Order Force

Spontaneous order, also known as freedom, is the highest level of a political pyramid of needs. These needs are: peace, security, law, and freedom. To advance order, always work for the next step – without skipping steps. In a state of war, advance toward peace; in a state of insecurity, advance toward security; in a state of security, advance toward law; in a state of law, advance toward freedom.

[…]

the assumption that all security problems, in all cases, can be resolved by the use of rights-preserving judicial procedures, is entirely unwarranted.

 Source: Uncommon Reservations

• One characteristic of modern societal structure that has been teasing at the edge of my mind for a while is the poor match of our legal violence to the above hierarchy of needs.
• Nation states today have an army, for resolving issues of war. The also have a police force, for resolving issues of law-breaking.
• Neither of these forces is intended to function to resolve or resist breakdown in societal order.
• Moreover, application of either force to the maintenance of societal order is an entrenched taboo. One direction takes you to a police state, the other a military regime — both anathema to the Cathedral governed state.
• That such a force does not exist within a Cathedral state implies that such a force cannot coexist with a Cathedral state.
• Were such a force to emerge organically, it would shortly be assaulted by the internal forces of the Cathedral state; first the police, then the army.
• Were such a force to emerge at the instigation of an Outer party — even the notion of such a force — it would shortly be assaulted by the Cathedral directly.
• Were either to be victorious internally, I cannot see but that international sanctions and then war would result.
• The inverse of such forces should, and do, emerge organically due to the function of the Cathedral. Their empowerment, at the instigation of the Inner Party, accelerates the approach of the singularity.

The Order Force

• In non-Cathedral nations — in both time and place — forces that utilise legal violence to reinforce the existing order are and were present.
• Even in Cathedral nations, one doesn’t have to step too far back in history to discover these.
• In states without separation of powers, these forces were sometimes located under the auspices of the church, other times under the state directly, other times as times existing as mid-level powers outside of the sovereign’s direct control.
• Residual portions of these have been actively eliminated by the Cathedral.
• Any order force implicitly imposes atrocity; more so that is its primary function.
• An order force imposes community standards.  This can step up from implicit pressure to conform, to explicit instruction to do so, to exemplary violence — neither condoned by nor hindered by the state, to state imposed violence, to exile or death.
• An order force actively resists any attempts to establish alternative orders. They are the response to both organised crime, and organised revolution.

The paradox

• Any community wishing to establish a basis that is non-Cathedral requires an order force.
• Any community wishing to co-exist with the Cathedral may not posses an order force.

End

Be thou my vision

Now faith is the title deed of things hoped for; the proof of things which are not yet seen

• At a certain point, the creation of a preferred future in ones mind becomes more than a hope. It becomes a vision of substance.
• The point this occurs is not fixed. Yet it is a point that always exists past the time where you start to invest yourself in it.
• It develops a pathway. It develops milestones. At at that point of transition, it develops the capacity to host faith.
• People do not follow a man of visions. They follow a man of faith, a man who possesses a title deed to the future they describe.
• That faith itself exists as a proof of things yet to come is utterly remarkable; we see that men follow faith. Men contribute wealth to see faith brought about.  At times, they even contribute blood.
• Thus today, as western civilisation continues to be hollowed out to the point of collapse, people are searching for faith in the heart of men. We are returning to the time of great men. Men of quiet determination, driven by a heart that holds to something real.
• Be those men.
• Allow a vision to take root in your heart, to the point it blossoms into faith.
• Sow into the visions of others around you. Detail them, refine them, exhort those who host them to greater hope.
• The time of ease has passed, and is yet passing. And yet as hardship comes, so also arises the capacity to thrive, to achieve more than could possibly be achieved in times of surfeit.
• I look around me and take great heart from what I see. Fires burning in the hearts of many, blazing trails in scant trod ground. When the second wave falls, the path will have been prepared.
• Not today for a life of ease, but a life of great hope, in faith of a future that is yet to be seen.

End

Maintaining The Final Frontiers

• As noted previously, I observe that contention with the frontier — the unvanquished natural state at the edge of civilisation — has a winnowing effect on a people.
• It eliminates without emotion and without fail the unprepared, the unable. Even the prepared, the able, remain ever in the shadow of its elemental nature.
• Thus it drives a people to closeness, to demand trustworthiness of each other, and a shared generosity and selflessness.
• Yet today, true frontiers are rare. Where they exist, they are often protected spaces, national parks. We as peoples of the new world have stopped pushing back the frontier. More than that, we have ceased to truly engage with it.
• To truly engage with a frontier, one must wrest a living from it. It is not sufficient to simply wander the space. The capacity to create basic civilisation ex nihilo, to push back the dark, to suffer, to succeed, to hunger, to feast is vital to its transformative character.
• As such, the modern practice of protection of the remaining frontier spaces simply bars us from the frontier engagement our people need.
• Yet with such precious little frontier left, what option do we have? Thinking generationally, is this generations need so great that we allow a burst of engagement that reduces the little to the none? No.
• So can we preserve the area for future generations while utilising it now? I believe so. This is the concept of the ‘Fixed Frontier’.
• Allow that the boundary of the Frontier doesn’t move; that the usage of the frontier is well managed; that it is utilised for a limited period, with limited mechanical assistance; that it is laid fallow after use.
• The frontier thus becomes a renewable resource, where a life can be carved out of nothing, for a time. Story is created. Culture is renewed and revitalised. People live. People die.
• Considered like this, there is more frontier than we recognise, and it can be both conserved and enriched.
• Ruins will accumulate, echoes of a earlier man’s struggle against the wild, binding us in ritual embrace. That each man might wish…

