“Nothing is less important than which fork you use. Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is ethics. It is honor.” ~ Emily Post
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Etiquette by Emily Post, originally published in 1922 and now in its 19th edition, is one of the most popular reference books ever published in America. I was raised on my mother’s copy of the 3rd Edition. It sits in my office today – one of three editions I own.
Etiquette and the teaching of good manners have flourished under the stewardship of five generations of the Post family, now organized through the Emily Post Institute in Vermont. Indeed, the Post family enterprise is an excellent example of building family wealth by making a quiet but enormous contribution to the civic life, health, and prosperity of America.
Emily Post’s great-great-grandson, Daniel Post Senning, joins me this week on the Solari Report to discuss good manners – how we learn them, pass them on to our children, and evolve them in both a changing world and a digital age. Daniel is a co-author of Emily Post’s Etiquette, 19th edition and The Etiquette Advantage in Business, 3rd edition. He is also the author of Manners in a Digital World: Living Well Online, and co-host, with his cousin Lizze Post, of a weekly podcast, Awesome Etiquette.
When I am appalled by some bad behavior online, I sometimes head over to the Institute’s website for some inspiration and age-old wisdom on how to integrate divine intelligence into our daily lives. From big issues of ethics and honesty to the protocols of table manners and social rituals, the Emily Post Institute is a treasure of “how to” resources for nurturing a more human civilization.
In Money & Markets this week I will discuss the latest in financial and geopolitical news from Friesland in the Netherlands. I am collecting stories at the Money & Markets commentary. It’s a great place to post questions and suggested stories and links – or e-mail them for Ask Catherine.
In Let’s Go to the Movies, I will review The Power of Your Intentions by Truthstream Media. Aaron and Melissa Dykes describe the famous “rice experiment,” which underscores the value and importance of thoughtfulness and good manners.
Talk to you Thursday!
Wow, this topic really struck up a lot of “conversation”. I own a book called Man Up!. It’s somewhere lost in my house. In it, there is the topic how to prepare a table for dinner, the English way, the French way and American way. That topic is found almost nowhere in my daily life, but it was subconsciously inculcated within me as the son of a European woman. And just to show you how many few fellow Americans know or care, only once in my life, while working for Vanguard, one colleague yelled out during our lunch hour. “Oh wow, you really are of European descent, you hold your utensils the way Europeans do!”
I was shocked by his reaction. I have never had anyone react that way to how I eat lunch before ever.
The guy’s name was Micah, his father was a pastor in Philly. Micah studied a lot obviously. He told me there was no way that in the 1800s the samurai would have entertained an outsider living in their village and learning their ways, they would have just killed Tom Cruise, vision or no vision.
Anyway, I used to take Micah to work everyday and thats how we got to learn about each other. His lineage was of Eastern European stock. I guess Philadelphia being a city where the majority of people with the last name of Cortes are from the Greater Antilles, it was not until he saw how I held my utensils and handled my table manners that he was keen on observing, did he realize that I was not making stuff up when I told him I am of European descent on my mothers side and that I grew up in Southern Europe as a young child although I was born in New York City.
Table manners was a big deal with my mother. She even taught me the Italian way of eating spaghetti, hint, it entails using a spoon with that fork. I also never noticed that my mother, while heavily accented, spoke English with a British accent and technique, makes sense since she lived in England for decades and her father was British.
So yeah, the less you know the less presumptous you should be, unfortunately, Americans today, feel they know a lot, because they read more? No, because they watch more CNN and really feel they know it all, they they are getting highly sourced information, as if a CNN propaganda machine is equivalent to a Solari Report. This is how powerful mind control is, the mind controlled feel empowered by this propaganda. It is astounding.
It is also astounding when you realize that Dwight D. Eisenhower was really just a puppet of the Dulles brothers. So POTUS being puppet politicians did not just start with Biden, which makes me sad as an American. Speaking of the 1950s and of etiquette, I am reminded of the individual being grilled by the alcoholic senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, when he said to him, “Have you no decency, sir? Have you lost all decency?”.
I feel like this era is a repeat of McCarthyism and then some.
So its time for me to get back to prayer like I used to, find that copy of Man Up! and purchase a copy of this Etiquette book.
Thanks everyone.
Correction: The book is not Man Up!, it is the Merriam Webster’s Spanish-English Visual Dictionary.
Having listened to the Daniel Post Senning interview (and subsequently ordering his book), I continue to admire your pluck in addressing topics that are at once difficult, yet essential. When we consider the role of America in a world of Chinese ascendancy, we will quickly find that our Eurocentric sensibilities are the sine-qua-non of our culture, and the same is true of Han Chinese. While much is said of the deferential nature that appears characteristic of many Asian cultures, it belies an overall disdain of The West. Meanwhile, we of The West may find, by turns, our oriental opposite numbers to be quaint and accordingly obsolete. I believe such cultural differences are precisely what Samuel Huntington had in mind when he identified the civilizational fault-lines that occur more or less naturally in The Clash of Civilizations. What currently unites East and West is their mutual competition for wealth. They are agreeing on the playing field and the officials, but not the rules. Their respective interpretations of the rules has everything to do with their value systems, which are partially expressed by their social manners.
