Post: #1

Quote:A quick glance at the USA tells me it takes about 3-400 years for a brand new society of frontiersmen and settlers to settle down into a civilization at equilibrium.

Every mass society that’s been around for any length of time has set traditions and customs, stratified social classes, and the vast majority living close to subsistence with a ruling class and its functionaries controlling most wealth.

This truth began to dawn on me when I first moved from the American West where “everyone is middle class” to the East Coast.
To my amazement I soon encountered a highly structured caste system. Each stratum of society lived entirely separate from the others even if they existed in close proximity. For each caste there were clear codes of dress, of speech, of behavior.
Working low status jobs that required uniforms or heavy duty work clothes, I quickly came to understand that white collar types, the perpetually harried and anxious middle classers, would refuse to acknowledge my existence, even trying to walk right through me as if I weren’t there. Talking to them was out of the question.
Sure enough, when I went out in nicer clothing, I had no trouble getting their attention and talking to them. I was amazed.

Lower proles often wore black shoes and gray baggy clothes that allowed them to blend into walls and not be seen as they hauled dollies loaded with goods in and out of shops or cleaned up the streets. These people I saw were the local class of untouchables, ashamed even to be noticed.

There were aristocrats who walked about in elegant earth tones with a satisfied smug expression on their faces. Just beneath them were their upper middle class followers, whose attempt to imitate their masters’ smile looked more like a petulant sneer.

In the West where I had been raised, athleticism, fitness, and outdoor activity had been counted as virtues.
In the East, the physical was clearly seen as a vice, fit only for proles.
Men prided themselves on being stick thin, emphasizing their gaunt figures with tight clothes. For women, gentle Yoga in indoor studios, well away from the sun, was the most vigorous activity they permitted themselves. They seemed to me very like Chinese mandarins who grew their nails long to show beyond all doubt that they never had to perform lowly physical labor.

It was not just the social systems of the East that made me think at once of China and India, but also the sheer density of people.
For the first time in my life, there were endless crowds everywhere I went. Public restrooms were scarce, the few available, mobbed by hundreds of people and filthy. Any public resource at all in such an environment was sure to be quickly exhausted in a true tragedy of the commons. There were few places to sit, even fountains were designed to make it difficult for people to snatch up the coins dropped in them. The spaces shown as “parks” on the maps were just islands in the middle of intersections, a ring of benches around a statue, most of them occupied by sleeping homeless people.

On reflection, I understood the East coast of the US, unlike the West, had existed for awhile under the rule of England and inherited its customs and institutions. But mainly, it has simply been there longer.
All available resources and social positions are taken, everyone is caught in competition for an unchanging quantity of scarce resources.

I realized that the Western USA with its relatively informal egalitarian culture is an aberration. It’s simply too new to have settled into a more normal system. The West is still a frontier.
Once there’s no more frontier, people have to live together in the same society.
Within a few generations, people assort roughly into classes based on their ability to control wealth and exert power. Then each class largely breeds with its own until each caste is practically a distinct genetic breed.
Once the process is complete, you have the classic mature social structure that’s indistinguishable from Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.

It is important to make this observation because many of humanity’s best accomplishments come from exuberant new cultures over short periods of time, while ancient empires more often plod on for milennia in a senile daze, living on borrowed inertia, unable to adapt or change, with millions of striving laborers, not one of them producing a new idea.

https://colonyofcommodus.wordpress.com/2...alitarian/

Frontiers in and of themselves awaken the human spirit and transforms us from beings that seem soulless and dead to ones alive and full of energy, it is a food for the soul for the young men who free themselves from the constraints of their old society and venture into untamed wildernesses to strange and beautiful continents and places. To feel new possibilities and to awaken the creative spark just like America was back in the frontier days:



Recommended TV series for those who would like to be inspired.


Now consider the cyclical nature of society. Consider the rise and fall of cultures, and civilizations. The inevitability of cycles as all living things are born, grow,decay and die.

