When learning about a country the easiest thing to learn is what is said. Harder and more important is to learn what is unsaid. This takes time, you have to repeatedly find yourself in situations where something would be obvious to say and look around you at all the silent faces. It is a slow process but over time you can learn what it is that a country leaves unsaid. This is vastly more important than knowing what is being said. You can know what is said in a country without even visiting it. Simply being read up on a country is enough to know what is being said in it. This information is barely useful at all and why travel is necessary for understanding. Without even visiting a country you can know what is being said in it, knowing that you are no in possession of almost nothing. Yes, you know what is being said. The least important thing to know. The next step is a useful one, know what is being unsaid. This can rarely be known without travel to that country. The specific experiences which let you know what is being unsaid are rare and even then require unusual perception to profit from. To know what is unsaid requires personal exposure to the people involved in circumstances where saying what is customarily unsaid would be normal and yet it is not done. And then it requires the perception to notice that it was left unsaid. Simply asking the local people what it is they never talk about is useless. One has to watch them not talking about it, that is all there is to it.
Understanding countries is important but understanding your own country is most important. Anyone can know what is said in his country. It is possible to not know what is unsaid if one does not have perception. You can spend your entire life in a country and not know what is unsaid if you lack perception. This shortcoming will not be compensated for by the assistance of the more perceptive as the specific subject here is things left unsaid. The perceptive will understand what is being left unsaid in their countries and this will be their private knowledge. If they try to share it with others then the subject is no longer left unsaid. So in each country the unperceptive lack understanding of something even more important than what is being said, they lack understanding of what is being unsaid. To achieve this second and higher level of understanding one needs to be adept at perception or what is unsaid will never be noticed. This leads to vast inequality in levels of understanding.
But there is something even more important than knowing what is unsaid, that is knowing why it is unsaid. This is the highest level of understanding. The lowest and easiest level is to know what is said. The two levels above this consist entirely of privately known knowledge for it consists of knowledge of what is unsaid. Should it not be left unsaid it will become public knowledge and become knowledge of what is said, the first category. The two levels of understanding above knowledge of what is said must remain private knowledge to remain in their categories. These two levels are knowledge of what is unsaid and highest of all knowing why it is unsaid. Both these levels are only available to private individuals through their adept perception. The highest level of understanding is always understanding why the unsaid is left unsaid. If this highest level of knowledge was made public it would no longer be an understanding of the unsaid.
There are certain things you can learn about a country without visiting or at least meeting the inhabitants. Most of these things are in the category of the said. The more important things to know are what is unsaid and why. Knowing these things are important even to understanding your own country. Even if you are American, you still need to know what is unsaid in America. Even if you are American you still need to know why it is left unsaid. Because these are the hardest and most important things to know. Because these are the most useful things to know. The real language of America isn’t what is spoken. The real language of America is what is unspoken. It is the American Silence that defines American culture and politics. It is what we don’t say that makes us who we are. It is what we don’t say that is the source of our unsolved problems. Let us turn these into solved problems. Let us speak what we have left unsaid.
If you only know what America says you think America’s peculiar obsession is race. If you know what America doesn’t say you know America’s obsession is religion. America is 13% Black and they make 30% less than average, since whites make around 5% more than average the gap is around 35%. This is not unusual. In Europe the gap is much the same. The gap between Aborigine and white income in Australia is much the same, in Latinx America the gap is much larger. Brazil is supposed to be the best Latinx American country and free of racism but there the Blacks make 50% less than whites. The 50% gap holds up across all of Latinx America. Yet if you only know what is said this gap only exists in America and maybe even was invented here. If you only know what America says you think this wage gap between Blacks and whites is unique to our country and defines its very nature. It does not.
The wage gap between Blacks and whites is not unique to America and does not define our countries very nature. This wage gap occurs wherever Blacks and whites live in the same country as Black culture is less advanced then white culture. There is nothing unique about this wage gap, it is not a feature of American life, it is a feature of Black culture and exists wherever Black culture exists. Humans evolved to think regard is the currency of success, to the extent a culture has moved beyond this instinctive belief it is successful. Blacks have not moved beyond this belief and are not successful. If America was the cause things would be different in other countries. Things are the same in other countries.
If you only know what America says you will think America’s obsession is with race. America’s obsession is with religion. It is easy to know what is said, it is harder to know what is left unsaid. This wage gap between Blacks and whites occurs in every country they both inhabit, but only in America is it happening in an undeclared Protestant theocracy. That this theocracy is undeclared only makes it more pervasive. What is unsaid in America is that Black failure is Protestant failure, as the Blacks were converted to a sincere belief in salvation-by-faith-alone generations ago. And this sincere belief has not borne fruit, and as Jesus said, we must judge the tree by its fruit. What is unsaid in America is that Black failure proves Protestantism wrong, proves the very foundation of our theocracy wrong. And so Black failure must be excused and overlooked, lest the Protestant theocracy collapse.