I would offer that scarcity and crowding in much of Asia is fundamental to their peoples’ social constructs, whereas The West’s relative plenty and access to open country is fundamental to ours. A personal anecdote I can relate occurred while in attendance at the nightly military memorial ceremony in honor of The Great Dead at Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Arriving ahead of time with a wife and three daughters, I was able to gain a position immediately at the temporary barricade, and leaned on its rail with my elbows. As the ceremony commenced, I was astonished to find the coarse, black haired head of a Chinese woman push up from beneath me and between my arms, without the least apology nor even acknowledgement! Naturally, considering the decorum of the situation, I didn’t shove her to the side, though I longed to. My takeaway has been this: we arrive at our senses of separation distances on the basis of our culture and they from theirs. And, to be sure, “discreet distance” is a fundamental cultural paradigm that underlies many others.
At the risk of long-windedness, we do need to understand our own culture, but meanwhile we will need to understand when it can be asserted and when it must be retracted. And probably, we are going to need to accept fundamental cultural differences as a fact of life. Samuel Huntington may have been a neoconservative, but, like Edward Gibbon, in his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, which would be considered impossibly racist and stereotypical by today’s standards, he had a keen eye for the proclivities of the world’s folk. My prescription is we need to have “company manners” when we have company. The less we know about people, the less presumptuous we should dare be.
Excellent points, John. You understand the challenges. If you have not watched that video on Shenzhen, it underscores an important example. Their learning/business model on intellectual capital defies ours – and has a history of bankrupting others empires.
The Chinese are exporting Institutes around the world that teach Confucian philosophy. I have always been curious to dip into one and understand what impact it is having.
I watched the first video that came up when I searched for Shenzhen, and it immediately made me think of Mark Twain “Innocents Abroad,” as the millennial hostess skateboards her way from awesome to amazing and shows how the fruit vendors take phone pay. There is much more to it, but here’s what I got: It’s China’s Disnefying of what Westerners are looking for, so as to attract them with the superficial pleasures offered. The video takes us from the highest, ultramodern, terrible architecture that characterizes many “advanced” cities, and then through slums, which she blithely dubs “affordable.” She sees no irony that this is exactly what we already have back home, albeit with different lower classes.
When one is young, the world seems his oyster, with a pearl waiting inside that special one, just for him. Later, one sees enough of oysters to know their commonness, the amount of work it takes to bring about the illusions we cherish and the simple likelihood that work is our destiny. Looking at the RT video, it is clear that whatever else Shenzhen offers, it is mostly a workplace, where humans create non-humans and systems to use them instead of humans. Again, nothing we aren’t already doing domestically, just more people in China at work on the “problem.” Who knows what the Final Solution to that problem might be?
“Right speech” is a well-known Buddhist precept, which involves refraining from hateful talk and by extension writing. Even if not always easy to practice or accompanied by loving thoughts – you have to be a saint or sage to have an aware mind 24/7! – polite speaking launches the intention of kindness into the medium during interaction with others. Intention launched into the medium is an act of consciousness, and consciousness is non-local. So in a certain sense “good manners”, seemingly so banal, are actually a foray into quantum physics that anyone can make….
Indeed. I have been in Stavoren for a week – people are so pleasant, kind and thoughtful. And happy. What a difference it makes!
Simple magic, benefit of clergy, say Grace over dinner. Then prove it actually helped scientifically? So what are the borders and boundaries of your intentions? Sophomoric. Eat, sleep, shit, pray, repeat. Get some interesting guests. Thank you. PS God Bless Uncle Ben. Hahaha.
Alas, this makes it so very boring for the people running the entrapments, no?
The challenge when betrayed by those you love most in the world – when family is killed or betrays to stay alive and attempts are made to try to kill you – when there is no sovereignty to be found anywhere – then the demonstration of how to build wealth and live a free and inspired life – of how value is created in a society without massive government subsidy and dirty tricks – must begin with the basics.
It is the integration of the divine in every day life. Think small. Preserving the capacity to love within the storm is like spiritual neurosurgery. Best to not make things too observable to the slave masters.
And transparency is built brick by brick. As Rauni-Leena Tellervo Luukanen-Kilde said right before she died, “Love is the answer.”
Yes, indeed. Thank you for your excellent Solari-Report, what a gift. Thank you for your wisdom, strength and kindness. And thank you for mentioning Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde, what a beautiful soul she was and is. LOVE IS THE ANSWER.
That is the great truth!
Manners … the perfect topic for this week.
I’m really talking about ‘Political Manners’! Where’d they go? It’s suddenly okay to openly discuss killing a sitting President? Vilifying his supporters? Ad Homonym attacks rather than factual & honest disagreement?
I listen to otherwise smart people truly believing he was not fairly elected, that he’s running down ‘America’, that he greedy and vile and on and on. All this for a man ‘they’ once supported 20 years ago, who is a successful businessman, who loves our country and who is working without salary. Whew!
40% of Americans believe this and are daily being fed by NPR, CNN and company. The Deep State is running very deep.
What are YOUR thoughts to successfully navigating thru this unmannerly mess?
Thanks!
I think the mind control and entrainment is so bad, that the best way to deal with it is prayer. And focus on what you can get done which is net energy plus for you and the people you love.