Western civilization has brought us stirring works of art and beautiful forms of music. It has brought us the concept of representative democracy in which every person is created equal and has equal rights before the law, which has freed countless people from the tyrannical regimes of unelected bureaucrats.
Inventors in the West have been responsible for the creation of the telephone, the discovery of electricity, the development of space travel, and incredible advances in medicine. Our modern technological culture would not exist without Western society, and the world would be a much darker and more impoverished place if Western thinkers had never transformed their dreams into reality.
Yet some contend that Western society has also brought us the enslavement of blacks, the exploitation of indigenous cultures, and a global hegemony that diminishes the overall well-being of mankind. These detractors have set out to dismantle the fruits of Western civilization, decrying the legacy of European culture as a “patriarchy” that systematically oppresses women, minorities, and fringe groups while upholding the values of “white male privilege.”
Determined to upend the existing tenets of society and install a new world order in their place, these progressive activists have demanded that Western nations open their borders, curtail the rights of their citizens to free speech, give minorities special treatment, and allow children to be influenced by alternative sexual lifestyles. All the while, increasingly invasive technological innovation is creeping up on everyone, gradually sucking us all into a perpetual virtual dream from which there will be no escape.
Here are 10 warning signs that Western civilization is collapsing under this relentless onslaught and that all the hard-won benefits for which countless generations have fought and died are going with it.
10. Gender Fluidity
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh, a university distinguished service professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, has long maintained that transgenderism is primarily a psychological issue rather than a biological issue. He recommends that counseling be the primary treatment used to help individuals who are experiencing gender identity confusion.
McHugh is not alone. Many psychiatrists and other medical professionals believe that leaping to perform gender reassignment surgery is not the best course of action when dealing with the issue of gender confusion. These professionals do not hate or look down on transgender people; they simply do not believe that surgery is invariably the best option when dealing with this complicated problem.
Yet in today’s social environment, anyone who so much as suggests that transgender people may benefit from therapy is shot down as a bigot or oppressor. However, it can be argued that only an individual who is mentally disturbed would want to risk gender reassignment surgery.
Many transgender people report that they feel trapped in their own bodies and persecuted by those around them. Our contemporary medical establishment makes an immense profit from intervention-based treatments, and medical facilities are more than happy to seemingly rectify this mental distress with costly surgery.
However, studies have shown that post-op transsexuals have much higher mortality rates than the general population and are more likely to commit suicide. It has also been noted that transgender individuals who do not receive surgery are also more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. Transgender individuals live in a state of acute mental distress whether or not they undergo surgical gender reassignment. Yet gender reassignment is still seen as the only valid course of action when treating transgender individuals.[1]
What could be the reason for this bias? Popular culture has readily portrayed the ailing days of Roman civilization as being fraught with acts of degeneracy that horrified Roman conservatives. After the annexation of the Greek states, Greek practices of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity were adopted by the Roman polity. Some commentators have suggested that this focus on sensuality contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.
After traditional Germanic cultural values were dethroned at the end of World War I, the Weimar Republic decriminalized prostitution and pornographic revue shows became incredibly popular. German cinema became increasingly sexualized, and child sex workers were easy to find outside every major hotel in Berlin. Many political figures of the time pointed to Jewish influence in entertainment and finance as being the source of this degeneracy, and this perspective helped fuel the rise of the Third Reich and its pogrom of the Jewish population.
With history as our guide, it becomes clear that abolishment of sexual norms contributes to social decay. Depending on your assessment of Western society, this fact could be seen as cause for either terror or jubilation. If it were your agenda to destroy Western culture, these historical examples could be seen as guidelines to follow. By putting a media spotlight on individuals who have surgically reconstructed their bodies due to their alternative sexual preferences, interested parties could alter the flow of social discourse about reproduction to manifest their desired cultural ends.
9. The Collapse Of The Family
For centuries untold, family units have served as the dominant formative force of the character of the next generation. In a healthy society, each family unit is informed and directed by general cultural trends. But in an unhealthy society, family units can break away and subsist on their own devices.
Sensing a threat to their power in the sovereign autonomy of the family unit, statist influences have enforced the mandatory education of children in government-run facilities. In these institutions, children are indoctrinated to transfer their perception of authority from their parents to the state. At school, children lose the freedoms and special treatment that they receive at home and are forced to ask permission to perform basic biological functions.
