Value Hierarchy
There are powers in the world and in cultural zeitgeist which determine human behaviour and System needs, though they are adjacent to natural powers. There are specific ways in which this power (for good or ill) works in the world – and the power-flow’s course and strength is determined (providentially) by the counter-strength of elements already in place, which may stop, hinder, or aid it’s progress. Humans can instinctually sense (or fear) when a power-flow has no safeguards in place to limit it, you can feel an instinctual sense of doom or glee when you hear about the power’s aims, when you sense it’s rise and hear it’s distant rumbling. Humans, as sentient beings, may then attempt to create additional counter-force, though often this is futile and requires a tremendous energy and homogeneity of opinion. Sometimes, more often in fact, the defence to a tsunami power-flow is found in an unexpected alteration of values, something existing within human capability which holds a tremendous unstoppable power of its own. And you know it has such because, again, we can instinctually sense and feel awe and fear at the prospect of it’s use, which we know is far-reaching and indomitable.
in the example of the pitfalls of technology, or more specifically industrialization, we see such a crushing tidal wave of power washing over us, in the form of the technological System itself. But what is a value change we could choose to make, to counter the destructive spread of assembly-line-landfill and ever-increasing human oppressions? It would be to embrace whole-heartedly values which already exist and have been naturally growing within the zeitgeist of power-trends: values relating to self-sufficiency, sustainability, slow food movements, organic farming, herbalism, health, ancestral diets, traditional craft, animal welfare, etc.. These values relate to a return of the strength of self-sufficiency, of the virtue of selected or self-testing privation, and the general desire to alter work-direction from office and convenience to soil, health, family, and direct access to ‘first things’.
However, in my opinion, the ideal twist on this ‘nuclear option’, this self-alteration of soul and species before the unstoppable tsunami, would include a stipend to value-alteration which diverts the tidal flow of technology-power, harnessing it’s strength towards a useful meritocratic heroism. As technology is a newborn god and will not cease it’s growth. We want kings and emperors with fleets of nuclear-powered spaceships, we want them warring in space as they colonize moons of Jupiter. Yes, we want all these things, as well as a protected garden-earth sustained by the dirty-handed labour of soil-husbands and animal-evolvers.
Deny high technology to the masses, to all but the master guildsmen of their trades, the nobility-class, the elite engineers! Absolutely do not allow the merchant class access to any of it. Insist on the value of human labour over the machine, and re-purpose the machine to supra-human goals, in a sparsity of use, targeted and condensed. The value system which permits this must screen the meritable heroes from the garden-class, the earth class from eden-Terra. No astronaut or engineer or high ranking human leaves orbit without proving himself in the cycles of nature. Before they have proven their strength and self-sufficiency – proven they can feed themselves, build their own house, survive in the winter like the outcast Spartan teen. By this measure of self-sufficiency could the earth be kept green and healthy, generationally, in a natural selection of heroes as humans expanded into a wider cosmos. There would be no turning back from the marvels of technological science, or the beauty of mother Earth, the only thing we would lose is the assembly line, the profits of the middle-men and distributers, the weakening and polluting convenience culture and fake individualism of exploitative mass-consumerism. By this aristocratic value-change power-flows can continue unabated, without flooding and destroying all of civilization, by not foolishly standing in the way of the flood, but by creating a dam which redirects the blind inhuman power. If this is impossible it is because you don’t believe it.
There is no reason not to attempt greatness across all fronts, and in every way. We should not block our own higher goals by succumbing to unimaginative conformity, preventing our own survival with sardonic, self-imposed ‘material impossibilities’, before we even try using a tremendous power within our grasp. Do not make any heart-warming assumptions about the supposed free-thinking nature of the mob. There is a switch inside your soul as powerful as the darkening cloud enveloping the sky.
