TEN THINGS THAT SHOW YOU THE COLLAPSE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED

by Brett Stevens

Western Civilization was a good thing. Starting a thousand years ago, it fell into decline, but, as is the nature of decline, this was not an absolute condition but a gradual one, overlapping some of the greatest moments of Western Civilization. Thus it seemed to be both rising and falling at the same time, but its ultimate direction was toward failure.

Between 1789 and 1968 the West fully collapsed, and all of us born after those times have inherited a vast disaster which we alternately try to save and escape from. This schizophrenic state cannot last; we must choose one, and the sensible answer is to stand and fight, saving what is good and throwing out the rest.

That requires however that we give up false allegiances. Our only allegiance can be to Western Civilization and the genetic stock of Western Europeans that produces it. Everything else is an intermediate, a symbol standing for those great things, and by misdirecting us from the reality to the symbol, these become parasites.

What we think of as our nations — governments and institutions — are dead. They are working against us. The only solution is to destroy them, much as we would destroy any other enemy, so that in their place we can create something that works again. The real culture we need is within our souls, but all the established means to that end need to be removed because they have become corrupted.

We must burn every American and German flag. And cheat every tax authority and public institution. We should ignore all social obligations. Whatever destroys this society is good, and whatever helps it is bad. Burn it down to the ground and keep what we have that still works, carried over from the past, and rebuild on the basis of keeping what is good and destroying what is bad.

Most people do not realize that we exist in a fallen civilization. Western Civilization, once great, died before we were born. Now we are either those who are trying to hold on to an illusion from the past or those who are ready to erase that illusion and instead re-create Western Civilization by displacing the parasites who rule its corpse, renewing it like a phoenix rising among the ashes.

Here are ten ways you can tell that you are living in a dying age:

1. Overpopulation. We hit 7.5 billion human monkeys this week. How will all of these people live? The answer is simple: by consuming everything we know of as our environment, and leaving behind only ruined wastelands full of starving people who cannot allocate the resources or achieve the social organization necessary to feed themselves. The First World is imploding, and the Third World exploding.


2. Diversity. To survive, every group needs to prioritize itself above all others. This is sensible, but means that multiple groups cannot co-exist in the same society. Groups which fail to prioritize themselves will simply fade away. As a result, diversity cannot work, and creates the ethnic tensions that Leftists — consummate reality-deniers — call "racism."


3. Tragedy of the Commons. A tragedy of the commons happens when a resource exists and individuals discover that they have an incentive to exploit it. The Left blames "capitalism" for this problem, but really, it occurs anytime a resource is owned by no one but is accessible to all. Imagine a forest: if every person needs firewood, each will cut as much as he can, and soon there will be no forest. With cultural cooperation and a shared purpose, people limit their own takings, but in an atomized, dying civilization, each person exploits to the maximum of his own benefit and to the ruin of all.


4. Ineptitude. Societies that are dying tend to formalize rules and procedures as a means of working around the inequality of human beings, which simply mean that some are more competent than others. So, instead of choosing the best, these societies set up "meritocracies" based on memorization and obedience. This means that they select incompetents in both the public and private sectors, leading to the idiocy of the likes of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, American President Barack Obama, and Catholic Pope Francis.


5. Low Human Quality. When a civilization is dying, it becomes inverted, or focused on the opposite of every meaning. This is so it can make everyone feel accepted. This means that the good are penalized so the bad can be included as well. This keeps the society together despite its citizens no longer having any real relevance to each other. As a result, the good fail to breed and are replaced by the thoughtless, selfish, and mediocre.
   
   This correlates highly with a "free rider" problem. In organized societies it is expected that every person contribute as they are able and take in proportion to what they give, so that the most valuable members of the community are those who contribute the most. When free riders, or those who take more than they give, are allowed, the society becomes dedicated to justifications, rationalizations, and excuses, instead of being focused on actions and taking responsibility for them. This creates an industry out of government where people are paid to manage the free riders, and in turn become a type of "mega free rider" themselves by blessing the decay and being rewarded handsomely for it, despite making negative contributions to the society.
   
