the inhabited human story

and the great irony that so many who speak of "evolution" want to "intelligently design" humanity

there is an increasing tragedy of the modern age:

we have no shared mythos, no shared heroes, no shared narrative.

and humans cannot coexist without a unifying story.

rob them of such and it creates nothing but the war of tribe against tribe and all against all.

the buildings of thousands of years ago are nearly all gone, but the stories, the traditions, the cultural touchstones live on.

or at least, they did.

will they esteem us for our pyramids or for the beauty of the stories that raised them?

like taliban blowing up ancient statuary, the modern meddling mob has been tearing these collected societal monuments down and replacing them with conjured hallucinations and made up meaning placed where civilization once resided.

they want to replace our collective story with a new story. a better story. a story of how that which we revered was evil and misguided and we are bad and of how we must deny and dismantle ourselves in atonement. a story that they made up to change us. a story where they are the heroes.

it’s ironic: every one of these people will tell you “you could never design a dolphin, it had to evolve” but then champion “intelligent design” of civilization and shared human experience. but like draftboard delphinidae, such structures are a broken and incomplete things and they cannot provide humans with civilization conducive to humanity because they did not come from humanity.

and so we come apart.

it's kind of dazzling the degree to which we're living in the same nations but inhabiting parallel worlds that cannot agree on even basic facts anymore.

i encounter this over and over in life and in social media: you meet someone and have no idea if you will even be able to speak to them. do you share any sense of the past, the present, what just happened, or why?

there is no center. there is nothing to hold.

gatopal™ david mccune put it well as we were discussing this:

“One Movie, Two Screens. And a thousand fights in the aisle.”

pretty soon, there is nothing resembling agreed meaning.

and this is a desperately stupid world.

and this is how civilizations die in orgies of blood and self destruction.

the inhabited human story was a common law style substrate that retained and enshrined that which worked through the endless and irreplaceable process known as “trying stuff and seeing what happens” and little by little converging on timeless truths. some won, some lost, but all were tested exhaustively long before they went into common currency. and that’s the pivot.

this kind of societal story darwinism relentlessly surfaces that which works, that which is effective. it accrued as useful from 1000's of years of collective benefit and experience. there is no substitute for that nor faking it. the rest is nutrient-devoid made up franken food from a lab.

the myths and legends spoke to vital human needs and were fundamentally human things.

they were evolved, not designed.

this is the disaster of trying to force top-down worldviews made up for ideological ends upon an unsuspecting populace:

the whole system is inhuman.

it does not speak to human needs or practice.

and so that which it builds is generally monstrous.

you cannot just pick a pile of salients and say “people should be like this” and demand that the world dance to your tune. generally, such music is horrifyingly off key, the drumbeat of pogroms and oppressive plans to remake us all in some egotist’s image and woe betide any who stand in the way or wish to go their own.

societies that grow from shared context and success possess the collective touchstones to flourish as wholes. those that seek to shoehorn the untested into place and then blame the victims when it fails to function go mad and turn upon themselves.

and this puts us at a precarious time.

make for glorious mew-ture

it’s the longstanding marxist/collectivist/utopian conceit that in order to have a “revolution” and supplant society with “the new man” you must first wreck that which came before, separate it from its touchstones of faith, family, friendship, country, or individuality and sweep it aside.

the doctrine and playbook demand it and, unfortunately, this is a play at which they can succeed, especially if you leave them alone with the schools for 20 years.

but then they try to push a new invented story upon society and it never works because this inapt story demands much and gives nothing.

the societal substrate recoils.

it’s the collectivism/human perfectibility classic: elevate an inhuman belief system in the place of that which evolved to enshrine humanity and its conscious and unconscious needs then act shocked when the outcomes are anti-human.

tear down every fence in chesterton then seem befuddled when 100 things you never expected get loose and overrun the world and nothing works anymore.

the human story is not some arbitrary thing. it’s not a space in which one can simply swap out what grew and replace it with something patterned from assumptive ideological cloth because you’re super-dooper double secret sure you know what’s best and that everyone else is some sort of benighted fool.

you cannot just remove the axis mundi of civilization and replace it with a new one of your choosing.

i am not generally a conservative person. i like new things, new ideas, new philosophies and avenues, but these things without the common canvas of societal cohesion are just ricocheting rounds bouncing hither and yon at deadly velocity.

such calamitous crossfire drives everyone mad and into conflict.

some things must be conserved or nothing else can work, grow, or change.

you get nothing but dissolution and ruin.

a city absent story is just an empty thing.

it is not troy that binds us together, but the memory of the stories told of it, the deeds and avatars and allegories.

and they must be our stories, those that collected us to their pole-stars.

we do not get to choose them.

the reality is that they must choose us.

acattes, leader of the purrmydons

and we find ourselves at this point.

much has been broken and disassembled. and we need it back. the only other way is the long night of coercion and violence as the puppetmasters grow ever more furious at the puppets for not being real little boys and start to break them in the attempt to make them so.

you can get decades of this sort of damage and coercive ideological imposition and remove societies from the world and alienate them from themselves. mao did it. stalin did it. and the one thing that every society that fell to such predation has in common is this: “they did not think it could happen here so they did not stand to reclaim that which was theirs.”

i have spoken often about how one will only get to keep the rights for which one is willing to fight. this stern truth applies to mythos and heroes and story as well. they are the marrow and integument of our association. they constitute the literal BIOS of civilization. we shared them and shared them well. we had a (mostly) good story and a path to a better one. organically. meaningfully. honestly.

and it’s time to re-install it.

the society we save may be our own…

dare once more to dream