Tag: declineandfall

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the implications of what appears to be a Münchhausen Trilemma transitory period playing out in modern society:

The so-called Münchhausen Trilemma is actually Agrippa’s Trilemma, attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic of the Pyrrhonist school of 4th Century BC. Agrippa’s Trilemma phrases the attack a bit differently:

• Circularity: The truth asserted involves a circularity of proofs.
• Progress ad infinitum: The truth asserted rests on truths themselves in need of proof, and so on to infinity. 
• Assumption: The truth is based on an unsupported assumption.

However it is phrased, the Trilemma presents a choice of “three equally unsatisfying options.” Or so it is claimed. Is that the case? Perhaps one of the three options is not “equally unsatisfying” and there are good reasons for adopting one of these three. But before we delve into that, let’s first explain why it matters. It seems a strange thing, after all, to dwell on an unsolved 2,500 year old philosophical dilemma. Why should we care?

Human beings are rational animals; each of us is endowed with our own sense organs and our own mind. By our sense organs we receive precepts about the world, from which we form concepts about what we have perceived. What we perceive and conceive is unique to each of us; no one else has access to the qualia of our senses or the thoughts of our mind. Our consciousness is independent of others.

Human beings are also social animals, who by nature flourish only in society with others of our kind. To exist in society, human beings must cooperate, which requires establishing and asserting their needs and wants, and consensually exchanging value for value with others of their kind. When humans cannot or do not cooperate, they struggle instead, using force or fraud to extract value from others nonconsensually. In both cases, our existence is dependent on others, either as creators, traders, looters, or moochers.

The juxtaposition of our independent rationality and dependent existence creates the necessity for agreement on what can be justified as true. Man in solitude doesn’t need to know or care what others think is true. Man in society must know and care what others think is true: The very concept of exchanging value without fraud presupposes the existence of not-fraud, which is to say, truth.

When human society is simple, the justification necessary to establish truth is equally simple, and typically based on foundationalism relying on sense perception. “Is it rain out?” “Hand feel wet. Yes.” As the complexity of human society increases, the justification necessary to establish truth also becomes more complex. More and more matters arise over which each independent consciousness might disagree. “Does Theodore rightfully own Breckenridge manor?” is no simple question.

As a result, every society of sufficient complexity has created institutions such as courts of laws, trials by jury, assemblies of law, boards of peer review, and other tools to decide what is true. Each such institution fundamentally works the same way: The individual consciousness, with its ability to reason, is embedded within a group of other individuals, and a method used to force the group to come to an agreement (often by deliberation and voting, as in a jury or parliament, but sometimes randomly, esoterically, or even violently).

Over time these institutions, in the process of defining what is true, build a great scaffolding – law, custom, tradition, craft, and practice – that collectively form its culture. But always it remains that what is true about complex matters is reliant on a core set of propositions which are deemed foundational and outside the scope of deliberation. (In the words of America’s founders: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”)

That is, the culture of every society has historically arisen from a series of agreements made out of necessity to permit cooperation to accept certain propositions as justified, with these agreements developing over time in a hierarchy as society becomes more complex, with all ultimately justified by reference to propositions held by that society as foundational.

But Münchhausen’s Trilemma holds that foundationalism is merely one of three “equally unsatisfying” resolutions to the impossibility of proving any truth. And if there is no possibility of proving any truth, it would seem there is no possibility of justifying the culture of any society as good, beautiful, or right. Worse, those who would argue against our society’s way of life do not even have to grapple with its truth-claims at all: They can simply develop another culture, based on another set of propositions that are self-consistent with themselves, and dismiss our own as irrelevant, unfounded, and wrong.

Read the whole thing there. Because what we tend to regard as a culture war is just as much a philosophical war as it is a spiritual war. The reason American society is showing cracks is that its philosophical foundations have been under assault for nearly 120 years.

 Essays in Idleness observes that the libraries are metaphorically burning:

For a new generation of reactionaries, old printed books can provide a way to preserve the culture and knowledge now being systematically “re-curated” (i.e. censored and physically destroyed) everywhere I look.

