CULTURE (A Genealogy of)

CULTURE
(A Genealogy of)



An Essay by

Daniel Scott
BATTEN


©Daniel Scott Batten, 2007
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Read Herring Press


Prologue

Lector benevole, that is, kind reader, I come to you with an open heart and a broken cup. I offer this, the promissory note of all good intentions, and give my blood for your salvation. I offer myself upon the great altar of words so that from these words the world might be given new life. Contained within these pages are sharp truths that may at first cut you and from these cuts, I assure you, you shall heal and from your lifeblood bloom a great and powerful unison. The world is in dire need of peace, and in peace there lives one notion, and that notion is unity. Unity means that for a culture to survive, the community within that society needs to become servants of the many, and as readily, the many needs become servants to the one. No bad note makes a good harmony turn disharmonic, and many discordant notes make not order, but chaos. It is important for you, the reader to understand the roots of the word culture. Cultura in Latin means “to till, to cultivate, and to culture.” Therefore, if we are to function as a true culture, we are by a unified labor, become a single and flourishing garden. If we allow but one weed to choke and kill one of us, then we fail as a community. This is the darker side of culture, and it derives from the Latin, Culter and Cultarius. Culter is Latin for “knife” and cultarius for “a slayer of the victim (for sacrifice).”

















PART ONE

To enslave man all you need do is call him free. If you teach him to love his freedom so long as he admits no knowledge of the enslavement of others, he is happy to accept his chains. The soul trained to fear is a slave to his guilt. A person bound by guilt is happy to embrace the doctrine established that gives him comfort in his confinement. Fear all things, especially God, the devil and all deviance of these opinions that we conveniently label the Devil. You are to give no credence to the devil and hold no idols in your heart and yet you are to fear, and in fearing, give praise to the Adversary.
Confounded by the love for comfort you forgo the obvious shackles that hold you to the biases of those who enslave you. Any outside threat to your apparent freedom instills within the slave a feeling of commitment to his master. This commitment makes the feeling of belonging the appreciation, the pat-on-the-back in approval of the master. Instead of seeking comfort in morality, you find comfort in the whole of a certain bias. It is our nature to seek approval and it is the seeking that leads especially intelligent people into buying whatsoever truth is sold to them. The intelligent person does not seek truth, but rather the apparent truth that dilutes the questions he holds. We are taught not to question; rather we are trained to seek the answer. I tell you this is a great lie and a greater shackle. Question everything! Especially why it is that you should question everything, for intelligent people are controlled by their submission to the notion that there is a singular truth and in accepting this truth they put all doubts (or most doubts) aside to ply their views by the omniscience of such a respected authority. This is slavery!
“Fat people are slobs that eat too much and are unable to make commitments in their lives and are less than people.” This statement appears to be all too contrived by me, and solely constructed to make a point. However, you watch and you seek the perfection instilled into you about how you “should” look. People think of fat people as “disgusting” and so they are “less than people” or are “stupid and lazy.” People going to café’s refer to the attendant that is overweight by refusing to buy pastries because “That is why America is so obese. I refuse to be fat.” After all, being fat is a sign of possessing no “free will” and having a “weak mind.” It is “disgusting” to be fat, and no one wants to be “disgusting.” People will do anything to not be seen in this light and so they buy pills at high costs, and they subscribe to various diets and exercise programs to keep from being “disgusting.” All the same, you think yourself to be virtuously unmoved by others wills. You do not date an obese person because it reflects badly on your image. You buy fancy cars to attract people to your possessions and not your personality because you are immensely strong-willed and free of outside influence. You are, after all, an individual!
I take my refutation even further. It is a sign of weakness and stupidity to be obese. It is seen as extremely unhealthy and those who are obese are considered lazy individuals who give easily into the urges to eat in compensation for some feeling of inadequacy, right? This is the opinion of the common person, is it not?
It is a strange phenomenon that such strong-willed people like the rest of you are not guilty of the same desires and weaknesses. I am you’re your spending your money on expensive clothing is purely good for you and based upon your “like” and not upon your “appearance.” Obviously, you are not subject to smoking or stupidity. Everything you do is healthy and if you are thin than you are focused and confident. If thin, you are established in yourself and able to free yourself from the chains and confines of the slave. False! You are doubly imprisoned. You are not only a slave to the master (appearance) but you are slave to the thought that you are of free will. You act out the dictates of your master, and call it your own will! You think yourself healthy because you are not obese and yet you do not read, you do not put your efforts into exercising the mind and so you die of your obese ignorance. Alcoholics and drugs addicts are obviously diseased. Scholars are prideful and the wealthy are ostentatious, and so they are obese in arrogance. Does not stress kill more than obesity? Yet, you go on living stressful lives not because it appeases your desires but because it appeases those of the television and the master that is ‘appearance.’ You must have a fancy car, a nice house, and expensive toys or you are nothing to anyone! Well I tell you what, you are not free, and the creditors at your door are not knocking for sake of your freedom. They are not seeking to praise you for your strong will! If you are in pursuit of happiness, you shall never catch up to it! Happiness does not live in things nor does it live in means. It is a means unto itself and it exists so long as the heart speaks it. Just as the reasoning goes that, an obese person could just go down to the gym that an illiterate person could just pick up a book or a vain person could be less self-absorbed. Unfortunately, nothing is as easy for some as it is for others. Where one fails, the other succeeds, and when one pushes the other falls down.
Culture fails when it deviates and controls the public view on happiness, love, and all things good and evil. It distorts and perverts itself with the commoners mind, the average is the best a Democracy can get and the average person is obese, either in wisdom or in foolishness, in weight or in arrogance.

