What our love affair with collectivist solutions has wrought.

Thus, what is at stake [given the abandonment of the virtuous cycle of work, saving, and investment in favor of negative interest rates and the political and economic pathologies that preceded them) is not only the world economy, but the accelerating decline of Western culture, which, based on liberalism (personal freedom and private property rights) and Christianity (personal responsibility), laid the foundation for a decentralized Europe that allowed for competition of goods and services but especially the competition of ideas. This dangerous decline is nothing new, either, as it began after World War I, when Europe turned towards a more centralized approach, with all sorts of collectivist ideas causing all kinds of schisms that we still see today in modern societies. Today, we see a rapid acceleration of this decline, as our economic system can barely remain standing, and as our politics and our societies devolve even faster into tribal or more precisely into political identity groups, fighting each other [in] meaningless feuds. All the while they are distracted from the real threat, the one that governments and central banks pose to their future and to their children’s future.

As long as people are afraid of liberty and falsely delegate their self-responsibility to a central authority, hope is dim. It’s time to think independently about whether today’s centralized system really makes sense, if it is sustainable, and for how much longer. If the answers to these questions scare you, it is pointless to expect solutions to come from above. It is then time to act directly and responsibly, with a solid plan, hard physical assets privately owned, and a long-term strategy that does not depend on the whims and caprices of those in charge.^[1]

I've often thought of the terrible curse that descended on the world when the idea of revolution took hold in the human mind deeply rooted in an insufferable hubris. The French Revolution was the first real example of destroying the old and substituting in its place something entirely new. Soon thereafter this insanity was followed by the Marxist/socialist/progressive variants with primacy always for the vaporous ideas of really, really smart people who, it turns out, didn't have the common sense that God gave a duck.

The Founders took a shot at political revolution, true, but what they devised really sat firmly on the existing foundation of Christianity, the common law, a limited franchise (excluding thereby the lunatic voices we hear around us in our own time), and the experience of millennia of Western political experience with which they were quite familiar. They attempted to avoid the very centralized, all-powerful federal government that plagues us now, and the day after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution was like any other day without, most definitely, blood in the streets or violent upheaval.

Fast forward to the tyrant Lincoln with his idiosyncratic ideas of the Union and his forcing a unitary government down the throat of the nation. Then another leap to the progressive era and we were off to the races with elite, savior politics with a generous helping of communist experimentation, and subversion in the form of cultural Marxism. In our time, it's been taken to the next level with the elites' adoration of globalism and their lunatic embrace of open borders and multiculturalism, last-nickel cost discovery as the apotheosis of corporate practice, and complete abandonment of anything remotely resembling representative government or devotion to salus populi.

It is instructive to look back at this bit of stained glass art you see below from a 1910 design possibly by George Bernard Shaw. It celebrates the Fabian Founders and their approach. There you see two men, Sidney Webb and Shaw, with hammers raised to smash the world globe with the nearby captions, "Remould it nearer to the hearts desire" and "Pray devoutly. Hammer smartly." One of the figures along the bottom holds a book with the title New World for Old. The Fabian logo over the globe in the background shows a wolf in sheep's clothing, revealing the understanding of the subversive nature of their thinking and of their intention to deceive. H. G. Wells is among the other 10 figures (far left). Nine of those 10 at the bottom are depicted worshipping not God but sacred works of political and social commentary and "Fabian tracts and essays." Worship of false gods anyone?

All told, you see the disdain for the existing world, the determination to destroy utterly in favor of what could easily come out of a sophomore seminar in the School of Social Work at Wellesley, embrace of deception not honest debate, and worship of the human mind not God and His order.

Well, hold me back! A vision for the ages. Yet, there you have a rough but still accurate representation of the thinking of our political class for the last 100 years . . . . with results to match. Custom, tradition, law, the ancestors, experience – all out the window without a thought for the consequences. Worship of abortion, sodomy as a sacrament, disdain for God's creation, and utter human confusion and despair.

And do note at this link that in 2006 Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged "New Labour's intellectual debt to the Fabians."

Ms. Glass is correct to single out our obsession with collectivism. However, it's the opposite of collectivism that's shouted to the sky. Our exceptionalism, our freedoms, our economic dynamism, our Constitution, our "democracy," and other hog swill. In fact, these are aspects of that sheep's clothing beloved of the Fabians. Underneath is a contemptible, dishonest (it's not a tax but, wait, it's a tax) illiberal reality that is but a nearly-completed race to autocracy and the prefect fulfillment of the destroyers' dreams. If you think they are benign, think again. Shaw was once quoted as saying that in the Soviet Union troublesome workers (Tony Blair call your office) are taken down to the basement where they become no longer troublesome. And you have to have been in a coma for 30 years not to understand that civil internal war in all the West is the heartfel desire of the elites, for it is truly said that people intend the natural consequences of their acts.

Notes
^[1] "How Today's Central Bankers Threaten Civilization." By Claudio Grass, ZeroHedge, 12/26/19.