On Culture - From Whence Does It Spring?

I really didn’t want to wade into this debate. Not because I think it to be particularly incendiary, controversial, or divisive, but more for the opposite reason—that any such popularly trending ‘divisive’ issues, which are typically algorithmically contrived, full of manufactured outrage, simply bore me.

But I saw several responses and treatments of it from respected writers, and it turned a few loose screws in my head such that I’d decided it would be an interesting jumping-off point for a broader exegesis.

I won’t bore you with the entire word-count-filler backstory, except to say that Jordan Neely was a vagrant in New York City, with both good and bad deeds to his name. He was a subway performer with a long list of mental health issues as well as a lengthy rap sheet of assaults. He died when a poster-boy for ‘White America’ put him in a chokehold, after Neely had begun acting erratically and threateningly towards subway passengers.

The story has inflamed the public and captured the current zeitgeist with its picturesque accoutrements that seem purpose-made for the ensuing Netflix blockbuster that’s sure to follow. The innocently disarming but ‘troubled’ Black entertainer whose bright light was dimmed when he was ruthlessly garroted by the dashing ex-Marine exuding such soigné composure he’s practically the embodiment of White-Supremacy itself.

It’s surely a tale made for America.

The moral judgments regarding Neely’s death are immaterial; after all, that’s what the court system is for. Let the accused be judged by a jury of his peers, and the whole nine yards. I’m not interested in that part of the story.

What interests me more revolves around the idea of culture in general, as brought up by writers like this one:

I'm not racist; I'm culturalist...

Daniel D. is one of many people that have been posting comparative videos of subways in different countries, in the wake of Jordan Neely’s death. The implication is always the same: why does every other country (or most of them, at least) possess subways which are safe, comely, hospitable, orderly, etc., compared to the seemingly barbarous, violence-ridden subterranean steel-beasts which crawl through the sewery seepholes of the American transit system?

And of course, this takes us ultimately to the ontological question of culture in general. The subways are merely the parallels for American cities. It’s easy to blame ‘black culture’, as many do, and be done with the debate. But it’s an issue that highlights a much broader and more important, globe-spanning one: that of multiculturalism itself.

The idea of multiculturalism sold to us has always been a lie couched in various myths and half-truths and exaggerations to provide an air of normalcy. In grade school we were taught about the wonders of the American ‘melting pot’ and how this distinguishes America from all other nations, gives it its special and unique cultural fabric and achievement potential. It’s easy to sell this idea when you shine the light only on the small positive tip of the iceberg and ignore the gargantuan mass wallowing just below the surface.

But this debate is not merely about ‘Black’ vs. ‘White’ culture; such basic reductivism is a passé low hanging fruit about which innumerable other writers have gaustered at length. Instead, I want to muse on culture in general, which firstly must proceed from an appropriate understanding and definition of the word itself.

So, what is culture, exactly? From whence does it spring? There are many ‘experts’ who can expound on it with endless longueurs, citing historical sources, philosopher’s postulates, and all the rest. But I hereby radically propose that culture, at its essence, can be boiled down to just one word: Geography.

Culture is geography; or rather: environment.

It’s really that simple. Geography and environment are the wellsprings from which all ‘culture’ sprouts, and if you understand the fundamental mechanisms of an environ’s effects on a people, then you will grasp the founding principles of their culture, roots, ethos, etc.

For example, we know anthropologically that environment dictates genetics. In Africa, people had dark skin because of the sun’s activation of melanin cells, and Allen’s Rule dictated various bodily characteristics like length of limbs and height:

According to Allen’s rule, a biological rule that says the limbs of endotherms are shorter in cold climates and longer in hot climates. Limb length affects the body’s surface area, which helps with thermoregulation. Shorter limbs help to conserve heat, while longer limbs help to dissipate heat . This means that people living in hot climates like Africa may have evolved longer limbs to help them dissipate heat more effectively.

