ately there have been lots of gloomy articles about how Western civilization is
falling into a death spiral. One article compared Westerners to the intellectuals
in a god-awful movie called Zardoz (1974) where a bunch of super-smart
immortal people had become so intellectually exhausted they only wanted to die,
and so they all killed themselves. The implication was that westerners have become
tired of living.
What elicits this outpouring of gloom and despair is watching Europe hurl itself into yet another self-destructive frenzy. Their demographics have turned south, the EU is an economic time bomb, and their government is becoming less and less democratic. It's as if they have a death wish—literally. Legalized euthanasia has spread just as the skeptics predicted: people are asking the state to kill them, like the imbeciles in Zardoz, instead of showing initiative and jumping off a cliff like a normal person. They throw open their borders to Muslims and are now reaping the dividends.
Those dividends—a divided society with no-go zones, car burnings, and rapes, where doctors kill their patients, not just to end a terminal illness, but for autism and even for depression after a romantic breakup—were as predictable as night following day. And we are one step behind. But why is it happening?
We can't just blame leftists—what we in America call liberals. The purpose of leftists is to break things down and destroy barriers. It is their biological role, like the bacteria that break down dead trees. Their role is to try to break down the idea that homosexuality is something to be resisted, that the sexes should have different roles, that Western civilization is different from others. They see this not as destruction, but as part of a great progressive cause that leads to social justice and equality.
Breaking down barriers is how liberals think. It's what they call creative destruction. They thrive on chaos. That is their role in our cultural ecosystem.
And we should revel in that, because without it we would grow complacent. We need people to break things down, just as we need people to build new things. Breaking things down and reassembling them in different ways is part of our Western enlightenment culture. It is how our scientific and technological class think. It is the mechanism by which civilization renews itself and how it evolves.
Conservatives build walls to keep out destructive forces. They assign different roles based on biology. They believe in fixed, inviolable principles. They thrive on order and stability.
At heart scientists are conservatives. Like conservatives we build things back up to make our theories stronger. Like them we just want to be left alone to explore the universe. But without the challenge of new experimental results, our theories would never evolve.
In a way liberals are doing all of us a favor, just as computer hackers and virus writers do us a favor by making us strengthen our computer networks. They may be goofballs and a pain to have around, but our defenses against them could save us if and when a real attack comes.
Conservatives see the world as it is. Liberals see it the way they'd like it to be. So liberals will advocate impractical ideas like socialism where everything is paid for by “the rich.” Ask them how that will work after the rich have run out of money and they have no answer.
There's an important clue there. They have no answer because they know, if they've thought about it for more than a few seconds, that taking from the rich is only the first step. They won't admit it, and maybe they genuinely don't see it, but what they really crave is a collectivist communist society.
We know it too, and it is our opportunity to strengthen our defenses against these ideas. We can't do that if nobody advocates them. Today we have a nice, fat target-rich environment. By fighting these ideas we will build up the West's immunity.
Western civilization is intrinsically resistant to communalism because of its belief in the individual. It is the basis of our system of rewards and punishments. We have copyrights and patent laws that protect individual achievement and reward it financially. We imprison people on the basis of factual evidence and for crimes they committed as individuals. We glorify people like Einstein and van Gogh who achieved great things as individuals.
Collectivists do not believe in this. Their idea for the future is for mankind to live and think as one. To them it's an idealistic concept.
To achieve it they must destroy those parts of Western civilization that interfere, which is to say all of it: the belief in the individual, its confidence in its own greatness, its reproductive capacity, and its economic strength.
Those on the right who say Western civilization has a death wish are falling right into the left's trap. The Left want us to think the West cannot survive, that it is ill-adapted to the future, and that its present wealth is based on ill-gotten gain. Not because it's true, but because believing it will make it true.
Western civilization has strong defenses against the danger of collectivism. But if we believe ourselves to be weak, we will be weak. If we come to believe ourselves as decadent, we will be decadent.
Despite what some historians tell us, civilizations don't just grow old and die. They die because those who would defend them become disgusted at the decadence, decide civilization is worth less than the alternative, and allow the destroyers to prevail.
That is why the collectivists are constantly trying to demoralize us: in small ways by attacking our bakeries and small businesses, by blocking us from speaking, and by encouraging racial hatred and crime, destruction and chaos; and in big ways by surrendering overseas and corrupting our legal system. The purpose is to convince us that the country is not worth saving. But they can only succeed if the creative builder class—the conservatives and intellectuals—stop fighting back.
We've become complacent. We've fallen into the trap of believing that conservatism is only about preserving the past, and so we're becoming fatalistic. We need to regain our revolutionary zeal. The first step is to demand the right to tell the truth and to state the real problem. Stating the problem honestly is the first step toward solving it.
If someone gets offended that's too bad. If they, or we, want a comfortable death, tough shit. There is no such thing.
