Traditional man and country

[VartanK]

Re: Traditional man and country

First, I did not bring up evolution. Read the damn thread carefully. Second, it was a comment that was merely incidental. From the nature of it, a reasonable reader would notice I did not intend to make a full blown discussion out of it. In all threads that is usually an unwritten, unconscious rule that sort of goes with the flow. One or two posts here and there are not off-topic and a given and foreseeable. However, when the discussion fully tilts in another direction is when a thread is considered going off tangent. You did not have to comment about this yet you chose to be a smart alec.

Nobody is being a smart alec and I've never heard of such a "usually an unwritten, unconscious rule" and it sounds a bit arbitrary to me.
Does it mean that I should count the number of replies on a given topic to make sure that it's in the first "one or two posts" so my post won't be off-topic?
Can it be that you did not have a good answer to my question? Is that a possibility?

[hipeter924]

Re: Traditional man and country

Okay might as well bring everything back on topic. I can't help but believe anarcho-capitalism as the best social order, because it gives the greatest empowerment possible to the individual, while allowing a stable society built upon the free market of thought, and production.

[jgk3]

Re: Traditional man and country

1. Does everyone start at the same rank when they are born? Does a Son/Daughter get preferential treatment because of what their Father/Mother did before they were born?

It is up to the society to decide how much birth to meritorious parents will translate into preferred ranks and privileges. Most often, you will find that this occurs, and that the parents and their rank are expected to provide their children their talents or skills that make them worthy of this rank to begin with. This is why in many rank based societies, it is an embarrassment or heresy to the family when a child grows up and takes on a trade, a role, etc... that they were specifically not eligible for given their birth. Exceptions to the rule do occur, but if measures are taken by the community to fully accommodate for this kind of deviance of personal role and function from one's well defined rank, then you have a corruption of the traditional order. You are leading to a democratic society where anybody can be anything, and thus, the plebs gain more and more ground to becoming obsessed with their "rights and freedoms". Traditional leadership will eventually be succumbed to chaos. With no noble leadership, there are no guardians for traditions, they become tram'pled over and lost for the most part.

2. Lets say a Boy/Girl who has a natural talent at understanding Maths/Sciences is born into a rank that has nothing to do with Maths/Sciences. Would He/She be placed into a Tribe/Rank that would be more suited for his talents or would He/She have to prove himself doing other things first? How about a child that can play amazing sounds on a Guitar by age ten, is that child moved to a Musician's "Tribe"?

Interesting that you bring this up. Many traditional societies have extended their sights for surveying the population of the plebeian ranks for uncommon talents in the arts, and perhaps sciences, recruiting them for royal or imperial service. These individuals do not acquire "noble blood" and are still kept at a certain distance from royalty and the ranks associated with nobility (e.g. chivalric warriors), however, they enjoy the privileges of being personal servants (or performers) to the throne or to lesser seats of power.

3. You talk about tradition...How do we decide which societies traditions are the correct one's to follow?

There is an idea of a primordial tradition of mankind, who's truth is perennial and can only be deviated from by an individual's choice to hold material aspects of the world as the only truth, or to hold their emotions, aspirations, passions as more important than acknowledging the shortness of their lives, a subjective experience of reality, an experience that reaps no lasting reward for the individualized self. When a community is wise, it is well aware of what I just described, and thus has no alternative left but to live out of divine inspiration. They not only learn to work together to compliment their material necessities to live as a community, but also find a way to fit together in a well defined order that expresses their values and cosmology very potently. This primordial tradition is a universal for all of mankind, and yet, we can deviate from it. When cultures adhere to traditionalist principles, they produce veritable civilization or religion, characteristic of an esoteric ritualistic center for its spiritual royalty and warrior class, and an exoteric order to be adhered to by its community's laymen, non-initiates and perhaps its lower level clergy. This phenomenon has in the past been manifested rather potently in Roman, Greek, Hindu, Iranian, Armenian, Germanic civilizations, just as a few examples within the Indo-European speaking substratum of mankind. Today, this structure is gone, and those who seek knowledge and practice of the esoteric, occult spirit and rituals of these civilizations represent the warrior and/or spiritual leadership of a tradition that is yet to be restored over the population. For a good example of this, look no further than Native Americans seeking to hold steadfast to their old traditions and use them for leading future generations, in complete opposition with the mainstream political and cultural influence that engulfs them and has for generations attacked and obscured the influence of their native traditions.

For the record, the pinnacle of traditional realization within a civilization is not to be measured by the lavishness of its wealth and success of its commerce/economy, its poetic and philosophical writers in expressing themes of love, liberation or intellectuality, or its artists growing ever more secular (relating to worldly as opposed to sacred things) in their expressions, no... not at all... Because none of such cultural markers suggest that the population is adhering to their traditional orders, they in fact suggest a well rooted deviance from the primordial tradition, a tradition completely disinterested in such earthly ideals of "freedom" and "progress".

