The Hierarchy of Culture
With Audio Version

3,157 words

To listen in a player, click here ^[2]. To download the mp3, right-click here ^[2] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

I believe there is a hierarchy/pyramid to culture, I have been working on this theory for a while now, I think it’s developed enough to at least introduce the concept and framework here as a blog post. It will deal with how culture operates both in theory and conceptually, as well as in practice with examples of people interacting with culture in day-to-day life experiences. It will also deal with what I view as anti-culture, where I see culture as a positive force that creates civilization and beauty, I see anti-culture as the inverse, a force that destroys civilization and beauty. The assumption that high-culture and beauty are inherent is made, I will not be defending or explaining that I do not believe beauty or culture are subjective matters.

This will seek to answer the “what is culture” trope and explore why culture is often hard to pinpoint or explain for many.

At the base level is of course the foundation and where most people exist, as it is the broadest section. That is existing in the culture while not being aware of it, going about their daily lives in both the Unaware and Mindless Consumption blocks. These people, really through no fault of their own, exist between the worlds of culture and anti-culture. These people are busy in their day-to-day lives, trying to make ends meet, raising children, working too many hours, stuck in traffic, perhaps they do not have the cognitive ability or resources to understand a plane beyond their own existence. As a concrete example, suppose one of these people in the base levels fly on an airplane, listen to music, and on the plane watch some Hollywood-produced filth on their phone. They are participating in both culture and anti-culture, as the two both exist heavily in modern society, often side-by-side.

You fly on airplanes or listen to music or go into a building and so on. In doing those things you are benefiting downstream of what were the products of a culture, a specific people. But maybe you don’t think about the Wright brothers, or who invented a certain instrument, or what people were responsible for figuring out how to build multi-story buildings or a certain architectural style that you like, or who created the one you dislike. It just “is” for this level of the population. Maybe they watch football and pornography and see commercials on the television that depict dysgenic “families.” This is again the blurring of culture with anti-culture, existing in both planes. These people often enjoy pornography, get very excited for the next Avengers movie (or whatever is being pumped out en masse), but also enjoy Beaux-Arts architecture and will always remember their summer in Paris without realizing why it was so special. 

I understand the difficulty this broad group would have teasing apart strains of different cultures when they are currently very much mixed and integrated into modern society. As a further example, consider the technology and infrastructure in place to deliver a film to the theatre or a news broadcast into your home. All of the technology that must be in place for a film to have been recorded and transmitted — the electric grid, the freeway system you used to get to the mall to see a movie — all of that was created, built, and maintained almost exclusively by European people. However, you may be watching a news broadcast funded by Bloomberg or a film directed by Weinstein, a mixing of cultures, a mixing of the creation and the destruction. Going through your daily life with all the stress that entails, to be able to have the extra cognitive resources available to actively work on pulling apart these often tangled webs is incredible. A non-white can deliver a piece of anti-white messaging on technology and infrastructure that only whites could have developed. 

We’ll use two sets of examples to show how this works in practice a bit more, one positive and one negative.

For the negative examples, we consider mainstream media and pornography. At the lowest level, the broadest group, are people who consume the media and pornography at face value. They are both in the Unaware and Mindless Consumption levels, floating between levels, above and below, depending on what they mindlessly consume today. They don’t ever truly question anything, they exist, floating through life, through space and time.

For the positive examples let us consider a novel, a political treatise, a film, a piece of art, and so on. At the base level are people consuming them and not thinking they are even part of a culture that is specific to a group of people. They may consume these mediums from various groups that even have conflicting messaging. Again, floating through life, like a leaf down a stream. The dissonance and conflicts, the lies and truths, none of that seems to bother them for one reason or another. They’ll mostly believe what the status quo tells them. For good and bad.

Anybody can fly on an airplane, but not many can work on them, understand them, fly them, create better ones, and maybe most importantly, have kids that will be able to do so as well.

I have not assigned a percentage to these levels, but for the sake of clarity let’s say the Base levels are 85%, the Aware levels are 5%, Curators, Producers, and Patrons make up the next 4%, and the Guardians are the 1% or so of the population. Truthfully, the top level is probably something more like 1 in 10,000 or more. 

The next level up is presumably a bit narrower set of people who experience these things but realize they are a product of a certain people. That flight, for example, wasn’t the “world’s culture” or from “Latin culture.” They recognize or might even seek out things that are born from European people. 

This group can tell you important architects in their favorite style, they know which Hollywood directors are of our own stock and who is not, but more importantly, why that matters. They know why it was the Americans and Germans and English and French who were interested in flight and why Mozart could not have been born in Ghana. 

