Collapse: The Blog

There Will Be No Race War

From Lawrence Auster, the story of yet another innocent white person murdered by a deranged black man:

This poor woman, Beverly Hope Melton, was on her way to pick up her grandmother for some shopping on the day after Christmas. She stopped by a convenience store in Jefferson, South Carolina, where a black savage named Nickolas Jermain Miller noticed her, then followed her in his car, drove her off the road, kidnapped her, drove her around to different locations, attempted repeatedly to rape her, then beat her to death with a baseball bat. Mrs. Melton called her grandmother from her car and told her she was being followed by a black man from the store. That was the last anyone heard from her.

The commenter Allan E. remarks:

There is such a rage that I felt in this story especially after seeing the photo gallery of her (just a young working-class Southern girl with her life and circle of family) and her smiling face in the store surveillance camera before her horrible end.

I can't believe I am alone in feeling the pressure building inside, the gnawing thought that this cannot go on much longer before Western man takes the law into his own hands.

Look, this is tragic and obscene and horrifying. I get it. And probably one in every ten leftist who reads this story will ask himself, "Ah, but was she a racist?", and that only compounds the outrage.

But there will not be a race war. Nor will there ever be substantial levels of white-on-black vigilante violence. Ever. Get it through your heads. You can bet that even if such rage and retaliation began to emerge, it would be immediately squelched with disproportionate police (even military) violence. The great sickening madness of it is that you would be choked to death by the bare hands of a white redneck Marine from South Carolina before modern society would ever permit you to enact denied justice against even a single "protected minority." These guys have shut up and gone along with every other leftist-mandated abomination, most recently the forced homosexualization of their own ranks against their own convictions. There is no floor here, no limit to how low the left will drag them.

White people have surrendered. Completely. In fact, a sizable portion of them are now actively your enemies and would cut your beating heart from your chest if they could do so without consequence. The rest don't care. Their main concern is not being seen as discriminatory. And if their children (preferably yours) have to be raped and tortured to death to achieve that, well, such is the price one pays for Progress, the blood-drinking god of our degenerate age.

This is the reason this is not a white nationalist blog. Many whites are actively in the service of evil: the rest are detestably weak, virtueless cretins who went along with evil because they thought it would buy them popularity. So much for that. You don't get to sell yourself into servitude for a nickel and then complain when your new master takes back the nickel.

This nightmare will end with the parousia, and not a second sooner.

Liberalism and the Immediate Future

Liberalism is getting bolder with time, shucking its unprincipled exceptions and revelling in its awesome destructiveness. The rapid embrace of homosexuality is only the most recent example; in Canada and Europe both, speaking the truth about the immorality of deviant sexual practices warrants civil and sometimes criminal punishment.

Things are really coming to a head; to paraphrase Dr. Charlton, the good is getting better and the bad is getting worse, all the time. The totalitarianizing impulse in modern/leftist politics is metastasizing. The last fifty years or so has seen the total and unprecedented collapse of all resistance to it. Catholics should probably expect state persecution of the Church to begin within the next 10 to 20 years, starting with relatively mild and unofficial (even technically illegal) harassment, graduating to fines and then arrests of outspoken priests, theologians, and talking heads, and culminating finally in the forcible closure of parishes that persist in teaching the wrongness of homosexuality or which refuse to preside over gay "weddings."

What will be the duty of Catholics under such circumstances? We are commanded by natural law, Scripture, and Catechism alike to respect civil authority -- but no civil authority can command disobedience to natural law, Scripture, and Catechism. I've no doubt most priests and bishops will roll over like a cheap typewriter ribbon the moment the state starts making unjust demands, but that doesn't mean faithful Catholics should acquiesce, too: if anything, we should step up our noisy complaints. But what, then, happens to us? Presumably, we get tossed in prison and raped to death by semiliterate degenerates. Our life is all we can offer to the God who gave His son's life for us.

That much I could probably tolerate. What I could not bear would be to live to see federal officials raiding churches, dragging priests and parish staff out in handcuffs, removing and destroying the crucifixes and paintings and statues of Mary, and bulldozing the hollowed-out shell. Or worse -- handing it over to some bureaucratic dump for low-level leftist functionaries, turning it into the finance office for the State Human Rights Commission or something. Such outrageous desecrations of the Lord's house should be prevented with the level of violent force necessary to do so.

It is really hard for me, as an aspiring Catholic, to see any silver lining in the years ahead. The good is not only getting better, it's also getting smaller. God can turn all things to good, and we should always continue to pray for just that; but the days are dark, indeed. Perversely enough, I suspect the spirit of the present age is such that it will seek to break the Church without spilling a drop of martyr's blood -- the blood which, alone, could rejuvenate it.

