All human societies have some form of belief system, usually based in the supernatural or in unexplained mysteries. People who study these things think that belief is one of the earliest modern human traits. Language and religion, the formalization of belief, most likely evolved together. That certainly makes sense. Religion has always been a handy store of knowledge and language is the way in which it can be transported over time and place. They are complimentary.
That is speculative, but what is not speculative is that all known people have had something we would consider to be a faith system. Primitive people have primitive belief systems, usually based in natural phenomenon like the seasons and elements. American Indians have a whole collection of deities based in nature. More complex societies create more complex myths and belief structures. The Greeks and Romans had complex systems. Christianity is a rich and complex belief system.
We in the modern West tend to think we have moved past this stuff. The educated classes, while not willing to say they are atheists, scoff at the religious. The most you will get from the upper classes is the line about being spiritual, but not religious. The truth is, Western elites are believers like all people in all times, maybe more so. It is just that their beliefs are informal and ad hoc. The people toting canvas sacks to the market are doing so because our better say nature demands it of us.
Belief systems describe a people. The ancient Egyptians had a complex belief system like many ancient people. Their religion, however, was unique in that it was entirely focused on the afterlife. They did not make sacrifices and pray for the here and now. They built monuments, complex burial systems and temples in order to prepare the living for the after life. There is a good argument that this focus on the after life is what allowed the Egyptians to keep their culture going for 3,000 years.
On the other hand, the Greeks were not overly concerned about the after life. Their focus was on the here and now. The gods interfered in the lives of men, so it made sense to focus devotion on swaying the gods to act on your behalf or against the interests of your enemies. The Greeks did have the concept of an afterlife, but it was not the focus of their belief system. Immortality for man was possible by having sons, who would carry his name, or dying for his polis, which would live on and remember his name.
The Greeks may have been more concerned with the present, when it came time to worshipping the gods, but they had a nice long run. It was not as if they were hedonists, living only in the moment. Even so, this focus on the now had some odd results. For instance, we know just about every Egyptian ruler and his deeds. We even have some of their corpses. The Dorian Greeks, on the other hand, burned their kings, as well as any record of them. We know nothing about them as a result.
This brings up an important point about our present age. The cult of Gaia, for example, is long on rhetoric about the future, but its focus is on present virtue. The greens are not trying preserve the environment for future generations. They are hoping their efforts snuff out future generations. The same is true of anti-racism and multiculturalism. These are all about the present. Calling them suicide cults is useful rhetoric, but in fact our virtuous rulers do not think past tomorrow. it is all about grace today.
This is particularly true with regards to migration. Nationalists like to cook up complex theories as to why our rulers are wedded to the idea of mass immigration. Some say it is cheap labor. Other say it is cheap votes. Still others see it as spite. All of those things are true, but the real motivation is virtue. Instead of a public ceremony where they sacrifice a bull or consecrate a church, inviting in the poor and downtrodden is the big public act of virtue. The consequences are down the road. The grace is today.
It is not just vanity. We are the first people to have no conception of an afterlife. Even the Greeks believed in the after life and they believed there was judgement of souls. They may not have made that the focus of their faith, but they still believed there was something beyond this life. This spiritual hopelessness of Western elites may be why the Cloud People couch everything in terms of personal fulfillment and self-actualization. It is a way of crossing the river Styx without actually believing in it.
The nuttiness of modern elite culture may simply be a neurosis arising from the conflict between the natural desire of man to be remembered, colliding with the lack of any reason to be remembered. Even the humblest of men will carve his name into a tree or scratch his name on his prison wall. “I was here” is the primal scream. Today, that impulse has no outlet. The lonely barren spinster yells “I was here” and the only thing that happens is the cat stirs and then goes back to sleep.
Maybe this is it for us. Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West.
I wrote a post on a blog of mine that may help to explain the goals of a religion, or a religion-like belief system. Here it is:
http://improvingbuddhism.bravesites.com/entries/general/goals-and-improved-buddhism
what you have said is essentially correct, but you do not follow through. You peeled one layer of the onion. Peel the next!
