The primary practical aim of what may be termed the Folk Culture movement is to create a new culture through establishing a new community of individuals who share the same outlook.

This new culture would seek to make real the understanding embodied in the ideals of Folk Culture - that is, to establish a truly civilized way of life where those things which make us human (reason, fairness, honour and so on) are valued, and where individuals make a conscious effort to increase our humanity through artistic, cultural, philosophical and scientific means.
 

The genesis for this new culture would be a small rural community where a way of living would be established in harmony with Nature. Thus, manual work would be encouraged and preferred, with individuals accepting the priority of living in a quiet, almost contemplative way as a means of not only gaining personal understanding but also of acquiring a personal harmony and harmony with their surroundings.

One of the aims of such a community would be to be a living example of the ideals of Folk Culture. This new community would encourage civilized and artistic pursuits (such as music, painting, philosophical and scientific study) as a means of expressing the ethos of the new culture. It would be the community itself, and its creations, which would be the only means of spreading the ideals and ethos of the new culture.

The fundamental principle would be to allow this community to grow in a natural, organic and thus slow way. There would be no involvement with the problems external to the community - political, social or whatever - since the focus of the community would be the land where the members of the community dwell and have their being. The excessive and unnecessary materialism of modern world would be left behind, as would the problems and strife which the artificial ideas of this world have created, do create and will create.

If a similitude is needed, it would be of a Taoist-type community, reverencing and respecting Nature, pursuing knowledge, understanding and creativity, and living a simple, non-materialistic life of as much self-sufficiency as possible.

The essence of such a community - and the culture which would develop from it - is that individuals have their very being where they dwell: in the land around them, and in the work or endeavours that they do while so dwelling. Their work and/or endeavours involves this land, or expresses and so enhances it. Thus are they truly rooted in place and time, with their very identity arising from this dwelling. Hence there is a natural rejection of all the ideas and all the artificial ways of the world which are external to this dwelling, and its being, because such ideas and ways are unnecessary and inauthentic.
 

A New Ethos

What distinguishes this new community - and what should enable it to maintain its existence despite the many problems which would beset it - is the understanding of this community as the beginning of a new culture, with a new ethos, with this new culture being a natural, necessary and evolutionary, development of our humanity.

That is, the community has a sense of identity and Destiny - a supra-individual purpose. This purpose is to uphold and extend those things which make us human and which enable the creation of culture and civilization. These things are reason, honour, the desire to know, and the use of will to change ourselves for the better by upholding ethics based upon honour.

It is the task of the community to preserve a way of living, a way of thinking - a way of being - in a world where reason, the pursuit of truth and pure knowledge, the creation of numinous art, music and literature, and the upholding of personal honour are at best disparaged and forgotten, and at worst forbidden.

Thus the community would practise the Arts of Civilization as it would seek to be a centre where the numinous itself was understood and presenced in a real way by, for instance, a natural reverence for Nature, for life itself, and by that quest for Thought, that rational understanding the cosmos, which enshrines the evolution of our humanity.