The Situation

You and I and the rest of the world share this planet and I believe, are responsible as stewards to make sure we take care of this Mother Earth and the civilizations we happen to live in. My own civilization is Western and I know that it is the dominant civilization on the planet. Nearly all people are, therefore, at the mercy of this civilization even it if is mixed with very different civilizations. The world-system we live in consisting of trade and a balance of political and military power comes from the West and is enforced and maintained by Western nations primarily as well as non-Western countries who have accepted the basic framework created by the West.

The West, in the meantime, has deeply influenced and will continue to be influenced by other world civilizations and traditions whether Asian, African and native traditions throughout the world. 

We lack a “Big Picture” view of life and are therefore confused at minimum whether we know it or not and this stark reality registers often as stress, depression, anxiety escapism in general and various addictions. We blame ourselves and each other for these things. We think that if only we or our relative could just get their life together, take responsibility for their lives and straighten-up and fly right then the problem would be solved. But these notions are based on profoundly erroneous views of reality in general and human nature in particular. The tragedy is that a more correct view (no view is entirely correct) is everywhere around us if only we would look. Our problem is not that we don’t have answers to the basic problems we face whether practical or psychological. Successful approaches are out there but they are undermined by us and those we regard as “the Authorities.” Human beings require a basic coherent framework to hang our lives and thoughts on so we aren’t just “winging it” all the time. We act as if we do have such a framework but we don’t know what it is and we are most certainly not interested in examining it because we know, correctly, that once we do that it will fall apart and we will be left with nothing.

We have to deal with this matter urgently. It isn’t just our internal social problems we are facing. We have profound existential issues civilization-wide. We are at the edge of major war and possible environmental collapse both of which would require international cooperation which is, in the USA, a force with no force. If scientists are correct about Climate Change then we are headed for major environmental and social upheavals merely from that. The Narrative doesn’t currently seem to have any interest in any of these matters and instead emphasizes “enemies” everywhere in order to continue their political/economic control of the populations of the West, particularly the USA, whose population is being fooled in providing the financing for the instruments of control of the new Western “Roman” Empire centered in Washington, DC.

My work is for those who have at least some interest in the reality of our collective culture particularly our culture in the USA but also those who see themselves is “Western” which could mean anyone who accepts the overall framework of current Western belief. That overall framework is hard to describe because it is largely fragmented and incoherent though it has one guiding and overall dynamic principle which is the bottom line, the ultimate arbiter of all morality despite religion, philosophy or moral belief and that guiding light is money.

That is not to say that most people think money is the most important part of their lives because unless you are a sociopath or morally depraved it isn’t. But fears of not having enough for basic needs, fears of not having enough to help your kids or others, fear of not having enough to make sure you get some minimum amount of respect and have some sense of status are all focused on money. Ambition and success are usually measured in money because our society is set up that way. Money remains, however, our ultimate arbiter of value no matter what. This fact is the first thing we have to face.

If, for example, an educators, academics, journalist, or politician were to tell the truth as they honestly knew it their careers would be ruined, their family impoverished, and their social life diminished if that truth was out of the realm of the mainstream Narrative (the Narrative). This is somewhat less true in other fields where people just hunker down, do the job they are required to do, go along to get along and come home and live a “private” life. Public life, compared to former periods of history, gets little attention—we figure it is best left to the “experts” and the powerful. The best we can hope for is nothing much will change and we can keep living our lives as we have been. We may be alarmed by threats of war, environmental degradation, moral decay, corruption, and a general lack of love in our lives but we are, generally, uninterested in major change though that may be changing. This is not “bad” because it is necessary for society to function—some minimal agreement is required for society to function so conformity has a very important value. The problem we have is that we are living in a historical period when the Narrative is so internally incoherent, twisted, fragmented and arbitrary that it fails to either move us to a social morality that can bring us together, it fails to fulfill the long-term Western values of logic, truth, beauty and compassion for our fellows o the flowering that could be here if we chose to move away from the current Narrative into our true Inheritance. Using the treasures we in the West have discovered to cobble together an inspiring and convivial counter-narrative is a requirement that has to precede any social, economic, political or cultural shift. I say this while observing that while there are elements of positive in some of the general movements around, each movement is deeply problematical because it is based on the Narrative as I’ve described it so that nothing good could possibly come out of it. Only a paradigm shift can possibly move us in anything like a positive direction.

