Tag: decline and fall

An Errant Conclusion

The amusing thing is that the author, and the publishing industry, imagines this somehow says anything about the decline of young white literary men as opposed to the death of the literary mainstream:

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men.

In other words, they’ll publish inferior work that no one wants to read, their audiences will dwindle, and their publications and awards will become completely irrelevant until their only hope for survival is lobbying for government grants based on the idea that they used to be important.

Meanwhile, young white men will continue to write, continue to innovate, and continue to invent just as they have been doing for centuries. And they will build new institutions to replace those their ancestors built, and perhaps next time, they won’t fall for all the arguments about the need to relax their rules and lower their standards in order to let the women qualify.

Does anyone think the Hugo and Nebula winners of today are better than they were 50 years ago? Does anyone believe that what is published in The Atlantic matters anymore? Of course not. We don’t even read any of these things anymore, precisely because they no longer matter.

No magazine has ever discussed my fiction. And yet the readers compare it to Tolkien (unfavorably) and Martin (favorably), and when the playing field was level – as opposed to algorithmically managed – my works on political philosophy were outselling both Marx and Machiavelli.

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Demographics Not Digital

It’s true that average human intelligence is falling across the West. But it’s not because of smartphones:

Human intellectual abilities such as reasoning and problem-solving are diminishing, possibly due to increased exposure to visual media, the Financial Times has reported.

Human intelligence appeared to peak in the early 2010s and has been in decline since, the FT added, citing PISA, an international benchmarking test for 15-year-olds that includes reading, mathematics and science, and adult cognitive evaluations. The reported trend comes amid a rise in artificial intelligence (AI) which, by some estimates, may surpass human IQ in a matter of years.

The recorded spike in the share of high school students who reported difficulties in PISA tests coincides with a broad change in people’s relationship with information, such as the transition away from reading and towards visual content, the publication explained.

I suspect they’d find that accounting for demographic changes will suffice to explain the entire decline in human intellectual abilities. I pointed that the average US IQ is on track to fall considerably back in 2015, a decline entirely due to the changes in US population demographics.

If you import millions of third-worlders, you’re not going to see the average IQ rise. The dirt is not magic. All you’re doing is gradually transitioning into a third-world country.

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The Return to Sanity

Forty years of Clown World failure – more like sixty, actually – are in the process of collapsing.

The return of sanity to politics is a significant break with the consensus of the last four decades, which produced a liberal system with ambitions to dominate the globe.

As the Soviet Union fell, a paper was published by the RAND Corporation. In 1989 Samuel Hirschfeld wrote on “U.S. Grand Strategy for the 1990s and Beyond” for the Pentagon think tank, and presented four options for the role of the United States at the end of the Cold War.

Three of them would have seen the US draw down, with one offering a “disengagement strategy” – pulling back its military and financial commitments to a minimum. These options would reduce its enormous military budget and allow it, in varying degrees, to spend the resulting “peace dividend” at home.

Only one of the four options demanded an increase in spending and commitments. This was the strategy the US decided to pursue – option one, to become the “Only Global Power”.

The strategy of world hegemony – becoming and remaining the dominant global force – became the grand strategy of the United States. This means everything it did was mobilised to support this goal. Its economic, military and political culture was shaped, along with the production of belief through the sponsorship of mass culture, towards securing world dominance.

This goal is no longer in the national interest of the United States is what the Trump administration’s new direction means. Why is it no longer interested in global supremacy? Why has it pivoted to national renewal in place of building an international empire?

There are two main reasons for this shift. One, the world has changed. Two, these enormous commitments will bankrupt the United States if they are not cancelled. The dream of global hegemony has met with the hard limits of reality. We were made to believe that the end of the Soviet Union meant that the “liberal democratic” system had won, and for all time.

THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT

Defined by Francis Fukuyama as elections plus cheap consumer goods, the fall of Soviet communism was heralded as the “End of History”, with “liberal” consumerism emerging as the perfect system.

This was the ideological basis for the argument that it should be spread around the world, by any and every means necessary – including propaganda, the subversion of sovereignty, and through the more direct means of regime change which is war.

This was the “unipolar moment” – when the world had only one power.

How was that power used?

The idea of a peace dividend was quickly forgotten. Instead of reducing the military and cultural propaganda budget, it was massively increased as a series of wars and dubious attacks furnished a globalist project with a case for a permanent “war on terror”. The US National Security State expanded enormously, with billions spent on domestic and foreign surveillance. Projects such as the National Endowment for Democracy – begun under Reagan to subvert Soviet satellite states and counter Russian influence, were expanded through cutouts like USAID to sponsor a global social revolution.

These activities resulted in the subversion of news, entertainment, and the entire political culture of the Western world, producing a system which was either perfectly suited to produce a global empire – or was totally corrupt and fake, depending on whether you agree with liberal globalism.

