Notes Towards a New Age

By Ed Ramsey

Ed Ramsey is a blue collar philosopher who has been living, working and writing, and developing his personal philosophy for 37 years.

He refers to his philosophical approach as Mavellonialism, the art and science of sophisticated self-development, whereby the individual cultivates his or her beliefs. This philosophy is amenable to the needs of every individual, man or woman, rich or poor.

This lifelong pursuit of self-improvement is inspired by the divine in every person on the planet, and will ensure the future of humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ed Ramsey
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476176154

Ed Ramsey

I grew up on a family farm in northeastern North Dakota. We were a lower middle class family, struggling to make it on a small farm. My folks were honest, church-going, decent, hardworking folk that kept struggling to feed their large brood, and make their farm business succeed. All things considered, they did pretty well for us. They are both gone now, but I can never repay them for what they did provide. For the last 32 years my family and I have lived in worked in the Twin Cities area. I have always worked in the facilities field, and have been a building engineer for the last 14 years. God, my wife, my children, work, and writing are the main loves of my life. I hope that I have made them proud. There are thousands of professional thinkers representing academia, governmental agencies and various think tanks. The advantage to being an amateur thinker is that one 's thinking is not distorted by professional or institutional biases. Living and working in the every day world, and in the marketplace, have allowed me to see the world from a more practical, free market perspective. As the years pass, and Mavellonialist thought becomes accepted, mainstream and popular, please remember that this outlook grew out of battling hostility, poverty, hardship, ridicule and indifference to bring this wonderful, God-derived philosophy to the world. All in all, so striving has been a joy, honor and privilege. Enjoy everyday, and grow in every way! Ideas have always been a passion of mine. For 39 years I have been jotting down my ideas, and these three books are the first fruits of that labor and refinement. More books are forthcoming.

Book preview

Notes Towards a New Age, Volume 1, Revised

By Ed Ramsey

Copyright 2017 Ed Ramsey

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of philosophy, the product of years of reflection and life experience. I began writing philosophy while an undergraduate student at the University of North Dakota, and continued my life quest while working as a maintenance engineer at a variety of Twin Cities facilities and commercial buildings. 

Many thanks to Jane, who has supported me through ups and downs (including knee and ankle surgery). She has proven to be an apt editor and amazing life partner. 

The cover was designed by Nancy Lambrinos, graphic designer and art director extraordinaire. You can see more of her work at nancylambrinosdesign.com. 

I welcome feedback from readers who, like me, embrace the Maverick Way. Let’s stay connected at smashwords.com/profile/view/maverickphilosopher.

Table of Contents

Culture

Freedom

Education

Friendship

Power

Science

Self Esteem

Truth

Wisdom

Work

Leadership

Love

Miscellaneous

Moderation

Objectivity

Ontology

Philosophy

Knowledge

Human Nature

Culture

1

We will be civilized once we enmasse discover that doing our duty is our chief pleasure. 

Civilization is about intermingling art, business and high culture to erect a moral and political utopia. 

Being an empire with colonies and exporting all the inequities erupting from mercantilist nationalism makes a country decidedly uncivilized.

2

In the next hundred years, thousands of languages with accompanying cultures will be wiped out by the invasion of global village with its travel, migration, technology and inter-continental communication spreading to every corner of the earth. 

A lowbrow, undesirable, universal monoculture may by accident come about. What would be preferential would be the arising of a bunch of little anarchist states that juxtapose a highbrow, selective world culture with three elements of equal percentage. Rationalism and a love of bourgeois, industrial, constitutional republicanism would constitute the first and universal part. Western, individualistic, capitalist-socialist, sacred/secular humanist culture is a fine choice for the basic culture to build upon and adapt to changing cultural needs.

The second part would be the multicultural part, a borrowing from any or all other cultures, what the locals value. No culture is so unblemished that its purveyors cannot gain from gleanings offered from neighboring cultures.

The third part would include local retention of native, pure cultural elements like language, religion, folkways, costumes, etc. The advent of this world culture will make living anywhere on earth a fascinating endeavor. 

We are trying haltingly to work towards—and must work towards—the new multi-culture that is moderate in flavor. It must be a culture based in the faith and morality promulgated by the Good Spirits, that has the advantages of being a traditional but young culture. It must be one that the people believe in, and follow morally and spiritually without the fanaticism, the absolutism, the anti-secularism and anti-individualism of a traditional culture.

A utopian culture must be multicultural and multiracial; pluralism comprised of biologically and institutionally blended elements from all isolated, pure culture and ethnic groups. And the subcultures of rich class or poor class from all peoples, in urban, suburban or rural luxury or poverty must be forsaken, for a classless society of middle class citizens.

Peoples have been borrowing each other's cultural heritages for thousands of years. The practice is as unstoppable as it is desirable. We need to encourage people to learn from other, not stay in their own conceptual rut.

We must detach ourselves from being overly fond of our society's civilization. Humans are frail and passing, so anything wrought by their hand too must perish--including America’s greatest civilization having not yet reached its zenith.

The culture of a people must be an elegant blend of the old and the new with global and local flavors blended tastefully in a believable way, pandering to no fad or done for monetary gain. A civilized society is a unique and flourishing native culture but is also multicultural, inclusive of all peoples.

No society is the sole possessor of civilization. Nor can it denizens rightly portray the members of all other societies as savage and unenlightened. All peoples are civilized and uncivilized in various ways. Neither primitivism per se or nor state-of-the-art technological advancement per se make a people automatically civilized or uncivilized--although the stream moral, democratic and civilized behavior more likely flows from its source in the mountains of technological development and scientific investigation. 

Though their chauvinism is unbecoming, those preservationists--around the world--of local culture have a point in rejecting the current imposition of Pan-Americanism upon local peoples.

If Americanism, in its deeper aspects as refined by its keepers, were to serve, and should serve, as the universal cultural cornerstone upon which to erect thousands of edifices of local culture, the world could do far worse than set up this model.

We should cherish and salvage our pasts, studying them and learning from them and our native culture. But we should also investigate and borrow from foreign influences too.