This does not mean that we scrap the Narrative in its entirety only that we re-arrange and organize the elements so that they have some coherence and fill in the missing portions. The causes of all this have been historical and unavoidable.

Europe was a relatively semi-civilized culture known as Western “Christendom” dominated by the Catholic Church which became the center of Western Civilization by keeping literacy and basic technology alive. The more civilized Christianity existed in the East and went in a very different direction since it lived within the Byzantine Empire so it did not have to create, from almost scratch, a coherent civilization as the Roman Church had to create. Thus in the East, there could be more focus on contemplation and mysticism whereas in the West the Church had to take care of both political and spiritual affairs and gradually fell apart in both areas over time.

The Church, gradually moving away from spiritual teachings, emphasized power both in the realm of ideas and military power. Gradually, the Church experienced a deep corruption within the hierarchy that caused it to lose legitimacy and populations began a wary approach towards the Church while still embracing its moral and spiritual teachings. As the power of princes and kings increased the Church was cut out of the councils of power until the Reformation shattered its political power. Before then, with a population no longer content with the status quo, we saw a growth in trade with other more wealthy and civilized societies and that produced a hunger from all elements of society to replace stability and spirituality with a desire for adventure and money that proved irresistible. Thus came the Age of Exploration, the invention of the printing press, and the eventual evolution of completely secular culture and the rise of Kings and Princes throughout Europe who were able to hold sway over their subjects not through “fear of God” but through nationalism and coercion. In contrast, in India, China, and the Islamic world, life was more stable, less confusing, more satisfying such that there was little interest to look around. These were “old” societies with continuous civilizations going back not just centuries but millennia. In the case of Islamic culture it readily adopted the cultures they found before the great conquest of Mohamed and his followers. Unlike the “barbarian” invasions of Europe the Arabs found a wealthy and highly civilized society that they did not destroy or look mercilessly. Unlike Western Christendom the Islamic rulers did not persecute Christians, Jews or other minorities as a rule. These communities existed and thrived right up until our time when the West decided to create as much chaos and destruction as possible inside Islamic society in the Middle East and that anger and “blow-back” has created still dangerous problems.

This spirit of adventure and discovery, new in the world, began to shape the world most of which was stuck in ancient and stagnant ways of life that melted like butter in the face of a hot knife in the face of Western culture and its unique taste for the new (modernism), discovery, the use of reason to solve practical problems (rather than through tradition), evolving new technologies, inquiring into the nature of nature through science and so on. These tendencies too the world by storm and lifted the human population everywhere from about 1 billion in 1800 to 7.5 billion today and, as the same time, spread prosperity and riches the ancients could not even dream about to a surprisingly large number of people in the world. At the same time the West spread the idea of individual human dignity and freedom as an essential component of its narrative and the notion, through the ideas of Christianity, that we are all brothers and sisters, ultimately, despite the fact few people in the West actually thought that way the idea was transmitted and is still, today, at the heart of Western Civilization and the Narrative.

To be sure this movement of Western expansion featured acts of extraordinary cruelty, genocides, looting, and coercion both in dealing with non-Western peoples but also within Western society. But, with each passing decade the West has moved away from brutality at least within the borders of the major developed countries and, to some extent, outside its borders.

Industrialization, science and technology created the idea of almost an earthly paradise wherein human beings could have almost anything they wanted—and this meant not just the rich but the common people which was a unique notion. As Huey Long put it “every man a king” was and is a possibility once human beings understood that there may be no limit to what technology can create but this notion has created some very deep problems which we will look at later.