Three things happened within a year of each other which really sent me philosophically into a direction which requires a change of focus.  Five to six years ago I had identified that socialists were running our education system in America and that private sector influence needed to be introduced to root them out from dominating the minds of our children.  It took half a decade but now those discussions are becoming mainstream—they are discussed openly when prior they were considered conspiracy.  We are now on a path within 15 years to correcting the behavior.  It won’t be fast enough to help all the poor children raised currently, but it may be to help the next generation.  Nothing happens fast when so many people are involved, but first you have to properly identify the problem. That is what I do; I identify problems then use dynamic resources to repair static patterns.  CLICK TO REVIEW.  I have done that all of my adult life—so I am always on the lookout for the next needed priority. I found it actually while traveling around Japan on business. 

For a culture that had been plucked clean of the right to defend themselves first through a dominating emperor than under occupied presence—the Japanese were still very much in love with their ancient samurai culture and it made me ask myself why America had allowed itself to step away from its own cowboy culture so willingly—because I see cowboys and samurai as being symbolically similar to our respective cultures.  Japan was conducting its society very well with some basic foundations of philosophy established during the feudal period of their history rooted in Shinto Buddhism.  The other thing that happened to me was that my two daughters were both pregnant within a few months of each other and I have this nagging feeling that the world needs to be fixed so that those grandchildren can have a shot at a good life—and I’m not going to let them down.  It is my mission in life—from a position of philosophy. Then I saw this old Mattel commercial for a cap gun that the toy maker made for our society supplied to me by some friends within a group that I adore and belong to, the Cowboy Fast Draw Association.  This little commercial really says everything.

Boys who grew up in the period when they could actually buy that toy gun and use it, didn’t grow up killing their friends and neighbors.  They are now our senior citizens and they are some of the best people on planet earth. They are mildly affluent, respectful, hard-working, and they vote most often–participating in our Constitutional Republic.  The culture that made them who they were has been attacked by progressives from every level of life with quite a lot of ferocity.  Progressives have attacked our American love of guns and our Christian roots that based our society into foundations centering on the Ten Commandments—which to me are similar to the “9 Ways of the Samurai” established in The Book of Five Rings.  What we used to be before progressive instigation made good responsible people and one of the greatest countries on earth, into a thing of scorn.  What we have allowed ourselves to become is something of a nightmare.  CLICK HERE to read about a recent trip to Wal-Mart as just one example. 

I didn’t worry about it too much when I was raising my daughters.  My wife and I grew up under the optimism of Ronald Reagan and had our children at the end of his presidency and as George Bush took over in 1988.  The world was in pretty good shape, communism had fallen in the Soviet Union, and Clint Eastwood was the top box office star in Hollywood.  Then Bill Clinton became president and we watched our country fall to all the socialist hippies left over from the 1960s protests.  By then it was too late.  In our family we stayed very traditional as the world around us fell to progressivism and by the time our two children were married, I had committed myself to healing my nation through philosophy with this blog site—volumes of writing that I provide for free not for any hope of financial gain, but to actually help our country stay solvent by bringing up topics for discussion that nobody wants to talk about.  It is a commitment to a survivable human philosophy for living in an emerging century where we either survive, or destroy ourselves following the Vico cycle. 

Watching that little video about the Mattel .45 cap gun reinforced in me that an important ingredient to our American philosophy has been purposely destroyed by progressive propaganda and that we must renew it in our culture—perhaps for the first time.  I’m not suggesting that America return to a time when women and people of color couldn’t vote—but that the chivalry that was introduced through mythology within the American western needs to be a staple that holds our society together.  In Japan, the samurai culture goes a long way to assisting them in just about every aspect of their society.  Our counterpart is the American Cowboy and I intend to make it my mission in life to restore it to its rightful place—with gradual infusion of my brand of philosophy. The first time through I don’t think we understood the magic that made America exceptional.  But now we have a much clearer idea through the benefit of hindsight.  We have seen what the progressives in our society intended for us—and that is the enemy of capitalism.  As much as I liked the Teddy Roosevelt “Rough Rider” presidential persona, he was a progressive that established the anti-trust elements of an over-extended government and the roots of that failure need to be reversed all the way back to the period of 1870 to 1890, legally and morally.

It was in those years—after the Civil War was out-of-the-way and mankind was free for the first time in its long history—that giant steps toward human endeavor took place.  No nation on earth was superior to America and finally the philosophy of the American Way had taken root to free the slaves.  Not everyone was on board yet, but the laws of the land dictated the social evolution.  There was still war among the collectivist cultures of the Indian against the frontiersmen—and that victory went to the individually based cowboys who settled westward expansion with great emphasis on personal freedom. While some may look to what the Indian lost and their reverence toward nature as tragedies what a nation gained was the type of society that could be built under capitalism—and it was in those years when railroads connected the nation and cities rose on the wealth created under Adam Smith’s capitalism that the most opportunities known to humankind showed itself for the first time truly.

Progressives have put an emphasis on the destruction of the Indians—(which they call Native Americans) because the nomads living in North America at the time of Columbus’s arrival reflected many of the mystical elements of a progressive culture—a Kantian philosophy rooted in blind trust in spirits, nature, and the individual’s insignificance among the heavens.  While the Navaho sand paintings of the North American southwest were nearly identical to the practices of Tibetan monks in eastern China it never seemed to raise an eyebrow—whereas it should have—the many hours of delicate work that went into making such paintings were routinely and ceremoniously destroyed to reflect the point of the art in the first place.  Once created into beautiful and complex pictures they were then mixed up into a collective powder to return to the earth as “one” element.  The ritual is of course to emphasize that we are all just grains of sand that make up a beautiful life together but a reminder that at the end of our days we return to the earth to become part of the greater cosmos.  It’s the old question, are we the light bulb or the light—from which do we associate?  Does light come from the light bulb or does it come from the energy that flows through it?  The collectivist says it’s the energy that flows through the bulb.  The individualist says that without the bulb, there is no way for the energy to emerge into this world as a captured element.  This is the philosophy of the modern progressive  who hates the light but loves the light that comes from it and is why they love gay sex, abortion, orgies, broken families, dysfunctional relationships and other diabolical practices—because they don’t associate themselves as individuals (light bulbs), but as part of the “greater” universe.

