High Culture? WTF? Part Nine

XLV

We began our look into High Culture by defining it as high-level problem solving and significant innovation. By now it should be obvious that by significant innovation we mean significant Beyond Technology and toward Human Behavior.

Note: The result of limiting innovation to technology is Cultural Impoverishment. A fact easily confirmed and with depressing clarity by a glance at Big Tech. Fortunately, a glance is enough. Jack Dorsey, for example, wrote like a child and ran his company like one too. But it has to be said that, unfortunately, though not surprisingly, his replacement already sounds even worse, much worse.*

* This entry in general and the above Note in particular were written before the Elon Musk/Twitter episode. So maybe he'll fire the current fat, stupid and ugly anti-free speech CEO, Parag Agrawal.

We also said that Human Behavior can be reduced to two aspects, Culture and Social Institutions, or Directions and Performance, as in The Directions-Performance Complex.

So, obviously, the most important innovations have to do with The Directions-Performance Complex. At the end of Part Eight we asked ourselves an important question. What holds that Complex together? We’ll attempt to answer that question now.

XLVI

Answering that question will help us understand why, as we also said before, High Culture is essential for our survival.

So, we can begin to answer the question: What holds The Direction-Performance Complex together? by asking another question: What is the connection between The Directions-Performance Complex, High Culture, and Human Survival?

The shortest answer is that these are three ways of talking about the same thing - Human Behavior. And, of course, Human Behavior can not be understood without Explanation.

That means that The Directions-Performance Complex can be most succinctly reduced to Explanation and Behavior. In other words, Directions (Explanation) and Performance (Behavior). Or,

Explanation and Behavior = The Direction-Performance Complex

But there's more. Humans can scarcely survive without responding to both the world around them and the world inside of them. They respond by giving themselves directions to perform an action. That action, or activity, might come in the form of an experiment, a thought, a creation, or a belief (or evaluation).

But, whatever form the action we take comes in, it has to be connected to reality to keep that action from becoming dysfunctional and the actors involved from lapsing into insanity.

SPAR

Since all behavior is continuous and hierarchical an experiment at the highest level is Science, a thought is Philosophy, a creation is Art, and a belief culminates in a Religion (or, Evaluation).*

*There are two reasons for using the word Religion, as opposed to the word Evaluation. One is it helps with the mnemonic device we’re using SPAR, which of course is taken from Boxing. Sparring, like High Culture, is preparation for an actual encounter, as education is for life. The other reason is to emphasize the fact that Politics is secular Religion. They both have to do with Belief. The conceit of the politically-minded is that they are above the religiously-minded because they have transcended Religion. But that’s not true at all. Politics = Truth does not prepare one for life, it devalues life by inhibiting the problem-solving process without which life is impossible. Politics = Truth = Death = Extinction. We don’t need another political revolution. What we need is Cultural Transcendence.

This is what we’ll refer to as our Cultural Pyramid.

The top point representing High Culture. High Culture is impossible without a foundation. And what serves as the foundation for a civilization cannot survive without High Culture.

But, as this is an entry on High Culture, our basic aim is to direct attention to that area of human activity, particularly as it relates to both The Directions-Performance Complex and Human Survival.

XLVI

Now, before continuing, we have to point out that though High Culture might be necessary, that doesn’t make it automatically good. In fact, that it’s not automatically good is one of the justifications for writing this entry. The other, of course, is to direct attention to the subject in the first place, since I have been asked many times by partners and friends of PRC to do just that.

So then it’s only fair to say what I think is an example of good High Culture and bad High Culture. To do that let's refer back to the entry on CRT when we discussed Dogma vs Pragma.

Dogma would be an example of bad High Culture and Pragma would be an example of good High Culture. And the reason for that is as I said Pragma is willing to expose its ideas to a process of continuous feedback and correction and Dogma isn’t.

That being the case, a dogmatic or bad High Culture, like the one the hostile elite now controls, is either not aware of, or not interested in, developing a radical sensitivity to problem-solving, let alone to the Arts & Sciences. Which means it is not interested in educational reconstruction. And that means it is incapable of correction by feedback, because it is not at all interested in feedback inconsistent with the hostile elite's explanation of itself.

This is why everything is falling apart all around us, everywhere you look. And now we’re back to our question, How does The Directions-Performance Complex hold itself together?

One short answer would be: It depends.

It depends on whether or not The Directions-Performance Complex is open to correction by feedback. It depends, in other words, on whether we can subsume that particular Directions-Performance Complex under Dogma or Pragma. To answer the question in this way is to make a judgment of appropriateness.

That's fine. And, of course, that is our basic aim, we want to be able to determine in a way satisfactory to us, what would be the appropriate way to manage The Directions-Performanc Complex.

And the best way to do that would be to see if there is a word we can use to subsume both Dogma and Pragma. After all, whether or not the Complex in question is Dogma or Pragma, that Complex still has to be held together. So then, is there a word or words we can use to help us answer our question so as to gain a better understanding of The Directions-Performance Complex?

And the answer is Yes, there are such words. Two, in fact, that can help us answer our question and understand exactly what it is that holds The Directions-Performance Complex together.

And the first word we have already discussed in Part Eight is - Convention, or conventions, and what we said was this:

Conventions are pre-established responses learned from verbal directions - or from nonverbal directions, such as, for children and even on occasion for adults, manipulation by others.

So let's put it in Q & A form to make things as clear as possible.

Q: What holds The Directions-Performance Complex together?

A: An incredibly complex web of social convention.

Q: Alright then, what holds convention together?

A: To answer that question will bring us to our second word.