Commit to nothing: Commitment absolves one’s critical thinking skills, it limits one’s goals in foundation of, and support of, something, and so it looses all altruism and truth.

PART TWO

Imagine a room completely dark. A voice tells you to find a light-switch or a door. Picture yourself on your hands and knee’s trying to find a switch or a doorknob, and all you find is more floors, more walls, and more darkness? Now pretend that the voice tells you that if you cannot find this switch or this doorknob then you are ‘stupid’ and that you are worthless to man and to God. You feel around more anxiously, until you have felt the entire room over ten times. Then suddenly, there appears to your senses a switch and so you flick it and you realize that there is a door in the ceiling and so elated you open the door to great applause and so you think yourself elite.
Society then applauds you and adorns you with metals and awards and soon you find yourself the master of many and put to test thousands more. You are the prized citizen by which each man measures himself and each woman is brought up to admire. Women throw themselves at your feet and you are the toast of all conversation. The world is at your fingertips and so you think of it like a puppeteer thinks of his puppet.
Poor people come asking for your money, so you toss them a few pieces of stale bread and let them drink water from a cup. Women come to you with bruises on their faces and crying children in their arms and you tell them to leave their abusive husbands but offer no room and board or give no thought to how she might go about leaving him. You see two older kids bullying a younger and smaller one and do nothing but smile, and reflect, how that young boy should learn to be tougher or find another route to school. After all, we all have hard times, and you overcame the box, so he can!
A few glorious years pass in like fashion until the jealousies of others come to surface in the newspapers and on the local television screens. You then scurry to resolve this issue so you create charities, fund likeminded institutions with intuition for children, sports teams, and city beautification. You gather your likeminded friends and run out those businesses that do not think the same and put trees and gardens in their place. You build fantastic schools so your likeminded friend’s children can go to them; adorn them with the best of the best in learning and materials. Soon enough a few people start to catch on to your antics and so you build a homeless shelter to hush your critics on homelessness and build hospitals for the poor. The only trouble is, that this is only done for appearance, and so the shelters soon run out of space (and ignore the helping them get back on their feet), the hospitals are pro bono and so they get either medical students trying to get skills or hire those with big hearts and bad nursing.
When still your critics do not stop their carping, you say that perhaps the bums could just get jobs and the poor could just up and leave and find better means somewhere else! How is this MY trouble you say?
Then your likeminded friends gather in support of you and so suddenly homeless people are seen as ‘stupid’ people who are just too lazy to get a job. The poor are depicted as ‘idiots’ that should get a better job. It is the job of the homeless to solve homelessness, and it is the job of the poor to solve necessitousness. This is how culture works, its biases are the source of the illusion – and it controls us by mode of our ‘truths,’ and truths are conjured by those within those truths, allowing them to control how others see the illusion.
The very instance that you are told to “find the switch or the door” you are controlled. The very fact that someone is holding the power to your escape makes you a slave. The applause after is how we are lured into our idea of “truth” and our “truth” serves only itself. The problem with one’s truth is that it looks to nothing but itself. Like the person in the dark room, looks only for that switch and how there can’t be another way to make light. Now what if I told you that the room was not dark, but the person in the room was merely told it was dark. What if I told you that the room was no room but a small cardboard box? You would think whoever was in the box was a fool for not just standing up and bursting out of the box. This is much like ideas and truths. The one inside an idea or a truth looks not for “what is a room,” but is only concerned with what it is told about that “room.” If you are told to believe, and believe because you are told that doubt is evil