The decadent West - is it in terminal decline?

A Political Refugee From the Global Village quotes an article from the state-controlled Chinese news agency Xinhua claiming that the decadent West is in terminal decline. One of the commenters asked why things like out-of-wedlock births and homosexual marriage should be considered to be evidence of decadence. I’ve thought about it and I’ve come up with answer.

Homosexual marriage is sterile. Sterility is a hallmark of decadence. Recognising homosexual marriage means recognising a marriage that cannot produce children. It means voting No to the future. It is a vote for death. Cultural death, national death, even spiritual death. A society that embraces its own death is most assuredly decadent.

As for out-of-wedlock births, if a couple takes on the responsibility of having a child, the biggest responsibility there is, and they can’t even be bothered to make enough of a commitment to each other to get married, they are also voting No to the future. It is an indication of a lack of belief in the future. They are not creating a real family, merely a collection of individuals in a temporary association, an association that can be terminated at any time on the grounds of boredom or inconvenience or mere whim. This is the endgame of liberalism - a vote for cultural death.

The argument can be applied to just about every feature of our modern society. Stupefying oneself with drugs is saying No to the future. 

Our frighteningly low birth rates are an obvious sign of our culture’s embrace of a death cult.

Feminism, an ideology of women who hate themselves for being female and an ideology that seeks to encourage men to hate themselves for being men, is ultimately sterile, negative, self-pitying and self-destructive. Decadent.

The idea of men who think they’re women and women who think they’re men inevitably leads to further sterility. There people are not going to vote for the future by having children. Decadent.

I remember many years ago watching Kenneth Clark’s television series Civilisation. Lord Clark made the point that the transition from barbarism to civilisation could be traced in the buildings they produced. The European Dark Ages produced virtually no buildings that have survived because a society that has no belief in its future produces buildings of a purely temporary nature. There was a huge change around about the twelfth century. Suddenly Europeans were creating buildings, the medieval cathedrals, that are still standing today. They are still standing today because they were built to last. They were built by a society that had confidence that it had a future. In other words, a civilisation. Even more significantly, these cathedrals could take a century or more to be completed. The men who began their construction would never live to see them completed but they built them anyway because they had absolute confidence that the cathedrals would be finished by the following generations. This shows an extraordinary level of faith in the future.

A society that has not developed sufficiently to have confidence in its future is in a state of barbarism. A civilisation that has lost its belief in the future and has embraced its own death is in a state of decadence.

Families are like cathedrals. They require faith in the future. If you have that confidence you will want a real family built on the foundation of marriage. You are building something for future generations.

Feminism, homosexual marriage, out-of-wedlock births, pornography (the ultimate in sterility), the drug culture, celebrity worship, disastrously low birth rates, the voluntary submission to population replacement through immigration - this is serious death cult stuff. These are unmistakeable signs of a decadent society, if not in its terminal stages then certainly in serious danger of entering the terminal stages.

are the elites stupid or malicious?

A recent discussion at Vanishing American II has caused me to do some further pondering on exactly what has happened with our elites. The big question is - are the elites motivated by stupidity or malice? Are they engaged in a gigantic conspiracy against us or do they have no idea what they’re doing?

While I accept that there certainly is a good deal of informal conspiring going on I’m not convinced that the conspiracy argument is conclusive or that it provides a complete explanation. I have come up with some ideas on how the elites may have succumbed to collective stupidity, or at least collective blindness.

Our present day elites differ from the elites of the past in several ways. In many respects they have been rotted away from the inside by the following factors.

1. Isolation from ordinary people. In the ancient world, in the medieval world, even in the modern world up to the nineteenth century, the elites did have some contact with ordinary people. Landowners had personal contact with their tenant farmers. The wealthy had personal contact with their servants. Even factory owners generally at least visited their own factories and had some contact with the workers. They might have considered themselves to be virtually a separate species but at least they had some sense of the mood of ordinary people. If there was extreme dissatisfaction among ordinary people the elites were aware of it.