¡Viva Cristo Rey!

Courtesy of Audio Sancto (and major hat tip to commenter Bill, who first alerted me to that wonderful site) comes this sermon about the Cristiada, in which is recounted the manifold horrors unleashed against the Catholic faithful under one of the West's first totalitarian regimes, the noble defense of the martyred peasants who gave their lives for their right to worship Christ the King, and the shameful cowardice of the bishops and complicity of the American government.

I found especially telling the response of the Mexican federal troops to the faithful's cry of "¡Viva Cristo Rey!" ("Long live Christ the King!"). They were perhaps the most honest of all the grim atheistic totalitarians in history, revealing their true allegiances in their own battle cry: "¡Viva El Demonio!"

Anyway, finally this horrific episode is being brought before America's limited cultural attention span in the form of what looks like a pretty decent movie:

 

Understanding Nazism

How best to understand Nazism? I don't incline toward the modern tendency to diagnose it as a purely political phenomenon. For one thing, it clearly wasn't: the intellectual rationalizations for Nazism came later, and as Peter Drucker demonstrates in the introduction to The End of Economic Man, no one took them seriously, anyway. There was something else going on.

(There is good reason to disbelieve most of the received wisdom about the Nazis, anyway: Robert Locke once aptly demonstrated that they could barely be called nationalists, while Lothrop Stoddard, in The Rising Tide of Color, revealed that Nazi racial mythologies, such as the description of Germans as racially purely Nordic, were at best deeply confused and incoherent and more likely an intentional propagandistic lie. How much of the modern misunderstanding of the Nazis is due to their own internal inconsistency and incoherence and how much of it is due to the deliberate obfuscation of communists with the complicity of their Western academic fellow-travelers is anyone's guess).

 Of course it's not possible to separate Nazism from politics entirely; it was, after all, still at least a superficially political movement. I think Nazism is best understood as a reaction both within and against leftism (not merely political leftism but existential/transcendental leftism): within leftism because Nazism embraces the left's (anti)metaphysics, theology, and ethics; against leftism because Nazism objected to some of the logical conclusions of these positions, such as its individualism. This, of course, is an impossible tension to sustain psychologically, attacking one's own foundations as it did -- it's practically the equivalent of suicide.

The average leftist tendency is to declare on the basis of a few superficial observations that Nazism is right-wing; the usual symptoms are presumed to be its nationalism, its racism, and its anti-Semitism. There is, as I mentioned, good reason to doubt its supposed nationalism [see the above link for Robert Locke], but even so, people forget that nationalism is a leftist invention and that it was abandoned as such only with the rise of communist influence on the international left. With regard to its racism, it is also incoherent as such, and at any rate, racism is neither essential nor particular to the right, as witnessed by the fact that virtually all white Westerners prior to the 1950s and 1960s was committed to racism, at least in theory. Much the same is true of anti-Semitism; given the Jews' traditional association with communism, a meme of at least partial truth that predates the Nazis by several decades, it's just as reasonable to assume that Nazi anti-Semitism is distinctly bound up with its anticommunism. Given that communism is not, or at least was not then, the whole of leftism, that the Nazis were anti-Semitic really proves nothing. Really, the closest relationship that can be assumed between Nazism and conservatism is that both are antiliberal: but this alone means very literal, for Nazism doesn't go far beyond antiliberalism where conservatism had once constructed a vast theological and philosophical tradition which Nazis and leftists alike reject.

(It's worth noting the usual modern pseudoconservative objection to the characterization of Nazis as right-wing is equally stupid; they would tell us that the Nazis were pro-big government and that this is completely incompatible with genuine conservatism. This is as much part of the deplorable modern tendency to reduce quite sophisticated metaphysical movements to mere political superficialities -- sophistries, really. A large and powerful, even centralized, even absolutist, government is no way inconsistent with conservativism; it's when this government is divorced from metaphysical and transcendental considerations that it ceases to be a meaningfully right-wing institution. The conservatism = small government notion is a relatively recent innovation in the history of political thought, invented more or less completely by people who aren't really right-wing at all but merely leftists of the American Revolution tradition).

So Nazism is metaphysically leftist, but hates the left: therefore it hates (and wants to kill) itself, and endeavored to do exactly that. This hews rather nicely to Locke's interpretation of Nazism as basically a suicidal war-cult, and to Drucker's analysis of the publicly-advertised irrationality of the Nazi regime (e.g., "National-Socialist bread prices!") and the internal tension of the people subjected to its rule. It also explains why the communists so violently hated the Nazis despite their transcendental (or rather antitranscendental) common ground: Nazism was a very real perversion of leftism, a thing of the left but not in it. It explains the completely irrational and quite suicidal errors that cost the Nazis the war despite innumerable advantages: the Nazis were nothing if not irrational and suicidal.