This is why the formerly Free World is now managed by corrupt officials in every walk of life.

From Church to State, through the military and judiciary, everyone is managed by zealous political commissars who ruthlessly punish anyone who disagrees with the liberal-global agenda. This agenda, also known as the “rules based order”, seldom defines its obvious principles.

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has given a simple explanation of what these rules are. “LBGT, open borders and war.” To this description can be added the Net Zero or Green agenda.

Whether you agree with this agenda or not it is enormously expensive to maintain.

DISSOLVING POPULATIONS
The effects on national cohesion are disastrous, as nations are replaced with global supermarkets browsed by borderless bargain hunters. Wages are driven down, and housing costs go up with increased demand, making the raising of a family nigh impossible. Birth rates have collapsed, as the financialisation of the consumer economy has seen real wages stagnant since the early 1970s.

Importing millions more people to fix this problem simply makes it worse, and will lead to the extinction of the nations of the West in short order.

This is not a problem but a solution if you seek to standardise all former nations in a global system.

Yet the costs of this ambitious utopia are endless.

The consumer lifestyle is one of convenience, in which unwanted babies can be destroyed with a pill, and the elderly taught they should dutifully dispose of themselves when they become a burden. In this system there is no higher spiritual purpose to life than shopping, with fornication a close second.

To persuade people that the politics of national and even personal suicide are progressive and desirable is also enormously expensive. The USAID scandal has shown how vast amounts of money were spent to manufacture belief in this diabolical system. Much of our news, popular entertainment, our “thought leaders”, and indeed most of our mass popular culture in music and film and video games are all simply messages from the sponsors of a war on our entire civilisation.

The reason Clown World’s potemkin global village is failing is because it is literally at war with Nature and Nature’s God. It is correctly described as the Empire of Lies because everything about it is quite literally fake and gay. It is sterile, it is uncreative, and it is unproductive. Rather like its cartoon villains, it can be defeated by simply refusing to believe its many lies and deceptions.

This is why “conspiracy theory” looks more like prophecy; because the only thing you can be absolutely certain is not true is what you are being told.

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Projecting on Putin

Clown World propaganda outlet The Atlantic absurdly tried to pin the observable loss of faith in “democracy” across the West on Vladimir Putin:

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration…

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization’s very survival.

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

This is revisionist and characteristically-inversive nonsense. The idealism of “American democracy” has vanished, not due to Putin and Xi cunningly exploiting the advantages of autocracy, but because so-called “representative democracy” has repeatedly and reliably proven itself to be aggressively opposed to the will of the people.

In fact, “Western democracy” is explicitly anti-democratic; genuine democracy that accurately expresses the will of the people is castigated as “populism” or worse. Every time the will of the people is democratically expressed, it is overturned and overruled by the elite’s captive courts; one little-realized consequence of the failure of this faux democracy as a governing system is the way that it has underlined the intrinsic corruption of the court systems which have even less respect for genuine justice than the “representative” institutions have for genuinely expressing the collective will of the people they supposedly represent.

The Founding Fathers were always rightly dubious of democracy. But their intricate tripartite system designed to achieve some of its benefits while avoiding some of its costs has turned out to be even more corruptible, and even worse, than they could possibly have imagined.

The astonishing and observably reality is that both the Russian and the Chinese systems are now superior to the wicked corruption of Western democracies, in both the moral and material senses. And this is not the result of anything the Russian or Chinese leaders have done, it is the direct result of the complete abandonment of the historical principles of Christendom that made the West great.

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Boomers Never, Ever, Learn

The absolute inability of Boomers to grasp that the things they unquestioningly believed were good things were actually very bad is astonishing. They still cling to their outdated, disproven, dyscivilizational beliefs despite the fact that they are complaining about the consequences of how they successfully changed the world, or at least the country, from what it used to be to what it is now.

BOOMER: I’m 75 years old, and I don’t recognize the America I see today. This used to be a good country. What is wrong with people?

NOT-BOOMER: The Civil Rights and Hart-Celler Acts of the 1960s is why.

BOOMER: You don’t believe in the Civil Rights Act? You sound like one of those whites-only racists.

NOT-BOOMER: Yet you’re complaining that America isn’t more like the America you were born in which was 88% white lol.

After watching tens of millions of foreigners invade the United States over five decades and transform it completely beyond recognition, Boomers are still more concerned with clinging to the Narrative and being sure that no one can call them racist than they are with the spiritual, material, technological, financial, demographic, and military decline of the country.

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Where the Men Are

All the men are doing things of which this woman disapproves, disavows, and seeks to destroy. Men have no interest in the social environments that women create, much less learning how to navigate them, and very few men have any interest in seeking the approval of what appears to be an increasingly deranged and increasingly medicated population of maleducated women devoted to dyscivilization.

