What is White Anglophone American Culture All About?

[Jester]

Amazing.

[Cornfed]

The OP poses an interesting question, and also interesting is that it is difficult to answer, given that we have really had our culture, and even its memory, erased in the last generation. I remember being asked to give a speech in Korea about the culture in my own little part of the world. At first I didn't have a clue as to what to say, but after contemplation and asking around on the Internet, I came up with quite a long speech which I think summed it up well. I really wish I had saved that speech. Although I must have bored the audience ridged, I moved myself to tears by ending with how it has all gone to crap in the last 30 years.

[pandabear]

Do you remember the highlights/major points of your speech? Thirty years ago--1984. Reagan was president, there was a big recession. The Cold War was ratcheting up at that point. Culturally, I don't think that there was much of a difference. Except that now we have the internet. In 1984, we wouldn't be having this conversation (i.e., there was no internet).

By the way, Ireland and Montserrat are the only countries that celebrate St. Patrick's Day as national holidays. In 1984, I'm sure that I wouldn't have discovered nor shared this titbit.

[Gadfly]

Thirty years ago--1984. Reagan was president, there was a big recession. The Cold War was ratcheting up at that point. Culturally, I don't think that there was much of a difference.

You're right, there wasn't much of a difference. The damage started much earlier in the 1960s, when for the 1st time norms and standards in the white Anglo nations (US in particular) were attacked and eventually loosened. This decade (2010s) is a time of 50th anniversary observances for the seminal events that ruined your people and by extension the world.

[Cornfed]

Do you remember the highlights/major points of your speech? Thirty years ago--1984. Reagan was president, there was a big recession. The Cold War was ratcheting up at that point. Culturally, I don't think that there was much of a difference.

The speech was given in 2010, so 30 years takes us back to 1980, when I was a little kid. The traditional culture I described was obviously on the way out then, but was not completely dead. I talked about a lot of stuff (food, recreation, holidays etc.) but it was the general cultural outlook that I had never really thought of that made it an interesting experience for me. I don't want to pinpoint exactly where I'm from, but broadly speaking the culture used to be colored by a kind of pioneering spirit which had various consequences.

The place had been carved from the wilderness with minimal available resources. Related to this, we valued intelligence, but in a practical rather than intellectual sense. In particular, a kind of clever ingenuity where you could make useful things out of seemingly nothing was valued. There was the ethos that you should never buy anything you could make yourself.

We tended to be quite physically oriented and outdoorsy, interested in sports, camping, fishing, swimming etc. and looked up to people like adventurers, mountain climbers and such. We were greatly over-represented in international sports and athletic pursuits, despite top level sports being largely amateur and poorly funded, and of course as a corollary we were renowned for producing good and brave soldiers. In fact, popular sports were followed almost like a religion, but in the sense of basing the week around kids and average young men playing sport on the weekend, as opposing to watching overpaid professionals on TV. Not teaching your sons the basics of the popular sports would have been regarded as the moral equivalent of deliberately not teaching them to read.

The place could have been described as egalitarian and ethically "socialist". People saw it as normal to be able to go up to top officials and international celebrities and engage them in conversation as though they were casual acquaintances. If a worker in a meat packing plant were prepared to work overtime in a tough job he could earn as much as a top university professor. The basic necessities of life were kept cheap. There was generous, easy to obtain welfare available, but few took up this option, because there was work available, we felt we were all in this together, and abusing the charity of others wasn't what we were about. Due to the lack of financial pressure, we could afford to be generous and fun loving. It was an ethical principle that everyone should be given a fair chance to get ahead in life, regardless of his background. If someone was prepared to work hard and play by the rules, we saw it as a failure of society if he were not automatically rewarded. Lets say there were more graduates with science degrees than graduate level jobs in the industry in a given year. In that case, the government would obviously just hire more junior scientists or pay industry to do so. After all, the graduates had done their bit by graduating, and the state of the industry was hardly their fault. They could be made economically useful in due time, but in the meantime they could be given the position in society that they deserved and the chance to start families and raise intelligent, hard working children.

We saw the commercial system as being a utility to support communities and families, not the other way around. The most respected professionals in any industry were regarded as those who had done the best for society, NOT the ones most highly paid. People dealt with each other based on personal reputation. Small businesses acted as creditors to customers they knew, making credit cards and the associated usury unheard of and unnecessary. Banks would give unsecured loans to young people based on the reputation of their parents. And so on.