Dissatisfied by the control of the next generation rendered by public schooling, authorities have begun attempting to eradicate the existence of the family altogether. Hillary Clinton is famous for suggesting that parents are incapable of rearing their own children with the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” In 2013, then–MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry more openly suggested that the state owns human beings by stating that “kids belong to whole communities.”[2]
The Democratic Party has been in charge of public policy in urban black communities in America for the past 50 years. In this same time period, black families have been utterly decimated. Since the 1960s, the number of black children raised by single mothers has skyrocketed from just over 20 percent to more than 70 percent. Deprived of the example set by a father, generations of black boys have grown up to become directionless men destined to lives of prison or poverty. Black mothers have become increasingly reliant on state benefits legislated by Democrats to make ends meet.
Urban black America is a microcosmic prophecy of what is intended for other communities as Western culture collapses. Like all other aspects of society, statists believe that the education of children should come from one central point. With the traditional family structure out of the way, the state is free to form the next generation’s perception of reality unchecked.
Divorce rates are on the rise everywhere in America, and fewer young people are getting married and having children. Men fear women, and women despise men. Traditional systems of reproduction are dissolving, and new systems will have to replace them to maintain the workforce.
8. The Rising Dominance Of Virtual Worlds
Robust civic engagement is a fundamental tenet of Western society. Citizens of Western countries must actively defend their rights to stem the relentless onslaught of tyranny that always looks for a new opening. Without the constant efforts of individuals seeking ever greater freedom and quality of life, the ingenious productivity which is the hallmark of Western culture would rapidly grind to a halt.
Yet more and more each year, people in Western nations are becoming disconnected from reality. Cloaked under the promise of keeping people connected, social media has torn us apart. Former hacker and Facebook president Sean Parker has revealed that this social media platform is designed to trap users in a “social-feedback validation loop” that relentlessly urges them to gain ever more likes and comments. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, has expressed his feelings of deep guilt for helping to create a system that is tearing society apart by ensnaring users in these dopamine-driven loops.[3]
At the same time that human social drives are being replaced with social media, human sexual drives are also under attack from online pornography. Various spiritual traditions throughout human history have maintained that human sexual connection can be a portal to the divine. Robbed of this connection, not only are human beings incapable of producing offspring, but they also miss out on one of the key mysteries of existence.
Women depicted in pornography are not threatening to men, and they do not have desires of their own. They can be expediently discarded like the objects that Playboy culture has taught us they are. Lured by these seeming advantages of pornography over real relationships, some men are doing away with pursuing women altogether.
Like social media platforms, modern video games are explicitly designed to incentivize players to spend as much time in the virtual world as possible. When researching why American men aged 21–30 worked fewer hours from 2000 to 2016 than those over 30 years old, a Princeton study found that at least 79 percent of the reduction in aggregate working hours was attributable to video game use.
Men who play video games are provided with a feeling of achievement and power that has been largely denied to men in recent years. These men are gradually becoming acclimated to the concept that the real world is hard and boring and that virtual environments are rewarding and fun.
Men who are entrapped within virtual worlds are incapable of defending the women and children in their lives. They give up actual productivity for simulated achievement. Men have always been those voices within Western society that stand up to tyranny and stake their claims to their own plots of land, family units, or accomplishments. Robbed of these virile masculine traits, men become toothless, broken shells that can be easily bypassed by whichever exploitative or authoritarian forces happen to come their way in search of prey.
7. Fusion With Technology
In 2017, former Google self-driving car developer Anthony Levandowski announced the formation of a religious organization called Way of the Future. This “church” praises artificial intelligence as a force superior to man that should be worshiped lest it destroys us.
Levandowski’s ultimate goal is to fuse human civilization with artificial intelligence. This is also the goal of Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil has predicted that an event called the “technological singularity” is fast approaching. He surmises that this event will occur when Moore’s law causes technology to outstrip human consciousness and triggers unfathomable changes in culture. It goes without saying that Western civilization would not survive this apocalyptic event.
Levandowski and Kurzweil are called “transhumanists.” People who subscribe to this ideology believe that human beings are inherently flawed and that we will be redeemed by our technological creations. They view reality as a prison and seek to escape into a virtual world that will gradually consume what the rest of us call “reality.” Transhumanists seek to fuse with machines to cheat death, enhance intelligence, and achieve human godhood.[4]
Transhumanists operate under the assumption that the mysteries of reality have been thoroughly plumbed. Subscribing to a materialist philosophy that began with Newton and which was expanded upon by Darwin, transhumanists reject the primacy of consciousness and the evolution of the soul detailed by traditional religions. Instead, they believe that spiritual perfection can only be achieved through the use of machines.
