Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Great insight. I've been grappling with this as well. The quote I went with is: "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
NE, what I am surprised at is that America which was founded on the best of best Rome, the best of Greece, the best of Abraham and Moses, the 10 commandments and the Biblical Prophets, all they could come up with is the 'the pursuit of happiness'.
Granted all five of those cultural virtues are wedded into the foundations of Judeo-Christian work ethic of the west. All of these virtues are under attack by marxism and libertinism which destroys and forces people to live for material and seducing pleasures.
There is a line in an old Jefferson Airplane song: "When eating comes too easy, nothing makes you think." We have lived in the richest time to be alive with all the abundance of food, global shipping, air travel as easy as bus travel but with global reach within a day, miraculous medicines (though advancing hygiene to large parts of the world did more than the medicines), education for the masses, electronic wonders for communication and connection. Al of those things also has down sides as well. Pursuit of happiness is a wonderful sentiment, but it represented far deeper meaning to the founders than the leisure to play video games, indulge in food for pleasure, easy access to sexual gratification etc. Happiness is based in purpose and meaning, seeking knowledge and understanding of the world, and in particular, nature. There is a reason the bible states that the love of money is the root of all evil. We all see that playing out all around us now.
SR, perhaps 'the pursuit of happiness' meme was a shorthand version of the biblical, roman and greek virtues--a crystalization of everything wrapped into a simple expression everyone could accept. As a Christian, I have been disappointed in the framing documents that they were provided very limited undergirding of the nation from a Christ honoring perspective. I know a small number of the founders were not Christian and had their influence. I also know the founders were very concerned that dogma related to specific denominations would not become part of the documents. That said, they could have built a more overt mention of the idea of God as Creator or specific references to the Ten Commandments, etc so that subsequent generations would not be able to try and decapitate the God of the bible from the public square of the nation--as we have been witnessing for the last 60 years--the lack of biblical reference is very unfortunate. Then again, Christianity has always been a matter of personal choice and never something inherited or prescribes as a birthright, so perhaps the founders had certain wisdom in the words they selected. Franklin was correct, we had to keep the Republic which we are now on the verge of loosing the experiment in individual liberty.
Everything we are witnessing is the destruction of transcendence. not surprising suicide on the rise. I believe that Jesus and in being in relationship to the Creator offers the only source of real lasting joy.
I think everyone commenting here cares. My sister cares but she is scared of her religion. She thinks I am a heretic or an apostate for reading Gnostic gospels, Roman history, believing the earth is billions of years old, and homo-sapiens have existed for at least 300 thousand years and that we are designed creatures placed here by god or gods hundreds of millions of years ago.
She hasn’t actually called me a heretic. She has asked me if I still believed in God. 😇
Yes sister. I most certainly do though my philosophy is not limited by Roman-Christian dogma. We should all pray and talk to God directly.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Well, hang on now. This:
"Blind Trust in Authority: An uncritical acceptance of information from authority figures and mainstream sources can lead to a lack of independent thinking and scepticism."
can come from this:
"Pietas: Reverence and dutifulness towards the gods, one's country, and one's family. In essence, it was about fulfilling obligations and responsibilities, and honouring the relationships that defined Roman society;..."
Jupiter and Juno, for example, had a pretty shitty marriage. Were they good examples of fides, gravitas and virtus?
There's got to be a balance in all things and an individual sense of morality and ethics too, because the customs of one's people may not necessarily all be good ones. Revering the wisdom of one's leaders can be a dangerous blindness.
And as far as foodstuffs and toxins and musculoskeletal injuries etc. etc.--the past was not entirely a time of glorious plenty and good practices and healthy strong straight bodies.
I appreciate your sentiments here but don't over-romanticize the often grim realities in those classical societies.
There were grim realities in ancient & even recent past but if one just takes the most current example of grim realities of WuFlu “advice” e.g. mandates & worse: they told us isolation, distancing, masks & a “warp speed” untested “vaccine” was the ONLY solution. They denigrated & outright BANNED anything that would help - cheap therapeutics, fresh air, sunshine, losing weight, exercise.
Now there is an effort to undermine &/or ban over the counter vitamins, holistic, plant or otherwise natural based medicine, etc as “dis” or “mis” information.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
The situation is actually worse than what was depicted in Idiocracy... humans are buffoons run around by their noses by cnnbbc stuffing KFC and gallon jugs of cola down the maw and demanding pills to fix their obese diseased bodies... addicted to watching reality teevee and social media...