 that my grandson may find the ruins of what I once built, and build once again.  that I will have left him enough to strengthen his spirit, but not so much as to spare his soul. 

END

Frontier as Foundation

• Preliminary Reading: Frontierland by Sarah Perry
• Of parallel interest: A Disney World by Anton Silensky
• I’ve seen a number of pieces over time now looking at what is lost on the frontier.
• While these aren’t incorrect – a great deal of high culture is lost – they tend to ignore what is gained.
• A people exposed to the frontier are winnowed. Life is hard, elementally so. The elements are unforgiving, uncaring, and yield only to persistent labour. The people who survive are individually greater than those that came before.
• A people exposed to the frontier are alive, and contribute elements of story to the greater culture they are part of. The tendency to insularity and self reference is stripped away.
• A people exposed to the frontier develop and high trust and demand trustworthiness. Breaking trust is… final. Community is precious.
• So the frontier, while it strips away high culture, develops a rough nobility in its people. This nobility is rough; it suffers no pretence. It is coarse, deeply masculine.
• Thus the frontier develops in a people the character required for a noble culture to emerge. Everything soft, pampered, degenerate is removed, at the cost of the beauty and grace that went with it.  But as a basis for building anew, far better the frontier than the degenerate urban ghettos.
• So here is the challenge.  Bring greatness to the frontier. Bring your Able Men. They will be valued. They will be valued because they are able to trade: refinement for nobility.
• Bring your Able Man, and the Lady will follow. And the presence of a Lady will see grace, and beauty fostered. For the material for grace and beauty exists in abundance, waiting for the skilled hand to draw it forth.
• With the advent of the skilled hand, see a transformation flow. See refinement join with rough nobility, advecting both. A culture stripped of its pretence, built anew on a people, in a place. Led by a noble leader, mixing high trust and skilled hand.
• Place this community under wise advice, and see civilisation flourish. This is what those who look only at what a culture loses at the frontier miss. Opportunity.

End

Ritual Observance

• We all perform rituals. Repeated activities, conducted in order to remember certain things.
• At the simplistic level, there are personal rituals that are just part of our day. Coffee. Shaving.
• However even at the personal level, rituals can be deeper than this. Habits we have to remind us of who we are, have been, have known.
• However, ritual is something that comes into its own when it is shared. Whether this is at the level of the family, the group, the team, the community, the state, the nation, the church. Shared ritual brings shared experience.
• If you are trying to strengthen community, ritual is one of the primary tools of both analysis and construction.
•  Observing the rituals conducted by the people in your community reveals that which is common to them, that which is important to them.
• To establish identity, establish ritual.
• To break down identification and association with competing structures, modify or replace rituals.
• In general, attempting to cause others to cease a ritual will fail unless an accepted alternative is provided. In specific cases, specific circumstances, it may be possible by a process of mass refutation / repentance. No half measures.
• None of this is simple. Shared rituals are the product of intense, shared emotive, experiences. Death. Life. Change. Loss. Love.
• Because of this, even subtle modification to an existing ritual is fraught. Rituals will have guardians; individuals for whom the ritual is more significant, and who will defend its form.
• Thus an intentional modification to a ritual should be a greater observance.
• Again, establishing rituals is critical to establishing and maintaining identity.  But to establish a ritual, one needs an event, commonly experienced, to emotively connect community to.
• These event occur sporadically. Intentionality begins not with the causation of an event, but with a response that leads to a memorial.
• Doing this requires touch, a sense for what people will do, what people will find appropriate, what people need to remember from an event.
• Foster champions for your rituals.
• The extent to which ritual is established within a community, rather than framed from without, dictates the independence of that community.
• The extent to which ritual is shared with other communities, dictates the level of interdependence of that community.
• Maintain these in balance. In the modern world, most communities lack sufficient local ritual, depending rather on national rituals franchised locally.
• To follow a different path to the wider nation, a community needs to slowly replace national rituals with local variants, while nurturing its own.

