored or tired. And even movie-lovers find it daunting to see more than a movie-per-day.
In the Sean Penn film INTO THE WILD, the main character rejects the very notion of home — though there are episodes when he recharges his batteries by staying with relatively settled folks for extended periods — , and he keeps moving from place to place to place, as if his mission is to lead a life of endless adventure.
Yet, despite the idealism/heroism, he predictably comes to a sad and terrible end, dying all alone of hunger, toxins, and exposure. His radical will to be totally natural was actually against human nature. He fails to understand, as Dorothy did in THE WIZARD OF OZ, that there is a need to return home.
After all, even or especially savages who live close to nature know that they cannot survive as free spirits wandering aimlessly. They must form tight-knit communities. Consider Mel Gibson’s APOCALYPTO that begins with a hunt, but what do the men do with the tapir? They drag it back to the village where the womenfolk, old folks, and children are. It is among their own kind in their community that they feel most relaxed and homey. Also, it warms the heart to eat together than alone. The Mayan raid is terrifying precisely because the very sense of familiarity and security is eviscerated out of the blue. The attack comes like a sudden storm that destroys everything.
Be that as it may, it’s understandable why Liberals have gained the upper hand in modernity. While both the liberal fascination with novelty and the conservative fondness of familiarity are essential, the former is more likely to strike gold(even if it turns out to be fool’s gold in the long run) because it goes beyond the tried-and-true which, without improvement or replacement, could become rusty or stale.
As modernity thrives on change, those more open to it will gain an upper-hand over those who resist it. In both Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER!, despite the crucial roles played by the ‘conservative’ wife-mother figures in maintenance of home & stability, the agents of dynamic action are the husband-father figures who are more drawn to novelty.
Yet, the Man in MOTHER! keeps re-creating the Home, and George Bailey realizes in the end that there’s no place like home. And in BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER, the orphaned daughter who cuts all human ties and embraces nihilism nevertheless feels a need to find herself back to her New Home, one she set up with the Devil.
What applies to individuals applies to culture as a whole. The case of Ned Merrill(Burt Lancaster) in THE SWIMMER is a cautionary tale of what happens with the loss of home. In some ways, Merrill is an exciting, even inspiring, figure as an all-American romantic, but in having chased after thrill after thrill after thrill, he never established a clear sense of home and his place in it. In his own way, he’s as deluded as Gatsby. So deluded in fact that he has mentally blocked the sad fate that has befallen him. At once, he seeks adventure and home. Except his neglect and irresponsibility led to the loss of his family and home, which remains desolate and boarded up. At the films end, weary of mind/body as the cold wind blows, he bangs on the door of his old home, but there’s no one to let him in.
A life that is all adventure, whether impulsive or idealistic, is a road to madness. There is a need to wander but also the need to return. Surely, one of the joys of parenting is to come home every day and greet the spouse and children; and for young children, nothing is happier and more reassuring than their parent(s) returning every evening. Consider the love between George Bailey(James Stewart) and his kids at the end of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.
Even though it is sad, perhaps even tragic, that George Bailey’s ambition was thwarted by the needs of his hometown, he realizes nothing matters more than home and family. And, even if he didn’t ‘lick the world’, he got to know everyone in town, and, as such, his life was a kind of adventure, prying out the unfamiliar within the familiar. One can find a universe through a microscope as well as through a telescope. And in understanding the importance of home, he did what he could to procure homes for others in the town, which is so different from the operative mode of people like Neocon oligarch Paul Singer who makes Mr. Potter seem like Mr. Rogers by comparison.
The problem is not so much the move away from the home(land) but the failure to ritualize one’s return to it. Even in exile(which can be tragically permanent), one must recreate a sense of the home, both personal and tribal, to maintain a mental and emotional equilibrium that balances the Wander Principle and the Return Principle.
For example, even in what seemed a permanent state of exile, Jews created in their diaspora their own communities(or ghettos) that served as centers of Jewish life and religion; and of course, in traditional Jewish life, the family was central to one’s existence. The profession of a peddler, money-changer, or tax-collector wasn’t exactly pleasant as the Jew had to hustle, haggle, and/or cajole often in a distrustful and even hostile environment with the goyim.
Then, one can appreciate the relief of returning home where the Jew could be himself with his family, culture, and tradition(and, Archie-Bunker-like, speak shit about goyim) than the much-loathed merchant in the eyes of strangers. (Still, a home in an alien land is never quite the same, e.g. David Sumner[played by Dustin Hoffman] in Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS. He fights to defend his ‘house’, but Sumner is an [Jewish-looking]American in a small town in England.)
The ‘tragedy’ of Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN is that the Art of the Deal, the American Dream of Success, has come to so define Willy Loman that even at home he’s obsessed about money, status, and bragging rights. Even though Loman isn’t explicitly presented as Jewish, he is a deracinated Jewish figure who has allowed Money and Success to define everything in his life.
Among traditional Jews, there would have been meaning, mainly ethno-spiritual in nature, as a counterbalance to materialist competition. In decades following WWII, many Jews found meaning in Zionism and/or the Shoah, but throughout most of the first half of the 20th Century, the main theme of Jewishness was, “What shall replace the old with the new?” Universalist Ideology of Communism, Individualist Idolatry of Capitalism, or the Nihilist Indulgence in Gangsterism?
Willy Loman went all in on capitalism and has sunk into a functional madness as the dream failed to materialize, not for himself nor for his sons. Even though Loman has a home to return to, what remains of his soul is always on the road, despite the presence of his devoted wife because his measure of a man is all about licking the world and showing off one’s emblems of success and wealth. In that sense, he’s found his own kind of madness just like Ned Merrill in THE SWIMMER. People often feel restless, but if they become rootless in the bargain, they wash away in the mudslide of an ever-shifting modernity.
Now, what happens to a culture that loses its sense of foundation, development, and core? It’s natural for individuals and even society-at-large to deviate at times, but there must follow a return to form and a restoration of normality. Individuals have their crazy moments, but they must come to sense, the normal state of mind. The ‘crazy’ and the ‘normal’ feed off each other, just like the Wander Principle and the Return Principle. If we’re always normal, we would hardly venture beyond the familiar and comforting, physically and psychologically.
Sometimes, new possibilities arise from going beyond what is deemed as ‘normal’ or ‘common sense’. Still, most of craziness is just plain craziness without reason or rhyme.
Therefore, people mustn’t normalize the crazy. Just like a mountain climber must come down to ground and a deep sea diver must return to surface, we mustn’t lose sight of the normal to return to. In GRAVITY, when things totally spiral out of control in space, the female astronaut obsesses over returning to Mother Earth.
Normality constrains the excesses of ‘craziness’ while moments of ‘craziness’ shake off stuffy doldrums of the same old same old. It’s good to have a bit of ‘punk’ spirit in everyone. But as enlivening as ‘crazy’ may be, one must return to base, just like a battery has to be plugged for recharging.
This was the function of the church in Western Civilization, especially as white peoples became dispersed around the world, often permanently separated from their places of origin. I would wager most Greek-Americans born in the US never went back to Greece. Most Anglo-Americans probably never visited the UK. Most German-Americans never visited Germany. No doubt, traveling across great distances was far more daunting and expensive in the 19th century world of horses, trains, sails, and steamships.
Yet, wherever white folks went, they built churches in their newfound communities, and church attendance not only bound the members together but connected them to a deeper sense of history and spirituality. Every Sunday, they were touching base with the House of God.
The Church was like a bathhouse where one’s sins and trespasses were scrubbed— homos use bathhouses in a different manner. Just like bodies and clothing, souls needed regular cleansing too. There also a sense that one was touching base with Christendom through the ages. Thus, one could be in some far-flung territory in America, Canada, or Australia but, within the House of God, back at ‘home’.
A rural church sits all alone by itself on a bed of Montana prairie grass south of Malta.