Is it possible that Nazism is actually something like the logical conclusion of leftism, even without being fully leftist itself? I think so; leftism is purely critical and unconstructive: it follows that, having criticized everything else into oblivion, it would eventually have to criticize and thus destroy itself. (We can see glimmers of this in postmodern thought -- leftists fed up with leftism!) And this, I fear, is largely where the "alt-right" is going: not toward religious traditionalism of the sort that alone furnishes a basis for a sound and stable society, but toward a reactive, insane, and ultimately suicidal anti-leftist leftism.

More on Communists and Witches

See Personal Failure's response to my post on witch hunts over at Forever in Hell. For some reason, I can't seem to copy and paste any text between browser tabs on my work computer (time to switch to Firefox?), so click the first link and read it yourself.

PF's characterization of my argument is not entirely fair. For one thing, I didn't call McCarthy a "patriot"; not being one myself, I'd have a hard time counting that as a point in his favor, anyway (I simply said that the McCarthy hearings are always being used by leftists as an example of the horrors to which patriotism leads, which is of course nonsense). For another, my argument was not that every example of witch hunts in history (complete with pitchfork-wielding mobs and overused gallows and such) are A-OK but merely that actual witches (not Wiccans but straight-up cackling sorceresses) don't in fact have any right to live, so hunting them is not, in principle, a terrible thing. Given that I'm pretty sure actual witches don't exist, I even acknowledged that hunts for them are inevitably going to veer into excess and unreason. I didn't think I had to articulate any more qualifiers than that.

Now, the subtext to calling the McCarthy hearings "witch hunts" were that there were no communist spies in the federal government, any more than there were witches in Salem. But there were communist spies in the federal government, and we had evidence of it at the time. The basis for the McCarthy hearings were the fact that federal employees were being identified as security and loyalty risks by the agencies responsible for screening these risks, yet they were not being fired, much less being denied access to classified material. This has been documented in all kinds of books, most notably Haynes and Klehr's Venona as well as several McCarthy autobiographies (including, I believe, Oshinsky's A Conspiracy So Immense, otherwise hardly a favorable treatment).

PF doesn't seem interested in this fact, though, and seems to suggest that even if it were true that communist spies had honeycombed the federal government almost all the way up to the Presidential line of succession, nothing should've been done to root them out because "communism is in no way illegal." Well, of course it isn't. Neither is debt (regrettably), yet the horribly indebted aren't allowed anywhere near classified information; neither is alcoholism, yet drunks aren't granted security clearance, either. As I said, civil service is not a right but a privilege, and one reserved to those who are demonstrably trustworthy and loyal -- not to any red goon who'll hand over nuclear secrets to our enemies in a time of war.

We can all agree that McCarthy was an ambitious, asshole-ish lout and that the hearings were imprecise and often unproductive. But he was groping around in the dark, without any help at all from the security agencies or the intelligences agencies, who knew better but who were deliberately concealing the fruits of the Venona project so as to avoid tipping their hand to Moscow (why bother intercepting and decoding their messages if you're not going to act on them, anyway?). Had the government  done its job and enforced the security guidelines for hiring and maintaining federal employees, the McCarthy hearings would never have been necessary in the first place. In that sense, they were rather like the function of bullying in the sphere of public morality: a suboptimal enforcement mechanism of legitimate norms (in this case, laws) rendered regrettably necessary (or at least unavoidable) because of the delinquency of the proper authorities to do their damn job. Even if I can say he could've handled the whole thing better, I can't begrudge him the recognition he deserves for blowing the whistle here, given the alternative would have been to allow all this to continue at the cost of countless lives.

I'm not much interested, either, in the claim that the hearings promoted hysteria. For one thing, hysteria is, by definition, irrational and excessive, and I don't think there's a limit to how worried you're allowed to be when a rival nuclear power bent on your destruction is discovered to have been pillaging your government for diplomatic and military secrets without, apparently, even the slightest barrier to their activities. For another, if the hearings had promoted hysteria, that stands to reason given the enormity of what was going on. People have a right to be alarmed about treason and espionage, and avoiding panic is not a sufficiently sound reason to permit it to continue unmolested. Had the government really wanted to avoid panic, they'd have done their jobs quietly, firing the risks and prosecuting the traitors.

