I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is that the world as you know it is going to end. Depending on how old you are, the death of Western civilization may happen during your lifetime. The myriad forces that have hollowed out our society – feminism, Marxism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism – keep growing in strength and effectiveness every day. Like all the great civilizations of the past, ours is crumbling into dust. Our once great nations will be reduced to nothing more then names in a history book. Our culture will survive only as art pieces in a museum or footnoted translations in anthologies. The achievements of our peoples will be buried and forgotten.
And there’s not a single fucking thing you can do about it.
That’s right – there is nothing you can do to stop the goose-stepping of time. Think about it – you are but one ant in the six billion strong colony that is planet Earth. How much can one person affect the teeming horde? Very little. Your vote doesn’t count in any race higher then city dog-catcher. Your street-side protests accomplish nothing. Politicians hire interns to shred the letters you send them. You are a fly on the ass of an ass.
The attitude among the denizens of this corner of the blogosphere, where the intellectual circles of men’s issues and conservatism intersect, is that the war is over and we’ve lost. Dennis Mangan, OneSTDV, and Prime have written recently on this, and the latter two cited my August essay on rebellion in their posts. I’ve recently come to the same conclusion as Godless Capitalist over at Prime’s – there is no saving the West:
I’ve basically come to the same conclusion. I went into blogging with hope that truth and science could turn the West around. I stopped when I realized that the West is well and truly screwed. The contradictions run too deep, the center cannot hold.
Anyway, by now it’s a moot point. These taboos are not going to change anytime soon. Civilizations *do* die. The West had a 500 year run in which it was characterized by being the most willing to jettison holy lies in favor of truth. ..
And like a man with a damaged nervous system, the West’s internal perceptions are out of sync with the external reality. Consider a hand on a hot stove. It does not matter if the lowly epithelial cells are burned by the million if the nerve cells refuse to communicate this truth to the seat of conscious action.
The West’s time in the limelight is fast coming to an end; the West will be known for fractious infighting in the years to come, with the taboo looming above like a solar eclipse, with “decent people†tasked with blotting out truth for as far as the eye can see. Hate speech legislation will come to the US. Sensitivity demands it.
Oh, we rightists are correct, but Boobus Americanus can’t handle correct. Our ideology is a rational one, but despite the feeble protestations of the Aspergeress Ayn Rand and her autistic intellectual scions, human beings are inherently irrational creatures. We as a species have more in common with the Yahoos then the Houyhnhnms, and we’re a scant few steps away from reverting to caveman status. We are the heirs of a world that is not only dead, maggots are consuming its flesh.
The good news is that you are not powerless. You may not be able to stop the lemmings from marching off the cliff, but you can break off from the pack and do what you like. We may have lost, but you haven’t. The unified forces of government, society, and culture are still out to rob you, rape you, tie you down, and profit from your misery, but you don’t have to lie down and take it. You still have agency as a man, which entails having the freedom to control your life.
My name, to you at least, is Ferdinand Bardamu. I was born into this dying civilization, the elements that killed it having emerged, morphed and metastasized long before my parents even met. I work a useless job in the ruined capital of a moribund province of a once-great empire. I have a decent lifestyle, one that is far better then I deserve given my life choices, and I’m content with my existence. I’ve made my peace with the coming collapse of my society. I no longer give a damn about saving it, because my power to do so is nil.
So what am I doing? I’m working on my game and my relations with women. I’m being a loyal buddy to my buddies. I’m keeping the promises I’ve made to the people who depend on me. I’m pursuing my independent interests, which include studying up on books written by Dead White Men to watching old movies and playing old video games. I’m socking away cash in hopes of one day leaving my job to do whatever. I’m writing this blog in my spare time. In short, I’m doing what I want and can within the sphere of my own power.
I’m advising you to do the same. The social contract is dead and society isn’t loyal to you, so why the hell should you be loyal to it? You’re a free man and you can and should do what you like. Dump the 9-to-5 job and go on an adventure, go ghost, leave the country and spend the rest of your life banging hookers, join a strict religious community and start cranking out kids with your equally devout wife, or whatever you really want – the choice is yours. Talking about the fall of the West is step one – taking initiative to deal with it is step two. Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean it’s the end of you.
