The Will to Achieve and the Indomitable Determination

As an analysis of a point Bookworm brought up. How do poor generations get out of being poor in only one generation, when so many other groups of people are forever mired in poverty, despair, and government handouts?

I base my conclusions and precepts on human nature. Ever since humanity evolved, it's been through a constant testing process. Much as a piece of steel must be refolded again and again, and put into a high carbon quenching process, or it isn't good high carbon steel that cuts through bones and armor like butter. There are many ways to temper wrought iron, but there comes a point when wrought iron just can't get any stronger. The basic chemical matrix just isn't strong enough potentially. So how do you change the nature of a man? Is it as easy in principle as changing a low carbon steel to a high carbon steel, in getting rid of the impurities? I tend to say yes and no. The secrets of changing the nature of objects, has not been easy to come by. Regardless of the demand. However, purifying steel of impurities and then adding more impurities, is an interesting way of looking at things when you relate it to human nature.

The obvious object is to make people stronger, smarter, better educated, and more happy. One way to do that is military discipline, is to instill a purpose or to get people already with a purpose, and basically grind them down to their constituent parts and then reshape them through a fiery forge. What comes out, then is as sharp, as deadly, and as well crafted as high-carbon Damascene steel, with a water edge. But what if you don't want to make someone that deadly and proficient, what if instead you wanted that person to become strong in a endurance sense? A servicible blade instead of a razor sharp one. A blade that can take to a tree without breaking as well as cutting down a man.

Just as the history of the Earth is the history of the remolding and the reshaping of landmasses, mountains, and plate crusts, the history of Mankind is the history of how we are shaped by our will, by our environment, and by just plain luck. Over the Eons, we have been pitted against whatever nature may throw at us. And the end point of all that evolution, all those trial through combat and survival, was a creature that had the physical abilities of every single lifeform on this planet. We do not have natural poisons or claws, yet we can fashion weapons of steel, iron, bronze, flint, and obsidian. We can coat our weapons with natural and unnatural poisons. This is the basic nature of man, an ultimate ability to adapt and an ultimate ability to both conform to a heirarchy and not conform to a heirarchy. Because deep in our genes is a requirement not to do like the former generation have done, but instead to do it better. The rebellion of the 60s, was a split not in genetics, but in ideology. Marxism pitted against Capitalism and Conservatism, when the new generation did not believe in working to make capitalism better at all. Thus like vectors that don't converge, they start to cancel each other out, the old generation giving way to the new.

It's almost a genetic imperative not to do the same things as everyone else has. This kind of racial panic, serves the purpose of making sure at least some people will survive. But it does not factor into effect luck, skill, or determination.

If that is the basic nature of humanity, then of course we come back to the original question, what exactly makes people go from rags to riches?

The motivation is already there of course, genetically speaking. Ideologically speaking, that is also present given that it had to be an immigrant's choice to risk all they had and ever will have, to go to America. So you had both genetic motivation and personal determination. This supplies some of the will, but what of the other qualities?

Who were they, what did they want, and where did they want to be. Obviously, the immigrants wanted to provide for their family, to ensure that their children lived better lives than theirs had been, to provide security and peace as their duty, and to succede at their goals while never breaking a promise.

This is a form of personal integrity, a never-ending will to survive.

And it was these people, who melded with the Irish and the Scots, with their warlike tribalistic Appalachian customs, that made that culture into the bedrock of America.

Because we have outgrown the need for humanity to rank itself based upon personal battle prowess and muscles. We have outgrown that. No longer can humanity afford to determine the best of us based upon simple trial by arms.

Engineers, warriors, soldiers, scientists, politicians, and civil protection are now the standards. The new professions.

Therefore, the Testing has never stopped. It has only changed its prerequisites and what it was Testing for. But the goal had never changed.

The inner strength of a person, their willpower, their determination, and their intelligence has been tested and found worthy in America's history.

So why do future generations fail in this test that many people less fortunate than them, had already succeded in?

