When you observe shootings;
divorce; drug use; low savings rates; diminished work ethic; an increased focus
on recreational pursuits; few or no offspring; disrespect within the family;
personal mutilation; skimpy clothing; loud-mouthed arrogance; foul-mouthed
internet culture; youtube skate-and-crash motifs; non-musical music; and
diminished desire and ability to read, study and learn; you may think, why now?
Why all at once? Do these things somehow relate to each other? How can
they? How can a shooting at a concert be related to the fact that
millions of homes are affected by divorce or contain mongrel children from more
than one father? (By the way, the latest shooter was twice divorced, grew up
without his father, and lived with a divorced woman.) How can high credit
card debt be related to the fact that many demanding people show up to job
interviews in shorts, flip flops, designs etched into their scalps, and
decorative hardware protruding from their faces?
It is the boom period of a social cycle. The social cycle moves
roughly in parallel with the business cycle. We now have the
biggest bubble in history poised for the biggest crash; a bubble of
government—including all the areas touched by its tentacles—fueled by
unprecedented central bank credit expansion. This dark symbiotic
relationship between the state and banking results in a state-backed social
foray into previously non-viable lifestyles. It occurs in the same way
that unnatural credit expansion causes entrepreneurs to embark on unsustainable
business expansion. The same artificial credit fuel that explodes the
stock market and causes a housing boom causes an explosion in unmerited,
unsustainable social action. The new Fed money finds its way into society via
thousands of outlets like federally-backed student loans, welfare payments,
research grants for schools, policing grants, environmental grants, war
contractor funding, and payments to federal employees.
In the decade following the
creation of the Federal Reserve, skimpy clothing and late-night partying
exploded. The late 1920s saw the peak of a business cycle and a social
cycle. During the subsequent crash—the period of creative destruction
when society was coming to its senses—modesty in clothing, manners, and less
boisterous lifestyles returned as people rearranged their priorities so they could
regain their reputations, regain productive skills, help their families, and
seek and retain the jobs available after the collapse of the credit-fueled
insanity.
If natural interest rates
prevailed and the state could not create money out of thin air, we wouldn’t
have to go through these cycles. There is a saying in the investment
world, “Don’t confuse a bubble with brains.” Every goofy business or
social experiment seems to work during a boom time. Everyone is a
genius. Let’s see, I will get a lot of tattoos, put decorative metal in
my face, chug booze, and crash a motorcycle into a wall. I will film
myself doing these things and become an internet sensation. The babes and
paychecks will flow in like crazy. It may work like that for a while;
until the dam breaks and reality re-imposes itself.
What does this have to do with culture? What is culture? To
culture something means to grow something. Almost five hundred
years ago, the word came to also signify the idea of cultivating, growing,
building, enhancing, or refining a person’s mind, faculties, or manners.
To culture is very simply the training process that parents undertake with
their offspring to enhance their prospects for survival. It is the
process of imparting proven skills; the process of cultivating children.
Since humans are born as almost completely blank slates with little instinctive
specialization, it can be a daunting task for a parent to develop a workable
philosophical matrix to impart to his children. Many intelligent parents,
perceiving this complexity and their own shortcomings, choose to rely on the
wisdom of their ancestors who spent eons on trial-and-error developing workable
philosophical constructs and physical skills. The ongoing “culturing”
process is therefore often seen in the form of imprinting packages that are
adopted by parents to be used with their children. The parents imprint
the skills that have proven to be successful for the survival of previous
generations. The parents may choose to utilize an off-the-shelf imprinting
packages that may or may not include a component with a religious or
philosophical moniker like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Taoism or they may
choose to take their chances and use an imprint of their own design (or no
imprint at all) and hope for the best.
A successful cultural model
may be multi-faceted covering such diverse things as language, food, religion,
and how to deal with regional weather issues. Cultural models will likely
have different components combined into an imprinting package that has proven
successful for generations in specific regions or under specific circumstances
or with people that have specific aptitudes. The items that make up these
workable packages are usually absorbed by children from their parents and may
include a combination of specific components like Christianity, thrift,
speaking Swedish, fishing, preparing pickled herring, building a cold weather
house, singing songs about the joys of winter by the hearth, etc.