trying to deceive you away from the truth of the solidity of the walls and solidity of the darkness, then you will not accept the softness of the walls nor trust the value of the light. A hypnotist will prove to you that when the mind believes something so strongly, it will make a pillow a sheet of metal and a touch of it will cut you (in your mind) and you will feel the blood and ache with pain. Truth matters little to a mind who fools itself into believing that the illusion is truth. It is inside these confines that the few are so easily allowed to rule over the many. They make life seem so good for the few that the common person will forget what he has and seek, by nature, for more. It is the tool of the rich to make the poor greedy. It is to the advantage of a merchant to sell his fruit at as high cost as his customers are willing to pay. Prices will never cease to inflate so long as the average person will pay for that service, whatever the cost, so too shall the rich feed off the poor. A thirsty man will pay triple that of a man who has water readily available. Thirsty masses give drops the value of a water jug.
The poor person then is made to look down on the poorer person, and the rich person down upon the lesser. It is how the illusion takes on the form of truth. Make a man desperate for water and he will drink polluted water, anything, to quench his thirst.
It is in this fashion that the poor person is hated and made a castaway. The poor person on the street is too bothersome a reminder of the price of the failure to assimilate. It is the homeless persons desire to be homeless, and so he is seen as lazy because he does not go and get a job. Therefore, I am forced to ask you, who is going to hire a man who stinks of urine and has not showered in weeks? Who is going to trust a man that talks to himself to service their customers? Who will hire a person off the street who has no place of residence, no mode of transportation, and who very possibly has suffered a lack of public or private education? Who will have the patience to train such a person? You see it is not as simple as ‘go get a job.’ Sometimes things go wrong in people’s lives. Their spouse leaves them and takes them for a ride, or a fire hits their house and they had no funds to fix it, nor the funds to insure it. What if I told you that the highest percentage of homeless people were children of a young age, can they just go and get a job? A responsible society would ask, how can we help? A responsible society would have hospitals that cared for people and not for the thickness of their wallets. If psychology were utilized for the masses and not for the wealthy, then they would be out on the streets trying to help these people. In fact, maybe most of the homeless people would not be on the streets. Their schizophrenia would not go uncured. Perhaps if proper healthcare was provided for them, they might not of needed to live in such rancid conditions, for IT IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY to help them. Life can take a severe turn on us all. It matters not how much money you have now, tomorrow you might trade places with that bum on the street.
Within the confines of this culture is the idea of education and learning; and how its measures dictate who will and will not “succeed.” In ancient societies, there were tradesman, peasants, the working classes and the artisans. Before the world of education reached them, they were limited to these employs. It is the distinction of the times that no matter by which ties a man is born to he is not bound to them thanks to the power of education and the application of a said knowledge. The peasant is no longer chained by his alms. The worker is no longer bound to a single trade. An artist is no longer seen as a mad man who is better off running wild in the woods.
However, the powers found in knowledge and education is all too easily perverted into instruments of oppression. The learned become elite members of society and force their will upon the masses and look down upon the commoner as dregs of society and as lesser members of society. It is the error of the learned to think that they are insusceptible to the forces of another’s will. No one wants to be controlled, at least not knowingly. However, in the belief that education comes at the hands of another, that only a good mind can be produced by his conformity to the ideas of these elite persons is a grave mistake. In today’s societies, we praise Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, and other fantastic philosophers, and yet, oppress they who live among us who