Summary: Every day brings stranger news about America. These stories tell us a lot about how we are changing, and why. There are several levels to this problem, but there are solutions.
“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder — and nearly always from the former….”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History.
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“I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
— William Buckley Jr.
Our intelligentsia have gone bonkers. The signs of their decay are all around us, and wash over us in the daily news. Debauchery is common among elites, as usual, but this is different. They have the stench of decay because they have been rotting slowly for decades. Their madness is for America like the death of a canary in a coal mine. The most delicate are affected first, giving a warning to the others.
“The Intellectual Sex Fetish” by Anneli Rufus at the Daily Beast – “It’s S&M for Ph.D.s: Cuckolding, in which men watch their wives have sex with other guys, is catching on among people with high IQs who revel in the psychological agony.” She wrote two books exploring our decayed society: Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto
“It’s time to reconsider polygamy” by Mark Goldfeder, an op-ed at CNN — “Polygamy is back in the headlines.”
“Cuckolding can be positive for some couples, study says” by Ian Kerner, a Health and Parenting article at CNN.
“Tough day at work? Get the toys out” by Andrew Ellson at The Times — “The spirit of Peter Pan lives on in modern Britain with adults buying toys in record numbers, Such is the determination of grown-ups to relive their youth that almost one in five children’s building sets and action figures are bought by over-18s for their personal use.”
These are snippets. See other examples of weirdness in the news and at our universities. For a daily dose of madness by intellectuals, see Alternet, Slate, Salon, and any of the host of Libertarian websites.
Another perspective from someone bearish on humanity
Bill Bonner writes about finance at The Daily Reckoning (and is a founder of the conservative phenomenon The Agora; see this great article about it). He is a doomster and perma-bear, but has an interesting perspective on our situation. From “Corrections”, March 2001…
“Men do stupid things regularly and mad things occasionally. And sometimes, the impulse to self-destruction is so overwhelming it overtakes an entire nation. …The best a person can hope for when he goes mad is that he runs into a brick wall quickly …before he has a chance to build up speed. That is why success, in war and investing, is often a greater menace than failure.
“…people seem to make such obvious and moronic errors that it seems as if they were driven to it by some instinct of self-destruction — like lemmings periodically exterminating themselves in a march off the cliffs. What’s more, this diabolical instinct seems to report for duty at the very moment when the future seems the brightest — that is, when it is most needed! Just when men are most proud, most confident, most expansive in their ambitions and hopes …that is when they make the most lunkheaded judgments.”
True but superficial. Now let’s look deeper
“The rise and fall of civilisations in the long, broad course of history can be seen largely to be a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilisation. A mythological canon is an organisation of symbols, ineffable in import, by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus.
— Joseph Campbell in The Masks Of God – Creative Mythology
(1968).
(1968).Western civilization and the American Republic were built on illusions. Modern science and the progress of rational thought have shattered these without providing substitutes.
Men strived to accumulate wealth to build a family tradition and patrimony. But that is just an imaginary construct about future generations that might not know or care about us. We gloried in our wonderful history, which we now know was stained by acts of extreme evil. We boasted about our land of equal opportunity, which we now is a myth.
Our criminal and civil courts work on the basis of sworn testimony — meaningless in a land where holy words are uttered by most people only as profanity. We marry with promises of “until death do us part” with full awareness of easy divorce — and roughly half press that ejection button.
The big problem
“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”
— Hegel in Philosophy of Right(1821).
Most important of all is the death of god in our hearts. Our behavioral codes assume that most people will be good even in the night (i.e., when unobserved). That earned a place in Heaven an eternity of mild pleasure; misbehavior brought an eternity of torment. Without heaven and hell the incentives to be good are weak.
Society rests on people’s willingness to respect the prisoner’s dilemma. The bad guys are richly rewarded (so long as they are not caught), until there are too many and the system crashes. Then mutual trust and social cohesion radically decline, and social disorder destroys much of our wealth. — This process has already begun.
We can accelerate that day by bringing in hordes of migrants who consider our ideas to be stupid.
