We live with technology, not by technology. To the extent we do live by technology we live an inhuman life. Of course, the hostile elite that is running and ruinning the West today, and not just the West, would prefer that we live an inhuman life. A fact that a glance at the contemporary scene makes perfectly obvious. But what does it mean to say we live with technology and not by it?
Innovative Technology is dependent on Science, and Science is dependent on Culture, and Culture is dependent on The Vital System of Ideas Culture lives by. To maintain that system of ideas requires living at the height of our times. Culture today can neither support or sustain itself by technology alone.
Any culture that thinks it can live with just technology and dollars is in the same position as a culture that wants to benefit from civilization without contributing to it – doomed.
The cracks have begun to show and the reason is clear.
Those cracks can be seen in the fact that the West has become so pathologically soft and weak that it now even takes the side of any culture's worst enemy - criminals - and calls it, Progress!
So much for the cracks. But why say the reason is clear?
Because the world, though technologically advanced, is culturally undeveloped because we do not live at the height of our times, anywhere. This has led to a devastating incoherence. When that incoherence is felt by enough people the result is a cultural crisis, a global cultural crisis. And that is the position we are in today.
We help no one by constructing an ideology that deliberately distorts reality in an attempt to rationalize the crisis away. Such a response is symptomatic of the crisis and in no way an answer to it. On the contrary, it simply makes matters worse - much worse.
We're in an unparalled situation requiring original solutions and a dedication to reality (two things, among many, that our leaders of today do not posses - and not just our leaders).
The number one conflict in the world today is not within families, or between races, genders, religions, ideologies, economies, cultures, globalism, or nationalism. Important and as real as these conflicts are they're not the most important. The most important conflict in the world today is the one between the extraordinary complexity of our problems and the limited capacity of our minds.
That's why the number one problem in the world today is Learning. It's also the number one solution. So, what do we need to learn? The Vital System of Ideas that any Culture lives by.
But, before we get into that, a brief word on Culture itself.
Culture and Social Institutions
Directions for Performance
The most succinct definition of Culture is Directions for Performance. Where does that performance take place? In our Social-Institutions, of which there are five, all interdependent:Teaching-Learning, Value, Economic, Government, and Idea-Institutions. The most succinct definition of Social-Institutions is Performance of Directions.
Life without Social-Interaction is impossible.Social-interaction without Explanation is inconceivable.
Life without both is a chaos.
The mind reacts against the sensation of chaos, and the tension, disorientation, and disturbance it produces, by building roads, ways through the forest, in the form of clear and firm ideas that help us find our way in the world. We cannot live on a human level without ideas. We are our ideas. But we're also born in a specific period of time at a definite stage of history.
We must live at the level of the ideas of our time in history.
The world needs competent and dedicated professionals. But before this, and more than this, it needs those who know how to govern, to direct and guide the social-institutions that drive the many cultures of our global civilization.
Today, that means all of us, not just our leaders. To do this at all well means making our lives a vital influence in harmony with the ideas of our time and in their most developed form.
It's important to point out that the phrase the ideas of our time does not in any way refer to fashionable ideas anxiously squeezed out of the bowels of a political ideology's contemporary interpretation of itself before being narcissistically confused with the truth and imposed on the world by force.
In other words, we are not talking about Identity Politics or Cancel Culture. And we're definitely not talking about The CCP.
We are simply talking about ideas derived from human behavior.
We must, in short, know something about the relationship between those behaviors and our culture and how that culture directs the performances that takes place in our social institutions, and how all of this relates to the world we live in. That way we'll know if we, and our leaders, are responding to that world and its many problems with any adequacy - and for the benefit of all.
Cultural Pyramid
To apply a metaphor to The Vital System of Ideas and relate Behavior with Culture let us imagine a Cultural Pyramid.
The height is a metaphor for the rate of learning and innovation, the edges for the distance from the center of that learning and innovation. Each face stands for one of the four innovative social roles, scientist, philosopher, artist, valuator (the last being a role played in all fields of science, art, and philosophy).
The pyramid is best viewed behaviorally and historically, and better understood if expressed in the proposition that all behavior is continuous and hierarchical. And by hierarchy we mean simply the most developed explanations, symbols and concepts in the areas of problem-solving and significant innovation.This is all that was ever meant by the term High Culture, ie; high-level problem-solving, innovation, explanation, and the corresponding behavioral patterns associated with these activities.These activities are also referred to as Survival Skills, for a reason, since they are directed toward ensuring the survival, success, and growth, not just of our social-institutions, but of our species. Ignoring their value is fatal.
We can illustrate this by relating, briefly, the four innovative social roles, or survival skills, to child-development.
A little girl dips her toe into the water to see if it's too cold for swimming. This innocent curiosity and love of experiment, found in all children and in every part of the world, becomes Science, which strives to improve our predictive powers.
A boy makes a mark in the sand with a stick or on a piece of paper with a crayon. From these simple marks develop the paintings of a Raphael. Creativity in its infancy becomes Art, which works to improve our powers of the creative imagination.
Before children can speak they utter nonsense syllables in their attempt to communicate with us and make sense out of the new world they've just entered. Experience and study can turn these nonsense syllables into the thoughts of Philosophy, which strives to improve our control over explanatory behavior.
Valuation, which strives to improve our control over our value behavior, begins in infancy when a child is told they are good for learning to do something competently.
Though ascription of value is often separated from judgment of competence they usually go together.
For example, if we ascribe value to an individual and are asked why, we respond with judgments of competency, He's a good husband, She loves her children, He's a good leader who cares about his employees and clients, They're a good company who care as much about social responsibility as they do economic profit, etc. This is of the greatest possible importance in terms of any kind of social-management, from the family, to small and large businesses, or to world leaders on a global stage.
By far the most important manifestation of this is the ability of an individual, family, company, or culture, to ascribe value to itself and others through fair and competent judgment. All four, science, philosophy, art, and valuation, are forms of Communication, linked by Explanation and Social-Institutions.
Thus, human behavior is identifiable with communication. We are not animals that use communication; in so far as we are human beings we are communication, and that is all we are.
To break down old barriers and penetrate new frontiers requires effective communication and exceptional leadership, both of which emerge from our knowledge of the vital system of ideas. Ideas that help us live Beyond Technology.
The Vital System of Ideas and The Quality of Life
The intellectual, social, and ethical qualities we develop from our relationship with the vital system of ideas not only enhance the quality of life, but protect us from the dangers of what we call The 3 O's, overwhelm, oversimplification, and overconformity.
Without this knowledge our thoughts and actions are limited to impulse and routine, or, chaos and confusion, negatively
impacting the effective management of our social-institutions.
Without a knowledge of the vital system of ideas and how they're related and tied together by explanation, without an awareness of their influence on our social-interaction, we lack perspective, both contemporary and historical.
We lack a technique of learning that will enable us to analyze any body of data and identify and examine its structure in a time-appropriate manner. We're much less able to make valid connections between people, places, and things.
We'll lack self-awareness and the joy that comes from learning, not to mention the strength and stamina needed for change, for flexibility and growth, in a complex and unpredictable world.
On the other hand, with a reasonable amount of knowledge of the vital system of ideas we'll have the intellectual qualities of perspective, technique of learning, self-awareness, flexibility and growth. We'll have the social qualities of emotional comprehension of others, and ourselves, and the sensitivity to the diversity of human emotional experience. We'll have the ethical qualities of the desire to discover what is true and good and the desire to put these values into practice.
There's so much we can do with a knowledge of the vital system of ideas. Just as there's so much we can't do without that knowledge. The choice is ours and the readiness is all.
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