On one hand it is quite commendable to live pluralistically, adopting admired customs from other peoples. On the other hand, outlandish, clumsy attempts to be what one is not, and can never be, should give one pause about going beyond admiring what others do.

Are some cultures superior to others? Yes, but only based on their existing, cultural product, demonstrating their inclination to build a high civilization. They have evinced their interest in leaving a tribal, primitive past to participate in the Era of Internet. Having said this, it seems intuitively correct to suggest that any people can manufacture, given time, training and coordination, a high, modern, progressive civilization. No people is superior to another, but cultures created can be more advanced and others far behind but able to catch up where the people express the will to do just that. Any tribal and primitive people could dramatically modernize while retaining the best of their archaic culture.

Acculturation is the principle of moderation applied to culture. It is manifested as an appreciation and learning from diverse peoples around the earth. 

Acculturation is the blending of borrowings from the ways of life of divers peoples. This should overlay a core culture that is the American culture, the American Way. All should assimilate to the gold standard, and then customize it to fit their ethnic and national preferences.

Multiculturalism, if carefully constructed, should lead to a complex, rich mosaic of cultures all celebrated, and none given short shrift. The main line culture of the majority of people still should hold sway, but borrowings from the cultures of ethnic minorities should be included, and all should study the cultures of others. An honest effort should be made to objectively appraise each culture, in terms of their good points and bad points. This process should be as non-ideological and de-politicized as possible.

Multiculturalism should draw people together, not split them apart; its proselytizers should delineate where the cultures converge and where they diverge, with the emphasis on building common ground.

Multiculturalism is accepting a variety of subcultures and their accompanying values as legitimate components of our mainline culture. We must borrow copiously from and give generously to others cultures; this is the most beneficial and fecund free trade policy to adopt. We must be almost as proud of the ways of others as we are of our native customs. As Bahais used to advise, we need unity in diversity. 

Let the American culture be a gestalt culture in which a thousand monocultures are mixed and remain pure side by side, and the configuration is evolving by adding and removing characteristics from all these cultures, and then inventing new cultural features too. Thought, Godliness and individualism will drive a great culture more than feeling, demon-worship and collectivism. The great culture would externally and independently oriented.

Being open to diverse others is appreciation of them, realizing that we can learn from them and their culture. Being open is not tantamount to total abdication of who we are and what we like. Learning from others must not degenerate into acting like a surrendered clone to what others are and like. Such surrender is university, not diversity. It is a cultural monopoly.

Ultimately, a culture constituted on the principle of multiculturalism must be colorblind with affirmative action and anti-discrimination social and legal protections built in for all people as individuals and group-belongers.

Multiculturalism will lead to social discord, political disintegration, chaos and civil war if its adherents do not subordinate chauvinistic but legitimate celebration of their personal culture (mono-culture) to a miscegenized, uniculture (universal culture that is a moderate collage eclectically borrowing from all mono-cultures). Genuine multiculturalism cannot just be a code word for supplanting Western, Eurocentric, andro-centered, Father Sky Faith cultures. They have their place their too, and I would suggest for them senior partner share of the cultural attention and space too. All histories of people must be added, and included must be their political, economic and cultural ways and values, and the presuppositions upon which they base their ways. This alone will lead to unity within diversity, as championed by Bahais.

The great cultural paradox of our times is that to preserve our traditional culture we must embrace the latest cultural borrowings from about the world. Another way of making the point is to suggest that to retain the old, we must mix it with the new. The old, as part of the new cultural blend, will survive, if in an impure form.

Cultural pluralism: To discard our prejudice and racism and learn how to think not just what to think.

The arising of the world culture or the dominance of two or three world cultures, with retention of local color retained, will be a pressing concern and controversial decision to make in the 21st century. We must broker between various competitors to include the best of each and discard the inferior from each group to build and blend together that new culture.

Europeans traditionally believed in dominating nature more than being dominated by or coexisting with nature. There are three orientations towards nature which profoundly characterize and express the mission of a people. Like tribal people, hunters and gatherers, a people can live submersed totally within wild and untouched nature as it was originally thousands of years ago.

Or a people can inhabit villages and practice agriculture in the half-cultivated countryside in the midst of forests and prairies. 

Or a people can live entirely within a metropolitan area, where spaces are totally manicured or tilled plots. A sensible people will balance and practice all three orientations concurrently.

Population control is key to modern livability. If there are more jobs available then workers, too bad: either find more ways to be efficient or not let the economy grow. The emphasis must be on economic growth over environmental preservation but these conflicting needs must be balanced. The heritage of the local people needs to be maintained and honored. A balance of population and traffic must be established. Architecture traditional or immediate must be tasteful and blend with the historical bent of local culture rather than be clashing with it.  

A community must be lovely to visit, to live in and work in, no contrast in image and actuality. In the age of the global village local culture and legacy are in danger of being homogenized. It needs to be preserved. 

Development must commercially manage the local landscape without destroying its unique natural attributes or exterminating its fauna or flora. The local culture must be singular and exceptional, welcoming visitors and funds but restoring its dignity and livability too. It must be a bit for sale but not too much for sale. I support individual property rights and want compromise (anarchists agree on joint, private informal standards for voluntary compliance to prevent governmental, formal intrusion and control), voluntary compliance. 

Planning and zoning must take into account need for uniform protection of local flavor yet recognizing individual rights to do what one wants with one's own property. A culture must be true to itself and not lose its character and essence.

We will and should be influenced by foreign cultures, but we must adopt them to build upon the native genius of our own culture. If we do this we shall flourish.  

People can study the cultures of the world but that must not preclude them from studying their own culture. Accordingly, interest in white pride studies and in white culture among Caucasians need not be misconstrued as activities promoting separatism, racism or chauvinism. Indeed, as any ethnic group immerses itself in its own culture, the undertaking informs and complements their multicultural studies of other peoples. In any endeavor nothing is more informative and rewarding than a compare/contrast exercise.