Well, how would you like Armenia to be? With or without Some/Any of those laws?

I have not yet decided what Armenia should go through in order to ensure a return to its traditional ethos at a level fully realized by its people, capable of leading them.

Well, I would say that having a rigid system of classes, ranks, and traditions is what reduces man to mediocrity.He is born into a system and is forced to do things and live under a system simply because generations before him deemed it all to be ''Right''. What happens often in Societies based off of tradition is that it's members are discouraged of providing alternate viewpoints on any number of issues/elements because the majority of said society would shun, embarrass, and in some cases kill them for questioning the "Sanctity" of it all. If Humanity had always lived in such a system, would it have produced the same number of Philosophers?..Artists?..Musicians?..Novelists and Storytellers?..Etc.

muahahaha.... We are living this poverty of culture and dampened ability to criticize our modernistic existence as we speak. If one speaks against modern ideals of longevity, wealth, "standards of living" based on completely materialistic models, the utility of fighting for "peace", the supreme importance of "human progress", etc... they are seen as a wacko, and perhaps labeled as a fascist (which is not really something to be ashamed of in reality, unless you're an idiot about it who believes in dictatorship as a positive end in itself, rather than using it as a means to weed out the forces which stand in a peoples' way to return to their traditional warrior leadership, ensuring a classic hierarchically stratified, divinely inspired civilization)

Traditionalism isn't about having an authority figure brooding over everyone's shoulders like in a dictatorship. People just have their own personal function to accomplish, but it is seen as something important, vital towards their people, their order, their connection to the gods. People today also have personal functions to society, just as they would in a traditional world, except they are completely despiritualized and have no organic relation to any single leadership that brings together an entire people. The economy and bureaucracy is esteemed as a good enough glue for a people to have their "peace", their modern countries. This model is regarded as "advanced", "efficient", "caring about human rights", blah blah blah...

In the end, you die. If you took the economy and materialism too seriously, you end up not knowing who you were, what life was all about, what you died for, what you worked all those years for (haha, for your kids? So they can some day die too, just as poor in knowledge about life?). You die, feeling cheated about all those luxuries you chased after, the peace you wasted because you used it to serve nothing more than your own desires. I can go on ranting, but I seriously believe that the above, this materialism and its result on what a person lives for, is the expression of modernity, this modernity that is so safeguarded by our media and educational institutions, with its myths of "progress", its martyrs of "freedom", its high esteem for "work" as an ethical value in and of itself (even if you hate it and feel oppressed by it).

Modern Science isn't used or proposed to fill this gap at all, I don't know where you're getting this, I've never heard anybody "push" Science as the gap-filler. Whatever fills the gap is completely and utterly up to the individual to decide. Some take Modern Science, some take Organized Religion, some take their own path of Personal Spirituality and Faith, Some take on Philanthropy, Some go back to College and try to master a new craft, some decide to take on a completely different lifestyle and move to a Farm/Ranch where they live off the land, some decide to write down and maybe publish all the ideas and philosophies they've come up with throughout life, Etc, Etc, Etc.

If you say so...

Well, Nature can evolve can't it? Isn't it possible Humanity will one day compete in ways that don't result in war and death? Isn't it possible to eventually become a truly superior species? Albeit, thousands and thousands of years from now.

Nature isn't about changing itself into some new kind of nature. Within nature, be it human or of the ecosystem at large, there is variation, there is flux of movement and stabilization, there is growth, maturity and death. But there is also an underlying form that makes a human, human... Why try to identify ourselves with something "better" or "more peaceful"? Why hope to become of a form that is outside of what we are? Why not fully realize the actual form we have, instead of live in delusions about "what we could be" or "what we ought to be"?

When you realize your own personal nature, or seek to learn more about it, you find greater freedoms, greater possibilities within your experience of life than you would by seeking or hoping that it "changes" or "evolves".

The only constant, true freedom is the internally realized kind, not the kind that is granted by legislation or material wealth.

[jgk3]

Re: A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom

Continuing from the A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom thread:

I could have told you that... if you took the time people spent watching TV in the past 2 generations, and focused that time into something productive, we probably could have collectively found a cure for many ailments. Or sheltered and fed the homeless. Or built a couple hundred gread wonders of the world. Modern day and age is a waste of life.

Yes, but this critique is based a spiritual assessment of modern man, the rigid individualist perspective that dominates his life, his fear of death, his total lack of appreciation for the void/emptiness/nothingness as the very fabric from which all existence is contained, his hostility towards obedience/humility/submission to the divine, all this and more leading up to the key difference between modern man and traditional man: Modern man, isolated and trapped by a passion for rationalizing the infinite complexity of phenomenon in nature, sees himself at odds with it as he could never grasp it without "changing" it again. He will never be happy or satisfied in his "progress", but likes to pat himself on the back with "At least I can live up to 70 years old now" or "we have all kinds of vaccines to cure diseases that would've killed us" or "most of our population gets to go to school now, can vote, gets healthcare, etc..."

