From B. F. 10/27/2022

Sir, here is my question to you.

Long story short, can a high trust society be resurrected?

My father, grandfather and office-worker mother all encouraged me to give two weeks notice as "the honorable" thing. 

Three weeks ago, the foreman of my construction site told me, the last words he spoke to me (unless I should meet him again): "Don't bother coming in monday, you're not needed." When I called the foreman's boss, he was a little more diplomatic, but it basically amounted to the same thing. "We don't have any more work, the more senior men in your union get preference. Sorry. Come back next spring!"

My last job before I entered the union, working at taco bell, I gave them three weeks notice, as soon as I had learned I was to be accepted into an apprenticeship program. They did allow me to keep working, but I was not as honorable as I could have been and stopped going to work a week before my departure. I had wanted to put things in order with my tenants and other preparations for the drive across the state, rather than spending 8-10 hours making tortillas and soft drinks.

Most of the other jobs I have worked, whether as unarmed security, more fast food, or office drone, made a point of kicking me away as soon as they had no further use for me.

So the old rules don't apply anymore, I can see that. But (and I have more questions along the same lines in different parts of life) can this attitude be kept alive among a smaller, more close-knit group? Should it? What should be the attitude of a modern tribe, with the goal and intent of strengthening and trusting the tribal circle while taking advantage of the womanly, stupid, kangz of the hostile outside?

God bless you and yours.

…

The two weeks notice thing was getting sketchy in 1992 when I did it, and even offered, and did, train my replacement. This set well with my new employer and resulted in me getting job offers from the old employer and eventually being brought in to save that failing business some 15 years later, not because I was the most qualified person for the job. But in retail food, a snake pit of bitterness, the owners knew that my word had been tested, that I had worked just as hard—harder actually—to preserve my reputation as “The Hardest Worker” even after I had set my sights elsewhere. I was marked as a chump willing to work for something greater than myself. This is the essence of honor, that in the modern sense, the honorable man is a chump, a sucker, a patsy, a fall-guy, a fool, a casualty, and in the ancient sense a hero. Virtually all humans do not have the capacity for honor. It is possible only for the few.

20 years later, at that same company, at the place that had sought me out as a fixer based largely on my weird sense of honor, when I had to resign because these people were breaking laws and at the same time demanding that I abandon my moral code: which included protecting female employees, not surprise firing male employees, and counseling terminated employees on how they could get employed ASAP, I had to sneak out.

Monday was my day off. Monday July 4th 2010, three employees called me and told me that they had been fired on my day off, that an outside security goon had been brought in to fire them for accusing the store detective of molesting them, which we all absolutely knew that Gordon was feeling up the women. The class action lawsuit against the company would be successful.

I knew, that if I broke ranks with management, that the Goon, a three-piece suit private eye, Gordon, the African store detective, and Thomas the corrupt BPD homicide detective, would be brought in to walk me out the door in cuffs and make it look like I had been caught with my hand in the til. They would absolutely use the “honorable” practice of giving notice to sully my honor. This is the honor trap, letting honor, which is of essence internal, being extended to a hierarchy, which is of essence infernal.

I went in at 6 A.M. cleaned out my locker, shook hands with my co-manager and night captain, extending honor where it belonged, between men, turned in the keys and had them lock me out, turning off the phone.

Three weeks notice was unrealistic, and is why two weeks was the old standard, a week to train your replacement and a week to work on his follow up questions. In some states, I am told, mechanics and such, for fear of sabotage, are paid two weeks severance pay when they give notice. A society may only operate under a two-way hierarchical honor system when it is building at exponential rates. This is why all martial empires surge, rise, stagnate, decline and fall.

The funny thing is, when speaking with people about this subject, there are two kinds of people who believe in their bones, that giving notice to an employer makes zero sense for either party:

-Successful business men and people who work in high finance, and

-Drug lifestyle people. Straight folks might think there are those who abstain and those who are addicts. In reality, there are tens of millions of Americans who are not addicts and choose to deal with the insanity of modern life through treating their brains with substances that are either controlled or illegal. I am not one of these, but I count many as my friends.

I was left wondering yesterday, that even though my friends who are drug lifestyle people tend to have low will power and self-discipline, and the generally low drug use high end people who have high will power and high discipline, why do these two groups tend to chuck notions of honor out the window of the mind in the same dismissive way?

I think it is because Money is our God and that drugs are our Jesus Christ and that separating getting high from having money is about as hard for drug culture people as taking Yahweh the God of Isrаel and his Chosen People from Christianity.

As to your initial question, honor is the first casualty of the high trust society, of the modern police state where most compliance is done with economic incentives and final obedience is a question of the police boot upon our neck. Honor is utterly internal and is based on:

-Deeds

-Word

I lived an honorable life in my mind by keeping my word, especially when this pact with myself, in which the person I made the pledge to was nothing more than a witness, worked against my own material well being. I decided in 2010, that if I could not protect my employees from the store detective or the outside goon in the suit that was brought in to threaten women who claimed to have been molested by the store detective, or from the Owner, who needed to fire a man once a month to achieve orgasm as she danced in her office, that I would walk away from the only good paying gig I ever had.

Such choices, small and large, including how I left my last job after giving six months notice due to a nagging and deteriorating hip injury, and being totally jerked around by John and Larry, my bosses, have increased my inner sense of honor, and my will.

Most people believe that we will never know in advance how we will react to a dynamic situation. I know what I will do in a given situation and have always come through. If someone pulls a gun on me I will close the distance and stab them. I know this and I will do this and have done this, specifically in mid winter, 1999, at Southern and Schley against two negro foes.

Money Men and Drug Heads, they do not know such things about themselves, their own nature caught up in the grim tides of the world that hates us all.

All honor gets you is knowing your will. That is a potent thing in a society where criminals and cops and bosses don’t trust each other. Honor also labels us as a threat to The System and if that sense of inner honor is extended to include others, then our honor is a trap in which we are caught and defamed. I think Uncle Ted is innocent and was set up by the System.

My sense of honor, that I absolutely know that I will die to defend my empty wallet at the end of this month, that I will take bullets getting close enough to stab my killer, that makes me an unsavory and disturbing person to many people I care about.

My point is that there can only be an honorable society when it is formed by people who have already developed an internal honor code that surpasses craven survival. An honor based society must begin as a horizontal social relationship network between men who are their own actors, who depend not on cops, bosses, pitbulls or group approval. For this reason, and the intrinsic vetting problems, honor as an institution of internal discipline, best described in The Song of Roland, only seems to rise among fighting men, to the point that men who are enemies in combat are more likely to trust one another than they are to trust the politicians or fight promoters that set them against each other.

Thank you for your well wishes, Sir.