Cycle of Moral Cultures
December 14, 2020
By AHNZ
Having discussed and derived the 4 Moral Cultures, the next thing to know in the Theory of Moral Cultures is that each cultures takes its turn in a defined order.
Honour Culture is followed by Dignity Culture which in turn is followed by Victimhood Culture then Slave Culture. Slave Culture is succeeded by Honour Culture and around we go again.
Why should this be? In essence, it’s because each Culture has a nemesis that grows stronger as it annihilates or eats up its natural prey. The image above shows that Slave Culture replaces Victimhood Culture by consuming it and then is, in turn, gobbled up by Honour Culture, and on it goes.
So, like the four seasons, at any given moment a Moral Culture can be said to be in Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter. The culture whose population doesn’t have the others on the run will soon go from predator to prey. At our level of these cycles the populations don’t die, although they may feel that way sometimes. They simply go underground to recuperate and rally while hegemony over society as a whole will be held by another for a spell of years.
Historical Order of Moral Cultures:
HC -> DC -> VC -> SC -> HC -> DC -> VC -> SC -> HC -> […]
Let’s go over this in finer detail to explain why one Moral Culture is prey to another and comes to replace it.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”- G.M. Hopf
Honour Culture becomes Dignity Culture
Strong men create good times and history is replete with examples at home and abroad. The epitome of Honour Culture was Genghis Khan, conquering barbarian nomad yet his grandson, Kubla Khan, ‘in Xanadu a stately pleasure-dome did decree.’ A few generations later, Oljeitu the Builder, put together a great Dignity Culture city where disparate religions and nationalities thrived.
Alexander the Great started life as a back-woods prince who battled with his rude Macedonians through great risk and hardship. When faced with the Dignity Culture challenge of the ages, the Gordian Knot, he solved it with one Honour Culture sweep of his sword. Within his own lifetime, Alexander adjusted to the Persian mode of living and clothing and eating and administration necessary to hold onto such a large empire. Having conquered all the Near East, Alexander drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzer at Babylon. Some people just shouldn’t retire.
A pirate or warlord (HC) is like a dog chasing a car because he doesn’t know what he’d do with it if he ever got it. He desires to put down his crude ways and be wealthy, to live a refined life. To bathe, to provide a home and an education for his children. To have the medicine and monuments and manners and peace of civilisation (DC.) He is seduced by finer things, and why not? New Zealand’s pioneer settlers didn’t break their backs for no gain but wanted to earn a better life for themselves and those to come. The basic Celtic people who settled Dunedin were rabid about education, about making sure their children had better instructions than themselves.
Image: A Dignity Culture era sees a Kiwi on Mt Everest, a feat of symbolic importance made possible by DC technology and a disregard for practical utility that a HC could never even consider.
It’s no bad thing that a hard-working population can fight and work their way into better circumstances and leave behind the bloodshed and the toil. Eventually, this is always the aim which is why Honour Culture is always consumed by Dignity Culture.
Dignity Culture becomes Victimhood Culture
Dignity Culture is a boom time because the population is dominated by capable men and women. Having provided for the wealth and administration and security of their people the successful DC has earned some surplus for philanthropy.
Initially this is a wonderful arrangement and the Victimhood Culture emerges to identify needful causes to spend the DC’s money on. For argument’s sake, VC’s benefit society by facilitating things like old folks homes, returned soldiers clubs, orphan’s homes, charities for cripples, single mothers, battered women. Votes for women. Abolition of slavery, statutory holidays, eight hour work days, shoes for Northland kids, milk in schools, books in homes, transexual book readers in schools. It goes on and on, never ending, until the DC and his entire culture becomes bankrupt.
The DC doesn’t know how to say “no” to the VC. Everything she asks for seems so reasonable and likely to gain or keep her affection so he keeps writing the cheques. The VC has no sense of how this money is made or how to earn it or when to stop. Even in Ayn Rand’s DC hero, Hank Rearden, didn’t have the ego boundaries to say “no” to his VC family and instead abandoned his world to live in John Galt’s Gulch.
Who was Kate Sheppard (image above) but a society woman who bled her husband of his fortune, cuckolded him, and put all of her effort into VC causes such as Votes for Women? What do we find Mary Poppins doing in her movie but trying to SuperNanny for Mrs Banks (image right) who abandons her children to the cooking staff because she is obsessed with her Feminist Victimhood Culture crusade?
Every Victimhood Culture ends in economic recession, if not depression.
“Today in history: 19 September 1893: Womens’ Sufferage enacted in New Zealand. What a disaster it has been!”- AHNZ
“Nemesis overtook not not only the banks…in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, but also the land-owning classes and those who possessed money and the control of commerce…longest spell of acute commercial depression which had so far weighted on New Zealand. Prices of food and raw products on which New Zealand lived were very low…meagre profits…declining wages and salaries and chronic unemployment…bankruptcy overshadowed thousands…People left the country in their thousands.”- p179 Pritchard (1970)
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing (Robert Conquest.)