2. Scepticism. The elites embraced the Enlightenment with enthusiasm. Their religious faith faded rapidly. Scepticism led to atheism which in turn led (as it always does) to nihilism.

3. Morality. This follows from point two. When you believe in nothing you have no morality. The pursuit of pleasure, power and wealth is all there is. Greed is good. Corruption is fine if you can get away with it. Actually serving your country is for suckers.

4. Sexual depravity. Once you embrace hedonism and the pursuit of power in the absence of morality you are highly likely to succumb to the lure of sexual deviance, which rots the moral sense still further. Anything is acceptable if it gives momentary pleasure.

5. Arrogance. Elites were always arrogant but today we see a different kind of arrogance. European aristocrats of the eighteenth century were arrogant but they knew there were certain things they simply could not get away with. Today’s elites believe there is nothing they cannot get away with. They have no concept of consequences.

6. Trans-nationalism. Elites were always to some extent international in outlook but there were limits. If you were a wealthy French landowner then the source of your wealth was in France. If France went down the gurgler then so did your wealth. If you were a rich English factory owner then you had to care about the future of England because if England went belly-up your wealth would disappear. A certain amount of patriotism was necessary, if only out of self-interest. Today’s elites do not need to worry about such minor details. Their wealth is trans-national and thus patriotism is unnecessary. 

These factors might well provide at least a partial explanation for the existence of elites prepared to destroy their own nations and their own civilisation simply because they have no comprehension of the consequences and they simply don’t care.

I am of course talking in this post about native-born white European elites. Members of other ethnic groups within the elites obviously have different motivations. It’s the native-born white European elites that I’m concerned with because without them none of the globalist/SJW agenda would have been possible. In countries like Australia the elites are overwhelmingly native-born white Europeans and yet our elites are every bit as destructive as American elites. They have exactly the same mindsets.

modern feminism and where it leads

Robert Stacy McCain's review of Jessica Valenti's memoir Sex Object is an exhaustive and thorough demolition of modern feminism and the insanity to which it leads. It's worth reading.

The War We Never Fought

Any book by Peter Hitchens is going to be worth reading and his 2012 book The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs is not only particularly good it’s also extremely important, drugs being a subject on which there seems to be no sensible debate at all.

Hitchens begins by pointing out that in Britain the war on drugs is a myth and has been since at least 1970. In that year the Labor government of Harold Wilson made an important decision. Cannabis would be reclassified as a “soft” drug and the laws against cannabis possession would no longer be enforced. They couldn’t legalise cannabis since that would have caused an electoral backlash, so it would be “decriminalised” by stealth. Laws against other drugs would also be much more leniently enforced. 

When Labor lost office later that year Labor’s legislation was passed by the incoming Ted Heath Conservative government. This marked another crucial step. The entire political establishment was in effect deciding that there would no longer be any genuine debate on drugs.

The decision also marked the end of any actual “war on drugs” in Britain - the idea that there has been such a war is quite simply a myth. The political establishment had decided on a policy of abject surrender.

The new policy would be to concentrate on the supply side. Drug dealers would be prosecuted but the laws on possession of drugs would not be enforced. As Hitchens points out such a policy was doomed to failure. As long as there was no attempt to put limits on the demand for drugs it was inevitable that any attempt to prevent the supply of those drugs would be futile. Which is exactly what the political establishment wanted.

Needless to say the British people were not asked for their opinion on this momentous change. The elites had made their decision and that was the end of the matter.

Hitchens also argues forcibly that the popular idea that cannabis is more or less harmless is very dubious. There has been insufficient scientific research but what evidence does exist suggests strong links with serious mental illness, notably schizophrenia. Given the fact that we’re not sure about the long-term dangers but we do know that there may be a very high risk it is irresponsible in the extreme to make policy on the assumption that these dangers do not exist.