live by their teachings of self-knowledge. The learned soon become boisterous with their importance and soon become a grave hindrance to progress for sake of their own egos. It is by the instrument of the ego that universities and places of schooling are founded upon. Within these places of learning live the biases of the privileged and the accredited, and not the likes of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus. There was no accreditation in the wisdom of Socrates when he was put to death for his sacrilege against the learned men and the fearful idiots of Greek society. Only two types of people are bothered by piety and true wisdom, the arrogant and the foolish. A fool hates wisdom for it tortures him with his acts, and an arrogant soul despises it because it means they are to face scrutiny and criticisms, which exposes their misconceptions and in some cases, their blatant lies. Socrates told any who would listen, “Question everything.” I say in amendment to this, question everything, especially why it is that you should question everything.
I do not mean to say there is nothing of good within institutionalized education, nor am I condemning academia, I am only bringing up the perversion of ideas that can come from this kind of structure. Too much structure brings about a question of slavery. If a mind is made to think but one way upon a matter, then he is enslaved by the notion, and not educated in it. If one is taught that the Big Bang Theory is an absolute truth and it is taught in that manner, and that none shall question it, then this is not accredited learning, it is not education at all, but it is brainwashing. In this manner educated people are controlled by their submission to the notions that are said to be truths and in their acceptance of these truths do they ply their opinions and views and seek to please the omniscient eyes of their professors and the ‘accredited world of masters.’
From this desire to please the educated comes another problem, that whomsoever disagrees with the ‘established truths’ of academia, are seen as amateurs and sleuths, who are all fine and good, until you consider how society is trained to treat them! They are considered freaks and wannabees. They are scathed at and intellectually alienated. Whosoever does not conform to the opinions of the learned is seen as heretics of God and man. They are looked down upon as maniacs with insane ideas. Much as a peudo-wiseman might scathe a fool, the learn scorn the unlearned and so too become unwise. This only creates a circuitous battle of rhetoric between the foolish and the unwise. Learning is then used to teach the fool, and a fool is taught the folly of the unwise. Measuring dirty pools by less dirtied pools becomes the way to measure clear thought.
The confusion of the common person and the learned are seen by all to be a weakness. All though confusion is oftentimes seen as a weakness, it is a pillar of strength. He who does not know is wiser than he who thinks he knows.
Soon enough truth becomes pestilent among the masses and in the hand of the plague, there exists several ways of infection. 1) There is direct infection. Direct infection is when; you are convinced by the biases of the masses and are happy only when society tells you how to be happy. 2) Indirect infection is you oppose, but find comfort in complaint, and safety in complacency. Figuring it best to go with the flow and raise complaint only when the sickness gets too bad. It must severely hurt or kill someone close to you before you realize the depths in which you are diseased. 3) Self-Infection is you hate it and seek out any means to destroy it. This too is a product of the same infection. By becoming the antithesis, you give the disease something to repel and so you strengthen it, just as viruses make a host of the very antibodies made to fight them. You are not happy unless everyone is infected also.
The most fantastic error that lives within the body of culture is the assumption that all must assimilate into the same ‘ideals’ in order for society to function in a uniform manner. This is a grave fallacy, for in truth, just as some people like hard tones and others like soft tones in their music, does not mean they are unable to become unified. It only means there are more ways in which many can come to see the same truths. It is like wine, some like bitter wines, some like sweet, but it is not wrong to have two kinds of wine. It means there is a diverse way of being unified, for if they drink together then they accomplish more than just being told how to drink and what is to be drunk.




