History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world have a chance for it.
Those prophetic words were written by one of the greatest essayists and philosophers to come out of the British Empire, and they are every bit as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them.
Those words come to mind when I look at what is happening in some of America’s greatest cities today, where law and order is beginning to break down once again in a way not seen since the late 1960s.
The signs of civilisation collapse in the urban centres of the USA are all present and surely accounted for at this point. It is clear as day that a large number of the greatest American cities are being run straight into the ground.
The surest and most inescapable sign of this collapse can be seen in the utter refusal of city officials to maintain law and order.
To understand why this is so, we must first ask ourselves how civilised societies are formed.
As Bagehot observed in Physics and Politics, the early stages of civilisation often require adherence to principles that are directly antithetical to what we would call “liberalism” – which is to say that the early stages of civilisation require discipline, austerity, stoicism, a deep mistrust of outsiders, absolute loyalty to clan and kin, and not only the willingness but the desire to sacrifice current pleasures for future rewards.
It is through this willingness to delay gratification – this development of long time horizons, if you do not mind slipping into the phraseology of Austrian economics – that the physical and human capital necessary to build a great society is created.
You can call this mentality many things. Among those who favour the explanations provided by the evolutionary psychology of politics, this is known as a “K-selected mindset”, which dictates that people guard their resources carefully, be loyal to those who are most like them and especially to those who are related to them by blood, and slowly and painstakingly raise their children to obey certain hard and harsh norms.
This attitude is forced upon people in a world with harsh conditions, few resources, and lots of dangers – because that is the only possible survival strategy in such a world.
But, as time goes by, that precise mindset is what creates the conditions for prosperity. And eventually, as society builds upon itself and prospers and stabilises, a certain lassitude, a laxity, begins to set in.
That is because resources have become plentiful and life has become easy. And so, the old ways begin to matter less and less, until eventually the hard-won wisdom of our forefathers seems quaint, anachronistic, and even downright ridiculous.
In our “enlightened” state, we come to believe, absurdly, that anyone and everyone can be part of “our” society, that others who come from lands that we have never even seen can surely be just like us in their hearts and minds, and that it is our solemn duty to welcome those outsiders into our ranks and treat them as equals, in the name of the three goddesses of freedom, justice, and equality.
This is how and where and why the mental disease of Progress takes hold of men, and turns a nation into a ruination.
Resources have become plentiful, so the old ideas about husbanding them carefully and raising children in the ways in which they should go become ridiculous. It begins to make much more sense to “live fast and die young” – to adopt an r-selected mindset, if you will.
This mindset inevitably results in a deep disrespect for law and order, which any student of history can tell you is an absolute prerequisite for the maintenance and prosperity of a nation.
The reason for this is very straightforward. It comes down to the fact that life is all about taking risks – but there is a huge difference between risk and uncertainty.
When you are dealing with risks, the full set of possible outcomes is completely known; all that remains is to compute approximate probabilities for each possible outcome, evaluate the expected outcome based on those probabilities, and execute an action. You rise or fall based on whether you evaluated those probabilities – the risks – correctly.
Make no mistake, measuring those risks is hard. It comes down to experience, skill, wisdom, and no small amount of random chance. But at least the events themselves are known, so you can always make those evaluations.
When you are dealing with uncertainty, however, the set of available outcomes itself is unknown. By definition, this means that it is impossible to compute probabilities of something happening – you literally have no clue what could happen.
The consequences of this are obvious.
In a world ruled by risk – the existence of which is absolutely vital for civilisation to thrive – it is possible to make long-term plans, delay gratification, raise children, build homes, create businesses, and transact through contracts using stable money.
In a world ruled by uncertainty – which is anathema to civilisation – it is impossible to do any of these things.
A thriving and successful civilisation is built on risk. A dying and decaying civilisation is mired in uncertainty.
And uncertainty is precisely what envelops the biggest and most successful American cities today.
You need look no further than the dysfunctional and broken politics of Washington, D.C., and the extreme corruption of the Party of Uncertainty, to understand this.
When politicians promise to take money from the few and give it to the many, that introduces uncertainty – not risk.
When politicians promise to let anybody and everybody into the borders of a nation, that introduces uncertainty – not risk.
When politicians promise to suspend the rule of law for the foreseeable future, that introduces uncertainty – not risk.
And when politicians promise to simply spend into oblivion, without any regard to how to pay for such profligacy, and destroy the value of the monetary unit that makes contractual transactions possible, that introduces VAST uncertainty – not risk.
Uncertainty rules the streets of New York City today. You cannot be sure, at all, that the police will do their jobs, because they themselves are unsure as to whether they will be censured and persecuted for holding criminals accountable for their actions.
In the face of uncertainty, people do not take risks. They adopt a pose of complete conservatism. They refuse to interact with each other. They refuse to trust each other. And that is how the bonds that hold a civilisation together, begin to snap.
The result is inevitable. Uncertainty is the death of a civilisation.