Hitchens also explodes the myth of medical marijuana. The whole concept is based on very little scientific evidence whatsoever and pro-drugs campaigners have admitted that it is merely a public relations exercise to advance the cause of complete legalisation.

He also points out that while laws on cannabis possession are no longer enforced at all 

the laws on possession of other drugs have also been progressively softened.

Hitchens is not concerned only about illegal drugs. He is equally worried about the massive over-prescribing of drugs such as SSRIs and Ritalin, given that the evidence for the efficacy of such drugs is very slender and very dubious and there is ample evidence to suggest that SSRIs in particular pose very real dangers. 

He notes that the arguments advanced in favour of surrender on drugs have not changed in half a century and were unconvincing and misleading from the start. The war on drugs most certainly could have been won and even in the 1960s it was being won. It is of course impossible to eliminate the drug problem entirely but at that time it was being successfully contained. It is equally impossible to eliminate murder and bank robbery or any other crime entirely - the whole point of a criminal justice system is not to eliminate crime but to keep it within acceptable bounds and most importantly to prevent it from increasing.

While The War We Never Fought is specifically focused on Britain there’s no question that it has relevance to Australia and United States as well. An excellent well-argued book. Highly recommended.

why have conservatives failed to revolt?

It is easy enough to make the claim that the catastrophic decline of our civilisation over the past fifty years or so has been imposed upon us by without our consent and against our will by  cynical elites. There is a considerable amount of truth to to this but it is not the full story. We have in fact given de facto consent to our own destruction. We have done this by failing to resist this destruction.

A particularly interesting question is - why have rank-and-file conservatives allowed our civilisation to be trashed? The supporters of parties such as the British Conservative Party, the Australian Liberal Party and the Republican Party in the US have been historically drawn from the middle classes. They are supposedly well educated. Many if not most are people who are at least modestly successful in business or the professions. Can these people really claim they had no idea what was happening? Can they really claim they failed to understand the consequences of one disastrous decision after another, one catastrophic policy after another? Can they also make the claim that were was nothing they could do to halt the remorseless slide to ruin?

By the time Ted Heath became prime minister in 1970 the British Conservative Party had long since ceased to stand for anything conservative. In fact it had ceased to stand for anything at all. It’s true that under Margaret Thatcher it had a brief flirtation with the concept of standing for something, although what the Thatcher Government stood for certainly wasn’t conservatism. After that it gratefully went back to standing for nothing except the hope of power. And for half a century Conservative voters have dutifully turned out to vote for them.

It’s understandable that they didn’t wish to vote Labour but there were alternatives. Even voting for an independent is preferable to voting for unprincipled charlatans. Conservative voters could have made it clear to the party that if it intended to betray its conservative principles then it was going to face political oblivion. Faced with a revolt by its core voters it would have little choice but to rethink its slide towards amoral cynicism.

In Australia as early as the 70s it was clear that the Liberal-National Coalition intended, with its catastrophic embrace of multiculturalism, to betray its own base. It’s the same story with the US Republicans.

Each of these these parties has consistently treated its own base with contempt, and that base has kept on voting for them.

It could be argued that in the 70s the process of betrayal was not yet completely obvious, but it has certainly been obvious for the past twenty years. Finally, in the past few years, there have been some stirrings of discontent - the rise of UKIP, the Trump phenomenon - but it has been too little too late and there is still no guarantee that even these belated revolts will be sufficiently sustained to have any real effect.

Even more puzzling are the motivations of the actual members - the rank-and-file members - of these parties. They should surely have been even more aware of the extent to which these parties had abandoned any loyalty to their supporters. Why do they remain within parties from which it is obvious that nothing good can be expected?

Of course the leftist parties have betrayed their principles and their supporters to an equally egregious degree, but conservative voters are as I indicated earlier supposedly better educated. 

