Decadence and Greatness

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong. —Winston Churchill (I obstinately persist in quoting this, as it is, as Churchill says, the essence of human history, which is being perversely ignored by so-called “progressives.”)

     Not long ago, one of the Demogorgons of the USA's Democrat Party, Eric Holder, former Attorney General to former President Barack Obama, as part of the globalist “Establishment’s” standard non-stop attacks on President Trump and all he stands for, publicly denied that America has ever been a great nation. This was of course a rebuttal of the Trumpian slogan Make America Great Again. In an interview on MSNBC, a dedicated anti-Trump media outlet, he stated, “I hear these things about ‘Let’s make America great again’ and I think to myself, ‘Exactly when did you think America was great?’ It certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was denied the rights to which it was entitled.” So of course the idea is, in addition to “Trump is bad and wrong, and bad,” that America will never be great so long as it does not follow a politically correct, progressive agenda to its fulfillment. From this point of view, “Great” means globalist, politically correct, feminist, more or less socialist, and practically opposed to traditional religious morals, especially with regard to sensual restraint.

     At around the same time that Mr. Holder’s speech was in the news, there was another news item involving Democratic politicians in Washington D.C. displaying the pink, white, and blue flag of transgenderism outside their offices. It wasn’t just a few of these flags either, allegedly, but rather several dozen, hung before several dozen offices. This demonstration of transsexual advocacy was done largely in protest of the Trump administration’s countermanding of the Obama administration’s efforts to have transgender persons recruited into the military. According to trans-friendly politicians, the move wasn’t because transsexuals are much more prone to mental illness and suicide and would cost the military millions in paying for psychological counseling and sex change operations, or because they are wimpy girlyboys who can’t fight so well, but out of simple “bigotry” and “hate.” Even to promote traditional religious values now, especially Christian ones, is labeled “hate” by those who wish to replace those values with something more “progressive.”

     With regard to all this I can honestly assert that I am not exactly opposed to homosexuality or transsexuality, or in other words I don’t think they should be illegal, or that gays and shemales should be thrown from rooftops or otherwise persecuted. As for slavery, I think it is obviously much more bad than good, although I suppose it might still be allowable as punishment for serious crimes, or voluntary for those few people who really would prefer to be slaves (and there are a few of those). I think, all things considered, granting women the right to vote may have been a big mistake in the long run, although it is an easily understandable one; it comes down to the old ethical question of whether a government or a society should do the right thing even if it is harmful to the nation. (And the main reason why women’s suffrage is harmful to society is that women are more emotionally insecure than men and tend to value security more than freedom—and thus they tend to vote more and more socialist, favoring the forfeiture of rights and the regulation of everyone’s everyday behavior to a much higher degree than most men do. Also, studies have shown that women tend to be much less informed on political issues than men, and mostly hold the political views that are favored by their peer group, or happen to be in fashion.) Anyway, I think some nations that have allowed slavery, etc., have been “greater” than many that have not. Republican Rome and early 19th-century America were great, despite the fact that they were human, and thus necessarily imperfect.

     But the very idea that a nation cannot be great without gay and trans rights is really pushing it. People who actually want transgender soldiers defending their nation, or who think we should have a lesbian President or a transgender Disney princess, and so on, are either abysmally ignorant of history or else are just opposed to history. Maybe they think that, as with the case of Marxism, just because something has always ended in disaster in the past, it will work next time because the people endorsing it are so wonderful and special—not like everyone else who tried it in the past.

     Personally, although I think homosexual people should be allowed to do their thing, whatever it is, in private, so long as they’re not depriving anyone else of their own rights, such aberrations from the standard heterosexual norm should not be mainstreamed or glorified. This really has been done before, and it has not ended well. That’s because the mainstreaming and normalizing of sexual deviancy is a symptom of what used to be called “decadence.”

a rather demonic-looking shemale reading stories to small children
at a public library

     I’ve mentioned before that it used to be a truism among historians that a civilization goes through a kind of life cycle, starting with tough, aggressive patriotic conservatives, who through their strength, vitality, and unity of views, values, and purpose become a great and powerful nation…which then causes the nation to become rich and pampered and luxurious, with greater concerns for what is now called “social justice” than for what is actually good for the society…which causes eventual collapse, primarily by internal rot, usually followed by an invasion of tough, aggressive patriotic, conservative barbarians. In Edward Gibbon’s classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the author mentioned as a matter of course that, historically, the rise of eunuchs into social prominence is a telltale sign of the decline of a civilization. That is happening now, except instead of “eunuchs” the people in question are called “transgender.”