The model may change and
improve somewhat over the generations to adapt to different circumstances, but
core principles that ensure the multi-generational survival of progeny will
persist. Some of the subordinate components will also vary within the
same region because of the importance of the division of labor. For
example, a family of carpenters that speaks the same language and shares the
same religion as their neighbors may imprint somewhat different skills on their
children than a family who runs a dairy, one that operates a retail store, or
one that provides accounting services.
What then is cultural erosion? Cultural erosion (in the sense I am
using it) doesn’t mean specifically the demise of any component, or the
entirety, of any previously-successful imprinting package. Cultural
erosion, means that less effort is made by parents across society to culture
children, to cultivate children, to imprint children with skills—regardless of
imprinting package— that will enhance their chances of survival; skills that
they can pass on to their own children to increase the chances that the family
lineage will endure. The next generation becomes less “cultured.”
This also has the effect of reducing or eliminating regional cultural
imprinting packages—regional cultural models—to the extent that they are
abandoned or infiltrated by other packages.
The current state-backed
mega-boom has made other alternative lifestyles appear to be as successful as
traditional lifestyles. Previous cultural models seem unnecessarily
constraining. There is no longer extreme biological pressure (and
resultant cultural pressure) for a woman to assure a specific man—through her
behavior—that he is the father of her children; and then to stay loyal to that
man.
Every lifestyle appears to
work. We no longer need culture. We no longer need to imprint
children with social skills and adhere to the tenants of a cultural
model. People with a high time preference can impose themselves on people
with a low time preference since the state will bail out everyone—especially
those with short time horizons. Cultural constraints against bathroom
humor seem antiquated since the trappings of promiscuity are no longer taboo
under the “everything works” state model. Sarcasm replaces
sincerity. Why make your yea be yea and your nay be nay when you can get
a bigger laugh by denigrating your neighbor with innuendo? The proven cultural
imprints seem to be excess baggage. They are in the way. Why
bother.
During a boom, every weird
lifestyle experiment, no longer how unsustainable over the long run, appears to
work in the moment. The skills of previous cultural models are
lost. Many children, potential future parents themselves, grow up without
ever being exposed to the imprints of a proven cultural model. The
knowledge of how to “culture” future children erodes and dies when statism
expands.
A
clamor for workable lifestyle skills will return when this biggest of all
bubbles pops. The ones who have the best chance of making it through and
preserving their parents’ lineage are the ones whose parents loved them enough
to diligently—in the face of the deafening contrarian voices invading the
cultural models—imprint proven thought and skill patterns on their children.
Technology
and resource availability change and some minor aspects of the imprinting
packages adapt correspondingly. But, there are basic imprints that
endure. What are the fundamental tenants of the most successful cultural
imprints around the world? The encouragement of voluntarism as opposed to
predation in children; the elevation of the family; the recognition that
fathers desire to support and train their
own children; and a corresponding awareness that the mother’s
behavior is key to gaining the support of the father by assuring him that
her children are his children. These simple truths are the building
blocks of most long-standing cultural models. When these basics are not
passed on, predation and violence emerge and prevail in future generations.
Hence, statism with its promise of effortless stolen prosperity for everyone
leads to cultural erosion which leads to predation which equates to violence.
It is no surprise that there is an upsurge of violence owing to
destructive distortions in society as people abandon proven models and wander
back and forth between state-sponsored social experiments with divorce, drugs,
warfare, coerced property transfer, and public school not knowing what is
workable and what is a state-sponsored fad that will ultimately impoverish
their offspring and be a dead-end for their lineage.
David Hathaway [send
him mail] is a former supervisory DEA Agent. He is a cowboy and
aficionado of LatinAmerica where he has lived and traveled extensively. He is a
homeschooling father of nine children and maintains the website charityendureth.com."
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