Rapid Cultural Decline and What Comes Next

Western Civilization changed the very nature of life - and is the only civilization worth talking about

Writes Doug Casey:

Whenever the public was in a frenzy about something or other, my friend Herman Kahn (look him up) liked to quip, “There are only two important things that have happened since the dawn of history—and this isn’t one of them.” He was referring to the Agricultural Revolution around 5000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution. It’s good to keep things in perspective…

[. . .]

The thing to remember is that Western civilization is built on a certain set of values and virtues that have given the world something unique in history. Before the rise of Western Civ, people everywhere in the world survived by piling sticks and stones on top of one another and grubbing for roots and berries, freezing in the winter and starving in the spring, expecting an early and likely violent death.

Western Civ changed the very nature of life. It is, in fact, the only civilization worth talking about. China may have given the world Taoism, martial arts, and General Tso’s Chicken. India developed yoga, and curries are tasty. But on the whole, Ayn Rand was right when she said East minus West equals zero.

We’re now undergoing our own Great Cultural Revolution. It’s much more serious than what the Chinese attempted in the ’60s. Why? Because a whole complex of destructive ideas have now captured the apparatus of most governments, academia, media, entertainment, charities, and large corporations. The public has been both subtlety and overtly indoctrinated for generations. It’s not easy to reverse a trend this large.

Let me give you the dozen things that made Western Civilization and America not only unique but vastly better than any other country or civilization in history. I’ve listed 12 concepts. These things are the essence of Western Civ—and are unique to it. Ask yourself if attitudes towards them haven’t changed radically in recent years. Ask yourself if the trend towards collapse of the West hasn’t accelerated since then.

  1. Free thought has been replaced by Political Correctness, and it’s discouraged. We’re approaching the stage of Orwellian thought crime.
  2. Free speech is subject to cancel culture at universities, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and society in general. In totalitarian societies, free speech is cause for imprisonment or worse. We’re headed in that direction.
  3. Free markets mean the freedom to act. They’re gone as an ideal, replaced by socialism as a goal. Regulation is now considered essential by most people.
  4. Limited government has been replaced by State control of almost everything.
  5. Individualism is seen as bad, or at least antisocial. Identity politics is preferred. You’re not an individual so much as a member of a race or a party.
  6. Rationality is white and therefore racist. Science, logic, and fact are replaced by superstition. Group think is the new secular religion.
  7. Liberty is seen as a danger. Snowflakes need shelter in safe spaces for fear of being triggered.
  8. The concept of Progress is dangerous because it leads to inequality, and no one should be left behind.
  9. Privacy has been replaced by Transparency. God forbid you might have a secret. Everything is monitored. The Chinese Social Credit system is becoming a model.
  10. Property Rights—Fuhgedaboudit. You’ll own nothing and better be happy. On the bright side, your masters may give you food, housing, education, meds, and a Guaranteed Annual Income—if you’re obedient.
  11. The classic Rule of Law is gone, replaced by thousands of micro rules. Everything that’s not obligatory is forbidden.
  12. Industry & enterprise are evil since they lead to “greed,” inequality, and using the planet’s resources.

Statists and collectivists have largely succeeded in corrupting the public’s attitudes towards the twelve things which made the West unique. The trend is accelerating, and trends tend to stay in motion until they reach a crisis. Once they reach a crisis—it’s called a revolution in the case of a country, or a collapse in the case of a civilization—things usually get even worse, at least for a while.

[. . .]

My guess is that for years to come, we’re going to see a serious devolution of civilization everywhere. The world has become top-heavy with the fruits of civilization. Hundreds of millions rely on those fruits, with no clue about how they came about. Meanwhile, the roots of the tree that produced them are rotting.

As a result, we could be looking at not just a historic financial meltdown, accompanied by a really serious economic upheaval, with wars and serious shortages. But an overthrow of traditional cultural norms, social chaos, and political totalitarianism. Of course, mankind has survived all that for at least five millennia so far. And I suppose we’ll handle this as well. There will just be more unpleasantness and inconveniences than usual in the decade to come….

C.S. Lewis predicted medical tyranny

in this exquisite sci-fi trilogy

Writes Kennedy Hall:

Lewis – perhaps best known for his Christian apologetics and Chronicles of Narnia series – wrote a science fiction trilogy that was aptly named The Space Trilogy. The three books that make up the series are called Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Each book can be read independently; however, read as a whole they are more exquisite and meaningful.