In the long run perhaps cycles are a good thing. For cycles may be the mechanism by which new cultures may arise from older cultures that died akin to a bushfire in Australia where old senile trees give way to more vibrant and young seedlings. For as cultures and countries fall frontiers are recreated and civilizations emerge that evolve and innovate, change and improve, building upon the achievements of all that came before them( if the civilization preservers exist and do their thing like the medieval monks of Old).

Post: #2

I've only lived in the American mid-West, so I find the quoted article very interesting.

I'm genuinely curious to experience this type of society myself -- but not live in.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I live in such a place where I am now.

Post: #3

(04-14-2015 06:59 AM)Suits Wrote:  I've only lived in the American mid-West, so I find the quoted article very interesting.

I'm genuinely curious to experience this type of society myself -- but not live in.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I live in such a place where I am now.

To clarify you mean that the society you are living in is stratified and not frontier territory and that is in the mid-west correct?

Post: #4

That might be true in a closed system...aka the divide
between the haves and the have-nots solidifies into
a rigid hierarchy.

However history is punctuated by a series of booms, busts
revolutions and upsets that shake up the system like a snowglobe.
The French revolution and post war America/Baby Boom
are good examples of this.

The only real constant is ambition and an individuals desire
to accomplish more that drives everything. So in a way,
there's always a new frontier to explore.

Post: #5

(04-14-2015 08:59 PM)infowarrior1 Wrote:  

(04-14-2015 06:59 AM)Suits Wrote:  I've only lived in the American mid-West, so I find the quoted article very interesting.

I'm genuinely curious to experience this type of society myself -- but not live in.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I live in such a place where I am now.

To clarify you mean that the society you are living in is stratified and not frontier territory and that is in the mid-west correct?

I've previously lived in the US, so I cannot speak for the East Coast or the West Coast for that matter.

I currently live in China, which is super stratified.

Post: #6

I do agree that frontiers challenge people and bring out the best in them. Plus, unfamiliar places are exciting to explore.

The cool guys in New York are the ones who defy the class structure. You can't judge a city's hierarchies by the way people act in the street, because those people are frequently either ( a) engaged with a job so you shouldn't bother them if you're being respectful, ( b) en route to a destination so they're hurried, or ( c) so conditioned to the imaginary barriers between people in cities that they just ignore the reality around them.

I think this piece says more about its author's own perceptions than anything else. Some of the kindest and most humble people I know would fit into the rich-and-smug category, if judged in the author's manner.

Post: #7

I believe in boundaries, insofar as I must smash through them.

Post: #8

I think part of the "red pill" can be waking up to the fact that there are social and class boundaries all around us. It might seem obvious, but particularly in my home country (Australia) this fact is very much downplayed or even hidden. No-one will admit that there are all kinds of status-seeking games going on - that is part of the game, seeming to be be oblivious and above it all. In an egalitarian country like this, the office worker or even executive will make small talk with the cleaner who comes in to empty his rubbish bin, unlike other countries where he will just ignore her. But there is a wealth of condescension in the small talk.

Post: #9

(04-14-2015 10:07 PM)Apollo21 Wrote:  That might be true in a closed system...aka the divide
between the haves and the have-nots solidifies into
a rigid hierarchy.

However history is punctuated by a series of booms, busts
revolutions and upsets that shake up the system like a snowglobe.
The French revolution and post war America/Baby Boom
are good examples of this.

The only real constant is ambition and an individuals desire
to accomplish more that drives everything. So in a way,
there's always a new frontier to explore.

And thankful we should be. Going along like drones and adhering to rigidity, routine and materialist values kills the male soul. It is what happens to the main character of fight club before he develops the alternate personality of Tyler Durden.

Yet from time to time things explode, things change, new ideas come forth.

As if the story maker of the universe itself will not abide boredom,and sameness. Stars explode and transform into black holes, Galaxies clash.

And exciting possibilities lay before us as we escape from the matrix tasting freedom.

But many men end up bumbling along, wasting their lives, bereft of ambition.

Now the question is how we can cultivate ambition. And how it may be possible to awaken ambition in men whose souls were previously dead.