Medievals and Gangsters: Misguided Primitivism

It is a frequent theme among young people especially to see the civilization as being fake, unnatural or amoral and to look toward more primitive cultures. While the sentiment is understandable, most of the solutions we see in this age have been wrong-headed, and it is important that people understand this.

One big trend in recent times has been glorifying the medieval culture. There are people who are into swords and suchlike and think that the world during the Middle Ages had more ethic and purity than does the world today. They are wrong. The Middle Ages was the worst time the history of the white race, when Europe was at the bottom of the world and could not hold its head up to China, India, Baghdad or Timbuktu. It also was anything but morally pure. Most people were indentured servants or serfs. Young men were drafted into armies to fight useless feudal conflicts, and women were drafted into domestic or sexual slavery. The average life span was about 30 years. I do not need to speak of the complete absence of scientific and technological knowledge at the time or the extremely low levels of commerce.

Another trend along the same lines has been the glorification of the American gangster. While the medieval trend is mostly simply misguided, this trend is downright evil. The American gangster has no more to recommend himself than does a British hooligan, a German neo-Nazi or a Russian skinhead. They, like the others listed, are parasitical thugs who misuse the resources that are given to them by the generosity and compassion of the civilization to brutalize, rape and pillage people who can't defend themselves from them. There is nothing genuine about them; they are scumbags. And it is a sad day in the life of a civilization when people look up to such characters and see them as being better than the next person.

A person who wants to look for something genuine actually does have viable directions to look toward. He could look toward the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines. He could toward the Samurai, or the Buddhists, or the Taoists. All of these people have real wisdom that the white person has not had at any recorded time in his history; and looking toward these worlds can in fact broaden one's outlook and increase one's wisdom. Much more so than looking toward the Medievals, and vastly more so than looking toward the gangsters.

Most social trends have a legitimate reason, but in this case the solutions have been counterproductive. Not the Medievals, not the gangsters, constitute viable authority as to what is righteous or what is genuine. There are however genuine articles all around the world, both in the past and in the present. It is toward these genuine articles that such sentiments should be directed. This will result in people actually growing in wisdom, and with them the Western civilization likewise growing toward greater wisdom and greater genuineness.