The third installation presents a scenario most analogous to today’s world. In it we find a global conspiracy largely led by academics and scientists, who are hell-bent (literally) on ushering in a world that is overtly sanitary and free of any intellectual or biological germs.

I believe that it was Lewis’s Christian sense that allowed him to be more accurate than Orwell. Orwell wrote of the government as an immovable and impenetrable force, whereas Lewis portrayed governments as a bit weak and thus controlled by nongovernmental organizations.

Since Lewis was not an atheist like Orwell, and therefore not a materialist, he understood that the most important thing was not force, but mentality and belief.

Another pandemic? So soon?

"Fool me twice, shame on me!"

Writes Mike Whitney. He adds:

So, here’s your Pandemic Quiz for the Day: What do you think the chances are that an oddball affliction, like Monkeypox, could spontaneously break out in 10 different locations around the world (where it had never appeared before) at the exact same time?

[. . .]

So, it’s everywhere already? Then, what do we do?

The obvious answer is lock-down, mask up and get vaccinated as soon as possible. Otherwise, most of the world’s population could face an agonizing death… just like Covid, remember?. Of course, some people might conclude that we are being deliberately misled again, and that 2 pandemics in 2 years is a statistical impossibility. But why be reasonable when mass-hysteria is the order of the day?

[. . .]

So, what’s going on here? Why does the Pentagon have over 300 bio-labs spread around the world conducting secret gain-of-function research on pathogens that pose a clear threat to all of humanity? And why has the Pentagon partnered with notorious elites whose links to the eugenics, depopulation and climate movements suggest the research may be shaped to a particular strategic agenda that could involve significant casualties?

And what if Monkeypox is not, in fact, a natural occurring virus but merely the next phase of a relentless war on Constitutional government, individual freedom and the basic institutions of modern civilization? Perhaps, we are being prepared for a different civilization altogether, a civilization in which all of our decisions will be made for us by enlightened elders, corporate stakeholders and well-meaning philanthropists. Is that possible?

From Finite World to Infinite Growth

The Malthusians decided in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist.

Tom Luongo has written a piece called “From Currency Resets to Limiting Infinite Growth“

In it, he writes:

In a recent article on this blog, I did a quick and dirty takedown of the globalist talking point about infinite growth in a finite world.   That gaslighting was at the core of the conflict in the big story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of films, which centered on Thanos coming to bring balance by destroying half of the life in the Universe.

Davos has gaslit two entire generations of westerners in the Malthusian talking point that you can’t have infinite growth in a finite world. All of their economic dogma is predicated on this.

It doesn’t matter that this talking point is predicated on an inane premise, truth is, after all treason, at this point in the economic and cultural cycle. But, to try and explain quickly for the slow-witted. GDP growth is not necessarily real growth. It’s just spending. It says nothing for the quality of the spending or whether, in real terms, the people spending the money are materially better off than they were at a previous point in time.

What isn’t measured by GDP is VALUE. Value is what we crave, the ability to plan further into the future, using our ingenuity to find better mousetraps to build and more efficient, and yes sustainable, ways of deploying scarce capital and time.

When you have a monetary system and regulatory regime designed to thwart that to stop growth then you have the world we live in today. That infinite growth is a subjective, not objective, measure…. not in GDP terms but in the ‘alleviation of human misery’ terms.

Davos absolutely doesn’t want this because a world where everyone gets maximal value for their time is a world without our need for them.

Thanos in the Marvel films makes the same mistake Davos and Huxley made, deciding in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist. This justified their acquisition of power unlimited to re-make the world in their image.

I liked his conclusion in particular:

At that point you will then see what the real growth rate of the world is.  Gary North used to say that prior to the early 1800’s the real rate at which wealth compounded was ~1% annually.  Then something changed and it doubled to 2% and that scared the bejeesus out of the elites because too many people were getting rich too quickly to need them to look out for their interests.

Now you know why the Club of Rome began in the 1850’s, why central banking was so bitterly fought over here in the US then. It’s why Marx’s insane ideas were adopted by those with generational power.  It was to STOP our growth as a species, not keep it from destroying the planet, but their system of unearned privilege.