But of course I meant small private libraries, that will have to be hidden from public view, and guarded against electronic penetration; not the extravagant starchitectural wonders that pass for “highbrow” among people who never formed the habit of reading.

Too, as in Aldous Huxley, and the age of Homer, we should be memorizing our most treasured works for the dark age to come. Intelligent schooling, even rote learning must, like the Catholic Church, survive underground.

This is one of the reasons we founded Castalia Library. It allows every subscriber to take on the role of those monks who saved so much human knowledge from the rise of the Dark. Given their censorious behavior, do you really believe Google Books and Amazon and other converged institutions aren’t going to systematically eradicate those books that they find “problematic” for one reason or another?

UPDATE: Speaking of Castalia Library, the bindery just sent a picture of the test stamping of the Libraria edition of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.

But the decivilizational process won’t stop until the toilets no longer function:

The effects of allowing chaos to prevail in liberal run cities across America might not be obvious to liberals now, but when their cities empty out completely, it’s going to become crystal clear. Such is the case in San Francisco, where the city’s new normal of shoplifting and chaos has driven another Walgreens pharmacy out of the city. 

The move to close the Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy came after “months of seeing its shelves repeatedly cleaned out by brazen shoplifters”, according to the SF Chronicle. The location served “many older people” who lived in the area. 

One customer told the paper: “All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters.”

The same customer photographed someone in the store, days prior, “clearing a couple shelves and placing the goods into a backpack”. Because when there’s no police and politicians are afraid to enforce the law – why not?

The penalty for shoplifting is a “nonviolent misdemeanor” that carries a maximum sentence of 6 months. But in most cases, for simple shoplifting, the criminal is simply released with conditions.

The customer, who lives a block away, said: “I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted. The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”

When the Chronicle went to visit the store, they noticed “aisle after aisle of near empty shelves” and said that beauty products seemed to be a favored target. While the Chronicle was in the store, a man with a mask on walked in, emptied two shelves into a bag and walked out the door. 

When they asked a clerk where all the products were, the clerk responded: “Go ask the people in the alleys, they have it all.”

Walgreen corporate commented: “Organized retail crime in San Francisco has increased the challenge for all retail, and Walgreens is not immune to that.”

This location is the third Walgreens to close in the city over the past year. 

The benefits of Christian civilization are not a given. Technological progress does not rely solely on knowledge, but also on societal character. Abandon Christianity, and you’ll eventually find yourself living like the pagans did prior to Christendom. 

 A new historical study entitled “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past” reaches some very similar conclusions to my own predictions for the USA:

Societies with ‘good’ governments like the Roman Empire and China’s Ming Dynasty fell harder than tyrannical dictatorships, a new study suggests.  

When ‘good’ governments – those that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power – fell apart, they broke down more intensely, US researchers say. 

Although good governments may have been able to sustain themselves longer than corrupt regimes, they tended to suffer a more catastrophic collapse when new leaders undermined social contracts with the people.

It was two British ministers, Andrew Reed and James Matheson, and not Alexis De Toqueville, who wrote: “America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” America has already ceased to be either great or good, indeed, she has ceased to be America and is now a perverse Pharisatanic empire ruling over a polyglot collection of diverse peoples.

But as America’s government was once both very good and managed to disperse wealth and power to a historically unprecedented degree, this study suggests that the coming breakdown is going to be more intense than even the most pessimistic observer tends to anticipate.

John Scalzi thinks he doesn’t miss America:

I don’t miss the America I grew up in — the America I grew up in, aside from being saddled with the strong possibility of nuclear war, had leaded gasoline and smog, it had stagflation and an oil crisis, it was a place where people smoked everywhere, including on airplanes, and people were still comfortable tossing out racial epithets in casual public conversation. It was a place where gay and lesbians and trans people couldn’t get married but could get arrested for existing in public. In my lifetime banks were not obliged to give women credit cards or loans without a male cosigner, women didn’t have the right to control their own bodies, and in the America I grew up in sexual harassment was an expected part of the cultural landscape.

