A few days ago, Colonel Lang made a comment that “It is a basic belief of the left that humans are endlessly malleable.” I offer a different view.
It’s not the left who believe that humans are endlessly malleable. It is primarily all those who believe that mankind and his cultures are evolving in some inexorable and manageable way towards the ultimate civilized and cultured man. Some lefties are clearly amongst this group, but foremost among these are Western civilizations who were/are convinced they are the best mankind has to offer and that all others should be grateful they are given the opportunity to emulate these Western civilizations… even if it is at the point of a sword or gun. Lenin and the Marxist/Communist quest for the “New Soviet Man” or the “New Socialist Man” are certainly among these evangelical true believers. How about the Church of Rome and my beloved Jesuits setting out to set the world on fire?
Within the field of anthropology, this idea was championed by many early Europeans such as Sir Edward Tylor and Sir James Frazer of “The Golden Bough” fame and Lewis Henry Morgan, an early American anthropologist. Taking their cue from a certain reading of Darwin, they believed that all cultures evolve naturally through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex. Political scientists seem to generally buy into this way of thinking as well. I’m thinking of Fukuyama’s “The End of History” as a prime example.
On the other hand, the American school of anthropology, fathered almost singlehandedly by Franz Boas called bullshit on that idea. He and his students developed the ideas of cultural relativism and historical particularism. By cultural relativism, we mean one can only grasp an understanding of a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context without making judgements. They scoffed at the notion of primitive cultures. Every culture is complete and unique, not some stepping stone on the road to modernity. Boas and his students, Mead, Benedict, Kroeber and others also pioneered the undertaking of long term fieldwork using the participant-observation methodology as opposed to the “armchair” anthropology of the evolutionists.
The Boasian school believed that a culture’s history determines particular elements, not just its environment and certainly not any immutable laws of cultural evolution. Each culture has its own unique patterns of culture. A culture develops in specific ways because of their unique histories. Flowing from this point is the idea of cultural plasticity. Cultures change over time. That change is influenced by changes in technology, the environment, changing thought patterns of a society’s members and myriad other influencers. But the most influential cause for change is contact with other cultures.
All this means that humans and especially human cultures are malleable. But that malleability cannot be managed or halted. That is unless you want to preserve it in amber or as a living history museum. I remember a Margaret Mead quote where she noted it would be far easier to create a culture out of thin air than to modify an existing culture into a desired state. That is why civilizing the savage, creating the soviet man and other such endeavors are folly. Sure cultures will change, but no one has the slightest idea where those changes will lead.
TTG
Regarding evolution to an “ultimate civilized and cultured man.” I am reminded of the samples of poetry provided by Steven Willett. These statements on hubris and war, love, divinity and other things stretched my understanding.
I know we have accumulated large amounts of knowledge: industry, energy, space travel and so on. But to me, the ancient magical bits of poetry contradict that civilization has evolved in a particular way.
Margaret Mead, isn’t she the one who got lead a merry chase by some South Sea Islanders and happily believed the b.s. they told her naive little self?
That’s what some Puritanically prudish researcher accused her of after her death. He did his research on a different Samoan island, using old men rather than young women as informants and a quarter century and a World War after Mead. Mead left all her notes and research for others to examine. She got it far more right than wrong.
TTG
I would agree with Margaret Meade’s observation that cultures and the people in them are not easily moved in their character. My writing here and elsewhere are reflective of my conviction based on personal observation that it takes very prolonged pressure from a variety of forces to move the needle on the nature of a culture, the jihadis are one example but there are many others. We can explore them if you like. But that reality of cultural resistance to change merely makes the desire of the Left to force cultural change on people more obviously foolish.
it takes very prolonged pressure from a variety of forces to move the needle on the nature of a culture, the jihadis are one example but there are many others. We can explore them if you like.
Would it be fair to say that Ron Paul has been one such source of prolonged pressure? He strikes me as a genius who has changed the culture of the USA slowly, over decades of effort.
I would be very interested to explore positive influences on Western culture. I would also love to read and learn from deep discussions of the question “What culture is ours?”
Personally, I locate the center of Western culture in the school of Pythagoras. I know that philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, but I believe that Plato was a footnote to Pythagoras. I count the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and even Persians as parts of Western culture (although I fear the Greeks would not want to consider the Persians as part of the West). In my opinion, people who can honestly count themselves as Neo-Platonists are part of Western Civilization, even if those people are Muslims. (I don’t know whether most readers here would agree with this.)
Aside from Western Civilization, I believe that many Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist values are entirely compatible with Western values, even though they clearly are not Western. I would like to believe that Emerson’s Transcendentalism can unite West and East, at least philosophically. I fear that all of my claims here must seem terribly impractical and distant from the serious concerns of keeping the peace and preventing people from cutting the throats of Western civilians.
To better tackle this question, be aware that within a civilization, there are many cultures and subcultures. We participate in many subcultures or cultural scenes in anthropological terms, often several in the course of a day.
I note that some subcultures transcend civilizations. A Buddhist electrical engineer and a Christian electrical engineer can transcend their civilizations temporarily to work out international standards of electrical equipment, for example.
( various quotes from the comments: )
“it takes very prolonged pressure from a variety of forces to move the needle on the nature of a culture”
“That change is influenced by changes in technology, the environment, changing thought patterns of a society’s members and myriad other influencers. But the most influential cause for change is contact with other cultures. ”
“Science and technology have become an amoral force with a momentum all of their own.”
“If our culture is to survive we must become the moral master of our science and technology again.”
===
Marshall McLuhan, a devout catholic, “answered” these questions:
“The medium is the massage.”
And then the different types of media – Hot ( high definition ) and Cool ( which needs “user” engagement to compensate for a poor signal to noise ratio )
E.g. listening to a mobile phone conversation requires a lot of concentration due to the poor sound quality.
With the advent of the printing press, man exchanged an ear for an eye: aural non directional for visual perspective. A cultural change beyond measure. The “subjective” has been replaced with the “objective” – intuition has been replaced with intellect.
Seems “soft” or “pop” or “sixties” however his work is not light weight .
E.g. He viewed “puns” as an important way to view an issue – a pun divides the mind with multiple thoughts – similar to Cubist painting – seeing all perspectives at once.
Completing the thought: And now cell phones. Has not the global culture been greatly affected very quickly ? Does not too many people trust the information that is presented to them when searching on their cell phone ? The new authority. And if there is bias in those results ?
Extremely simple, very powerful and very easily corrupted.