Yes, our leaders, our elite seek to be virtuous. But who or what determines what is virtuous? And what forces made that determination? And what are the effects of being virtuous or non-virtuous?
Let us peel this next onion layer together. Are you ready? Great.
Things happen in this universe for a reason. If an apple falls from a tree, the force that causes its movement is called gravity. Cause and effect. Forces. Effects.
What forces caused us to think that flooding our developed nation with third worlders is virtuous?
Cui bono? Who benefits from mass immigration of third worlders? Follow the money. The big corporations benefit. The CEOs and plutocrat shareholders benefit from mass immigration. How?
The economy is largely based on confidence in the future. Once businesses and consumers sense an impending downturn, they stop spending. Which causes a crash.
The economy is 80% based on consumer demand. Consumer demand is largely based on population. White collar workforces have fewer children. So the developed nations have fewer children, which causes a drop in consumer demand. Also, high tech/phones/computers cause a drop in consumer expenditure. Less consumer demand. How can the corporations increase consumer demand? Increase population. How? Mass immigration.
So that is the force–greed. CEOs. Plutocrat shareholders.
So, how is the force of greed shaping what is seen as virtuous?
Picture a newspaper editor in the past. Say 1990. The editor writes an editorial saying immigration is bad because it destroys the cultural fabric, etc. You know the drill. The CEO of a corporation that advertises in that newspaper reads the editorial and thinks that this editorial goes against his interests. He is making millions as long as the economy stays afloat, meaning as long as consumer demand stays up. Less immigration means less consumer demand (yes, even if on welfare, immigrants CONSUME). So the CEO calls the newspaper owner and demands that the editor be fired and that the newspaper issue an apology to immigrants. The newspaper does that because advertising is their income.
Now do you see the chain of causation? Force and effect? Cause and effect?
Now picture a young up and coming intern at that newspaper. He/she sees what happened to the editor who knocked immigration. Now, years later, when that intern is an editor, how will he/she behave? Well, the intern made editor will praise immigration. And the readers will ingest that propaganda and it will affect their behavior.
Now multiply that scenario 1000 times over decades.
Greed is the force that creates propaganda, which is in turn ingested by humans, which modifies their behavior.
So virtuousness is a cover, a disguise, a rationalization for self-interest.
Belief systems are rooted in the common belief of another existence prior to this one, a presupposed unknown. Our ability to form an abstraction and bring it into the third dimension validates this “belief”. Without this function, there would be no concept of a past or future, only the here and now. It is in this inner space the past is revealed and the future unfolds. Knowledge is the currency of the power to create reality, increased exponentially by the merging of minds with a common goal.
Barren cat ladies are waiting for us to make their world a better place. We won’t let them down.
ot: Zman, what’s your take on the weinstein take-down? that bastard looks like he is one more piece of bad news away from topping himself. looks like he will pull the temple down around himself, too, judging by Affleck and Damon getting sucked in so quickly.
Yes. What a joke. We don’t have God any more but we have had militant secular religions that reach around the world that make all previous religions look like Sunday outings.
There was a West of a different sort long before Christianity. Its not exactly what we are used too but it lasted centuries and worked well enough
If we can get over the space between loss of our old religion and its assumptions and the natural formation of a different one, we’ll be fine
Look at it this way Christendom was already waning but the 1600’s which is what 600 years without paganism , the Greek, Roman and Celtic lasted even longer before they too ran dry
Its a natural cycle and once the hump is passed we’ll get by with some mix of religious ideals and faith that works for us.
This is a painful way off, we are basically just entering our Fin de Siecle (a few decades in) and there is some time yet before its done and anew cycle starts , Till than chaos
How hilarious! The idea that Greens who want us to have clean drinking water, organic food instead of GM Frankenfood and pollution-free air belong to some kind of “cult of Gaia” is priceless comedy. Have you tried selling this idea to Hollywood? The cult of the military-industrial complex, intent on destroying all vestiges of family life, healthcare, a social safety net or meaningful human rights, will certainly donate some of their millions to produce such a film!