At any rate, however one feels about the McCarthy hearings, I'd hope the West is not so far gone that we can't all agree that communist spies have no business working with classified information for the federal government in a time of war. Or, for that matter, that people who sell their souls to Satan for magical powers deserve to live their lives in peace, while they conspire to murder and corrupt the innocent.

The "Witch Hunt" Meme

I have a soft spot for Joe McCarthy. Back in college, I wrote a 15-page paper in my history class defending his investigations of communist infilitration of the American government, which received a B- along with an unceremonious declaration from the professor that it was "bad history." It wasn't, of course -- history has ascertained that communist infiltration of the federal government was deeper and more widespread than most people presently know. This includes many of the high-profile people liberals love to claim were unfairly persecuted, like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and Harry Dexter White (who was almost in the Presidential line of succession!).

Granted, McCarthy was a drunk liberal who did his part to advance the liberalization of divorce. His methods were sloppy and excessive, chiefly because the government kept secret the information that could've been used to root out and prosecute (preferably execute) the traitors.  Groping about blindly in the dark is naturally imprecise; toes are going to get stubbed and heads bumped. But while McCarthy was wrong incidentally, his opponents were wrong categorically, although you wouldn't be able to tell from the modern fetishization of communist traitors.

The historical revisionism surrounding McCarthy is some of the rankest I've ever seen, and it's barely even disguised; liberals openly use it to advertise the supposed horrors of unrestrained patriotism. But when you really stop and think about it, nothing he did was all objectionable, at least in principle. Civil service is not a right but a privilege; and like any privilege, it is contingent on the satisfaction of several conditions, including a commitment of loyalty and security clearance-worthiness. The fact that there were many people who failed loyalty and security screenings but remained in high positions handling classified documents and information is nothing short of alarming: the national security apparatus was literally not doing its job, at the worst possible time for it to be slacking off. Literally no one today believes that a person who cannot pass a background check because of alcoholism or conspicuous association with foreign intelligence agencies has a "right" to work for the government handling highly sensitive material; yet we are expected to believe that this right existed then, at a time when we were on the brink of war with a nuclear power bent on world domination! And all because the only alternative is to legitimize witch hunts.

Liberals love declaring things "witch hunts" and therefore illicit. But the analogy is nonsense: if actual witch hunts are wrong, it's only because the people who suffer under them aren't actually witches. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, if there were witches -- people who sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for power -- we absolutely ought to hunt them down and kill them. To compare the McCarthy hearings to "witch hunts" is to assert one of two things: either that there were no communist spies in the federal government (which we now know to be false) or that there were, but to hunt them down was somehow morally wrong. But this implies a moral right to treason!

And, to expand slightly on a point I made a while back, liberals' supposed aversion to witch hunts are especially noxious considering the employment far more excessive methods in their efforts to root out every scrap of illiberal thought they encounter. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education documents all of them; I recall a major story in the news several years ago concerning a student who was nearly expelled for yelling some Yiddish word at a group of rowdy black students partying under his window because the word (which translated to something like "water buffalo" was presumed to be a racial slur). Don't forget the student penalized for saying "God bless you" to a fellow student who had sneezed. Or the student suspended for voicing his disapproval of sodomy. And so on and so on and so on.

(To this, I can imagine a liberal crying, "Oh, so suddenly you disapprove of witch hunts -- hypocrite!" Well, no. I disapprove of "witch hunts" in service of evil and falsehood. What kind of consistency requires you to punish children for poo-pooing perversion but permit spies to hand over nuclear secrets to deranged serial killers? Idiot.)

The Perils of the Present Age

I sometimes think I understate the perils of the present age.

Things are falling to bits. Karl Denninger gives America no more than a year before the Greater Depression hits, a blow up that will shred its monetary system as well as its social safety net. People forget that, until about 15 years ago, the Dow Jones' average was in the range of 2,000 -- not 12,000. Fifteen years before that, the Dow was rarely (if ever) in the four digits. That's the range to which we'll be having to return, and the transition will be extraordinarily painful. Make no mistake: people will die by the thousands, if not millions; those senior citizens that don't starve will freeze, people will lose their homes and wind up on the streets, and general civil disorder will rage as the Free Shit Army loses its mind once and for all. As a nation, America will undergo its most severe stress test in history -- at a time when it is already fractured along political and racial lines. There continues to be almost as many (if not more) guns in America than there are Americans. Did I mention the failed narco-state on our southern border and the rising tide of secessionism and local partitioning, even in areas like Arizona and California, which have comparatively little history of such movements?

