The collapse of a great civilization is as anticlimactic as the death of a terminal cancer patient. As always, there is writing on the wall, for those who remember how to read it.
by Vijay Prozak
In the end stages of every great civilization, several things happen. First, impetus is lost: people no longer have an urge to create civilization as, heck, it’s already here, let’s enjoy it and not think too hard, because the people that made this place, they took life too seriously, man. Second, consensus is lost, in that people accustomed to appreciating the benefits of society no longer have the singular focus on maintaining it that comprises a healthy goal set. Once consensus is lost, what we commonly call “values” cannot exist, since there’s no agreement about what is valued. After this, the symptoms set in, namely internal division, loss of learning and culture, and of course, bad breeding, first within the bloodline and then miscegenation.
This is how great civilizations fall, and you can see their ruins today all over the earth. T.S. Eliot was correct to note that “it ends” with a whimper and not a bang, because by the time the ancient structures are falling, there are few left who can actually realize what’s happening. Most of the population have already transitioned to the idea of living among the ruins in a more primitive state, and lacking most qualities of discernment in themselves, aren’t much concerned about how all finer things are crumbling around them, because they still have their fast food and television and are content with that.
There is rarely a sudden appearance by the forces of evil to sweep into the streets and crush a vibrant culture; rather, the collapse of a great civilization is as anticlimactic as the death of a terminal cancer patient.
As always, there is writing on the wall, for those who remember how to read it. Lacking a goal, people become obsessed by novelty and personal conceits, so instead of having hearty, strong people who can create, you have very trendy people who adorn themselves excessively and are neurotically obsessed with appearance. This is a natural consequence of having lost consensus, because since there is no longer a goal to the society as a whole and an agreement about how to reach it, people focus on living in a society of disorder. To gain power in such a society, one entertains and flatters, and this requires a decadent but “different” lifestyle in order to distinguish oneself in any way. Bread and circuses for the poor, trinkets and fads for the wealthy.
One can survive such a society, but it requires doing something most free-willed people find abhorrent: dedicating themselves in the largest part toward earning money, and sacrificing most of their time to this goal. Work six day weeks and bring home a fat paycheck, and you can get out into the suburbs where most people are gentler. You can afford the Alta Dena organic dairy milk, the no-pesticide vegetables, the finer clothes; you can drive a nice car, and buy memberships in places where the screaming rabble don’t congregate. However, ultimately, such a lifestyle requires increasing amounts of money as the rest of the economy collapses and thus such finer things become aberrations in a consumer environment rewarding goods that above all are cheap — quality becomes second to quantity.
In effect, this destroys the middle class, because it raises the bar on the cost of living outside of the undifferentiated mass. You’re either wealthy, and living in a gated community, or you’re with the rest living in a technological third-world environment. With the loss of the middle class comes a loss of the ordinary, hardworking decent people in the world, because they are turned into either whores for money or semi-impoverished scatterbrains like the rest. When that occurs, the base of support for the finer things in life — the arts, culture, and learning — falls entirely into the hands of the wealthy, who are not really concerned with getting it right; they’re concerned with finding a way to make millions so they escape the hoi polloi. Culture dies; art dies; learning dies.
Of course, the mutant corpses survive. There will be “art” — but it will be little more than decoration, “unique” patterns and styles designed to shock or amuse: the kind of stuff that Hitler, being an artist, had no problem ordered being destroyed. There will be “culture,” but it will consist of going to places where you buy things to participate in cultural events with all of the decorum and depth of a Nirvana concert. The institutes of higher learning will continue but will devote most of their time to teaching the ways of the new society, re-interpreting the older knowledge to fit the new rubric and, consequently, destroying it as a system of thought. It, too, will become aesthetics, and although it will exist in reference books (if not burned by the “progressive” newcomers) there will be only a handful who understand it, and none who can add to it.