   
6. Pollution. No sane society sacrifices tomorrow for today, but every dying civilization does exactly that, because, in absence of a cooperative spirit, each person wants to extract as much wealth as possible and flee the collapsing ruin. As a result, it becomes culturally acceptable to be self-centered to the point of disregarding the environment. Disregarding others is socially taboo, but externalizing cost to the world is encouraged, especially because most resent nature for not making them equal.


7. Existential Misery. To live in a dying time is to know that all is for naught; every act of the individual will be ground down into the same uniformity as everything else, and nothing honestly good will be appreciated. In addition, people are aware at a gut level that their society is crashing and dying. As a result, they become alienated and unstable because they have no actual hope for the future. This misery spreads between individuals.
   
   Existential misery relates strongly to a sense of purpose. Healthy civilizations have some form of purpose which is shaped from an ongoing and immutable goal, even something as simple as "be the best possibility of what we are." When a civilization turns inward, and focuses on people instead of purpose, the existential certainty and meaning that comes from purpose is forgotten, and the citizens turn aimless, starting with the most sensitive and intelligent.
   
   
8. Inversion. In a collapsing civilization, the actual goal of results in reality is replaced by a social goal, which consists of doing things that are approved of by others. This leads to inversion, or the changing of definitions and goals to be the opposite of what they once were. Good becomes whatever flatters most, even though that is bad; heroism becomes victimhood; benevolence becomes cleaning up after a crime instead of preventing it.


9. Pretense. An awakened person in the last stages of a civilization will notice that most people around them are pretentious, holding forth as if they are a gift to humanity and nature alike. This is their projection and preemptive passive aggression that allows them to act as if they are victims when criticized, despite the fact that they are acting in an exploitative way. Pretense is required to conceal the actuality of their behavior, and enables them to fend off criticism despite it being well-deserved.


10. Ugliness. Healthy societies produce beauty, pleasure, goodness and honesty. Dying societies cannot do this, so they produce novelty and freakishness as a way of garnering attention, and then claim that is beauty, inverting the original meaning. When you see brutalist architecture, ugly modern art, crass mass culture, and aggressive, unpleasant social interactions, this is a sure sign of the decline.

I favour two general responses to the decay. The first is “clean up, rebuild and restart” and the second could be characterized as “burn it down and start over.” These two are compatible in that they implicate the same action: remove the dysfunctional, collect those who are still able to think realistically (the “remnant”), and then rebuild civilization according to the ways that have worked for time immemorial.

Another way to put this is that an accurate assessment of human existence never changes because humans never change. The pitfalls of our cognition that lead us toward bad acts remain the same, as do the impulses that impel us toward positive acts. Even if we become transhumanist super-geniuses, the same struggles will afflict us. Much as the cosmos might be seen as a struggle between creation and emptiness, the soul of the thinking animal — human or not — will always be a struggle between good and evil (hubris, narcissism, individualism, solipsism and egoism).

For that reason, we do not face this problem blind. We are not struggling against the gods, but ourselves; we do not struggle against an ideology, but the human mental mistake of which that ideology is an example. Our goal is not to defeat evil, but to separate from it, and, by our own improvement, to thrive, such that the evil fades into the background by becoming irrelevant.

Our first step, then, is to discard loyalty to the dead and dying. Take those national flags and throw them in the fire. If there is a war, make sure you do not fight. Anything you do which strengthens the dying system will only prolong its suffering and yours. Give it as little money, time, and power as possible, and sabotage it at every turn.

This outlook is entirely compatible with the idea of rebuilding. When a forest becomes overgrown, a fire sweeps through and destroys all that is weak, parasitic, and irrelevant. The vines that choke the trees, being weaker than the trees, burn. All take some losses, but those things that are enduring remain and then regrow, newly freed from encumbrances.

Recognize that most institutions and many people merely serve to impede this process and must go. Yes, the Other must be relocated; big deal — the bigger problem is within, and lies in those who are our people on the surface but not in the soul or mind. These entryists weaken us by appearing to be of Us, and yet, working against us because of their moral or mental weakness.