I’ll leave off this entry with two excerpts, the first from Mencius Moldbug’s essay on “passivism“:
Since anyone with a good intuitive sense of history, which lots of people have, can sense the irresistible nature of the giant, grinding bulldozer that is the democratic movement, they respond intuitively with the natural human response corresponding to passivism: apathy. This behavior is also known as learned helplessness. Contrary to democratic dogma, LH is the normal human response to tyranny. It is almost always far more rational than resistance.
And the second from my rebellion essay:
Behaving in good faith according to the principles of our degenerate civilization will inevitably lead to your demise. It is not immoral to behave in bad faith in regards to such a society – you have no obligations to a culture that only seeks to harm you and keep you down. Rebelling is the only sane and moral option in an insane and immoral world.
You are without excuse. Now let the good times roll!
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It’s gonna get pretty ugly. But I ain’t going down.
My young friend,
Congratulation for your graduation. You are at the hing point of your life where you have lost your illusions and start to accept the world as it is.The world is going to hell, as it has been doing since the Greeks and the Romans. Find that devout girl destined for you, but before let sing with Professor Dolittle:
There are drinks and girls all over London, and I’ve
gotta track ‘em down in just a few more hours!
I’m getting married in the morning!
Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime.
Pull out the stopper!
Let’s have a whopper!
But get me to the hupah on time!
let me get this straight; your conclusion is that men should go do what they like. your premise is that men are not doing this already. I’m confused here: shouldn’t men always be doing what achieves a higher purpose that they find unique to themselves?
Perhaps Western Civ has gone down the tubes because men stopped giving a damn about the world they lived in, stopped giving a damn about liberty, and started caring more about their rankings on Xbox Live or how to imitate what they see on tv. It doesn’t take generations for change to come – it takes a focused effort of a few individuals. The American Revolution is a prime example. When I first fell upon The Spearhead website, my thought was exactly the opposite of yours – that there are people who give a damn – who care about something greater than the best technique to bed women. This is why i’ve always distinguished people like Roissy from people like Mystery – the latter preaches game only, the former lectures on ideals on top of that.
It’s ironic that you posted this on the week the Berlin Wall fell. Had you been in East Germany and posted this 30 years ago, and East German men took your advice, it’s very likely that the wall would never have been breached. It is a reminder that a few men who seek a higher value can transform the world in a speed not seen before in man’s history. Five years ago I would have never thought that people would come out in droves for these Tea Parties. But this year, they all came out in the hundreds of thousands – men and women included. Because they’re pissed. Because, to paraphrase Alfred, good men entrusted them with the care of a nation they had created, and it was being wasted away by careless, mindless, lifeless zombie lobbyists and politicians.
The social contract isn’t dead until I accept its death – and I do not. I fight to preserve and re-spark this civilization because I value individual freedom almost as much as life itself, and because there are many men and women whose friendship I value just the same – that is to say, I seek a better world for them, too.
and no, i’m not going to take your ‘advice’ and go on a walkabout, go ghost, or go on a hedonistic adventure just because some day Western civilization will end. It may come to an end, but that chapter has not been written. So you may choose to go lay on the beach and sip on Bartles & James while the world burns,but I’m choosing to fight that fire with every last ounce of energy I have left in me.
And you’re wrong – men have the capacity to reason: some choose to use their mental faculties, others choose emotionalism. But just because one makes decisions based on whims and emotions does not mean he is foreclosed from reason altogether – it takes just a little nudge. How many beta’s have been transformed into alphas in quick time? tens of thousands. Probably way more. Sometimes it takes a little more concerted effort than posting woe-is-me’s on a blog to snap them out of their white knight attitudes.
The first battle is over, but I submit that the war is not. It took many years for people like me, yourself, roissy, and many dozens of others to calibrate our perceptions on what was before us. Thousands of hours of reading, ruminating, analyzing…to get to this point. Now that we understand the nature of this war, we can return to the field and make a stance.
