One Must Imagine Sisyphus American
Cultures Aren’t Murdered — They Commit Suicide
The monuments of the old locals are meaningless to the Men of Culture (New Aliens) — and as they are meaningless, it is meaningless to maintain Them. The new aliens won’t maintain your monuments for you — you have to maintain them yourself, and if you don’t — — don’t expect anyone in the world to care more about things that should matter to you than you. If you couldn’t care less, there are others that could.
When something that used to inspire <culture> now only inspires <a mystery of culture>, it is a result of becoming less real — and it became less real not because of any action of an alien enemy. It became less real because the culture that made it real was lost…. its legacy now is just its mystery. Enemies usually don’t kill cultures, even alien invaders with genocidal tendencies generally don’t. Sometimes alien invaders even serve strengthens the power of cultural symbolism. Nearly every single culture which has died — died because it chose to die.
When a culture is suicidal it is because its customary members have stopped giving a shit about what they are and what they represent. They don’t share any more legends. They don’t venerate anything. When the condition becomes terminal, they get assimilated into any empire that comes knocking, they start embodying another culture, or they go back to just living hand-to-mouth like savages and engage in the all-v.-all brawl for as long as the fun of it lasts — until some power comes around to force (force, force, force) compliance. If at that point the cultural symbols have no more power they will be made compliant and assimilated. Great cultures eventually die. They die because the people of culture become convinced that their cultural symbols have no power and no meaning, and they become unconstrained by cultural (traditional) law and begin to believe they are free to do as they wilt.
Culture Is A System of Symbolic Interpretations
A properly developed culture facilitates common understandings. A culture in decay generates conflicts of meaning. Let’s consider some hypotheticals to see how this works.
The God-praiser Culture praises God. Then, someone comes around and says “God is not real and that is the objective truth. Your cultural fundamentals are entirely at odds with reality as such.” What if God-praiser people are convinced “God is not real and this is the objective truth,” then? With the removal of a fundamental cultural truth, the entire cultural superstructure begins to crumble — the same propositions of devaluation and contradiction are then brought to every other cultural trait.
The Prairie Cattleman culture lives in the prairie, and raises cows. One day, someone comes around and says: “It is morally wrong to raise cows on the prairie, as it violates the directives of Environmental Sustainability. Environmental Sustainability is an objectively correct principle, and that makes you objectively incorrect to live this way.” If the Prairie Cattleman believes the ENSU agent, what happens to the Prairie Cattleman culture?
A culture does not permit homosexuality. People who argue homosexuality is permissible begin to show up. Your response to the presence of such people is direct product of how strongly you believe to the truth of that culture’s custom of interpretation. If you don’t care one way or the other, or agree with the homo-permissive you defect from the culture; if you stand opposed to the homo-permissive, on the grounds that homo-permissiveness is outside of appropriate behavior, you affirm the culture. A homo-permissive culture is not a homo-prohibitive culture. At the basic level, the question is: “Is Queer Normal?” Since your culture holds that Queer cannot be Normal, because your culture has defined Queer as That Which Is Not Normal, any answer other than “no” is the act of joining a culture that believes “Queer May Be Normal,” and the act of yes is joining the culture of “Queer is Normal.” What result? We fundamentally do not share a definition of Queer on the symbolic level — we are not using the same alphabet to write or using the same math to account. We Are Not The Same. If Queer is Normal in a culture that defines Queer as = Not Normal, then Normal = Not Normal… yes is no, up is down, left is right, love is murder and compassion is rape. That’s not the same culture anymore. There is no shared custom of symbolic interpretation anymore.
Pink Flamingos on your lawn — pretty, or trashy? This question alone could create a new nation, because this is a Cultural Question. At core: do pink flamingos on a lawn symbolically represent civilized behavior, or barbarism? Are you a man of culture, or a savage?
Cultural dissonances on basic questions can generally not be tolerated for long — given a chance to flourish, the culture confuses itself into absurdity, decides its own existence is absurd and kills itself. Controversial matters have to actually get settled, and when settled, then so enforced. Eventually, someone has to win the debate — otherwise, someone will have to win a war.
The Great Ideal Form Generates Culture, But Only If the Culture Conceives the Great Ideal Form
The great ideal form is the totality of a culture’s value-sets — it is the abstract (psychic, spiritual, metaphysical) body of the culture — it is the culture’s soul. As long as there is genuine belief among a group in that Great Ideal Form, then that group’s culture lives. But if the group comes to think that the Great Ideal Form is made up, that it’s just shit rich white men came up with so they could break more negro bucks and, in fact, there is no ideal form and never was…. well, there ain’t no culture neither. Culture minus The Great Ideal Form equals Savagery and War of Lesser Ideal Forms, until a new Great Ideal Form emergences again. There is really no escape from the cycle — other than maintaining your culture’s Great Ideal Form.
Now, of course, we are discussing abstractions. But even though abstraction isn’t concrete like concrete, it does not mean that the abstract idea of concrete isn’t required for concrete to be concrete. We are metaphysical beings whose physical experiences of life are psychically and spiritually generated…. that’s how we make meanings have meaning. But how do you know what that’s supposed to mean? Your culture teaches you. When you believe what the culture does, you make the culture real — perhaps through monuments made of concrete. When you and all your friends are together engaged in the endless project of constructing the universe in the abstract to make it a concrete reality — you and your friends are living a Life of Culture. “Reality” itself as an abstraction — the sum total of your understanding of physical phenomena in symbolic form. Your soul is to your thoughts + intentions + actions, what “reality” is to the sum total of all actuable possibilities — both are abstract forms, like the Great Ideal Form, the soul of culture. But, what if you think metaphysics is bullshit and philosophy is gay? Even then, you are still a metaphysical actor whose symbolic anarchism is a cancer on culture — you are probably depressed and suicidal, seek help before you drag the universe my friends and I are building into a horrible nothingness with you. Be silent, you’ve got nothing to say.
If you insist that “Truth = True” according to your culture’s perspective of True, your culture lives. They have to actually force you to stop believing/insisting that Truth = True to threaten your culture. If they’re not going to use absolute force to put you in compliance, then if your culture dies it ain’t because someone else killed it — you were simply a coward who chose the easy way out, instead of accepting the struggle of keeping it alive as your duty. If you can use force to make people comply with the notion of “Truth = True,” then you actually must, because any notion of truth = false means false = true will be enforced against you. But if you lack the force — and you aren’t being forcibly prevented from asserting “truth = true” — then you have to keep insisting that’s the case, until it’s undeniably so. If “truth = true” is in fact true — the truth will reveal itself as self-enforcing — and you will eventually have its force behind you… in concrete form.
I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend
You could cut ties with all the lies that you’ve been living in
And if you do not want to see me again
I would understand, I would understand
The angry boy, a bit too insane
Icing over a secret pain
You know you don’t belong
You’re the first to fight, you’re way too loud
You’re the flash of light on a burial shroud
I know something’s wrong
Well, everyone I know has got a reason
To say, “Put the past away”
The job of maintaining a living, breathing culture under antagonistic circumstances is difficult. It is a big, stupid rock you must push up a hill — for your entire earthly life. But you should take pride in being the guy who pushes up that stupid rock up progress hill. You should imagine Sisyphus American.