Over time, the Church lost much of its historical/cultural character as Christianity went from an essentially Western/White religion to a World Faith. The Church still has meaning as a sanctuary of spiritual values(for all mankind)but lost the distinction of .
In contrast, the Jewish Temple still retains its historical/cultural essence because it is for The Tribe alone. As for Western Christianity, it’s only a matter of time before fading from history. The Western church has gone from a bathhouse of spiritual cleansing to a bathhouse of globo-homo-maniacal celebration with ‘gay rainbow’ colors, indeed as if jesus died on the cross to bestow god’s blessings on sodomite fecal-penetrators and tranny penis-cutters. Unless the white race finds a way to transform Christianity into a Faith that allows separate covenants for different groups, races, and nations, it will continue to slide into lunacy and/or oblivion under increased deracination, jungle-boogie, globo-homo decadence, and mindless worship of the Jew.
It wasn’t too long ago(in macro-historical terms) that most of humanity lived in the countryside. Most people were farmers or herders. They were close to the soil, and as their lives were a never-ending toil for survival, they had an elementary sense of life. It’s like the Joad family in THE GRAPES OF WRATH are focused on the essentials. There has long been a tendency to romanticize rural life, the pastoral setting as idyllic, but it was a tough and grueling existence.
Still, farmers worked as a family than as individuals. And there is something meaningful about planting seeds and watching the crop grow. Also, as the dead were buried in the land on which they lived and worked, the survivors felt a direct connection to the dead, the forebears.
It was a world of communal interdependence. Even with modern technology, a rural inhabitant lacks easy access to medical care, which is all the more reason why rural folks must form a sense of mutual aid and support. There is much to be said about the city, but there is something authentic about life close to the soil, with plants and animals, in a community where folks aren’t strangers but know each other by name.
There was a time when most Americans could trace their roots back to the people of the soil. Indeed, during Thanksgiving, many city folks would travel to the places of their rural origins and reconnect with kinfolks. Even if someone was born in the city, he might have parents in the countryside. Or even if one’s parents were born and raised in the city, the grandparents could still be on the farm. As a result of such connections(though growing ever more tenuous with each passing generation), even those who were born and raised in the city might follow their parents or grandparents back to the countryside. Or, at the very least, they would hear tales of rural life centered on family, church, cooperation, and hard work. A place where one had to grow food than just pick stuff from shelves at a supermarket.
Then, we can understand the appeal of films such as HEARTLAND, PLACES IN THE HEART, and DAYS OF HEAVEN(though a dark and twisted tale). Also, films like IN COLD BLOOD and MIDNIGHT COWBOY that, though hardly sentimental about rural/country life, diagnoses the symptoms of the modern malaise.
We can understand why the great humanist directors of Italy, France, Sweden, and Japan, despite their urban upbringing and experience, made films of the countryside. Jan Troell’s HERE’S YOUR LIFE and EMIGRANTS/NEW LAND, for example. Even as city folks, they still had connections and/or memory of their kinfolks who’d lived close to the soil. Or they adapted national literature that paid homage to men and women of the earth. Pearl Buck did this for the Chinese in THE GOOD EARTH.
Now, people being people, it’d be foolish to idealize country folk(or small town folk). Rural folks are no strangers to petty and bitter rivalries, like among the Hatfields and the McCoys. Some go half-mad with boredom or loneliness, especially if without family or shunned by the community. Some country boys even get a bit racy with farm animals. Rural folks could be rednecks and ignoramuses. The films JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING dramatize small-minded limitations of provincialism and folksy crookedness as detestable as any found among city-slickers. Wherever one goes, scoundrels will be scoundrels, and those naturally predisposed to hyper-neuroticism or psychopathy will go mad. And the prostitute/porn characters in TAXI DRIVER and BIG LEBOWSKI had reasons to run from their humble origins.
Still, there is something essential about rural/agricultural life that is missing in urban life. Urban life lacks the elementary nature of rural life where work and life are intertwined. Urban affluence makes for fancy living but never feels quite like ‘home’. Everything is a price than a place. Properties are traded at breakneck speed. Of course, given the takeover of much of US agriculture by corporate conglomerates and the fact that only 2% of Americans are directly involved in agriculture, ‘rural America’ often means small towns and even small-sized cities than the rustic countryside.
One thing for sure, connective links to country life has eroded close to zilch in the decades following the 1960s. How many Americans in urban areas still return to rural villages or small towns from which their ancestors sprung, especially as so many Americans have been on the move across the vast plains, with families ever more dispersed with each generation? How many relatives are still on the farm? Truth is, just like the great majority of Puerto Ricans moved to America, most Americans have moved out of the farmlands, and their children hardly have any sense of connection to rurality that defined most of their ancestors, whether in the US or some other part of the world. It is no wonder that so much of American Conservatism is defined more by ‘muh guns’ and ‘Muh Constitution’ than by a sense of place or origin.
But it’s not as simple a matter as rural vs urban. While urban life was always prone to rootlessness, it also had advantages in the preservation of memory and procurement of meaning. Due to emphasis on manual labor, limited access to books/culture, and relative isolation, many rural folks were ignorant about culture and history. Throughout history, the literate folks were mostly in the cities, whereas most farming folks couldn’t read or write. It was in the cities that museums preserved past artworks, cultural centers passed down received knowledge to future generations, concert halls kept alive the tradition of classical music, and the great churches radiated their authority throughout the domain.
Because, for most of human history, city-folks were a minority vis-a-vis the majority of rural/agricultural folks, they had a modicum of respect for country folks, especially during the aristocratic era when some of the most privileged people had manors in the countryside, which could also be a place of knowledge, a model adopted by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello
Besides, every city folk had kinfolk somewhere out in the country. Also, as the economy relied heavily on agriculture, there was due recognition for those who harvested the grains and fruits(though, to be sure, much of the honor was hogged by aristocratic landowners who pick the crops but reaped most of the rewards).
Furthermore, as Christianity in the West and Confucianism in the East valued humility and honest labor, both favored farmers over merchants, at least on the moral/spiritual plane. The Church depended on the financial support of the rich, resulting in resentment as well as gratitude; in contrast, it had firmer authority over the poor, thereby a sounder source of respect and prestige. Besides, prior to the rise of hyper-modernism, even urban culture acknowledged the importance of continuity, hierarchy, and propriety.
Aristocrats understood their wealth mainly derived from land and agriculture. The church played a key role in the culture of civilization. As the patrons of culture, aristocrats believed the arts should embody the higher aspirations of man, the timeless virtues that bound men of now with men of the past and the future.
Thus, urban life & culture were, in more ways than one, an extension of rural life & culture. Of course, the city had bigger & nicer things and served as the repository of all that was best and most precious, BUT those assets & advantages were used to represent the values and aspirations of everyone in the domain as both the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, were bound by common values rooted in shared faith. It was less a matter of city vs the countryside as the city as the culmination of all that was good and true in the countryside.
But in the late modern era, as more and more people left the increasingly mechanized countryside for the city to labor in factories, urban life and culture took on a life of their own increasingly at odds with the ways of the countryside. The fading of church authority and the decline of the aristocracy meant the rise of a new urban sensibility that was less morally-spiritually inclined and, if anything, favored mass appeal, hedonism, individualism, profits, and narcissism as the primal themes.
Initially, the ascendant bourgeoisie, full of anxiety over their status and reputation, upheld a culture of respectability that was mindful of tradition and higher aspirations, but modernism’s obsession with novelty and experimentation made bourgeois attitudes seem stuffy, outdated, and repressive.
No less important, as the bourgeois mindset was beset with status anxiety and reputation, they could easily be swayed to take up the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ if such were deemed ‘prestigious’ by the experts and intellectuals. The essence of bourgeois mentality was to keep one’s head above water, not to probe for deeper meaning. As such, fashion became The Thing, and urban culture lost its connection to the past and the wider humanity within the domain.
