[Crackpot opinions are in brackets.]

James,

You've alluded to this many times but I wanted to hear your collected thoughts. In a recent podcast you discussed Amish men, the youngest deployed as a scout.

[Drug sets—being small neighborhood gangs—have traditionally used boys and older men as lookouts, exactly as the Amish did at Chicago Union Station. The spry young fellows serve as mobile lookouts and the older men with better judgment serve as stationary observers, often around stash houses. The men in their prime will coordinate with these two branches of their intelligence service and make necessary adjustments.]

In discussions on the idea of investigating a topic, you've discussed the role of scout in council, and at times extended the idea to the artistic and spiritual realms, who goes where others don't and shares his findings.

[This would typically be a middle-aged man, still mobile enough to explore, not young and brash enough to get into dominance encounters and experienced enough to make assessments. In tribal societies Taboo men, such as Marno, from Melville's Typee, and the scouts of the American Frontier, tend to serve this function in a freelance capacity, being granted deferential status among various tribes.]

Can you flesh this out?

[Only modern white people would have to ask this. This is the most timelessly sensible use of age-based manpower practiced by hunting-based and warrior societies around the world. ]

How natural or intuitive is this?

[This is very intuitive. For this reason, societies with high levels of social control, dedicated to large scale, centralized slaughter [Roman, Anglo, Prussian, Soviet, Zulu] will divide children in to segregated age groups and disable organic structures of cooperation. Age-based schooling is perhaps the worst aspect of this. Boxing gyms and other martial fraternities do not do this, but practice natural mixed age cooperation. In Civilization, the elder is replaced by the expert, the risk-taking leader by the risk-limiting manager, the elected chief by a selected upperclassman, replacing the natural hierarchy of experience with artificial actors. In the military, to maintain functionality, the compromise is at squad and platoon level with an experienced NCO providing the actual leadership in cooperation with the ranking commissioned officer who provides system sanction.]

To what degree does it rely on passed-on knowledge?

[Application of passed on knowledge confirmed and adapted and placed in context by experience, is what the scout ideally embodies.]

Should the artistic / spiritual scout fulfill an apprenticeship as a martial scout?

[Knowledge of reality comes most starkly from violent experience and our nearly universal blindness to reality seems to be directly related to our lack of violent experience, with upper class academics entirely divorced from reality.]

Is that even possible today?

[Not with a smart phone.]

Is it always a young man's game?

[No.]

Is the shaman a scout, or something more?

[I see the shaman as a metaphysical scout, and like the scout, he operates as a guide as often as an observer.]

How does the role change through history and across culture?

[Priesthoods, including academia and media, are inserted into artificial hierarchies in the Civilized context in order to disable spiritual guidance and enable utopian fantasy and dogmatic doctrine to be accepted by the domesticated masses. To take a free people and enslave them you need a priesthood to replace the shamanic figure—thus the rampant witch burning of the Reformation.]

How has modernity impacted it?

[Modernity—being the Apex Expression of Western Civilization—has succeeded in almost totally divorcing the human from reality by two primary means: separation from nature and development of the media as a crypto-priesthood, who pretend to act as scouts and guides but instead mislead and pervade lies. However, anything so inauthentic will be unlikely to conceal its false nature from the naturally inquisitive minority mind, which is the mind of the scout. This person is generally not a leader or a follower, as the blindness embodied in the follower and the willfulness of the leader, both disable investigation into the unknown or misunderstood. For this reason, the messenger of truth is the most hated enemy of the media and the system of modernity and must be destroyed and discredited whenever he commits the crime of inserting truths great or small into the Sanctuary of the Hallowed Lie which is Modern Western Civilization.]

Best,

Polynimbus

Thank you, young man, for permitting me to separate further from that which hates Us.