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
I agree with both comments, but with a mobile constantly clutched there are instant answers and distractions. No one has to search deeply and with constant entertainment there is no time to ponder anything of any depth No silence or soul searching and you have to stay on trend and fit in. It does make it more difficult to be authentic but not impossible. We can only hope other wise the future is bleak.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Good leaders are required to build and sustain good societies. Bad leaders never build but always destroy prosperous nations. The destruction often starts from the inside as moral decay, making a people vulnerable to external forces. It was so with Rome. It is so with America. We face both a moral crisis of the people and a crisis of leadership. The two go hand-in-hand, especially so in democratic nations.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
It can certainly be argued that everything “traditional”, “conservative”, “ethical”, “rational”, “common sense”, “HOLY” is being very deliberately co-opted, debased & erased w/ the drug-abortion-tyranny-everything goes-no personal integrity or responsibility-victimhood-blame anyone but yourself society today.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Religio; is really the key isn’t it?
Ever since Yeshua was executed and Peter woke up the next morning and exploited him to start a new religion with himself in charge we have been on this philosophically destructive path.
Christianity was co-opted by many along the way. Early “christians” burned the universities of philosophy in their day, the temples, the philosophy’s, murdered prominent philosophers and worshipers. Then when America was discovered they proceeded ti burn the Mayan and other libraries they discovered there as well, destroy their philosophies, and murder/enslave them.
I can not say that this period, millennia we find ourselves in is ANY DIFFERENT from what has been occurring since Julius Caesar’s time. Namely the organized corruption and suppression of knowledge and philosophy, and true religion.
We continue to be attacked and enslaved and war’ed upon. There is no peace. When they tear down General Lee, recognize what is going on, see the pattern and the gods of evil behind it.
Aug 20, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Just a reminder that schools removed physical education that included exercise plus study of health, including diet. Of course I hated it. I could never climb that rope, but I had to try.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Brilliant! Thank you for bringing this ancient principle to light. I've long been an advocate for critical thinking toward all things but particularly technology. People forget that marketing has brainwashed us to believe that all new technology is automatically beneficial to us individually and to society. History demonstrates this clearly isn't true. Each must be assessed on its own merits or lack of them. Those with more negative than positive impacts should be rejected, or only minimally used, e.g. social media. The question to always ask is: Do I control my use of technology? Or does it control me?
The breakdown of the Family Unit and Morals was what destroyed the Roman Empire the same thing is destroying the United State of America! History does repeat it’s self!
I read, long ago, so there may be newer perspectives, that it was the lead in the vessels that got them. Which is analogous, if true, since we are drowning in toxins.
I was just talking to my progressive Howard Zinn obsessed friend about the value of traditions, which I think are in one way like psychological boundaries in a family. Another friend of mine and I, used to enjoy ranting about dead white European males, since we had to write long papers on, say, Milton, but at that point the Judeo-Christian Greek and Roman tradition, in all realms of culture, was still a strong backbone and boundary, which we could rebel, like teenagers, against, eclipsing its foundational depth. Now it is vanishing, like a father that leaves home for Chinese food or cigarettes, and never comes home, and we long for embeddedness and boundary, and only recognize their worth now that they are absent. The proverbial hell breaking loose seems engineered to me, but perhaps it always was engineered, though just as when they blamed the surrealists for inciting WWII, now some are blaming the New Atheists for the incoherence we find ourselves in. More complex than that! This is a great investigation, and, oddly, it partakes of the coincidence of opposites-- tradition as wild eyed revolution, a chimera, a Roman emperor crossed with Che, or Subcomandante Marcos.
Aug 19, 2023Liked by NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter
Maybe one of the things we need to do today, to add to the mos maiorum, is to look deeply into our own motivations for why we do what we do, and why we are so disempowered that we rely on authorities instead of trusting our own knowing. The work being done on trauma today could open a few windows - especially information about the early trauma we experienced before we were cognitive, and we often don't even see that as traumatic (ie, making infants cry themselves to sleep, feeding them on 'schedules', not giving attachment when they need it, etc). Early trauma lodges in the body, and when cognition comes in it is just recognised as discomfort. When discomfort arises, we can push it away with any number of distractions - so is that why we now live in a 'culture of distractions'? Pleasant distractions are not 'happiness' but we confuse the two. Happiness comes from the inside and is more reliable and unshakeable, pleasant distractions come from the outside and never last. For anyone interested in trauma, Gabor Mate's book 'The Myth of Normal' explains it all beautifully.
Great insight. I've been grappling with this as well. The quote I went with is: "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/tradition
NE, what I am surprised at is that America which was founded on the best of best Rome, the best of Greece, the best of Abraham and Moses, the 10 commandments and the Biblical Prophets, all they could come up with is the 'the pursuit of happiness'.
Granted all five of those cultural virtues are wedded into the foundations of Judeo-Christian work ethic of the west. All of these virtues are under attack by marxism and libertinism which destroys and forces people to live for material and seducing pleasures.