The easiest thing to know is what is said. What is spoken in America revolves around race. But the racial wage gaps in America are no different than in the rest of the world. So merely knowing what is said doesn’t let you understand America. What is harder to know is what is unsaid. What is unsaid in America is any talk at all about a cultural basis to the wage gaps. In a Latinx Country if the Blacks and Indians complain of their poverty the whites will immediately ask questions regarding culture and whether or not all cultures are equally successful and why are these complaints legitimate. The whites will promise to rectify any individual case of discrimination but will reject any attempt to rectify on a race by race basis until an explanation as to why all cultures are equally successful has been given. As no such explanation can be given the conversation quickly dies. None of this ever happens in America. The c-word is never spoken. Blacks complain of the wage gap and no one mentions culture or asks for an explanation as to why all cultures are equally successful. Just as in Latinx countries there is no such explanation, all cultures being equally successful is equally absurd in America as it is in the countries to the south. But in America no explanation need be given as no question is asked. America is silent on the question of culture, this is what is always left unsaid, this is what you must know to better understand the country.
The easiest thing to know is what is said. The harder thing to know is what is unsaid. The hardest thing to know is why it is unsaid. The reason culture is left unsaid is that the Protestants want to use a book the Catholics wrote to prove all Catholics will go to hell and so everyone must join up with the Protestants before its too late. The New Testament lays out moral rules for entering heaven, obey them and your in. Sounds simple and none of the rules cannot be done by a none Christian so it means a heaven for all peoples. St. Augustine did not like this at all, he wanted a heaven for only Christians. So added a level of needless complexity to the debate to justify theological exclusion of non Christians. Augustine’s formula was that anyone who follows the rules of the New Testament will go to heaven, but the rules can only be followed by a Christian as God will only give efficacious grace to his true followers and this long and technically termed gift called efficacious grace was needed to follow the rules. This nonsense argument was meant to justify belief in a heaven more exclusionary than the one outlined in the religion’s founding text. Luther picked up on this and used the same idea to exclude all Catholics, including St. Augustine and anyone who shared his beliefs.
The method for creating a Christian heaven more exclusive then the New Testament heaven is not to deny the rules, but to say only those given a gift by God can follow the rules, the gift of efficacious grace. And the Protestants believe it goes to them. So free will is denied, in the Protestant view those outside their religion do not have true agency and thus cannot pass the entrance test and enter their exclusive heaven. This lack of agency has a cost, you have to keep up appearances. You cannot admit to agency in one arena and deny it in another. To keep up the appearance of a Protestant only heaven we Americans must deny agency in our lives. This is the reason culture goes unmentioned in America.
What is said in America concerns race. What is unsaid in America concerns culture and is left unsaid because America is an undeclared Protestant theocracy. To keep alive the formulas they use to justify damning Catholics on the basis of a book the Catholics wrote they Protestants must damn agency itself. This is why it was the National Council of Churches that got Daniel Moynihan fired in 1965. It wasn’t the Blacks. It wasn’t Jesse Jackson, it wasn’t Malcolm X. It wasn’t the NAACP or the New York Times or the hippies. The National Council of Churches got Moynihan fired in 1965 and that shows you who really runs this country and why. Moynihan-the-catholic wanted to make strengthening the Black family the number one priority of the entire country and made a list of proposals to achieve this. All the proposals were saving the Black family through works, none were saving the Black family through faith. Moynihan had to go.
It was the Moynihan Report of 1965 that was the true Birth of a Nation. Since that moment nothing has been what it was before. Moynihan’s firing let the world know where America’s weakness is. The Protestant’s who run this country are devastated on the inside that their magic religion isn’t working on the Blacks they converted. They gave the Blacks efficacious grace and so now they can enter heaven, live by the rules supposedly no one else can. But its not working. The Protestant theocracy will do anything to avoid talking about this. Including fire a man because he wants Blacks to have better families.
Race is what is said in America. What is unsaid is culture. Why culture it is unsaid is because of religion. To understand America is not to know that Blacks make 35% less than whites, that gap occurs all over the world. To understand America is to know that culture is never discussed as cause of the wage gap and the reason is Protestantism. You cannot openly discuss culture’s influence on success in a way which does not tear down the exclusive heaven of Protestantism and let the Catholics in. American politics, on the surface the shoutiest and angriest politics in the western word, is truly the most silent and mute politics as the most important subject never gets spoken about. Understanding this is the key to understanding America.
I believe in the rule that the less you talk about something the more you talk about it. When something important is suppressed in pops out somewhere else. When you forbid direct discussion of culture’s influence on success this subject pops out into proxy debates. And the more you suppress discussion of culture’s influence on success the more this subject infects other subjects and makes everything into a proxy debate for the one debate we refuse to have. This is the America we live in today, everything we say is a proxy for the one thing we can’t say. All our debates are proxy debates for the missing debate on culture’s influence on success. This is why American politics are the shoutiest and angriest in the world. We are shouting and angry at each other because we never have a real conversation about anything that matters. All our real questions for each other are forbidden, so we ask phony questions and get phony answers. No one is satisfied and the frustration quickly turns to anger and anger eventually turns to violence. There is only one solution and that is to talk openly about culture’s influence on success. But to do that means crossing the invisible line Moynihan crossed, the line that keeps the Catholics out of heaven. I know most readers do not believe me when I say America is a Protestant theocracy, but when the Protestants finally decide quality of life politics is more important than religion everything is going to change like you flipped a switch. And I mean everything because all our current debates are proxy debates for the real debate on culture. So everything will change.