Volume 2, Number 2 Simpsonville, South Carolina
Contents
Greetings from the Writer-in-Chief..............................................................................................1
Culture Frames Capacity............................................................................................................1
Culture Frames Capacity
The great thing about the Enlightenment was the uplifting
recognition of Natural Law. We can either be in harmony
with Natural Law, or we can break against it. Very
important to our culture and our welfare is the Law of
Conservation. Because resources are limited, they are
contested, and because they are contested, the most
powerful users of resources may actually use them. By
natural standards progress is mandatory. By natural
standards economy is mandatory. This is our enlightened
framework from the simple recognition of the Law of
Conservation:
1) Economy is the social and economized
utilization of resources for material means.
2) Politics is the maintenance of jurisdiction by
superior violence whether latent or kinetic.
3) Culture is the aggregable value of personal
values across a society.
4) The Law of Conservation requires progress of
culture.
Economy, politics, and culture. The three are
inextricably linked. They are the relative riches or
impoverishments, depending on your perspective, earned
by the teamwork of civilization. Thus, the capacity of
culture delimits the possibilities of economy and politics.
Because resources are limited, culture frames capacity.
Another important product and producer of civilization
is religion. Religion may define a cultural sophistication
that is high or low relative to a given society. Thus,
religion may be uplifting or debasing depending on
context. The Law of Conservation requires a progress of
religion if religion there is. Appreciation of the
ramifications I must leave to your consideration for my
own safety. I only note that Christianity was
democratized in the 16th century and abolitionized in the
19th.
© 2010 Douglas Morris All rights reserved.
‘Crapportunity Threatre’ is an unregistered trademark of Douglas Morris.
June 2010
Greetings from the Writer-in-Chief
This is the fourth all-time issue of The Cerebral
Freedom. This issue is inspired by a Web video I made
called Crapportunity Theatre: Culture Frames
Capacity. Beside a monologue on the first principles
of being civilized, the video presents a cyclic analysis
of British-American history. The cyclic view of
history's leading civilizations is sound. In imperial
China, new dynasties brought vitality, but over time
privilege found such merits inexpedient. Romans used
cycles roughly the length of a human lifetime called
saecula to measure history. British-American saecula
are well documented in The Fourth Turning by Strauss
and Howe. Why should Western history cycle with the
periodicity of a long human life? Because most people
appreciate history as the treasure-trove of one's own
personal experiences. In this second great Western
civilization of ours, the ‘ruling’ people repeatedly lose
character as the last crisis fades from living memory.
Ignorance courts the next crisis and the next lesson.
Societies don't always survive the reset. The lifetime
of a civilization is the concern of the so-called Tytler
cycle, a model reliant upon intuition as far as I know.
The flow of Western history has been: Greco-Roman
Westernized civilization, the Middle Ages (in
hindsight), British-American Westernized civilization.
Success of the imperial Roman Republic rested upon
one language, one culture, and religious freedom.
Interestingly, flavors of paganism provided the Roman
masses with a sound cultural matrix, not unlike
Christian denominations have gently bound Americans.
Yet likewise obtained the objectivist pursuits of
intellectuals. Before us I fear looms the return to
serfdom, albeit Orwellian. The rude tastes of lesser
peoples is again vogue. Citizens untrue to the first
principles of natural law are your greatest threat.
—Douglas Morris
Page 2 The Cerebral Freedom
Capacity varies with culture, and so all cultures are not
equivalently able or good. Rejection of cultural
discrimination is absurd because such discrimination is
imperative to our freedom. Why? Because our respective
standards of living rest not only upon our individual
results but also the team results of our society. Since
freedom is endowment of jurisdiction, freedom requires
politics, which requires economy and culture, which must
advance or perish. However, freedom is an individual
endowment requiring a restrictive kind of viable
civilization according to the Laws of Nature and the very
definition of freedom.
It is important to distinguish between man's viable
freedom of today and of prehistory. Civilized freedom is
freedom through responsibility. It is self-government.
Feral freedom is freedom from responsibility. With
billions of people on the earth, feral freedom is not
possible without extreme depopulation, not to mention a
huge decline in living standards. In practice the pursuit of
freedom through irresponsibility has little chance of
degenerating completely to feral freedom. It will usher in
a different opposite, the civilized opposite: slavery.
In the civilized world the qualitative battle is between
self-government and slavery. Both are truly civilized.
Both use the structure of civilization to elevate people.
Slavery lifts people up enough to hold them down. Self-
government requires self-disciple to respect the confines
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Volume 2, Number 2
within the uplifting structure of civilization. Individual
responsibility has been most perfected in Western society,
but with a glaring lack of individual accountability. In the
West the debt of individual irresponsibility has been
accrued and liquidated in the course of cycles called
saecula. The reset of cultural values has been of
enormous benefit, but the American boys who stormed
Normandy did not politically support Wilson's Fourteen
Points or make speculative loans to Germany during the
Roaring Twenties.
The closer to individual accountability society gets, the
sooner the debts of individual irresponsibility are paid, the
greater the culture and the people will be. Cultural
idealism for one people can be cultural greatness for
another. True progress, as exemplified from the Stone
Age through the Industrial Revolution, is our moral
directive by the Laws of Nature and Nature's God.
Therein lies the cruel maturation of our infantile common
good, in riches that need not be economized but must be
progressively standardized. The common good like social
progress is generally mischaracterized by Americans as
purchasable or mythical. All according to the left-right
political straitjacket of the Establishment. The
widespread misconception is crucial. A Crapportunity
this way comes.
Cherchez la femme.