People are social animals. They look around and see what is lauded or encouraged, or winked at by the larger culture and they see what is frowned upon. This includes their sub culture more so than the larger culture. They act like their peers act. They do what their peers do.

This informs how people interact with one another, including spouses or live in lovers, as well as how they raise their children. Broken marriages and feral children are one result. It isn’t just the economic incentives of welfare, either. The incentives of culture are just as powerful.

Drug addicts don’t do well economically or physically. You’d think with those bad incentives, there’d be a lot fewer drug addicts. And yet there they are.

It could use a lot more discussion, and it would be easier to knock more than a few progressives loose, given that most leftists now focus almost entirely on victimology above everything else. Certainly it must make a lot of them feel slighted.

The funny thing about balancing books is that many of the economies run the most by economists tend to struggle with the basics there.

Traditional extended families connected individuals several generations backwards and forwards. Constant interaction with your grandfather will pass along many traits and thought patterns from your grandfather’s youth, which he learned from his grandfather, et cetera.

The dissipation and scattering of extended families, accelerated after WW2, severed generations from one another and mass media / pop culture further exacerbated the issue.

The grandfather you worked with, who helped raised you, passed along culture. The grandfather you see once a year on holidays is a funny old man who you only understand via anachronistic pop cultural anecdotes.

The way to rebuild culture necessarily starts with growing families and staying close (and staying put) across generations. Connect with similar local families (traditional catholic church; homeschooling groups; etc.). After a generation a significant amount of local folk culture will spontaneously reemerge (to say nothing of the embers of High Culture such traditionalist groups strive to pass along).

A rich local folk culture is the necessary basis, the necessary foundation for the flourishing of high culture.

The technocratic way of thinking about the state essentially says that as long as the books balance, it doesn’t really matter all that much what happens to the culture that that nation-state governs over.

Very good line. With the change from “generalisation” to specialisation which occurred in early 20th C, I think that many of our experts gained their credentials through a reductionist understanding of their subject, ignoring the broader context in which their specialty operated, assuming that they were constant givens. Economics is particularly guilty of this, judging its success or failure by simple appeal to balance sheet analysis and ignoring the meta-economic factors at play. Catholic economies were different to Protestant ones because economic activity differed in each due to the cultural factors in which economic activity had to take place. As far as I’m aware, the only economic school which emphasised the study of meta-economic factors was the Ordoliberal one. Current mainstream economic opinion ignores this dimension.

The other problem here is hyperindividualism which emphasises the particulate nature of every person and sees the guarantee of their rights as something protected by law instead of common agreement. We don’t see our rights as “common good” agreements rather as properties intrinsic to our beings, the common good be damned.

Also, I don’t think people actively seek to neglect culture, rather they act as if their behaviour is both inconsequential to the common culture and that hyperindividuated expression is the the greatest human good regardless of group norms. It is asking too much for the proles to recognise the consequence of their actions when many of their intellectual superiors clearly can’t. I don’t think that they are lazy, I just reckon they’re stupid.

I got the impression that the following is your goal:

“Effective states and organizations can be composed out of multiple cultural groups, but it requires some compromise and synthesis between those groups.”

My own thoughts has lately been that culture is in its essence a defensive technique, of a group. This is being reinforced by witnessing how/what little boys and girls learn before the age of 5. Of course they learn so much more and this is why I would like to add a reference describing the “growth” part. Using safety as a base is good, but one forgets that growth is continuous requiring safety to evolve with it. However, this growth should always align with safety, otherwise it becomes frivolous.

“Culture: it can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.
The word “culture” derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin “colere,” which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture. “It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth,” Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London, told Live Science.” http://www.livescience.com/21478-what-is-culture-definition-of-culture.html

From all above (including your article), my deduction is that the 1% are out to destroy our culture, leaving us basically defenseless. However, the irony is that defenseless people also have a very low productivity. Defenseless equals productionless.

With all this not making sense, we have the perfect motive to re-engage our basic tribal defensive posture – ie culture.

This should not have been so confusing to you. Read graf 5 again.