We are seeing this play out right now. All you have to do is watch #BasedTucker tell it like it is, as he usually does:
This is a situation that we have not seen since the dark days of the 1970s, where the streets of American cities became ungovernable and therefore uninhabitable. And that was done entirely at the behest of progressive politicians who insisted that the old ways did not matter anymore, that the wisdom of our fathers had become outmoded and irrelevant.
Hundreds and thousands paid the price for their stupidity as victims of crime and lawlessness. Millions more paid a lesser price as they fled the chaos of the inner cities for the sprawling havens of majority-white suburbs and gated communities.
It took decades to recover from the madness, and it was only done by restoring law and order with sometimes draconian measures. The men who took to the streets as policemen and law enforcers were later called “the New Centurions“, and they passed on the lessons that they had learned very much the hard way just as their ancient Roman predecessors had, to newer and later generations of police officers who held the thin line.
But that recovery took place within the context of a country that was still a nation – majority white, majority Christian, and not completely batshit insane, not yet. That recovery took place because those majority white and majority Christian people elected to office politicians who believed that liberalism had gone too far, and that a return to the old ways was necessary and just.
Today those people do not exist anymore. Their nation does not exist anymore. In its place is an empire, held together almost entirely by the threat of force.
To be fair, that empire has existed in the geographical footprint of the USA since at least 1865, when it was made abundantly clear to the “rebel” Southern states that they would never be permitted to leave the Union of their own free will. But, as empires go, it was largely benevolent and benign, and unusually united in demographics and national purpose, for the better part of 100 years.
Since 1965, however, the core nation that made up that empire has disintegrated. At least a full third of the current American population is anything but American – which is to say, white, Christian, of European descent.
That core nation was famously designed to be one of laws and not men – but, as I have already pointed out, laws do not matter when the nation itself is broken. And now we see the inevitable end result of that breaking.
This is not something that can be undone. We are long past that point. When His Most Magnificent and Benevolent Astral Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus, was elected 3 years ago, I stated unequivocally that America was beyond saving. President Trump simply bought America more time.
I should have been more precise. I should have stated clearly that the American empire is beyond saving – which it has been, for decades, long before President Trump was sworn into office. But the core American nation can still be saved, even though it is no longer an actual contiguous geographical landmass.
Nations are not soil. Nations are people. And even as the empire that inhabits the geographical span of the United States of America dies, that nation can still be saved – though it can only do so at this point by splintering into different pockets related by blood, culture, common history, language, and faith.
The day will come when new nations rise up, strong and proud and free, burning with the fires of liberty and hope that once drove the American nation to such incredible heights and such magnificent glories. But before that day dawns, there will be bloodshed on a scale that we have never seen before.
Pray to the Lord, as I do, that such bloodshed is over and done with quickly, for at this point there is no use in pretending any longer that it can be avoided.
9 Comments
One wonders if, perhaps, you didn't spend too much time in and around New York City.
Near-as-dammit 12 years.
Couldn't be helped. That's where the Master's programme was – and then work after that.
I got out of Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson eventually, of my own free will, after living there for 5 years. It wasn't bad, mind you, since I lived in a pretty nice neighbourhood, but I needed more space and more greenery, and ended up across the river for a while.
What I mean is that your post – and I think your wider outlook – is very large city centric. Cities aren't all there is to a nation, and they're less of America than most places. A way for you to look at it, and perhaps cure some of the recular octitis you've acquired from listening too much to certain doomsayers, is to look at how people in say, Hamilton, Massachusetts and, say, Chelsea, Alabama, have a lot more in common with each other than either does with Birmingham or Boston. These are the kinds of people who fought the civil war before, and would fight it again, but probably not on different sides this time. Another way would be to google "guide to gun rights in your Massachusetts town" to see how different most of that state is from the uber-leftism of Boston.
In short, you're seeing dying where quite possibly it's only a severe illness, easy cured with some old fashioned blooding.
What I mean is that your post – and I think your wider outlook – is very large city centric.
Not a word of argument from me there, sir. You are 100% correct. I'm a city boy born and bred, and I've spent my entire life living in or around cities with minimum populations of 4 million people. And indeed this does affect my outlook.
These are the kinds of people who fought the civil war before, and would fight it again, but probably not on different sides this time.
I actually agree with you about this, for the most part. As I've argued in other posts, America is tearing itself apart along rural-urban lines, with the Left concentrated in the cities and coasts, and the Right spread out across the entire country.
You and I are also agreed on the need for a serious civil war to cleanse the filth. And it will be truly horrendous war at that – but an inevitable one at this point.
Where you and I disagree is in whether or not there will be one nation, or many, within the geographical footprint of the USA when the bloodshed is done. You think that the USA can be saved by simply exterminating the Left through bloodshed; I simply think that the regional cultural differences will result in related but separate nations after that bloodshed is done.
We'll see how it turns out, but the one thing that I am certain of is that bloodshed IS inevitable now. I wish to Heaven that it were not so.
Another thing for you to watch out for is the "lost cause" mythos and "the civil war wasn't about slavery" bullshit emanating from the neo-confederates and some portions of the alt-right. You should reject it because a) it wasn't true; it was entirely about slavery, and b), it makes people see cultural differences that are either not there or not so pronounced or important as all that.