Civilizations do die. But there is life still left in this one. Time remove the cancer.
I’m with slumlord.
I seriously doubt that Western Civ will going down in your (or my) lifetime. As Adam Smith said, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”
if you want what everyone else has (misery) do what everyone else does. great post. found myself more and more eschewing the majority, the consensus of our society in terms of buy a house, get a mortgage, kids, dog, cat, wife, go to church, clean the gutters….die.
balls to that. great post.
Yeah, but thats whats great about the West – it constantly destroys itself and reinvents itself as something new.
Was there really any point in the West continuing in its old form? It pretty much ran through all the forms of culture and thought possible to it, and now it is dying.
And something new and exciting and wholly original will arise from the dust heap – its great. Maybe after a few centuries of barbarism, but itll come.
Would you prefer the Chinese model? A clever people, but esesntially the same boring, dull old thing for millenia after millenia, the same thought patterns, the same art, the same culture, the same philosophy, the same religion, never anything new, exciting, or original.
Sure, the Chinese have and will continue to SURVIVE, as a people and a culture, but in a peculiarly uninteresting state of arrested development. Nietzsche wrote that it wasnt the highest life form that was best equipped to survive forever, but the mediocore.
The price of genius and greatness is that it carries within itself the seeds of its own self-immolation – could the West have risen to its heights of greatness without eventually destroying itself? The genius of the West is that it is fatally curious – it goes through every last form of human thought and way of being imaginable – unfortunately, one of those forms of thought is decadence.
And so it goes – creative destruction, the process of nature. The West needed to reinvent itself, but first it needs to destroy itself. This might take a few centuries or millenia, but time is long.
lol @ the melodramatic post.
Hey, Ferdinand, if “western civilization” wasn’t going to fall, would that make your brief existence on this earth that much better?
I’m gonna go ahead and say no.
Good points, Jon. Who was it that called the West ‘Faustian’? I think it was from Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was written in the 1920s I believe.
lol @ the dissenters.
If civilization were falling or not, should that impact how you decide to live your life? Eschew the “expectations” and do what makes you happy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRj01LShXN8&hl=en&fs=1&]
No, I’m not going down. But if the bastards do take me down, they I want to go down like this.
The women don’t matter, the money doesn’t matter.
Being a man matters.
I agree with Ferdinand. The West as it has been known is finished. The process of morphing is underway, and what it morphs into will suck ass for men, full stop. I agree with the personal approach, too. Do what makes sense to you. Fighting for the culture is a lost cause. If you want to take up the lost cause, that’s cool, too, but really most men need to take pragmatic approaches to their lives and do what makes sense. It’s true, Thursday, that the “end” of the West isn’t happening in my lifetime (I think), but the “end” is a long process, the long “good bye”, if you will, which is already underway. The successor will still be called “The West”, but it will be an utterly different civilization, and to be honest I count myself fortunate that I will likely not live to see it.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
Thursday, I am continually amazed at how many (mildly) unpopular influences we share. Calvino, Chesterton, Kipling. I’m guessing now — how about:
Gene Wolfe
Immanuel Velikovsky
Peter Duesberg
Tom Bethell
Tom van Flandern
R. A. Lafferty
The only thing that can save The West now is the rise of vigorous Caesarism/neo-fascism and the scrapping of rotten Judeo-mercantilism — that is the only thing that can lift us out of the sociocultural ennui, widespread decadence, mass-atheism, worship of materialism/, oversensuality, etc that we are now experiencing.
Luckily this is coming to pass just as Spengler predicted in his DECLINE OF THE WEST.
“You, the West, are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your birth control that is bleeding you from below and killing you off at the top in your brains. I can prove to you that these were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states . . . Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome . . . The real queen of this century is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. Money, also. Is beginning to lose its authority, and the last conflict is at hand in which civilization receives its conclusive form–the conflict between money and blood. … The sword is victorious over money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will . . . Money is overthrown and abolished by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream in microcosmic form . . . And so the drama of a high culture–that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities–closes with the return of the pristine facts of blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow.” – http://www.toqonline.com/2009/06/nietzsche-and-spengler/
I am still not willing to rescind the prediction that the US will still be the only superpower in 2030.