Of late, Western Culture has almost completely lost its direction home. This is true on both the micro- and macro-level. In the Age of Empire, the British colonialists, dispersed as they were, still looked to King/Queen and Country. They oversaw colonial affairs in other parts of the world but with a strong sense of their own identity and loyalty. And when the empire closed its final chapter, the colonialists had a homeland to return to. The British soldiers in Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK certainly are relieved to make their way back to Mother Britain.
During the Age of Empire, the Anglos had a powerful sense of both Wander and Return. In contrast, the Germanic barbarians that overran much of Europe following Rome’s fall had a weak sense of home-base, and their ‘order’ came to nothing until the reconstituted Christendom radiated a semblance of unity.
Despite venturing far from home in great voyages of discovery, trade, and conquest, the Anglos never forgot where they came from. And the one bunch of Anglos who made a decisive and clean break with the Mother Country, the Anglo-Americans of course, nevertheless maintained the closest relationship with Britain up to the 1960s when the US, under the rising Jewish elites, leaned more to Israel as the #1 political ally and spiritual mentor.
If Europeans once had a sense of home, it is gone now, and what fades from the will fades from the world. Consider the shift in the European worldview since the end of World War II. With the fall of empires, the British colonialists were welcomed back in Britain, the French colonialists in France, Dutch colonists in Holland, and etc.
Now however, Holland will not take back the Boers faced with racial violence in South Africa. The message is clear. Boers better get used to being ‘white Africans’ because the Dutch in the Netherlands no longer identify with them. Worse, the Dutch don’t even identify with their own kind in their own nation. If anything, any Dutchman who says Holland belongs to the real Dutch, the white Europeans, will be dragged to court and fined/imprisoned. All Dutch children are taught to believe that Holland belongs to all the world that wants to come: It is no more European than African or Muslim; or ‘European’ no longer means native folks of Europe but any bunch of newcomers designated as ‘New Europeans’.
Politically and psychologically, white folks have lost the sense of homeland, a ‘world of our own’, a place of roots, and the right of return(and rejuvenation). Thus, not only are Boers in South Africa a diaspora of people without a country — the black majority looks upon them with hatred and the white Dutch in Holland look upon them with disgust or indifference — but the Dutch in Holland itself no longer believe their home is their home. It’s like someone who wakes up one morning and decides to implement an all-year round open-house policy for his home. With the front and back doors flung wide open, the house is no longer the home of its owner but belongs to anyone who decides to come and mooch.
The politics of this phenomenon is inseparable from its psychology. While the mind reacts to matter, it also shapes matter. Jews ‘regained’ Palestine/Israel because of resilient psychological attachment to the Holy Land. Without such a grievance(and determination), there wouldn’t have been the Zionist movement. If a people-with-will-but-without-land can use the will to gain the land, a people-with-land-but-without-will can lose the land without a fight.
And, this is why the media and academia are so essential to Jewish Power. Via control of the Narrative, Jewish Power robbed White Psychology of the Will to Return and the Right of Homeland. It is then hardly surprising what has been detailed by Douglas Murray in his book, THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE. Actually, it’s not so strange when the Jewish role in the academia and media are taken into account. Jewish Power controls the US as the new metropole of all the West. Indeed, Jews not only robbed White Psychology of the Right of Homeland but infected it with the Duty to Diversity. In other words, the Suicide of the West isn’t merely the product of apathy but of passion(for self-negation). From white elites in ivory towers to Antifa riffraff in the streets, they have in common the Jewish-coded mental program that calls for Righteous Renunciation of Whiteness by Whites.
Jews have such power over whites in relative peacetime because a stable society favors brain power and legalism. It especially affects heavily urbanized societies where the vast majority of the people live in or around big cities, small cities, or big towns. In a world of war and adventure, the men of physical prowess, courage, and daring command considerable respect and power.
In the Age of Empires when many whites took part in sea voyages and endless battles with rival empires and/or natives, the men of action were among the main decision-makers and the most heralded. Also, raw manpower, essential in a world of farms and factories, was the foundation of great populist and labor movements.
But, as the West turned increasingly into a white-collar and managerial society, those most adept at money-making and manipulation of the law gained the most prestige and power. Once the physical stage of development passed into history(or to the Third World where labor was more tightly controlled), it was all about the mind. This was no less true of gangsterism. While Jews were prominent in organized crime from the beginning, they had to contend with Irishmen and Italians who were just as or even more willing to take physical risks to get their way. In such a brutal topsy-turvy world, the gangster with the gun could go far.
Eventually however, the gangsters with briefcases gained a decisive edge over those with guns. And, if your side controls the law, it gets to decide what is legal or illegal. Under Jewish Power, entire drugs have been legalized, and gambling, once regarded as a vice, is now seen as the Christmas-Place-To-Be all across America. And Jews have even pushed to virtually decriminalize illegal aliens, not only in places like New York and California but throughout the nation as well. Besides, even rural elites(and elites of rural origin) are educated in PC-pushing colleges and get their news/entertainment from Jewish-dominated globo-homo corporations. As Nicholas Roeg’s film EUREKA shows, the Anglos felt most alive in the mode of discovery and adventure, whereas Jews have been most adept at conspiring behind closed doors, like Hyman Roth in THE GODFATHER PART 2.
Having been lobotomized(or globotomized) of the Will to Return and the Right of Homeland, white folks began to lose their material homeland as well. But, it wasn’t only due to the Jewish manipulation of ideology & idolatry but to the very nature of popular culture, celebrity, the cult of youth, and general rise of decadence that comes from having too much(and taking too much for granted).
Compare the boomer generation that came of age in the Sixties with the successive generations up to the present. Possibly, the boomers were the last generation to feel any real direct connection to tradition and normality even if they rebelled against much of it. The boomers sought the new and the different(and in their minds, the better), though, to be sure, many of their ideas originated with the more radical members of the older generation.
In some ways, the boomers had the best of both worlds because they had one foot in tradition and another in fashion. They enjoyed the new liberties and choice but also in contact with matters of roots, family, and community. When things got too weird or crazy, they could return to their parents and regain a sense of stability.
Even though boomers embraced the cult of youth, they nevertheless had contacts(even if grudging) with parents and grandparents whose characters were molded in a time and place that emphasized adulthood and maturity. (Oliver Stone, for all his rebelliousness, appreciated certain virtues of his father’s generation that had a sense of limits and duty beyond me-me-me.)
The boomers came of age in the first nearly universally affluent society. They didn’t know hunger and had the means to, at the very least, graduate with high school degrees. Still, the boomers knew of their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents whose lives were wrapped around simpler needs and more elemental themes.
Even though the boomers decried the older generation’s hypocrisies and limitations, they gained from the older generation’s sense of decorum(especially among the elites) or toughness(among the hoi polloi that appreciated John Wayne movies). Traditional academia was about higher-learning, and spirituality was about true spirituality and reverence, not pop and pap.
Perhaps, the boomers were under the delusion that the older generation will always be there, not least because they regarded themselves as the forever-young generation. Thus, even though the older generation was growing older and dying(never to return, not even as zombies) while the boomer generation was growing older as the new elders, the boomers were trapped in an attitude that they were always up in arms against the Old Order. Such an attitude can’t handle maturity. There is no such thing as forever-young. Youth is a phase, not an identity one generation can claim for its own.
But, the boomers failed to properly mature and take full responsibility for their dominant role in society. The result for the next generations proved to be dire. To make things worse, the boomer refusal to mature converged with the Jewish denial of responsibility when both the generation and the ethnic group came to power. Clinton-Bush-Obama was like one long college party or rap session while Jewish Power as the new victors of America remained stuck in ‘victimhood’ mode.
If the boomer experiment was stabilized by the experience of the older generations, the following generations, especially beginning with the millennials, had no such insurance. Boomers could go a bit crazy(not necessarily in a bad way) with social, ideological, or cultural experimentation, but when things got out-of-hand, they still had a traditional family, normality, spirituality, and patriotism(the true kind) to fall back on. Consider Rosanne Arquette’s character in BABY IT’S YOU who goes a bit nutty in college but still has solid middle class Jewish parents to turn to. And Archie and Edith Bunker of “All in the Family”, for all their limitations, are a bedrock compared to the glassy ideals of Meathead and Gloria.