The world has been disenchanted
We know such much more than previous generations did. But much of this knowledge shatters the foundations of society — disorienting us and plunging America into the crazy years. This has happened before. For example, when the flowing of Athenian philosophy — the sophists and Socrates — did the same thing to the polis. It did not end well for them.
Another path
The Mandarin characters for “crisis” do not mean “danger” and “opportunity”. But that’s a powerful and optimistic way to see a crisis, like the one I believe has begun.
The Republic has had such moments before and come out stronger than it began. If we try, it can again. We can dream new dreams and create new values. America has everything working for it, except time.
I have faith in all you — in us — so that more citizen involvement will make a better and stronger America. I suspect we cannot imagine the eventually result. Perhaps a better Second Republic (founded on the Constitution). Perhaps a Third Republic.
I do not ask you to share that faith. I ask you only to have faith in yourself, and see us as the crew of America — not its passengers. Pitch in and help. For ideas what to do, see Reforming America: Steps to New Politics.
For More Information
Ideas! See my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See these posts for more information…
- We are alone in the defense of the Republic.
- The bad news about reforming America: time is our enemy.
- Why the 1% is winning, and we are not.
- Can we organize the political reform of America? Our past shows how.
- Much of what we love about America was true only for a moment.
- Rebuttals to the big list of reasons why America will fall.
- America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. It’s falling like Rome’s Republic.
- A picture of America, showing a path to political reform.
Strange times. This is how I feel (like the woman, not the bird).
The culkold is the supreme narcissist, he wants to be the guy who has the wife who other guys want to fuck. His pleasure is knowing that other men envy him for his wife, his sense of worth comes from the objects he owns.
Narcissistic behaviour is endemic in our culture, just switch on the tv and watch the adverts, we allow ourselves to be defined by what we own.
There is a good reason why such influential sections of our elites want to destroy concepts like tradition, honor, self sacrifice, they are hard to monetise. Its easy to sell to a society of narcissists great and small.
Gerard,
The two first comments on this thread are both deeper than the post. That’s a great start!
This post points to observations but provides only a group-level explanation for them. Sociology, but no psychology. You and Steve take this several steps deeper, looking into the minds and souls of the people afflicted.
Nietzche’s diagnosis of “passive nihilism” would seem to be at play. Even at the dawn of the industrial age, he saw that breaking from the past moral framework without some sort of adequate replacement was fraught with risk. We are far down that road now, and while cultural momentum makes the change multigenerational, it sure feels like we are floundering, with no clear reformation in sight. And of course, it doesn’t help that we have political structures that attract and reward sociopathic behavior.
Steve,
This is easily best of thread. I tossed this post together from notes several years old. Your connection of these observations with Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism is brilliant. As someone who so often uses N’s framework and thoughts, I don’t see how I missed that.
For readers unfamiliar with Nietzsche’s writings about Nihilism, see this series (articles & videos) at the Academy of Ideas:
Some Hegel, NOW we’re cooking!
Cheers!
All this is just sophisticated whining and me first thinking. Personally a good skin flick and a bag of Cheetos is all you need. Don’t worry the orange washes off.
Gute,
“Personally a good skin flick and a bag of Cheetos is all you need.”
Unlike you, I believe “each to his own.” So I won’t denigrate your lifestyle choice.
Excellent post/observations. Same for the comments so far. Thanks for the Nietzsche primer.
Well, one does agree about the insanity of the elites. But…..but…..!
Admiration for Hegel and Nietzche is very worrying. I really think both were dreadful mediocrities, and that one of the main causes of our present intellectual morass is excessive reliance on the school that began with Hegel, continues in Marx and Nietzche, and flows through Satre into the Parisian nonsense factory in the last part of the last century. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and so on.
This tradition is the problem, its not the solution. Where is the solution? Well, its the other tradition altogether, which begins with Locke, but whose main exponents are Hume, Mill, Russel, Moore.
Kant is a different story. You may find Kant misguided, but you will never call him a charlatan. That is what Hegel was. Russell said all that needs to be said about Hegel in the ‘History of Western Philosophy’.