In a few short years most of this disappeared, to be replaced by ... nothing really. Multiculty liberalism is not so much a culture as its absence - a void available to be filled by various disorders and addictions springing from the bowels of the human psyche.

I'm not Canadian, but to illustrate the kind of thing I'm talking about, Aurini's take on Canadian "Red Toryism" might be instructive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9-8nghrFEo

[Moretorque]

There was an individual who claimed "allow me to issue the currency and I car who not makes the laws", they figured it out long ago that in a modern culture with diverse trade over big areas who ever controls the medium of exchange runs the show.

Here in America the people have the ability to control there culture and what it represents by issuing the purchasing tickets in the economy to mold the society to their wishes. We cannot help it if the masses are to stupid to understand the founding documents and how they are to be used.

Our rulers understand this and that is why they are taking the purchasing tickets of the entire world over so they can run it to their liking but not necessarily ours. With the current state of affairs all cultures will look the same when they are done because a one size fits all is much easier to manage. WELCOME TO COMMUNISM, the communal dictatorship so our rulers can attempt to rule forever.

To pull this off it requires the herd be to dumb to think and reason for themselves and I rest my case with the new Common Core curriculum!

[Jester]

The speech was given in 2010, so 30 years takes us back to 1980, when I was a little kid. The traditional culture I described was obviously on the way out then, but was not completely dead. I talked about a lot of stuff (food, recreation, holidays etc.) but it was the general cultural outlook that I had never really thought of that made it an interesting experience for me. I don't want to pinpoint exactly where I'm from, but broadly speaking the culture used to be colored by a kind of pioneering spirit which had various consequences.

The place had been carved from the wilderness with minimal available resources. Related to this, we valued intelligence, but in a practical rather than intellectual sense. In particular, a kind of clever ingenuity where you could make useful things out of seemingly nothing was valued. There was the ethos that you should never buy anything you could make yourself.

We tended to be quite physically oriented and outdoorsy, interested in sports, camping, fishing, swimming etc. and looked up to people like adventurers, mountain climbers and such. We were greatly over-represented in international sports and athletic pursuits, despite top level sports being largely amateur and poorly funded, and of course as a corollary we were renowned for producing good and brave soldiers. In fact, popular sports were followed almost like a religion, but in the sense of basing the week around kids and average young men playing sport on the weekend, as opposing to watching overpaid professionals on TV. Not teaching your sons the basics of the popular sports would have been regarded as the moral equivalent of deliberately not teaching them to read.

The place could have been described as egalitarian and ethically "socialist". People saw it as normal to be able to go up to top officials and international celebrities and engage them in conversation as though they were casual acquaintances. If a worker in a meat packing plant were prepared to work overtime in a tough job he could earn as much as a top university professor. The basic necessities of life were kept cheap. There was generous, easy to obtain welfare available, but few took up this option, because there was work available, we felt we were all in this together, and abusing the charity of others wasn't what we were about. Due to the lack of financial pressure, we could afford to be generous and fun loving. It was an ethical principle that everyone should be given a fair chance to get ahead in life, regardless of his background. If someone was prepared to work hard and play by the rules, we saw it as a failure of society if he were not automatically rewarded. Lets say there were more graduates with science degrees than graduate level jobs in the industry in a given year. In that case, the government would obviously just hire more junior scientists or pay industry to do so. After all, the graduates had done their bit by graduating, and the state of the industry was hardly their fault. They could be made economically useful in due time, but in the meantime they could be given the position in society that they deserved and the chance to start families and raise intelligent, hard working children.

We saw the commercial system as being a utility to support communities and families, not the other way around. The most respected professionals in any industry were regarded as those who had done the best for society, NOT the ones most highly paid. People dealt with each other based on personal reputation. Small businesses acted as creditors to customers they knew, making credit cards and the associated usury unheard of and unnecessary. Banks would give unsecured loans to young people based on the reputation of their parents. And so on.

In a few short years most of this disappeared, to be replaced by ... nothing really. Multiculty liberalism is not so much a culture as its absence - a void available to be filled by various disorders and addictions springing from the bowels of the human psyche.

Very moving, actually. Thanks.
+1

[pandabear]

A lot of this sounds like it could have come from Michael Moore.