The Boomers had both Mick Jagger and John Wayne(who made movies into the 1970s). But, when the millennials came of age, much of the older generation prior to the boomers were senile or dead. To them, the boomers were the old generation, but the boomers hardly represented anything resembling normality, responsibility, family, and tradition. Boomers looked old but didn’t act it.
The fact that so many boomers(even ‘conservatives’) easily caved to nonsense like ‘gay marriage’ shows a total lack of confidence in their role as elders and guiding lights for the young; rather, their main obsession is to be ‘cool with fashion’. So, when Jewish Power brainwashed young morons to worship Holy Homo, the boomers had to follow suit to keep up with the kids.
Sixties libertine-ism led to an explosion of creativity, but such an unfettered freedom was more a boon for exploitation than artful expression. Every THE WILD BUNCH was followed by a hundred gore-fests. Films like LAST TANGO IN PARIS soon got crowded out by sexploitation and porn. Culture was increasingly made and sold like drugs.
When the cultural transformation took off, the boomers had the best of both worlds in that they could watch something like BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE WILD BUNCH but still feel a connection to the moral affirmations of works by John Ford and Howard Hawks routinely featured on TV. There was the lurch toward the new but also the pull of the old, still part of the mainstream culture.
The final scene of BABY IT’S YOU, where a college dance party eases into a crooning electric rendering of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”, is a telling moment. The students initially feel put off by the old-fashioned melody but gradually realize its ‘truth’ teetering somewhere between sentimentality and cynicism. It reminds them that their parents have a culture of their own(still part of the mainstream in the Sixties), different but no less real, and that their own youth will fade away and they will fill their parents’ shoes. And despite all the passion and excitement, most of their friends will be forgotten like strangers in the night. For a moment, there is a realization that youth is a phase and life goes on. And, consider the cultural anchor provided by the father in the French-Canadian film C.R.A.Z.Y.
For all their shortcomings, the prior generations believed in the essentials of adulthood, maturity, family, and normality. Sadly, the oldest son in C.R.A.Z.Y comes to a bad end with drug addiction and overdose. Still, how fortunate for him to have grown up with a father who took on the role of patriarch. The son chose a destructive libertine life but still had a family to lean on(and mourn his passing).
Now, imagine having as a parent someone like the oldest son in the film. It’d be crazy-upon-crazy than crazy-upon-normal. The boomers had the best of both worlds in that they were living in a crazy-upon-normal world. They could go to Woodstock and fry their brains on bad drugs, but if need be, they could return home and be in a world of the normal, the stable, and traditional.
After all, Archie Bunker, for all his faults, is a man of God and country. But, millennials came of age in the world of crazy-upon-crazy(or even crazy-upon-crazy-upon-crazy) as the boomers never really grew up. Consider the fate of Billy Boy Clinton. Or the sheer ridiculousness of George Dubya Bush. People have praised Obama of being a respectable Negro, but this is someone who worships globo-homo as the new cult.
Jay McInerney’s BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, though no great work of art(as book or film), understood this crisis. The main character, Jamie Conway, is a city-slicker living the high life, has a cocaine habit, and clings to his estranged wife Amanda, a shallow & narcissistic fashion model who dumped him. The night life with its dance clubs and easy sex & drugs has its allure and excitement but is a dead-end.
If anything pulls him from the brink(though the associated pain is also what pushes him to the edge), it’s the memories of his late mother. In his reminiscences of her, the light as well as the dark, Conway is reminded of a life of loyalty and attachment. Indeed, it appears his marriage fell apart not least because both he and Amanda cared more about oneself than the other. It is through the unity of man and wife that one attains a continuity with the past and future.
Still, at the very least, Conway knows something isn’t right and longs for balance. The story takes place in the 1980s, which means his parents belong to a generation that believed in the norms of family, obligation, and respectability. Jay McInerney was born in 1955, and Conway is several years younger, born around 1960. That means his parents grew up in the 40s and 50s before things got really crazy in America. Therefore, Conway, though living in a ‘crazy’ world, grew up supported by a world that was saner and more stable.
Sadly, too many Conways of the 1980s failed to grow into emotional adults. (The Reagan Eighties ultimately failed to revive any meaningful conservatism, especially as libertarianism came to define yuppie-dom; as for the Moral Majority of Christian Fundamentalism, it was too dumb to win influence over the kinds of people who control the institutions and culture.) And the Amandas of the world got worse because women, like homos and trannies, are naturally more vain and narcissistic than men and more likely to betray anyone and anything for a leg up in society. Conway himself was born when many women still saw wifehood and homemaking as proper and essential roles. Since then, so many men lost jobs to women, and so many women chose the life of harlotry, idolatry, and ideology that have degraded the cultural and spiritual fabric of Western Society.
Just imagine having a shameless blue-haired & tattooed skank as a mother or aunt? Imagine the kind of kids they will raise. Then, imagine having a shameless blue-haired & tattooed over-the-hill skank as a grandmother and having her even worse child as your mother. It’d be crazy upon crazy upon crazy, with no family remembrance of the sane and stable. The old black woman in RAISIN IN THE SUN didn’t have much book-learning but had a strong sense of values, but does anyone in the black community recall such a cultural archetype? Black churches still exist in strength but seem mainly to be about rapping, jiving, and cursing out whitey for more gibs. Not that idiot white churches are any better; many are worse, openly and shamelessly celebrating sodomy and tranny-penis-cutting as the ‘rainbow’-like wonders of god.
It is human to make mistakes. It is part of life to do foolish and crazy things. But at some point, one must pick up the pieces, put away childish things, soberly assess one’s place in time and place, and bear the torch. But for so many people, the torch has been lost(like what the sheriff says of a dream in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN). All they have are the flickers of fake light emanating from their various electronic devices. Apart from the age difference, it’s hard to tell the adults from the kids. Gavin McInnes made this very point in his columns, but then he went off to kiss Milo Yionnopoulos on the lips and stick a dildo up his ass to prove he’s hip with the homos and the Jews. When even the messenger acts like a retardo teenager, is there any hope left?
Of course, the world didn’t suddenly stumble upon immaturity in the Sixties. It’s always been a part of human nature to say “what the f***” and have a good time as the ‘prodigal son’ or Aesop’s grasshopper. Especially the young ones of any age, from ancient to modern, have been drawn to thrills, whatever seems most exciting at the moment.
Even the appeal of moral, spiritual, or ideological movements often owed more to their hype than hypothesis. Whether it was communism or fascism, or Christianity and Islam for that matter, many jumped onboard because it happened to be the biggest show in town. There is a psychological link among Christian rapture, Jihadi fever, Nazi theatrics, and Beatlemania. People often latch onto movements inspired by powerful ideas for sensationalism, thus creating the impression that people favor depth over shallowness.
The fact that so many people dropped true Christianity for Globo-Homo & Negrolatry should dispel any doubt that it is marketing, not meaning, that matters for most people. That being so, the predominance of Christianity through the ages likely owed more to presentation than preaching, at least until Elvis the Pelvis and Globo-Homo came along. John Lennon was onto something: “We are bigger than Jesus”, less a criticism of Christianity than of mass psychology.
Granted, pop idols come and go, but the nonstop barrage of the ‘latest craze’ means hardly any time and space for reflection among the young in the Current West. Both the advantage and disadvantage of capitalism has been the power to dispose of the old and generate the new. The cult of constant novelty creates the illusion that something far-out is happening at every moment(and our role is to do our best to barely keep up). Yet, it’s also a disadvantage because the capitalist order has no essential, eternal, or core theme, a tradition that transcends fashion. In contrast, communism sought to establish Proletarian Power as the eternal theme of history, but what once seemed radical and revolutionary became dreary and weary for the masses starved of sensory stimulation.
