One thing Nobody made clear in his article below was what I mean when I keep repeating, “This is SIMPLE. It is NOT EASY!”
If you go back to basics, you have to change your whole world view, your whole picture of the world.
I meant that LITERALLY. Let me show you some examples:
What gets me is that all the Neanderthal men I see in documentaries are dressed as if they were in the Bahamas in July. But they are being chased over SNOW. What they have on is what I supposed you would call Neanderthal Chic, an animal skin with their arms and most of their chests bare. This is to show they were primitive, of course.
Which brings me to another subject along the same lines. Every time I see a movie about The Real Rome, it looks like it was filmed in a particularly rundown section of Spanish Harlem. All the buildings are gray and worn, every statue is gray stone.
When I walked along in Washington, DC and saw the Capitol and other buildings in The Classic Style, I often laughed to think that an ancient Roman or Greek wouldn’t believe what RUBES those guys were who built them!
You see, what the rubes saw around them in Rome and Greece a couple of centuries ago were the bare ruins of classical buildings. They were, indeed, gray stone. So when they built “classical buildings, they used grey stone. By the same token, when they found ancient sculpture, it was plain gray stone, so Michelangelo and all the rest made what they thought were classical sculptures that were gray stone.
In ancient Rome or ancient Greece, if an architect had produced a plain gray stone public building he would have been committed to a madhouse. If a sculpture had carved a plain GRAY stone statue he would have put in the same asylum. But when you watch what claims to be EDUCATIONAL television shows on BBC like “I, Claudius,” the Emperor is in his garden surrounded by gray stone sculptures.
There is a reason for this. Just as Neanderthal Chic tells us the guy is primitive, gray stone tells us the statue or building is Classical Like-It-Was buildings or statues. The real statues back then looked almost exactly like a wax museum today. Can you imagine trying to stage a Like-It-Was version of dramatic scenes from Classical time with a bunch of what looked like brightly-colored wax statues all around?
Can you imagine a play which shows the Like-It-Was Roman soldiers coming up to a brightly-colored building, through a street full of brightly-colored buildings? Can you imagine showing a Neanderthal man dressed in a complete suit of clothes that would keep him warm?
It wouldn’t look REAL.
This, as Nobody points out, is the story of almost everything today. The BASE is wrong. We assumed so long that the worn-out, gray buildings we see were the REAL Rome that we cannot, even on educational television, be presented with the real thing. It was a long, long time after statues that had been worn to the gray base stone were first time to the nineteenth century when traces of color were found — or NOTICED — on a few of them.
We got the BASE wrong. So we began as hicks and we will STAY hicks until we look at the BASE. And nobody gets paid to look at the base. People get paid to “keep abreast of The Literature.” Dr. Strawmeyer’s last article talked about the shape of the nose on that gray stone statue, so if you want to be published, you have to make a slightly novel observation about the nostrils.
In every area, that is what our present society does.
Nobody CARES about the Democratic victory in the House in 2006. No one cares who the next president will be except those who make a living on talking about it. The BASE is wrong. And no one will look at the BASE.
No one but us.
#1 by Dave on 12/27/2006 - 11:48 pm
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Since I read financial and economic commentary constantly, I have no problem seeing what BW means about “the BASE” and what confusion results through mistaken notions that are fundamental. For example, I just finished reading an essay by a “celebrated academic” premised on the idea that Islam has impeded capital formation because Islamic religious trusts allow only for the accumulation of and retention of real estate interests and morally prohibit unequal profits.
The idea is that the corporation and unlimited executive pay is responsible for the prosperity of “the West”, in contrast to the “Islamic East” that prohibits such organizational forms.
It is astonishing that anyone takes this nonsense seriously, yet academics are paid to produce it. Worse, they actually believe it.
What can I say? I just thank God I am not some poor student, tumbling in perplexity, assuming something important is going on.
Academic orthodoxy truly is primitive. It is astounding so many are lost in it and don’t even know that they are only pretending to be grownup human beings.
#2 by Elizabeth on 12/29/2006 - 12:35 pm
There’s always new stuff coming out about earlier times — but academic orthodoxy blocks much of this. One example is “No Europeans found North America before 1492.” I was a little girl when archaeologists found the remains of the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, on that Canadian island. I could go on and on about academic orthodoxy in history and geography (especially climate)…
#3 by Nobody on 12/29/2006 - 6:45 pm
Dave and Elizabeth made interesting observations about getting trapped in academic orthodoxy, a uniquely self-perpetuating series of interlocking myths, which will lead to our downfall.
