Posted on 11/18/2021 8:18:32 PM PST by Noumenon
The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless.[1]The West is literally unmoored. Nothing controls us except untouchable elites, a corrupt press, arrogant billionaires, special interests, a degraded judiciary, and a goony-bird academy. These are the source of our degradation and decay into rule by the grade-A, vitamin enriched, non-GMO, tofu-flavored, yoga-toned Virtuous Ones. It’s all top down from now with nothing springing from the soil of past human experience. The bitter clinging remnants fight only a rear guard action, essentially at the mercy of the bankers, the federal courts, and the police-surveillance state.
Not every decision made by someone else is necessarily a threat to your well being but it’s as plain as can be that for just about every major decision to be made in society as a whole the more people in on the decision the better. And I don’t mean the big decisions like legislation, regulations, treaties, or elections primarily but those daily ones made in the humblest of circumstances by the millions of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” and pursuant to Tocqueville’s widely-distributed “spirit of association.” Give me trial and error over the centuries by the millions of our ancestors over the ultra-recent agendas of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros, visionaries all with their Agendas. For us.
It’s a tepid defense of Western civilization to say that at least there was a there there. A lot more can be said of course but this stripped down celebration of it aids us some when considering the utter wasteland of the “progressive” vision. Think building your house on sand or hydroponic gardening in tanks of distilled water. Good luck with that human reason deal and cue the uncertain trumpets.
Cults, buses in the Alaska forest, Negroism, multiculturalism, living Constitutions, feminism, license, and socialism lead to distortion (AKA “progress”), dissolution, death, mobocracy, civil war, arbitrary rule, and economic devastation. All brilliantly marketed and with personal destruction for the dissenters. But if it’s gospel truth throughout the land that the Constitution can be ignored, someone with a dick can compete in women’s sports, sodomy is a sacrament, and (funny) money can be conjured out of thin air, you know for a fact that the center has collapsed.
Notes [1] “The West has lost its virtue. We have abandoned the taboos that held us together.” By Paul Kingsnorth, UnHerd, 8/30/21.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
If we fail to find our courage, we simply don’t deserve our civilization. There must be a reckoning, a retribution, a retaliation so grim, so dire that it will resonate through the next millennium. The Gramscian, Machiavellian Left have removed any last iota of concern, care or compassion for their fate that I might have once had.
This thread has nothing to do with Jackson Browne?
It looks to me like you’re equating the incredibly grim state of our political state with the parts of the culture we actually care about. The two are thankfully very different.
Looking for a solution? Several have already suggested some form of cultural separation. A divorce if you will. They’re right, and it’s actually already happening although most folks don’t identify it as such. But you’ll notice it if you’re looking to buy a house in Idaho or renting a uhaul headed for Texas.
In the end, there is free choice. People who want a culture of death badly enough will get their wish.
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Build the church! The description largely fits the post Christian or non Christian west. But we aren’t all post Christian, not by a long shot.
Agreed. Build the church. As far as I’m concerned, we can skip it in the west coast sodom and the east coast gomorrah. At some point Lot did need to just walk away.
Going Galt becomes a more viable option every day. All I need to do is find Galt’s Gulch.
It’s pretty easy. Look at the reddest areas of the reddest states. There is a better life waiting.
You can’t fix amoral, hateful, and stupid.
as a 69 year old reading this, where the heck were you in 1993?
i’ll have my bucket of movie style popcorn with extra butter,please.
i”m a senior citizen tthat is out to pasture sucking up all those social security dollars. to the ones making decisions, i’m in the way.
good luck for y’all trying to do something, now.
At 70, I am unwilling to give up without a fight. Ive taken a beating over the last few years - a near fatal accident in2019 that broke me up pretty good and a recent bout with the CCP flu that took more out of me than I care to admit.
That said, I'm still quite capable of settling in behind my optics-equipped FN FAL and taking a few with me before they they catch up with me. The realities of aging and "the mortal shocks that flesh is heir to" dictate a change in outlook and tactics. No shame in that. But it's not all about firepower.
How about that old guy with a smile on his face dressed in an expensive suit and carrying a nondescript briefcase?
Or that guy in well-worn Carhartts, a scuffed up hardhat, equipped with a radio and a clipboard with a legit looking work order?
Or that dirty, smelly old bum mumbling to himself while he pushes what looks like a shopping cart full of trash?
Or that average looking mom pushing what looks like a baby carriage?
Think of the places you'll go and the things you can do.
Ha ha well being here in SF I am not quite ready to abandon yet! Work where God calls you I suppose.
“Ha ha well being here in SF I am not quite ready to abandon yet! Work where God calls you I suppose.”
Hoo boy. It’s your path of course. History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. SF seems an awful lot like Berlin of the 1920’s. Very avant garde, very left. As we now know, staying in Berlin wasn’t a very good plan, especially if your last name was Goldstein.
i accept your answer, sir. although i prefer iron sights and levers. i also accept your ‘grey man’ ideas ....cold war habits diie hard.
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