Its very curious that what starts out in Hume with a general skepticism about human knowledge changes in the hands of Moore and Russell into a careful examination and rejection of grand metaphysical systems, and a restoring of proper skeptical rationality applied to human scale issues.
Moore, when confronted with British Hegelians who claimed to believe that time is unreal, asked whether they shaved before they had breakfast, or after.
All you need to say, really. Also when confronted with the claim that we could not know that the external world exists, he simply held up his hands. This is one external object, this is another. I know the exist. Now, what exactly were you saying?
As for Nietzche…… Well, Russell is excellent on him, too, and says all that needs saying.
Post Modernism, moral and conceptual relativism, is a dreadfully mistaken and self contradictory approach to ethics and epistemology. It has infected the most surprising areas. And once aware of it, you see its roots in the American scene when it was not clear what they were really leading to. I am thinking of Quine, the idiotic idea of the indeterminacy of translation.
This was probably the start of making epistemological relativism intellectually respectable, and its a logical howler, which, when extended in the way that Derrida and co did, from a different tradition, proved capable of powering the US nonsense factory whose workings have frequently been documented on this thread.
Simon,
“Admiration for Hegel and Nietzche is very worrying. I really think both were dreadful mediocrities”
Wow. Not much to be said about that. Their work can be attacked as wrong, of course. But “meiocrities”? I believe few (or no) historians or philosophers agree with you. My guess is that in our Star Trek future, they’ll both be among the few period of the western history of our age who are regarded as serious thinkers.
You comment conflats three very different things: “mediocre” thought, accuracy or utility of their thought, and the very selective looks at people saying that they use Hegel or Nietzsche.
Time will tell.
Russell’s impressions of Nietzsche are probably the most embarrassing gaff of his illustrious career. A History of Western Philosophy has many inherent flaws, but his ad hominem attacks were egregious and uncalled for. There were also factually incorrect as he was relying on shoddy translations and the popular idea that the Third Reich was an accurate portrayal of Nietzsche’s philosophy (guess he missed the part where he stated his loathing for both nationalists and anti-Semites!).
Simon, you need to let sleeping does lie. The analytic tradition is dead, hoisted by its own petard; its emphasis on clarity, rigor, and logical precision are precious commodities long transferred to other philosophical fields. It’s not like they managed to provide any great insight into areas outside of formal logic anyway, not with their obsession to mimic the natural sciences and mathematics. Williams pretty much vaporized the corpse with his scathing critique of utilitarianism 40 years ago LUL.
The key point is the bankruptcy of the tradition, and the role of the tradition in producing the intellectual malaise among the liberal elite. There is a line of development which leads from Hegel through Marx to what I have called the French nonsense factory. But there is also a line of influence, where progressively rationality and objectivity are abandoned – are decried as being impossible and non-existent.
You have to assess the tradition in the light of what it has delivered, and it has made the kind of crazed ideological approach to the social sciences and literature that are regularly decried on this site.
The ‘dialectic’ was the first real sign of where all this was going – as Russell rightly says, the art of deriving a conclusion which does not follow, from two false and mutually inconsistent premises. The tradition starting with Hegal endorses irrationality and subjectivity. The wilder shores of feminism and political correctness derive from this.
The first step in correction is to recognize the root source of the rot.
I recommend The Romantic Agony, by Praz, for a non-philosophical literary account of the wilder extremes of late 19c romanticism. The origins of the intellectual morass of the present day are clearly visible to anyone who cares to look and connect the dots.
If you look in history saying “the elites are screwed up” is VERY easy. Rome at almost any time (Post Augstine Emporeers until about AD90). England has examples throughout her history.* And France. Was not this the cause of the French Revolution? Elites who lived one way that in the end wasn’t based in reality?
I’ve read it suggested that there is a flaw in our genetics that causes this. Basically we are evolved to either work with responsiblity and to improve – which is generally caused by shortages in resources (read primarily food). This causes the people who are living under these conditions to have children later, do more mate guarding, absent birth control have fewer children but value them more (with birthcontrol they have more children). The oposing setup of having enough, or even super abundant resources (again read primarily food), means that they will have earlier onset adulthood with increased sexual activity, more children unless they have access to birthcontrol and care less about them. They also do less mate guarding. The elites having more wealth, more resources therefore are more prone to this.