The inverse of this group is the “Enjoy + Prefer” group on the bottom half of our structure. These are the unrepentant bugmen. They actively seek out and enjoy degeneracy. You’ll find them spending their rent money on OnlyFans, buying extremely expensive adult-toys and figurines. A sort of arrested development is usually found here as well. Things we find the most abhorrent, they take the most pleasure in. Given the choice between reading H.P. Lovecraft and Elie Wiesel or spending the day in the forest versus inside watching VR pornography, they will always choose the latter. You know the type. You probably work with a few of them. 

The layer above the Aware segment is the Curator group. People who participate in, actively understand, and seek to continue on the specific culture. They might be somewhat of a curator or historian of the culture, a bit of a guardian on some level if you will. They know the roots of flight and the phonograph and their evolutions into the modern era. These people may collect art, artifacts, and books. They often actively seek out museums and performances that carry on the tradition, they may also participate themselves at some level. Not only are they Aware, but they also want to preserve and pass on the culture. It’s a higher level of existing than “I like this more than that and why.” It’s “I like this, and it’s important to carry on the legacy, to preserve these things, to teach others about these things, and to pass them on to the next generation.”

The inverse of the Curator group is the Promotor group of anti-culture. This is essentially the mainstream media apparatus along with Hollywood, nearly 100% of elected officials at any level, and the major advertising agencies that operate in the West. They create false narratives in the media, outright lies, more often than not. But they do not produce too much beyond ads and news segments — they are more of an amplifier. The lower level of the producers of anti-culture. 

Penultimate are the Producers + Patrons, the people actively producing and funding culture. This level has always existed in history along with those creating beauty and masterworks that may become timeless. The creators and patrons of culture may not even realize they are carrying on culture per se, they may be simply expressing a creative urge as an individual, but taken together we see how these individuals form the broader culture. Again, Mozart and his patrons could not have been from Ghana. Others in this category do see themselves as adding to the culture and the broader European experience in an explicit way. I think again of H.P. Lovecraft here. Where somebody like director Christopher Nolan, although adding to the collected films of those from European stock, is somebody who perhaps does not see himself as explicitly European, where I assume Mel Gibson does. I have no personal knowledge of Nolan, I have reason to suspect he does indeed know, but for the sake of argument here, let’s say he doesn’t, or simply substitute for one who doesn’t, but still adds to the overall collection of works by Europeans. 

I use the term Patron here because there is a slight demarcation between people who “fund” culture at this level and those who “vote with their dollar.” We see this in both extremes of our structure. Buying a film you enjoy does help fund that production, but being a person who writes a check to get the film started, who believed in the vision when it was a mere concept in the mind of an artist, is clearly a higher level. Similarly, in the anti-culture section, paying for a pornography subscription monthly is one thing, being the person or group who funded the pornography studio to begin with is another. 

The inverse of the Producers + Patrons level will have the people producing the filth and degeneracy, the Subverters + Gatekeepers. Equally as important as their production of anti-culture is their gatekeeping function. It’s not enough to produce anti-beauty. They seek to keep those who want to create beauty out of the business. People with the “wrong views” struggle to make it, or find it downright impossible to get into Hollywood, the mainstream media, music industry, contemporary art museums and art schools, top universities, top positions in government and business. They keep people who might damage their system from having a seat at the table. We have to build our own. As with the inverse, some of these people see themselves as active subverters, others are merely expressing their “creative” urges that their DNA dictates. Some create pornography because they believe it is their calling, others have famously remarked they must create smut because of their hatred of Christ and Europeans. Some people work to bring out mass-migration into the West out of some urge or co-ethnic interests, others had more malicious intent from the start. The end result is the same, contributing to anti-culture, anti-beauty, and subversion of the proper culture and tradition of a people.

In the dark trench of the anti-beauty structure exists the people who are the most dangerous. They are not useful idiots or mindless consumers, they are not those who merely prefer and enjoy the rot of civilization, they do not simply promote the decay as a good thing, they do not even necessarily produce or gatekeep anything themselves. They are the orchestrators. The people with the necessary funds and connections to keep the rest on schedule and on track. For all their evil and faults, they are brilliant in their own way, possessing the ability to have a birds-eye-view of the entire structure, with the will-to-power needed to see their haunting image reflected upon them in the broader culture. Their disease and ugliness are infectious — Midas, if he had a touch of decomposition and rot instead of gold. These people are dangerous to the core. Never underestimate the lengths they will go, for nothing is off-limits, not your life, not your children, certainly not your livelihood. Nothing. This cabal makes everything else possible down the pyramid.