Anyway, it’s not like human nature suddenly changed in the Sixties(though it is now changing due to radical transformations in mating habits); it was the same human nature that Americans had before, but the socio-economic changes that centralized the cult of youth, hedonism, escapism, petulance, and idolatry fundamentally changed the way people regard themselves and others.
One was a consumer before a citizen, and the globalization of Americanism meant even non-US-citizens were ‘spiritual’ Americans. To ‘consume’ connoted a mindless duty to partake, in body and soul, whatever is hastily mass-manufactured by Capital as the New Vatican. And as young people, women, homos, crass materialists, and bling-obsessed Negroes are the most conspicuous consumers, they came to matter the most. Those who consumed less became non-persons.
Consumer culture wasn’t about consuming what’s essential but what’s ‘iconic’ and fashionable. As fashion became the center of life, those in the fashion/advertising industry, many of whom were Jews and/or homos, came to dominate not only pop culture but the ‘new morality’ and ‘new spirituality’ of the New Normal.
In the past, even big corporations paid lip service to tradition and normality. (In Whit Stillman’s METROPOLITAN set around 1969, an office building still lights up with a Crucifix during the Christmas season. Today, they light up with ‘gay’ colors.) What now passes for social values and morality are mainly generated by ‘woke’ corporations in cahoots with faux-leftists weaned on corporate junk. There is talk among conservatives of the symbiotic relation between greedy capitalists and ‘far left’ Marxist-types, but it misses the picture.
In the 1966 film MASCULIN-FEMININ, Jean-Luc Godard posited the notion of the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola won out over Marx, and today’s so-called ‘leftists’, far from being communists or even socialists, are just pop-culture addled minions whose idea of ‘progress’ centers on worshiping and celebrating homo neo-aristos, billionaire Zionists, and crass black celebrities overloaded with cash & bling. And their kids talk like characters in computer-animated cartoons.
While it’s true that mega-corporations take their ideological and neo-‘spiritual’ cues from the academia, the post-boomer academia is very much in tune with mass-popular-culture, all the more so due to the breakdown of the high-brow/low-brow dichotomy. There was a time when the scholar class and intellectuals felt duty-bound to uphold the high, the deep, the true, and the meaningful against the pressures of Big Money and Mass Culture, but those days are long gone. Several years ago, John Simon, perhaps the last of the Old Guard, passed away, but even he, in his final days, was reduced to hosting a show along with some lunatic tranny freak. And the late Harold Bloom bemoaned the transformation of academia into a hotbed of identity-vanity politics and pop culture, with even educated people praising HARRY POTTER books as works of great cultural significance. Thus, there is no longer a meaningful separation between academia and big business. People in the academia work in unison with the business class fixated on profits via advertising companies, think tanks, and publicity agencies. Just like today’s journalists work hand-in-glove with big capital and deep state, today’s academics rub shoulders with money-men and hype-artists.
In a way, the cultural transformations were the result of mass urbanization, material abundance & eradication of hunger(and most diseases), extensive safety nets, explosion of individual freedom/choice, fixation on fantasy ideals(disseminated by idolatrous pop culture), endless electronic distractions to fend off loneliness & boredom, the cult of the ‘cool’, identification with idols than with close ones, Jewish agenda to weaken goy identity & roots, homo vanity & decadence, and Afro-primitivism.
Mass urbanization physically separated the people from soil and roots. They became like Antaeus lifted above ground. Material plenty made people less tribal and territorial. Human Nature changes according to Hunger Nature. This is also true of animals. In the wild where hunger is the general state of being, animals are especially aggressive, anxious, and territorial. Hungry dogs growl and fight each other. But well-fed dogs tend to get along with other dogs. Thus, once Hunger Nature is satiated, Animal Nature becomes friendlier. Likewise, well-fed humans tend to be less hostile, distrustful, aggressive, fearful, and territorial than hungry ones.
That said, it’s also true that hunger can be manipulated to make people less tribal. While hunger generally makes people more committed to defend and fight for what they have, it is also likely to betray anything, even the right of identity/territory, for satiation. The reason why so much of the world has become willing accomplices of the American Empire is that the US offers lots of goodies around the world in the forms of aid, goods, bribery, and immigration to America. And a US military base(or occupation) in a poor country means dollars and stuff for the locals. As hunger prioritizes basic needs, it will fight for what little a people have, but the same people may well trade what they have in terms of identity/territory for lots of free stuff offered by an outsider force.
In the past, Americans were hungrier and more territorial about what they had. Also, as the majority were farmers, they felt a connection to land that their folks had conquered, settled, and were buried in. But, once the urbanized and uprooted Americans, especially the boomer generation, were better-fed and forgot what it meant to be hungry, they lost much of their territorial instinct. They became like a satiated dog that doesn’t much care what other dogs eat from its bowl. Its own stomach is full, and it would rather rest or have fun than guard the bowl, i.e. essentially what happened with White Californians.
And then, more individual freedom led to many people making poor choices, those with short-term rewards but negative long-term consequences. Gambling is an obvious one. Whatever fun one might have at a casino, it is a stupid way to waste time and money(and degrade one’s soul). So many young people became immersed in individual freedoms that had no long-term meaning, realizing their folly only after ruin.
Also, as pop culture became the main culture and inundated consumers with endless streams of glamor, glitz, sensationalism, cult of the ‘cool’, and etc., people lost their sense of dimensionality. As most people aren’t ‘cool’, the consumer mentality became estranged from parents, relatives, workers, and even friends who didn’t measure up to the Pop Cultural Ideal of the superstar or idol.
Electronics created the illusion of life where there is no life. Prior to electronic gadgets, people could easily grow bored or lonely without human company, without a community. And so, they sought out friends and mates; they stayed connected to family members. But with electronic gadgets filling people’s lives with the illusion of always being connected or stimulated by ‘cool’ stuff, people became increasingly divorced from real people. The cult of the ‘cool’, as the song “Hey Jude” warned, made the world a little colder. It made people afraid of human emotions as ‘uncool’. Vain homos in culture emphasized fashion, and black culture emphasized animalism devoid of history and restraint. And Jews, while guarding their own identity and territoriality, sought to deracinate the goyim, rendering them easier to control.
Just because a culture prioritizes maturity doesn’t guarantee anything, anymore than a culture emphasizing intelligence and cultivation can guarantee intelligent and sensible people. People can superficially act mature while remaining immature, child-at-heart. Plenty who’ve attended elite schools and talk intellectually are fools.
That said, the emphasis on certain norms or ideals can serve to restrain brazenly negative actions. So, even though seemingly mature people may actually be immature, they will think twice about acting shamelessly immature in a Mature Society. Likewise, even though seemingly intelligent people can be pretty stupid, they will think twice about openly wallowing in stupidity in a Culture of Intelligence.
At the very least, the norm or ideal may serve as a reminder that eventually leads the prodigals back home. Consider the film HUSBANDS by John Cassavetes. Born in 1929, Cassavetes was closer to the ‘Greatest Generation’ than to the Boomers, and his films recorded the (not-so-)quiet desperation of the American Middle Class that kept up appearances but often drowned in alcohol and other vices. HUSBANDS is about the kind of men who came of age about a decade-and-half prior to the rise of the boomers. They belonged to an Age when boys were expected to grow into men and girls were expected to become women, then wives and mothers. Yet, on display throughout the film is so much neurosis, bouts of alcoholic binges, even debauched acts. Still, at the end, the characters played by Cassavetes and Peter Falk finally sober up, return home, and get on with life. All said and done, they retained a sense of family, responsibility, and home.
PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is another instructive film about the problems of the American Middle Class. Even though the parents are far from perfect, they still managed to start a home life, produce children, pay taxes, and keep up with the mortgage. Then, why are the children so different? Much of it’s due to the blessing(and curse) of more freedom and choice. Unlike the parents who grew up in leaner times and in a culture still anchored to traditional values, the children have the freedom to put off the future. (Despite all that, the son seems like a rather upright character despite his hippie-ish antics.)
