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.
Practical advice for the other half of the country
Pssst. You guys are the antichrists, which is why the system you are trying to undermine seems so resilient.
Confess now that Jesus is the Christ, and God has raised Him from the dead.
I continue to be shocked at just how effective the witch test is, it’s both masterful and concerning
Time’s up, Bill Spencer. You forfeit all moral authority. Banned for witchery.
Yesterday I saw Razorfist tweet out something akin to ‘The constitution was not a failure, it had to be destroyed to allow our current situation.’ and following up with essentially claiming ‘The constitution did not fail us – we failed the constitution.’
I found this a puzzling sentiment, because if you admit that, why do you keep invoking it? If your constitution only has as much value as society gives it. Then does it really deserve to be glorified as it does?
I see a lot of American conservatives still having a lot of faith in the system and it being salvageable, often invoking the constitution and needing to return to it. But that seems to put the cart in front of the horse to me.
The question to ask CivNats who spout Constitution idolatry is “Which Constitution: the one that allowed slavery, the one that denied women the vote, or the one that made men in makeup and heels a protected class?”
I recall (from pre-Trump days) a stauch ex-military libertarian on John C. Wright’s blog rattling through Overton-window platitudes which were all easily disposed, then he blurted: “MY holy book is the U.S. Constitution!”
Libertarianism’s devolution to low-tax Liberalism was inevitable.
Conservatives love losing. This is why they often spend more time identifying why they shouldn’t be blamed for losing than they do shoring up those weaknesses.
See also: “Immigration is no problem because it’s your beliefs that make you American. But I will categorically reject loyalty oaths, even for incoming immigrants, and will not even ask that schools teach American values (since kids can ‘learn that at home.’)”
Such persistent dereliction of duty despite the undisputable dire consequences can only be called malice.