Reader Durandel comments on yesterday’s post:
I’ve said for years the West is now entirely made up of infantilized generations. Civilization is built on the back of men. What are we to build with generations of perpetual 14 year olds?
The authoritarian who shows up to whip these kids into shape is very likely going to be communist, atheist, and nihilistic. These people will get what they desire good and hard. I just feel bad for my descendants. And I feel bad for my ancestors too. Just a great civilization and culture, and now we go the way of Numenor but worse, we self inflicted our ruin.
I don’t know what to do with the kids on the culture issue. My faith I will teach and pass down, but I didn’t receive my cultural patrimony that was owed to me, and that’s because my parents didn’t receive it from their parents. And I reject modern Western culture from the time of a German nominalistic to the present, so I don’t have anywhere to take them or move them to to show them and allow the. To immerse themselves in it.
We are going to have to rebuild…but I still feel like we will go the way of Tolkien’s elves…slowly fading out, through genetic assimilation while tiny isolated groups disappear into the background.
My response:
Tolkien’s works honored two types of heroism: the zeal of the Christian knight who, though he may be overmatched by his earthly foes, fights joyfully because he knows that Christ has already secured final victory, and the stoic, honorable courage of the pagan who is entirely without hope but fights just as fiercely because it’s the right thing to do.
Read the works of 20th century Christian authors like Lewis, Tolkien himself, and even Ratzinger, and they seem more informed by the second spirit than the first. Much is made of Christians being in the world but not of the world and “fighting the long defeat”.
As much as I admire these men, I think their fatalistic attitude, most likely imparted by the World Wars, lulled a lot of people into a false sense of soft despair. It’s not a big jump from “We’re outnumbered and outgunned, but it’s our duty to fight the good fight” to “There’s nothing I can do anyway, so I’m off the hook.”
Revolutionary political movements only need 10% of the population to succeed. The Church only needs twelve men. The Apostles took on an empire that was far more ruthless and run by much more cunning people than ours. True, they didn’t live to see Rome conquered for Christ, but their heirs did.
Amid the grim spectacle of the Left’s madness, it’s easy to get caught up watching the train wreck and lose focus on what we’re fighting for.
Imagine a world where the arts and popular entertainment honor fathers and Christians.
Imagine having a functional economy where everyone from rocket scientists to unskilled laborers can find honest, fulfilling work at a living wage based on merit.
Picture cohesive local communities where intact families support one another and look out for each other’s needs without requiring the intrusion of the state.
Parents, imagine not having to worry if your son will be frivolously abandoned by his wife and reduced to penury when she robs him of his house, income, and children with the backing of the state. Imagine not fearing that your daughter will flit from one sociopathic fling to the next while using Big Brother as a surrogate father for her bastard children.
Imagine universities honestly pursuing the truth and teaching it to your children.
Imagine a world that makes sense.
We could live there tomorrow if we really wanted to. The hardest red pill to swallow is the fact that the only obstacle in our way is us.
heroic heroes you can love and disturbingly inventive and evil monsters
To reiterate time to repudiate the moral and cultural Sykes Picot and take up arms like the knight errants of the past.
xavier
Another trend from the multiple infantilized generation is white teenage girls deciding they're trannies after a couple of introspective weeks that only kids can fool themselves into thinking are deep thoughts.
What do their parents do? Tell them no? Pull them out of toxic public schools? Restrict internet time? Get them to church? Tell them that who they were born as is a gift from God?
No. The infantile parents "support" their decision, because that's easier that being the adult in the room.
It's with heavy heart that I've come to this conclusion, but the only explanation for the abuse and debauchery running rampant in the world is that we hate our own children.
They turned apathy into a virtue.
How many times have you heard "What do you care what they do. It doesn't affect you, bigot. Let them do what they want." or some variation?
Letting people destroy themselves has become noble.
I'm honestly surprised interventions are not against the law yet. I'm expecting a case to show up in the news cycle within the next few years that someone will rant about but will be too late to do anything about.
It's either that, or we've forgotten how to love anyone that's not ourselves. It's the same effect on the kids who are inheriting a crazy, broken world.