The parents have a basic sense of what life is about and a person’s responsibility to oneself, family, and community. This sense is missing in the daughter who is usually zonked out on drugs or worse; the drugs brought her face-to-face with ‘profundity’ that her inexperienced mind cannot process. She could easily be one of the zombies in the Rolling Stones documentary GIMME SHELTER. One might even say she is halfway possessed by the Devil like Linda Blair’s character in THE EXORCIST.
The girl comes close to losing her mind, but the seeds of discord were there in the parents. Even though they’ve done the duties as parents in providing stuff and affection for their children, they seem like run-of-the-mill materialistic keep-up-with-the-joneses type of Americans. Such materialism both defined the boomers and animated them against it, leading to a strange hybrid of revelry and rebellion. To an extent, the kids at Woodstock were stating they don’t want any part in the consumer society that is all about ‘plastics’, the latest appliances, status, and property values. Instead, they yearned for meaning and authenticity.
Yet, their ‘quest’ relied on lots of leisure and material support made possible by American materialism. Who made all those Rock albums, vans & motorcycles, bandannas, foods, and toilets? Who built and maintained the roads that made it possible for the guys in EASY RIDER to cruise around with such ease? What made prolonged youth possible for the boomers? Economics of plenty and surplus.
So, even as the boomers rebelled against the LOOK of materialism, they wallowed in its substance, often without knowing it(but then willfully naive people tend to be delusional). The fault of the parents in PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is they naively assumed their kids would eventually grow up sooner than later like the earlier generation; they permissively thought pop culture was just recreation for the kids when, in fact, it became the defining ‘philosophy’ and ‘spirituality’ for the boomers.
They failed to appreciate the extent of the cultural transformation. If art became the new religion of the elites in the 19th century, popular culture became the new god for the masses in the 20th century, especially with Rock Music.
Boomers grew up with TV, Rock, and the Cult of Youth. As such, they were sucked into the TV-lala-land and musical wonderland. Beatlemania now seems rather ‘innocent’, but it was a sign of things to come.
That said, as there had never been anything like the boomer generation in the history, it’s too easy to fault the ‘greatest generation’ for its blind-spot. How could they have known? (If permissiveness ruined many boomers, the solution isn’t repression either. VIRGIN SUICIDES is about parents who say NO and deny their daughters the sinful ways of the world, but a void hungers to be filled by something. Therefore, children must be instilled with a rich and meaningful culture that acts as a bulwark against junk culture. The ‘NO’ must be followed by a ‘YES’ of higher/deeper culture. ‘NO’ alone will lead to neurosis, leading to either sheepish submission or raving rebellion.)
One problem for Americans since World War II was the loss of racial, cultural, spiritual, and historical identity. Even prior to the boomers, Americanism came to be defined by what you do and what you have than what you are or where you came from. What is MILDRED PIERCE about but a hardworking well-intentioned woman who nevertheless leads her daughter to ruin because, despite her devotion and sacrifice, the main values she imparted to her child is that Money and Status are what counts most.
Money and nice things are good to have but shouldn’t define the core of existence. Despite Mildred Pierce’s caring and dedication, the summation of her life is pursuit of happiness through money. Materially, she doesn’t want much for herself, but the ‘love’ she craves from others is bought by money. She’s selfless in service to her daughter’s selfishness. Even her relative independence as a business woman is motivated by her need to serve the vanities of ‘better’ people, whose gratitude she yearns for and the lack thereof inspires a kind of masochistic martyrdom. The more Pierce tries to be in good graces with the ‘better’ people, the more they despise her as a vulgar money-grubber, worse as a money-grubbing slave without self-respect who supports them for their approval. Even as they take her money, they hate being reminded that their vanity and leisure are afforded by her efforts. Then, it’s no wonder the closer Pierce tries to approach her daughter through money, the divide only widens.
While the parents of PEOPLE NEXT DOOR aren’t as deluded(and fanatical) as Pierce, there is also a serious disconnect between them and their children, especially the daughter. The father(Eli Wallach) and the mother seem like good people. Hardly saints but not scoundrels. They provided the kids with their own rooms, TVs, record players, clothes, food, and etc., but what else?
Apparently, they left it entirely up to impersonal public education to instill their kids with what it means to be good citizens. The parents, driven to desperation, even go for family counseling and finally commit their girl to an expensive mental clinic. Yet, as in the Beatles’ song “She’s Leaving Home”, none of that was enough. According to silly Paul, the girl left home to have FUN. Fun-fun-fun is nice but hardly an explanation as to why so many boomers went astray. After all, plenty of them had lots of fun but their problems only got worse.
This is where SERIOUS MAN by the Coen brothers is most instructive. Like PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, it takes place in the Sixties, a time of social upheavals, even in a seemingly idyllic suburb somewhere in Minnesota. These changes encroach on the main character’s personal life as well: His wife intends to leave him, and his kids are immersed in conspicuous consumption and/or pop culture. In one amusing scene, he gets an ’emergency’ call from his son because of faulty TV signals, as grave a problem to the latter as God’s silence to the faithful.
Now, the father himself is obviously more modern/liberal than his forebears. He’s rather tolerant of his children and even tries a joint(marijuana) for the first time with a rather loose next-door neighbor. Still, another side of him appreciates the tradition. There are quiet moments when he listens to Jewish ‘folk’ music. He seeks advice from various rabbis. And most importantly, he does his duty of initiating his son into tribal manhood via Bar Mitzvah. It proves crucial.
Unlike the East Asian father in the film whose main concern for his son revolves around grades & status and the white American father whose idea of acculturation for his son is about guns & hunting(anachronistic in post-Wild-West America), the Jewish father imbues his son with a sense of ethnic-identity inseparable from history & spirituality.
The son and his best friend are no less into Sixties Rock/Pop culture than any other bunch of kids across America, but ONE thing that distinguishes them from goy kids is this union with the legacy of the Covenant. Even though the son snidely smokes marijuana before the ritual, the ceremony has a truly transformative effect on him; ironically, the pot ends up intensifying the moment, making him feel even more profoundly Jewish in the process: It’s like a combination of Bar Mitzvah and the Grateful Dead.
Now, what is the difference between the family in PEOPLE NEXT DOOR and the family in SERIOUS MAN? Superficially, they have much in common. The father has a job, the mother takes care of the home. And both pairs of kids are into Pop Culture, hedonism, and More Freedom/Choice.
The difference however is that the Jewish kid in SERIOUS MAN, though lured(and despoiled) by the same temptations, is also a receiver of a tradition & legacy as reminders that there is more to life than the Now. The entirety of his being isn’t given to fashion because a sense of roots anchors him to something deeper than ever-shifting modernity.
There is something of this in the movie THE JAZZ SINGER. Even though the cultural distance between the father and the son is far wider than the one in SERIOUS MAN — the son’s into black music and in black-face — , something of the father leaves an imprint on the black sheep son because the old man, more than simply a dad, is a reverent carrier of a legacy bigger than any single Jew and his era. So, even though the son’s face and sense of rhythm is ‘black’, his soul remains Jewish.
This deeper sense was shared by Jewish gangsters also. Even though they did loutish and brutal things, they nevertheless did what they could for the Tribe. By Christian morality, one’s worldly and ego-driven sins must be redeemed by serving all of humanity. One must reject one’s ego and ethnos.
In contrast, according to Jewish morality, one’s sins and trespasses can be redeemed in service to the Tribe. This is where Jews were different from Italians. Even though gangster movies show Sicilian/Italian mobsters to be tribal, they aren’t quite. After all, there is no spiritual covenant associated with Sicilian-ness or Italian-ness. For Sicilians/Italians of organized crime, the highest loyalty was the family or the clan, not the Tribe.