6. Mass Immigration From Undeveloped Countries
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In March 2011, Muammar Gadhafi warned the world that Europe would be swarmed with migrants if his regime were to fall. This was no idle threat. Libya had long served as the gateway to Europe much in the same way as Mexico serves as the gateway to the United States. As a way of shoring up his country’s ability to fulfill this role in perpetuity, Gadhafi began taking steps to abandon the petrodollar and return Libya to a gold-backed currency.
In October 2011, Gadhafi was killed. Hillary Clinton expressed her fond remembrance of this incident with her infamously candid phrase, “We came, we saw, he died.” But Gadhafi didn’t simply die. He was brutally raped to death by a gang of crazed young men. Some of these men opted to sodomize Gadhafi with bayonets.
This brutal rape served as foreshadowing for what was about to happen to Europe. In the last few years, millions of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East have swarmed into European countries. Most of them are men, and the vast majority of them do not have any marketable skills.
They have set up vast tent cities in Paris, and many areas in Sweden are now unsafe for nonimmigrant Swedes. Immigrants from the Middle East have set up enormous networks of grooming gangs in the UK. These gangs recruit girls as young as 11 to enter lives of sexual slavery.[5]
Immigration is also corroding Western culture in America. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and immigration adds a net benefit to America’s wealth. But when America’s borders are not recognized or enforced, immigration can transform from a point of strength into a crippling weakness.
Many communities in the United States serve as safe havens for people who enter the country illegally. They are provided with food, shelter, and education at the expense of the American taxpayer. Whether or not these people should be supported is a moot point. The reality is that this unfairness is putting a strain on intercultural relations in the United States and has reached a tipping point.
If immigration continues in this manner, Western society will be extinguished by sheer numbers. Many in the West are starting to wake up to the fact that they are slowly being boiled alive by immigration policies which seek to replace them and their way of life. Resistance to this planned cultural obsolescence is inevitable.
5. Inequality Under The Law
Photo credit: US Navy
When illegal immigrants commit crimes in the US, they are held to a different standard than US citizens. In 2015, a young woman named Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by a man who was in the United States illegally. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate admitted to shooting Steinle. However, he was acquitted of murder and released from custody.
Zarate and his lawyer spun a fanciful and constantly shifting story. Originally, Zarate claimed that he had purposefully shot the gun at a sea lion and missed. Then he claimed that he had unexpectedly found the gun abandoned under the park bench where he was sitting and that it had fired accidentally as he picked it up. A federal warrant was issued for Zarate almost as soon as he was acquitted, and Zarate has filed a federal suit in response.
Zarate’s story is not atypical. In 2018, an illegal alien named Ivan Zamarripa-Castaneda was released from jail despite being wanted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He had fled the scene of a car crash that he had caused, leaving the occupant of the other vehicle to die. Zamarripa-Castaneda was in the country illegally and had caused the death of an American citizen, but the Denver Sheriff Department decided to release Zamarripa-Castaneda because ICE had not filed the proper paperwork.
When people who have entered a country illegally are not held to the same legal standards as citizens, resentment is sure to ensue. The Constitution of the United States is designed explicitly to view all citizens equally under the law. But when criminals flout US laws and sneak into the country without following the proper protocols, the principles of the Constitution can no longer operate, which leads to a breakdown within American society.
Equality under the law is even more important as it applies to the elite among a nation’s citizenry. Much like people who are in a country illegally, elites who have accrued massive amounts of wealth and power often feel themselves to be above the law. Being acutely familiar with the effects of this type of tyranny in Europe, the Founding Fathers of the United States made sure to stipulate that elites are subject to the same laws as average citizens.
Though Hillary Clinton illegally stored classified material on a private server, she was absolved of all crimes by James Comey in 2016. That same year, however, a Navy serviceman named Kristian Saucier was found guilty of taking pictures of classified areas of the nuclear submarine on which he was stationed. At that time, Barack Obama was US president. The next president, Donald Trump, pardoned Saucier in March 2018.[6]
When a nation’s elites aren’t held to the same legal standards as its average citizenry, doubt begins to brew about the impartiality of that country’s legal system. By pulling at this thread of inequality, the entire tapestry of Western civilization can start to unravel.