Whatever cultural background we come from, and whether we are chauvinistic about it, indifferent about it, or loathe it, it is our starting point in the cultural quest, and by trying to reject it completely, we will usually end up frustrated and unhappy. How can we cut out our own hearts and then try to go on living? Therefore, we must develop a healthy relationship with our traditions, and then move ahead culturally, as we want to, borrowing from all over as we see fit. We should not feel lost, but root ourselves open-endedly in our tradition, and then move beyond it or live within it as need be. If we have a healthy relation with out origins, we will have a healthy relation to where we are arriving at. 

The only sensible attitude towards our culture is not to cherish it too much or too little—but more the former than the latter. And then we shall borrow from many other cultures in the spirit of cultural internationalism, but rightly live within our own culture most.

Extreme cultural diversity, that is not centered in, but supplants chaotically preserved native culture, can result in a loss of societal ties that hold people and the country together. If it thoroughly, speedily and focusedly replaced native culture, its impact will be so disorienting, because the people would be so flummoxed that they would have little to hang onto. Perhaps the Russian people are the best know example of what happens to a people when Bolsheviks did strive to wipe out the czarist past. 90 years later the culture and its populace seem spiritually crippled, not at peace with their past or handling well the present or future.

The subsequent loss of belief in traditional culture brings about loss of a meaning system from which people derive rationale and motivation to keep going forward, and to bring meaning to their lives. 

People unschooled in the culture of Mavellonialism would find the anomie following the crashing of their cultural moorings cognitively devastating. Reared in otherness and attached to the web of inter-collectivist living, sudden withdrawal of the warmth of the group and its cultural matrix leaves them feeling disconsolate and coldly separated. Open-ended cultural and intellectual investigation of new cultural forms does not appeal to them. They do not approve of the modified cultural landscape; the bonding available through the old culture, however limiting and closed, was very comforting and they want it back now. They are cultural isolationists. Cultural expansionism, inclusiveness and internationalism provide new vistas for those that can sustain the apart-ness of independent cultural experiencing. 

America's mainline culture is not bankrupt. Instead it is fantastically rich and open-ended with possibilities. Its very eclecticism is its treasure source, not its sign of banality and blandness.

Memorial Day Weekend, 1993: I listened in fascination to elderly World War II veterans interviewed on the news, and they recalled their unabashed patriotism in a simpler time when men and women were proud to serve their country. Then there was a mono-culture here absolutely believed in and mostly adhered to, and right was right and wrong was wrong, and we were the good guys and the Axis powers were the bad guys. It was America right or wrong, love it or leave it. What has changed? 

The monoculture has withered with our concomitant disbelief and disaffiliation with the religious, moral and political values that used to prevail in America. Gone is much of our certainty about the nature of the world, our place in it and how we should treat it. 

In the 90s the conservatives in America sought to take the high ground by announcing that the young were culturally illiterate: that youths are no longer grounded educationally in the Occidental classics.

They have a point. So to do the multiculturalists, who should add to traditional American culture instead of ignoring and discarding it, not introducing the young to it.

The Western, continental, primary, traditional culture and its adherents are what comprise the American social landscape. But this heritage is not the only culture in our multicultural society. Let all know their own cultural heritage in the larger context of societal heritage. People need to know their heritage to know where they are from and the confidence to pursue where they are going. The main heritage is wonderful, and let us blend it together with all the other heritages.

I am cognizant of the racial and ethnic complexities involved. I am also cognizant of the myriad of other valid exceptions at work in both modern and historical context that water down the following generalization. Still I speak the truth in stating that, inside of and outside of America, we are all struggling to optimally blend the clashing cultures and values of collectivist and individualistic peoples. In almost all cases our best efforts have failed miserably. No culture is utterly communal and no culture is completely individualistic, but one of these flavors is dominant in any given society.

We must find a way to borrow from each other, mixing together traditions and modernities so the best of communal and individualistic cultures are mixed. For some peoples or communities, returning to their traditional cultures in isolated purity (as much as is feasible like the Amish today resisting the outside world), will be the solution.

For the vast majority of us, the answer is to be what we are from our roots and take what we can from other peoples to guide our youth.

Where traditional cultures disintegrate, and new cultures are tossed together thoughtlessly, haphazardly and accidentally, the damage can be very great--given human nature, fanaticism and lawlessness when the veneer of civilization, law and training is taken away from young people.   

Then, with the disappearance of the family and family values, the result is a horrible instance of mixing the worst from individualism (lazy, self-indulgent, selfish, violence and doing crime to make a living) with the worst of collectivism (The absent father syndrome with young men raised in gangs and urban decay seems to spread everywhere.). From around the world, nonwhite and non-Western peoples, to the degree that they are collectivist peoples, need to mix individualism and collectivism for youth in a prideful way respectful of diversity to guide them to become productive citizens and adults.

There is little chance of returning to our traditional society with its collectivist, tribal and maybe rural way of life; but the stabilizing traits from that life style need to be part of a successful 21st century America. Should we not follow this path, we will be a destabilized people of a few haves and many have-nots, in economic decline, with racial and class warfare, perhaps a militaristic threat to the world as our democracy dies.

It is a hapless social agenda to urge people to stay within their cultural and ethnic enclaves. The best solution is to urge each citizen to live as an isolated individual, both multiculturally borrowing from all peoples and societies while remaining in touch with her own traditions. The sacred state of individualism must be proffered as the ideal universal identity shared by all--however much or little groupists have in common with anarchists. Once individualism is established as the base upon which many heterogeneous customs are erected, then real acculturation and intermingling--as well as the preservation of isolated, unadulterated ethnic purity--can commence.

Now in the l990s many are saying the traditional melting pot scenario (assimilation into the American Way) is not ethnically applicable to America, and nor should it even be considered desirable; the alternative: a mosaic of ethnic pockets of racial purity, cultural integrity, separateness and even separate languages. But the mosaic is not moderate and ultimately can be fractious and lead to splitting the country not unlike what happened in Canada. People should enjoy their particular patch of the mosaic but the melting pot should be the ideal that we strive for, and it has not failed when tried up to now, but was never totally implemented. America’s traditional brand of individualism is a pale, unimaginative portrayal of what individualism can be. The newer, full-blown version will serve as the perfect framework for a lively, flourishing melting pot to develop in.

