Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the difference between a successful culture and a failed culture is not in genetics but in its incentives. A barbarian acts as the barbarian due to his or her philosophy of life. The same is true of a civilized person. Civilization comes from culture just as barbarism comes from it as well. Take a Viking from Leif Erickson’s crew and bring him to today… and he will act a barbarian. Not because there is anything deficient in him, but in the culture he adheres to. Moreover, there are cultures that inculcate stupidity. They encourage actions that harm the actor and the audience. Rare is the culture that promotes pragmatism, thrift, and an entrepreneurial spirit. That’s why most cultures are corrosive of prosperity, freedom, and peace. This is why I say, cultures are not equal.
The only way to judge a culture is pragmatically, by outcome. Cultures have incentives. Every culture creates incentive structures that drive behavior. These incentivized behaviors determine if a culture is self-destructive, successful, or somewhere in between. Moreover, the more isolated a culture is the more self-destructive it is able to become. Isolation need not be geographical, it can also be ideological. A culture that has an isolated elite siloed off in an ivory tower is just as isolated as a tribe deep in the Amazon. The isolation is mental instead of geographical. That’s how successful cultures turn on themselves leading to civilizational collapse. Cultures that are not isolated, however, have to deal with other cultures. This competition has a winnowing effect on the absurdity that leads to failed cultures.
Cultures, for the most part, are not chosen… they are inherited. A child has no choice as far as we know in what culture he or she is born into. Once they grow, they might attain the knowledge to weigh cultures and choose one or an amalgam of cultures that best suits them. Most, however, never have the time or inclination to seek out a better way of living. So we mostly stick to the one we were born into. This means that unsuccessful cultures can live on for a long time, especially if subsidized by successful cultures. So a culture can do everything wrong and yet survive, even the competition of cultures if it is isolated or subsidized. The problem with subsidizing a failed culture is that it is often barbaric. That barbaric culture then can turn on its benefactor like the Goths on the Romans.
There are two ways a culture can expand, one is by war and the other is by success. Cultures that spread by the sword or gun will say so. Mao for example said, power flows from the barrel of a gun and so the communist party must never lose control of the guns. Islam is filled with Hadiths urging constant warfare against non-believers. These are barbaric cultures that can’t survive the competition of cultures unless subsidized. Special treatment is so ingrained in their psyches that if a subsidy is cut off they complain they are being choked to death. Without oil in the Middle East or progressives capturing the institutions in the West, Islam and communism would collapse everywhere. Even Communist China had to convert to fascism to survive. In order to seek trade subsidies.
Wise people don’t simply inherit a culture, they seek and cultivate the best parts of the best, as judged pragmatically. Just because someone is born into a failed culture doesn’t mean they’re condemned to it. If your culture inculcates ignorance instead of knowledge, hate instead of equanimity, war instead of peace, central planning instead of freedom, laziness instead of diligence, and political favor rather than merit, your culture is holding you back. It is not the equal of successful cultures. If a culture needs subsidies to keep famine from the door, it is a failed culture. Keeping it going by subsidy is just extending its harm to humanity. The solution is double-pronged, one is for the individual to adopt the best qualities of the best cultures, and the other is for successful cultures to stop subsidizing failed ones.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