Meanwhile, as a Christian Green, I will continue to fight for human rights, safe, clean drinking water, ecology and conservation of life on this beautiful planet. Not merely because I believe in the afterlife, but because I want to enjoy a clean conscience in this life. Allowing people fleeing from war is not “suicide”– it’s doing what Christ commanded when he said, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.”
You do of course realize that over 95% of people seeking to invade the West are not “fleeing from war”, they are seeking greater welfare benefits and greater material prosperity, don’t you? You do realize that mass immigration from the Third World, as opposed to helping them in their own countries, means the total destruction of much of the environment of Europe and the Americas, don’t you? And doesn’t “The least of these” include to increasingly battered, unemployed, and crime-victimized people of the West, especially the poor? And can’t you see that the “Military-Industrial” elites that you so rightly despise are using you, and people like you, to import new compliant voters and lock in the policies you hate permanently? Despotism, stolen elections, civil and race war, environmental degradation, the grinding of the poor in a race to the bottom” for wages, enriching only the oligarchs – is this really what you think Christ wants?
I salute your idealism, but I think that, as a “Christian Green” you will soon find have no alternative to support the cause of nationalism. It’s the only way out of chaos. As a very great “Christian Green”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once said “Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.”
Women who avoid having children (you) are civic pollution. Their maternal instincts, denied the outlet they were designed for, become shrunken and twisted, nagging instead the civilization which they refused to actually contribute to without ever first comprehending it. We’re not laughing.
You so wonderful.
To be extremely explicit, religions are created by small groups of individuals with some purpose in mind. The details of the religion have to ensure that others will be motivated to spread it, and help it expand its numbers; bright people can do that. If you don’t understand the reasons these small groups had to take the trouble to start a particular religion, you will not understand its evolution or its downfall.
Cosmogony is evolutionary? If that is true, then why did Darwin, who stole the theory of evolution from poor old Alfred Russell Wallace, end-up with essentially the same cosmogony as the Navajos even though Darwin had none of the same mutations and traits etc as they did and was born thousands of miles away.
Evolution is a false religion and there is not the least bit of evidence for the development of either the idea of religion or language but men have been persuaded that evolution is a fact and to deny it means you are, well, an ape.
Tom Wolfe’s book , “The Kingdom of Speech” exposes the evolutionary scientists as a clique of quacks who stole the work of another and attributed it to Darwin.
Of course, none of this will matter to most of those who love to intelligent signal every bit as much as leftists love to virtue signal.
Just thought I’d chirp in, to suggest that we all read (or, re-read, for I wouldn’t want to presume) Christopher Lasch’s last book, the 1996 “The Revolt of the Elites”.
Report back with any changes of heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA
Love the site.
The lefts total lack of awe keeps amazing me. We might be totaly alone!
Man will always substitute one religion for another. Take Darwinism, Marxism, or Freudianism. With the exception of natural selection, there are no facts that can be even anecdotally proven with the Theory of Evolution. And everyone of those theoretical maxims was provided by a finite man. Marxism has had over 160 years to show that there are any results that show the accuracy of another finite man’s opinions. And Freudianism….don’t get me started. How did Freud gain access to the “Big Cosmic Book of the Symbolism of Dreams”, the one in which a cigar is symbolically a penis? Or what divine being showed Jung the archetypes that “everyone” subconsciously recognizes?
No, if someone wants to destroy a religion, they will first create a substitute religion. We know this from the over 3000 year example of Akhenaton and the Sun God Aton, or from Constantine changing the Roman pantheon of the Gods to Christianity. We also see it in the destruction over the last 50 years of Christianity, to be replaced by some form of committee designed humanism. A childish religion that requires as much or more faith as Christianity.