I have to agree. Culture is very long lasting and although it can change – and quite quickly on some occasions – there are very ingrained elements of that culture which will carry through. B of Moon of Alabama highlighted this in a review of the recent German election results. Support for the various parties is strongly linked to the historical structure of the old German states. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/09/how-centuries-old-local-differences-still-influence-german-politics.html
TTG
A timely post, I’ve very pleased you’ve picked up on the Colonel’s comment about human malleability. This is a fascinating subject hence my rather long comment:
From the wiki on The Golden Bough; “Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought”. It is this concept of progress that can be so damaging IMO, for the following reason: Scientific thought is not something that should be seen as simply an improvement over religious or spiritual thought, relegating the latter to the cultural rubes. Likewise, it is highly dangerous to mistake scientific and technological progress for spiritual progress. If we are not careful the former replaces the latter and science simply becomes a new religion. Man has an inherent need for faith.
This is exactly the stage the Enlightenment is at now; “trust the science” we are endlessly told. The original concept of our enlightenment by rational thought guided by a morality founded in religious faith has changed. Science and technology have become an amoral force with a momentum all of their own. As Heidegger put it: “Modern technology is different from every tool. Whereas the tool is a means, what is distinctive about modern technology is that this is no longer the case, and that it is instead unfolding a domination of its own”.
“Taking their cue from a certain reading of Darwin..” is the start of sentence that can end very badly, but in this context cultural evolution is a useful concept. So long as we are not tempted to believe it has some sort of universal direction or endpoint, like Soviet Man, Fukuyama’s hubristic end of history, etc. etc.
Boas ideas are interesting and some cultural relativism is important in order to understand alien cultures (empathy). However, absolute cultural relativism gets us to where we are today, with the woke cultural apocalypse threatening to shred what is left of our culture. I would argue this is a direct result of our religious moral framework having been undermined by the now dominant scientism mentioned above, i.e. the belief that science is the solution to all our problems. We are on the edge of a cultural abyss and far too many are obsessed with the hows of scientific progress with too few asking the far more important shoulds. If our culture is to survive we must become the moral master of our science and technology again.
Burke did not argue that culture should be preserved in aspic, but he did warn that the pace of evolution ought to be gradual. His famous “files of a summer” passage in Reflections.. warns us to mess with the legacy of our ancestors at our (and our children’s) peril. This is the essence of conservatism and it lies in stark contrast to progressivist thought which holds that as the bright future cannot come fast enough, we must pay no heed to outmoded cultural norms in order to get there ASAP.
I’d therefore take issue with the statement that “[human/cultural] malleability cannot be managed” and say that not only can it be, it must be – or our civilization will not survive.
Barbara Ann
“I’d therefore take issue with the statement that “[human/cultural] malleability cannot be managed” and say that not only can it be, it must be – or our civilization will not survive.” A pious hope on your part
Have you no hope for our civilization Colonel?
Barbara Ann
Very little, but I don’t function on the basis of hope. This brings to mind the von Senger family motto. “Neither fear nor hope.” Ask me this question again when we know the result of the Virginia gubernatorial election.
RedState is interested in your Virginia elections too, and your governor’s attempt to play the”covid card” to allow him to unilaterally change election laws – which under the US Constitution can only be written by the state legislature.
Even California courts turned down the”covid privilege” card when Gov HairGell tried to play it in 2020.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/11/terrified-virginia-democrats-seek-to-change-election-laws-after-voting-has-already-started-n455021
Barbara Ann
BTW, which civilization is “ours?”
I was generalizing, as TTG did in his post, about Western civilization. If you need me to be more specific I’ll give the matter some thought.
Barbara Ann,
I’d also be interested in your thoughts on which civilization is ours. I know it’s a complex question, but an important one. Too often I hear vivid and detailed tales of the enemy and the other, their motivations, their methods and their grand plans. But I seldom see any detailed self-confessions and self-examinations from those who are quick to name the other. I’m speaking of the divisions within the US, not of the entire world or even Christendom. I’m not asking the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” just which civilization is ours… if we do share a civilization.
To better tackle this question, be aware that within a civilization, there are many cultures and subcultures. We participate in many subcultures or cultural scenes in anthropological terms, often several in the course of a day. That’s probably an easier way to see this question.
TTG,
Huntington wrote Clash of Civilizations. Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man. IMO, both had serious albeit different respective shortcomings in their assumptions about human nature and culture that ultimately led to their conclusions also not panning out as they predicted. Huntington’s thesis that conflicts of the future would be cultural/religious at their core seemed plausible and even likely to bear out in the early part of the 21st century, but he did not and probably could not have foreseen China’s rise as a modern, 21st-century, globally ambitious enemy power of the United States and the West in general. Fukuyama’s thesis was just baldly naïve in its linear, “goal-oriented” view of history and human nature. As I see it, he’s never been remotely close to accurate.
Thanks for spotting that. I was thinking of Fukuyama and edited my post. For Huntington, I thought he saw China as one of the major civilizations that were bound to clash with the others. His idea that civilizations will clash along cultural lines is certainly nothing new, but I don’t buy the thought that this is any different than clashes along ideological lines. It’s all just the continuing pattern of different cultures clashing. I suppose Huntington’s idea is far closer to reality than the belief that a one world government and one world civilization is inevitable.
I thought when Huntington wrote his book Clash of Civilizations post 911, he was more concerned about the rise of Muslim MENA civilizations when he forecast this inevitable clash with Western civilization.
China was still pretty much an isolated bit player at that same time – no real infrastructure to be a global power, but then pow they unleashed their own kraken in due time and quickly took over top spot.
Was Hutchinson more concerned about the Muslim world because their own unchecked very high birth rates would lead to his predictions of a future clash, when they call came of age 20 years hence? While China was still in the middle of their one-child era of population decline.
I heard Hutchinson speak at our local university public debate series, but it all seemed so theoretical and remote at the time, long before Minneapolis and Detroit grew such large Muslim populations leading to several very activist adherents serving in Congress.
One other book turned out to be remarkably prescient, written even before 911 was Thomas Friedman’s “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”- before he became so narrowly ideological and partisan. The clash of civilizations was happening internally within MENA, even before they burst upon the Western consciousness – an unrecognized tinder box ready to explode in all directions. And it did.
Spelling correction, sorry – Huntington, not Hutchinson who in fact led the former Center for Democratic Institutions think tank that ended up at the same locale.
https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2002/011573/sen-george-mitchell-and-harvard-prof-samuel-huntington-debate-conflict-civilizations
Huntington thought the Chinese civilization would find a natural ally in the Islamic civilization. Given the Chinese relationship with Pakistan and the recent landing of Chinese planes at Bagram, Huntington may be on to something. But I think this is done for a far more pragmatic and limited reason rather than any inter-civilizational alliance.
