Understanding social reality
How to stay sane in the Phone Age
In this fourth post on Phone Age Insanity I will briefly introduce two ideas about social reality which will help you understand why we seem to live parallel lives with so many of our people.
These ideas are of Emic and Etic Reality.
Emic reality is the perception of reality from inside a cultural system.
Etic reality is the view of that system from the outside.
I will say a few things about these ideas to show you how they might be useful when you apply them to your own understanding of the social reality you inhabit.
Briefly, the political economy which produces our insane belief system is demonstrably insane when viewed from outside its bubble, and increasingly so from within it, too.
These concepts help you to understand how we came to inhabit a manufactured culture which presents civilisational suicide as a normal and healthy agenda.
They may help you or people you know to detransition from this destructive mass belief system before it is too late for you, or for all of us, to do so.
Origins of the terms
Emic and etic come from phonemic and phonetic. They describe a particular or insider view against the general or outsider view.
A phoneme is a part of a word that has a specific meaning in a given language. Like “Anti-” or “pro-” for example.
Phonetic sounds are seen as universal. The “t” sound, or the “sh” sound, for example.
These terms were used by the linguist Kenneth Pike from 1954. He was a Presbyterian Christian, and believed that truth was personally found in Christ.
He thought reality was unitary when understood as God’s creation, and presented the emic and etic views of cultural behaviour as necessary to providing a complete understanding.
Pike showed an apparently discordant world was in fact coherent when correctly understood, being ordered by God and comprehended by the recognition of the unity of human experience, expression and existence this implies.
Some said this distinction was between subjective and objective views of reality.
I think it more helpful at first to stick with the basic idea that a cultural system is not visible to those inside it in the same way as it is to those outside it.
Pike’s point is that you can’t understand what a culture is with only one view. You must look at it from the inside and from the outside to get the full picture.
If you do this to the culture you inhabit you may understand it more fully.
Uses of these points of view
The terms were popularised in the 1950s and 1960s as liberal anthropoligists struggled to reconcile their discoveries of native cultures with the norms of the West.
Liberals reject Christ and do not recognise that the nature of Man, of being and reality, is changeless. For liberals objectivity is problematic. A doctrine of universal equality means there can be only perspectives instead. This is why our mass culture says there is no objective truth, morality or reality.
If you state some cultures are objectively inferior morally and spiritually, intellectually and culturally and so on, you will destroy your career and no one will publish your work. This is one custom of the Liberal tribe.
Customs of the Liberal Tribe
The customs of the Liberal tribe dictate a preference for the emic approach over the etic. The inside view of the individual is paramount, giving rise to a cultural norm of trans-sanity.
This is why it is socially acceptable today for a man to pretend he is a woman or an African to pretend he is an Irishman. No wider reference is given other than the personally view.
The emic has been internalised to the total exclusion of the etic: there are no general rules, there is no objective reality - only what is believed inside the believer and their belief system.
Other cultures will be presented without context from within their own belief systems and fetishised. The resulting fetish can be used as a weapon against Western civilisation and its Christian moral and cultural norms.
This is an unbalanced approach as it discards the coherence of Pike’s recommended partnership of combined insider and outsider views. Insider views absent outside context offer a limited if fascinating glimpse of another world. The absence of etic context permits fantasy to fill the gap, making any culture treated in this way a marvellous spectacle whose appeal is magnified by the viewer’s imagination and desire.
The cultural power of the emic point of view
What we accept as settled social and cultural research is often constrained by this type of emic reality framing. This style of cultural production presents a partially sighted view as perfectly free of prejudice.
The “wisdom” created by this locked machine will only allow input and output which align with its aims. Here is one example from around a century ago.
Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation was an early example of a uniquely emic perspectivism. This meant Mead tried to show the sexual practices of the Samoans from their cultural point of view, arguing the “storm and stress” of adolescence in Western girls was a product of sexual repression.
If our girls were are sexually “liberated” as those of the Samoans their youth and young adulthood would be happier. The idea continues that of Freud and Reich et al, who diagonosed normal sexual morality as a disease to be cured by “sexual freedom”. When you consider how hypersexualisation and extreme sexualities are presented as liberating today, you can also see how this notion has been rolled into the technique which produces our political and social reality.