And don't forget the West's utilitarian zeitgeist, according to which death is a perfectly legitimate choice whenever life ceases to amuse you.

Things elsewhere are even more troubling. Greece is Europe's future, complete with violent rioting and a simmering race war as order breaks down and desperate locals take the administration of public safety (and justice) into their own hands. The EU can count its remaining years on one hand: the first one out the door (probably Germany) may survive, but the rest will be trampled. The Middle East is burning, with Muslim fundamentalists rising up against (at least nominally) secularist tyrants. Japan is still in ruins, at a time when its debt-to-GDP ratio is north of 200%.

The world situation is desperate. The central state has smashed nearly all of the decentralized and subsidiary authorities that could have maintained order, and now the state's authority is itself crumbling everywhere. People are mad (in the sense of both "angry" and "insane" simultaneously) and soon to be starving, homeless, and armed to the teeth. Thirty years or more of economic progress will soon be erased, but our society is not presently equipped to handle a return to the economic conditions of thirty years ago. For one thing, our manufacturing sector is considerably smaller. For another, who farms anymore?

The last depression culminated in war, as a generation of despairing souls gave themselves over to godless totalitarianism in a vain effort to satisfy their unmet metaphysical needs. Are the conditions today much different? I don't think so. Socially, they are very similar. American society, at least, is already primed for war by virtue of its cult of soldier-worship. The consequentialism of the age has erased all our inhibitions about beating people up for thinking differently than we do (Iran hangs gays?! To war!). Like pre-war Germany, the political class is feckless and corrupt, and the high-priests of the ruling leftist clique reduced to mewling impotence while the laymen stew with rage over their weakness. Peter Drucker suggested that Nazism, while distinct from leftism, was in a sense its logical conclusion: they were simply doing what the left, by virtue of its lip service to reason (hence why they always term conservatives "ignorant" and "uneducated" for dissenting from their Utopian vision), could not.

Nothing, since then, has really changed. We defeated the Nazis, but never addressed the conditions that produced them, by abandoning the false narrative of man as an economic animal, a dismal lie that doesn't correspond to any permanent need of the human spirit and therefore cannot establish a stable, meaningful, or rational society of which he can be a part. Instead, we doubled down our efforts to build an economic Utopia. Like a blow to an already-broken nose, the coming collapse will be twice as painful.

Woe to all mankind.

The Problem with Liberalism

Besides being founded on error and evil? Its adherents tend to be really, really weird people.

Perhaps you noticed the minor stink in the comments section of a four-month-old blog post (which was accompanied by a surge in site traffic). Evidently, I've had the honor of being linked to over at Fundies Say the Darndest Things!, which I gather is where liberals go to fulfill their daily requirement for sputtering rage by gasping impotently over instances of the blogosphere's increasingly infrequent brushes with common sense.

(This linking is especially odd since that particular blog post came more than two months before my decision to convert to Catholicism; I was still a deist who denied the divinity of Christ at the time, hardly a "fundie." It's so nice to be told what I am, though, by my supposed moral and intellectual superiors).

So much about this episode illustrates the peculiarities in the leftist worldview. Note, first, the weirdness of the mere fact of that Web site's existence; there is, to my knowledge, nothing quite like it on the (genuine) right. Come to think, I don't think there's ever been much of anything like it in all of history. Did the Victorians go out of their way to expose themselves to views they found offensive? To intentionally inspire the vapors in themselves? How really, really weird. It's as if PC liberals are the sole possessors of some gene that enables its carriers to convert cortisol into riboflavin or something.

Second, take a moment to laugh at their total lack of self-awareness: in the very same post in which I point out the dishonesty of liberals' anti-bullying agenda (since they themselves bully, far more often and with more savagery, intrusion, and ruthlessness than anyone else), several liberals proceed to attack my stance on bullying... by threatening me with physical violence. This shouldn't surprise anyone: liberals are liars, and those that aren't are honest only because they are better than their ideals. The majority of devoted liberals don't actually care about bullying at all, although, being utilitarians, they have no problem lying about their motives. They only care about it when it's directed against their favored constituencies, or rather, against those members of their favored constituencies who behave in ways they think they ought to (sorry, black Californian voters!). And this is, in part, because liberalism is a coalitional ideology: when you spend all your time attacking and ruining every institution that offers people a sense of identity -- nation, religion, the family, etc. -- what is there left except the common brotherhood of aggressors?