4. Erasure Of History
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It is said that history is written by the victors. Our perception of the past, and therefore our perception of the present, is molded by those forces which have eliminated opposing viewpoints by diplomatic or violent means. The easiest way to control a person or a group is to manipulate their perspective on reality from the very beginning with a view of history that benefits those in charge.
In recent years, there has been a growing call to erase historical landmarks that are inconvenient to modern sensibilities. In New Orleans, a famous statue of President Andrew Jackson is under siege. According to critics of the statue, the fact that Jackson was a slaveholder is offensive to modern-day minorities.
However, it should be pointed out that President Jackson also excoriated those involved in public corruption during his administration. He abolished the Federal Reserve, which earned him the ire of the banking elite of the time. Despite his flaws, history remembers President Jackson as one of the greatest American presidents.
Educators have become increasingly vocal about downplaying the achievements of European and American men while glorifying the parts that Native Americans, homosexuals, and transgender persons have played in history. These educators claim that our “Eurocentric” worldview is damaging to children and harmful to society as a whole.[7]
The battle to control US history has persisted at least since the end of the Civil War. Educators in Texas are still fighting for the right to contest whether slavery was the central issue in the Civil War. The only answer to this debate is to provide children with the widest possible view of history and allow them to make up their own minds as to what it all means.
Yet many voices within our society appear to believe that remembering males of European descent, who have been nearly single-handedly responsible for the key events that have shaped Western culture, is so “toxic” that these progenitors of our modern technological and social systems should be summarily forgotten. In their absence, a new version of history could be erected that depicts a world free of their troublesome accomplishments.
3. Rising Financial Inequality
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The city of San Francisco is a haven for America’s technocratic elite. Executives at Google and Facebook frequently rub shoulders with Senators and Congressmen at swanky restaurants in Fog City neighborhoods like Pacific Heights. But San Francisco is rapidly becoming a haven for a caste that represents the economic polar opposite of the tech elite: the homeless.
Why do the homeless flock to San Francisco? It isn’t the weather. Houston has better weather than San Francisco, but you don’t see endless flocks of impoverished people erecting tent cities on Houston’s sidewalks. The answer is that the same elites who live in multimillion-dollar mansions nestled in San Francisco’s iconic hills have enacted policies that draw the homeless to the poorer areas of the city like magnets.
San Francisco serves as a picture-perfect symbolic representation of everything that is wrong with contemporary class structure in the West. Instead of using their limitless wealth to create jobs that would give the homeless purpose and sustenance, the elite in San Francisco finance planned giving schemes that only reinforce the belief that striving for anything is meaningless. Instead of working tirelessly to end the opioid epidemic at the source, San Francisco’s elite enact policies that provide heroin and fentanyl addicts with safe spaces where they can shoot up without persecution.[8]
The goal of the elite in the West is not to help the masses. It is to create a permanent underclass that is malnourished, misinformed, and addicted. Once the middle class has been eliminated, the elite will be free to dispose of this unaware underclass at will. Members of the immigrant populations that are set to replace these purposefully impoverished citizens of the West should be under no illusions: The elite seek to replace them, too, as soon as robots are capable of performing the menial tasks that are currently performed by underclasses all over the world.
Western elites can only be described as members of a breakaway civilization. They view themselves as inherently separate from the society that they inhabit like a parasite, and they feel no empathy or indebtedness to the civilization that gave them birth. In the end, it is the elite members of Western civilization that are doing the most to actuate the downfall of the West.
2. Drug Abuse
In the mid-1800s, the British Empire got China addicted to opium. Chinese goods like porcelain and tea were incredibly popular in Europe, and the Brits had nothing that they could trade for these hot commodities. So, this colonial power cooked up a scheme in which they would sell Indian opium at Chinese port towns, making a killing in the process and facilitating the addiction of thousands of Chinese people to a potentially fatal intoxicant.
Perhaps China is getting back at the West for this costly humiliation by flooding our shores with fentanyl. This designer drug was used predominantly by West Coast business elites until a few years ago when it suddenly became ubiquitous across the United States. Fentanyl is estimated to be 100 times more powerful than morphine, and the chances of overdosing on fentanyl are dangerously high.