Men don’t follow women. And men aren’t interested in women who don’t want to follow their lead. And interestingly enough, women aren’t interested in the few sad specimens of men who are.

It’s not a mystery. The pick-me girls don’t seem to have any trouble figuring out where the men are.

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One Pertinent Question

The Band contemplates just how deep the socio-cultural reset of Clown World is going to go:

The question is how deep the conflict goes. The beast system is built on the false materialist dogmas of the post-Enlightenment West. And proven incapable of maintaining a moral sustainable socio-culture. The West was culturally healthy to the extent that social norms were based in traditional Christian and organic values. The atrocities – from apocalyptic wars to rapacious colonialism – were all products of “Enlightened” elites. Cultural degeneration took off when those elite !values seeped into the NPC base code via screens. The pattern reveals the problem. Entropy.

In a fallen world, things that are not actively maintained degenerate. Personal, moral, social, as well as physical. On the socio-cultural level, objective standards – religious and organic – are the active maintenance. Banishing those for subjective relativism because [a human self-actualization chimera that isn’t actually real] guarantees decline.

It’s why The Band is disinterested in historical resets. Without a change in basecode assumptions, it’s just a different spot on the curve to here.

The beast system is the institutional and logistical structure of the West. The House of Lies is the operating system. The vertically integrated cloud of nonsense promulgated through every systemic organ. We separate them for analytic reasons, but the boundary is not that clear in reality. For example, Clown World globalist ideology shapes the beast system by guiding or establishing new institutions and links. How deep the conflict goes refers to how much of this symbiotic knot is under attack.

Low depth is switching some Clown World superficialities without real consequence. The most egregious beclowning is replaced with superficial civnat bromides as veneer over the House of Lies. The beast system isn’t touched at all.

This is the option The Band considered most likely. Early returns indicate this was the wrong call.

Which, I suspect, is a good thing. Not necessarily, and not necessarily leading to a significantly more promising future for our grandchildren, but at least there is some room for optimism going forward.

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The Crisis of Clown World

It simply cannot be swept under the rug or sugar-coated any longer: the Western order is in literal crisis. The people have had enough, and the avalanche is picking up inertia because the process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the more wanton elites fall, the more that citizens are energized to rise up against them. And when that happens, the elites are forced to clamp and double down on their lies, hypocrisy, and repressions in a futile attempt to stem the flow; this leads to even more ill-will, resentment, and revolt against their destructive policies.

Simplicius observes this. Peter Turchin predicted this. I predicted this. It’s becoming really freaking obvious to everyone now, everyone except the lunatics still trying to cling to power.

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We are the Elendilans

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.

The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.

Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.

If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.

I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.

But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.

Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.

When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.

Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.

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Racism, Disproved

An X-commenter proves the case for untrammeled immigration presented by Elon Musk, Ramaswampy, and Fake Short Trump:

All the vile, racist drivel on this hell site can be disproved so easily with one real life example. Look at man in his most debased and primal state, man in prison, where his survival instincts emerge. Notice how prison gangs do not segregate on racial lines, but instead, scout the top talent from the prison system, as the Black Disciples and Aryan Brotherhood furiously compete for the Indian inmates and other elite human capital.

In actuality, history underlines, illustrates, and proves the truth of Andrew Torba’s recent statement: Be racist or be replaced. Consider the selection from today’s eerily timely serialization of The Cambridge Medieval History, published in 1911:

This is the role of nomadism in the history of the world: countries too distant from its basis it could only ravage transitorily, with robbery, murder, fire, and slavery, but the stamp which it left upon the peoples which it directly dominated or adjoined remains uneffaceable. The Orient, the cradle and chief nursery of civilisation, it delivered over to barbarism; it completely paralysed the greater part of Europe, and it transformed and radically corrupted the race, spirit, and character of countless millions for incalculable ages to come. That which is called the inferiority of the East European is its work, and had Germany or France possessed steppes like Hungary, where the nomads could also have maintained themselves and thence completed their work of destruction, in all probability the light of West European civilisation would long ago have been extinguished, the entire Old World would have been barbarised, and at the head of civilisation today would be stagnant China.

In light of these historical observations, isn’t it intriguing to observe that the economic nomadism encouraged by the Enlightenment-era elite for the last 200 years appears to be in the process of extinguishing West European civilization, barbarising the New World and the Old World alike, and thereby leaving staunchly racist China at the head of global civilization today?

Perhaps greater intellectual courage, which is to say greater knowledge and acceptance of the fact that racism is neither a sin nor an evil, but a civilizational prerequisite, could have averted what is shaping up to be a global cataclysm surpassed only by Noah’s flood.

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