End

The limitations of the Individual

• There has been a persistent myth, basically since WWII, that our nature is due primarily, nearly completely, to our nurture.
• Primarily this myth stemmed from the need in the West to hold averse everything that was held to demonise the German people in WWII. This sort of emotive charge does not brook rational argument, not for generations.
• Recently however, the science resulting from direct genetic studies has slowly driven an unavoidable wedge in this issue.  Those involved with the field have known now for some time that nature/nurture falls far more towards nature than is commonly held. Now, this information is leaking out in news reports.
• That said, the implications of a dominant nature — that your genetics dictate your ‘hardware’, and that your hardware overrides your software as an adult — are yet to be integrated back into society.
• Before we go further, I’ll point out that this is one area where we as individuals tend to have very poor ‘statistical samples’. We don’t know that many adopted children.  We certainly don’t know that many pairs of identical twins that were separated at birth, and brought up in different environments. So our normal ‘intuitive’ understanding of this area tends to fail for lack of experience.
• Lets go there. First the details.
• Your children carry your ‘hardware’. The way they end up can be generalised as 20% from the father, 20% from the mother, 5% from each grandparent, 1.25% from each great-grandparent, and so on. 20% is essentially random variation.
• As children, their experience count for more than their genetics. As they grow, this changes, until as adults their genetics count for more than their experience.

• For more details, Jayman’s blog is a detailed source of data and information.  He can be a little… rhetorical at times.  For more on the research edge, Westhunter presents thoughts from two of the leading genetic researchers of the day. Be prepared to think.

Considerations

• If our heritage is passed on to our children , we continue in them.
• To have continuing effect at the level you do now on history, have four to five kids, and enculture that notion in your children and grandchildren.
• The notion of individualism, of living solely for yourself and your own gratification, seems childish.
• You have a place in a long line of heritage. You have a responsibility passed down from those who have gone before, and to those who will come for generations after.
• Who you marry matters.  Who your children marry matters.
• Who you are is a gift, paid for in full, through the hard choices and sacrifice of those who came before. It is a privilege.  Treasure it.  Make the most of it.  Add to it.  Pass it on.
• Don’t limit your consideration to your own life time and what you can achieve today. Think generationally; in a world that focusses solely on the next ‘fix’, you have immense advantage.
• You, as an individual, have a limited time to affect the course of events. As one in a continuing line… your capacity is limitless.

End

The Veil of Peers

• Initial reading: Henry De Sio puts forward an intriguing set of statements about a structure of leadership driving change in his post Don’t be sidelined. Henry recently spoke at the Education Transforms symposium in Hobart, Tasmania. The post leads with:

The old one-leader-at-a-time system was based on one person big and everyone else small in any moment. With hierarchies falling, silos collapsing, and technology lowering the barriers to access, you now have the ability to contribute more fully in every aspect of society. In this new game, everyone plays. There is no room for smallness. The everyone-leads game requires everyone to step into their BIGness.

• The structure described is immediately compelling as a response to the modern world of limitless resource and constant change.
• Barring collapse, we are quickly approaching a future where all ‘work’ can be automated, where bringing about change is the primary human function of value.  The capacity we have for humouring our quirks — those aspects of our lives and communities we conduct because they make us individual, not because they make us wealthy — will continue to increase.
• As such, the paradigm described is only starting to become available, and represents a paradigm of privilege and freedom.
• Given this, there may be some interesting parallels to the situation within the Peerage in England, back when that meant something. Both situations provide profligate resources, real problems of value to resolve, and the freedom to manoeuvre to bring about their resolution; its would not surprise to see similar systems were adopted.
• Some companies have made good use of this style of approach, creating quality pools of people from which teams form to meet needs as they arise.  There are similarities with the cabals at Valve, and with the way General Electric’s Durham plant is run.
• There is no room for smallness. The capacity of a cabal of to produce work is limited by the capacity of its least capable member.  This is in stark contrast to a classically hierarchical organisation, where the capability of the most capable members are leveraged by all.
• The implicit corollary here is that a cabal requires a minimum standard to be effective. You cannot take just any group of people off the street and hope to make an effective cabal from them.  You must be selective, which is clearly referenced in both of the examples linked above.
• With hierarchies falling, silos collapsing, and technology lowering the barriers… A cabal is consumptive of a parent organisation. The very structures that make an organisation work are fuel for a cabal, which gains effectiveness from the destruction of those structures.
• The implicit corollary here is that establishing a cabal within an existing organisation will hollow out that organisation. If the cabal is not capable enough, the edifice will collapse leaving little of value in its wake.
• With high standards, a cabal approaches an aristocracy. Without standards, a cabal degenerates to a democracy. A democratic state is also a massive pool of people, self organising.
• The best democracies had, and in some cases still have, minimum standards.  Minimum wages. Ethnic similarity. Immigration controls. Unemployment.
• Yet even in the best democracies, the minimum standard is quite low, and this draws down the capacity of the overall group.
• The best democracies also had significant structures that provide initial support and ongoing fuel as they are consumed. The worst… well we have seen the results of that in Africa where democracy was imposed post colonially, and in the Middle East, where democracy was utilised recently to destroy a number of nations in the ‘Arab Spring’.
• Thus a cabal is something to be utilised with care, from a high base, with high standards, in a situation of profligate resources where grand outcomes are required. Much the same can be said of democracy.

End