Third, observe the failure to engage on an intellectual level. This is highly consistent with Bruce Charlton's assertion, in Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, that liberalism destroys because it really can't afford to dialogue. As I wrote of his book last month:

By "political correctness," Dr. Charlton means not merely the irritating tics of leftist speech (with which the phrase is normally associated) but the general worldview of the leftist mind, a worldview predicated on the assumption of the universe's irrationality and which a priori admits no possibility of God, truth, or reason. ... [The liberal] is obsessed with enemies but cannot engage them rationally because to submit to rational evaluation is to admit PC's falseness: thus, he can only destroy his enemies, hysterically tarring, shutting down, attacking or even killing them. (Nevertheless, the leftist would prefer to deal with enemies that cannot actually challenge it, so he is perfectly content to tilt at windmills with poorly-painted papier-mâché tentacles hastily glued on to them). What matters to the leftist is not who its enemies are but merely that it has enemies; without something to rebel against, the whole flimsily-constructed charade falls apart.

Whoops!

The vulgar chest-thumping of these vile PC thralls serves two purposes, the first, as I mentioned, being destruction and intimidation. Leftists in general are completely unable to grasp the antimodern worldview, so they really can't engage it, anyway. For one thing, they simply don't have the language for it. Hence one Christian-ish-sounding commenter admonishes me to "love thy neighbor." He presumably mistakes that to mean "feel goopy sentimentalism and be nice toward thy neighbor" and not, as is the objectively appropriate translation, "will what is good for thy neighbor" -- a commandment that necessarily precludes any Christian from endorsing homosexuality or any other mortal sin, whatever his own faults. In fact, tolerating and even endorsing the sins of others is flatly contrary to that commandment. To say "do as thou wilt" is an expression of indifference to their fate, as loveless a gesture as could be asked for; to fail to admonish the sinner, and to refuse to protect the innocent from the ravages of thoughtless and unrepentant evil, constitute a profound lack of charity -- itself a mortal sin which must ultimately be answered for to God. (I expect this will sail right over the heads of any liberal that reads it, and at best will be responded to with the usual-suspect, bad-faith attributions of ignorance, fascism, bigotry, rationalization, etc.).

But even if they could understand it, it wouldn't matter: liberals have decided a priori that the antimodern worldview is false, anyway. They would prefer not to live in a universe that is objectively orderly, rational, comprehensible, and governed by an omnipotent, personal God. (Some atheist philosophers are actually willing to admit this in their more honest moments). I suspect, at its core, that decision stems from nothing more than a determination to enjoy oneself in life, and a willingness to embrace whatever absurdities, falsehoods, and unreason will allow one to do so with the approval of one's conscience. (And at the core of that... what whispering demon that spawned the heresies of modernity is now revelling in the praise of his infernal peers at the volume of souls he's managed to damn?) At any rate, if liberals cannot afford to engage their opponents, they can afford even less to ignore them, lest their own project be dismantled; the only alternative is to destroy all opposition, and the more savagely, the better.

The second purpose of such belligerence is merely to push traditionalist discourse, including the idea of moral norms arising from man's nature -- an idea about which PC liberals cannot even communicate effectively because they generally don't read those kinds of books, and couldn't read them properly even if they tried -- further beyond the modern pale. In some sense, FSTDT serves exactly that purpose, a kind of vast and ongoing Two Minutes' Hate for the leftist schutzstaffel to legitimate its pathologies by pointing to imaginary evils (of which, of course, it believes itself guiltless) while ignoring the real ones it has loosed on the world. This has the tendency to further exacerbate liberals' inability to grasp what traditionalists actually believe because it undermines any incentive for them to do so. Actually, it positively disincentivizes them from doing so, lest they earn the scorn of their peers (a thing that liberals, ever fashion-conscious, cannot do without).

What an intolerable thing it must be to a liberal: to be on the side of history that has experienced unparalleled success; to identify with an intellectual and philosophical tradition that has not only succeeded in its goal of destroying an entire civilization but has succeeded to such an extent that the survivors of this moral and rational apocalypse imagine themselves more civilized than ever, despite veering back toward illiteracy, paganism, and squalor; and yet to measure their successes against an impossibly high standard, a standard so high that every minor breach of their false and evil creed -- even a largely-unread post on some nobody's blog -- produces oceans of inchoate rage. What a miserable endeavor modernity has been: always destroying, always negating, but never producing anything of value and never fulfilling its promises. Somewhere in Hell, the devil is surely dancing at his triumphs.

