How We’ve Changed

Visitor Nobody leaves a despairing comment at the Goodbye, America online photojournal.

I’m not even mad, just… sad and disappointed. Why did I have to be born at a time of such filth, of such moral inversion, of such rotting decay? Why couldn’t I be born at a time when people were actually sane, pious, respectful and dignified?

…The other day my mom showed me these old postcards and black&white photographs of her mother when she was a child. Anyway, I must have spent a good half-hour just admiring the words written in those postcards. There was such a beautiful simplicity and innocence in the expressions that people used back then… and such humble reverence towards higher authority, too (be that authority God, or an older relative, or a cherished parishioner, etc). It made my heart ache with longing for another era where this was the norm, rather than the exception. Now people always have to be cold, sarcastic and… dismissive, I guess, when speaking to others. Being ironic all the time is “cool”, speaking with sincerity and seriousness is not. Mocking everything that is precious to people and gives their life meaning (be that their faith, their culture, their traditions, their family), is fun and rebellious. Edgy. No one shows respect for anything anymore. No one values the things that elevate Man above beast, because sacrifice is hard and debauchery isn’t. It all makes me sick.

Sorry for rambling but, this picture really hit me hard. This is one depressing site, but one that needs to exist so people living in the West can wake up to what’s really going on here. Keep it going.

Moving. We’ve lost something, and replaced it with something else. People are beginning to perceive the replacement as nothing like the progress promised by those who claim the mantle of the right side of history.

Jonathan Haidt describes five moral senses: Harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. He argues that conservatives possess a morality that is equally balanced among all five senses, while liberal morality de-emphasizes loyalty, authority and purity, and stresses harm and faaaairrrrnesss. Today, liberal morality is ascendent.

Strauss and Howe have a theory of long-term civilizational evolution called the “Four Turnings”, which they contend explains the rise and eventual fall of all civilizations. The Turnings follow a cycle beginning with High, Awakening, Unraveling, and ending in Crisis, which each lasting about 20-40 years. Currently, we are entering the Fourth Turning: Crisis.

Peter Turchin coined “cliodynamics”, the name for his theory of repeating historical cycles of violence and social instability. He believes there are 50 year cycles of crashing and peaking levels of violence and that we are due for another peak, a big one according to him, around 2020.

Islam has a term called Asabiyyah, which means group cohesion and shared purpose. Asabiyyah is strongest at the birth of a civilization (its nomadic stage) and gradually decreases as the civilization advances to pure individualism. The crooked celebration of Bruce Jenner’s mental illness is the apotheosis of extreme individualism.

Alexander Tytler had a theory of cyclical democracy, which states:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loss of fiscal responsibility, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith,
From spiritual faith to great courage,
From courage to liberty,
From liberty to abundance,
From abundance to selfishness,
From selfishness to complacency,
From complacency to apathy,
From apathy to dependency,
From dependency back again to bondage.”

If Tytler’s conclusion is correct, this year America exceeded the average length for a democratic form of government by 33 years.

America, according to Tytler’s theory, is currently in the last stage, utterly dependent on corn and porn and moving quickly into bondage (the surveillance state, SJW witch hunts, and militarized police).

There is another historical cycle theory, possibly originating with Turchin, which offers that inequality drives the rise and fall of civilizations. In this theory, the first cycle is marked by organic egalitarianism, and the fourth cycle by extreme inequality of wealth and social influence. America is in this reading in the fourth cycle.

All these theories of history as an engine that repeats cycles ad infinitum, through birth, life, and death, may share a single genesis, and a single fate. What that is, no one knows, but the correlation of these historical cycles with the personal evidence of decline that you, reader Nobody, has observed in your own life and in your own small way, may be more profound than anyone can conceivably imagine. This is the reason why the subheading to “Goodbye, America” reads “The decline is in the details”.

A libertarian autist will never get this about humans. He is removed from the sphere of human emotion, and can only see rises and falls and chaotic social change through the lens of MUH SUPPLY AND DEMAND CURVE, which means he misses so much, so very much, of the little ominous details that herald social collapse and culture death. You, Nobody, have seen more in the plaintive expressions of your grandmother’s postcards than a million Bryan Caplans in their gated communities or a million Cheap Chalupas traveling to thousands of ethnic restaurants will ever see in their cramped, pinched lives.

The CH take is that inequality, acute individualism, SCALE, the cultural triumph of leftoid morality, and Diversity™ are all converging at a time, right now, and to a point so sharp that it will pierce the heart of the West, and possibly kill her for good. Our people have changed, literally, through demographic dispossession, and spiritually, through character dispossession.

That’s the pessimistic view. An optimistic view: We still take the spear to the heart, but survive the blow to be reborn into a new cycle, once again grounded and intimately familiar with the wisdom of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. We reconnect to ancient Alpine rhythms and once again find our balance with the world and our greatness within ourselves.

Are you a betting man?