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Victimhood Culture becomes Slave Culture
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ust as Victimhood Culture has been emptying the pockets and exhausting DC, so too has SC been doing the same to VC.
Initially a decent recipient of a hand-up not a hand-out, the SC folk soon multiply when it becomes plain that it’s open season on a free lunch. All they need to do to graze at the DC’s wallet is to talk and act in a prescribed way so the VC will facilitate the transaction (taking their cut in money and fame in the process, of course.)
As this process advances, even productive people are drawn away from earning money for a living to being on some form of welfare relief. When you add up all the tax breaks and subsidisations it is true in many circumstances that a family is better off not being productive at all. A Slave Culture hero is an expert at getting this best out of this situation.
The old adage ‘”shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” refers the family unable to consolidate and retain their gains. Spoilt by the unearned inheritance of wealth and even a nation’s infrastructure, the children of a man who worked his way to the top take all that for granted. Shirtsleeves #1 is the self-made man, his children are VC born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Shirtsleeves #3 is SC, the money is gone, no direction home, groomed for a palatial life taken for granted, the archetypical parent of an HC kid with vigour and ambition.
So, now we have a Clown World. It is dominated, not by the productive, but by the protected class. The lunatics, as it were, have taken over the asylum. The SC call the shots, pull the strings, strike, riot, hunger strike, ask for the moon while the VC scrambles to accommodate their most wild wishes. Now it is the VC who cannot say “no” and has become exhausted trying to save every minority from their lot. In particular, the SC deprives the VC of the gratitude and fame they seek as payment for making a lolly scramble of the DC’s wealth. That’s what really hurts the VC and has them folding up their tent; Scepticism toward their rules and virtue. When the SC takes free goods and services as a matter of un-earned entitlement it deprives the VC of all sustenance.
Slave Culture becomes Honour Culture
By the time a society has criminalised, at least morally, their productive people to oblivion they are ready to be stormed by HC. Ideally for the group it will be by their own kin, their own resuscitated Honour Culture that has been latent for a generation.
However, it may well be that the nation or race itself falls to a foreign invader. Rome fell to barbarian, as did Persia. The Inca Empire fell to one near-illiterate Spanish adventurer, Pizarro, and 100 of his gang members. If New Zealand’s Honour Culture have been too badly damaged and misused they will be slow to return and immigrants will beat them to it. This, of course, was the thinking of Brenton Tarrant who tried to accelerate the process and Awaken the Saxon by committing a horrible massacre in Christchurch.
At any rate, it’s easy to see that a soft country with people who’s means of production is tantrums and begging is an easy target.
Ghandi’s Slave Culture methods work very well on an empire consumed by Dignity Culture and Victimhood Culture. However, an Honour Culture group has no compunction about cracking an Indian on the head no matter how good they are at going rubber-legs and passive resistance.
The HC will snatch the food right out of the SC’s mouth, kick dirt in his eye, and call him weak for complaining about it. The same weakness that were an SC’s strength in a time of VC have now become a deadly liability. Now everyone plastic enough to do so converts to the HC Moral Culture or else bugs out before the school bully steals their lunch money. Men, women, and children all come to prize Honour Culture and the practises and fashions and sports and pursuits that go along with that. It is a time of Physical Culture and vigour that only ends because it is transmuted into Dignity Culture.
Breaking Free?
All of us feel a pull toward one or another of these Moral Cultures. We feel at home in it, are drawn to it, wish to defend it and promote it. Yet, each Moral Culture can and does become toxic which is why they need to be seasonally ploughed under.
Each Moral Culture thinks their way is the way humanity ought to be. From a Functionalist point of view it’s clear that humanity is not just one quadrant but the entire wheel. We are a compound species broken up into parts that work in balance to prune the dead parts of our culture and raise up new ones.
When any given Moral Culture is overthrown it doesn’t die, it’s an immortal egregore and would simply re-emerge again from anywhere there are people. While in the mainstream a Moral Culture grows weak; Victory defeats it. While in the underground, a Moral Culture sharpens its weapsons, revisits its old texts, updates its tactics to come back as a new and better version of itself.
This is evolution on a cultural level, the ‘blind watchmaker’ that uses animals as pawns, people as means to an end not ends in themselves. People are going to be promoted and people are going to die without any plan or regard for justice or rights just as they have done for all time. To transcend the Cycle of Moral Cultures is to meddle with a powerful force of nature that ought not be taken for granted.
Some AHNZ Posts Featuring Moral Cultures
- Slave Culture
- Moral Cultures: Adventuring
- Parasitism by Victimhood
- 2020s: Dignity Culture Rising
- Honour Culture
- Victimhood Culture of the Great Wrong War
- Dominion Victimhood Culture
- 1987: The Krypton Factor
- 1988: Labour Goes Full Victimhood
- 1988: Life Education Trust
- 1907: Plunket
- 1990: Kiri’s Homecoming
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Image ref. Tomb of Oljeitu Khan, The Builder, c.1312 AD and still standing today; Don Croner
Ref. An Economic History of New Zealand, Prichard (1970)
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