There comes a time when just shutting up, and listening to the life around you, becomes an argument. For what? Well, that’s up to you.
Read Walker Percy’s “Lost in the Cosmos”, have a drink, and calm down.
They don’t believe in tomorrow because thinking about tomorrow keeps you from doing whatever you would most like to do today.
I think you can add to this the effects of the digital age. There won’t be much left behind by modern man. No notes, pictures, and we certainly can’t have any statues! Plastic doesn’t age well either.
The fall of the West coincides with the loss of objective truth. If there is no objective truth, no clear right or wrong, then EVERYTHING is on the table. You can do anything you want to anyone you want because you only need to ask yourself for permission.
The Simpsons nailed this years ago (1993) with their “Be Like the Boy” episode. http://pixa.club/en/the-simpsons/season-5/epizod-7-bart-s-inner-child
The relevant part starts at 12:00. To quote Lisa, “This is madness. He’s just peddling a bunch of easy answers!”
If you want to understand America in 2017, just watch from 12:00 to the end. Some fascinating commentary on everything from religion to “self help” to the PC linguistic nonsense of the Left.
If you think about it, there aren’t a lot of things left that we all agree in the West to be wrong. Murder? Well, it depends on who it is, right? No shortage of people who hope and dream for a Presidential assassination, for example. Sexual deviancy has been defined down to the point where the only thing really left protecting a lot of people is their birthday…their age…and that won’t last much longer. We can’t agree on the flag as a unifying set of principles any more, even though the people protesting it are almost wholly responsible for the ‘oppression’ they claim exists. And so on…
“Now the seniors in the back-we like Roy”, lol! Ah, the glamour of evil. Being transgressive is not as much fun when everyone else is doing it, too.
Dostoevsky also nailed it in The Brothers Karamazov in 1879, when Ivan observed, ” If There Is No God -Then Everything Is Permitted’
Language and religion, the formalization of belief, most likely evolved together. That certainly makes sense. Religion has always been a handy store of knowledge and language is the way in which it can be transported from one generation to the next. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for both to coexist.
Evolution is a false faith and one way we can see that is so is the way evolutionist attribute teleology to a system of mutations and random selection, that is, a pretend system that excludes purpose.
How can one claim such a system makes sense when even the most dogmatic believers in the evolution of language have thrown in the towel and now admit they can no longer pretend that language evolved.
“The Kingdom of Speech” by Tom Wolfe is a useful intellectual emetic for the true believer in evolution to vomit that crap out of his mind and he begins his book by quoting the true believers who have thrown in the towel.
Religion means “bond with God” and that bond was not the result of mutations over billions of years but, rather, religion was established by God Himself.
O, and there has always only been one true religion while there have been uncountable numbers of false religions with evolution being the most prominent one – but happily that false faith is being decimated by facts.
FIFY! As its much more likely:
“Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West’s Cultural elites.”
Partial cultural suicide by arrogance and credentialism is what they, the Cloud People, are bringing upon themselves.
Dirt people will continue to work their way through it, valuing wisdom over educated credentialism.
“Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West.”
Perhaps not for the West as currently constituted, and given what we see around us, there probably shouldn’t be. But the West we see around us, the West as currently constituted, is not the only possible West.
“But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man’s face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again…”
Excellent comment.
The West is obviously in a terminal phase, but that doesn’t mean western, meaning white, people have to die off with it.
There are many paths available to intelligent, productive white folks.
It will take a massive effort of the collective will, and a re- tribalization, of sorts, for European peoples to come through the other side of this.
I do not doubt for one moment that remnants of the West will circle the wagons and create new societies. European peoples have gone through these types of collapse scenarios before and flourished.
The end of the last Ice Age, the Bronze Age collapse, the end of Classical civilization leading into feudalism, the Mongol invasions, the Ottoman Empire, and more.
We will make it, but we must also remember how we went from total dominance to near total submission in the lifespans of most of the readers here.
I still marvel at how shockingly fast this all went down the tubes.
