Decline from Greatness


The west is dead.  I’ve been saying it for a long time.  A viewing of the Grammy’s the other night is all you need to see to conclude that we are a civilization in steep decline.  We normalize humanity’s deepest pathologies as if they were something to celebrate; even as we subsidize the destruction of the family, the community and our institutions of faith.  No civilization can long endure such an onslaught.  We are overextended trying to police the world, printing money as fast as we can, and abandoning the principles upon which we were founded.  Other nations are not engaging in such foolish activity.  They will overtake us, while we become a shell of what we once were.  A once great civilization destroyed by corruption and a deep lack of moral moderation.  In that respect, we are not unlike many civilizations that have gone before us.  The pendulum swings and the inability of humans and institutions to moderate their most selfish desires inevitably leads to ruin.  And sadly, if history tells us anything, our decline will not end peacefully.  It will probably end in tears and blood.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, America was ascendant.  Blessed with vast resources, a government founded in liberty, and an economy propelled by the power of free markets, we focused on ourselves.  Vast infrastructure projects the likes the world had not seen since Rome marked our progress.  The trans-continental railroad, the Panama Canal, the skyscrapers of Manhattan and Chicago.  We unleashed the innovation and power of an entire people to do great things.  When we encountered a challenge, we adapted, we innovated, and we figured it out.  All of it undergirded and tempered by a commitment to family, community, and faith.  And an unwavering love of America.  We were one people.  And we were unstoppable.  Does this dynamic remind you of any particular nation today?  It should.

We are that nation no more.  We are a nation that cannot get anything done.  We are controlled by massive oligarchical structures who have a stake in ensuring that the system remains the same.  The military-industrial-congressional complex keeps us in endless foreign entanglements and wars to ensure the money keeps flowing.  Trade deals and globalization are configured to benefit those in power – not you.  The largest corporations work to ensure that our tax laws, labor laws, trade deals, and banking regulations keep the status quo in place.  While globalized financial and trade markets send good jobs overseas, we get cheap flat screen TVs instead of the dignity of work; and are told that this means our standard of living has improved.  We are becoming a nation of Burger King workers eating out at McDonalds.

To distract you from all of this, the media works overtime to ensure that you believe the real enemy is your next-door neighbor.  Their objective, of course, is to ensure that you believe this sad state of affairs we find ourselves in is due to racism, sexism, trans-phobia, and xenophobia.  You see, these are the real problems.  But we all know this isn’t true and isn’t why we are where we are.  The reason critical race theory is a thing, as dumb and obviously silly as it is, is to ensure that poor black people and poor white people won’t realize that they are really on the same side.  It is to ensure that Antifa/BLM and Trumpers never realize that they are actually fighting the same enemy.  This is a critically important thing.  If ‘those people’ one day figured out that they are both fighting a vast sea of corruption and graft, they might come together to demand that trade deals, labor law, bank regulations, and tax law are created to benefit them.  And not the oligarchs who manage those things for their own benefit.

For example, do you for one second believe that trade deals are configured to benefit you?  They are not.  If you happen to benefit from them, then that secondary outcome is fine.  But critical race theory and cancel culture nonsense are specifically created to ensure that you don’t realize that the ‘powers that be’ are the real reason you now live in an opioid addicted community in Butler, PA or in a neighborhood in Baltimore that resembles a war zone.  And so, we fight each other instead of coming together to make sure that the regulatory state purposefully works to benefit us.  All the while taking government money hot off the presses to further distract us from the fact that we don’t have a decent job.

The result of all of this is that we live in a pantomime of greatness.  Great civilizations don’t have to bribe their people.  Great civilizations don’t have crumbling infrastructure.  Great civilizations don’t have barbed wire around their capitol.  Great civilizations don’t have half of their kids growing up in single parent households.  Great civilizations don’t have half of their people working at McDonalds trying to raise a family.  The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.


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