*  *  *

“Culture” is, at heart, the way of life of a certain group of people. It includes the customs and traditions, the creations of the people, their art and architectural styles, the physical and mental characteristics that they share commonly, and ultimately the society they create together. 

In today’s “marketplace of ideas” (I suppose this is the black market of ideas), I do not believe many have included the shared physical and mental characteristics of a people as part of their culture. It’s of course a very exclusive and limited view. The root of culture is DNA, therefore part of culture must also include DNA necessarily. I could perhaps move to Japan, dress as the Japanese do, either traditionally or contemporarily, learn the language, learn to prepare their food, build in their vernacular architectural styles, maybe mimic some of their art, adopt their day-to-day methods of interacting with each other, but one look at me, even if I spent a lifetime there, you would know I am not Japanese. At best, I would be mimicking their culture very well, but it cannot ever be my own. 

It seems the majority of people cannot grasp the concept of culture for the simple reason that they exist on a lower plane of consciousness and understanding. Those in the Base Unaware and Mindless Consumption levels of our social structure struggle to conceptualize things beyond themselves, or at least, beyond a certain level or plane. This can all be further obfuscated by sub-cultures and overlapping cultures. For example, in the United States, there may be a broad culture that gets more and more particular as it is regionalized and localized. Think of the French Quarter opposed to Martha’s Vineyard. They are different culturally, just like your family has some different customs and ways of living than mine. Just like you and your siblings are not the same, but you still belong to the same family. Culture is like that too. German culture is not French culture, but they belong to European culture and are in the same family, where Ghanaian culture or Somali culture is not in that family but in the African family of cultures. Just as there is a difference between German and French culture, Ghanaian and Somali culture, there is a difference between Europe as a whole and Africa as a whole. You may diverge in ways from your siblings, but you are still in the same family. Culture operates similarly on a larger scale, as it includes many more families. 

At the absolute precipice are the Guardians of culture, sitting in symbolic ivory towers with watchful eyes and vengeful hearts, protecting what is rightfully theirs by inherited succession. At this juncture in history, these people are woefully outnumbered by their “peers” at the equivalent level of the anti-beauty structure. This was not always the case, but it is certainly so today. To a woeful disproportion we are outnumbered and out-funded, likely even being outworked. The enemy is relentless. It is easier to be relentless with what appears to be infinite resources. With that said, this is where we find ourselves. As with our counterparts in the inverse, the Guardians see the whole playing field. Just as they can sniff us out and root us from their ranks, we can also detect them by their deeds and words alone. 

A war rages on, primarily fought between the Guardians and the Subverters. Each side is trying to recruit more and more people and resources to their side at the varying levels that operate beneath them. It’s an incredibly unconventional war, one that is not fought in trenches or jungles or concrete buildings in the desert. It is a war being waged from the top floors of glass-plated skyscrapers in places like NYC, Chicago, and Hollywood. For now, the Guardians remain largely scattered, hiding for cover in the shadows and alleyways, lobbing back what they can from their homes, on their mobile phones while on the metro, and in-between shifts at work. Control and power still comes from controlling land and capital, as with wars of past eras, but this time it’s not being taken by men on siege-towers or tanks, but through strategic networks of financiers, media moguls, and well-paid propagandists. Those who seek to destroy what our ancestors created have a tremendous head-start on us. That is for certain. We do have some advantages. This is asymmetric. I do not believe the same resources are required to tell the truth as are required to ensure people believe obvious lies. 

Guardians are tasked with the sacred honor of carrying on the civilization and culture. Monks who made duplicates of ancient texts in times of war and chaos to ensure the contents therein would not be lost to the eons were of the Guardians of their time. There are people today, like those at Counter-Currents, who are keeping the works of Yockey, Jonathan Bowden, and Savitri Devi in print. Others are keeping the legacy of Pierce and Rockwell alive. They are, in ways, the modern-day version of those monks. There are those among us who spend endless hours figuring out who is behind each assault to our people, naming them, warning others to make safe their family and friends from the endless affronts.

When entire cultures and civilizations are lost, and they have been lost over and over again, there is no coming back. The times we find ourselves in are dark indeed, there is no question there, only to the degree and perhaps how close we stand to the edge looking down. That said, we have been given a task that most of our people were never aware existed. With that, we have the opportunity to take our places again, to re-enter the scene of history on the main stage, and stand on hallowed ground amid the absolute finest men and women that Europe ever had to offer the world.

This post ^[5] originally appeared at Rich Houck’s SubscribeStar ^[6].

If you want to support Counter-Currents, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page ^[7] and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend on DLive ^[8].

Don’t forget to sign up ^[9] for the weekly email Counter-Currents Newsletter for exclusive content, offers, and news.