There is a line in an old Jefferson Airplane song: "When eating comes too easy, nothing makes you think." We have lived in the richest time to be alive with all the abundance of food, global shipping, air travel as easy as bus travel but with global reach within a day, miraculous medicines (though advancing hygiene to large parts of the world did more than the medicines), education for the masses, electronic wonders for communication and connection. Al of those things also has down sides as well. Pursuit of happiness is a wonderful sentiment, but it represented far deeper meaning to the founders than the leisure to play video games, indulge in food for pleasure, easy access to sexual gratification etc. Happiness is based in purpose and meaning, seeking knowledge and understanding of the world, and in particular, nature. There is a reason the bible states that the love of money is the root of all evil. We all see that playing out all around us now.
SR, perhaps 'the pursuit of happiness' meme was a shorthand version of the biblical, roman and greek virtues--a crystalization of everything wrapped into a simple expression everyone could accept. As a Christian, I have been disappointed in the framing documents that they were provided very limited undergirding of the nation from a Christ honoring perspective. I know a small number of the founders were not Christian and had their influence. I also know the founders were very concerned that dogma related to specific denominations would not become part of the documents. That said, they could have built a more overt mention of the idea of God as Creator or specific references to the Ten Commandments, etc so that subsequent generations would not be able to try and decapitate the God of the bible from the public square of the nation--as we have been witnessing for the last 60 years--the lack of biblical reference is very unfortunate. Then again, Christianity has always been a matter of personal choice and never something inherited or prescribes as a birthright, so perhaps the founders had certain wisdom in the words they selected. Franklin was correct, we had to keep the Republic which we are now on the verge of loosing the experiment in individual liberty.
Bertrand Russell foresaw (helped planned) a future world of just that, "though there may be pleasure, there will be no joy."
Everything we are witnessing is the destruction of transcendence. not surprising suicide on the rise. I believe that Jesus and in being in relationship to the Creator offers the only source of real lasting joy.
There is "peace beyond all understanding" within real spirituality, I believe too.
Yeah. All true. But few understand or care anymore.
They should - they will feel fulfilled and society will be stronger.
Yes, of course they should. But they won't.
I think everyone commenting here cares. My sister cares but she is scared of her religion. She thinks I am a heretic or an apostate for reading Gnostic gospels, Roman history, believing the earth is billions of years old, and homo-sapiens have existed for at least 300 thousand years and that we are designed creatures placed here by god or gods hundreds of millions of years ago.
She hasn’t actually called me a heretic. She has asked me if I still believed in God. 😇
Yes sister. I most certainly do though my philosophy is not limited by Roman-Christian dogma. We should all pray and talk to God directly.
Well, hang on now. This:
"Blind Trust in Authority: An uncritical acceptance of information from authority figures and mainstream sources can lead to a lack of independent thinking and scepticism."
can come from this:
"Pietas: Reverence and dutifulness towards the gods, one's country, and one's family. In essence, it was about fulfilling obligations and responsibilities, and honouring the relationships that defined Roman society;..."
Jupiter and Juno, for example, had a pretty shitty marriage. Were they good examples of fides, gravitas and virtus?
There's got to be a balance in all things and an individual sense of morality and ethics too, because the customs of one's people may not necessarily all be good ones. Revering the wisdom of one's leaders can be a dangerous blindness.
And as far as foodstuffs and toxins and musculoskeletal injuries etc. etc.--the past was not entirely a time of glorious plenty and good practices and healthy strong straight bodies.
I appreciate your sentiments here but don't over-romanticize the often grim realities in those classical societies.
It's Saturday, a time to over-romanticise the wisdom of the past.
Saturn's day, I should probably say.
I grant thee dispensation.
There were grim realities in ancient & even recent past but if one just takes the most current example of grim realities of WuFlu “advice” e.g. mandates & worse: they told us isolation, distancing, masks & a “warp speed” untested “vaccine” was the ONLY solution. They denigrated & outright BANNED anything that would help - cheap therapeutics, fresh air, sunshine, losing weight, exercise.
Now there is an effort to undermine &/or ban over the counter vitamins, holistic, plant or otherwise natural based medicine, etc as “dis” or “mis” information.
https://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NymphePharmakeia.html
The situation is actually worse than what was depicted in Idiocracy... humans are buffoons run around by their noses by cnnbbc stuffing KFC and gallon jugs of cola down the maw and demanding pills to fix their obese diseased bodies... addicted to watching reality teevee and social media...
We are a disgrace.
Idiocracy is here, Fast Eddy
We're living it!
Indeed, Andy
I agree with both comments, but with a mobile constantly clutched there are instant answers and distractions. No one has to search deeply and with constant entertainment there is no time to ponder anything of any depth No silence or soul searching and you have to stay on trend and fit in. It does make it more difficult to be authentic but not impossible. We can only hope other wise the future is bleak.
