I was and am amazed at the remarkable degree of re-normalization within Western societies; that followed after the successful early-2020 global totalitarian coup which was effected under the excuse of the Birdemic, and the giga-imposition of the (unnecessary, ineffective, harmful) Peck.
That the significant collapse of the world state was Not due to any kind of positive spiritual awakening is obvious from the mass failure to understand and learn from 2020; from continued strategies of Western self-destruction by multiple means; and from the gratuitously destructive, Western-caused, wars that are continually sustained and escalated.
My best guess of the cause of totalitarian recession post Birdemic is of increased dissent among the ruling class, causing loss of governmental cohesion and control.
To sustain the 2020 coup required that members of the "elite" ruling global government would suppress their own selfish short-term inclinations; and instead pursue a long-term group-agenda of mass surveillance and population control.
But instead, the erstwhile world rulers have broken down into multiple hostile factions, each pursuing a more local agenda.
Plus - rampant and accelerating individual-level self-gratifying corruption among members of the elite ( e.g. self-enrichment, and indulgence of spiteful personal resentments); has combined with the runaway factionalism, to destroy the cohesion of the 2020 worldwide totalitarian takeover.
In other words - although this relative relief from the tyranny of 2020 is welcome, there is no cause for celebration at Good Triumphant.
There is no positive reason for betterment; the Western trend toward evil has not reversed; and the partial collapse of 2020 global totalitarianism is Not a valid reason for civilizational optimism.
2020 was a bonfire of the institutions. The mass media and the universities slowly lost their purpose over the preceding decades. As serious people left, unserious people took control. Despite losing their purpose, institutions retained prestige. Prestige wielded by unserious people caused the omnihysterias of 2020. That prestige is now gone.
ReplyDeleteI agree it's not a happy ending. The institutions have lost their power to influence, but nothing replaces them. The 'normal' we have returned to is a society without any capacity to act.
@C incapacity to act - that's it. The UK gov't theoretically has wanted - more than anything - to begin full war with the Fire Nation for more than three years, and there is no significant public resistance to the idea - but apparently the demon serving leadership cannot (so far) overcome the national paralysis.
ReplyDeleteAnother possibility is the intervention of spiritual good, either directly or through individuals or groups.There was certainly no general spiritual awakening, but here “quantitative judgments don’t apply”, in Evelyn Waugh’s phrase, and perhaps some hobbit took up his spiritual sword and dealt a crippling blow to the Witch King. “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere”. Perhaps one person turning to good brought the number of “righteous” up to ten and caused God to delay the destruction, as in Genesis 18, or perhaps it was the prayer of some sick old woman in a nursing home for her feckless descendants which moved God. This is of course a theme throughout Tolkien and also in Lewis’ “Hideous Strength” and in Williams novels such as “War in Heaven”. Leon Bloy has a statement of this well known amongst Catholics. “History is like a vast liturgical text in which the iotas and punctuation marks are worth as much as versicles or whole chapters, but the relative importance of each is not to be determined and is profoundly hidden. Therefore, if I think Napoleon may well be an iota shining with glory, I am obliged to remind myself, at the same time, that the battle of Friedland, for instance, may easily have been won by a little girl of three, or a hundred-year-old tramp, asking God that His Will be done both on earth and in heaven…we are all of us together figures of the Invisible, and you cannot move a finger or slaughter two million men without signifying something which will be made manifest only in the beatific Vision”.
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