Clearly, this modern man places a lot of stock in this "life", he is afraid to fight because he could get killed, he hates God because he imagines that God is supposed to make us live comfortable lives, so he substitutes God with himself because "man has the right idea" for how nature should run, he hates hierarchy because it's "not comfortable to serve something greater than one's desires".

Andre, for the past 400 years, Western civilization as a whole has actively pursued its utopian dreams of "doing something productive, collectively finding cures, raising standards of living". All they did was alienate themselves from their highly sophisticated understanding of natural order expressed during the Middle Ages, their reasoning? They myopically considered that absolutism and tyranny, disease and darkness, was the expression of the age before them. Hardly the case. At least their ideal was that everyone's hearts where placed with God, something beyond their earthly desires and their flesh, beyond the material world, God was above all, and so everyone's orientation, from peasant to king, was both in ritual and ethos, was to this "above". Everyone had their earthly superior (until the king), yes, but because each superior placed his heart in God, the creator of nature and circumstances responsible for leading each man's life from Earth back to Heaven, it was understood in the most enlightened periods of this age that to think as an individual and believe in the pursuit of one's earthly desires, was The Sin.

As a result, traditional societies were characteristically non-materialistic, and their greatest cultural works where always oriented towards the divine, from their Cathedrals, to Castles, to paintings, glasswork, literature... Their pilgrimages and crusades (amongst the warriors and not the corrupt clergy sitting in Rome) too where an expression of this possibility for man to die before his death (that is, to rid himself of worldly passions) and live for only God. Divine leadership was a reality for them, this was their Great Force because it was not inspired by egoism.

This ethos was a reality in traditional societies. Today, if you say such things, atheists raise an eyebrow, whilst modernized churchgoers think you're a fundi and keep away from you, preferring to think about their mortgage payments and asking for God to help them with it.

Anyway, this post is sounding a lot like the "Traditional man and country" thread, if you want to continue this conversation, we can over there.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Traditional man and country

It is up to the society to decide how much birth to meritorious parents will translate into preferred ranks and privileges. Most often, you will find that this occurs, and that the parents and their rank are expected to provide their children their talents or skills that make them worthy of this rank to begin with. This is why in many rank based societies, it is an embarrassment or heresy to the family when a child grows up and takes on a trade, a role, etc... that they were specifically not eligible for given their birth. Exceptions to the rule do occur, but if measures are taken by the community to fully accommodate for this kind of deviance of personal role and function from one's well defined rank, then you have a corruption of the traditional order. You are leading to a democratic society where anybody can be anything, and thus, the plebs gain more and more ground to becoming obsessed with their "rights and freedoms". Traditional leadership will eventually be succumbed to chaos. With no noble leadership, there are no guardians for traditions, they become tram'pled over and lost for the most part.

You are leading to a democratic society where anybody can be anything, and thus, the plebs gain more and more ground to becoming obsessed with their "rights and freedoms".

I understand what you're saying however because of this debt based system that is driving the world, children born today are already at a loss. Parents have put material possessions in front of their own children to fulfill their worldly desires. If each child is born with say $20,000 debt created by their parents, they are already behind in life no matter if their parents are doctors, lawyers or pick up trash for a living. The traditional man worked to make sure his children would be better off, would have more choices in life, leaving the world with a sense of accomplishment. I don't think the next generation will be able to be anything they wish to be, I believe their skills will be needed to be discovered early on and put to work to make up for this loss of time by the previous generation. Society is being reorganized as we type.

[jgk3]

Re: Traditional man and country

I think already, most workers aren't doing what they want to do, not because of the nature of their job in particular but because of how they've been raised to think about life to begin with... This highly regulated bureaucratic system of education, participation in civic duties, even transportation/travel... it's just so abstract and not about personality, there is no room for a person to realize that it's all a joke, that there is something more important to attain in life than to worry incessantly about obligations or cyclical desires.

I'm going to talk a bit about serfs to provide a contrast: serfs had to live under a contract that forced them and their descendants to remain on the land, by decree, their nature was tied with the land and when the fiefdom they worked in changed hands, their condition remained the same. Serfs had their place in the universe and could not change it, they had to surmount their earthly condition internally, through their spirituality and ethos, and this was the point of religion and loyalty towards their masters and God.

Many people today who are born into their parents' debt do not have this kind of internal security provided by their traditions that the serf does, that is the key difference. It is only after this inner security and confidence towards one's nature is established that people can realistically about what they can do to better their childrens' lives, and it starts with instilling in them the same understanding of their tradition which provided their own internal peace with the world they lived in. Then, they can make all the sacrifices they can towards providing their children with the opportunities they need to excel using their talents. And if the parents and child fail in this prospect, at least they stand on something internal, solid in their hearts, that is understanding of nature and does not grieve.