Good leaders are required to build and sustain good societies. Bad leaders never build but always destroy prosperous nations. The destruction often starts from the inside as moral decay, making a people vulnerable to external forces. It was so with Rome. It is so with America. We face both a moral crisis of the people and a crisis of leadership. The two go hand-in-hand, especially so in democratic nations.
It can certainly be argued that everything “traditional”, “conservative”, “ethical”, “rational”, “common sense”, “HOLY” is being very deliberately co-opted, debased & erased w/ the drug-abortion-tyranny-everything goes-no personal integrity or responsibility-victimhood-blame anyone but yourself society today.
But we're going down the tubes like Rome.
This also made me think of Apollo, the god of prudence, which also has a bad rap these days.
They lasted a lot longer and then stopped following the mos mairoum
Religio; is really the key isn’t it?
Ever since Yeshua was executed and Peter woke up the next morning and exploited him to start a new religion with himself in charge we have been on this philosophically destructive path.
Christianity was co-opted by many along the way. Early “christians” burned the universities of philosophy in their day, the temples, the philosophy’s, murdered prominent philosophers and worshipers. Then when America was discovered they proceeded ti burn the Mayan and other libraries they discovered there as well, destroy their philosophies, and murder/enslave them.
I can not say that this period, millennia we find ourselves in is ANY DIFFERENT from what has been occurring since Julius Caesar’s time. Namely the organized corruption and suppression of knowledge and philosophy, and true religion.
We continue to be attacked and enslaved and war’ed upon. There is no peace. When they tear down General Lee, recognize what is going on, see the pattern and the gods of evil behind it.
Just a reminder that schools removed physical education that included exercise plus study of health, including diet. Of course I hated it. I could never climb that rope, but I had to try.
Brilliant! Thank you for bringing this ancient principle to light. I've long been an advocate for critical thinking toward all things but particularly technology. People forget that marketing has brainwashed us to believe that all new technology is automatically beneficial to us individually and to society. History demonstrates this clearly isn't true. Each must be assessed on its own merits or lack of them. Those with more negative than positive impacts should be rejected, or only minimally used, e.g. social media. The question to always ask is: Do I control my use of technology? Or does it control me?
The breakdown of the Family Unit and Morals was what destroyed the Roman Empire the same thing is destroying the United State of America! History does repeat it’s self!
I read, long ago, so there may be newer perspectives, that it was the lead in the vessels that got them. Which is analogous, if true, since we are drowning in toxins.
I was just talking to my progressive Howard Zinn obsessed friend about the value of traditions, which I think are in one way like psychological boundaries in a family. Another friend of mine and I, used to enjoy ranting about dead white European males, since we had to write long papers on, say, Milton, but at that point the Judeo-Christian Greek and Roman tradition, in all realms of culture, was still a strong backbone and boundary, which we could rebel, like teenagers, against, eclipsing its foundational depth. Now it is vanishing, like a father that leaves home for Chinese food or cigarettes, and never comes home, and we long for embeddedness and boundary, and only recognize their worth now that they are absent. The proverbial hell breaking loose seems engineered to me, but perhaps it always was engineered, though just as when they blamed the surrealists for inciting WWII, now some are blaming the New Atheists for the incoherence we find ourselves in. More complex than that! This is a great investigation, and, oddly, it partakes of the coincidence of opposites-- tradition as wild eyed revolution, a chimera, a Roman emperor crossed with Che, or Subcomandante Marcos.
N.E. sorry, off topic, the C40 report you mentioned which had been deleted on the C40.org site... is it this one now on Expose's servers? https://expose-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Arup-C40-The-Future-of-Urban-Consumption-in-a-1-5C-World.pdf
Put differently, translated from the Latin, this is a/k/a as "conservatism" with a small "c"?
Maybe one of the things we need to do today, to add to the mos maiorum, is to look deeply into our own motivations for why we do what we do, and why we are so disempowered that we rely on authorities instead of trusting our own knowing. The work being done on trauma today could open a few windows - especially information about the early trauma we experienced before we were cognitive, and we often don't even see that as traumatic (ie, making infants cry themselves to sleep, feeding them on 'schedules', not giving attachment when they need it, etc). Early trauma lodges in the body, and when cognition comes in it is just recognised as discomfort. When discomfort arises, we can push it away with any number of distractions - so is that why we now live in a 'culture of distractions'? Pleasant distractions are not 'happiness' but we confuse the two. Happiness comes from the inside and is more reliable and unshakeable, pleasant distractions come from the outside and never last. For anyone interested in trauma, Gabor Mate's book 'The Myth of Normal' explains it all beautifully.