These physical differences work their way into the cultural fabric of a people. Their body’s unique abilities and expressions can, for instance, inform the way they move, kinesthesiologically shape the dances they create. The environment’s nutrients, flora and fauna likewise shape the cultural expressions. For instance, India’s culture is known for the richness of its color, such as the saffron of its flag, the emeralds and yellows of their clothes, etc. These clothes were traditionally dyed with the naturally abundant spices which grew in that particular region, like turmeric and curry, creating the vivid yellows.

In regions where such spices didn’t grow, the culture reflected different colors and qualities. Extrapolate this simplified example out to every other attribute you can conceive of. These varied things create an endless tapestry which informs the people who live in that region, marking them with the idiosyncrasies they become known or stereotyped for.

There’s of course the popular Cold Winters Theory by Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, which states that Europeans developed ‘higher intelligence’ due to harsher winter climates creating the evolutionary need for more innovation to obtain food, whereas warmer climates near the equator led to easier lifestyles where food grew plentiful and did not require the inhabitants to ‘think outside the box’ in order to feed themselves.

It’s just another demonstration of how geography and environment formulate the foundations of ‘culture’. Take a Mariachi band in some rural Guadalajaran hinterland, for instance. Their wide sombreros designed to block the high sun of that region, their folk instruments, all cobbled together from materials native to the milieu—perhaps a Mexican cajon or some form of tabla drum of tanned and stretched lamb skin, or wooden shakers traditionally filled with rice or beans grown locally, to create the percussive sound famous to their style of music. The music itself: perhaps rancheras with lyrics rhapsodizing the rural countryside. This culture is intimately entwined with the environment, the very lineaments of it built from the materials at hand.

Similarly, in the United States, the cultures of each region can be said to emanate from those regions’ unique geographical features. For instance, the hardy Appalachians are often described as independent, lonesome, perhaps standoffish and wary of outsiders. The specific geographical feature of the tall and treacherous mountains which surround them inform these personality traits, stereotypes, and other characteristics which blossom into the umbrella term of ‘culture’. Even the physiognomy is affected, as people who live in remote, harder to reach places are likely to interbreed more, have ‘purer’ stocks and lineages compared to their urban-cosmopolitan counterparts.

Their lifestyle is dictated by their surroundings: hard mountain life, farming, etc., and the exigencies of that lifestyle dictate their apparel and accessories, which further informs the gestalt of what we consider their ‘culture’. Hardy, reliable denim, tough leather, music of the mountains and rivers. Even a throwback, hidebound disposition bred from the seclusion of the mountains; if you don’t get much in the way of travelers, you aren’t exposed to the cosmopolitan cultures and latest developments brought with their travels. This necessarily foments a sort of rustic sentimentality, a backward-looking lifestyle of nostalgia alien to those forward-thinking urbanites.

Why is it so difficult for some people to understand that culture springs from the fount of environment, region, locale? A people who live on vast plains teeming with swift-moving animals may become runners by nature, as that is their only way of hunting the region’s wildlife and creating sustenance for their community. This environmental characteristic naturally leads to the development of a certain physiology, perhaps legs and lung capacity. Their culture will likewise not only take cues from this activity but will likely revolve around it. Songs about the fast-trotting antelope, headwear and garb from the animals’ skins, decorations from their bones, perhaps eventually sublimating into a holy reverence, religious elevation and iconography. Their very physiognomy will mirror their milieu, and these features will further embellish their cultural iconography.

This theory saw its apotheosis in Aleksandr Dugin’s summarization of that immemorial of temporal struggles: the dualistic battle between the Atlanticist sea powers and Eurasian continental land forces. Dugin distills the global metaphysical struggle into that of these two vying poles. But crucially, the underlying basis for his theory is that of fundamental cultural precepts formed of the unique geographical realities of these two civilizations.