Authority: Live within the dictates of but one authority, that God lives inside you and that none, neither priest nor prophet shall encumber this identity. Change and evolve, but do not merely conform.

PART THREE

The unifying force behind the forming of a certain culture is a sense of belonging and this is meant to encourage widespread unity. From this unification is supposed to come a sense of safety and a sense of control. This is meant to strengthen both the human bonds between man and woman but also the spiritual. In ancient societies, spirituality was not books and words; it lived in every function of society. They prayed for each log they fell, and they sent thanks to the creator for each animal they killed for sustenance. Every act of their lives was what decided if they as a society were going to survive or perish. They allowed for individuality so long as it did not hinder the sublimity of the whole. The solidity of the group permeated their lives, and children were not merely extensions of the immediate family but they were the future of the entire society. The successes of their rearing were the signs of future prosperity. A child was brought up by the wisdom not only of his parents, his grandparents and extended family, but the entire village. The failure to bring up a child was not the failure of a parent, but it was the failure of that entire community. They took responsibility for their actions, and felt the effects and affects of those failures first hand. Whereas in today’s society the child is brought up by young parents that are left to their own understandings and devices to bring up a child and existing in the child are the faults of a couple people rather than the strengths of a whole community. This society is based upon loneliness and it is perpetuated by the ungodly expectations put upon the children by their parents. Two incapable people are left alone to feed, to teach, to love, and to mold a child until he/she too is sent out into the world, alone, at the unripe age of eighteen. They are supposed to have figured out the whole of the world by then, and if their parents lacked in direction, they are likely to also lack it. When children lack direction, the society in which they are cast out into, will also lack direction.

Guilt found its foundation within society when crops failed, not enough meat was gathered and people starved or died of unknown causes. Turning to the sky for answers they indicated the first of religious experiences and turned away from the sublimity of the whole for the sublimity of the self. The idea of salvation of the one, and the righteousness of the one as opposed to the wrongfulness of another, then created a rift both in society and spirituality. Therefore, the failure of the group to make ends meet was the beginning of the spiritual verses the human. They now felt powerless and so as a core they fell into disarray over thousands of years, until ingrained in them was such a fierce fear of the heavens they felt compelled to turn against their fellow culture. The individual became more important than the village, and each person now lived to serve themselves and no other. They covered this truth up by calling it “living for god” and for “truth.” The good was no longer the good of the whole; rather it was now the good of the individual. The hierarchy became a way of controlling the masses and soon the masses were seen not as friends but as hindrances of the elite who wanted power. The arrogance of the few invented the ignorance of the many. Knowledge began to corrupt and separate until several factions existed with their own special kinds of hierarchies. Hierarchies within hierarchies made it impossible to escape the growing ideal of acceptance and blind faith in the “truths” of the one over the “lies” of the other. Outsiders were scorned and called barbarians and those who let them in were exiled or accused of great crimes. Just as today, we have a great fear of outsiders and so we propose to put up a wall around our borders, not so much to keep others out, but to keep us in. The wall that keeps others out is also built to keep others in. The sacrifice of individual rights to contain a select few also enslaves you. To put others under the microscope is to put your own values and truths under scrutiny.
The fear of losing one’s position in the social hierarchy and thus being ostracized by the public for deviating in the least, they force themselves to admire the ideals and truths and so cease seeking to understand truth. Success is a word that means nothing but outcomes, and the power of the elite comes by telling you what that outcome is supposed to be. If it serves another, and does not serve yourself, then guilt leads you into it. Guilt is the hook of fear that ceases all outcomes considered undesired. The soul shudders in the wake of the tumultuous struggle between serving his community, himself and his masters. Guilt does not exist when one is in harmony with his environment. It is a great truth I have gathered in my perusal of the ancient Latin writers that has given me the answer to this crisis, and that is this: esse quam Videri (to be rather than to seem). It is the responsibility of society to gather as a whole and not live to become separated.
As a society we cannot live on pretense, for pretense is the scepter a tyrant uses to keep the masses enslaved, if you wish to again return to harmony, then the self must dissolve into a whole, where within the whole, an individual can again be equal. Equality can only exist where there is no separation. If each person lived on the successes of the whole, then the individual would again thrive without needing to oppress the rights and principles of another.