Interestingly it isn’t an actual shortage, but the effects of it that are important. Thus things like fasting can help create this mindset in humans that moves us away from perversion that the elites hold. However in the post 1970’s America where the Murder of God(tm owned by Neitzch) has occured, there is no outside group driving most of us to fast. To withhold either food or anything else from ourselves. This puts our very old brain into a “time of plenty mode” by which we try and have as many children as possible to push our genetic code out as much as possible. And why shouldn’t a biological construct want to try to do that? The goal after all is to pass on the genetic code for a biological. And while humans are more than that, they are also that.
you can read more on this over at www anonymousconservative .com and his book on r/K evolutionary psychology.
* See Barbara Tuchmans book “March of Folly” part on US Revolutionary War. She basically paints not just the Crown, but the Lords as more interested in play than in the just governing of her colonies.
ACT,
“If you look in history saying “the elites are screwed up” is VERY easy.”
I assume you mean “common” not “easy.” That is not correct. This is a commonplace error – looking a rare but momentus events and thinking their prominence means that they are common. That’s backwards.
As for “March of Folly” — Tuchman is a fun popular historian, but historians often condemn her books as so simplistic they’re misleading. As historians have pointed out so many times — British elites understood that allowing representation in Parliament for colonies would quickly dilute their power. They consistently refused to do so — from 1776 to 1950, and so they rule Britain today. It’s a choice of values, and not irrational.
As for the Revolutionary War — Britain was unlucky. We had breaks so often and so large that many on both sides saw divine intervention. The Brits could easily have won. How long they could have held it is another question. Imagine US colonies revolting in 1830 over Britain’s prohibition of slavery — with New England merchants and Southern slaveholders finding common cause to rebel.
This is all true, but it ignores the question “compared to what”?
For example, nearly every country’s history is stained by acts of extreme evil; but, unlike the USA, most countries do not succeed in building anything worthwhile on those foundations. And opportunity is far more equal in the United States than in countries where nepotism or tribalism are rife.
Elites like to bang on about past evils as a form of misdirection: to make ordinary people feel guilty about what they are and what they have; to tell them they are privileged if they were raised in a two-parent family (which is true, but ignores the fact that within living memory this was the norm; and also ignores that some have an even greater level of privilege). Let’s talk about your oppression of the 0.01% who believe they are transgender; and let’s never talk about the wealthiest 0.01% whose share of the national cake has increased even while most other people’s share has shrunk.
James,
I don’t understand your comment. Especially this…
“This is all true, but it ignores the question “compared to what”?”
This post says that our society — like all — requires people’s belief in core myths. Without those, or replacement myths, the social machinery breaks down. Comparisons with other cultures are not relevant.
I believe that comparisons with other cultures are relevant, indeed vital. When a transgressive SJW declares that his country is morally bankrupt because of slavery and colonialism, the unspoken conclusion is that (for example) Turks or Arabs are our moral superiors, and it would be a benefit to the country to have a lot more of them.
Yet Turks and Arabs had the same historic vices as ourselves; furthermore, they failed to develop their countries into decent places for people to live.
When someone wants to break our illusions, and they end up railing against our country, this is misdirection: usually what they are unhappy about is the human condition.
Only religion has the capacity to provide the answer to such malaise. Without this “core myth”, as you put it, we are lost sheep.
James,
“When a transgressive SJW declares that his country is morally bankrupt …”
Yes, I agree. I was puzzled since that is not the subject of this post.
“When someone wants to break our illusions, and they end up railing against our country”
As the examples I have given show, the breaking of illusions is a phenomena of the West — crossing both class, political, and national boundaries.