Per Dugin’s observations, the Atlanticist cultures, inheriting the spirit of Carthage, the immortal sea power vying against Rome, are built on the principles of individualism (read: liberalism), trade, and materialism. While the land power of ‘Eternal Rome’ represented statehood, communality, idealism:

“The War of the Continents,” in which he described an ongoing geopolitical struggle between the two types of global powers: land powers, or “Eternal Rome,” which are based on the principles of statehood, communality, idealism, and the superiority of the common good, and civilizations of the sea, or “Eternal Carthage,” which are based on individualism, trade, and materialism. In Dugin’s understanding, “Eternal Carthage,” was historically embodied by Athenian democracy and the Dutch and British Empires. Now, it is represented by the United States. “Eternal Rome” is embodied by Russia. For Dugin, the conflict between the two will last until one is destroyed completely — no type of political regime and no amount of trade can stop that.

These traits inhere from the very basic geographic and environmental groundings of each civilization. This essay qualifies it as a dualism of tellurocracy (land power) versus thalassocracy (sea power):

"Tellurocracy", "land power" is associated with the fixity of space and the stability of its qualitative orientations and characteristics. At the civilizational level, this is embodied in settled life, in conservatism, in strict legal norms, which are subject to large associations of people of the clan, tribes, peoples, states, empires. The hardness of Sushi is culturally embodied in the hardness of ethics and the sustainability of social traditions. Land (especially sedentary) peoples are alien to individualism, the spirit of entrepreneurship. They are characterized by collectivism and hierarchy.

As described, land people cultivate orientations of conservatism, tribal and clannish natures, respect for legal norms, anti-individualism but rather collectivism. The reasons for this are similar to what I described for the Appalachian folk earlier. Due to their more ‘closed-off’ and insular orientations they naturally develop certain characteristics where, for instance, promises are more meaningful. A handshake means a lot, because you have to live next to your neighbor—he’s the only trading partner you may have. In urbanite cosmopolitan cultures, your surroundings are flush with an ever expanding kaleidoscope of fresh faces where skullduggery is the expected norm, as you never develop close personal relationships in the same meaningful way.

Now here’s what the article has to say about the opposing pole, the sea people:

"Thalassocracy", "sea power" is a type of civilization based on opposite attitudes. This type is dynamic, mobile, prone to technical development. His priorities are nomadism (especially navigation), trade, and the spirit of individual entrepreneurship. The individual, as the most mobile part of the team, is elevated to the highest value, while ethical and legal norms are eroded, becoming relative and mobile. This type of civilization develops rapidly, actively evolves, easily changes external cultural characteristics, keeping unchanged only the internal identity of the general attitude

Here’s the crux: sea powers like Britain typically develop as countries which lack their own natural resources. They are most often water-locked island states relying on plunder or control of foreign colonies to thrive. This type of global cosmopolitanism naturally cultivates traits like personal and economic liberalism, because they are vital to such a culture reliant on trade and plunder of far off nations. To develop and spread socio-economic liberalism allows such sea-faring nations to ‘liberalize’ the economies of other states in order to ‘open them up’ towards favorable plunder. This was classic strategy for the British and American empires operating in places like China and Japan during the 1800s and early 1900s, for instance, allowing corporations like the East India Company to create both monopoly and monopsony at will where they saw fit.

The land people, conversely, develop self-reliant autarky and dirigisme to husband their finite resources, which are not subject to endless renewal from the wellspring of far off plunder. Additionally, sea powers are naturally inclined towards cosmopolitanism, as, due to the model described above, they are more ‘worldly’ in their reach and scope, and invariably develop ideas of multiculturalism which are antithetical to the communal land powers.

Whether you agree with Dugin’s ideas or not, they are merely to illustrate how such indelible traits develop from the influence of region, environment, and geography.