I wish to hell there had been some way for you to have gone into the US military. Inside it, you'd have seen that about 90% of the troops are of basically the same culture – and yes, that includes brown, black, white, yellow, and red – and very different from Megalopimarxistleninistfuckingurbania.
Hey Didact have you hear of the article John Glubb THE FATE OF EMPIRES ?
people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
I think page 15 on the decline of the Arab Empire is the most surprising on the similarity to what is happening in the west. Though it is sad that we have gone much further than any other civilization in it decline. The Arab empire only went so far as to had female lawyers. They collapses before they put female judges.
From the article "There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which,
however, does not appear to have succeeded. "
I have indeed heard about it, but I haven't read it. I know of John Glubb – he was a legendary military commander who led the Arab Legion against Israel during their War of Independence. The Jordanians in that force were perhaps the only really competent Arab fighting force.
I happen to have a book called The Fate of Empires on my (extremely long) reading list, but it's by a completely different author. I haven't read it yet.
I'll check out the paper by Glubb Pasha, it should be an interesting read.
I think page 15 on the decline of the Arab Empire is the most surprising on the similarity to what is happening in the west.
It's a valid comparison, but the thing to remember about the Arabs is that they are first and foremost a bunch of desert traders – and that's before you get to the extremely destructive influence of Islam, which removes almost any incentive for self-improvement and civilisational development. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the "Arab" empire of the First Jihad, back in the 7th Century, was actually profoundly Persian in origin and owed very little to Arab military or administrative talent.
Some 15 centuries of evidence have shown clearly that Arabs are largely useless at managing actual civilisations and don't really know how to be good administrators. About the only thing that they do well is trading – and not even that much these days.
Sorry for the long post but i started writing and relized it was long. I know you are right about the Islamic empire. I think Arabs invasions and civilization are different due to Islam more than just race.
Before that period (especially in the middle east) it was common for a tribes to come take over a civilization who people had become wealthy and declaine in spirit and morals, only to start the whole process over again. This happen with the persians who came from the mountains.
Islam is different because it enforces its religion on the conquered people and promotes Polygamy (which mean long term a society full of dysfunctional men with no hope of getting married unless they either go to war and conquer or over throw the ruling party).
Everything else being equal it is not surprising the persian and Greek influence in the early stage of the islamic kingdoms but over time you are right the religion gets in the way. Killing off the people who question it. It also probably help push Arabs men (mainly the warriors) to mix with the local populations of the middle east and north africa at a higher rate than other conquerors.
I know the areas of south italy have never really recover from the Muslim pirating of the middle ages and later the Turks. They were not even fully conquered but the affect of the attacks and the capturing of their women is still being felt today. Whole populations move away from the ocean and trading to the hills and mountains, becoming more self sufficient, low trust and having more ingroup loyalties. No surprise the gangs come from these areas. The wealth fair, free trade, emigration, anti christian media is destorying the towns and population growth of the south.
Just think how different the Macedonians, Romans and Persians conquests went and how they treated the conquered people especially the skill and smart.
Your points are valid, but the problem with Islam goes beyond the Arabs and well beyond polygamy. The reason why Islamic empires always and everywhere end up failing is because the entire legal structure of Islamic law is setup in an incredibly stupid way.
Under Islamic law there are only three possible outcomes for non-Muslims: convert to Islam, surrender and pay the jizyah tax as semi-enslaved dhimmi, or die. Islamic law dictates that Muslims cannot pay income taxes, so the entire burden of taxation falls upon Christians, Jews, and pagans who live in a state of fear and subjugation that is far worse than anything ever imposed by Christian conquerors anywhere.
The jizyah system always becomes so unbearable, and the tax burden so high, that eventually the majority of conquered peoples convert to Islam simply to escape the Hell of being a dhimmi. So inevitably the tax base of an Islamic Caliphate always collapses, and the rulers constantly have to seek out new territories to conquer – which places the empire on a permanent war footing.
This is incredibly destructive to economic activity, and the moment that Islamic expansion is stopped by force of arms, any Caliphate always goes into immediate decline. That has happened every single time an Islamic empire has been stopped from expanding.
The economic foundations of Islam are literally retarded.
On top of this is the fact that the "Arab" nature of early Islam is very likely greatly exaggerated. The latest evidence that we have available indicates that it was a Persian king named Khosrau II, who converted to a Reform Judaism proto-Islamic heretic sect of Christianity known as the Ebionites, that masterminded most of the early victories of "Islam" back in the 7th and 8th centuries. It was only about 100 years or so into the existence of the first Caliphate that the Arabs mounted an internal coup and proceeded to retcon the hell out of the origin stories surrounding Islam.
As far as we can tell, the entire scriptural and archaeological basis of Islam is suspect. Mohammed, as depicted in the Koran and Hadith, did not exist as a real historical figure but was most likely a composite of three or four historical, Biblical, and mythical figures.
And, inevitably, because Islam is founded on lies, it always and everywhere fails when confronted by the truth.