Running on empty.

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless.^[1]

The West is literally unmoored. Nothing controls us except untouchable elites, a corrupt press, arrogant billionaires, special interests, a degraded judiciary, and a goony-bird academy. These are the source of our degradation and decay into rule by the grade-A, vitamin enriched, non-GMO, tofu-flavored, yoga-toned Virtuous Ones. It's all top down from now with nothing springing from the soil of past human experience. The bitter clinging remnants fight only a rear guard action, essentially at the mercy of the bankers, the federal courts, and the police-surveillance state.

Not every decision made by someone else is necessarily a threat to your well being but it's as plain as can be that for just about every major decision to be made in society as a whole the more people in on the decision the better. And I don't mean the big decisions like legislation, regulations, treaties, or elections primarily but those daily ones made in the humblest of circumstances by the millions of Edmund Burke's "little platoons" and pursuant to Tocqueville's widely-distributed "spirit of association." Give me trial and error over the centuries by the millions of our ancestors over the ultra-recent agendas of Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros, visionaries all with their Agendas. For us.

It's a tepid defense of Western civilization to say that at least there was a there there. A lot more can be said of course but this stripped down celebration of it aids us some when considering the utter wasteland of the "progressive" vision. Think building your house on sand or hydroponic gardening in tanks of distilled water. Good luck with that human reason deal and cue the uncertain trumpets.

Cults, buses in the Alaska forest, Negroism, multiculturalism, living Constitutions, feminism, license, and socialism lead to distortion (AKA "progress"), dissolution, death, mobocracy, civil war, arbitrary rule, and economic devastation. All brilliantly marketed and with personal destruction for the dissenters. But if it's gospel truth throughout the land that the Constitution can be ignored, someone with a dick can compete in women's sports, sodomy is a sacrament, and (funny) money can be conjured out of thin air, you know for a fact that the center has collapsed.

Notes
^[1] "The West has lost its virtue. We have abandoned the taboos that held us together." By Paul Kingsnorth, UnHerd, 8/30/21.