It appears that the middle and upper classes, who provide most of the support for these supposedly conservative parties, have been thoroughly demoralised and corrupted. Of course our whole society has been systematically demoralised and corrupted by half a century of relentless indoctrination into the values of liberalism coupled with the worship of hedonism and depravity. What is disturbing though is that it appears that the demoralisation of the middle classes must have started long before this - after all it was educated middle class people who unleashed the horrors of the past fifty years of cultural degeneracy upon us so they must have already been corrupted.

It was apparently sensible and respectable middle class people who were already as early as the 1960s tamely acquiescing in elite follies such as mass immigration, feminism, the undermining of the family, the insane liberalising of the drug laws and the embrace of homosexuality. And not just young middle-class people, but in many cases middle-aged middle-class people. The demoralisation of the middle classes must have begun much earlier.

Societies can commit suicide but it takes a very long time to do so. It requires people to shut their eyes to reality for decade after decade. In fact it requires a real effort of will to ignore reality so completely for so long, and an even larger effort of will to persist in such folly.

the social revolution within the Left

The most extraordinary (and arguably most disastrous) change in the political landscape in the past century has been the social revolution that has occurred within the political parties of the Left.

In 1945 Ben Chifley became Labor Prime Minister of Australia. Chifley was the son of a blacksmith and he became an engine driver in the New South Wales Railways. He was the solidly working-class leader of a solidly working-class party.

Chifley was defeated at the 1949 election. It would be 23 years before Australia had another Labor Prime Minister. In 1972 Gough Whitlam achieved that distinction. Whitlam was a lawyer from a privileged background. He was the solidly elitist leader of a party already well on the way to becoming an elitist political party. In 1972 Labor still retained vestiges of its past as a working-class democratic socialist party. Today the last traces of that past have long since disappeared.

The same process has occurred in the British Labour Party and in the Democratic Party in the US. The leaderships are entirely elitist in outlook. They not only have no interest in the working class, they actively (and increasingly openly) feel contempt for the working class. They advance the interests of people like themselves - fellow members of the elite. There is only one group whom they despise even more than the working class - the few remaining remnants of the old school Left within their own parties. Not that there are many left - if you are an old school leftist your chances of a political career within these supposedly left-wing parties are just about zero.

The treatment meted out to Bernie Sanders is a good indication of the chances of an actual leftist in a modern leftist party. While it’s true that the current leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, does hold some old school leftist beliefs he was elected by the rank and file much against the wishes of the Labour Party establishment (who will do everything within their power to destroy him).

What all this means is that in practice there is no longer any political opposition. The mainstream parties all support globalism and crony capitalism. They all despise anybody who is not a member of the elites. They all work to further the interests of the same class, the class to which they all belong. On economic policy there are simply no genuine differences between the parties. There is no debate on real economic issues. 

This is an extremely unhealthy situation to say the least.

When economic policy is no longer a subject for debate failed economic policies go unchallenged. Even those who disagree strongly with the old school socialists should be concerned by this.

There are no real differences between the major parties on social issues either. They all welcome identity politics because it provides a convenient smokescreen for their disastrous economic policies. They pretend to differ slightly on social issues but this is quite simply a fraud. The “leftist” parties (which have abandoned leftism) want a complete social revolution right now. The “conservative” parties think we should move more slowly. They want a complete social revolution as well but think it should be delayed at least until next week.

It is quite likely that most people under the age of 50 have no idea that the Australian Labor Party, the British Labour Party and the US Democrats used to have actual socialist policies and, more startlingly, used to be solidly socially conservative. 

This political revolution has simply passed unnoticed.

homosexuality is a learned behaviour

Another story the mainstream media will do its best to ignore - an interesting scientific study by Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh on sexuality and identity. 

Here are the key quotes. 

“The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings — the idea that people are ‘born that way’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.”

and

“The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.”

Which is pretty much what I’ve always suspected. Homosexuality is a learned behaviour. Transgenderism is unscientific nonsense.

This is of course why the LGBT lobby is so anxious to spread its propaganda far and wide - they know that if homosexuality can be learned then it can be taught. And they would very much like to teach it to our children.