So, yeah, the America I grew up was kinda terrible! And the parts of today that aren’t great are a direct result of what was terrible back then — you may have noticed we haven’t quite gotten rid of racial, sexual or gender issues, and if the GOP gets its way we’ll be saddled with them longer, because that’s how white supremacy do, and the GOP is now a white supremacist party, from the top on down. We also have the largest income and social mobility disparity in over a century, and again, that’s a direct result of policies that got their start in the era in which I grew up.

Part of the reason people have nostalgia is because they yearn for a simpler time — which for most people means a time when they were young, and didn’t know or didn’t care about the rest of the world. This presumes, of course, that one’s youth was simple, which is another reason I don’t have nostalgia; my childhood was not. It had long stretches of poverty and domestic uncertainty and I spent a lot of my time not knowing what was going to happen next — and even if I did know, I had no control over it. To be clear I also had good times and good friends and people who loved and cared for me; I’m not gunning for a “worst childhood” award here. But neither am I nostalgic for my childhood, nor for the era in which it existed.

I don’t miss the America I grew up in. I want to make the America I live in now better, so that everyone has a chance to have the moments of joy that I have been privileged to have.

This is a prime example of the problem with all the clueless Boomers and GenXers who live in safe white enclaves and believe that diversity is nothing more than a nice dash of spice and color in their comfortable lives. They don’t realize that they no longer live in America… or how desperately they will miss it once they realize what has taken its place.

Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, this is what happens when you allow the wolves to infiltrate the church leadership.

A shocking new inquiry has found that, not only did the Church of England forgive some 400 pedophiles, but it allowed them to continue working with children. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that between 1940 and 2018, some 390 people employed by the church, as clergymen or in trusted positions, were convicted of child sex abuse.

They were ‘forgiven’ for their crimes by the church and allowed to continue their duties, often in close proximity to children, the IICSA found.

“The culture of the Church of England facilitated it becoming a place where abusers could hide,” the report reads. The inquiry found the church repeatedly failed to respond in a consistent manner to victims and survivors of abuse, compounding their trauma over a period of decades.

Never continue to attend any church that “forgives” the moral failings of its leaders. The only correct response to a pastor, a priest, a deacon, or an elder publicly wailing about “sinning against my God” is: “you’re defrocked and you’re fired.”

Penitent men should be forgiven. Fallen leaders must be replaced, whether they repent or not.

 AC points out that the US “meritocracy” was always a lie:

It is amazing how a conglomeration of these little lies, slipped in below your awareness, almost subconsciously, blinded us completely. We would see pedophile rings, and idiots in power, and public graft, and organized riots, and rumors of a vast surveillance state, and the richest people who were all new billionaires that all got their money off a chance clever idea while no multi-generational old-money family starting with billions, ever stole their idea and their fortune before they ever made it, creating multi-generational dynasties with so much wealth they were undefeatable. We even see an eerie exact rerun of pre-WWII Germany. And we saw all of that, pointing to a shadow dictatorship just out of sight which was lying to us, and rerunning a global plan for world war. But what we believed was we lived in the freest country in the world with privacy, and the people in control of the government, and elections, and it could never really be taken from us. And in reality, we never had it to begin with.

But it is all falling apart now. The truth always breaks through eventually.

I left the USA in part because at the age of 20 I was given the opportunity to see, up close and personal, what sort of people were at the very heart of power in the USA. And they were not only mediocrities, they were corrupt to the bone, without an atom of truth or honesty or integrity in them. 

Perhaps the most accurate way to describe the present system of US government is wickedocracy, or if you prefer, iniquitocracy. Advancement within the system depends upon one’s willingness to take the ticket, to sell one’s soul, to render oneself a hostage to the rulers of the darkness of this world. This is why the establishment hates President Trump and Qanon with such a virulent passion. The President and the movement represent the first genuine threat to the wickedocracy in generations.

Having successfully fouled Los Angeles, Shapiru is now relocating to Nashville:

Shapiro announced The Daily Wire is relocating from LA to Nashville. Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing cited declining quality of life in the city, including high housing costs and homelessness, as the reason for the move.