Philosophy wasn’t my strong subject. It would be nice if men men feared God or the afterlife, but failing that they must fear the hangman, or, in the case of the ruling class, revolution or assassination. Machiavelli often warns that a prince who makes foolish decision may lose his state. The rulers of the West were once restrained by fear of defeat in war. That fear has been largely removed. Maybe Vlad Putin was right and the disappearance of the Soviet Union really was a calamity. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been unthinkable if the Red Army was still poised to strike across Germany. Western governance has become an order of magnitude more reckless since the end of the Cold War.
Fear of Revolution and assassination has been largely removed my modern secret police and military firepower. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and North Korea are limit cases for how bad things can get once the rulers can no longer be overthrown. America has a long way to fall before it becomes like Venezuela, but I’m pretty sure we can get there.
Elections have become largely meaningless affairs. Opposition parties have been largely neutered in the West. How this has been done and what can be done about it is a regular topic of discussion here. The mass psychosis over Trump is a result of the establishment going into a panic when popular anger at their misrule resulted in someone not on the approved list getting elected. But Trump has no power base in Washington and has defects of competence and character that would limit what he could do even if he had such a power base.
I think Toynbee pointed out that barbarians could serve a useful purpose by hastening the demise of a civilization that had broken down and was beyond repair. I don’t think ours is beyond repair yet, but if we don’t, well… as Cavafy put it, those people are some sort of solution.
The Man,
(1) “failing that they must fear the hangman, or, in the case of the ruling class, revolution or assassination.”
Think smaller. Rot always starts small. The hangman — or even jail — do not provide a stable foundation for society. Cutting ahead of you in line. Jail! Stealing petty cash (difficult to catch). Jail! Perjury when filling our forms (e.g., marriage, taxes) or in court testimony. Death!
Social cohesion results from a basic level of trust between strangers. Developed nations have a high level. Failed states have little or none. Force can maintain order but not build trust.
(2) “Fear of Revolution and assassination has been largely removed my modern secret police”
No. Modern states have high levels of stability because they provide sufficient levels of order and services so that people do not want to rebel. Belief that desire for rebellion lurks beneath the surface was the core belief of the IRA and Basque terrorist insurgents. Yet both failed because neither obtained widespread support among the people they sought to liberate.
(3) “elections have become largely meaningless affairs.”
Life is a bitch! I demanded that the dealer replace my new car. It ran for a while after purchase, then stopped. The dealer made the absurd claim that I need to keep putting gasoline in it! In a similar way we sit on our butts and whine that elections are meaningless affairs. Few get involved working the political machinery; 40% don’t even vote — but everyone whines. Because they are Americans, we deserve awesomeness because we are awesome.
(4) “I think Toynbee pointed out that barbarians could serve a useful purpose by hastening the demise of a civilization that had broken down and was beyond repair.
Perhaps he said that, but Toynbee was usually more sensible (although he schema of history is, like Marx’s, made-up stuff that’s ignored today). Only a very sheltered person could believe that such massive suffering — sometimes centuries — is “useful.”
“No. Modern states have high levels of stability because they provide sufficient levels of order and services so that people do not want to rebel.”
All government ultimately rests on force. I doubt that Venezuela or North Korea provide enough in the way of services to keep people from wanting to rebel, but that have sufficient means of coercion to prevent it or keep it from succeeding. The Soviet Union probably provided more in the way of order and services than Venezuela does now, but either its means of coercion or its willingness to use them failed at bad time. Modern states are stable because they mostly can’t be conquered from without or overthrown from within.
“Life is a bitch! I demanded that the dealer replace my new car. It ran for a while after purchase, then stopped. The dealer made the absurd claim that I need to keep putting gasoline in it!”
Your sarcasm is duly noted, but the statement is factually true. Unless you count Trump, there was no opposition party in 2016 that stood a chance of winning. Maybe the major parties will take Trump as a warning shot across the bow and start to clean up their act, but there’s no sign of it so far. They still seem to planning some sort of do over for 2016. Maybe they’ll impeach Trump for for the Russian bots, or what have you, but if they do, that won’t exactly be taken as an argument for deeper civic involvement in elections.
What’s that ideology that takes a bastardized version of Nietzsche and a critique of Western culture as decadent and welds it to a deeply reactionary class politics that mouthes some socialist ideas?
