Cultural Survival Skills

Can You Define Progress?

This is not a trick question. I really want you to take a few minutes and try to define “Progress”.

I recently watched an important film entitled, Surviving Progress  produced by the Big Picture Media Corporation and available on Netflix.  Among the first thing they did in this documentary was to ask a number of people to define the word “progress”….this challenge was met with blank looks and it was never defined.

The people were simply stumped.

The documentary then went on to show that through history, sociocultures have developed various forms of technology (some primitive and others moving towards, and including modern technologies) that could be viewed as “progress”.

However, over-time wealth and power increasingly became concentrated in ruling classes and the majority of citizens grew poorer and more subjugated. As this “progress” unfolded, the sociocultures declined into incompetence, rebellion and/or conquest.

In all of this, history has repeated itself ad nauseam.

It is stunning to perceive this sick-sociocultual-cycle unfolding in all of the formerly great and  vibrant civilizations, now in decline during our own times on earth. This includes all of Western Civilizations and, more recently, America.

Clearly, it is important that we learn to recognize and define real progress. Obviously, increasing forms of technology does not suffice as a true example of “progress”. Real progress should not lead to the decline the socioculture in which it occurs. That should be named self-destruction.

I invite your best definitions of progress. I hope that some of my readers will take the time to send them to me in the comment’s section on this page.

In the meantime the following in my own best current attempt:

Progress is any evolution that increases the probability of a socioculture’s survival in both the short, intermediate, and long-term. True progress must lead to a socioculture’s increased viability.

The keen observer will note that in all of America’s cities and states that have adopted “progressive” political, economic and social practices (these are more micro-cultural evolutions), steep and continuing decline has occurred.

The astute observer will also recognize that as the whole of Western Civilization, including the U.S., has increasingly embraced “progressive” political, economic and social practices (macro- cultural evolutions), these civilizations have all fallen into a profound  mass-decline.

True progress has never been found within “progressive” political, economic and social practices: They are now, and have always been, true sociocultural suicide.

How can something precious, that has been lost, be found again?

To the degree that it is possible, we must return to the sociocultural practices, where we last observed it.

For a time, America had discovered true progress; thanks to the studied wisdom and courage of our Founding Fathers and the Conservative Constitutional form of Self-Governance they left to our safe-keeping.

Wake-Up America!

V. Thomas Mawhinney, 8/18/15

Tags: "Surviving Progress", A Definition of Progress, Can You Define Progress?, Constitutional Self-Governance, Progressive Practices Are Not Progress, Progressives Destroy Sociocultures, Sociocultural Suicide, The Sick-Sociocultural-cycle, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., VTM, Wake-Up America, When America Discovered True Progress

This entry was posted on August 18, 2015 at 9:33 PM and is filed under Boiling the American Frog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.