Welcome to the Palladian Republic!

First, allow me to apologise for the current state of my blog. It’s a work in progress and I haven’t got it tidied up yet.

In recent posts, Elusive Wapiti and OneSTDV have brought up the subject of the relentless negativity of the reactionary/HBD blogosphere. EW has committed to being more positive and constructive in his posts.

So, moving forward, I suspect I will dedicate more time and energy toward helping individual men and boys find the way. To humbly advise them in the way that I wish I had been advised in my youth, before I was forced to learn the hard way the lessons that billions of men had already learnt before me.

I will admit that I rather enjoy a bit of negativity but the fact is there are other things to think about in addition to the critique of modern, liberal society. It seems there is a niche for something like what I am proposing, not for Pollyanna optimism, which is certainly not my forte but for building up a consensus on civilised practices which is the subject of this blog.

The critique of liberal society is being well addressed by many blogs. Expanding their readership is a necessary task but I have seen repeated statements to the effect of, "what can I as an individual do?" Ultimately, the formation of real communities will be necessary but as a prelude, developing a positive sense of what we stand for and implementing it in our lives has the dual purpose of strengthening out immediate position in the society we in fact occupy and preparing us for building flesh and blood communities in the future. This is my small contribution. The answer to the question posed above is "become a fully civilised man."

I will be commencing a series of posts dealing initially with Time Management, Project Management, Planning and Logistics as applied at the personal level. This will not be the exclusive focus of the blog. As you can see from my masthead, I am aiming at a comprehensive treatment of civilised practices, an encyclopaedia, if you will. I hope these subjects will not be viewed as dull. I have a particular cultural take on these subjects that I think is a bit different from the usual approach and will make these subjects more engaging than reading a textbook.

I look forward to your participation.

Rules of Engagement

This blog is intended to be a conversation toward a consensus on civilized practices, what is required to be a civilized man. A first step in this direction is to maintain a civilized discourse. This requires rules of order. As my experience in blogging develops I expect to expand and revise my rules of order but here is a first pass.

1 – Be civil. Uncivil posts will be deleted.

2 – Be on topic. Off topic comments will not necessarily be deleted but they should, at minimum, be marked as ‘OT’.

3 – Certain statements I make will be declared ‘Axiomatic’. This does not mean that I believe they are truly incontrovertible but rather that discussion and defense of these statements runs too far afield for my purposes. If you agree fine, if you don’t, state your objection but I will not be getting into long-winded philosophical arguments about them. We’ll have to agree to disagree.

4 – Cite sources. This is, of course, a conversation so citing sources cannot be mandatory but it is encouraged as these have the potential to add to the bibliography or the encyclopaedia.

As usual, should you have any additions to the list please feel free to offer them.

My Background

Before I launch into the more substantial discussions, I thought it might be helpful to provide some biographical background on me, as a means of further clarifying my perspective on civilized practices.

I became a conservative through, I think, an unusual process. Although I had begun to experience dissatisfaction with the prevailing liberal orthodoxy in my late teens it wasn’t until I participated in the est training in 1980 that I had the ‘aha’ moment as well as a set of tools to move forward. Yup, Werner Erhard turned me into a conservative! Now before everyone goes ballistic on me, I understand, better than most, that est was deeply flawed and subscribed to many liberal nostrums, however there was a hard core to the teaching that appealed to me and that I found refreshing and fruitful. est, in contrast with its forerunner, the Esalen Institute, was considered to be extraordinarily strict, even fascistic, by its many critics. It also placed a high value on concrete success in business, which was one of the effects they claimed as a result of participation in the Training. It encouraged dressing up rather than down. Material success and its trappings, much derided elsewhere, were consider one, though only one, aspect of the ‘good life’.

The Training placed a strong emphasis on keeping one’s agreements. This is a good example of a common sense idea, which nonetheless, is not that common. And it was nowhere taught as an explicit ethical principle.

I eventually discontinued my association with est because of tensions over certain superstitious beliefs that were widely held in the organization. In the final analysis est was deeply flawed, not for the least reason that it did not privilege reason and was therefore subject to superstitions but I nonetheless benefited considerably from my sojourn. It toughened me up and put a certain kind of “fire in the belly” that I sorely needed at that juncture in my life.

I have participated in several of the Large Group Awareness Training (LGATs) all of them flawed to one degree or another but they do constitute a portion of what the Palladian Republic is or will become. I see this phenomenon, much derided by some conservatives, as a manifestation of a peculiarly American tradition, traceable back to Benjamin Franklin and de Toqueville, that one can improve oneself and prosper.

In upcoming posts I will comment on a few other LGAT systems and what we can learn from them.

On different note, please bear in mind that the purpose of this blog is to create a conversation about civilized practices. While I have a particular framework and perspective on this matter, I am certainly not trying to pose as a guru. It is my contention that fifty years of liberal dominance have left all of us fractured and partial in relation to the full body of civilized practice. Thus reader input and correction will be gratefully received.