But what is all this to say? The main thrust of the argument is that culture is not something you can just contrive on the spot, nor transplant to a different area—at least not successfully. Culture is ingrained into the very fabric of its birthplace. That is all to say that Western, and specifically American, culture is in many ways an unnatural contrivance, an abomination, at least in the areas where it attempts to mess with nature, recode the natural order of things.

As an exercise, I asked the AI chat to define the American ‘melting pot’ we hear so much about:

The United States is often depicted as a “melting pot,” in which diverse cultures and ethnicities come together to form the rich fabric of our Nation. The term “melting pot” refers to the fact that people from different lands and different cultures brought their own belief systems, their own religion, their own traditions and yet somehow, in their effort to share in the American dream of success, found common ground with their neighbors. Another phrase that is sometimes used to describe this phenomenon is that different cultures have contributed their own distinct “flavors” to American culture.

Interesting. So it references that these ‘different cultures’ brought their own belief systems, religions, and traditions, and yet “somehow” they found common ground. No one’s ever been able to adequately define that “somehow”, which is why it’s typically referred to in such vaguely ambiguous terms.

The fact is, anyone with a clear mind can take a look around and see that the ‘rich cultures’ which have embroidered the ‘fabric’ of America do not ‘integrate’ that well at all; in fact, they appear to form fairly sectarian enclaves where they associate only with themselves and do not bother trying to assimilate. Please show me a single instance of a strongly Indian or Arabic community in America which ‘finds common ground’ with a neighboring Puerto Rican community, for instance. Have you ever been to Brooklyn’s Borough Park, typically considered the densest population of Hasidic Jews outside of Israel? Does it look like they interact, integrate, or ‘find common ground’ with the neighboring, heavily-Latino Sunset Park or Crown Heights?

Using NYC as an example, the truth is, when anyone refers to a positive or successful ‘cultural integration’, they typically point to a place like Manhattan, particularly the tourist zones of Times Square, where one can see every vibrant stripe and color of cultural enrichment intersecting each other. But in reality, these zones act merely as ‘transit points’ through which these cultures pass, on their way back to their respective siloed enclaves. They are the modern bazaars or souks, where different groups merely find it convenient to shop or work, interacting out of necessity, but at the end of the day invariably returning to their own separate neighborhoods; the Asians to Flushing, the Whites to Staten Island or the exurbs of Westchester, the Hispanics to Sunset Park, the Blacks to the Bronx, the Indians to Middlesex.

Where is it exactly that cultures are positively integrating? Perhaps only in the dementedly conjured laboratories of academia, where under the strict master-hand of leftist Right-Think policy, impressionably idealistic youth are corralled into environments they will later find remarkably untenable out in the ‘real world’.

The Great American Experiment has always been one veiled in layers of subterfuge, gaslighting, and deliberate evasion. Throughout much of America’s post-WW2 ‘golden era’, our views of American culture and general ‘economic miracle’ have been carefully curated by that monolithic arbiter and gatekeeper in one, the mainstream media. This however includes the institution of Hollywood and attendant organs. It is chiefly through their lens that we’re taught of the rich ‘flower’ of American culture and its aspirational ‘melting pot’.

The world was shown one carefully selected slice of the full story. In movie after movie, show after show, America was portrayed as a happy, functional, integrated society, where the great ‘American Dream’ can be shared and freely indulged by all. The numbers, of course, always pointed to a harsher reality beneath the surface.

For instance, in the post-war building boom of the 1940s onward, when suburbs were going up all over the country, White America experienced an exuberant growth in home ownership from ~45% to nearly ~70% by 1990. Yet Blacks were left behind, having a paltry ~23% ownership rate in 1940, which increased to a middling ~43% by 1990.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf

Home ownership is by far the primary golden goose associated with that most elusive of ideas of the American Dream. How, then, can it be said that the melting pot has achieved such exemplary integration and “common ground” in the so-called ‘sharing’ of this dream, as per the earlier definition?