IMO, what has got clear through this whole pandemic, is that you can change unions, political party, even political ideas, especially as you discover their lies, corporativism in priotecting themselves from you as squeezers of taxes, and lack of consistence of their narratives.
In this regard, some, I would say even many, people are malleable, when they neglect politics, since they are not able to look for the information necessary to get a clear vision of reality around them, and thus, getting unable to defend themselves from those at the top of institutions wanting to misdirect them from their core values and this their vital defenses.
What you are not malleable about is the core values you are raised with inside your family.
This is why family must be destroyed by sowing distrust and confrontation amongst its members, and erased from the face of Earth, through gender fluid policies and zero grow policies…
https://twitter.com/TheJuggernaut88/status/1447138118910447620
One question which haunt us some surrounding the whole process started to turn our societies upside down we are suffering at the hands of the planners at the WEF and subservient institutions at governments level, is why the philosophers are absent in defying the absence of debate about how clear lines of civilizational rupture are being introduced through these two years in an accelerated way…
https://twitter.com/No__Plandemia/status/1447530126456012803
P.S: I hope I get to convey what I mean, it is difficult for me in English when trying to talk philosophical issues.
TTG,
Thought provoking. Thanks. A few random related thoughts that were provoked for me….
…..The typical middle class American (or westerner) enjoys more opulence, better health, security and freedom than did the typical king throughout most of human history. I think we who enjoy such abundance and comfort tend to take it for granted, but most, at least subconsciously, recognize that we have emerged successfully from the short, brutish struggle that was life for our ancestors and that many still suffer in various parts of the world. We do not wish to return to that more primitive state. Hence the worship of “science”, which we credit, correctly, for our material ascendance.
Materialistic plenty should not be discounted. For this reason I reserve some sympathy for the “end of history” perspective. I think it not unreasonable to believe that once the physical needs are met, then attention and resources can be focused on fine tuning societal structures such that finer concepts like justice for all, equity, peace, etc. can be achieved. There is also a sense that in working out the final societal issues humankind, via fine tuned society, can also afford the opportunity to each individual to self-actualize a la Maslow.
However, while human material and psychological needs are being met at unprecedented levels, humans remain, first and foremost, spiritual beings and this life a challenge field in which we must learn by acting out our demons and better angels, making mistakes, falling from grace, experiencing awakenings, achieving balance, losing balance, striving to love better, succumbing to hate, etc, etc over and over again, alone or in small groups of souls. It’s an endless drama and those that have overcome or fallen to irredeemable depths are removed from this field and new souls join the action and round and round it goes.
A culture will endure as long as it meets basic physical needs well enough maintain physical organisms, but also only if provides sufficiently varied and robust opportunity for the archetypes of the underlying spiritual drama to express and play out.
But, because the spiritual drama must play out, and because that drama includes demons and angels and everything in between, utopia will never be achieved on earth. The best we can do is love and hate, build and destroy in relative creature comfort. Any social engineering that denies the spiritual component is going to fail as surely as social engineering that denies the material and psychological.
Physician heal thyself should be the guiding principle for anyone seeking to organize a one global society world. Do gooders are too often evil doers in disguise. One day we will probably will have a one world government, but it is going to have to respect the need for expression of the astral backdrop of human conciousness.
Cultural relevance becomes garbage thinking when taken too far. I refuse to see a culture like the Aztecs as being the equivalent Europe. Despite both engaging in human sacrifice (the Inquisition, burning of “witches”, killing the Cathars, etc. in Europe) at least Europe set some lofty goals that it strived to achieve in fits and starts and with all aforementioned human spiritual foibles in play. It could see a brighter day. It slowly has achieved improvement. The Aztecs were simply bloody savages. They had no higher values.
“The Aztecs were simply bloody savages. They had no higher values.”
That is a superficial and derisively simple view of a complex and highly developed civilization. Their bloody sacrifices are shocking and revolting to our sensibilities, but the thought that we sacrifice and consume our God, not symbolically, but in actuality as the most sacred act of our beliefs would appear equally shocking and revolting to many outsiders. The Aztecs had an immensely complex cosmology in which their highest gods shed their own blood in sacrifice to bring the Aztecs to life. The Aztec blood sacrifices were done in fulfillment of that cosmology. This is why one can only grasp an understanding of a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context without making judgements. It doesn’t mean we have to approve those practices or accept them in any way, but it is the only way to understand them.
“And one other thing had been prearranged by the six rulers of the six nations: that all of them should sacrifice all their prisoners in their six capital cities on the same day. No one remembers the exact count, but I suppose several thousand men died … That very day, also, many people in the six cities enjoyed full bellies for the first time in years, when they dined on the remains of the sacrificed [victims]. The gods were satisfied to be fed merely with the ripped-out hearts heaped on their altars; they had no use for the remainder of the victims’ bodies, but the gathered people did. So, as the corpse of each [victim], still warm, rolled down the steep staircase of each temple pyramid, the meat cutters waiting below dissected it into its edible parts and distributed those among the eager folk crowding each plaza.
The skulls were cracked and the brains extracted, the arms and legs were cut into manageable segments, the genitals and buttocks were sliced off, the livers and kidneys were cut out. These food portions were not just flung to a slavering mob; they were distributed with admirable practicality, and the populace waited with admirable restraint. For obvious reasons, the brains went to priests and wise men, the muscular arms and legs to the warriors, the genitalia to young married couples, the less significant buttocks and tripes were presented to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and families with many children. The leftovers of heads, hands, feet, and torsos, being more bone than meat, were put aside to fertilize the croplands”
Sounds like a Lefty paradise. There’s a reason the leftist vision, when applied, always ends up in mass death and destruction. Amoral godless academics have something to do with it. Hope you had a happy indigenous peoples day.
Your account of mass cannibalism is pure fiction. The source is a pornographic novel written by Gary Jennings pretending to be historically accurate.
The Aztec diet was rich in protein and had no need for what the Caribs called <i"long pork". Aztecs had much more protein than the average European. They ate turkey, turkey eggs, dog, fish, crawfish and waterfowl from Lake Texcoco, plus one of their major agricultural crops, beans, are high in protein.
Sure there was some ritual cannibalism by high caste warriors and priests. But there was lots of that going on in Europe also. Even one of the conquistadors, Cabeza de Vaca is documented as eating human flesh. Much of the early Spanish accounts of cannibalism in the new world were made up in order to justify enslavement of conquered people.
Leith,
Apologist for the devil. And the annual ritualistic slaughter of thousands of people from weaker tribes?