If, at the end of the day, Jewish mobsters donated much of their ill-gotten loot to Jewish causes and Israel to wash away some of their sins, the Italians/Sicilians weren’t averse to butchering one another endlessly for the sake of the family or the clan(at the expense of the larger Italian tribe). In GOODFELLAS, one has to be 100% Sicilian/Italian to be ‘made’, but despite the fact that all ‘made’ men are Italian, they never seem to have a higher or unified purpose pertaining to their ethnic identity. As often as not, they treat each other like a bunch of goombas.
In contrast, however lowdown and contemptible Jeffrey Epstein acted, he did it for a ‘higher’ cause: To collect materials to blackmail powerful people in service to Zion. Epstein’s case shows how Jews will even weaponize vice and perversion to serve what they deem to be a deeper purpose. As Jews place Jewishness at the center of their lives, even their non-Jewish activities are ultimately evaluated in terms of their utility to Jewish Power.
When ultra-liberal Jews emphasize something other than Jewishness, it leads to the kind of neurosis exhibited by Rachel Sontag whose father was no less pushy, controlling, and insistent than past Jewish fathers but in the service of egomania, intellectual conceits, and cultural attitudes. Fixing the radio so that it won’t play anything other than NPR hardly makes for a meaningful identity. Also, especially because Jews tend to have strong personalities, they tend to spiral into egomania in the absence of something higher to serve.
Barry Levinson’s DINER follows the lives of young men who were among the last of the pre-youth era. It’s about the proto-60s generation that came of age in the era of consumerism, youth culture, and the pervasiveness of TV. Yet, they came to manhood before Beatlemania and the rise of sex-and-drugs. It was still an era when lots of young men preferred Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis to Elvis Presley, then still considered somewhat crude and vulgar.
Tell-tale signs of Sixties youth culture are beginning to show but still under the lid of social norms and expectations that emphasized shame. There are reminders, social and familial, that men must put away childish things and grow up. There remains a commitment to the rites-of-passage, a farewell to youth. Also, as the parents and grandparents of the period were still bound by family life with recognizably traditional roles, the youths embarked into unknown waters from the secure shores of familiarity.
In this sense, Levinson’s other movie, AVALON(though overly sentimental and decidedly inferior to DINER), is a companion piece for it shows a Jewish-American world where one’s identity and culture were defined mainly in relation to family, ancestors, and community. Even as Jews in the movie become Good Americans and celebrate Thanksgiving — and Jewish kids do what other American kids do — , what makes them distinct and special is the sense of who they are and where they came from, and much of this has to do with direct familial connections among grandparents, parents, and children. The family in the movie goes into the TV business and does pretty well, but the final scene has a child staring into a TV set while the grandfather sits old and forgotten in a nursing home. Generations beginning with the boomers developed a kind of phantom identity in front of a TV set than an organic identity on the laps of grandparents.
Still, despite these changes, Jews have done better than other groups for two reasons. They have the Covenant and the rituals. When goyim celebrate Sweet Sixteen, it’s about being old enough to drive a car and go on dates. In contrast, Bar Mitzvah spiritually connects one’s body and soul to all the ancestors going back to Abraham and the Covenant. It’s less about personal freedom than cultural obligation, less about growing independent of the family than drawing nearer to the tribe.
Another reason why Jews have emerged relatively less scathed by TV and Pop Culture has, of course, to do with their control of the programming, which often honors and celebrates Jewishness. In contrast, Jews have used the media to impugn, deride, and smear Christianity, the white race, and goyim in general(especially Arabs/Muslims, for long made synonymous with little else but terrorism).
The goyim are sorely in need of a formula of rearing their children into a culture of identity and meaning beyond the whims of pop culture, fashion, and shallow ideology(that is now concocted by a consortium of Big Capital, advertising companies, Monopoly Media, and decadent academia). It is all the more essential because the current pop culture and so-called ideology are more debased than ever.
Consuming ONLY the pop culture of the 1940s would have meant listening to Frank Sinatra & Big Band music and watching John Ford & Howard Hawks movies. How corrupting could they have been? In terms of ideology, even New Deal Democrats believed in family, patriotism, and all that.
But look around now, and Pop Culture consists of ‘twerking’, pornification of even kiddie culture, degenerate TV shows about trannies, homos, sluts, & jungle fever; mindless nihilistic superhero fantasies of wanton destruction, and the crudest kind of standup comedy. As for the current ideology(which is really a form of idolatry), it gushes about trannies reading books to children and displaying ‘rainbow’ globo-homo sodomy flags in churches.
There was a time when even a life devoid of roots, high culture, family values, and etc. couldn’t be utterly debased by popular culture or deranged by ideologies(where Mayday gave way to Gayday). But now, the scum-scam are out of the woodworks and crawling all over. It’s so easy for people, especially young ones, to become infected with all manner of lunacy and ludicrousness. The Power gets them when they’re young because children and childish minds are so easy to mold and manipulate. Even if people eventually break free of the programming, the damage will have been done as they would have wasted much of their productive years chasing after fairy tales or worshiping at the altar of Mammon.
So, what can be done? In THE GODFATHER, Michael Corleone is forced to make something of an ‘aliyah’ to Sicily, the homeland of his folks, and the experience stirs within him something deeper than the A-B-C lectures about the Constitution and American Liberty. The Constitution is a fine document and America is a land of opportunity, but it is in Sicily that Michael Corleone realizes something deeper than law and liberty. Besides, the Constitution is a set of laws, and the Power will always bend the law. And for all the choices availed to a US citizen, freedom doesn’t provide a special and distinct meaning.
After all, just about anyone in America regardless of race/ethnicity(or for that matter, anywhere in the world) can understand the meaning of democracy or indulge in American pop culture. The ultimate question is what makes the Corleones different from the Mass of Humanity?
To understand this, one needs to cultivate and preserve a sense of family, culture, and roots. Even as Italian-Americans must get along with other groups in the US, they must safeguard their unique identity, or else become part of the Human Blob.
Of late, it seems Italian-Americans have utterly failed in this obligation and produced future generations of Tony Sopranos and JERSEY SHORE morons. But, what was lost can be recovered through resolve and commitment.
Maybe, white Americans can formulate a ritual of pilgrimage. This wouldn’t be just another family vacation trip. Rather, it would be a carefully mapped out journey with well-thought-out family narratives about where the forebears had lived and died.
Also, national memorials have deeper meaning if historical events are interwoven with personal memories of family members, past and present. The Vietnam War Memorial has special meaning to the families because of the names inscribed of the men who didn’t return. Jews personalize the Holocaust by speaking of relatives who either died or somehow survived(though there seems to be A LOT of those). Russia emphasizes how every family lost someone near in the Great Patriotic War.
Muslims have the Hajj. White folks would do well to have their own rituals of remembrance. With a deeper sense of who they are and where they came from, fewer whites might be dying of drugs & despondency or soul-rotting with tattoos & piercings. But the fact is they were raised on pop culture by parents(often single mothers) who also took to pop culture as their main staple. Crazy upon Crazy in a world where pop culture has gone from moral entertainment to utter degeneracy, the kind concocted by Quentin Tarantino and the like.
Rituals like Catholic Communion has meaning, but it’s universal-spiritual, and as such, doesn’t connect one’s identity to roots of ethnicity and history. Christianity, though a great religion, is open to all and is timeless in meaning. Ideas and creeds are not enough. People need rituals and roots in combination. (Catholic Conservatives face the contradiction of wanting to convert the entire world but maintaining their own world separate from the newly converted.)
There is a silent cry in the White World for the return of patriarchs. Michael Corleone owed much to his father who, though a ruthless mobster, fulfilled his role as a husband and father. Now, imagine having someone like Gavin McGinnis as a father. Mama Corleone was a fine woman. Now, imagine having as a mother someone who wears a ‘pussy hat’, is splattered with tattoos, and has green hair. Who needs a father like dork George W. Bush, scum Billy Boy Clinton, or cuck James scummy Comey, whose wife and daughter are shrill harridans?
