The Trouble With American Productivity: How cannibal cultures and religion destroy initiative
If you have ever tried to start a business, start a new product within a large organization, or make anything that involves the participation of the population at large you will undoubtedly have run up against tremendous opposition that needlessly seems intent to derail your plans. Deep pocket old money tends to purchase away opposition to their projects with political contributions and under the table buy-offs. But new money innovation has only one way through the gauntlet—and that is by surprise. A fledgling entrepreneur must hope that they can take the market by surprise before the parasites zero in and destroy their efforts. Currently in America—as in most places in the world, it is nearly impossible to do business as most organizations are plagued with do-nothing bureaucrats created by government for the purpose of job creation—without any zeal for production of any kind. They have a parasitic relationship with production—the key to any economic endeavor–and simply get in the way of creating anything of value. The reason for this issue is actually extremely complicated and must be understood by examining closely the map below. It is not enough to complain that the situation is one of economic theory or political philosophy—but is much more primal than that and extends back to the beginning of the human race.
Looking at the map it will be seen the pattern of ritual cannibalism cultures as they flourished during various periods throughout the world. The map is useful and comes from the book Atlas of World Mythology: Way of the Seeded Earth Part II and is one of the most treasured books in my collection. The map is not concerned with periods by millennia so much as the pattern and residual effects of cultures that had foundations of cannibalism and human sacrifice in their societies. In Europe this was a dominate ideal which can clearly be seen in the Biblical translations that flourished in Europe during the times of the first printing presses and the Roman Catholic Church who built their version of Christianity around such ideals of sacrifice.
Across the Middle East it will also be noticed that the entire region from Greece down to the Persian Gulf had elements of cannibalism which should be obvious to the students of Zoroastrianism which became the foundation of Christianity and Islamic faith—both riddled with deep beliefs in sacrifice serving as their foundations. It should not be a surprise that the concept of Sharia Law allows for it’s followers to sacrifice themselves in this world for promises in the next—which is the basic premise behind the human bomb terrorism acts. The notion of human sacrifice is alive and well behind every Islamic terrorist. The goal of the terror is to convert people into Islamic faith through fear—to force them to take the path of least resistance. They are not asking people to become committed to the Muslim faith through religious purity—but through fear. This is a tribal remnant to their ancient tendency toward cannibalism. Their mythology which formulated the philosophy of their society is rooted in human sacrifice. The fundamentals of their faith believe falsely that something must be given up before something can be gained.
Cannibal cultures seen in the zones indicated on the above map tended to be agriculturally based. The workers of the fields at the time as they do today—tend to plant seeds in the ground and hope that the gods bring them rain to nourish the seeds to healthy crop yields. They felt they needed assurances that crops would grow prosperously and developed mythologies which attempted to appease nature by viewing the crops as gifts from some mystical source which desired some kind of payment. Because of this they developed human sacrifice rituals and other types of blood gifts hoping that they would not starve with bad crops.
The correct way to view agricultural activity then and now is to see the work of planting seeds as productive and the science as stable. If you perform the work, you tend to yield the results. This is why under American capitalism farmers tend to thrive where other countries not as free tend to starve if given the same type of land, the same access to water, and the same general labor force. The cannibal cultures of the past which led to the major religions of the world started with an incorrect premise that pointed their entire societies in the wrong direction. The emphasis of their religions is on sacrifice instead of productivity.
In business this old irrational notion congers itself up in the bureaucrats against industry who still believe that something must be sacrificed if something is to be built—as if all things were created in a finite state and that something must be given up to have something new. Job creation is an act of invention—of making something that wasn’t there before like a painting, a sculpture, or a literary work. A goat doesn’t have to be sacrificed to create a job. The gods do not hand them out to those who have been naughty or nice—jobs are created by minds able to make them. However, for those who do not understand such things, they believe their role in the process is similar to those old cannibals of yesteryear. They will sabotage creativity at every opportunity and attempt to stop any productive enterprise with an ancient commitment to the notion of greed—that a job creator is trying to build something without giving something up. For any such person in an altruistic society is viewed as greedy if they wish to make something—profit off it—and prosper without some kind of sacrifice to the gods of the past. These definitions are left over from their ancestors who literally believed that death of something had to occur before life could prosper.
Christianity is riddled with this type of behavior. The very core aspect of the religion is that Christ died for our lives and that we were condemned of sin at birth. But because Christ gave his life—we are allowed to prosper as human beings and that we should participate in some kind of sacrifice to give thanks to the effort. This is just an old variant of human sacrifice as it was propelled across the European region shown on the map. To replace the sacrificial tendencies of the Pagans Roman Catholics in a desire to preserve their empire used the notion of Christ’s sacrifice as a way to pull belief into their desire for a pacifist kingdom united under the flag of Christianity. There are of course wonderful values in Christianity, but the essence of it is false, the ideal of sacrifice as being needed to be productive.
Work is done by individuals. Goodness is not a gift from out there somewhere in the universe, but within our own hearts. Goodness is made by the mind of man. And everything that comes from the mind of man is considered productive when it is applied to reality. Productivity is the act of planting a seed into the ground and watering it with labor. Productivity is creating a job that was not there before to fill a market need that also wasn’t there before a mind made a need imagined by someone’s mind.
Productivity is not the government regulator who hampers creativity in business to protect a turtle habitat, or the union steward who keeps workers from hitting their piece rate while nearing a labor contract. It is not a mindless bureaucrat that thinks productivity is compliance to some stupid rule that man came up with out of a silly notion rooted in sacrifice—sacrifice to Mother Earth, sacrifice to mother government, sacrifice to our fellow man—sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice–ancient beliefs that were flawed four thousand years ago and are still wrong today.
When something productive is attempted the old cannibals of our society come out in full attack—and this is something that will not stop until the mythologies that form their cultures changes. As long as terrorists are willing to blow themselves up to gain access to a bunch of virgins in another world, or sins are removed from behavior because Christ was killed for disrupting the political order of the Pharisees—there will be lots of opposition to real productivity. And starting businesses, creating jobs, and conducting anything productive will be a constant uphill battle riddled with anxiety. That anxiety is needless, but is a direct result of old cannibal cultures and their stupid belief that sacrifice trumps production. Clearly all those who think in such a way are wrong—they just don’t have the ability to understand what a detriment they are to the human race.
Rich Hoffman