I like how Trump is evil to you guys because…well because he’s orange and you know, other stuff, like we think he lies and makes mean tweets! Confederates like General Lee also evil because we saw Roots and slavery! But Aztecs, well we have to understand them and appreciate them in the right context.
I hope a bunch of practicing Aztecs types move into your neighborhood, especially with your defunded police. Let me know how that works our for you. Maybe your daughter/grand daughter can marry one and engage in ritualistic human sacrifice of her neighbors. You would be proud of her no doubt. As long as she’s not a conservative.
Eric –
General Lee is one of my heroes, unfortunately he and my paternal ancestors were victims of an industrialized society. Kind of like Moctezuma and the Aztecs.
I’ve never thought of Trump as eevil. I was a long time Republican until a decade or two ago when the haters like Limbaugh and his ilk commandeered the Grand Old Party and trashed its message.
But I still would like to know why you used that fictitious quote about the Aztecs from a pornographic novel? Apparently you don’t want to fess up to that. Why not read actual history instead? And please tell me more about the the gentle Europeans that never slaughtered a soul, let alone thousands or even millions.
Leith,
How is Jennings novel pornography? So what if it was. Maybe that’s the way my cosmology works. It happens that I like how he describes what many anthropologists to be consider proven fact/settled science; whether you want to admit it or not. A member of a non-Aztec tribe was at greater risk of being savagely killed and cannibalized by Aztecs than I am of having a problem with covid.
How would you know if it is pornographic. You read it too?
So maybe you like Lee. Most liberals do not, evidenced by tearing down of statues, etc. Yet the same liberals make the same excuses for Aztecs that both you and TTG do. TTG most certainly expressed Trump Derangement Syndrome and a general loathing of the man; no seeking to understand his context within NYC entrepreneur culture nor the “Deplorable” culture. The nice thing about academics is that they carefully arrange the world from 9 to 5 in some kind of logical order that makes sense to them – and then forget all about it when class is dismissed; at which time they become as emotionally driven as the next guy..
I do not see people as “victims” of circumstances. Rather they are victims of their own lack of malleability and predilections. One group of people finds a valley with a river and begins to architect agriculture. A different group finds the same geography and decides the river’s best and highest use is as a latrine. Yet another group sees the river as an excellent opportunity to establish a cult that ritualistically drowns people by the hundreds. The world offers an abundance of opportunity. One’s nature decides how one will tap the opportunities that are present.
Leith,
As for you attempt to dissemble and make Aztecs the equivalent of Europeans because they all killed, I say you are profoundly wrong – and it is a childish argument, IMO.
In Aztec culture, the killing was it; as good as it gets. In Europe there was the hope brought by Christ. Europeans reached up to that hope. It drove the production of great works of art, architecture, literature, of thought itself. And, over time, a kinder more just society.
If not for the Europeans, the Aztecs would still be sustaining their way of life through ritualistic horror- or they would have died out all on their own. They were what they were and what they were was an expression of the lower aspects of human potential. They were unable to break out of that focus of their awareness. They were stuck on evil and their awareness was not malleable. Unlike the European, they could not envision a higher ideal toward which to strive.
Eric –
Tell me more about the higher ideals for which 16th Century Europeans were striving. Are those the ideals of the religious wars that bled the continent? The 80 Years War largely funded by gold and silver stolen from Mexico and Peru and which eventually bankrupted the Spanish crown. The two decade long Anglo-Spanish War. The Polish/Lithuanian/Swedish/Danish/Russian Livonian War that lasted for a quarter of a century. The two, or was it three, Italian Wars between France and the Holy Roman Empire. The Peasants War. St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Then there were the two Schmalkaldic Wars and the Colgne War that presaged the 30 Years War in which 4.5M to 8M people died – about four and a half to eight times more deaths than during the Armenian Genocide – as many or more than Hitler’s Holocaust – but probably less than Stalin’s de-Kulakization, and purges, and terror-famines.
And then there were the high Euro ideals of burning old women alive while tied to a stake. Their only crime was knowing a few herbal remedies, or being cross-eyed, or warty, or suffering severe menopause, or cussing out a more well-to-do neighbor.
As for Jennings novel, if you like porn, that’s fine with me. I’m a Christian myself but not one to impose my own code on others. But using a fictitious account in a novel to try rewrite history and prove your personal race theories is not within the bounds acceptable behavior IMHO.
Woke is over. Biden killed off woke. Time to pick up the pieces that woke broke.
Leith,
Every rebellious teenager quickly reverts to sophistry that basically distills down to pointing out and exaggerating the flaws in his elders to excuse his own.
I don’t think you fully understand your own claimed religion. Christianity isn’t about souls bound for glory because they never sinned. Rather, it is souls bound for glory because they sinned, knowing they were sinning, and then beseeching the Lord for forgiveness and guidance to not sin again; better yet, to be so filled with the Light of Christ that they act as one of His representatives on earth.
Of course they sin yet again and repeat the cycle, but the trajectory is toward less sin and more righteousness. This individual journey is closely paralleled by the collective soul journey of Europe.
The Aztecs had no such concepts; nor did/do a lot of primitive cultures. In Aztec land, a callous disregard for the rights and life of others was deemed normal and fine, not a sin. Might made right. To oppress others was just what you did if you were strong enough to pull it off.
In your world view Hitler was just acting through his cosmology. Hard to understand why he is demonized. Kill off the defectives and the degenerate Jews to appease the demands of the Aryan ideal is the same as making necessary sacrifices of captured neighboring tribes in Aztec land. Right?
IMO, Christianity has a lot of wrong dogma. However, it is a true path to the gate of salvation and further soul development. You apparently think that a religion that demands the perennial bloody mass slaughter of slaves is equal to Christianity. I find that incomprehensible. Just stop and look at the energies expressed by each religion.
Anyhow, maybe your loathing of your own culture has blinded you. Maybe it arose from some perceived personal injustice. For most people, at the end of the day, it’s always personal.
Eric –
Murder is murder no matter in whose name it is committed. I’ve never said Aztecs were equal to anyone. My beef was with your attempt to pass off Jennings fairy tale of mass cannibalism by all Aztecans.
As for culture, I love mine. But my view of that culture is probably much different than yours. So please spare me from your ‘woke’ proselytizing.
Leith and Eric
I have had a bellyful of you two bitching at each other. Leith is retired USMC sergeant and Eric is about as far from being “woke” s you can be. Enough!!
Colonel Lang –
My apologies. BTW I believe Mr Newhill also has some USMC in his background. Or maybe I read that wrong?
PS – Although I was an NCO for more than a dozen years I retired as a Chief Warrant Officer. I took the same oath as you and every commissioned officer.