Bending the Knee

Regular readers may have noticed a recent change in Collapse: The Blog's tone. First, there was my broadside against the evil that is modern America:

Ours is a nation that is deliberately endeavoring to impoverish hundreds of millions of people just to prop up banks that would have collapsed under the weight of their own fraud and greed if nature had been permitted to run its course, and which tolerates the rampant injustice of allowing them to continue their schemes without molestation by the law. We're a nation that tolerates the slaughter of a million unborn infants a year, that exports by military force it's cultureless hedonism to nations that want nothing to do with it, that sells its childrens into the slavery of student loan debt in exchange for an utterly hollow promise of prosperity by education, that treats the rule of law as yet another bit of patronage to be divvied up among favored constituency groups. We're a nation of narcissistic  sluts and assholes who have run their economy like a chain-letter scam, turned some of their once-greatest cities into Third World slums, and deprived their children of even a basic education in literature or mathematical competence -- a nation that celebrates the violent, belligerent depravity of its minorities, whose gradual numerical conquest it welcomes with open arms, as it so loathes itself that it cannot tolerate one more generation of life.

Prior to that, readers may have noted my instinctive revulsion to transgendered individuals (in which I argued that enforcing moral norms via bullying should supercede any transgendered butthurtery that comes as a result); sexual promiscuity (in which I pointed out that female sluttiness is the perverse equivalent of male rape, because the former hyperexaggerates woman's sexually submissive nature and the latter likewise exaggerates man's sexually dominant one); AIDS research (a gross misappropriation of limited resources aimed at enabling homosexual men to gratify their lusts without consequence); feminist careerism (which ruins women's lives as well as men's); and, most recently, gay marriage, an "ontological non sequitur" and a subversion of natural law.

Again, surely the trend is obvious.

The first article mentioned above ("America the Wicked") was actually inspired in part by a speech given by Peter Kreeft, called "How to Win the Culture War":

We’ve also had some true prophets who have warned us [about the moral collapse that was coming].  Kirkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age.  And Spengler almost 100 years ago in The Decline of the West.  And G. K. Chesterton, who wrote 75 years ago that, “The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially on sexual morality.  And the madness of tomorrow will come not from Moscow but from Manhattan.”   And Aldous Huxley, 65 years ago, in Brave New World.  And C. S. Lewis, 55 years ago, in The Abolition of Man.  And David Reisman, 45 years ago, in The Lonely Crowd.  And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 20 years ago, in his Harvard commencement address.  And John Paul the Great, the greatest man of the worst century in history, who had even more chutzpah that Ronald Reagan (who dared to call them the “evil empire”) by calling us the “culture of death.”  That’s our culture—and his, including Italy, which now has the lowest birth rate in the entire world; and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West’s great abortion holocaust. . . .

Where is this culture of death coming from?  Here.  America is the center of the culture of death.  America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower.  If I haven’t shocked you yet, I will now.  Do you know what pious Muslims call us?  The Great Satan. (Impious Muslims call us that, too, but that makes no difference.  We are what we are.)  And do you know what I call them?  I call them right.

Indeed, Dr. Kreeft.

When I started this blog, I had intended for it to be solely (or mostly) about economics. That trend persists to this day: I would venture to say probably 1 out of every 2, if not 2 out of every 3, posts relate to economics in some way.

But fairly shortly after I started, I came to the realization that our economic system isn't the only thing that's collapsing. Indeed, it will probably be the least traumatic part of our collapse. For our economy is intimately bound up with our social sense of selves, insofar as we are still governed (partly) by a creed that says that man is a rational economic creature who finds the fullest expression of his essence by his participation in the marketplace.

It also occurred to me, much  more recently, that this collapse is qualitatively different from those that have occurred earleir in history. There is a sense that things are really coming apart, not just economically and not even just socially, but that what is coming is completely unlike anything that has come before. In previous collapses, society had always become degenerate, corrupt, weak; but there was always something like a will to live in the face of death, the burst of dignity against the failure of the body politic to sustain itself. It is that will that enabled society to reorder and rejuvenate itself. I see nothing of equivalence here. Society seems to look forward to death, as a release from its obligations. Once that business of society is done with, we can all set about to getting high and fucking each other and not have to worry about taxes or caring for the poor or being decent folk or whatever.

Modern liberalism was birthed in the moral and intellectual squalor of the Enlightenment -- which, if there were any justice in the world, would have been called the Darkening -- when it shucked off the rational realism and essentialism of the classical and scholastic philosophers and embraced, instead, the manifold absurdities of nominalism, empiricism, and skepticism. Its worst excesses were constrained, at the time, by the residual self-control inculcated in society through a millennium and change of Christian worship, but with the passage of time, society has forgotten even the reasons for this self-control, and its irrationality has worsened, giving way to utilitarianism, totalitarianism, and, ultimately, the present degraded nihilism that cannot even be bothered to justify or rationalize itself. Centuries after the world supposedly liberated itself from the chains of theology, it has enslaved itself to darkness again. Thinking people must go to war against it: against the exultation and fetishization of all its base impulses, against the denigration of human life and the devaluation of the human person, and against the vile particularist passions of the world. And to go to war requires that one have a clear conception of who is fighting whom.

