Moral Cultures: Adventuring
August 2, 2019
By AHNZ
I’ve been writing so many posts of history content. Time to write some more about history theory. The main tool I use for thinking about people and history is called the Theory of Moral Cultures (TMC.)
Each Moral Culture has its analogous ways of getting things done; Their own means of production. They all need to gather resources, they all need to attack and defend, they all have particular reproductive strategies and so on and on. Frequent fellow contributor to Anarkiwi, Dan McGlashan, posed a question about Ernest Shackleton of the Antarctic and Adventuring: Adventuring is pretty masculine and definitely K-selected – surely more Honour than Dignity Culture?
Every culture has its own version of ‘Adventuring’. That’s my starting premise. Now to try to nut out what Adventuring is to each Moral Culture…
ADVENT’URER, noun
1. One who hazards, or puts something at risk…
2. One who seeks occasions of chance, or attempts bold, novel, or extraordinary enterprises.
[ref. Webster’s Dictionary 1828]
K-Selected Cultures
Honour Culture Adventuring– The sort of adventuring Conan The Barbarian does. Or Mad Max, or Francis Drake. Smash’n grab. Basic. Extractive. Rude. Tactical.
Dignity Culture Adventuring– Think Jame Bond or Captain Picard. Think of Captain Cook. Well-equipped with technological gadgets. Vehicles with comfortable chairs. Excellent technical support staff. Well-funded. Strategic.
I don’t think the Antarctic, or Space, or the deep sea, for that matter, is open to anyone but the Dignity Culture explorer°. There are too many checklists, too much reliance of tech. That’s one reason why they are the final frontiers. The more hospitable places were discovered long ago, the really tough ones awaited a high DC. For example, when British DC ventured to Africa they left a trail of infrastructure, prosperity, and the curing of malaria in their wake. You can’t cut through malaria with an HC sword.
Think of Mad Max eating dog food out of the can vs. the crew of the USS Enterprise drinking tea and replicating banquets of custom food. Think of Cook having one of the world’s first sea clocks on board and Banks’ huge support staff including two horn players¹ vs. Hercules Legendary Journeys walking along with the clothes on his back.
r-Selected Cultures
Not being primary producers, the r-selected graze the open oceans of free stuff. The resources they exploit have been discovered/won/made by the K Cultures. To discover new ways to entice productive people to hand over their goods and services requires pioneers and adventurers of a different kind…
Victimhood Culture Adventuring– These are the men and woman who first think up and try on strategies like One Man One Vote and Woman’s Suffrage. Like other adventurers, many take dead-end paths that earn them a Darwin Award too. Yet some blaze a new trail and get some results, setting an example for others to follow. Think of the Suffragette who kamikazed into the King’s horse but offered Feminism 1.0 proof of concept. Like John the Baptist, they were doing Jesus stuff before it became trendy and came with resurrectionist workers comp. Gandhi was a VC adventurer who unlocked new territory for how to hack DC folk, still celebrated today including having his own statue outside Wellington central train station.
I’ll listen if you say some of these VC folk contributed vital reforms to society over our history. However, these days, so much of the reasonable territories have been explored the VC must range into fringe and uncharted areas never considered before. The outer space, the Antarctica of the VC frontier pushes them to ever more ridiculous things to protest and be hurt and outraged by. The same drive that brought New Zealand pensions for the old and wheelchair ramps for the rotorped now bans energy drinks, plastic, guns, straws, “man-spreading” body posture, and digital editing. The inflation has set in so much that aggression, plastic, and credentials have in recent months become “micro-aggression,” “micro-plastics,” and “micro-credentials.”
For the latest news in Victimhood Adventuring see Storm Ihumatao, Storm St Lukes Mall at NZB3.
Slave Culture Adventuring– The waters charted by the Slave involve being pitiable for their poverty. Poverty of health, of hygiene, of education, of wealth. The Slave Culturist’s means of production are to advertise and elaborate their deficits in order to manipulate others into giving them what they want. As such, their strength as an organism relies upon being damaged in some way.
Everyone remembers from Monty Python, who has seen Life of Brian, the scene of the disgruntled ex-leper who demands compensation from the messiah for being healed and so losing his livelihood. Slumdog Millionaire showed us children being deliberately mutilated/maimed/crippled so they could be inducted into SC to exploit the market for begger’s charity.
The SC adventurer is the one who finds a new way to exploit a sickness benefit, a new mystery illness perhaps? He’s the first guy to convince people that cell phone radiation gave him a tumour or asbestos is a killer. He is a Snowflake. He fakes injury so well, so psychosomatically, that he and everyone else is convinced and ACC opens up a new category of compensation. A dingo stole her baby, a race stole their generation, a mad doctor abducted them into a concentration camp. Learned helplessness is for sale because people are buying.
Not to say there’s no such thing as real suffering and pain, true subjugation and slavery. But some people choose to overcome, others ego-identify with their enslavement and make a career out of it. This is made possible by VC willingly buying in to the SC’s narrative of suffering and championing it for them in return for all the glory and most of the compensatory take-home pay.
—
° Likewise, Everest. At least, not in the pioneering era
1 Of course, this demand of having 15 staff along for the Second Voyage was a step too far for Captain Cook
Image ref. An old swagger of the Golden Coast of New Zealand; Auckland Weekly News (1902); Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
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