VDH considers the other European volcano.
Few wanted to listen when it was pointed out — well before the Greek meltdown — that on key questions of demography and immigration, the future of the European Union was bleak. The very idea that, in historical terms, socialism, agnosticism, pacifism, and hedonism were not only interrelated and synergistic, but also suicidal for civilization, was considered crackpot.
I seem to recall a certain cowardly atheist who thought I belonged in the category. I didn’t mind that characterization in the least because the reality is that most intelligent and independent thinkers are considered crackpots and lunatics by the unthinking masses, right up until the moment that they are proven correct.* And, of course, at that point, everyone who previously dismissed them immediately begins to pretend that what they had once characterized as “crackpot” was never anything out of the mainstream.
Today, the smarter progressives and equalitarians find themselves in a state of intellectual shock. The foundations of the erroneous beliefs for which they have so confidently thrown away centuries of history and tradition are crumbling before their eyes and they have literally nothing upon which they can fall back. The less intelligent ones, of course, have no idea that anything out of the ordinary has been happening in the diverse areas of economics, genetic science, and government pensions and so they continue to blithely advocate their empty progressive, equalitarian, big government ideas even as a world that has been built upon them teeters on the verge of complete collapse.
This most certainly does not mean that a freer, more traditional, more capitalistic world is in the making. The opposite is more likely true, at least in the intermediate term. But the truths of these matters will be known and the seeds of future freedom find fertile soil in which to grow.
* A relevant quote from Mises happened to pop up today: “Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. . . . The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it.”