Spend any length of time in dissident circles online, and you’ll soon be introduced to the concept of the Collapse. Though formulated by philosophers of history a hundred years ago, the idea that civilization now faces a great decline is popular with ex-Trump supporters discouraged by the MAGA program’s failure. Embracing the Collapse, they say, is the ultimate red pill.
Not that you can really blame them. A fixed characteristic of our age has been Clown World’s baffling resilience in the face of every mitigation effort. The Tea Party failed. Attempts to take back old media failed. Online movements failed. Building new platforms failed. Sending Trump to reform the system failed–and spectacularly, in a frenzy of election fraud that effectively ended representative government.
The heralds of the Collapse see these signs and correctly conclude that the current system is broken beyond repair. Or perhaps, a system originally designed to enact the will of the people has slowly been replaced with a machine engineered to squeeze all value out of the middle class and siphon it to the elite.
Mistaking the problem for mere corruption was where Conservatives went wrong. Corruption denotes that an institution has been perverted from its original purpose. There’s still time to set it back on the right track. Our present kratokracy was conceived to immiserate us.
When someone replaces your La-Z-Boy with a torture rack, no amount of adjustment will turn it into a recliner. Such a system cannot be reformed from the inside. That is why every self-styled reformer Republicans elect immediately becomes a uniparty stooge.
Another disastrous mistake Conservatives make is assuming the gangster state is the cause of our woes and not a symptom. They should know better, too. The Founding Fathers warned us what would happen if the people’s moral character dipped below the minimum level needed to maintain the system. You can look out your window and see the results.
The truth is, barring a miracle we don’t deserve, the divine chastisement we’ve richly earned will come upon us. It’s gonna happen. You can’t stop it.
Now, most people speak of the Collapse as falling off a cliff. A look at history shows that’s not how societal decline happens. Wiser heads than mine have observed that civilizational collapse is more like falling down the stairs. It’s a long flight, but you only tumble a little ways before there’s a sudden stop.
People mistake this respite as a return to normal, but it’s really just one of many landings on the descent. A people can stay on one of these plateaus for a while, but eventually they tip over the edge again.
What does this process look like in real life? Not like Mad Max–not at first.
The first thing to go is social trust. Shared understandings and the ability to trust one’s neighbors are the fuel societies run on. “They took our jobs!” was exactly the kind of lame economic argument Conservatives were conditioned to lose with. The real threat posed by diversity was the documented erosion of social trust and cohesion evident in neighborhoods as they diversified.
If you’re Generation Y or older, you remember how neighborhoods where men borrowed each other’s lawnmowers and kids played outside after dark gave way to blighted tracts of rentals with barred windows. Now magnify that to a civilizational scale.
We’re already seeing processes everyone took for granted slip out of the sphere of knowledge. It’s more than Apple stripping features from each new iPhone. Planes are falling out of the sky, and ships are plowing into each other at sea. We could not go back to the moon if we wanted to.
Even the loss of social trust is just an instrumental, not a primary, cause of the Collapse.
Before we lost faith in each other, we lost faith in God.
Just as Jesus Christ remedied the original and worst Fall, He alone can save us from the loathsome state we’ve dug ourselves into.
It’s all downhill from here unless we each stand up, take up our cross, and make the penitential climb back toward the state of grace.
How far can we fall before we repent? For a vision of the post-future that’s drawing closer every day, read the latest book in my mecha thriller saga Combat Frame XSeed: SS
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “’a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’”
Jesus didn’t even expect families to be able to maintain stability, let alone nations. I have a large extended family and we were all very close…right up to C19. Now I’m a pariah to all of them because I won’t get the death shot.
After griefing a different commenter named CantusTropus about his clot shot, I cucked out and injected myself with the worst remaining version: the one from Moderna.
God owns.
Better you learn this sooner than later.
Everyone always thinks their family is the exception, even if they say otherwise, until the moment of truth. No one actually knows anyone until hard choices need to be made, and most people, no matter how well you know them or how good you think they are, will choose what saves their skin even if it only buys them a few extra moments.
Only one man’s blood is thicker than water, and it isn’t the one you see maybe once every three years at Thanksgiving.
Choosing the La-Z-Boy is how we ended up with the torture rack. Which is why the only correct option is to replace the torture rack with a throne. This task will be long and grueling with our current generations of people, however.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. It might behoove our ‘betters’ to study what happened the last time an empire decided to control its populace by diversifying local culture to destroy social cohesion.
Is this why intellectuals tell us to imagine what Rome and the Goths could have accomplished together? Because they know that human nature prevented them from actually collaborating?
Go back further. Assyria forcefully uprooted (rather than modern ‘incentivizing’) entire ethnic groups and scattered them across the empire to deliberately lower social cohesion as protection against rebellion. The second Babylon offered people something even marginally better, Assyria collapsed and forfeited its entire empire to Babylon, because the one thing everybody agreed on is that the Assyrians needed to go.
Then I have a better question. Would Americans voluntarily surrender themselves to a “noble” invader, or would the Republicans and conservatives join hands with the death cultists and sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as they salt their own land?
That depends on a lot of factors, greatest among them being how effectively they disarm the populace and whether they pretend the U.S. government still functions.
Third possibility, though. Fed up red staters let the noble invader take care of the problem, then mount a resistance against them.
I hope fighting and resistance to the death would be the option for God-fearing patriots. Maybe it’s a pipe dream and not to sound like a Pop Cultist but I love Damar’s patriotic, anti-globalist speech from DS9.
“And so two years ago, our government signed a treaty with the Dominion. In it, the Dominion promised to extend Cardassia’s influence throughout the Alpha Quadrant. In exchange, we pledged ourselves to join the war against the Federation and its allies. Cardassians have never been afraid of war. A fact we’ve proven time and again over these past two years. Seven million of our brave soldiers have given their lives to fulfill our part of the agreement. And what has the Dominion done in return? Nothing!
We’ve gained no new territories. In fact, our influence throughout the quadrant has diminished. And to make matters worse, we’re no longer masters in our own home. Travel anywhere in Cardassia and what do you find? Jem’Hadar, Vorta and now Breen.
Instead of the invaders, we have become the invaded. Our allies have conquered us without firing a shot.
Well, no longer. This morning, detachments of the Cardassian First, Third, and Ninth Orders attacked Dominion outposts on Rondac Three. This assault marks the first step toward the liberation of our homeland from the true oppressors of the Alpha Quadrant.
I call upon Cardassians everywhere. Resist! Resist today. Resist tomorrow! Resist till the last Dominion soldier has been driven from our soil.
One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is that most non-Western cultures do not care at all about lies. They will swear that they will do something and then completely ignore it. They will say that something HAS been done when nothing has even been started. They will tell you that they will back you up, and then say to your superiors that you were the one totally at fault.
The big difference with this sort of behavior among Westerners and non-Westerners is that while Westerners will do these things, they will often be ashamed of doing them and will do them in secret. Non-Westerners will often not even try to hide that they lied after the fact, and will be confused if you are insulted by the lies. If anything they’ll think you are stupid for not realizing that they lied, since lying is what they expect everyone to do.
Now think about the society we have when your doctor thinks this way, or your electrician, or your auto mechanic, etc.