Tommy,
What’s your point?
Cultures rot from the top. The thing that put an end to the Soviet Union was that the Nomenklatura no longer believed in the magical story of dialectical progress, the October Revolution as embodying an inevitable stage in human history which would lead to the Crisis of Capitalism, followed by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Withering of the State. All globally of course.
What we did was to teach the young for several decades that all assertions are nothing but the expression of the class, gender and economic interest positions of the person making them. We also taught that revolutions work, that there are laws of history and that we can judge both politics and statements by whether they are progressive, that is, going in the direction which those laws predict as inevitable.
For a generation this seemed like amiable madness of no great consequence. This was because it was being taught by and absorbed by students whose whole approach to life had been conditioned by the previous values, so they may have come to believe in this kind of extreme subjectivism and moral relativism, but in other areas of life they continued to act conventionally, and in particular in the sciences they continued to demand the conventional standards of proof and rationality.
However, when a generation emerged which lacked the previous conditioning, which had grown up surrounded by proclamations that if it feels good, do it, and that saying its good, either in the arts or in morals, means only that I like it, which is in turn an expression of my class or gender interest in it, things changed. If I can point to one key thing, its the change in the practical use of the concept of evidence and the concept of causation.
If you look at literary criticism, perhaps the most obvious place to find the phenomenon, the meaning of a work can now be asserted without having to supply any evidence in the text that one’s view of it is in any way evidenced in the text. A classic is the idea, when reading Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, that Marianne and Eleanor talking in a bedroom about the treachery of Willoughby is in some way an erotically charged lesbian encounter.
The old fashioned will say, but this is crazy, it has absolutely no support in the text. To which the interpreter will reply, you cannot see it because you are blinded by your patriarchal and oppressive mental structures. In a bow to psychoanalysis, they will argue that the strength of your resistance to the idea only proves the force of repression which you need to avoid seeing what is there. You know it, you see, but are in denial.
What we have done is to license the ad hominem argument, while calling it something different.
And so we arrive at politcal correctness in areas of policy whose main justification is interpretations of scientific truth. These have also been corroded. We find, in the case of global warming, a seamless passage from the idea that CO2 is a warming agent, to the idea that to deny that American can run entirely on wind and solar power is ‘denialism’, and must be attributed to some personal state, such as being in thrall to the fossil fuel lobby, or perhaps having some connection to tobacco. Yes, it makes no sense. It doesn’t have to.
We deny any role for inheritance in abilities. We are sure that people only think there is any innate element because they are racist or sexist. We think that there is such a thing as being trapped in the body of the other sex, and that this can be fixed by surgically changing men into women. At the same time of course we think that differences between men and women are purely cultural, there are no differences either in abilities, their distribution, or temperaments. Women and men are equally good kindergarten teachers, fighter pilots, whatever – or would be were it not for the prejudices of the partriarchal neo-conservative white male elite. And so a man who has become a woman, thus realising his true and different nature, is just as much a woman as one with two X chromosomes. And thus we arrive at the concept of cis-gender, which is just another way, not very legitimate, of being a man or woman, compared to the other, equally or more legitimate, which is by being trans.
We also arrive at the notion of communities – in this case, that there is such a thing as a Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Trans ‘community’. A curious use of the word and concept, you may think. But no, as Humpty Dumpty said, in the post modern world, words mean what I want them to mean. The question is who is to be master, me or the word. Since the word derives from the capitalist imperlialist patriarchy, there can’t be much doubt who is on the right side of history in this one.
Teach your young for a couple of generations that truth is just what I think and feel it is, and that word mean what I want them to, and you will end up with a generation that believes it, and to your astonishment they will come up with increasiingly mad proposals which are justified by increasingly idiotic and false premises, and when questioned in the old traditional way on their justification will simply reply at great length in a way which, when considered carefully, simply amounts to the assertion that well, its right for us so shut up.
Meanwhile, a few people lament the appearance of an increasingly vicious tribalism in the culture, They cannot understand why, and they propose readiing Hegel and Nietzche for enlightenment. After all, these are great philosophers, part of the canon, are they not?