One official language is enough for a country this huge, but concurrently everyone should strive to be at least tri-lingual. One language and one culture are critical to holding together our

Heinz-57 culture and ethnic diversity. We must be united and blending mostly, but still separate and unique somewhat--the ideal solution. We must love, tolerate, and embrace each other's different cultural habits and mores, being more inclusive than exclusive, intermarrying, interbreeding, being religiously super-ecumenical, etc. We must make it a big melting pot unlike the semi-melting pot of yore when the WASPS and later the WACS never did assimilate others, nor wanted to.

Cultural diversity means expanding not eliminating the mainstream culture. This Exceptionalist American culture needs to be the gold standard imitated and adopted—with local flavoring of course added in--all around the world. America need not be like the rest of the world. The rest of the world needs to become like America. Only then may humans survive and thrive.

The predominant, Eurocentric culture is eroding in impact in America. This culture of white males and many white females constitutes the conceptual core typifying Westernism. Its contributions are many, rich and varied. Nonetheless, it is a flawed culture--as all are--but this least flawed culture's advocates have committed many historical sins and mistakes justifying them in the name of this culture. That too is a typical cultural phenomenon, and represents evildoers clinging to ideological rationalizations for their wrongdoings. But, beyond that, it does point to some fundamental errors in thinking that enabled the wrongdoers to present this value system as the basis for their actions. 

While acknowledging all this and despite it, I submit that Westerners still offer the profoundest value contents and fantastic cultural treasures that have been invented. It is marvellous.  Westernism still has the most to offer. It would be a worldwide tragedy to wholly reject it and what its followers suggest. The best from it should be retained and built upon in order that we can achieve a better world tomorrow.

Referring to the raging cultural wars being waged between conservative traditionalists and liberal multiculturalists in academia, I wish to rewrite how Western culture should be examined. While proud of its tradition, its cultural contributions will be rich and provocative in the future, so the whole world should study and admire those in the future. The multiculturalists too promote studying cultures that have traditions too, and their modern contribution will be exciting to investigate. Studying the traditions and future inputs from all civilizations is the key to acquiring a liberal arts education.

The world is a funny place and I wish intellectuals would make up their minds. First, 25 years ago the American middle class people were excoriated for ethnocentric non-interest in the ways of life of others. Then, purists sniff that only cultural aborigines have a right to their own cultural practices. 

If and when we launch against outsiders our boastful, jingoistic remarks, it demonstrates plainly that we are provincial sticks in the mud. We are cautious, fearful devotees of routine, the customary, the local. We are not adventurous, curious, daring or searching for new and exciting prospects and peoples.

3

In the late 20th century we are close to constructing heaven or hell. Living in the Digital Age could mean anything, from a wondrous utopia to a wretched hell on earth. It can be used to build or destroy. It will be a sea change, dramatic change with technological adaptations that will be breathtaking.

I feel rather ambivalent about living in the Age of Information: these times will either be very good or very bad, depending on how the collective will reacts to the waves of technological invasion. Society easily could collapse into barbarism, crime, crippled infrastructure, chaos, poverty, war, and incivility, panic and totalitarian oppression.

It would not be difficult to give in to the temptation to misuse dangerous technology. We shall either have a wonderful future or no future at all. I realize that many in the past historically have mistaken their time as the pivotal end of the world generation, but now seems something like that to me. Either we are approaching the end of our world (never the end of the world which goes on forever in some mode) or the beginning of our world. I hope this is only a case of millennial nervousness.

History is replete with failed drives to utopia. Therefore, though I am optimistic about our eventually climbing to the plateau of high civilization, and before that blessed era commences, there is no guarantee that we will not enter a millennial dark age first, or suffer World War III or stumble into some Star Wars kind of advanced totalitarian, universal empire. Nor is there any assurance, that once we have entered an era of utopia, that we will not fall back out of the state of grace again. Nevertheless, we have a fair chance of making it.

There are always constraints on what humans can do. Some of them over time will be pushed back. Some will be permanently insurmountable. Having allowed this, I remain an optimist only somewhat concerned about humans future of grand potential and endless becoming and self-reinventing.

In 1996, with the Digital Age with its components such as cyberspace, the Internet and virtual reality, it is a fair question not rhetorical bloviating to wonder where it is all leading to, and should we live that way. I believe technology liberates and improves more than it stifles and brings darkness. It is so historically momentous that we are overwhelmed by it. 

We still need to work. love and get up every morning and take care of worldly affairs. We still need to talk with God, so that we may assimilate it all eventually even if we suffer through World War III, the Return of the Beast and the introduction of a Brave New World. Good times will return one day and we will go forward.

We will have unlimited prospects for inventing and reinventing culture. It can be incredibly rich or a paucity of highbrow, compassionate and civilized attributes. It is structurally, behaviorally, socially and fundamentally different from cultures in the prehistoric, the preliterate, the pre-tribal, the tribal past and historic, literate/non-literate periods of human development.

We must, collectively and individually, from the bottom and top of society, from Wall Street to Madison Avenue to Main Street, from Academia and Washington, from the farms, villages, suburbs and cities, from global and local perspectives, organically and naturally, intentionally and accidentally, inorganically, artificially, theologically and secularly, via technology and manually, create and recreate our new culture.

In this potential utopia of peace, love and plenty, tolerance and acceptance all cultural inputs are needed and wanted. And yet the individual must take what she can use and discard the rest without social or legal repercussions for doing so.

A utopian culture needs a balance between a reliance on science and technology naturalism and back-to-nature, primitive living. Both poles of living are fallible and cause problems, but science and technology liberate and civilize and make us win more than primitivism and anti-knowing, which stunt and are destructive forces of negative change and sameness (the historic years pass but qualitative change in human life are few). Primitivism dehumanizes and science humanizes and re-humanizes.

Technology is more beneficial than not--military applications, computer operated invasions of privacy, dangerous industrial and environmental hazards to the contrary. Technology is the hardware and software of material invention and application so humans can meet their needs in the every day life.