Leith
Sorry, I did not know that.
Leith
No. I am not sorry. To be a sergeant is a wonderful thing, you are next to the troops. I was a sergeant in the 103rd Infantry RCT. My father was a sergeant in the 26th Cavalry. Iwo of my uncles were CPOs in the navy before they retired as CWOs. As an officer I always tried to be as close to the troops as a good sergeant is. That was resented by a lot of stuffed shirts.
” To be a sergeant is a wonderful thing”
Agreed.
Eric,
I understand your take on the Aztecs, however I have to agree with TTG that it is very superficial. They had a very complex society and most of our understanding of it comes from very few, and very biased, histories. The other cultures they had conquered or subjugated were by no means saints, nor simpletons either. Understanding that doesn’t me we agree with any of it.
Fred,
I know that Aztec society was complex just as Nazi Germany was. The Germans circa 1940 were innovative. They built the autobahn. Their military and weapons were superior to the rest of the world’s. Their media and propaganda machines and ability to mobilize the population were awesome.
I don’t see “complexity” as being the correct metric by which to measure a society’s virtue. I have dragged the conversation into a tangential culdesac. Sorry about that. I got caught up in seeing “malleability” as the ability to evolve toward loftier aspects of human potential. I also became reactive to the progressive concept that every human expression is of equal value.
I think that maybe complexity is counter to being malleable. The more dependencies and the greater the division of labor, the less malleable a society. Too many inter-related moving parts and too hard to manage a top down directed change. Changes develop more organically and less predictably as complexity increases. OTOH, less complex cultures often appear to lack the intelligent/sophisticated vision that change is possible and potentially good.
But mostly I see the world through a spiritual focus that is alien to what interests academics and politicians.
TTG,
“their highest gods shed their own blood in sacrifice to bring the Aztecs to life. The Aztec blood sacrifices were done in fulfillment of that cosmology.”
The Aztecs did not shed their blood but that of conquered peoples, who were not willing participants in the Aztec cosmology but victims of it.
The failure of the Left/Progressives is that they seem incapable of recognizing evil for what it is – unless it is someone immediately blocking their political ambitions – otherwise just moral relativism.
The Aztecs aligned their souls with evil energies. They de facto worshipped satan. I’m not even an adherent of Christian dogma, but I know what it is.
The Left also does not really believe in, let alone understand, a soul or afterlife; despite whatever lip service a subset of them may give to the topic from time to time. To the Left, humans are organic robots to be programmed to operate according to the wisdom of the programmer and to be disposed of as the programmer deems necessary.
Units that do not prove to be malleable – meaning programmable – are disposed of or replaced with those appear to be. Force and threat of death increasingly become the programmer’ fall back tactics. However, over time, the soul rebels against the programmers’ desired expression set and the whole thing breaks down like the Tower of Babel.
IMO, Culture comes from the state of soul development of the people as much as the stuff academics like to study because the topics are far more easily confined to measurable metrics and offer funding opportunities from would be programmers of people. As advanced souls build better cultures, more advancing souls are attracted to incarnate in those culture. A positive feedback loop is established. The opposite can happen too (like the Aztecs).
Cortez was able to take the Aztecs down because so many surrounding local tribes hated the Aztec who were not so noble after all. They joined up with the White Devils, sharing their mutual interests.
I also thought the tear a youths heart out and toss it it down the steps blood ritual was a seasonal fertility rite in order to ensure good crops. A youth selected and pampered for a full year, and then sacrificed on the high alter at the Aztec version of the Church of the Spilled Blood.
Jesus willing sacrificed himself because he so loved the world. The Aztec’s victims? They wished they were never caught by the war parties.
Deap,
“They joined up with the White Devils”
That’s very racist, and superficial, of you. Please stop.
Argument: The tenacity and pervasiveness of covid fear is an expression of modern existential angst:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/we_kinda_have_to_forgive_them__they_are_really_just_ignorant_and_scared_people.html
In the 1950-70’s, seems like everyone was on a navel-gazing inner journey to find meaning and purpose in their lives – Beats in SF to EST in the suburbs to Himalayan ashrams. Primal Screams, I’m Okay, You’re Okay, LSD and Astrology.
Today, the same existential angst is searching meaning but now it demands someone else is at fault, someone else must change. The inner soul-searching of yore became the cacophony outer soul scorching that surrounds us today. Now it is I’m okay, but you definitely are not.
TTG –
I would have thought that the Taliban and all their their fellow jihadis of any name are fanboys of human malleability “at the point of a sword or gun”. And certain conservative evangelical sects in this country believe that a human’s psyche is capable of being molded, i.e. malleable.
I’d hope at some point in the future that you would publish a post on the Army’s use of anthropology in the so-called Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and elsewhere – both warts as there were many I hear, and pearls if there were any at all. Perhaps Thomas Merton, if alive could have had some key insights on HTS. But I don’t think any of his interfaith dialogue was with Imams.
As for Boas, maybe he should have kept quiet about Kwakiutl hamatsa myths of Sasquatch. He could of saved us from a hundred years of tabloid reporting about hybrid human/bigfoot babies and other stories by the tabloids.
Leith,
About eight or so years ago, we had a Dr. Adam Silverman active on the old SST blog. He was intimately involved in the creation and running of the Human Terrain System. I’ll try to dig up some of his old stuff. I’ve recently read an account of the value that some of these HTS types provided in Afghanistan. I’ll look for that as well.
The HTS was controversial among anthropologists due to the many objections of using the field in the pursuit of war. Given that we once had a professional journal called “Dialectic Anthropology,” this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Still, there were many in the field who dismissed these naive protestations and pitched in.
I’ve only an undergrad degree in anthropology. I’m barely an amateur. But in those four years, there wasn’t a semester in which I did not engage in the practice of observation, recording, analysis and working with cultural informants. I imagine the anthropologists assigned to those HTS teams had at least that level of practical training. I would think that had to lead to some value.
TTG –
As someone said “A little action with knowledge is far more beneficial than a lot of action with ignorance.” So I believed in the concept of HTS, although from the little I know of it the execution was flawed. Is that why the Army phased out the program seven years ago? Wiki says there were at least 31 HTT teams at brigade level. Per the Army each team had one or two academics the rest being NCOs and officers. But many of the academics were political scientists or sociologists, not anthropologists. Perhaps that was part of the problem?
We had something similar but on a much smaller scale in Nam, but they worked for the CIA CORDS Program and not the Army. And if there were any Anthropology PhDs in that program they were few and far between, probably only in Saigon or at Corps level. And I’m sure that during WWII there were a great many Anthropology Professors working for OSS. Probably the same on the other side of the Atlantic – the famous British ‘boffins’ weren’t just physicists engineers. On another similar effort during the early Cold War, British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer studied the Russians. Even Margaret Mead was involved in Gorer’s research.