This is why cities need walls. And a policy of sinking the ships. Ten years from now, when Nashville is as bad a hellhole as Los Angeles, Shapiru will be talking about moving to Idaho.

After all, that systemic pedophilia isn’t going to spread itself.

“It is disturbing how Ben defends the intentions of the movie.”

Quelle surprise….

Board of Clackamas County, Oregon, Commissioners Emergency Meeting

Thur. Sept. 10, 2020

There are lots of confirmed reports of looting, mostly in the outlying areas, Estacada, Colton, Molalla, Sandy, mostly in the outlying areas. Lots of looting has been taking place, burglaries and whatnot. There’s reports of — and this is not specific to an area but all over the county, both outlying and even closer into town — of people of extremist groups staging gas cans for later destruction. And equally concerning is there are reports of people from other extremist groups, it’s not confirmed Antifa but suspected Antifa — this is more specific to the Estacada area — reports and sightings of people armed with chainsaws. And the goal was to fall telephones poles in hopes of starting further fires.

– Captain Jeff Smith, Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department 

After hearing that from Capt. Smith here I’m inclined, Jim [Bernard, Clackamas County Commission Chair], we’ve got to make an appeal to the governor to call in the National Guard. That’s critical information that is very unsettling. There’s not enough law enforcement resources in the sheriff’s department to handle all that. And I’m fine with the curfew county-wide now more so than I was fifteen minutes ago but for crying out loud, we can’t allow a deliberate attack on property and people’s lives and just somehow leave the National Guard out there, sitting at home waiting for the call. 

– Commissioner Paul Savas

The issue, and I’m tied in, I’m sure we all are with our connections in the outlying areas of Clackamas County but it’s not only “Is this Antifa?” but it’s people’s perception that there’s a threat and so we have very strong members of our community that believe in protection of life, property, and we could have some unrest which we need to be measuring the pulse of that in our community. And so it’s beyond a specific group.

– Commissioner Sonya Fischer

Yes, I tend to anticipate that if people perceive a threat that is actually confirmed to be a threat that there just might be a little unrest if the authorities refuse to take any steps to address it. 

UPDATE: In the meantime, Oregon’s catch-and-release policy for Antifa arsonists doesn’t appear to be working very well.

Portland police arrested a man for starting a fire with a molotov cocktail and released him, only to take him into custody again the next day for allegedly setting six more fires. Domingo Lopez Jr., 45, was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on Sunday evening after police discovered a blaze set on the side of a freeway. A witness identified the suspect, who admitted to police that he’d set the fire. 

“Canadians” destroy a statue of their first Prime Minister:

Protesters in Montreal pulled down and defaced a statue of John Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, as police stood by, echoing attacks on controversial historical figures in the US. The statue’s head was broken off as it slammed to the ground from its high pedestal on Saturday in Montreal’s Dominion Square. Activists were shielded from view with umbrellas and sheets as they unbolted the statue, which was pulled from behind with a strap around its neck.

Hundreds of protesters had marched to the site to call for defunding the police. They reportedly were organized by the Coalition for BIPOC Liberation, which bills itself as “a collective of social justice groups and community activists led by black and indigenous people.”

Police asked the crowd to disperse on a loudspeaker but didn’t intervene as the statue was destroyed. None of the vandals were arrested.

While law enforcement took a hands-off approach to the toppling, it has drawn condemnation from the city mayor. Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante said that she would rather put controversial monuments “in context” rather than knock statues off their pedestals. She also suggested “adding more monuments that are more representative of the society to which we aspire.”

This is a reminder that there is no place in any civilized society for equality, tolerance, inclusivity, or diversity. Civilization is not compatible with social justice. The Greek cannot, and should not try to, compromise with the barbarian. Nor should he permit the barbarian within the gates.

It is difficult for a regime to last if its constitution is contrary to justice
.- Aristotle, Politics

Social justice is not justice, as the perversion and redefinition of justice, it is contrary to justice. And as Friedrich von Hayek correctly pointed out nearly 50 years ago, and as we have observed of it in recent practice, social justice “can be justified only in those societies in which there is a strict order of preference.”