If we do not blow ourselves up, or, as mentioned above, end up with the reign of the Beast or worldwide totalitarianism in the 21st century, it should be a wonderful century in which to live. It will be a time when the unusual is the usual, and the out-of-the-ordinary is the ordinary.

The Age of Information will liberate not frustrate individuators. Individuators will learn to use their remarkable brains to memorize, remember and understand sheer mountains of raw data and sophisticated descriptions of that data. Enriched life, social and work experience will round off their learning. Their vigorous, fresh and crisp perceptiveness, grounded in their independent, creative and original thinking, and their objectivity and empathy directed toward others (greatly improved listening skills so they learn from the past, the old, the young and from people representing many cultures), will be the means by which they swiftly but carefully reinterpret their cultural gleanings to build new conceptual worlds for human civilization to expand into. They will convert the complex, the proffered, the symbolic from society, reconfiguring it as an inviting, exciting tableau.

Fruitful culture in the 21st century will have to allot to people a framework by which they can hold onto the permanently valuable in the past while enthusiastically embracing the future, the changing world.

4

For society to not stagnate, degenerating into a cesspool of tradition without new creative inputs and increasingly civilizing impressions, the people must keep growing and welcoming of new peoples, ideas and ways. This almost never happens historically or naturally. Only a very developed populace of much vigor, self-awareness, determination and ambition can jump-start a moribund society.

Everybody realizes and accepts that a people experience a period of cultural blossoming followed by centuries or even millennia of stagnation--at worst degenerating into a permanent Dark Age.

Society is like a teenager: each is granted a short season of creative development. Then comes the hard part. People then find accumulating the energy, the courage and the adaptability to absorb further change hard to come by. Change predictably has become disjointing and painful. But what a catalyst it is should they summon the will to incorporate it routinely into their lives. Pluralism, affluence, leisure and competing ideas all go into the recipe for cultural explosion.

Then the new creations become the system and the people are growing ever more sleepy and increasingly groupist. The time of flourishing has already waned.

In the twenty-first century, to head off the coming of every-threatening cultural decline, we will need initiative-driven, risk-taking persons in our society to thrive, so from then on we must reward dissenters to develop a tradition of sensible risk-taking.

Many times in human history for many peoples the drastic changes acceptable to the current generation are completely alien and lost to the elders, and would be that also for the departed if they could be revived.

For these old-timers, the brave new world seems chilly, foreign, incomprehensible and disconnected. There is less communal warmth and organic beehive inter-associating. What was corporate has become anarchistically split up into remote, discrete units. It would be quite harrowing and difficult for them to adapt without the lacking the joint frame of reference.

For us in the year 2000, in 75 years, and sooner after that, we too would feel completely out of place in those times. The pace of change will expand at a bewildering rate of speed. 

5

Cultural orientation strongly dictates personal value positioning. To change the position assumed, change the orientation.

6

For the people in any civilization to excel to the next or higher level of development, the following set of preconditions is critical. First, a cultivated citizenry must enjoy and take advantage of arrived leisure, law and order, peace and prosperity in a civili society, as they become ordinary situations for them.

Second, they must be tending to opportunities to make their dreams come true. Third, they must build upon what they have inherited from their ancestors. Fourth, they must support each other’s parallel efforts to elevate the self via talent mastery. 

In 2009 I worked for a nonprofit organization: one of their mental health mottoes for clients is: learn, grow, excel. That is not bad shorthand advice for personal growth.

The drive to individuate is really a way of yielding to one's enormous appetite to be the genius and live the four-star life-style that one envisions as worthily matching one's huge ego and prodigious ambition.

This is not the same as being a luminary or wielding tremendous leverage over millions of lives. Rather, one should lead a rather drab outer life of the ordinary citizen encasing an inner life of splendor and wonder.

One should not crave fortune, power or fame--although if these come to one accidentally, enjoying them is permitted. One must not however come to depend on them, for these servants quickly turn against one, becoming masters which will ruin and derail one.

Once one actually makes it, one should thank everyone for his or her praise and fuss, and then return to the private life of self-actualizing peacefully, much indifferent to external input.

7

It is the mark of the survivor that she can come to America, ripped out of the cocoon of her traditional homeland--far away from family and friends--and thrives here. She remakes herself; she is born again. She makes a new life for herself, mixing the old and the new. Being uprooted is very excruciating, but there are great benefits coming to those who adapt. On the down side, there can be grave disadvantages administered to society by those shattered by the deracination.

8

I hate to sound like a missionary on behalf of proposing acceptance of the Myer-Briggs personality classification system, but for me it seems to explain a lot about people.

Now, I propose going one step farther by blending it with the ideology of moderation and self-actualization theory.  Thus, I envision a future where people of all 16 personality types will each be admired, accepted and encouraged to do their own thing with gusto.

In this future certain personality traits are not downplayed, and where specific personality types are not labeled as inferior, wicked or unacceptable. Millions of individuals from each personality type shall continuously ring the world's bell in a myriad of astonishing ways.

9

We all have some talent. All the average bloke needs to do is believe in him self sufficiently to dare to expand the boundaries of those talents as he creates some marvellous things. Cumulatively, this will much enrich society and him.

10

We are increasingly isolated from one another in the post-modern era and that is a blessing more than a curse. Self-realizers need to spend a lot of time alone to develop themselves. It is now more socially acceptable--or should so be--than ever to be alone, so we must take full advantage of the chance for solitude.

The digital age can leave us isolated in our little electronic prisons, but it need not be so. We can and indeed must remain in touch with our neighbors, God and the real world.

There is much that is hurried, crass and shallow in individualized Western culture with its emphasis on reason, democracy and its humanistic culture. But the private person here has unprecedented opportunity to live freely, to be left alone to follow his dream to its end. Even more individualism is needed, and that benefits the whole.

11

Hoffer speculates that the trader and hunter built the cities, the center of progress, while farmers in villages stagnated. Part of the problem, I believe, is that country folk are more group-oriented and city folk are more individualistic. I do not believe that this generalization of mine belies the nature of rural people—even though more of them would sympathize with the ideology of Ayn Rand than would members of an urban population.