One of the points made by the students of failed societies, like Joseph Tainter, is that they become overly wedded to one worldview – and the world changes. The handful of people who are truly present and responsible at the Creation of the next social order SEE that the Old Order can not hold.
Take Vladimir Putin, who, to my thinking, is the foremost statesman on the planet right now. He, and those who ally with him, saw that the JEWISH structures of the Soviet Union were a series of parasitic social overlays that focused on stripping the Russian society of their living heritage, and the natural resources of an Empire away from the people who serve, to the peole who rule. Thus, as the inevitable collapse became imminent, the Oligarchs – six JEWS and a shabbas goy front man – literally stole the immense natural and intellectual wealth of the Soviet Union for less than a penny on the dollar.
Putin, and his associates, saw this as the ideal moment to ignite the Russian spirit, and speak to the Russian soul; his identification with LIVING “Christian” forms of worship “is not by accident,” and, still facing what the Mind sees as tremendous obstacles, SEES, with the Spirit, what is possible for the Russian people – IF they can successfully cross a tremendous Abyss.
To their credit, they, raised in a society controlled by Wordists, looked PAST the Words to the spiritual dynamic forces that gave them life. They then threw off the intellectual bondage of archaic models of Reality (that the Wordists have mastered), and chose to create a new, more honest social order, pretty much from the ground up.
What we worship as “economic theory” seems to be really little more than intermediate price theory writ large, with the Wordist Inversion that the matters of Substance – the spiritual foundation of the lives of the people – have become subordinate to the matters of Form – market clearing prices, at any cost, in service to corporate forms.
The Islamist model works extremely well, because it is inherently organic; its value as an economic tool is that is is a TOOL – a Means to an End – and that End is subordinate to the health, organic social ordering of society.
Simply stated, the Islamic model resembles our Cooperatives to a degree, with one big exception; rather than having the dead mechanistic hand of interest as the sole determinant of risk, and thus, value, their social order replaces it with a series of organizations that are the constructive equivalent of partnership system. This requires all parties to the arrangement approach it with a much stronger awareness of the risks and rewards inherent in the enterprise, but, unlike what our system has become, all of the skills of all of the parties are joined in a common purpose, and no one gains MECHANISTICALLY at the expense of another.
It is our duty, as the CREATIVE RACE, to not be bound by the dead hand of archaic tradition, and to remember the Great Insight of Peter Shank concerning our RACIAL Enemies:
The JEWS took over this country without firing a shot; they did it by controlling the pictures you see, and the words you hear; from that, the Institutions that control the social ordering of Society were easy prey.
Following Shank’s lead, I have a simple test for the degree to which Wordism has taken over an Institution – I just look at the degree to which the Institution serves the Bureaucracy – the Church serves the Priesthood, for example – and it becomes obvious as to how much the dead hand of archaic Ideals rule the day.
Look at it this way – TO WHAT DEGREE DOES THE INSTITUTION ACTIVELY REWARD POLICIES AND PRACTICES THAT ARE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF ITS STATED GOALS?
To THAT degree, the dead hand of Wordism softly, silently, triumphs, even as softly, silently, termites triumph over the living tree.
Overcoming THAT is our daily battle, for our families, and our daily duty, on behalf of our RACE – RACE, writ large, as the dynamic living bridge between FAMILY and CULTURE.
#4 by Pain on 12/29/2006 - 9:57 pm
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The Romans built in white, shining marble. They painted and gilded highlights and particular architectural features. Art historians have known this for at least a hundred years, and yet art history text books still show buildings colored to match the drab ruins of today.
It once was thought that the buildings were wholly unadorned and that the statues were too. Then someone, probably a German, began rooting around in the hair of a famous Greek kouros. He found in the deep crevasses golden blond pigment. This kouros became known as the Blond Boy. But since we know that Greek society and art was based on an ideal of neat, tidy perfection, it is safe to assume that all or most all their marble statues were colored the same: glowing white skin, bright golden hair.
The Greek preferred bronze, and anyone who has spent some time with Brasso knows you can polish bronze to innumerable hues of gold, yellows, tans, and pinks. Yet Greek bronze statues in art history books are always greenish black, as if the Greeks kept their greatest works of art buried and corroding in wet earth.
#5 by Dennis on 01/02/2007 - 5:06 pm
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The movie “Alexander”, is probably the only one I’ve seen which actually depicts the statues as being brightly painted. In this movie, which was done by Oliver Stone (?), the anceint city scape is depicted in vivid colour. Was it done this way for historical accuracy, or for eye-candy for the moviegoers?