@ JD Cowan – I'd actually say they turned cowardice into a virtue. It is afterall, "so brave" to do vice, and racist/sexist/etc. to do virtue.
@ Brian – agree, it's child abuse. I'm annoyed, as a parent, at how many other parents technically hate their children because the child is a constant drag on their conscience to stop being self-centered asshats.
"The hardest red pill to swallow is the fact that the only obstacle in our way is us."
Once you understand that we are fundamentally broken on a deeper level you quickly realize secular humanism can never work. Whether that means original sin or a random fluctuation that brought us into existence is beside the point. Once you understand the fact that humanity's problems are never going to be talked, bred, or engineered away you are left with the crushing reality that you are stuck with this shattered planet. Your only choice is to pray for help or recede into your own world away from reality. Or there's the secular humanist approach of breaking reality to mold in your own image and silencing the heretics who rightfully protest.
This is where we are now. SJWs are the logical endpoint of secular humanism. They will always appear as long as we continue to cling to this useless ideology.
The black pill isn't so far from the truth. Secular humanism needs to be put to pasture for any positive change to happen. And the longer we ignore this, the worse its going to be when the change comes.
The QuQu had a salient tweet earlier where he said something to the effect of, "Anti-SJWs who want to discard SocJus but keep Modernism are kidding themselves."
He's right. One is the ultimate logical conclusion of the other.
Nothing is built into modernism prevents postmodernism.
You can't get rid of one without the other. PoMo wouldn't exist without the fertilizer Modernism provides.
@ JD Cowan – you described what broke me out of atheistic stupor back in my late teens and twenties. It all started with rejecting secular humanism, as I could not figure out how the imperfect would build the perfect.
"Imagine a world where the arts and popular entertainment honored fathers and Christians."
It's kind of sad that the only positive depictions of Christianity and the West in general I've seen lately come from anime and manga.
It was pretty cool to see a scene in Fate/Apocrypha where Jeanne D'Arc and Vlad Tespes share an interaction where they discuss being warriors of God. Its small, just one scene but its there. I'd like to see more of that from Western media.
Tony Stark is portrayed as a positive father figure in the latest MCU movies. Especially in Spiderman Homecoming and Infinity Wars. There's something in those films to build on, I believe.
"Tony Stark is portrayed as a positive father figure in the latest MCU movies."
Hate to rain on your parade, but the bitterest truth is preferable to the sweetest lie.
Note that I didn't say "father figures". I said *fathers*. Stark is childless–unless he's got a bastard or two being raised without his knowledge by a former F1 track girl he had a fling with in Rio.
The third act turn of every single MCU movie is the motley cast of bullheaded misfits burying the hatchet and forming an ad hoc "family". Sometimes the pseudo-family angle is even made explicit when the jaded loner of the group delivers a line like, "My family died/disappeared/abandoned me, but this is the family I choose!"
The thrust of the message is to eschew natural kinship bonds in favor of an unrelated group of friends. It's highly subversive of real familial relationships.
I've been hearing the narrative that "Kathleen Kennedy spits on the fans with her feminist agitprop, but Kevin Feige listens to his audience. He's in it to tell a good story; not peddle SJW drivel."
No, my friends. Kennedy and Feige both hate you. The difference between them isn't political. It's that one is a brazen, incompetent propagandist while the other is sly and vastly more skilled.
Cobra Kai is surprisingly pro-male and pro-father. The entire theme of the show is about how the disappearance of masculinity has all but eroded the cultural climate.
I'm actually shocked this was released in 2018.
Yeah, Anon, the message the SJWs of Marvel are showing isn't pro-family or pro-kin, it's pro-globalist and pro-diversity. It's simply good, subversive propaganda.
Brian, would the XMen also be guilty of this I wonder? Much of the interactions in the series is described as that of a surrogate family.
X-Men has been equalist leftoid propaganda from day one. Mutants were always convenient stand-ins for the oppressed minority du jour.