In the 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone”, Bob Dylan mocked a young woman who lived for the moment and ended up lost in a world of strangers. At some point in life, Dylan feared such could be his own fate, and he got off the fast lane to regain a sense of self. He opted for retrenchment from the excesses and egotism.
As for those demanding he be the leader of the Counterculture, he knew well enough(despite his monumental self-confidence and arrogance) the value of humility. He was no Moses but an inheritor of a tradition created by the Jewish prophets.
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Lemmings do you not actually run off a cliff and commit mass suicide, Mr. essayist. This is an urban myth. The Disney film “White Wilderness” is responsible for this. The filmmakers trucked-in the Lemmings and threw them off the cliff.
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56#:~:text=Lemmings%20do%20not%20commit,state%20wildlife%20biologist%20Thomas%20McDonough.
Maybe you actually knew this, and you wrote what you did as a complex metaphor of some kind, too complicated for me to grasp it so it’s back to school for me and not you.
Here is a good take and introduces a good Saileresque term for this.
The rise of “IKEA humans”. I prefer “IKEA people”, more catchy.
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/09/13/the-ikea-humans-the-social-base-of-contemporary-liberalism
Ad-hominun nit-picking pipulater.
This piece is almost long enough to be a book. What is stopping you from publishing one?
Regarding the embedded tweet about the pregnant woman shot – I looked it up, and the news quoted her saying, “The guy said, ‘Give me that!’ and grabbed my keys,” she recalls. “I thought he was playing, because he was young. And then I went, like, to reach after him, and he shot me.”
She thought he was playing. Her parents failed her. I taught my kids to be race realists. If my son saw a couple of jigs coming quickly up to him, I don’t think he would assume they were “playing.”
This is so long and confusing , must be written by AI
Pris, don’t get too hasty here: “the white American father whose idea of acculturation for his son is about guns & hunting(anachronistic in post-Wild-West America).”
There are at least a dozen solid reasons that firearms and hunting skills are not anachronistic.
Too obvious to mention really. Both my boys (grown men now) can shoot pistols, shotguns and rifles. Unlike niggggs, they can also field strip and clean the firearms and handle with saftely.
Fascism is coming, like it or not. And like the old school fascists like to say, “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” We are all better off with people like me and sons holding the power.
Okay, I’ll take the bait. If you are going to accuse me of using an ad hominem attack, at least spell it correctly.
Gaza, you be kRaZy!!!
Signed,
Coco Washington
Actually, everything the OP and writers on the same frequency are not talking about any generation in particular, but the somewhat strange era that started in 1945.
Prior to ’45 and in most parts for quite awhile after, people of whatever age were defined by their work and the place they did it. Because distances were vast, the Minnesota logger and the Mississippi sharecropper lived in different worlds. It’s how the world worked in most ages anyway.
Postwar US polities altered all this, first by the transportation revolution, squashing distances and making people FEEL crowded even when they weren’t. The managerial revolution, aided by the GI Bill to returning WWII vets, created a New Class. By 1960 there were more managers in sales, bureaucrats and others than there were either industrial or agricultural work. It helps to know that Bill Buckley’s conservative movement was aimed at these newbies, while giving lip-service to the worker bees. Finally there was media.
In a nut: Work + Time + Place were all upended in a period of maybe 15 years.
Note how insidious the New Class was when offshoring work made it possible for productive industries to multiply their profits by hundreds of percentage points. “Free Trade” became their god and they threw their factory/farm cousins right under the bus. It’s why conservatism stopped conserving anything. That’s why there are Japanese and Mexican cars all over the road and even vegetables at Walmart might come from Pakistan.
All this hasn’t been factored in by ANYBODY yet. What happened between 1945 and now was less a revolution than a total reinvention. The gloomy critics might be right: Nothing will improve till it all falls down.
OK, you’re now gutted, finned, scaled, filleted, seasoned and on my grill and I’m on my third Bud Light.
The drought has ended. We the readers finally has another 10,000 word essay from JF. Thanks! BTW, JF does not just write essays, he composes symphony.
Bud Light would be your chosen brew.
Yes, the car dislocated people from their communities, now the people you lived next to weren’t also your coworkers or working nearby. With the end of religion you also lost your local community coming together once a week.
Women continuing to work after marriage also destroyed what little was left to keep streets and communities connected with the wives socialising with each other and organising community events etc.
Now people have begun to live alone together being increasingly strangers to the people next door.
Then you have things to fill this void of community socialisation with radio, cinema and then TV. (People today forget the big concern about radio being a tool of social and political radicalisation and hysteria. Seen as being key to totalitarian propaganda. As late as the 90s, we had the Rwandan genocide organised and egged on by the radio)
But schools remained as something close to normal human community (Even if environments full of children of similar ages is itself unnatural, the scale and constant proximity of familiar people was) but then came smart phones and suddenly teenage girls, seemingly the least impacted by modernity having a great desire to spend time with each other and gossip have become the most radical and political people in Western society.
Instead of them being unduly influenced by their real life peers, now they are indoctrinated by whomever is the most powerful organised minority on social media populated by them. And now they have become even more neurotic through competing not with the pretty girls in their schools but the whole world. Teenage girls used to be the least interested in the internet but now they are the most addicted to it, even teenage boys for whom the internet is a fount of unending free pornography use it less. (You can’t exactly watch porn in public)
The final storm from increasing social atomisation has been an army of deranged Lisa Simpsons suddenly becoming one of the most influential political forces and it’s almost pushed the US into fullscale war with Russia. People don’t want to accept that teenage girls have done this but the neocons should be getting pushback from teenage girls but because they believe the “truthiness” of Russiagate and have TDS, they created an absolutely hysterical atmosphere that helped lead to this situation and a Democrat party reunited once again with the neocons after many decades of their wandering with the Republicans.
Review my commenting history and reconsider that response.
And yes, the right was filled with lots of people whose animating emotion is contempt for those they deem their social inferiors. These people cheered on libertarian style policies and free trade. Their hatred for the poor was so great that they never considered whether the freedom for antisocial economic aggression might be a gun turned upon them someday or that in general their contempt for having social concern or responsibility for others might leave them at the top of a very sick and eventually collapsing society.
The right can’t accept that it opened the door for mass migration (As even in Britain the very libertarian right conservative government quickly made efforts to open new doors for cheap labour after closing them with Brexit) and the left can’t accept that mass migration is doing exactly what the right hoped it would. I saw Ana Kasparian going on about the WGA strike it still blows my mind how people who are for endless and increasing mass migration don’t get that borders and citizenship are a kind of union, indeed the most important one and immigrants are scab workers. A lot of writers who’d like to work for cheap or without this strike even though it would harm the other writers’ long terms interests and help capital are just looking for a better life too…
In general the individualistic antisocial politics that has emerged first from the US and then through the greater Anglosphere and into other places is just a call for freedom of aggression of the antisocial at the economic and social level. As these policies tend to produce a kind of social pollution, eventually something has to give as society stops being able to even function. Some countries can tolerate this better having a lower baseline amount and social tolerance for antisocial economic or social actions or the importation of those who will (Denmark) but most don’t.
The idea that 50 years of a politics which essentially says nobody owns a country or that nobody really has any social obligations would produce anything other society writ large being taken advantage of by it’s resident parasites, the social immune system compromised, is, at the end of the day, weird but also fundamentally not something society was ever asked it’s opinion on anyway. You get more of what you incentivise and politics which fundamentally don’t consider national interest or are even able to define it will tend to betray it.
THE HOMELESS MIND: MODERNIZATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS By Peter L. Berger & Brigitte –
IMAGE
LINK
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/the-homeless-mind-modernization-and-consciousness-berger-etsy--155303887595680158/
Why not just Ikeans?
Standard libertardian response: “”B-b-but classical liberalism worked so well for 150 years; I just don’t understand what changed.” You can repeat yourself a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, and, it seems, they’ll never understand.