Cities, despite their problems, are the center of human advancement, and are where modern faiths will go forward the quickest.

It is so dreary to listen to the cultured sneer at how uniform, crass and barren is the suburban mall culture. Of course there is much to what they say, but their snobbery disguises a fundamental misconception underlying their contempt for the masses. 

They believe people should walk before they crawl. I believe people should crawl before they walk. The great material blessings to be browsed through and marvelled at, at the mall reminds me how good the average American has it, how high they are living and how far they have come along the road to high civilization.

They have learned to crawl. Now they must retain their mall civilization while gently, carefully getting up onto wobbly legs, and began enjoying, supporting and making the finer things in life.

12

There are many young people in the 90s--not unlike similar patterns in other decades--who are college educated but view studying and gaining a degree as only acquiring a glorified technical certification which will open the profitable doors of professional employment to them. They are baffled by anyone who actually likes to read, think, ruminate and discuss things of import with others. 

These non-intellectual young people are not stupid, but they will end up that way because they do nothing to expand their intellectual horizons. Instead, they scoff contemptuously upon those who do read and think. Most people applaud that point of view.

Obviously I am recommending that reading and thinking for their own sake are dimensions of self-realizing.

Sadly, pseudo-intellectuals posing as deep thinkers intellectually steal the thunder of leading the thoughtful life. There are so few intellectual originals. But affected intellectual followers are legion. Most members of the intelligentsia are merely pretentious hacks. They may read, think and discuss great ideas, but their words are stilted and shrill; their concepts are as barren as the imaginations of the clique members that they run with and pander to. Their ideology, their intolerance, their conforming ways, their interfering with others, their jealousies, their squabbling, their competing, their plotting to run others’ lives, their selling out and serving the status quo, their unwillingness to grow and learn from others--these traits have smudged the reputation of pseudo-intellectuals, making becoming an actual, nonconforming intellectual, a socially embarrassing ambition. 

Hoffer correctly notes that the material, practical civilization of the masses is a fecund, unregulated springboard for human progress. Middle class affluence, conformity, uniformity, shallowness, superficiality, playfulness, self-indulgence and triviality are not admirable ends in themselves, but they operate admirably and inescapably as desirable traits serving to further the advance of civilization. 

Should the grim commissars who hate the middle class come into power (Barak in 2014 embodies them in power)--with their economics and psychology of scarcity--they will grind human progress to a halt as they micro-control the lives and affairs of the masses, ordering them about like children.

One relief from this is to rear a generation of blue-collar intellectual loners who, even if they follow the white-collar rout, do not lose their intellectual aliveness.

It is simplistic, unwarranted and destructive for well-meaners to criticize intellectual dallying in pure research, fine art projects, private hobbies and going after personal dreams, dismissing these endeavors as so much elitist self-centeredness at work in the midst of worldwide poverty and injustice.

Cultural advancement hinges on engaging in such endeavors. Granted no one should turn a blind eye to the suffering, poverty and wretchedness of brothers and sisters anywhere. The better off and their governments should do what they can to alleviate the state of the less fortunate.

Beyond that though, improvement is largely achievable only by the downtrodden themselves. We need to program the unfortunate to be self-reliant in order that they can bootstrap themselves upward. 

Also humans do not live by bread alone, so private cultural achievements may be enlightened self-interest at work, but such endeavors are to be praised, or even become suggested to all.

As all Americans individuate, mixing together a business degree with personalized flashes of artistic expression, the special domain of the elite clerisy will wither away. When everyone has intellectual and creative leanings and acts them out, it is no longer the resort of a privileged few. Here again, the psychology of abundance reveals that devolved cultural power engenders a people with a live-and-let-live ethos where no one is dominated by another, nor harbors ambitions to be put on a pedestal and revered by others. They just want to be left alone.

The pseudo-intellectuals, populating our cultural elite, may hate or pretend to hate poular culture, but in fact they are the haves of the same culture, or its gulag-arriving  replacement. 

High culture, the bedrock of high civilization, is to be sought after by all as middle class intellectuals. High culture can only be founded and established as a mixted extension of American middle class culture.The blend must include steaming, regular inputs from elite main line culture and countercultures of every description. We are all liberal and conservative about different cultural entities, and we should all be more intellectual than anti-intellectual. But we should be practical and materialistic too.

13

As our culture goes forward, the natural world is unfolding too. The latter should be subordinate to the former where their needs conflict. But its subordination should be respectfully, thoughtfully stewarded by humans as God-fearing angels.

We humans must live apart from nature to grow unfettered and free. With the advancement of our civilization, universal affluence will give us the drab and stimulating work to do and leisure time too to enjoy it.

The unnatural and artificial need not become depraved if not overly centralized in cities: we can be urban and artificial and yet decentralized. Nature, freed up from natural law, is depraved and utterly centralized.

We are the center of goodness and improvement. Nature is the heart of darkness and backwardness.

Therefore, it is a betrayal to the cause of human advancement for well-educated, affluent liberals to seek to immerse humanity back into the muck from whence they struggled so mightily, for so long and at enormous cost to extricate themselves. The Devil is using the liberals to undo all the gains of the last couple of hundred years, and odds are Sa’s fell cause will rebound on the backs of these smug, clueless, lost, stupid, arrogant and self-righteous feel-gooders. 

Sometimes I think they mean well, and at other times I am convinced that conscious malice and class warfare guides their hatred of middle class suburbanites and their splendid western civilization.

The pitiless, unending war between good and evil operates on all planes of existence. In the human domain this entails that humans are the good forces battling against encroaching natural forces. The fight is real and in earnest, a clash to the death, eternally as well as biologically speaking.

Humans must stay somewhat in contact with nature without being immersed in it or surrendering to its rhythms. Residing harmoniously--as harmoniously as possible--with nature yields the obligation that humans keep nature at arm's length. Humans must live uncontrolled by, awake and focused on controlling, directing and making a living off of nature. They will not pollute or plunder nature, but alter it they must to further the development of their society.

Technology liberates, improves and brings progress more than it enslaves, worsens the human condition and destroys and leads to retrogression. 