The analogy is self-defeating if you think about it for a minute. Was Stan really saying that the Civil Rights movement was as destructive as having a subset of the populace that can vaporize a school by looking at it?
I always rooted for Kelly and Trask.
Always rooted for Magneto personally, always wished they'd make XMen less political. Left a bad taste in my mouth and thought it dragged the stories down.
Magneto's position is at least internally consistent and supported by history and evolutionary biology. When a new species with advantageous mutations appears, older species that compete for the same resources can either drive the new players out, eradicate them, or be driven out/eradicated.
If Magneto is right, and mutants really are "homo superior", i.e. superhuman, it opens a whole ethical can of worms. Human morality is derived from human nature. If mutants have a different nature from humans, then human morality no more applies to them than the rules governing the pecking order in dog packs apply to humans. We honestly would not be in a position to judge Magneto's actions.
As such, any arrangement wherein humans and mutants attempt to coexist as equals would be ontologically absurd.
I can say that no one gave a crap about any of the politics in the X-Men.
Critics try to sell God Loves Man Kills as some important work, but fans regularly consider it Claremont's weakest work in his run.
The most famous? Phoenix/Dark Phoenix. A space opera.
People liked the X-Men because they were a colorful cast of characters using their individual powers to surmount tough odds and villainous schemes.
When they tried to push politics to the forefront, the franchise fell off a cliff. Kids never cared about that aspect.
And to be frank, when you have 95% of the crazy things in the Marvel universe being so common to the public, the whole mutant panic theme is patently absurd.
"And to be frank, when you have 95% of the crazy things in the Marvel universe being so common to the public, the whole mutant panic theme is patently absurd."
I tried a similar argument with a comic geek acquaintance. When I pointed out the absurdity of people in the Marvel Universe loving the superheroes who have superpowers but hating the mutants…who have superpowers, he claimed that non-mutant superheroes (e.g. Spider-man) are distrusted just as much as mutants.
Funny, when I typed that comment I thought to myself, "I should say something, such as 'we only need 12' because my comment is filled with more despair than I have." Sorry about the typos, I tend to read and comment on this site from my phone rather than my computer.
I do oscillate, fear and doubt are sins of mine that likely stem from my days as an atheist. I know we only need 12 (Vox Day is fond of reminding folks that) and technically we can get down to 3 and still be okay (for the Church to persist), but I also know we deserve the coming Babylon moment. Does God really need to deliver us, even if 10% of us are willing to sacrifice and perhaps be martyred to turn the ship of Christendom around? Should he? And if he did, would enough of us have learned our lesson to finally recant, repent, and amend our lives? What is owed for the abortions? For those killed by Liberal Democide? Only God can answer these as only he can see the hearts of men, but this is why I go back and forth.
I also oscillate because I see a leadership crisis all across the West. I'd be more at ease if I saw a real prophet or warrior king on the horizon.
As for me, I can do very little, which is frustrating. I'm dealing with a career transition, tight finances, Church of Nice parishes as far as I can see around me, and few people who seem to be aware of what is really going on. It's isolating and is discouraging.
But we only need 12. And baby steps will lead to small steps, to medium steps, to finally great leaps (that aren't communist). If I was to look at it as a health issue, we as a civilization are an 800 lb. couch potato who despairs about our weight and thinks getting to a muscular 200 lb. is impossible. But it's not, it just takes time and effort and perseverance.
So I try to persevere in prayer, and keep looking for true allies.
+++
Good points about Tolkein, Lewis, Ratzsinger and others. I never liked the "fighting the long defeat" argument. It's why Conservatives annoyed me to the Nth degree. It's a nonsensical position because you are either fighting for no good reason or you are refusing to change your tactics and strategy so that you can win the war. It's merely a phrase used to excuse cowardice and surrender.
"Does God really need to deliver us, even if 10% of us are willing to sacrifice and perhaps be martyred to turn the ship of Christendom around?"
God doesn't need to do anything for us. As finite creatures, we are not in a position to make any claims whatsoever on the Infinite.
To put the matter in perspective, God would be perfectly justified in preemptively obliterating the entire universe rather than allow the smallest venial sin to be committed.