[Haykakan]

Re: A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom

"As a result, traditional societies were characteristically non-materialistic, and their greatest cultural works where always oriented towards the divine, from their Cathedrals, to Castles, to paintings, glasswork, literature... Their pilgrimages and crusades (amongst the warriors and not the corrupt clergy sitting in Rome) too where an expression of this possibility for man to die before his death (that is, to rid himself of worldly passions) and live for only God. Divine leadership was a reality for them, this was their Great Force because it was not inspired by egoism"
I gotta say i disagree with this statement. People have been materialistic since money was invented and they were just as materialistic back then as they are now the difference being it was more about how many pigs, goats.. you had vs how big your hdtv is. Most of the crusaders joined to get loot from the conquered lands not to die for god. As usual religion was used to justify a war which was about money and power not god. To find the natural state of humanity uncompromised by greed is probably impossible anymore and sure was hard to find back then to. A native tribe in south america which was discovered and studied in the 90s probably is the best example of true humanity and how we naturally lived long before religion and money in hunting and gathering societies.. This tribe had no concept of possesion and because they did not have posessions they hardly ever fought or argued with each other.Mates were selected by mutual attraction only and no other social rank or order because no ranks or orders exis.After a courtship which would last a few months or however long the couple wished it to last they would split up and eventually meet another partner and do it all over again.This is called serial menogomy and it is the truely HUMAN way of life.It was difficult if not impossible to know who the father of the child was so all childeren of the tribe were treated by men as their own.This was a peacefull, happy and content society untill money was introduced into it after its discovery.The introduction of money and all the xxxx you can buy with it in todays society turned this truely happy and content tribe of people into a much more familiar forms of greedy materialistic beasts like us.Violence jealousy etc soon became common place in a society where they never existed and it all happened very fast right after they discovered money.I dought there are anymore undiscovered tribes and these people were probably the last ones who lived a truelly HUMAN lifestyle.

[KanadaHye]

Re: Traditional man and country

I think already, most workers aren't doing what they want to do, not because of the nature of their job in particular but because of how they've been raised to think about life to begin with... This highly regulated bureaucratic system of education, participation in civic duties, even transportation/travel... it's just so abstract and not about personality, there is no room for a person to realize that it's all a joke, that there is something more important to attain in life than to worry incessantly about obligations or cyclical desires.

Go ahead, try to break the cycle.... you are born into the system.

[Sako]

Re: A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom

I could have told you that... if you took the time people spent watching TV in the past 2 generations, and focused that time into something productive, we probably could have collectively found a cure for many ailments. Or sheltered and fed the homeless. Or built a couple hundred gread wonders of the world. Modern day and age is a waste of life.

...I bow at the feet of your wisdom !

After a courtship which would last a few months or however long the couple wished it to last they would split up and eventually meet another partner and do it all over again.This is called serial menogomy and it is the truely HUMAN way of life.

Who says? This is animalistic, not the HUMAN way of life! I know a town where everyone believes in God, lives happily, lives by the rules, shares whatever they have with each other, and basically LIVE their lives ... and not like dogs ... like real human beings. That is the real HUMAN way of life. I don't understand where you get your views from, Haykakan. And here's something else ... this town isn't spoiled by money, modern life, or anything else. Why do you think that is, my friend?

[jgk3]

Re: Traditional man and country

jgk3, sometimes it scares me how deep and close you are to my own thoughts! Dare I say, almost piercing. If I were a girl on this forum, I would probably PM you. But anyway.

Haha... All I can say is I've been influenced a lot by the genre of books I'm talking about in the Arts and Lit forums, so I guess you might enjoy them too.

I want to point out that the fragile nature of a modern "democratic" society that is a melange of all sorts of cultures and races and a heap of bureaucratic dung, has not, does not and will not allow this realization of the individual to overcome the odds and realize an internal peace, for they are internally fragmented. I believe that sense of culture consciousness that serfs would tap into, almost a "Folkish" kind of thing, is only a product of a traditional, culture bound people, tied to something tangible, and concrete, like land. This is why most Folkish movements and peoples have identified culture with land because inevitably a peoples' culture is bound with the land. But in modern democratic societies, where there is no tie between culture, people and land - specifically, where everyone is equal; the state is the savior; the religion of self and secularism pervade; the goals of pleasure, lust and material possessions and fame are the endpoints - we are truly lost.

You can only tap into that "Folkish" core if there is a folk to begin with.

Thanks for making that insight Anon, I agree with it.

Go ahead, try to break the cycle.... you are born into the system.

I already have broken it. I think your defeatism on the matter is making it hard to realize how easily it can be done.