This is the future that T.S. Eliot and other writers of his generation saw in the 1920s, when America first became obsessed with money and fads, and the first wave of “mostly-white” immigrants rode into the middle of a fair complexioned Northern European stock. Currents in thinking changed, then the population changed, and that cycle begat another. What T.S. Eliot was fortunate enough not to see is the dimension to which modern society has grown. Thanks to industrial technology and greater transportation, this is now a global society, with counterdependent economies and military alliances. It probably does not pay to wonder if the domino theory will apply in nations falling to decay, but it’s clear that most nations are on the same liberal democratic, global industrial society path, and thus will suffer similar fates.
You can’t mention any of this in the current time, of course. Since there’s no goal, people are concerned with making their own money and “rising above” the undifferentiated masses, thus they are mortified that you might offend someone by pointing out that there could be a consensus, because having agreement in values would make some people “better” and “others” worse for the purpose of having citizens who can enact those values. They are also socially concerned; they can’t speak out without losing friends and alienating potential mates. Where bravery is called for, sheeplike herdthink prevails instead simply because the immediate personal cost is too high, although the long-term personal cost of inaction will be much higher. Most can’t handle that so conclude that with personal death their interest in the world ends.
So what is someone concerned about having a civilization to do?
The first and most important task is to begin sorting the world into yes and no categories. This means finding out what you will support, and what you do not consider part of the fulfillment of your goals. In this, you are escaping some Absolute vision of what is “right,” as the conservatives do, and opting for the stronger assertion of will that is “I prefer.” It transcends subject and object classifications, and will occur to the degree of which the individual is capable, but this is a more flexible system than some knee-jerk Absolute which rapidly parodies itself and becomes reactionary and preservationist, which is an error because what is needed is not to save a society that exists — that one has already fallen, I’m afraid — but to create a new society according to the ancient tradition of the Indo-Europeans.
After Friedrich Nietzsche, who asserted a naturalistic and aristocratic social system and derided liberal democracy for its failings, there was René Guénon, who gave us a simple logical device for understanding resistance to modern society: all that we saw in the ancients that was functional is part of a set of values that are true in any age because of their fundamental recognition of the problems of reality for those who desire higher civilization, and that is called Tradition; what opposes it is Modernity, and the “progressive” society that believes we can reach some Utopic ideal through egalitarian and utilitarian government. Guénon was correct in dividing current history into these two threads, as Modernity takes many forms, including both Capitalism and Communism, conservatism and liberalism. There is no escape from Modernity once you begin using its divisions.
This split is important in that it allows us to group all aspects of traditional, pre-Christian Indo-European civilization — what is called “ascendant” civilization because it believes in evolving toward a higher state of an eternal ideal, in contrast to “progressive” civilization which advocates a constant change of ideal on a route of progress to Utopic liberalism — into something which can not only be upheld but developed. The only future for Indo-Europeans is to stop trying to finding Absolute reasons to “prove” we are right, and to start building this form of ascendant, Traditional civilization within the train wreck of ideas that is a modern time.
One aspect of Traditional civilization worldwide, regardless of race, is ethnoculture, which is the idea that no culture can exist without its traditional ethnicity to uphold it, because the tens of thousands of generations that produced that culture also shaped the population through selection for those who tended toward upholding its ideal values. Ethnoculture does not designate an Absolute “superior” or “inferior” race. Instead, it asserts an “I prefer”: for each culture to exist, it must prefer to have its own ethnic group isolated from all others. This is not inbreeding; there’s enough variation in even a small population to avoid inbreeding. It’s not “racism,” in the sense of wanting to keep others down, but it’s an honest statement of need and will to keep them out so that the culture can develop without becoming a mixed-race society like so many remnants of collapsed ancient civilizations.
The only workable way to create a Traditional civilization is to begin working with the declining ruin at hand. Yes, the basic values of society around us are defunct, but like a disciplined wrestler, we can use its oncoming weight against it and thus achieve our own means. For that reason, the first proposition of this article is that we accept “diversity,” and take it to its logical extremes.
Diversity means having different groups coexisting; however, in order for them to remain different groups, they can’t merge (our media and institutes of higher learning seem to have forgotten this part). As I once put it to a homosexual gentleman, diversity means that I don’t think much about what you do in your bedroom, but it also means that you don’t begrudge me the right to make gay jokes and be repelled by sodomy, because to a heterosexual, such behavior would be a disastrous submission and loss of masculinity. I respect his “difference,” but he has to respect mine. The same applies to different ethnic groups. To acknowledge their difference is to recognize that participation in that group is limited to members of that group, and no matter how “authentic African art” we buy at Wal-Mart, we’re still members of our own.