Similarly, humans will not become well-bred, free to develop or acquire happiness without much distance kept between them and nature, bounded by the suburban world, a haven in the midst of biological madness and tumult.

A people with their culture are not making history and moving forward unless its people depart from nature and migrate towards science and technology. Then they are moving forward and upward as they activistically develop in a straight path up and away from old levels of cultural underachievement.

Humans have not really gone far along the elevated course of human separation from nature until they not only move apart from nature per se, but also intentionally diverge from one another's presence in calculated defiance of their overwhelming, herding instinct.

We need to know that we should dominate but not suffocate the world around us. We should rearrange nature to meet our preferences. We should make our presence felt more in the world. We are not to live unobtrusively submerged in nature. It is not our destiny or duty to blend in non-ambitiously. We are superior. We are the best. We should get the lion's share of natural resources--not other animals. We must not be unduly restrained in helping ourselves.

We need lots of room around our single-family dwellings. We will be most happy in big houses with lots of material things commensurate with the life of affluence. We require play time and leisure activities for their own sake. We still need to work and individuate also.

We should live well but not ostentatiously. We should live respectably but still live the way we want to. Our pursuit of trivial, material things and pleasure should be for reasons of personal enjoyment, not to impress others, nor hide from an unloved self in a fantasy world of conspicuous consumption, nor to keep moving endlessly as a hopeless attempt to refute a our core suspicion that our existence is meaningless. 

It is pure twaddle to talk of forcing all people to live in the urban center as a means of halting urban sprawl. The solution to ending urban sprawl is to cut our population back to World War II levels while ending almost all immigration.

Those who crave to live in the city let them. Those who crave to live in the country let them. Those who prefer to reside in the suburbs let them. Where they want their ranchettes, it should be no problem. Affluence, room, plenty, peace and quiet, non-congestion and genteel out-of-itness will appeal to civilized anarchists. Wherever they are, they will establish their things to do, their salons, shopping, their fine arts, etc.

They are not stuck-up: they are just quality folk who know their worth and are not shy about announcing it to the world. They view no one else as inferior, but they do chastise others of any race or gender who settle for living different and sometimes lesser lifestyles. They will not punish non-performers for non-performing, but they won't approve of their laziness or slovenliness either. Their urge all to live and let live, and they want social engineers and power-hungry eggheads to leave them alone.

It is laudable (even an ethical obligation) for a people to consume more than they conserve. By this I do not mean spending more than they make. This they should refrain from doing. What I do mean is that a culture based on materialism, a careful, Epicurean materialism, elevates their humanness and makes modern civilization hum. They should not waste or engage in ostentatious acquisition, but conserving (the psychology of sparseness) is less prudent than expending resources (the psychology of abundance). Somewhere in the 90s I heard these terms about sparseness and abundance used.

There is a strong philosophical link between the pursuit of egoism and the pursuit of materialism and idealism. Engaging in all three concurrently makes achieving the other goals much richer, more productive and more likely to occur. Anti-materialism usually is philosophically linked to a misanthropic anti-humanism, self-loathing, anti-idealism, and a perverse greed for natural and artificial goods.

Acting upon a psychology of abundance is to express one's belief in the future of human development. It is an expression of confidence that humans deserve better times ahead. Practically speaking, consuming a bit more than conserving helps our beneficial capitalist economy expand.

Despite all the education and human advancements by the late 90s, well-educated, urban Americans reveal their anti-humanistic biases by exhorting all to live simply and go back to nature, chumming about with nature, regarding it in a romantic, saccharine and naive mood of wonderment.

14

Hoffer correctly warns that society can be destroyed by teenagers passing from adolescence to adulthood without being kept apart from each other, under the effective supervision of firm but loving adults.

This is especially true in times like the 21st century. The transitory character of the cultural canopy under which citizens exist has the potential to throw every teenager into an identity crisis, and that could destroy society. Times for children now are much harder in some ways and are much easier for them in other ways. By training kids to persevere, work and self-realize, they will stand tall and make us proud.

Embedded, in my appreciation of the need for pre-teens and adolescents to experience coming-of-age rituals, training and job experiences, is my understanding of those mutually inclusive activities. Youth must wrestle with the fact of their human depravity in order to obey the divinely commanded requirement that each person self-realize. Children must be taught to surmount their basic natures to mature and individuate if they are to become productive members of society. Rites of passage go a long way towards helping them grow up and heading them in the right direction.

15

It is claimed, but only a little bit rightly, that it is unrealizable for me as a white male to know what it means to be black. Some would adjure that is also my obligation to struggle futilely to undertake such a study. I reject these demands. Nor can non-whites know entirely what it is like to be white, and nor is it their chore to attempt it.

In fact, outsiders making the effort to understand those alien to themselves can largely come to understand what it means to be that other. Paradoxically, the path to understand what makes another tick is to get to know the self first, via maverizing. There is no other way.

For any ethnic groupt, there will be mysterious niches unknown to any but insiders but they are not significant. Fascinating but not significant. We struggle to know another deeply; but it is enot harder than getting to know ourselves.

We should not even concern ourselves that members of one group can not know what it is like to be members of a different group. This is an intellectual dead end. All that is required is to offer them liberty and an open field to discover what andwhom they are by maverizing.

The vital issue is that all are individuals first, and group-affiliated second. For individualists the mandate is to come to know the stranger at hand, themselves. Each should most live her own life, coming to know herself over time. She should learn from others, and teach those others about herself as her spare time allows. The primary objective then, is not to understand another. Rather it is let the other go free to self-discover while striving furiously to grasp the essence of one’s self.

We cannot completely understand someone else's unique situation because we are not that person. On the other hand, humanity's ethnic members share some common perspectives and experiences, so some greater understanding is possible. And someone from another people brings her understanding to another's unique experiences that can enlighten those experiences from a fresh vantage point. And then the observer’s just applying the practice of plain objectivity brings yet another type of understanding to these various experiences.

We cannot ultimately know another, only deeply.

