No Culture: The Return of the Primitive

July 12, 2019

By NZB3

Dan McGlashan (writes for VJM, thus Anarkiwi) makes sage pronouncements from time to time. Yesterday, this:

“One man’s ferality is another man’s natural vigour.”

I don’t accept that wholesome vigour is the same as feral urges, that it’s just a matter of one or another man’s point of view. But how do we tell one from another?

Let’s break down the vector of human experience into two parts: Motive force and Direction. By splitting each of these two again we create four categories that ought to throw enough light on the situation to figure out what’s going on.

Human Motive Force: The most basic state of human nature is to be as an animal. Uncivilised, uncultured, unlettered, unsophisticated, unlearned. I spend a lot of time thinking about Moral Cultures but let’s spare a moment for those who have little or none. They are Down Regulated, commanded by their appetites and aversions. Their life is a sequence of Fight, Flight, and Freeze interspersed with some lucky breaks for feeding and reproducing.

More evolved, more Up Regulated, are humans who are motivated by more than their base instincts. They have cultivated and received moral values. They are host to a culture that guides them to a means of production to survive and thrive in the world. They have something more cerebral and intellectual to guide them than the reptilian brain. They have a DC, VC, SC, or HC to live up to and pass on to the next generation.

Human Direction: The most elemental way to divide how humans are directed is from without or from within. If a human is at liberty to follow his own path and live his own values then he has a living culture. On the other hand, if a human is in captivity he must obey the directions of someone else’s values. He must speak, work, express, dress etc according to laws and clocks and languages imposed upon him by outsiders.

Putting it together

Now we have our four quadrants…

Left Top: A cultured group of people who are free to follow their culture. They have been successful enough not only to create for themselves a way of being but one that had led to the freedom to live it. This is the norm for the Western World and has been for a long time.

Right Top: A cultured community in captivity. Their captors will not allow expression of this culture but instead insist on things being done their way. So here we have the English under the Normans, the Jews under the Babalonians, the Deaf under Van Asch, the Moriori under the Maoris etc. Guy Fawkes lived here along with all the best terrorists.

Lower Left: This group of ravagers really are feral. In extreme, they wouldn’t even have enough culture to form friendship or family ties. They cannot form communities. Though they are at liberty to be directed by their own inner voice and morals there is none to heed but the basic reptile mantra: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Feed.

Lower Right: Here is what happens when the feral are caged. Some are (or were) contained by the church and regular Sunday refresher conditionings, some are simply in prisons. Some, en mass, have been inputted into mass global war against one another. Without any conscience, they mechanistically blasted away at one another during WW1. Being able to humanise others would place a limit on how many you could slaughter but propagandised people who are only drones have no such computing qualms. Goodness knows how many such sociopaths are employed in our governments and corporations, their willingness to destroy others only checked by institutions. Christian Bale’s character lifted the lid on that one a bit in the film American Psycho (2000.)

“One man’s ferality is another man’s natural vigour”

Everyone gets to be vigorous but the question is WHICH kind of man is being invigorated? The natural vigour of a culture-less man is the state of being feral. The natural vigour of a cultured person is the state of being civilised. One of these men refines oil and paints a masterpiece; The other tries to eat crayons and would just as soon wipe his armpit with a Raphael as look at it.

The return of the primitive has always been a theme in Western philosophy and contemplation. It’s certainly essential for us to tell apart the feral from the naturally vigorous.

For example, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome explored what happened to a society that slipped into the Lower Right box. Having been smashed to dust, the survivors ran feral and Max had given up trying to impose control during his journey of the first movie. In the third film, Tina Turner’s character attempted to restore culture and laws by building a settlement. Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage. The primitive Honour Culture/Thunderdome code was a step out of the feral primitives humanity had been reduced to. The ambition was to take the people further, to move beyond Thunderdome to a new era of love and compassion and not make the same mistakes that led to the Pocylypse.

“Listen on! Listen on! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring, and that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now, busted up and everyone talking about hard rain! But we’ve learned! By the dust of ’em all, Bartertown’s learned. Now, when men get to fighting, it happens here, and it finishes here! Two men enter, one man leaves.”

The disaster scenario of films like Terminator and Mad Max is not only that humans become estranged from their cultural motive force; Feral. It’s that our natural vigour is not celebrated but wrested away by a controlling machine that replaces our conscience with propaganda and rules. We need to fight for autonomy over our Motive Force as well as our Direction in order not to be placed on the wrong vector.

(Example: The human rite of fire festivals, currently in the form of Guy Fawkes Day, are being actively taken out of the hands of the people and put into the hands of Government. Ref. Councils call on government to ban private fireworks; RNZ)