[C. Edmund Wright]

It’s not the SHTF scenario I worry about so much...it’s the slow, almost silent death of a culture, of a nation, of a way of thinking. That’s how most nations, empires end....they just sort of crumble slowly from within.

[QT3.14]

==...silent death of a culture, of a nation, of a way of thinking. That’s how most
nations, empires end....they just sort of crumble slowly from within...===

Cicero thought the same way:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is
less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely,
his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a
traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness
that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to
undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

[boxlunch]

It’s not the SHTF scenario I worry about so much...it’s the slow, almost silent death of a culture, of a nation, of a way of thinking. That’s how most nations, empires end....they just sort of crumble slowly from within.

---

That is what makes me the saddest, too. At 55 years old, I realize that even many of my generation have no clue what America was about, much less the following generations. That is heartbreaking to me. I don’t know how we can get back politically and economically, if our religious, moral and cultural foundations are crumbled.

[Lakeshark]

it’s the slow, almost silent death of a culture, of a nation, of a way of thinking.

I'd characterize it as having happened slowly most of our lives, then with a huge, sudden and continuing acceleration over the past eight years.

It's going faster than I ever thought possible. Ten years ago I would have laughed at SHTF thinking, or the culture collapsing; ten years ago I would have said today's situation could never happen in the US.