     Glorifying homosexuality is a little more complicated, in that some societies have managed it fairly well, to some degree, without being destroyed. The Theban Sacred Band, to give a relatively well-known example, was the Theban army’s elite fighting force, which, under the command of Epaminondas, possibly the first great military genius in western history, defeated a numerically superior Spartan army on multiple occasions—the Spartans up until that time having been undefeated in any major land battle for centuries. The Sacred Band was composed entirely of pairs of male lovers who made a sacred vow to die fighting if their lover fell on the battlefield. Homosexuality mainly becomes a problem when it becomes primarily of the “femme” or “twink” variety, or maybe when it becomes so prevalent that it results in population decline through lack of enough heterosexuals having babies. When gay men are limp-wristedly feminine they become essentially eunuchs with balls—and are considered as such in the ancient texts of Buddhist monastic discipline. The ancient Romans even at their peak had little if any concept of homosexuality, but rather had the idea of masculinity or femininity based on who was on top, so to speak.

     The modern (or postmodern) west is decadent not only with regard to its socially prominent eunuchs but also in many other ways. Consider what has become of modern art. Consider how uninspired most movies and songs have become, relying more on skillful training of the performers and flashy production than on genuine artistic creativity. (The decline of Rome was also mirrored by the fact that the esthetic quality of art declined dramatically, with much of it consisting of inferior imitations of earlier Greek creations.) Consider how mentally and emotionally weak the young have become especially, apparently being unable to cope with words they don’t like, demanding safe spaces and everyone around them to walk on eggshells to avoid hurting their feelings or offending them. The later forms of feminism have been endeavoring to turn everybody into eunuchs of some sort or another, with or without balls, with masculinity positively demonized, or else redefined into something soft, sensitive, and effeminate. Consider how white liberals in the west have become the only major population group to be, on average, biased against their own ethnicity. The whole cultural Marxist ideology is based on attacking a system that has been the most successful and powerful and “great” in all of history, promoting like no other such concepts as individual dignity, constitutional rights, liberty, and equality of opportunity, and trying to replace it with, essentially, decadence and weakness. The patriotism and unity of purpose that used to prevail, relatively speaking, in the west are gone, and will have to be regained if our civilization is to survive. What leftists now call “progress” used to be known as “decline and fall.” It amounts to the same thing.

     There is a reason why the word “decadence” is rarely heard nowadays. It’s because we’re smack in the middle of it, and the so-called “progressives,” with hysterical, spiritually bankrupt good intentions, are trying their damnedest to increase it.

     Whether a nation is great or not does not depend on whether everyone is absolutely equal, which would amount to a kind of mandatory mediocrity if it were ever somehow accomplished. The greatness of a nation, or a civilization, depends upon the strength and accomplishments and prosperity of the people as a whole, which in turn depends profoundly on their spirit; and what we’ve got now is a demoralized spirit, mainly at the insistence of globalists, feminists, and other decadents. To vilify the strong and successful and productive, and to glorify the weak and dysfunctional, will never produce greatness.

     If I may be allowed to point out the glaringly obvious…Moral weakness and hypersensitivity are losing strategies in the Darwinian struggle for existence, no less for civilizations than for species. Not only moral feebleness and emotional fragility, but also feminism, hedonism, and other contributors to negative population growth, especially when surrounding cultures are still multiplying profusely, are practical guarantees that a culture is dying, or in danger of dying anyhow. What is required is for people to be proud of their civilization, and be willing to fight for it if necessary, and be willing to bring children into it, and be much more willing to contribute to the system than to parasitize it by depending upon a socialized welfare state, possibly even while complaining about how messed up the whole system is at the same time. This may sound harsh and unfeeling, but the fucking universe is harsh and unfeeling! As Jordan Peterson occasionally points out to his listeners, the universe is always trying to kill you, and it ultimately always succeeds. As the First Noble Truth of Buddhism observes, existence necessitates suffering. The world will never be “nice,” partly because niceness is weak and falls by the Darwinian wayside. Niceness is most effective within one’s own family, including the extended families of race and nationality. If any nation or civilization is “great,” it is the one that is most successful in a pragmatic sense, and strongest, both in body and in spirit.

     The new feminized left has degenerated into what is essentially a civilizational suicide cult. Even if it were morally superior, which it isn’t, it still would almost necessarily fail and result in chaos, collapse, and darkness. So if our state of decadence is reversible, then we’d better get on the ball and do our best to reverse it.