As I said at the outset, the point is not the same old tired argument that one race or culture is to blame for all America’s ills. It’s that the globalists who’ve hijacked Western governments falsely believe that cultures can be artificially transplanted, intermixed, used and borrowed in the same way they’ve done with DNA, biology, and science in general. Just like they play God in the arena of biosynthesis, believing themselves divinely justified to wield that incomparable power of modification over life itself, here too they believe they can tweak and modify cultures in vivo like they do mRNA sequences.

Critics will customarily invoke ancient Rome as the model cosmopolitan nation, thronged with a varied patchwork of cultures successfully integrated into one world-spawning society. They use it as an example of a successful, multicultural state. But Rome, too, had many dark secrets beneath the hood. Much of their society can be said to have been held together economically by slavery, for instance. Is that really what we should aspire to?

In truth, there are not many actually successful multicultural states. The USSR prided itself on its richly multiethnic society, but it was a rare example, perhaps, of that being done correctly. Like the USSR before it, Russia today has inherited various federalized ‘autonomous regions’ where most of their secondary cultures reside happily. For instance, Chechnya, Tatarstan, even the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Russia strikes a fine balance by allowing semi-independence to regions like Chechnya, yet still integrating them under the auspice of the Russian Federation proper. If you go to Chechnya, you will still feel like you’re in Russia, yet at the same time, there will be clear cultural differences, for instance with how men are supposed to interact with other men’s wives, and things of that nature.

But in the U.S., the federal government has been outright pushing for forced, arbitrary, and artificial integration under the contrived premise of the ‘American melting pot’. We’re supposed to just ignore common realities and subscribe to the make believe notion that antithetical cultural norms can diffuse through each other, particularly when the two sides have not only little in common, but no desire to even truly intermix.

Obama’s changes to the ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ (AFFH) policy were decried by some as ‘social engineering’:

Obama passed regulations in 2013 to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities.

According to Kurtz, the underlying thrust of the rule change was to force racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs.

The regulations used coercion on small towns, by withholding important federal subsidies, to strongarm them into building low income housing in well-to-do suburban neighborhoods. This type of cynical, forced integration ignores harsh realities about real society—not the fake one surrogated in the make-believe land of Academia, which exists entirely in some warped, idealized Elysian vortex far removed from real humanity.

But these globalist designs, passed down to sock-puppet Obama from his Frankfurt-School-pedigreed handlers are only the tail end of an old master plan hatched in the early 20th century. Those familiar with the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan will know that it has been the express pursuit of the Rockefeller-linked globalist clan to homogenize society into a sort of amorphous soup of cultureless, obedient, and most importantly, subserviant, Morlock-like creatures.

For those unfamiliar, I’ll give a brief precis. Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi was an elite goldenboy and ‘pioneer of European integration’ who was instrumental in the foundation of the later European Union, which of course we know to be the precursor to what was envisioned by the ruling class as the final one world government system.

Don’t actually bother clicking on his wikipedia because it’s been totally scrubbed of the most ‘interesting’ elements; or rather, go to the Wayback Machine’s oldest capture of his profile. The difference you’ll note is the liberal mention of his being plucked from obscurity by one Baron Rothschild, who sponsored his activities and writings, introducing him to the likes of Max Warburg and Bernard Baruch, who sponsored his movement for the proceeding years.

According to his autobiography, at the beginning of 1924 his friend Baron Louis de Rothschild introduced him to Max Warburg who offered to finance his movement for the next 3 years by giving him 60,000 gold marks. Warburg remained sincerely interested in the movement for the remainder of his life and served as an intermediate for Coudenhove-Kalergi with influential Americans such as banker Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch. In April 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the journal Paneuropa (1924–1938) of which he was editor and principal author. The next year he started publishing his main work, the Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa, 1925–1928, three volumes). In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union was held in Vienna and the 2,000 delegates elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as president of the Central Council, a position he held until his death in 1972.