Allen Ginsburg – 1955 – Howl
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
TTG
Have you seen the Swedish movie Aniara? It’s an adaptation from an epic sci-fi poem written by Harry Martinson in the 1950’s. The plot concerns a group of colonists on their way to Mars whose ship is knocked off course. The interesting aspect, from an anthropological standpoint, is the ‘devolution’ the colonists undergo as their voyage drags on and on. They eventually revert to a mystical belief system and cult-like behavior as the prospect of salvation becomes ever more remote. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the film on other criteria, but I enjoyed the unusual plot and exploration of the fragility of the rational part of our psyche. A warning; it is bleak, in a sense perhaps only the Scandinavians can capture.
I haven’t seen that movie or even heard of it, but it sounds interesting. It reminds me of the old Star Trek episode when Kirk and company landed on a planet of two waring tribes, the Yangs and the Kohms. The Kohms turn out to a post-biowar armageddon version of the Chinese Communists and the Yangs are what’s left of the United States. As Spock would say, “Fascinating.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory
That Swedish movie also reminds me of “The Lord of the Flies.” Oddly enough, there’s a real life version of “The Lord of the Flies” when six kids from a Tongan Catholic School stole a fishing boat in an attempt to run off to New Zealand. They ended up shipwrecked on a small island for 15 months. Those six kids did very well for themselves before they were rescued.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
TTG
Thanks for the Guardian link. Interesting story, somewhat marred by the author’s character assassination of William Golding. The lessons; get yourself a good Catholic education before getting yourself shipwrecked and when you do make sure it’s on an island full of wild chickens 😉
I’ve wondered if Lord of the Flies is a reflection of a general distrust of western culture within Euros. The periodic mass slaughters raise unavoidable doubts. As Gandhi is said to have quipped when asked about his opinion of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”
If I were shipwrecked I would prefer to be shipwrecked with a fairly small group. Anything more than a handful risks tribal splits. Personal splits tend to be much easier to resolve than tribal ones.
According to Dunbar the manageable number is around 150 people. TTG will know much more about this than I.
That Dunbar Number seems rather arbitrary to me. There’s a good reason we organize military units around much smaller numbers and build larger units from small numbers of smaller building block units. I can’t see managing a group of 150 individuals to accomplish any worthwhile task. OTOH, you can assemble a crowd of thousands to cheer on a hockey team, often in unison. So I guess the answer is it all depends. Surviving for months on an uninhabited island does seem ideal for a group of around six.
Fukuyama got it right later on; “trust” – the economic value of trust and cooperation explains the world and civilisations at least to my low level of understanding.
If you look at civilisations, religions, movements, politics in terms of trust levels, things become a lot clearer, at least to me.
Our current western civilisations depend on the existence of very, very, high levels of trust between people. If those levels decline, as they are now, then we suffer economic and social consequences.
A classic example is the American response to covid19 – the emergence of any number of conspiracy theories – stimulated by decades of being lied to by Government and corporate sectors that was finally discovered. Watergate, Enron, the Pentagon papers, 2008 crash, deep water horizon, Boeing B737, Corvair, big tobacco – all of these and many more, gradually erode our trust levels and with that goes our ability to cooperate and build a better society.
You forgot, amongst the corruption cases discovered, those involving Big Pharma, of which Pfizer takes the big prize in number and gravity of criminal cases it was declared guilty, which, far from any conspiracy theory, tore down the trust of the people ( and by association the trust on governments already quite corrupt to levels unbearable already fro the populations, especially after this transnational corporation was granted immunity on any side effects, lied about the results of its essays and the real effectivity and security of its product, what does not stop it from claimming now being allowed to vaccinate children….
These past days a US family went to a pharmacy to get the flu shot, they were inyected the Covid-19 vaccine instead, amongst them their 4 and 5 years old children, who, as a result, are in ICU with cardiologic complications.
All this add for increasing trust both, in government and Pharma industry…
Well Walrus, you might have to unravel your own rhetoric.
1stExample: “the emergence of any number of conspiracy theories – stimulated by decades of being lied to.”
So which were true, the Conspiracy theories or the “government and corporate sector” versions of the events you list?
If the former, then instead of the label “conspiracy theories,” how about confronting the situation that ordinary citizens uncovered falsities (aka lies) in the “government and corporate sector” version of event.
Why call “exposing lies” a “conspiracy theory?”
When I was 15 years old a teacher told me I was a “cynic.” Didn’t know what that meant back then, but now I know it is so.
As a cynic, I can live with the knowledge that “government and corporate sector” lie to me. (PS Cynicism is not a pleasant personality trait, to live or to live around.)
But I gather you are a more trusting sort.
It must be terribly destabilizing to force that acknowledgement, that government lies to you. Routinely.
Where does one stand?
Where is True North?
walrus,
“If those levels decline, as they are now, then we suffer economic and social consequences.”
If we import tens of millions of non-Westerners into our nation they won’t magicaly adopt our values, or respect them either.
“any number of conspiracy theories – stimulated by decades of being lied to by Government and corporate sectors that was finally discovered. ”
Thankfully our government and corporate sectors have never lied to us about Covid.
Walrus – you have to be right about the level of “trust” determining to some extent the success in dealing with the pandemic.
In Europe it was I believe the Danes who did the best. Partly because it’s a prosperous country with a good health system- for example, they did a much higher level of genomic testing even than the UK. But mainly, as Danish health experts themselves claim, because the Danes are much more inclined to believe in the integrity and competence of their politicians than the most of us.
In my view that makes them mugs when it comes to politics generally. But in the case of a public health emergency it’s gold dust. Similarly in Germany, Mrs Merkel’s outstanding performance in simply explaining the pros and cons of how they were tackling the disease played as significant a part as the fact that the Germans too seem to have a better health system than the most of us.
No such luck for Johnson and Trump, and now Biden. Large numbers of people didn’t or don’t trust them an inch. Perhaps the epidemiologists should factor in levels of public trust when working out control measures. The number of people who are likely to mistrust and therefore ignore public health measures is as significant a factor as R values and the like.
On the more overtly political side, there was a lot of squabbling about vaccine distribution in Europe. Some of that spilled over your way. Some promised vaccines didn’t get delivered to Australia when they should have been. The resultant diplomatic froideur was noticeable. Did that play any part in the way the Australians broke the AUKUS news to the French?
