livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
Living a Barbarian Life: Don’t Settle for the Mediocrity of the Minimum
We, as products of western civilization, tend to hold the view of “barbarians” as uncouth, slovenly, unindustrious hillbillies. This, despite the fact that there are artifacts of the barbarian past that we still cannot explain the construction of, outside of attributing it to “space aliens.” Yet, without the specialist divisions of labor inherent to civilization, our barbarian forebears managed to not only feed and clothe their families, they managed to develop their mental faculties to a degree that allowed them to develop many of the cultural values we tend to hold dear even today (because, as I pointed out in Forging the Hero, the values we tend to hold up as the most cherished of “American values” are NOT Roman, but were originally Celto-Germanic tribal traditions that survived the Imperial period).
The fact is, those ancestors of ours were very industrious and productive…they just didn’t produce the same things, in the same industries that the urban civilizations did. That doesn’t make their contributions less valuable, unless your metric of value is how long a relic lasts, even after it is no longer useful.
Living a Barbarian Life: Don’t Settle for the Mediocrity of the Minimum
We, as products of western civilization, tend to hold the view of “barbarians” as uncouth, slovenly, unindustrious hillbillies. This, despite the fact that there are artifacts of the barbarian past that we still cannot explain the construction of, outside of attributing it to “space aliens.” Yet, without the specialist divisions of labor inherent to civilization, our barbarian forebears managed to not only feed and clothe their families, they managed to develop their mental faculties to a degree that allowed them to develop many of the cultural values we tend to hold dear even today (because, as I pointed out in Forging the Hero, the values we tend to hold up as the most cherished of “American values” are NOT Roman, but were originally Celto-Germanic tribal traditions that survived the Imperial period).
The fact is, those ancestors of ours were very industrious and productive…they just didn’t produce the same things, in the same industries that the urban civilizations did. That doesn’t make their contributions less valuable, unless your metric of value is how long a relic lasts, even after it is no longer useful.
Living a Barbarian Life: Don’t Settle for the Mediocrity of the Minimum