Apply ancient mental technique to your quest: envision a renewed Western Civilization and visualize us getting there by discarding the bad and keeping the good, then nurturing the good until it covers everything else. Imagine the shopping malls not aflame, but being replaced after the fire. Focus on the image of the civilization you want to see.

This renewed civilization would make note of the fact that modernity was created by egalitarianism, itself a product of the division of hierarchy by conflict between religious leaders and monarchs, caste-mixing and conflict, and destabilization after crises like the Black Death and Mongol invasions. In this light, it becomes clear what to discard from modernity.

Uniting our past civilization with the best knowledge of modernity, namely the study of organizations and psychology, we can envision a futurist traditionalist society as follows:

• Aristocracy. The best of our people are entrusted with wealth, property and power. This occurs in a cascade from kings through lesser lords. Every locale has a lord who is responsible for final decisions.
• Wise Elders. In each community, an informal group of wise elders is chosen whose goal is to be the memory of the community and to make helpful suggestions on everything from placement of businesses to potential partners in marriage. They handle civil actions as well.
• Anti-Work. Jobs are replaced by roles, in which each person has not only certain responsibilities and privileges, but a unique position in the local landscape and a calling, or a skill they develop. This requires us to be less efficient and decentralize industry and food production to some degree.
• Culture. Our society becomes strongly nationalistic, including only Us with all Others relocated generously. Almost all regulations and detail-oriented laws are rejected, replaced by cultural norms and standards which allow people to collectively ostracize violators. No one has a right to live anywhere; those who exhibit the values of the community have a place.
• Capitalism. No subsidies or wealth redistribution exist. Instead, people are able to offer products and services on the market, as regulated by cultural norms and local lords. Inequality is viewed not as a linear competition for money, but natural to a hierarchy both vertical and horizontal in nature.
• Caste. We recognize the natural divisions in people by intelligence and character, and assign to them familial roles that persist through the generations except in case of getting a “bad egg.” The upper castes become the arbiters of culture and tastes, which enables them to influence aesthetics and through it, values.
• Technology. Our society fears no technology, but insists that every technology fit within our purpose and values. Grants and commissions are used to separate innovators from the workforce so that they may focus on their ideas, even if these have no immediate monetary value.
• Purpose. Civilization requires that we have purpose, which is an ongoing and immutable goal in which we can always improve qualitatively without shifting approaches to a quantitative approach. At first this is simply to cast off the bad, select the good, and use that as a basis for rebuilding.
• Family. The fundamental unit is no longer the individual but the family. Our goal is to have each person integrated in one of these, or heading in that direction, at all times; and to that end, families and family-directed activities are given precedence. Courtship replaces dating, love replaces casual sex.
• Aesthetics. Instead of aiming for materially-deduced quantities like efficiency and convenience, we act from moral imperatives and aesthetic sensibilities, building a society that is a pleasure to live in as our first and greatest goal. From that come all other good things, including technology and quality leadership.
• Religion. Our aristocrats are also our religious leaders, and they lead by example and argument, not by force. This enables those who can believe to understand the metaphysical underpinning of reality, while allowing the others the time they need to come to that point if they can.
• Leisure. We, as a people, are not a means-to-an-end of ourselves; we are an end in ourselves, as a means of being a means-to-an-end of our principles which create our civilization. Through this, we do not sacrifice ourselves, but better ourselves, as an integral part of the ecosystem of our culture and civilization.

In the penetralia of our hearts, we know what we want: a rising civilization, happy families, pleasant social interaction, the ability to explore ideas and space, honorable and moral standards in our hearts. All that stands between us and that is the illusion of equality which keeps us atomized and withdrawn.

We have not had this for many generations, and this tells us that collapse has occurred and we are no longer in a phase of resisting decline and conserving, but in a mode of having to tear out the bad and rebuild from the good. This painful recognition, while off-putting, provides us a doorway through which to stride in order to inherit our future.

Originally published at Amerika.org