As you talk about clash of civilizations, I think there are core values which are universal and common to all of us, all religions and cultures,and thus, we find common ground and have peace when leaders who have these universal values at core are at the helm, and we have war when they totally despise or simply lack these core values…
It may sound too simple, but it is as it is…
As an illustration, this scene sawn yesterday at Kingdom of Heaven, which they broadcast, once again, yesterday night, a film I never tire to watch…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6blMYuemUYI&ab_channel=CWallace
A in A
“I think there are core values which are universal and common to all of us, all religions and cultures, and thus, we find common ground and have peace? Nonsense MY Cambodian tribal soldiers liked to eat the livers of their fallen adversaries so as to inherit their warrior spirit. my Choco Indian friends liked to drink booze made by having their women chew corn then spat into jugs and buried for a few months. Want more examples? Do those fit in your effete European fantasies?
Well one guesses your friends would not be representatives of all the Cambodian people, I have not traveled to Cambodia, to my regret, but people who traveled there tell they are a very charming and peaceful people..
No idea about the Choco Indians….
Yes The Cambodge Rouge murdered their countrymen by the millions in pursuit of the Marxist utopia. That was how they sought cultural change
We are not all like Raynald of Châtillon, either, nor they were all the crusaders, I guess…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUQhnGDGGDY&ab_channel=JackSparrow
What nonsense are you talking now?
A in A
I must remember that you are someone for whom the faith has failed. Cheer up! Creatures like you may win here yet. Civil war will then begin and it will probably begin in Texas.
You’re right. Your idea not only sounds too simple, but it definitely is way too simple and wrong to boot. You should read “Jungle Ways” by William Seabrook. I don’t know what would offend you more, the culture of those west African tribes, including cannibals, or Seabrook, the hard drinking occultist who partook in a cannibal meal. He also introduced the concept of voodoo and zombies to his American readers. He was one strange SOB.
I first read “Jungle Ways” as a child when I found a 1931 edition of the book on our bookcase. I’m sure what drew me to it was the photo plates of bare breasted young African women, but Seabrook’s take on cultural relativism really stuck with me. The book stood me well when I eventually was able to walk the streets of Ouagadougou and Timbuktu.
……….and the veneer of civilisation is very, very thin, even on Europeans, as events last century demonstrated. Furthermore, behaviours of some Eastern European countries today towards Russia suggest that they still have learned nothing.
As for Covid conspiracies, history will be judge of that. From my point of view, government and scientific community behaviour does not indicate the existence of any grand conspiracies. There are of course plenty of bureaucrats trying to utilise the pandemic for their own advancement and they spawn petty plots at the state level but a grand alliance of Pfizer/soros/gates/illuminati? I think not. There are also plenty of grandstanding egos in the scientific community shouting as usual. It was ever thus.
walrus
Yes, the veneer is much thinner and civilization itself much more precarious that most folk care to admit to themselves. But it is the widespread expectation that we are capable of learning to be civilized (on a permanent basis) that I find so dishonest. The only way that will ever happen is if the transhumanists have their way with us, with drugs or by editing out the distasteful parts of our genome maybe. But at that point it will cease to be useful to talk about the nature of Man.
BTW, if the conspiracy theory I subscribe to turns out to be true, “history” may not be around to judge anything. It will more than likely end – in the manner foretold by Orwell. If Archbishop Viganò’s version of it is right, well, this is what he has to say:
“We are at war: a war that is not openly declared, that is not fought with conventional weapons, but a war all the same, in which there are aggressors and aggressees, executioners and victims, kangaroo courts and prisoners; a war in which violence is used in ostensibly legal forms in order to violate the rights of citizens as well as believers. It is an epochal war that is a prelude to the end times and the great apostasy spoken of in Sacred Scripture”
https://insidethevatican.com/vigano-tapes/the-vigano-tapes/
Curiously, or not so, he talks in quite similar terms that a sunni escolar which is one of the last ones dedicated to the study of eschatology, Sheikh Imran Hossein, one of the last ones, since, as he himself admits and regrets, it is not a matter of study any more, ven amongst those claimving so minded, less it will be when they achieve erasing any memory of the books from human mind…
One of the parts of this project is to erase memories from other times, epochs, etc…even erase whatever genetic footprint we could hold, to, imo, erase any kind of hope of salvation and redemption, any hope of liberation, so that humanity submitts to the concept that there is no other thing than terrenal reality and power, and thus, comply with the elites desires, even when that means self-sacrificing themselves for the sake of whatever they deem anytime, now Covid pandemic, next climate change and pollution, as it has all the aspect will be….
This escholar talks about the end of Pax Americana and the coming of Pax Judaica…
Wondering whether the fact that Israel is at the vanguard in vaccination and technosanitary dictatorial rules right now, has anything to do with what this old man says, also the fact that those trying to control world economy and taking over our countries in the West, economically, and my be also politically, like Larry Fink, are jews….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPOD-WFXOQ&ab_channel=SheikhImranHosein
walrus
But, you are accustomed to living in a culture in which you accept your status as property of the state.
If you want to put it that way Col. Lang, however remember that the politicians, military, judiciary are also property of the state and by definition under the Westminster system, the state = the crown whose only function is to hold the power and can only exercise it upon advice of parliament.
Australian/ British military law makes this distinction quite clear. It is a cute and useful legal device most of the time, except perhaps once a century, when someone tries to usurp that power. Civility prevents making comparisons.
Barbara Ann
I have thought of you as intelligent. Please do not disillusion me. I was speaking of my tribal, non-urban ethnic Cambodian soldiers recruited from their villages in SVN.
The Soviets spent 70 years try to remold Russians. The Priests were killed or thrown into “the camps”, churches were expropriated for other purposes or in some cases dynamited. Schools indoctrinated children with rubbish and kids were encouraged to rat out their parents for counter revolutionary speech. When the Soviet govt. ran out of gas, all those traditional Russian “volk” cultural/religious/ familial leanings emerged like Willows in Spring. I remember A Bulgarian girl I was friends with while a student in Italy back in 1965 telling me that people there just pretended to be communists, but weren’t actually.
There are four formative and modifying influences on human culture – Genetic/Racial, Geographic, Functional/Economic, and Psychological/Intellectual/Religious. It is a community of blood, place, work, and thought. To exclude or overemphasize any of these factors leads to great error.
Social change occurs mainly through four ways – migration into a new geographic environment; fusion of two different peoples through migration and/or conquest; adoption of an outside material element or technique; and adoption of new intellectual knowledge or religious belief.
The last factor is the most significant in that it involves a change in the whole attitude to life and conception of reality. This was most evident and revolutionary in the transformation of the ancient civilizations of China, Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. through a variety new philosophic and religious visions.
