James Doyle Penrose [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In some of my own articles I’ve explored things I believe are going wrong with our society and civilisation. I very much believe there are multiple issues which we are failing to deal with, and each of them has a capacity to deliver a killing blow to our increasingly fragile civilisation.
Many of you will have read about the survey carried out of muslims living in Britain by ICM on behalf of Channel 4 in 2016. It revealed that rather than integrating into wider society, very large numbers of muslims hold views which are the antithesis of the tolerance preached by the supporters of multiculturalism. Here are some interesting quotes from an article published in the Sunday Times written by Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission:
“There is one truly terrifying finding. Muslims who have separatist views about how they want to live in Britain are far more likely to support terrorism than those who do not. And there are far too many of the former for us to feel that we can gradually defeat the threat.”
“We have ‘understood’ too much, and challenged too little — and in doing so are in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims.”
“The unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future … I thought Europe’s Muslims would gradually blend into the landscape. I should have known better.”
Trevor Phillips you will remember, is the man who first coined the term “islamophobia”. Apparently he’s had something of a change of heart.
Muslim populations are, if you will excuse the pun, exploding across the Western world. Their birth rates are far outpacing native Westerners. As Trevor Phillips has now realised, far too many of them are not integrating and are instead adopting views and beliefs which are completely inimical to Western Civilisation.
Our establishment, our politicians, our police, our judges and our media all seem to be at best turning a blind eye to it. At worst they are complicit in the islamisation of the West. We are living in what is difficult to describe as anything other than a police state right now. There are very likely police reading these very words looking for proscribed “hate speech”.
Which leads me on to the next grave problem facing our society. Authoritarianism.
The Americans like to believe they are the one shining beacon of liberty in the world. They like to believe their system is the best and the most successful. The truth is in less than 250 years they’ve managed to create the biggest swamp in the known universe, they’ve racked up over $20 trillion national debt, $200 trillion unfunded liabilities, their welfare bill is the equivalent to 16% of the gross earnings of every single American employed in the private sector and they’ve got the worst adult literacy rate in the developed world.
The American experiment looks increasingly like a failure which could very possibly drag the rest of us down with it. This country I believe had the better overall approach. Slow and steady does it. This country is the one which has been the leading light of Western Civilisation. This is why it’s heart breaking to see the British government taking political prisoners in 2018 and operating a police state. The extent to which we have lost our way is incredible. Whilst we play with our iPads and gorge on a gazillion channels of utter shit on Sky our society has slid into authoritarianism.
It’s both astonishing and incredibly sad to see such a short time after our nation helped defeat Nazism and Communism the authoritarian snake has slithered into the heart of our society.
I take heart in the fact authoritarians and dictators never stand the test of time. Their very nature is to destroy themselves sooner or later. I do very much fear the cost in both misery and human life they will exact on society before their inevitable demise.
The next threat is a very insidious one. Decadence and the dissolution of the moral fabric of society. It appears over the last 50 years or so we have become completely detached from any notion of personal or collective responsibility. All of our problems are somebody else’s fault and we don’t have to take responsibility for our own decisions, choices or failures. Combined with rampant consumerism, materialism and the relative wealth of our society versus that of previous generations it becomes only too evident we have turned into feckless arseholes. Family and community are gone. Now we seem to be only interested in *things*. A better house, a flashier car, a better holiday. The content and measure of one’s character and intellect no longer matter, it’s all plastic tits and shit tattoos in an attempt to mimic the pond life which passes as celebrity these days.
It seems for a very large section of society, life has become a bizarre fantasy filled with the mindless pursuits symptomatic of the intellectual and moral decay of Western Civilisation.
The final threat is the hardest one for people to grasp. The collapse of the financial system. It’s quite a difficult subject to get your head round which I suspect is why most people pay no attention to it.
An explanation of our financial system is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s one I would definitely like to write in the near future. Suffice to say our entire financial system is built upon debt that will be paid by the wealth created by future generations. We’re all living on giant national credit cards. If for whatever reason we can no longer convince our credit card lender we can pay the debt, we’re in very serious trouble.
Our entire financial system is a gigantic house of cards that came very close to falling down in 2008 and we’re rushing headlong into doing it all over again.
Apart from the disastrous real world consequences of a financial collapse; your bank balance becoming worthless overnight because your bank ran out of money, a loaf of bread costing £100 or filling up your petrol tank costing a couple of month’s wages… understand when social security and benefits stop getting paid law and order will rapidly break down in our towns and cities. There aren’t enough police to keep order. Think of the 2011 London riots, but on a much larger scale.
I understand I’ve painted a very grim picture. On balance I think yes, our civilisation is going to come crashing down around us within a generation or two. I certainly hope we can do something to avert the coming catastrophe, perhaps some sort of political, cultural or social revolution. However, at some point we have to consider the worst case scenario and we are living in the dying days of Western Civilisation and find ourselves on the cusp of a new Dark Age.
Think of some of the civilisations and cultures which have been lost to history. The Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians, various Mesoamerican civilisations like the Aztecs, the Inca, the Olmecs. We know relatively little about them and what we do know has to be pieced together from the archaeological record. How much of these civilisations’ knowledge, experience and achievements were lost? We can never know because no records were kept when these civilisations fell.
During the Dark Age that followed the fall of Rome it was the Christian monks of Europe who kept the flame of civilisation burning. They recorded much of the collected knowledge of Greaco-Roman Civilisation which proved so vital in the creation of modern Western Civilisation. These monks were perhaps the greatest unsung heroes of our history. They preserved and guarded the knowledge until such a time as we were ready to use it again.
Just for a second consider how much knowledge would have been lost if those monks hadn’t made the effort to preserve it through the Dark Ages.
If you’re familiar with the Fraser-Tytler Cycle you’ll know we’re currently in a pretty bad place and what’s coming isn’t going to be very pleasant. You’ll also know that the Fraser-Tytler Cycle predicts civilisation will rise again. Night always gives way to the dawn which turns into the bright day.
Perhaps we need to be thinking about how we can best preserve the knowledge of Western Civilisation in preparation for the coming night. So that when the dawn breaks once more it is ready and waiting to be rediscovered and put to best use by those generations that will follow us.
© Æthelberht 2018
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