This does not preclude decline, of course. It just means that our lead is so big that no other country will have caught up by 2030.
This is because of the dozen or so countries with over 100 million people, America still arguably the one with the fewest problems.
Furthermore, there are too many countries that are heavily dependent on America (whether for defense, or as a consumer of their exports, or both). They will share our pain, because too much of their well-being is dependent on ours.
The reason all of you feel so bad is because the US enjoyed a number of things that were anomalies, taken as norms. For example, from 1946 to 1973 or so, a factory worker could afford a 4-bedroom house with a front and back yard. This was amazing, and was an unnatural bubble.
So what you call decline, I just call expectation resetting from artificially high levels.
To avoid getting screwed in America, just avoid 4 things :
1) Getting sued, or charged with a crime (where you have to pay lawyers).
2) Getting sick without health insurance.
3) Getting divorced (the surest guarantee of this is : don’t get married).
4) Going into areas populated by high-crime groups.
Stay clear of these 4 situations, and life can be good.
“Immanuel Velikovsky”
@ Thursday and Eumaios:
Please tell me you’re joking.
j.d.1.:
Should != is.
The “blame the men” school of declinist theory. BS. Men are dropping out because society has nothing to offer them anymore, and is trying to screw them over in many cases. See: MGTOW.
You’re wrong. The American Revolution began a century before the actual war when Locke published Two Treatises on Government. Large-scale changes to society are the result of factors stretching back for decades and possibly more.
The Spearhead is an intellectual pulpit, not the first wave of some organized political movement. We aren’t even an MRA site. A couple of us may be interested in activism, but the site as a whole doesn’t represent that.
Roissy has openly said he doesn’t care about civilization. In his words, “I’d rather be poolside.” He gave up a long time ago, if he cared to begin with. Novaseeker has also thrown in the towel.
The East German state was, at the point, like all communist states – sclerotic, corrupt, and choking on its own lies. All the people who tore the wall did was push a terminally ill man into his grave. The governments of the West are still functional and still strong.
My lifetime has seen the Reagan Revolution and the Republican Revolution of 1994, which were instigated by the same people who are fueling the Tea Parties. Both Reaganism and the Republican Revolution accomplished nothing. The socialist system is still alive and still growing. The Tea Party movement will falter and fail like all the movements that came before. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me thrice, I’m retarded.
If one of your loved ones should die, are you going to say they’re not dead until you “accept it”? The flesh is decomposing and starting to stink, but that doesn’t matter – what matters is what YOU want!
Hey man, do what you want – I really don’t care to begrudge other peoples’ life choices in this regard anymore – but don’t expect me to climb into the foxholes in order to wage a war that’s been lost.
Of course men have the capacity to reason. Most, however, would rather not bother with reason. If they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The cancer is in all of the vital organs. Good luck with that.
Jon:
No, it doesn’t. Before our current civilization, there was no West, and after our current civilization is gone, there will be no West. Rome is still around, but the Romans are gone, and the people who live in their city speak an alien tongue and have a different culture.
The conservatives who are fighting to save civilization are looking to preserve it in its current form. Not gonna happen.
OneSTDV: Thursday has not expressed any interest in Velikovsky.
And no, not kidding. Velikovsky’s chronological revisioning better explains the evidence than the mainstream, Manetho-phile view. James and Rohl may disdain him, but he broke the ground.
IV’s astronomical works, on the other hand, one may take with a grain of salt. His thesis that Akhenaton was the model for Oedipus makes for enjoyable reading.
Ferd – Ancient Greece and Rome went through a process strikingly similar to our own – they discovered science, adopted it as a mentality, and had an Enlightenment which broke down the *inherited conglomerate* and tried to replace it with a secular, rational worldview. This eventually led to weariness and loss of motivation which made the culture easily replaced by a more vigorous belief system, Christianity, which also brought about an intellectual closing of the mind.
