In the last post, I wrote this:
It’s hard to care about culture when knowledge about it is manipulated, when the country is being filled with people who don’t understand or appreciate it, when heritage French defer to Brussels and heritage Americans don’t know who they are, when decline seems inevitable and no source of information can be trusted.
Lets go deeper.
Marx had a vision of society in which the economy was the basis of everything. A schematic of his teaching looked like a pyramid with the things that matter — culture, faith, language, created things — squeezed together on the tippy-top. I’ll draw a picture:
In Marxian theory, the fat part of the pyramid is “base” — the thinning part is “superstructure.” Clearly, the base is all-important (the means and relations of production) and the superstructure a bit of an unfortunate afterthought. What I consider to be the core of life as well as the core of culture diminishes to nothingness in Marx’s scheme.
Lets imagine that Marx’s theory is inverted so that the economy rests on the strong foundation of culture, values, faith and family? Could this be a better representation of reality?
I think so.
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I ask this because elitists in the West have so distorted and diminished their own cultures that they can barely function as “basis.” Western economies were also distorted because the values on which they rest have changed. For example, when the work-ethic was replaced by an ethic of easy graft and greed, immoral cultural anomalies became the norm. I’m thinking of Sam Bankman-Fried, the kid who wiped-out billions of dollars of other people’s savings while riding high as the second biggest Democratic Party donor (the first is Soros). That kid didn’t lack values as much as he possessed ones which are foreign to those of heritage Americans. He’s not ONE bad apple in the bushel — the bushel is full, though not filled, of people who have values like his, that is, utterly unlike the values of that informed American culture.
Could you do what he did? Could you, with a clean conscience, steal the savings of people who invested in your company? Could you donate a huge hunk of money to obviously horrible people and sleep soundly that night? I couldn’t. Why? Because my values are the values of heritage Americans and I haven’t jettisoned them. My values are “basis” and any desire I would have to make and flaunt money is, at best, “superstructure.” I’m a “grounded American,” as my father used to say.
As the political LEFT demeans and mocks American exceptionalism, they can’t see that they’re simultaneously demanding their own sort of exceptionalism, a moral exceptionalism that justifies pleonexic behaviour such as that of Bankman-Fried. Is SBF as evil and diabolical as Soros appears to be? I don’t think so. I think he was insulated as a child and therefore never imbibed the moral culture that informs the declining percentage of heritage Americans. He’s not a hypocrite but a lost soul, a moral cretin permitted to live among us. He didn’t become insensitive to the moral values or “truth” that was taught to him as a child; he wasn’t manipulated as the Nazi’s manipulated the minds of the German people; he wasn’t deceived as so many Americans are now over the cause and motives of NATOs war against Russia in the Ukraine … he had no cognitive dissonance, no sense of wrong, and no ability to re-orient himself from the self-aggrandizing moral certitudes of the cultural Left to the fading yet still existent values of heritage America.
He was culturally siloed to such an the extent that he is unable to respect the moral values of people who wanted to live unmolested lives unlike his own … he doubled down on what he was and what he was doing, then doubled down again. Perhaps he had a whiff of a bad conscience — I don’t know. I do know he never let himself get off that ramp, perhaps because he had no vision of an alternative path. He is so severed from the tattered Christian values that still undergird American culture that he was morally clueless about what he was doing. He looks scared and should be. As a mum, I want to give that kid a hug and a spanking, two things he probably never had. The values that have undergirded his life so far are about to be pulled out from under him. He may have a huge awakening as spends the rest of his life in prison. It’s tragic.
Bankman-Fried has bequeathed to us his behaviour, other people’s lost investments, the corrupted election of Biden and his own gasconading language that still can be found on Twitter and other social media sites. That’s his legacy. Again, it’s tragic.
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The political and cultural Left doesn’t just reject or spurn Christian values but hates them (and us). When the EU was debating the inclusion of a reference to Christianity within the Preamble to the EU Constitution (I hope this memory is correct) bureaucrats shook with furor. Virtue again signaled until that clause was excised.
Think about this — it only took a few words about Europe’s Christian history to make doubleplusgoodthinking EU bureaucrats go ballistic. European elitists hate their own past. This hatred is the cause of what conservatives call, “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — a blind hatred of Trump which motivates people like Adam Schiff, for example. Hatred explains why Twitter metastasized into an intolerant, tumorous Leftism. It’s also why France’s culture is in such a precipitous decline. French elitists are SECULARISTS and damn proud of it! They’re not Christians, aughhh … tut tut tut. After they experienced a mass conversion from one faith to another, from Christianity to Secularism, they became determined to NOT GO BACK. Not even in cultural memory. They’ll ride their own country into the dust before they admit they’re wrong.
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of culture as a living organism. If you cut off an organism’s legs, hair and other stuff, it can survive with help, but if you remove it’s heart or mind, it surely dies. In my opinion, Europeans have cut off as much as they can before killing their own culture. You and I can debate what comprises the core of culture, but in my eyes, it’s faith. Religious faith. From faith, morals are derived. There are no morals outside of religion and there are no a-religious people, so what we think is right and wrong have a religious dimension. As I keep harping, we all of have a religion. Some of you deny this. Some of you hate religion with a passion and claim to have “No Religion.”
And some of you are delusional.
The religion of the Left is Secularism. Few political leftists can handle the cognitive dissonance of believing in Christ at the same time they promote policies that destroy Christian faith and morals. This is why anti-Christian bigotry is such a prominent or distinguishing feature of the cultural Left. Right elitists are not much better, by the way, just more subtle.
Destroying people’s savings is an arrogant behavior that didn’t come out of a void. It was justified by an anti-Christian pride inherent in the cultural Left. Destroying countries by promoting policies which undercut their heritage and moral and cultural foundation is the sort of thing that will earn you a long stay in hell.
Ask Sam Bankman-Fried about this in, say, twenty years.