This requires formally defining diversity in the first place, and getting some public agreement on this fact. The definition proposed above benefits all groups, as it keeps them distinct from others and guarantees them the ability to govern themselves culturally. A change of this nature would reverse the current tendency for “diversity” to become an emotional value of a passive nature, translated into “accept everyone regardless of their behavior,” which is exactly the opposite mentality of every group that has ever created a civilization with more than mud huts and large rodents roasting on the open fire. Some might call this change “extremist diversity,” but every philosophy should be able to be extended to its extremes without becoming paradoxical.
Because after culture has fallen the task of restoring culture is an artificial one, meaning imposed externally instead of occurring “naturally” from within, it can’t be done with bureaucracy or rules. It has to be done by creating something and drawing those who can appreciate it into the fold, and this can only be done by eschewing alienated ideology for a commonsense belief system that does not require them to give up their membership in society or to adhere to any philosophies of a radical or violently emotional nature. The philosophies these people will find meaningful are ones based on “I prefer” which involve action toward a positive goal. They are not interested in bigotry, nor are they interested in Utopic silliness from liberals. They want a better way of life. This is the origin of all civilization-building, from the first caveman who decided having a permanent fire might be a good idea, onward.
We’ve all read the articles in National Geographic talking about the isolated tribe of Whatitsname “fighting hard to preserve their traditional culture and ways in the face of the onslaught of modernity.” You would never guess from public rhetoric in America that Indo-Europeans are fighting the same battle. We can win it by taking our society’s mechanisms and adapting them singularly to our own need in the type of scenario described above. If we begin building something new that is an option within the realistic spectrum of choices offered to people in our society, the hardiest among them will consider it and be likely to move. The others are too busy “just doing my thing, man” and we are fortunate for their voluntary exclusion.
This plan would require an Indo-European living space. To get started, it needs some kind of economic base, even if only a single corporation that is willing to hire local people. Once the character of the community is started, the laws of our society must be changed. Anti-discrimination legislation, including the Housing and Urban Development rules, no longer need apply in a modern society, so we can campaign to have them removed, not on the grounds that we “hate” other groups, but on the ethnocultural grounds described above — “white people” are no longer in charge of America, and this group of Indo-Europeans wants the right to preserve itself. Similarly, other affirmative action legislation needs to be repealed. It has served its purpose, and now isn’t needed; we want the right to hire only our own kind so we are not forced to alter the makeup of our community to fit racial quotas. This would be a quiet revolution in American law against “one size fits all” legislation to something that would allow actual diversity by giving localized groups the ability to rule themselves, as culturally appropriate, in ways different than those preferred by the undifferentiated masses.
A state such as this, whether located in one place or communities distributed across a continent, will require its own cultural conventions, much as neighborhoods of a longstanding ethnic mix have their own informal ways of governing themselves. It will require its own media: its own television, its own authors, its own artists. It will require its own economic structure that only hires members of that community. Much like successful cultural holdouts such as the Basque or Amish, it must be willing to isolate itself without falling into a passive and hopeless “reservation mentality.” In all likelihood, it would be a feudal state organized by breeding — much like National Socialism. With only a handful of legal changes, it can happen in modern America and Europe, and can separate those worth saving from those who oblivious go into the same doom that has afflicted all great civilizations.
It may seem like fanciful thinking now, and perhaps this article is only metaphor for the changes needed in society as a whole, but given that society has developed on its current path through 2,000 years of liberal democratic thought, it is unlikely to alter its course without violent collapse and revolution, things which historically have not afforded the birth of a new civilization but have cheerfully destroyed many remnants of the old. Civilizations die like stars, by collapsing inward, and the only way to reverse that is to birth a new star from the ashes of the old. We are in the end stages of what our ancestors built, and the time has passed where we could simply destroy alien elements and consider ourselves saved; we must create something new according to the values which engendered the great Indo-European civilizations. In this new birth is our only future.