XLVII

As we said before, if communication can break down behavior can disintegrate. That is, the conventionally established links between Directions and Performance, between Culture and Society, can dissolve. This is why Culture and Society, Directions and Performance, Communication, and therefore, Human Behavior itself, are all inherently unstable.

We are always threatened with and constantly experience the inability to respond to directions and the failure of our performances. That’s why the central concern of humanity is and must be the stabilization of responses, that is, the stabilization of the conventions of appropriate performance.

Only if two people, or a large group of people, have engaged over a long period of time in the same set of performances in response to the same set of directions can behavior flow smoothly (though never for long and never perfectly - ever).

So much in verbal directions depends on constancy that a deviation is bound to be disturbing, since it brings to the foreground the constant threat of communicational dissolution, of the dissolution of behavior itself. This is the ultimate source of an emotional constant - thoroughgoing relief from which is rare and fleeting - anxiety. This is exactly why a dominating expenditure of available human energy must be devoted to stabilizing communication, that is, to stabilizing The Directions-Performance Complex. So then, how is it done? Well, we've already given an answer. The Directions-Performance Complex is held together by conventionally established links - by convention.

But we also promised a second word to help us understand what holds convention together, and that word is Policing. Both the policing of others and self-policing. At the present time police are the most obvious mode of stabilizing behavior.

That’s why the hostile elite that runs the West in general and the USA in particular is not the least bit interested in abolishing the police, but in replacing them. Defund the Police is about replacing regional law enforcement with a global military.

As well as a global security system that will aggressively police human behavior on behalf of the hostile elite so as to bring about the desired result - blind obedience to their authority. In short, a Surveillance State for the purpose of Full Spectrum Dominance.

In any event, the police, in whatever form, are merely the surface manifestation of what must be our central concern - Stability.

Since self-policing in particular is the more difficult kind of policing to understand, a few examples will show the subtlety as well as the pervasiveness of policing in general and why it is found in all forms of The Directions-Performance Complex, whether that Complex is subsumed by Dogma, or Pragma.

XLVIII

One aspect of self-policing is the phenomenon of collecting. Collecting appears when there is a surplus of time and energy. This explains the surge in collecting that really took off during a period of affluence in the United States in the 1960’s.

Many at the time became interested in collecting something, anything, from rocks to baseball cards to paintings. Even the simultaneous interest in tourism can be seen in this light, in the sense that one collects means of transportation and places.

When one collects, one disposes of free time and energy by buying or otherwise acquiring examples of some category of artificial or natural phenomena.

The most effective kind of collecting, of course, is to collect something well established, such as stamps or some of the more famous tourist cliches throughout the world. Over time these latter become more and more crowded, while places less well-known, though possibly more interesting, generally go neglected or only slowly move into the prime tourist market.

The reason for this is explained by the concept of self-policing.

Disposable income makes it possible to increase the range of one’s behavior. But in actual practice this does not happen. What does happen is that the individual pounces on a strategy for disposing of their disposable income by moving into a severely limited or heavily policed area of behavior. The explanation is that to increase the range of behavior is to increase the possibility of being unable to respond to novel directions, and thus to experience the threat of behavioral dissolution.

Self-Policing therefore takes the form of a self-imposed limitation of behavior. This answers the question of why anyone is interested in anything. An interest limits the range of behavior.

To be even more precise, an interest is a self-imposed and self-policed limitation of the range of behavior.

XLIX

Another example cuts even closer to an anxiety of our times than does the anxiety-provoking disposable income. It’s the phenomenon of drug and alcohol use.* The effect of any popular drug or alcohol is to limit the range of behavior. That’s why it’s found in virtually all societies the world over. This principle of the use of drugs and alcohol can be successfully employed to explain the extraordinary link between itself and rebellion.

* I want to make a distinction in this part of our entry between drug and alcohol use and addiction.

Though the youthful rebels of the late 1960’s talked up a storm and even succeeded for a time in scaring faculties into a momentary consideration of their behavior, the behavior of the rebels was actually very limited, considering the immense possibilities for social disruption that lay easily at hand. After all, a few well-placed charges of dynamite could have made Chicago or any other city impossible for the 1968 Convention.

Fortunately perhaps - or perhaps not - the rebels had already established in their use of drugs and alcohol a very effective means of limiting the range of behavior. But perhaps the real source of the limitation of their behavior was found in a lack of imagination and intellectual dishonesty. In short, the true source of their very limited behavior was cultural impoverishment.

From this perspective the riots and destruction they engaged in was in truth the largest collective temper tantrum in recorded history of a spoiled rotten child-people and not in any way, shape or form, a matter of Social Justice. Thus making that phrase and much of their verbal behavior at the time one big rhetorical mask designed not to discover the truth, but to conceal the facts, so as to acquire power, which is all they really ever wanted.

Of course, it wasn’t until some 50 years later when those same rebels became the hostile elite and had complete control of all of the social institutions of the United States, and not just the United States, that they finally figured out exactly how to destroy, not just entire cities or even whole countries, but how to completely destroy an entire civilization. Unfortunately they don’t seem as interested in construction and social management as they obviously are in destruction and social mismanagement and the whole point of the rhetoric surrounding the promotion of their Build Back Better project is, as it was before, to conceal the facts.

Be that as it may, the point is that drug and alcohol use is a mode of limiting behavior, of self-policing, that is, of social stability.

But it is by no means the only mode, nor is sex, which is not even a close rival. Central to the purpose of this entry is the most interesting and important mode of policing - High Culture.

So to that, in Part Ten, we shall turn.

Until then!