What man requires is a return to first principles: and modern man's first principle, long before he was industrious or economic or intellectual, was spiritual. He understood himself as arising from a natural order ordained by a rationally-provable God. He understood faith to be not a mere assertion of hope in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, but a willful trust in what reason has revealed to be true, no matter how much his unreliable senses scream out against it. And he understood that to embrace that order was to live virtuously, and thus rationally, and that to rebel against it was to reject the rationality of the soul that had been given to him by God and therefore to live in sin and disorder.

When I realize this, suddenly the mere collapse of economies or societies or even civilizations seems woefully unimportant. What matters, and what is at stake here, is the collapse of man: whether he is able to embrace his noblest traits -- his reason and his will -- and so to transcend the animality of his sensory soul, or whether he will become enthralled to his passions and his senses, rebel against all order and reason, and exile himself into spiritual darkness. What is at stake is souls, by the billions. What is at stake is Heaven.

And a return to first principles starts at home. So I'm joining the Roman Catholic Church -- bending my knee to Rome and to the God whose will is all that sustains the universe in every second. The Church has been reduced to a pale shade of its former fierceness, but it is the last and best hope for the redemption of the world.

I begin the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults in a month or two. Wish me luck.

Our Ongoing Collapse Opera: Flash Mobs and Alienation

I've noticed lately a sudden and dramatic surge in "wildings," essentially flash mobs that storm and rob stories and attack anyone that gets in their way, sometimes for apparently racial reasons. The news has been awash with reports of wildings lately, including recently, in Peoria, Illinois, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Ohio, and various other cities. (The DC appears to be little more than a rowdy street brawl.)

I'm naturally suspicious of anything the media reports given that they are among the most staggeringly incompetent people employed anywhere today (and there's reason to believe that some reports may have been overhyped). But the possibility of incompetence can only cast doubts on one bad story, perhaps two; half a dozen in a few few weeks is conspicuous, and of course what I've cited above is only a small sampling of the number I've seen reports of in the last two months or so.

Let's assume, for a moment, that general instances of mob violence are on the rise nationwide, and that the reports are accurate that these flash mobs and flash robberies are largely racial in nature, or at least that the mobs are racially homogeneous (i.e., black). I'm not a conspiracy theorist so I doubt there's some sinister black-uprising conspiracy or something; rather, it's reasonable to assume that they are responses to some phenomenon that is relatively uniform across the country.

Naturally, I'm inclined to believe this is all tied to our ongoing social collapse. The ongoing deterioration of the American economy, and the resultant reduction in Americans' quality of living, is inculcating a sense of desperation in everyone (not juts blacks); and as national allegiance breaks down people are reverting to their baser passions of class and race. Blacks, being generally poorer on average than everyone else, get this effect doubly: their class identification is only amplified by their racial grievances (hence why wealthy, talented blacks who go to college to escape the miserable privations of the black subculture are demonized as "turning white").

Black Americans, I think, have always been more intimately bound up with the Society of Economic Man than whites ever were. Slavery, of course, exposed them to it directly, and upon their manumission, they came to see in that society a promise for equality and freedom that whites largely took for granted. Get rich or die tryin is a grim and perverse expression of that promise, which has been revealed as utterly, hopelessly hollow. Economic society, they believe now, can never really give them the freedom or the equality they yearn for. Thus, rising mob violence is, like the rise of totalitarian fascism, a reaction to the reality of collapse and the exposure of the vacuum beneath our decomposing social order. It is a protracted howl of despair and alienation, a plaintive elegy in the ongoing opera of our collapse.

Of course, I'm not trying to excuse such violence -- managing your despair and angst is your own responsibility, after all, no one else's, and those who try to do so by breaking the law deserve long prison terms -- but merely to understand it. And I think the best way to understand it is that blacks are maladapting to the unpleasant realities of modernity. White men kill themselves; black men kill each other (and sometimes others). We tend not to think of suicide the same way we think of criminal behavior and homicide but it seems to me that the distinction between self-oriented and other-oriented aggression is irrelevant to a corpse. In either case, the aggression is a form of rebellion against the appearance of injustice and irrationality of modern society. And it will persist, if not intensify, until and unless we succeed in once again endowing society with reason, order, and purpose.