Some very thought-provoking essays

 

I subscribe to a few Substack authors that pique my interest and make me think outside my usual box.  This morning I'd like to mention a few articles that have hit the mark over the past few days.  I highly recommend that you read them.  Individually and in aggregate, they try to forecast where our society is going - and with it, our future.

First, Ted Gioia says that "a huge change is coming".

Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press?

That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.

• How long did it take before the Renaissance got mentioned in the town square?
• When did newspapers start covering the Enlightenment?
• Or the collapse in mercantilism?
• Or the rise of globalism?
• Or the birth of Christianity or Islam or some other earthshaking creed?

The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.

. . .

There’s a general rule here—the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss.

We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.

So let’s give it one.

Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

It's a valuable examination of why our "common knowledge" is becoming uncommon, to the detriment of our society and those who are (and will be) growing up in it.  Very important, IMHO.

Next, El Gato Malo (who eschews capital letters, but will doubtless forgive me for using them) points out that the political playbook of the progressive left is nothing new.

why is so much of the modern left constantly in alliance with the worst possible people and trends?

why do they champion only anti-social anti-heros?

why do they attack virtue, resilience, and any sort of rugged individualism?

why do they seek to break any sort of successful structure, high trust system, cultural or individual confidence, exceptionalism and function?

it’s a playbook.

they do it because they need to.

and nothing about this strategy has changed since 1919.

. . .

only in the first phase is marxist-leftism about lawlessness.

that's the precursor to set up the conquest.

it's ultimately authoritarian subjugation by boot and bayonet.

the disruption serves to destroy your culture and set the stage for the demand for another one, a strongman to step in and make the streets safe and put food on the table and stop the chaos.

the goal is destruction. they want wreckage and dissolution, amorality and failure.

they want fear and dependence. that’s the only soil in which such an odious weed of tyranny can take root.

this is why marxist revolutions always commence by wrecking everything high function about the societies they seek to subsume.

they seem like the enemy of success and sanity, of flourishing and fecundity because they are.

they can only win by wiping such things out, destroying them utterly.

Last but by no means least, Rod Dreher sees in the Los Angeles riots a portent of a new civil war, one that might easily spread to Europe and engulf the entire Western world in a new "civilizational collapse".

Waking up this morning in deepest Gascony ... I can’t help wondering if what’s happening in L.A. — and that spread overnight in some ways to other US cities, I’m just seeing — is a foretaste of Europe’s future. Except things are far, far worse in Europe. If they try mass deportations here, what’s happening in L.A. will look like a schoolyard fight.

. . .

Are we at the point of Submission Or War? If Trump’s decision to enforce American law — think about that: enforce American law! — is an autocratic casus belli (as the California governor says), then … where are we, exactly? Put another way, if the only way to avoid this conflict is for Trump to say that borders don’t matter, then isn’t that a choice to surrender the country?

. . .

Yesterday in Camus’s vast living room, we listened to him discourse on how cultural knowledge has already collapsed in France. Camus is not a politician or a political polemicist, though that role has been forced on him. He became a polemicist because he is a deeply cultured man who has lived through the ruin of the things he values most. As he makes clear in his Great Replacement writings, the barbarians from abroad were aided and abetted by the native barbarians — chiefly his former comrades on the Left — who demolished cultural knowledge and authority for the sake of “justice”. This grand leveling has dispossessed the French in their own land (and has happened throughout the West). I pointed out too that technology has more recently played a role, with professors back in the US telling me that their students now can scarcely read. It’s not that they are illiterate, in the sense of not understanding what words mean; it’s that they lack the attention span to process a lengthy text, and don’t see why they should have to make the effort. AI is going to “remember” it all for them, right?

It’s civilizational collapse all right. Camus said to us yesterday that it’s imperative that people today who want to survive this intellectually and culturally form retreats where the knowledge of what it meant to be a civilized human can stay alive. He likened this to the Benedict Option. This elderly gay agnostic French writer, who has retreated to his own small rural castle, full of books and music, has taken his own version, and says we all have to find ways to do the same.

Three very important articles, IMHO.  All three reinforce each other in identifying the collapse of education and "common knowledge" into a society more ignorant of reality, and deprived of wisdom, than any in the past century or two.  I recommend them all . . . and I'm grateful that I won't be alive long enough to see their forecasts come true, if the authors are correct.

Peter