Western expansion put these two philosophies at war with each other and the Indians lost.  The Indian way of life pushed westward until they ran out of ocean, and only compassion preserved their culture for the sake of memory.  It was the great war between individualism and collectivism and it finally happened in North America from 1800 essentially to 1900.  The Indians even though they were credited with being the native people of North America were not, they only arrived a bit before white Europeans fleeing the kings of the Bible thumping inquisitions—and adopted the settlements of a long forgotten sophisticated race of people who settled and traded around North America.  Evidence points clearly to the fact that more archaeological and anthropological study needs to occur before any species of Native American population can be properly identified—if at all.  CLICK TO REVIEW.  So for the sake of this discussion, we shall now and forever call them Indians. The Indians as nice and noble as they were lost the fight and the individual frontiersmen and their guns won the West articulated through the mythology of the silver screen western.

Young boys who grew up on those westerns and the women who fell in love with them, married and had children, found that within the values established by the American western the foundation concepts of a thriving nation.  When a young boy could wear one of those Mattel six shooting cap guns on their hip and play at being a western hero like they saw in the movies and on television they grew up to be good husbands, hard workers, and generally good neighbors.  There were imperfections of course, but the basics were foundations which helped create the strongest economy in the world with the greatest GDP of any nation.  Ronald Reagan essentially restored some love for the American western during his presidency and Clint Eastwood made a lot of money producing and directing them, mainly the great Pale Rider and Unforgiven.

Pale Rider has always haunted me; it is about two ways of looking the same problem.  There isn’t an Indian in the entire story—it’s all about land rights and who has a claim to them—which is a rather strong premise for a typical western—the protection of private property.  The film is about the argument of two aspects of capitalism—settlers looking for gold so they can get rich and live a fresh life on the frontier.  The villains are crony capitalists who have industrialized the gold mining process with strip mining and the heroes are the little village of gold miners working the creeks panning for gold in a very traditional and non evasive way.  Of course the industrialists are trying to force the underdogs off their land so they can mine it in the stripping process they are utilizing upstream.  Clint Eastwood as a hired gun is brought on to protect the underdogs from the vicious strip miners.  Both villains and heroes in the story are capitalists—certainly not collectivists.  It was the perfect western to see at the end of the Reagan presidency which gave rise to people like Donald Trump.  The movie was essentially about “responsible” laissez-faire capitalism and that brand of economic method is only possible with a culture that can defend itself from the natural greed that sometimes overtakes the overly ambitious.

The Indians and other mystics of the “East” have decided that material acquisition in this life is not important—which is essentially what their sand paintings were all about—the futility of achievement.  What they were able to do was beautiful, but that nobody should fall in love with the products of their imagination—that at some point we all return to the dust and become of the earth.   Progressives to this day still believe such things and their philosophy have virtually destroyed our human species.  That needs to stop and the only way is to return to a period before their incursion of faulty philosophy.

That Mattel commercial spoke of a time when young boys walked a bit taller, strived to be a bit better, and desired to be a good guy with a gun fighting bad guys who use force and collective might to incite tyranny upon the world.  The cowboy and their six guns spoke of justice that anybody who practiced with it could utilize to keep peace and order in the universe.  It was a philosophy that evolved under the guidance of American Old West mythology but instilled more than just history into inquiring minds.  The six-gun brought value to our society and kids couldn’t wait to use them so they could learn to grow up and be the kind of man who people wanted to hire, and the type of man women wanted to marry—and the type of man who their children wanted to grow up to become.  Progressives have attacked that premise, and it’s time to reverse the damage.

So that will be the focus of this new stage, which I’ve said before will put a light on the aspects of our culture known as the American Gunfighter.  If it takes five years to start changing minds toward guns and the American West, my new little granddaughter will just be entering her first year of kindergarten.  15 years after that, she’ll likely be starting to look to start a family of her own—and when she arrives at that time I want her to have a lot better options than she has right now.  She doesn’t need to deal with “he/she girly men, lazy losers, and drug addicts.  She deserves a real man, and obviously in our culture that starts with establishing respect for a gun and the people who properly teach young minds how to use them.  The tradition of passing down a gun from father to son or cinematic hero to a hungry audience is important.  And the use of the gun to protect capitalism from collective enterprise is a key to understanding America.  For that reason, we were a better country in 1870 than we are in 2016—and to return to that level of awareness; we need to make the gun, especially the single action six-gun, more a part of our national mythology. 

It is in that very simple symbol a major key to solving many of our contemporary problems, and it is time to express it in a way that makes philosophic sense to a society that has been flamboyantly lied to by progressives.  To me, the heart of America is in that Mattel commercial.  And it’s time that we properly defend it from enemies foreign and domestic.  Japan has been through a whole lot more than we have as a country and they have held to their traditions.  We have a lot more to be proud of, and there is no reason we shouldn’t hold our traditions dear to our hearts.  That was the question and answer I had while leaving Tokyo recently, and the samurai culture that I had observed.  I learned all about the West by traveling the East—and the clarity for me couldn’t be more profound.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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