16

Nothing is more consecrated for people than their ancestral, hidebound customs. No serious reformer can afford to underestimate people's resilient ability to backslide away from an embraced reform, back to that which they are accustomed to. People can only change so fast. Forcing them to move faster than that pace dooms society to ugly backlashes and unnecessary upheaval. No reformer, that loves people, coerces them into accelerated change. Peter the Great was too impatient, and failed. He did not modernize the backward, Russian value system, the one thing that the Slavs desperately need to reform.

The sensible reformer is patient and forgiving, willing if need be to wait forty years in the desert with the people. People need time to catch up.

As Hoffer aptly points out, rapid change causes us all to regress to become those more primitive, juvenile beings--children again. Children are much more extremist, emotional, seeing the world in black and white terms, more credulous and willing to join a pack. 

For the advent of high civilization to last, we must learn how to cope with rapid change like the shrewd investors dealt with the volatile stock market in 1998. 

Like them, we must note the changes and adjust, as we are required to without losing our sense of balance. We adjust while remaining confident that what we are and have built up is essentially sound. A civilized response to rapid-fire change allows us to change without disrupting society or derailing our sense of inner peace in any chaotic, destructive way.

Where the majority of citizens routinely, quietly transform themselves to keep pace with drastic change, and keep doing so all their lives, there is no evidence of them being transmuted into passionate misfits which they historically would have been. In place of that, we observe sensible adapters going contentedly about their affairs, blending the old with the newest to arrive at a workable status quo. Their fragile senses of self have been reaffirmed.

In 1996 everyone was urged to scurry about using voicemail and e-mail, to install a fax machine in their house and to get online with the Internet. Entering virtual reality and living in cyberspace can be fun, beneficial and illuminating but everyday reality, relationships and business must not be sacrificed for the sake of this latest, popular obsession. We are in grave danger of losing contact with reality, floating in free association without our feet planted solidly on terra firma.

Maybe things today are moving forward too swiftly. Still, we must change with it or fall hopelessly behind. This does not mean that we should uncritically embrace every change. It does mean that though we cannot worship technocracy as a cure-all, we should embrace it knowing it has brought humanity more benefits than setbacks. We must take care of our sanity and change gracefully at a manageable pace that does not leave us agape as quivering emotionalists, or cultural cheerleaders thrilled to board every passing bandwagon. 

Our lives have sped up, and things are no longer uncluttered, unsophisticated and laid-back. We live in very unique times, and we must keep what needs keeping, toss what needs tossing. We must control the rate of change for ourselves rather than letting society run us ragged. If we try we can grow and still live in a comforting matrix of traditionalism, confidence and stability. If we do not continually, tranquilly and rationally adjust to change in an easy way, we are in danger of being so upset by it that enmasse, in a mood of desperation; we could suffer future shock and start a mass movement rolling.

17

All artists are not equal in ability, production or outcome. The work of some is more estimable than the work of others. It is of higher quality. With average people now being encocuraged to maverize, the end products of lives spent maverizing will be work of remarkable quality for average people, and work of incredibly remarkable quality by more talented people. This uneveneness of outcome is predictable and acceptable, because all have done as well as they can. None can ask more of them. God is satisfied, so we should be content too with the outcomes. Living a remarkable life is a life to hang your hat on.

18

All towns, cities and rural areas should be safe, secure, warm, clean, quiet, affluent, stimulating, crime-free and non-congested. They should be havens of comfort. There protection from chaos, filth and disorder should be the norm not the exception.

19

The exiguity, of structured, meaningful, comforting offerings available to time travelers bombarded by the asteroids of Digital Age existence, may lead them to slough off modernity. The solution is for them to produce their own meaningful lives here or in the past or future, should they choose to travel to these destinations. God may have issues with time travel disrupting fated outcomes, past or future, so it could be that such is impermissible. I need to relfect on this

Wherever and whenever they live, eople need to continue to follow their careers, self-actualize and embrace progress with accompanying faith in technology, while sufficiently cocooning in traditional, monogamous relationships and partaking in family, hearth, church and community. 

So involving themselves will give them that craved sense of rootedness and continuity amidst the startling, rapid changes whirling about them. People need connections to others, to themselves, to God and with nature to stabilize them. They will learn to pace themselves and make sense of it all. They will proceed by managing stress as they reeducate themselves over and over again. They will balance career, family and social lives in productive ways.

20

Along with fancying the thrill, convenience and advantages which our rapidly, technologically changing world will heap upon humanity in the 21st century, visionaries must overlay, their predictions about the future of innovative mechanical and digital wonders awaiting us, with moral codes and canons of obligations. Building a sophisticated civilization in space in the future may be our popularized or dreaded outcome, but we should always anticipate it with ever fresh wonder, outward-looking zeal and enthusiasm. Despite the pain, wars, holocausts, pollution and setbacks suffered, we must embrace the future in a mood of optimism.

21

It now is considered politically incorrect, racist and ethnocentric to refer to a modern culture as advanced and an ancient culture as primitive. Nonetheless, I largely think this characterization is precise and necessary. Modern society generally is superior, and is more ethically—not just technologically--advanced than a simple, primitive, tribal life style. For humanity, as expressed culturally and as history unfolds, progresses, despite setbacks and its genetic flaws. One prime reason is that tribal, prehistoric living is group-living. Modern individualistic living in America is much more advanced in all ways.

We must not be so squeamish where our labels are thoughtfully applied. The labels are to be applied to the situation, not the particular ethnic people residing in the villages in question.

22

Miss Manners to the contrary, being a stickler for rigid conformity to precise, formal comportment probably is not the same as being polite and well mannered. The former qualities can be desirable for the denizens of society, but seem to class-bound, artificial, preachy, condescending, irrelevant and restrictive to this ex-hayseed. Respectfulness, friendliness, diplomatic speech, humility, kindness, consideration, flexibility and courtesy are how people need to carry themselves in their daily interactions. Decency and winsome behavior will be the norm. As long as such is typical in a culture, there is room to fiddle with pronouncements about what is proper etiquette or not. Substance is more important than appearance. Be a follower of informal Jesus, not like a stuffy, proper Pharisee.

23

Count not from the ranks of the pampered rich or the despairing poor for your most creative voices. Extract