We are accustomed to assuming that 'the thing is' to have a strategy if you want to change culture. And certainly one can strategically wreck culture - think of government departments, 'new initiatives', five-year-plans; think of Mission Statements (actually, that's too nasty - you had better not...).
But there is no evidence that culture (or science, or literature, or music, or morality, or virtue - or anything Good) can be improved by a strategy except in the short term (if a system is already good, and resources are thrown at it, then there will initially be an improvement in so far as the good aspects are resource-constrained - before the overall system is corrupted). Indeed all the evidence is that a sustained strategy always wrecks every-thing it addresses.
One reason is that strategy treats of people in the lump, and assumes that individual differences don't really matter. But if every-body really is different from each other in their eternal essence; if we began different and are intended (by God) to end as different - then we ought to give-up strategic thinking at the fundamental level... if we can (it's hard).
This is a place in which traditionalist thinkers are as badly in error as radicals: both envisage a world in which the individual is fitted to the system. But Heaven won't be like that, and it is not what the Christian God wants from the sons and daughters of God (or else he created the world very ill, or is not Good - both of which we must reject).
To give-up on strategic thinking at first induces a sense of despair; because it is how we tend to conceptualise progress. Yet that assumption is itself a corruption of exactly the kind we hope to overcome.
And then, when we continue to reject strategic thinking - and cease to make plans to resist and fight, and plans to expand and conquer, and abandon plans to be better... and more consistently so - there is a great sense of rightness: the heart informs us that we have done-good, that we are on-the-right-lines. That this is truth and based on truth.
Only then may we be able to think properly; to think from our true-self, to think intuitively.
We feel secure, and - in a deep (not surface) sense: indomitable.
I feel like you’ve tapped into a crucial truth here. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteSounds like the True King versus Democracy.
ReplyDeleteA strategy is fine provided it incorporates a proper *scope*: what conditions the strategy is designed to work under and what goals the strategy is designed to achieve.
ReplyDeleteThe problem comes when either of these two things is forgotten. This leads to people sticking to the strategy long after it has become obsolete, applying the strategy to people with different goals, or abandoning the strategy even though it is still vital (the Chesterton's fence scenario.)
Naturally, if an institution has grown up around a strategy there are plenty of incentives for people to cause these problems or make them worse.
-- Robert Brockman
I think that the key thing is that there is no strategy that does not involve the basic and unavoidable evil of war, i.e. collateral damage.
ReplyDeleteAnd the collateral damage we must accept to form a realistic strategy at this stage is stupendous. Essentially, the sacrifice of all civilization and everything that depends on it, saving only ourselves and what we can personally conserve. This would be an evil strategy if the wider culture were viable, and thus had to be actively undermined.
What makes this strategy less evil is that it requires nothing of us but that we individually disengage and stop actively serving the unsustainable evil of the wider culture. But by the token of being a movement of individuals moved by personal conscience, it ceases to seem anything like a strategy at the scale of events we're facing.
Nor is it one, because the larger scale culture is not our concern. What matters is the individual, personal decisions of each of us and our accountability to God for them.
There is very little need for strategy nowadays, since large-scale strategies are unlikely to work.
ReplyDeleteThere is, however, a very great need for tactics, knowledge of how to behave in situations where one is confronted with people of crooked intent both individually and in groups, situations that are calculated to cause most people to compromise their integrity.
For example, stupidity and incomprehension could be a tactic... if one visibly fails to understand a veiled enticement or threat, then the other person must make themselves known explicitly, or back down. Depending on the situation, this might result in being left alone, or it could result in disaster.
For another example, studying the behaviour of different Christians and dissidents during the Soviet regime, and the different consequences for that behaviour, is typically enlightening in terms of learning different ways to respond to authority figures forcing a crisis situation. However, the lessons learned generalize poorly to today's situation, in which failure to conform is punished primarily through the media and indirect sanction, and only secondarily by coercive power.
The tactics described in Vox Day's books are also tactics, but are mostly effective for someone who becomes the target of an explicit political witchhunt... whereas the real danger to most people is that far more subtle forms of compliance will be demanded of them, and they will go-along because they have no idea how else to respond.