Can Western Civilization Be Saved?
Just because everything is permitted does not mean some things are not forbidden.
Ever wonder why civilizations form?
Given that ours seems to be eroding from the inside, I’ve been considering that question with a lot more frequency.
If you search in the libraries and online, there is a lot of information about the fall of civilizations, but not a lot of consideration of why they form. The most helpful I have found is the treatise “The Civilizing Process”, written by Norbert Elias, a prominent German sociologist, and published in two volumes in 1939.
Elias wrote:
“This fundamental interweaving of individual human plans and actions can bring about changes and shapes that no human being has planned or created. From this, from the interdependence of men, arises a very specific order, which is more compelling and powerful than the will and mind of the individual people who make it up. This order of interweaving determines the course of historical change; This lays the foundation for the process of civilization.”
What I took from that is that any civilization arises when such an aggregation of people forms around things like common beliefs, languages, social mores, economic activities, and religions, because the recognition and standardization of those “civilized” aspects are beneficial to the members of that group.
Over time, others join because they also glean some form of benefit from doing so.
Of course, civilizations compete. They compete for political power or domination, natural resources, access to trade routes, prosperity, any number of things real and imagined. In that competition, some succeed, some fail.
Above, I mentioned that people join to reap the benefits, but as often is the case, they are forced to join because they represent a benefit to the expansion of a particular civilization. It seems evident to me that the name of the civilization game is ‘Grow or die”, and history seems to bear that out. When the costs outweigh the benefits, growth stops, and a doom loop begins. Sometimes civilizations die as the object of conquest, sometimes they just rot and collapse.
In truth, I’ve thought a lot about this, albeit in small increments over a large period of time, but lately the alliances of defeated civilizations (i.e., North American (American Indian) and South American (Maya, Inca, Aztec, etc.) civilizations) with reprehensible proto-civilizations (radical Islamism and communism) and their bonding along irrational “intersectional” lines.
The one that got me today was when members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe raised a Palestinian flag raised on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float.
The tenuous intersectional connection is apparently that White Christian settler-colonialists eradicated Native Americans and stole their lands in a manner similar to the Israelis eradicating and occupying Palestinian lands.
Effective only in the weak minded, such a link between the situations is ludicrous. The fact is that a multitude of Native American cultures were subsumed by an overwhelmingly superior civilization which possessed technologies beyond the comprehension of the native tribes, something they were powerless to resist long term. Had the Incas, Aztecs, or Mayans – or any aggregation of North American tribes – possessed technologies superior to those of Europe, the colonization may well have occurred in a very different direction.
In Israel, it is the Gazans who choose to make war on the Jewish people, the stated purpose of which is to eradicate Jews from a land promised to them by God and inhabited by them for thousands of years before the word “Palestine” was invented.
The “intersectionality”, if there is one, is that these were/are not really a civilizational conflict at all, they were/are conflicts between civilized society and savagery.
Of interest to me is how this conflict between Hamas and Israel has laid bare the cracks in American civilization in specific and Western civilization in general. One of the key components of all civilizations is the ability to recognize right from wrong, good from evil, at least as defined for the good of the civilization and its members. For example, even though it took a bit, the entire world recognized the evil of Nazism.
In my estimation, absurd relativism (the inability to clearly see right from wrong and act accordingly) is the key indicator of a failing civilization. When this infection metastasizes, people, ideologies, and philosophies that are damaging to the host are allowed to enter the bloodstream and if not addressed quickly, becomes terminal in rapid fashion.
Liberty is what is left of freedom when just enough freedom is ceded to sustain a civil society. It is also said the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but for that to be true, we must recognize something the French philosopher Albert Camus said:
"The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. ‘Everything is permitted’ does not mean that nothing is forbidden."
America is fast approaching her 250th birthday in 2026. Whether we make it past that point depends upon our recognition that to save our civilization and way of life, there are things that must necessarily be forbidden. Relativism and the hatred of our nation are two of those things.
From the blog Ace of Spades, here is Ace his own bad self contradicting the stupid narrative about Thanksgiving and indigenous people or savages as they were better known:
So I'm going to say something that is considered racially rude, but I'm sick of the bullshit.
Conquest without morality was the rule of all peoples and nations until a couple of hundred years ago. Only in the very recent past has morality become a major consideration in warfare.
And the people most responsible for adding moral considerations to the law of conquest were... Europeans.
People pushing the Victim Narrative pretend that their ancestors were morally superior to their conquerors. In fact, they were not. Their ancestors conquered everyone they could conquer. The Commanche Empire conquered other Indian tribes, which is why Indian tribes allied with American government to fight the Commanches.
If Indians had advanced shipbuilding, navigation, and steel-working, they would have conquered Europe.
Native Americans' ancestors did not refuse to do this because they were more moral. They didn't do it because they simply couldn't do it. They were not superior in morality; they were simply inferior in technology.
And all of this endless bullshit whining about generations-old conquests is just a nasty cope.
You've heard of "Victor's Justice," in which the winner of a war can vindictively set the terms for peace...? Well we live now in an age of Loser's Justice, when the losers of the war can, somehow, endlessly torment the great-great-great-granchildren of the winners of their ancestors having won in war.
And we're sick of it, and we're done with it. We never point this out, because we don't want to upset people who are clearly insecure about their ancestors' failures. Who wants to pick on the fat kid?
But by not shutting this bullshit down, we have invited endless demands on us. Endless reparations and payoffs, endless "land acknowledgements," endless affirmative action programs, endless demands for apologies (which are endlessly offered, and endlessly rejected as insufficient), endless demands we change our lives to "honor" people we don't even fucking know, endless demands we "center" other people and endlessly think about what we owe complete fucking strangers.
Enough. Enough.
The fact that my ancestors were good at war is no credit to me. I can't take racial credit for what people that lived 200 years ago did.
But neither do I have to take responsibility for the actions of ghosts.
And the fact that some people's ancestors were bad at war is not a credit card with no limits entitling the bearers to make endless demands on others.
I'm done with walking around eggshells because some people just cannot get over their distant ancestors having been shit at fighting.
Your article is spot on. It also reminds me of what Michael Savage would often say...Borders, Language, Culture.