Chinese fentanyl producers use the dark web to sell this toxic drug directly to American consumers. But even if China wasn’t getting back at the West for losing face by getting Americans hooked on a drug hundreds of times more potent than opium, America would still have an opioid problem.
By the year 2000, opium production in Afghanistan had nearly ground to a halt. But after US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of 9/11, production started reaching record highs. In what’s surely an unrelated coincidence, the American opioid epidemic has spiraled out of control since 2001.
The effects of increased opioid use on the American people have been devastating. More children are being put into foster care because their parents are addicts, and more workers are being removed from the workforce. Most victims of the opioid epidemic are older white people who have been prescribed these drugs legally.[9]
At the same time that American society is being ripped apart by opioid addiction, the drug culture is being legitimized by the legalization of marijuana. While marijuana certainly has medical uses, so does opium. That doesn’t mean that either substance should be used recreationally with impunity. Yet more and more states in the Union are opting to defy federal law by setting up recreational marijuana programs that generate enormous sums of tax revenue while fueling America’s gradual decline into a drug-induced stupor.
As traditional methods of generating dopamine in the brain, such as workplace achievement and familial relations, are replaced by drugs, conventional meaning structures are being replaced with the absolute necessity of the high. Sensual thrills are replacing reason, and compulsion is replacing the power of will. Since meaning, reason, and will are the hallmarks of Western culture, the West will cease to exist at the moment that these organizing principles are fully replaced with the degenerating and corrupting influences that encroach on the horizon.
1. Nihilism
Photo credit: The Telegraph
The quest for meaning has always dominated the Western psyche. In the Dark Ages, the concept of mors certa, hora incerta (“death is certain, its hour is uncertain”) encapsulated the obsession with death that sprang out of Christian theology.
Europe’s bleak social landscape caused average people, clergy, and aristocrats alike to look to the metaphysical for answers. A solution rang out loud and clear with the dawning of the Renaissance, in which thinkers from across the continent devised new ways to tap the essence of nature for the betterment of man.
During the Enlightenment period, the quest for meaning turned to the social sphere, and the Romantic era saw the birth of psychology, the science of the soul. With each successive era, Western philosophy took on new nuances and the task of unearthing a cohesive framework explaining man’s relation to the universe ever took the fore of this adventure of discovery.
Toward the end of the Romantic era, however, Western ideas of meaning took a somewhat darker turn. Hashish-inebriated poets like Baudelaire took a guillotine to previous ideas of beauty, and vagabond philosophers like Nietzsche propounded the virtues of nihilism. A macabre tone suffused the leading ideas of the day, and it was informally agreed that the past should be left behind to rot.
A new philosophy of modernism emerged from this decay. Modernist thinkers related all things to their perceived function, and the importance of the self overshadowed all observation of tradition. From the ashes of modernism sprang a new ideology called postmodernism, in which nothing concretely relates to anything and the conscious self is the ultimate origin of all reality.
The philosophy of postmodernity preaches that there is no sacredness to socially agreed-upon meanings and that objective fact is a delusion. Morally, this implies that all taboos are ridiculous and that any act is permissible. In postmodernity, each individual is atomized in a dream of subjective reality with no reference point to the outside world. This effectively breaks the civic character in the individual, rendering him into a spineless cipher with no investment in his own betterment.
In Communist China, the nihilistic miasma of postmodernity is taking hold. Young people in China are checking out from reality to such an extent that the younger generation of Chinese men and women is now referred to as Generation Zen. These tech-addicted teens and twentysomethings have no political inclination, communist or otherwise, and are blown to and fro with no active stake in their fates whatsoever.[10]
While Generation Zen is seemingly a problem for China as this nation relies on vitalizing propaganda to keep its modern-day slave state in operation, these young people are a perfect representation of what the decay of Western values looks like. Steeped in generations of atheistic communism, the younger generation in China has nothing to live for and no overarching meaning to give them spiritual sustenance. Looming financial inequality and disenfranchisement from free expression have left China’s youth with no voice and no shared national spirit.
As Western values continue to collapse, the ideological contagion of Generation Zen will spread and leave the people of the world disconnected and disempowered. The centuries-old thought experiment known as Western philosophy has finally met its match with a void of meaninglessness, and it is uncertain whether the liberty-preserving values of the West will survive this decisive confrontation.
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