But He doesn't, and to steal a line from Tolkien, that is an encouraging thought.
God is love, God is merciful, and God is in charge. It's clear from Scripture and salvation history that He works with peoples on the national level. As with individuals, if a nation he's invited to participate in His saving plan persistently refuses to bear fruit, He'll find someone else who will get the results He wants. The fate of nations that turn their backs on God follows a pretty reliable pattern: They get handed over to their enemies.
"I'd be more at ease if I saw a real prophet or warrior king on the horizon."
If the swamp prevails, then one day in the midst of the Third World War declared by the next Democrat president and the Second Civil War that breaks out at home, a particular colonel will be ordered to fire on civilians. He will probably have seen friends killed in every meaningless neocon-inspired war from Iraq to Afghanistan to the Ukraine. He will probably have lost cousins to the opioid epidemic in the Rust Belt and a brother to post-divorce rape and debt slavery suicide.
That man will look at the rootless, sneering elites telling him to kill his remaining family and neighbors, and he will tell his men to turn their guns on the elites. And he will not stop until order is restored.
This individual will be the Man. He has come to many different peoples and places in many different times, and when he comes here, events will play out as they always have.
We do not know what the Man's politics will be, but he will have total power to impose them on the nation. Will you be pure enough for him? Will I? There's no way of knowing…yet.
That is why the advent of the Man is not entirely a contingency to be hoped for.
Many say that Trump's primary mandate is to build the Wall or to drain the swamp. But these are the means to achieving the true end for which he was elected.
The people elected Trump to reclaim our country from a ruling class gone mad. Had the swamp bowed to the people's will, or if Trump can force them to, then the coming of the Man may be significantly delayed or even averted.
The future currently stands on a razor's edge. We are ahead, but time is on the enemy's side. If Trump fulfills his three primary campaign pledges, their time advantage will be significantly reduced. Pray for that, and not the coming of the Man.
"As for me, I can do very little, which is frustrating."
It will simply have to do. Beggars can't be choosers.
I believe that many on the Right make a grave error on the subject of men's vocations. The pickup artists call any man defective who fails to rut with as many women as possible. Those of a more traditional bent hold that it is every man's duty to marry and sire a family.
While I find more merit with the latter than the former, I also note that historically, there has been a vital role for unmarried men with few or no family and career obligations.
Taking an active hand in changing society has always been difficult for husbands and fathers. It has been purposefully made even more difficult today.
The strategic value of men who are not beholden to family and professional obligations should not be overlooked.
"I never liked the "fighting the long defeat" argument."
The general vocation of the laity is to consecrate the world to God. He would not give us this mission if it were impossible.
Thank you for those words, Brian. I'm more at ease now.
You are welcome.
There is some things anyone can do, Durandel. You can leave a good review Amazon, Goodreads, etc. of a book that promotes Christian values. You can upvote positive reviews of those same books on those same sites. You can retweet, share, promote creators that share our faith in Christ. You can encourage Christian bloggers or YouTubers with a simple, "Good article" in the comment sections. You don't have to spend lots of money. You don't have to create mountains of content if that's not in your ability set. But you can do those other things.
@ Anonymous
Amen.
@Anon – thanks for the suggestions. I already do those as much as I can.
"We could live there tomorrow if we really wanted to. The hardest red pill to swallow is the fact that the only obstacle in our way is us."
Walt Kelly agreed with you, Brian.
While the context leaves something to be desired, there's no arguing with the message.
True. Relevant theme in 1971, though not so much today with the shills using false guilt for evil purposes.
Two weeks into that public epic reading I declared I'd do. (Three, if you count the first trial, when it was raining and I tried my luck in a bus terminal only to be shut down by a martinet staffer who believed I was inflicting a poem on poor, captive, unsuspecting souls who ought to be free to tap their toes and stare blankly into space.)
Nothing but a few curious lingerers, thus far. But I swear by Mark Helprin on the power of singing the true songs even if it's to no one, and am brimming with encouragement.
Godspeed, sir.