Northern Europeans, a people only distantly and marginally related to the Ancient Greeks and Romans then *rediscovered* the scientific heritage of the Ancient world and embarked on the same path – this time, developing that same heritage in stunning new ways and taking it much further. But the same thing happened, the attempt culminated in weariness and loss of motivation, and a new closing of the mind is approaching.
Why does this always happen? Is it impossible for a culture to remain *secular* for long? Perhaps.
And what will happen in the future? Seems likely a few centuries of barbarism – quite possibly under and Islamic West – followed by a new *rediscovery* of the heritage of the Ancient World, which might well be developed in surprising new ways and once more the attempt will be made to create a rational, secular world – with what success?
Perhaps
Ferdinand@
No fair.
You made me spit up my coffee all over my desk.
What is it with Aspergy femes and their strange emotional disconnects anyway, Penelope Trunk’s rather Aspergy. Her blog, though not without some really interesting insights, reflects this.
Kamal:
Aspergery people in general are disconnected from the rest of humanity. I think we notice it more in women because as a rule they tend to be more socially savvy then men.
Yes. Because religion is the only thing that keeps women and lesser men in line.
You, me, others here might be able to understand that we need to act against our own immediate-personal best interests for the long-term good of the society which will eventually pay back personal best interest in the long term.
The common men? Can’t do it. They need religion to trick them into doing things to serve their “immediate” best interests (going to heaven) which ultimately serve the long-term best interests of the society.
Women? Even less can do it.
Without religion, everyone shits on their children for a piece of the pie now. That rots out the core until serving society’s long-term best interests of survival no longer serves a man’s long term best interests, because the society is against those who take responsibility for themselves rather than expect others to take care of them.
Anyone who thinks the writer above is not correct does not have enough information. Honestly. You don’t know enough about the subject to understand what is being talked about.
I notice that the forces of decadence in the West have truly been successful when even the demographics with higher native intelligence believe you can pull the tablecloth out from under the silverware with a flourish and leave all the tableware standing. That’s a fantastic egalitarian myth.
When you remove male leadership, religion, patriarchy, meritocracy and the nuclear family you don’t have a civilization anymore. You’ve got a crude oligarchy like the one we are seeing size itself up right now. All the peace, prosperity and tranquility the West has attracted immigration with will vanish very shortly and no amount of televitz talking heads blathering commentary will restore it. It is actually gone now – this society is just coasting on afterburner fumes as it is. The mojo has already gone from the West and very soon so will flush toilets, sanitation and electricity. It’s a done deal.
If you want to see where a thinker moves on from these conclusions, you will see what this author might be contemplating ten years from now if he applies himself by visiting my blog at http://www.vault-co.com …
“The achievements of our peoples will be buried and forgotten.”
Seriously? I hope this is merely hyperbole on your part, otherwise this is a ludicrous statement. Unless there is an all out nuclear war, and given the state of modern technology, this is not the end of Western Civ. It is merely changing, as all societies and cultures change and morph into something else. Nothing ever stays the same, nor is there nothing new under the sun.
I can’t believe I missed this essay before: a small work of genius. I’ve been considering Uruguay myself. Too bad the ladies aren’t as easy on the eyes as even-more-doomed Latvia.
Our world is changing because we are under the stronghold of men/bankers whose only concern is profits at the end of the day, quarter or whatever. They dont give a crap about you or me or anyone. Its all about money. They are rich and still they hunger for more money and power. Do the research for yourself. Our world is doomed as a result of a plan that has been in the works since 1913. The monetary system we are using today was set up with a continual schedule of failure so at given intervals our economies would fail. Look for the answers and find that men controlled the downfall of countries, and the start of wars. War makes so much money and all you have to do is research this matter and you will discover the truth for yourself. These men want world domination. First they will bring this world to its knees and then they expect the people will submit. People of the world must free themselves of the monetary system that is choking us and destroying nations. Stop fighting and educate yourself. The only way for this world to survive is to learn to work together. What good is technology if we dont use it for the betterment of mankind. If used properly, we have enough resources to run this world where there is enough for everyone. Use common sense, then go educate yourself. Stop being the puppets of the one percent that would keep all people in perpetual slavery.
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