While political struggle is important and immediate, it is of the utmost importance to learn and teach the source of our fundamental social unity which is our common cultural tradition. Without this, there can be no peaceful cooperation.
Today we see a totalitarian movement that seeks to absorb the whole of life in a secularized community. It is brutal and deceptive but also appeals to an attenuated spiritual yearning – the desire for unity in an ideal and this-worldly holy community.
The Christian vision of eternal life is the only power that can liberate from the darkness of this self-destructive dead end, but Christians are both disunified and thoroughly conformed to worldly standards. So, let us study, pray, and act on our faith that the Church is no purely human society but the channel of divine life which flows into cultures and sanctifies humanity in its corporate and individual activities.
TTG I came across this interview only just now. Two men attempting, in my view ineffectively but that’s only my view, to grapple head on with the questions you’re raising. The American interviewer, by the way, is not at all as dumb as he claims when it comes to looking at our problems in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQXHc-tJMXM&t=190s
On whether “guilt”, in particular German/European war guilt or in your case slave guilt, is at the root of current political thinking I’m less sure of that now than I was only recently.
Certainly I feel it an urgent necessity that we in England should get clear of the murky and confused guilts of “Old Europe”, as an equal impatience that we should get clear of the pretty well nihilist American “West Coast” self-flagellation that has become so rooted with us over here too. But I suspect if we hadn’t imported all this nonsense we’d have made up something similar of our own. This self-important search for historical guilt is I suppose a characteristic of the modern West generally.
How fundamental to our current problems is all this? I don’t know about you – I recollect you expressing an impatience with “ideology” of whatever stripe a while back – but I’m getting more and more impatient with this ideological theorising, of attempting to trace our current malaise back to some defect in our way of thinking.
Whatever castles in the air our intellectuals demolish or construct, I find amongst the bulk of us a common day to day moral framework that’s serviceable enough. Increasingly I want simply to get back to a political and economic framework in which two and two just behave as they should do and make four. These anguished theorists, and the politicians who pay lip service to their shibboleths, are very much in the way now of us simply getting a society that works.
So I’d want to say to the two of them, I can look after my own belief system, thank you. I’d very much like, however, to get down to working out how to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. That’s really all I ask from politics. I can find my own God my own way.
Related to precolombine cultures and civilizations, in the last ten minutes of Hispanity Day, I was just these past days hearing a radio program from Andorra, by people really awaken with respect all what is happening through these almost past two years, they were tlaking about the Cave of Tayos in Ecuador.
They, who have visited it, stated these constructions, these big stones, the termic spanding junctures, had to be bukit by a very davanced civilization.
They were talking about people not human…These did not seem to me fantastic people, but serious one, not your usual allowed on TV, one of them has a program on esoterism and ocultism…
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_los_Tayos
Have you heard of that cave? I read there were even travel packs to visit there, but as result of recent frictions amongst Ecuador and Peru, thezone is no more avaialable to visit…
Very coincidentally with all what is happening…
They told Armstrong, the astronaut, has visited it once…
I was trying to mean, lines of termic spanding at junctures…
Lineas de dilatacion térmica en las juntas, entre los bloques de piedra….engineered…thus….
Those caves look quite remarkable, but they are a geological formation, not some vast manmade or alien made structure. That should be clear from photos and videos. The caves do appear to have been visited by humans for thousands of years.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/journey-center-earth-cave-oilbirds/
I write down random thoughts…about the Evidence..of Human Experience…..I call them Snap Shots…This is Snapshot #3.. Ancient Pathways Now Abandon High Mountains..Where Soft Water Carved Caverns In the Dark….And Many Wonderful Mysterious Chambers….Bear Prints..On Walls…And The Limestone Floors…Are Littered..With Ancient Tools..That Are All..That Remain…Of The Battlefields of Fate…
Fascinating…thanks for the report.
Well, who knows, TTG, Father Crespi is said to have been receiving artifacts from the Shuar during all his stay there, compilatingv a whole bunch..
Then, there is talk that the Britons left with three wooden boxes full of artifacts….as always taking what is not theirs…
Whether the metallic library exist or not, we will never know, since in case it contains the secret of human origins, the elites will have for sure placed their paws on them, lest their power languishes…
The same as The Vatican Library will be always forbidden for humanity along with the thousands of rolls filling the walls of tibetan monasteries…
What do those rolls contain and say? Will we ever know?
Do not you find fascinating that in the times of Coronafear Eileen and Kristen are just planning a new expedition to Tayos Cave? It´s just wonderful, so hopefull, and refreshing….in the middle of mass collective zombification…
The intrepid spirit of men/women can not be erased.
Also this story is an exmaple on how you can deeple connect spiritually with ancient peoples eventhough when from so different cultures…
Would you like to engage in the expedition?
I would like…although I find tarantles quite repugnant…
P.S: Von Daniken could well have succumbed to the elites´ buy out and thus now deny everything he thought before, since now he frecuents golf courses…instead of caves…
Reviewing the artifacts, something stunning, the silver one seems to have what can only be the depiction of an elephant.
http://www.hmongsandnativeamericans.com/legendary-metal-library-found-in-tayos-cave-in-ecuador/
Either a tribal memory of mammoths (and if so, where are the tusks?) or there was earlier contact between the new and old worlds than had been thought.
Very Interesting Debate…Profound in Its Deliberations…and Refreshing..To See Civilized Communication..and would be Wonderful to hear the Debate..In the Manner of the Greeks..I only Offer My Opinion…as a Long Time Reader..that This Test of Human Malleability Began In The Garden of Eden…With The “TEST.” Established Order..The Temptation To Disobey..and Rebel..The Tempter..Lucifer…”Did God Surely Say,,.?” The Fall of Mankind..Every Element..Every Persona..Ever Act…and Reaction…Played out..Over and Over..with ever Nation..Tribe..and Tongue..Ever Since..The same Questions..The same Temptations..The Same Reactions..The same Results..Principalitys…Powers…The Works of Dark Places..They Meet in Secret..Conjure up New Fruit..or New Poison..Western Civilization….The Cup of Rome..even to this day..All Others..The Malleability of Man..According To Who Held Power..According to thier Humanist,,and or NonChristian but Own Religious Believes…Its No Longer Regional…Its Universal..And The “”Question.”” ..In My Opinion…Will Soon Be Answered…In Our Lifetimes..With a Life Line..
Just read this line on RedState. Magnificent
“The reason government is viewed so negatively is that the government is a soul-sucking leech that steals peoples’ money to blow it on utopian ideals that never pan out.” (Bonchie)