"Our lives are more about watering deserts, than they are about tearing down walls." - CS Lewis

“Ever to excel, to do better than others, and to bring glory to your forebears, who indeed were very great ... This is my ancestry; this is the blood I am proud to inherit."
- Homer, The Iliad


Life has never been perfect, nor will it ever be.  Human nature will never fundamentally change.  We are flawed human beings.  Progress, if it does occur, occurs when we realize we took the wrong turn and we head back the other direction and then take a different path.  After reading “The Blue Zones”, about the healthiest places in the world, I became even more convinced of how big of an impact culture has on health and about how wrong we have gone in education, as one example.  
 
Each one of these groups in The Blue Zones has a specific culture in which young people participate in and are brought up in and that they crucially belong to.  There are certain values, ethics, morals, traditions, roots, celebrations, and commitments which go along with this.  The young people are acculturated into a grounded and specific way of being in the world.  Most Americans are no longer acculturated in their educational upbringing. Indoctrinated maybe, but acculturated no.  
 
This is not healthy and it is a distinctly modern problem.  This was a wrong path.  I lived it myself, where I can remember the utilitarianism, political correctness, and ideology creeping in, as Alabama history, religious teaching, and Appalachian cultural dancing, folklore, and literature were slowly pushed away into an encroaching oblivion.  No wonder Americans love traveling to other countries and other cultures so much.  
 
In the seminal work on depression, “The Weariness of the Self” the author makes the timely point that our depression epidemic is largely a cultural phenomenon.  The human psyche needs culture to make sense of the world, and to live a healthy life.  This was formerly the role of education.  The ego is tired, the psyche is weary, the American is sad.  The existential burden of an atomized individual, without a culture to fall back on, is too much too bear.   Plus, the struggle to become an individual, set apart, ironically only exists in the context of a culture.  If you want to reject a culture, or even excel as an individual, don't forget that you have to have a culture to reject or to excel in relation to in the first place in order to do that.  
 
Now we teach self-esteem, whether earned or not.  Now, we dumb down thinking, in order not to offend.  Now we teach utility, but not values.  It’s as though we are trying to create the world from scratch and that nothing learned throughout our history matters anymore.  
 
The older form of education involved lore, tradition, and belonging.  It gave young people a way to make sense of their experience and a classical ideal to aspire to.  Now, in many cases, education seems to be about validating the student’s whims and vanities, not bringing them into a community where they can more objectively measure themselves and find their niche.  I love the idea of bringing back trades, and trade schools, of teaching the great old books, and in linking schools up with other transcendent cultural institutions to create local community.  
 
Education is about more than test scores, self-esteem, or diversity quotas.  It’s about belonging.  

Read Next:  Hari Hachi Bu @ Other Secrets of The Blue Zones

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Men become richer not only by increasing their existing wealth but also by decreasing their expenditure.  
- Aristotle
 
Most people I know would like to be rich if they had the choice.  I’m sure there are a few people out there who could care less about money, but if we’re being honest, most of us would like to not have to worry about it. Good news:  there are two ways to achieve this state in life, there are two ways to be rich in life.  One way is easy, and you can decide upon and maintain your ethics ahead of time and stick with them easily.  You need much less in this case, and so it’s much easier to work and live how you see fit, and be rich. 
 
The other way, the 2ndway, could be ethical too, but it will be harder to maintain your ethics and there’s a good chance it won’t be an ethical richness.  And you may, in the second case, need to pretend you like people that you don’t, for years and years and years.  This way of being rich is to make so much money that you never worry about money.  Depending on what you want to buy and own, you may never achieve this status of being “rich”, even if you have $3 million dollars or whatever.  Which do you think is easier and more realistic for most people? I’m always amazed at how many seemingly “rich” people are miserable.  
  
The average American only saves 5%, while 50-75% of the population has no savings at all.  The juggernaut of unfettered consumerism, which is our primary source of identity in America- that of a consumer, has been terrible health-wise for most people.  Most people need more of an identity than an unfettered will, thrown back on pre-human and primitive desires, unconstrained by wisdom, morality, or the higher brain’s cognitive restraint.  Consumerism as our primary identity is a game we can’t win and a thirst that can never be quenched.  Its “ritual” is consuming, it’s “bread and wine” is credit cards and statements, and its “liturgies” are commercials, slogans, and logos.  What make it even worse is that since we live in an anti-culture we are constantly atomizing more and more towards a life solely existing as a consumer, because it’s the only source of identity most modern people have. So, we keep consuming to feel alive. 
 
Consumption is the only way we know to be rich, because it’s the only way we know to feel alive.
 
The iphone takes precedence over tea with friends at the café.
The expensive car emblazoned with a logo, takes precedence over walking with a friend.
The best SAT score takes precedence over character.
And the best elite schools, highly connected to the new moral community of rootlessness and political correctness, ascend culturally while real community, built on roots, tradition, and internal values, vanishes. 
Overall, despair sets in.  
It’s a game that no one can win.
 
Now back to the original proposition.  I like money. I like traveling, sometimes.  I like having a good business and doing good work.  There’s nothing wrong with financial gain and I wish it for everyone.  But again, there are two ways to be rich and one comes with a big downside if we aren’t careful.
 