(Neo-)Marxism is the one disease that liberalism could not defeat

The big question is: why?

Writes eugyppius:

For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. In Western countries, the leftists took aim at the traditional institutions and culture of the European middle classes. There, they still struggle to impose not a socialist utopia, but a never-ending industrial and financial serfdom.

The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards. From the hysterical, crazed opposition men like Trump, Orbán and Salvini have inspired, you can measure the power of this approach.

If Corona restrictions return in the fall, populist political upsets will become our only hope.

Liberalism was susceptible to (neo)-Marxism because it lacked Christianity.

Covid Mess

An open letter to a GP and devastating accounts from vaccine widows

James Rogers is a pseudonym of someone who, according to the TCW website, is a “well-travelled, polymathic dilettante who voted for Johnson but feels we’ve ended up with Blair on steroids”.

Rogers has written an open letter to his GP, published on 18th May 2022. He writes:

You may recall saying to me, ‘These drug companies would not run the risk of being sued for supplying dodgy drug products.’ I replied that the drug companies had been given immunity from civil action and criminal prosecution. You seemed not to know this. In this regard, I am writing to describe what has happened in the interim.

[. . .]

It is important to note that as C-19 jabs were authorised in an emergency situation, the ‘trial’ is still in progress, and the effects the jabs have on people must be fully recorded. So, this matter has two spheres to consider: firstly, the trials that were run in 2020 that persuaded the FDA (and our own MHRA, CHM and JCVI) to approve the jabs; and secondly, the trials run in 2021 – and ongoing – that are necessary to allow those drug authorisations to remain valid.

After some 150,000 pages of Pfizer’s documents, some very fishy and worrying facts have emerged – here is one assessment. It turns out that ‘these drug companies’ did indeed ‘run the risk of supplying dodgy drug products’. 

What happens now? Doubtless, the likes of Dame June Raine, Sir Chris Whitty, Sir Patrick Vallance, Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, Wei Shen Lim and many others anxiously scan the internet for news of what the FDA papers reveal. I mean ‘the internet’ specifically, because none of this is being reported on television or in newspapers.

Read the rest here.

The same “non-reporting” by the legacy media can be observed in the many cases of vaccine-induced deaths and severe injuries AND the fact that, in the case of deaths, NONE of the bereaved family members have yet received any of the promised compensation. And when a marginalised outlet such as GB News does report this, some of the viewers heap the bereaved with scorn and ridicule. What a sick world we live in.

I wonder what the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin “taking the vaccine is a moral issue” Welby has to say about this development, if he’s even aware of if, which I doubt.

The BBC’s climate fake news

Time and again it has put the narrative ahead of the facts

Article by Fraser Myers on spiked-online.com.

Excerpts:

The BBC is very worried about ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ – especially when it comes to climate change, a cause close to Auntie’s heart. So much so that in 2020, it hired its first-ever specialist ‘disinformation’ reporter, who last year fronted an eight-part series for the World Service all about ‘climate disinformation’. The main theme of the show was that fake news about the climate could lead us to ‘catastrophe’.

Perhaps the BBC’s misinformation specialists should have been looking closer to home. Recently, the corporation’s very own climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, was found by the Beeb’s own editorial-complaints unit (ECU) to have made two ‘misleading’ statements in a Panorama documentary about climate change and extreme weather, broadcast last year.

The vast global reduction in natural-disaster deaths – tragically misreported by the BBC – tells an alternative, humanistic story. This is the story of human progress – of global economic development, industrialisation and innovation. This has allowed humanity to liberate itself from the vagaries and cruelties of nature. It is the simple reason why worsening weather does not translate into greater death and destruction. And it is this very progress and liberation that climate alarmists threaten to undo.

There is no climate emergency

Consider Signing the World Climate Declaration

From the “Climate Intelligence” website:

>>>>>

A global network of 900 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.

Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.

Epilogue

The World Climate Declaration (WCD) has brought a large variety of competent scientists together from all over the world*. The considerable knowledge and experience of this group is indispensable in reaching a balanced, dispassionate and competent view of climate change.

From now onward the group is going to function as “Global Climate Intelligence Group”. The CLINTEL Group will give solicited and unsolicited advice on climate change and energy transition to governments and companies worldwide.

* It is not the number of experts but the quality of arguments that counts

World Climate Declaration plus all signatories in pdf

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