Simply because, as a culture grows richer, more peaceful, and more prosperous it also grows more decadent. In our High Society, what do they value except physical beauty, plastic surgery, and cultural snobbery? I tend to see those aspects as waste byproducts of human nature and success, not the intended goals here. Others might differ. It is true that America is far less progressive than Europe, and I tend to think this is because we have been tested far beyond the normal standards applied to the rest of the world. We have been given many chances to win and to fail, yet we have succeded far in excess of anyone's purported odds. This has bred a hardier people, a people that have not forgotten either the End Times or their Painful Beginning. Therefore, without the hardship, without the breaking and purification, without the impurities necessary to strengthen the core of a person, that person will never realize their potential.

The parental desire to protect our children is at odds with our intellectual understanding that if we protect them too well, then they will be less than what they may have been.

This stems from a desire to see our children live a better life, yet how will a human being live a better life without purpose, without a chance to test their will, integrity, and determination? It need not be tested in the cauldron of brutality as their parents had faced, yet it still needs to be tested, tempered, and challenged. Because without that, humanity is nothing but a mindless, destructive, beast.

It is no wonder that Europe and Gansta Rap/Hollywood/Gang cultures do not produce any black/Muslim people of worth or value. How could sinking a bar of metal into a garbage dump, make it into either a useful tool or a weapon? We can understand how to shape raw materials in abstract and in applied reality, but when it comes to human nature, we tend to vascilitate and to think that Language is the tool to mold human nature. Language is not the tool to mold human nature, Lanague is the tool to mold human thinking, which is only fraction of our natures.

A person need not think, to understand their purpose, their power, their duty, and their determination. Thinking, would sometimes interfere with those processes. It creates doubt, it creates fear and hesitation. To act without thinking, is to act without hesitation, with purpose, and without doubt. Those without purpose, may only act recklessly.

It is all pieces of a part. Gangs try to emulate the militancy of the military without the discipline, values, or challenge that is necessary to become a Weapon. Hollywood culture and Democrat ideology, is too weak to appeal to the males and offers nothing of value to the great majority of young humans, nothing that would take a young human and make him into someone with useful tools and a good attitude.

So, no, I cannot really say that despite the Great Society, African-Americans are still in deep poverty. It is rather because of the Great Society of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, and other Democratic handouts that these humans full of potential, are treated as if pricelss porcelain and never allowed to break or to improve. The one basic principle of America is that you should be free to fail or to succede, this is anathema to the welfare system and the Great Society in which failure is unacceptable and unthinkable. They think failure is injustice, perpetrated by some God or some rich dude up high. They never realize it is they themselves perpetrating injustices.

You will never grow stronger, you will never become a better person, and you will never discover just who you truly are, until the moment you are faced with a challenge that requires everything that ever was you, ever will be you, and ever is you to overcome.

This is no different for a man or for a woman, simply the means are different, not the goals.

Aristotelian Virtues exist, independent of whether someone knows about them or not. Because those virtues and vices, are part of the very fabric of our human existence and condition.

It is the secret to success and the fault for failure.

To Europe and to the ME, they do not understand what success truly is. They never will the way they are. And because they do not understand themselves, they have become mindless tools of others, such as the Palestinians and the Islamic Wahhabis.

Europe has nothing to offer that a human being requires. Riches, political correctness, reliance on police to protect your family, and British/French institutions do not have the impurities that a human being needs. But Islam does, it has all the impurities anyone would ever need, so many impurities that the raw material becomes twisted, bent, and ultimately broken. On one side in Europe, you have Order and Decadence turning into entropic decay. On the other hand, you have the ME, with chaos and violence, becoming as predictable as election cycle politics. Only here in America, do you see violence tempered with discipline, peace tempered with vigilance, and prosperity tempered with a drive and ambition to become even more prosperous. We have just enough barbarian traits to keep us safe, and enough civil traits to keep us at peace and prosperous. Neither tilting towards Europe nor tilting towards the ME.

There has always been an underlying reality to things, that cannot be changed by spin and distortions and lies. Yet, we should ask ourselves, why is that? If human nature is as malleable, as ductile, and as diverse in potential as I have said, then why cannot it be made into what Utopians want it to be?

My answer, is simple. Because you cannot turn iron to steel nor gold to iron, by reciting poetry or ritual phrases. It takes fusion, fission, a breaking and a making.