Most of us can want less of the things we don’t need, the things that chain us down, and the things which aren’t wise to desire in the first place.  If we do this, our wealth increases instantly.  Unlike the stoics, I’m not asking you to eliminate desires. But I am asking you to desire what makes you happyjust like “the philosopher” - Aristotle taught 2500 years ago.  Sometimes, we need to change what we desire, we need to transform it into something better.  
 
Sure, you may one day make so much money that you finally feel “rich.” I hope you do.  But there is another way to be rich.  And how much is enough?  Most people never define it.  I like Clark Howard’s, Dave Ramsey’s and the Bible’s and ancient philosophy’s advice to stay out of personal debt.  Be wise, desire the right things, the things that really make you happy in the long run and learn to get by with less.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  You can make money but not let it become your sole identity, your primary focus of richness. One focus on being rich emphasizes external values and the other internal values, and internal values are time and time again the bulwark of a healthy and meaningful life.  You know and I know what we need to do.  
 
Why not start by being grateful, content, simplifying, and enjoying the simple pleasures in life?  Your wealth will explode!
 
There are two ways to be rich.   Be careful which one you pick.  

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I was thinking a lot about violence this week after the depressing incident at the school in Florida. 

No matter what you think of guns, gun control, and that particular issue, there is obviously something else going on besides guns.  Perhaps guns should be more tightly regulated, but there is so much more to this story, because this kind of thing never used to happen.  

One of the more insightful takes on mass shootings comes from a book called "Tribe: On Homecoming & Belonging" by Ernst Junger.  His thesis is that the breakdown in community and purposeful living in America, particularly for males, is what is driving the increase.  I think there is a lot to that, as well as other factors.   I did not know until I read his book that the Northern European myths about werewolves, were the same type of story, where a lone male removes himself from the group and its values and then proceeds to kill members of the community.  Normally these males have a productive role in society and are valued for something but when things go haywire and these males are not channeled properly, things get evil.  He also shows some stats in the book about how violence as a whole, as well as depression and mental illness as a whole, often actually decreases during time of war because war brings people together and gives men something to do.    

I did some brainstorming just to see what had changed in the last 50 or so years to drive the mass shootings.  I do find it strange and anti-intellectual that no one is talking about these things:

• Multi-cultural societies experience a decrease in social cohesion and an increase in social isolation and the US has become much more multi-cultural.
• We live in a contradicting time, relativistic on one hand and ideological on the other, which creates a type of mass psychosis and mass irrationality:
  • Relativism- one value or belief is as good as another, emotions make things "right", there is no such thing as good or evil, every individual can determine what is right or wrong.
  • Ideology- One group says if you don't believe what I believe, you are wrong, evil, or a bad person who needs to be jailed, fired, or socially ostracized, therefore contradicting the relativistic stance.  In other words, "our" values and "our" ideology are right, and yours are wrong.
• Another way this mass psychosis and mass irrationality will play out will be total war and mass narcissism, which is what is happening and what the philosopher Nietzsche predicted.  Nietzche describes it this way:
• "If you don't believe in truth, you must believe in power"
• We now have legal insta-porn at the tip of a finger where every form of debauched violent and dehumanizing act with people, animals, and implements is available for small children and anyone else to watch.  How is this legal?
• 50 years ago, abortion, which somewhere around half of America including myself view as murder, was illegal.  Considering unborn babies can recognize their mothers voices and feel pain, this is really amazing and sad.
• You could only “identify” as what you actually were.  
• Masculinity itself was not treated as an evil pathology and chivalry as a disease to be cured and re-educated.
• ​Men had roles to play, had purpose, and were valued members of society, even men on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.  The same could be said for women.  
• People, whether religious or not, generally respected their elders, their parents, and the common sense of our inherited 10 commandments of cultural morality.  This "natural law" as John Locke would call it, was ingrained into the psyche of the average person.
• People went outside to play and knew their neighbors.
• Marriage actually meant something, and was an unbreakable religious covenant difficult to get out of.  Divorce was much more rare.  
• People didn’t stare at screens in an addictive rush of narcissistic rages, indignation, and autistic spasm all day.
• TV movies and games did not show the graphic details of mass bloodshed and violence. It's actually kind of funny now if you watch a show like "The A-Team" which was popular in the 1980s how little violence was shown.  
• The bestselling book in the history of the country was not a tacky nonstory about sexual violence and a man who humiliates and controls his “lover.”
• People didn’t sit on their butt watching mindless soul crushing technology from various screens all day.
• If someone hurt your feelings or school was hard it wasn’t cause for immediately taking psychotropic drugs, but rather an opportunity to grow up.

The truth is never easy to hear.  Perhaps the philosophers are right. Maybe the government will have to continue to get bigger and bigger to deal with growing social dysfunction until it finally collapses.  I hope not.

There are dark spiritual energies and forces, which unless confronted and dealt with, and converted into something good and positive will plunge our world further into chaos.  Perhaps we need to change our laws, but I know for certain that we need to get real.  If you want to talk, then everything is on the table.  

Does America even have a conscience?  I think so but I'm not sure. 

We need to cut out the cant.

And have a real conversation.  

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