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s true biographical details appear to be too incendiary and ‘inconvenient’ for modern sensibilities, so they had to be excised. But the fact is, he wrote his seminal work, a book called Practical Idealism, under the patronage of these figures like Baron Rothschild. In the book, he laid out a vision of the future world to which we should aspire that is downright dystopian, like something out of 1984, but worse.

The most famous quoted passages, which have suspiciously been removed from his wikipedia page, read as follows:

“The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”

“Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe's feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.

In short, he both foresees and advocates for a future where humanity is dissolved into an amorphous ‘mongrel race’ to be ruled by a noble Jewish pharisee class headquartered—naturally—in London.

What’s more, is that he was a proud, high-ranking Freemason, about whom a prominent Masonic paper wrote the following:

Even the Masonic newspaper The Beacon enthused about the thoughts of the higher degree Freemason Coudenhove-Kalergi, and stated in March, 1925: "Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi's program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.""

It’s the chief reason for the proliferation of memes like this one:

In fact, the direct Bavarian Illuminati and Masonic lineage through Kalergi’s work is quite scholastically evident. Beethoven was famously taught by Christian Neefe, a member of Weishaupt’s Illuminati order, who instilled in his young, idealistic pupil the ‘Enlightened’ precepts of Freemasonry and of the Illuminated. This was later echoed in Beethoven’s magnum opus, his Ode to Joy symphony no. 9, when he chose his fellow Mason, Schiller’s, poem Ode to Joy as the basis for his symphony’s lyrics. Schiller’s poem, extolling universal brotherhood, humanity’s triumph, and other Masonic virtues was already being widely set to music in Masonic lodges and Illuminati halls at that time.

So, it was only natural that Kalergi proposed the Ode to Joy as the official anthem of the nascent European Union, which it remains to this day. Kalergi himself was the inaugural president of the first ‘PanEuropean Union’, the precursor to the final EU.

In the best of times, the myriad cultural incoherences in a country like America can be glued together into a sort of pastiche of harmony, its many seepage points cauterized by the gaze-redirecting narratives spewed daily by the MSM. But this manufactured harmony begins to quickly show its seams when things come undone. In times of growing crisis, the lack of base unity, the jagged cultural incongruities become painfully obvious. We can all put on a phony smile and pretend at coexistence when things at least have the semblance of going well. But those latent differences lurking beneath the surface tend to explode like dormant volcanos at the first sign of disintegration. That’s the point we’re at now.

America has long been an experiment, a sort of perverted laboratory for the globalists to prototype and trial their transhumanist visions of tomorrow. But these experiments go contrary to natural law like John Hammond’s hubristic meddling with science and chaos in Jurassic Park.

Much of what we call culture and tradition are celebrations of things greater than ourselves: they are awe, reverence, and nostalgia mixed into one. Celebrations of our elders, our gods and spirits, to whom we prostrate ourselves in sublime release.

But that’s what seems to separate us from them: the elites, the System Controllers and Techno-fascist Pharisees. How can you have respect and awe for something when all of temporal power is already at your command? For the ruling class which controls our entire financial system, global governance, puppet politicians, there remains no awe, no reverence to speak of, no nostalgia for a better time to be had. Everything they could ever want is already mustered at their fingertips. Then we can say that culture and tradition are perhaps concepts wholly alien, even inimical, to them; a strange alterity which might only confuse and anger them, an aberration to be clinically and surgically corrected. And what angers them must naturally be destroyed.

The easiest way to destroy culture and tradition, though, is to slowly dissolve them into the acid pool of artificial integration. Blurring all the Westphalian lines of nation states, religions, cultures, customs, and everything in between. To the long lineage of the Kalergi clan, the Morlocks must worship none but them. As I’ve espoused before, this is the ultimate goal of everything, from the manufactured identity movements, to the sudden-surging transhumanism of the AI takeover: the fracturing of identity is just the first wedge in the prying open of those floodgates.

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