Mead’s work was one example of using a purely emic view to present our culture as ignorant and sick, and the so-called more primitive culture of the Samoans as wise, enlightened and healthy. All we had to do to get better was to abandon the moral norms inherited from Christianity.
This too is an element of the technique which rules us. It is the inversion of reality. What is less is presented as more, what is worse - better. Backwards is forwards, vice is virtue and so on.
If Mead’s view was balanced with an etic view it would be better understood. This means, if Mead’s motivated reading of Samoan culture was presented alongside the ideas and beliefs of Mead’s own “tribe” we would have a fuller picture of reality, which would show the motives behind the presentation of Christian morality and norms as bad - and their destruction a panacea.
The broader view of the tribal beliefs of the liberal progressives is that they align with the goal of global standardisation. This is one etic view which helps you explain seemingly disconnected processes. If they destroy nations, peoples, your religion, history, culture and understanding of reality, this all helps to dissolve everyone and everything into a single global system.
What is the use of “Emic” and “Etic”?
The emic and etic framing of reality is most useful when applied to our own mass culture, which has been manufactured to make us all believe in the Liberal Belief System (L-B.S.)
When we look at our mass culture from the outsider perspective it looks very different from the view it presents to we who have grown up inside it.
In fact, it looks as insane as it is in reality. It does not appear insane if your entire life is shaped and submerged in the pseudo reality of a mass culture produced with advanced communications technology. All you have to do is step out of the display and look at it as if you were a visitor from elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” could be a place, a time, or a completely different point of view.
Three outsider views
There are "etic” or outsider views we can adopt to do this.
One is to consider how we look to peoples and cultures outside the “Western Bubble”.
To Western Liberal Believers it is a shock to be reminded that peoples exist in tribes, and tribes have particular customs. This is obvious to anyone who has not been schooled to be incapable of recognising it.
This means the Western Liberal eye is an evil eye - its gaze is limited by the designation of totem and tabu. You are not permitted to see reality. You are permitted to see totems. A totem is a cult symbol of something to be worshipped.
To people who have not been indoctrinated by Liberal doctrine human difference is a basic fact of reality and the assertion of the opposite ridiculous.
Another is to consider viewpoints of culture and indeed of liberalism itself from outside the bubble of liberal cultural production.
This is to study writers and ideas which supply other ways of seeing the world, and the social reality engineered by the liberal system.
I would suggest you read “Liberalism is A Sin” or some of the works of Joseph de Maistre. For a conceptual treatment of why liberalism collapses in insoluble paradox, you could look at “Why Liberalism Failed” by Patrick Deneen.
To my mind, the best treatment of the Liberal idea in its revolutionary and counter-sane dimension is presented in the Catholic Social Teaching of Leo XIII.
Finally, you can look at the culture produced to make us all believe in the liberal international system from the point of view of the civilisational timescale.
CULTURE AS PROPAGANDA
The second great violent revolution of the 20th century is known as World War Two.
Consider whether the worship of false idols such as the progress of the progressives, universal human equality and the replacement of the nature of reality with the power of make belief creates a system which will remain stable over centuries.
This is to think of a system in terms of the civilisational timescale.
Will the liberal belief system guarantee the survival of our civilisation over time?
Coherence and its contradiction
Viewed from the inside our mass culture no longer makes sense. It is a litany of contradictions of reality, a cacophony of countersanities.
From the outside it is completely incoherent. It does not match the world, it refuses to recognise reality, it acts as if reality can be remade in its own image, it is increasingly irrelevant to anyone outside its shrinking sphere of influence.
This is an economic and political system whose ideological beliefs have translated into the production of incoherence.
If you want to live an orderly, meaningful and valuable life a coherent view of being and reality is better than its opposite.
Try to find the most complete view of life, the world, and of human affairs which satisfies this description and test it against the competition.
If you would like to sponsor my efforts to detransition our people from embracing self destruction you can do this:
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God bless you all and do not despair. Staying sane is half the battle!
Another excellent article by Frank Wright. Outstanding. This one I will put on Twitter and Facebook also. Bravo. Bravo.
Margaret Mead's work wasn't even true. A small number of teenage girls had made stuff up about sexual exploits.
As Derek Freeman later discovered, virginity on marriage was expected of Samoan girls