“ But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.” Deut 13:15
“Jeshurun” is a pseudonym for the ‘last days’ kingdom of Israel. The Pilgrims and our ancestry–those who established this nation recognized who that was…
Because we have forgotten we are the Stone Kingdom of the book of Daniel. We have lost sight of what Plymouth Rock meant to our fathers who hewed this nation out of a howling wilderness. We no longer call God “our Father” and we have forgotten who we are as Anglo-Saxon people—the lost sheep of the House of Israel…This is the end of the age of man’s rule.
“Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.2 By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.3 Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away…6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
What is coming cannot be avoided, BUT redemption follows and the Remnant who have turned to their God, as Jesus said, “shall inherit the Earth”.
“…And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.”
You’ve confused the means and the end again. Religion is a means.
Read Ernest Becker’s denial of death. He called this urge the “immortality project”, which has been transformed from the religious to the material. Although he pointed to stuff like Marxism, I think he would have been horrified by the even stranger course it has taken now.
The book is profound if very depressing.
Becker is good. Eric Voegelin goes into more detail on the magical thinking of modern people, who use symbols as if they are objects. See his brilliant New Science of Politics.
Seeing a lot of talk like this here and there. Maybe we need to dig up Robespierre and his cult of the supreme being after the revolution.
Or maybe just genocide the libs like they’ve been doing to us.
I would dispute that “More complex societies create more complex myths, legends and belief structures.” Materialist society inevitably devolves into superstition. The Soviets were deeply interested in ESP and UFOs; and look at your modern American space fanboys who believe in an imminent space-faring destiny led by Elon Musk. They read “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and now believe that the close confines of a crowded colony in an airless place is the perfect breeding-ground for a libertarian utopia. Meanwhile, Washington socialite Sally Quinn puts her witchcraft skills at the service of DC matrons, and puts the whammy on Republicans.
Derryl;
Another recent ersatz religious variant is attributing personality and agency to vast (‘the universe’) or obviously impersonal and ill-defined entities/concepts such as ‘nature’, ‘evolution’, etc. That way elitists evidently suppose that they can have it both ways: Acknowledge the ageless human sense/instinct that there are extra-human, superior forces and intelligences in the universe while avoiding needing to actually bend the knee to any of them. And, as a big bonus, they can pretend to speak for that entity without any fear of objective refutation. This is because, so long as they avoid specific, near term*, prophecies, their claims are deliberately/inherently untestable. The only pushback possible is their peers giving them social media down votes.
As an example, any time you read about ‘evolution’ doing/causing this or that, you know that the speaker/writer either doesn’t understand Darwin’s actual theory or chooses to ignore what it actually says (for religious reasons_?). In fact, the nub of Darwinism is that it posits that completely random and impersonal forces can account for all the observed features of the biosphere, given enough time. And, in fact, Darwinism remains a scientific *theory* with the usual situation of potential refutations and counter-examples that is common to all scientific theories.**
*It is no coincidence, comrade, that all actually testable Global Warming/Climate Change predictions are far in the future.
**A useful capsulation of the epistemology of ‘the scientific method’ is, ‘If it’s ‘settled’, it’s not science. And if it’s science, it’s never settled.’
Maybe civilizations operate on a complexity budget. We spend so much complexity on politics, economics and technology that by the time we get around to religion and philosophy we have so little complexity left we can’t manage anything beyond vacuous gaia worship.
Contrast that with the ancient Egyptians. “The Nile floods, we grow wheat.” OK, put a check in the box next to survival. Then they can use the rest of the complexity budget to develop a religion with hundreds of gods functioning as avatars of concepts and a language that weaves the narratives into their daily lives. They can devote generations to building amazing works of art that look impressive even from outer space. Etc.
Cheer up, Zman, wherefore such a pouty pants? There is no Christendom (The West) without Christianity and we have been running on just the fumes for quite s while now. There can be no Christian society without Christianity, that’s not how it works, that’s not how any of this works. Sorry, materialists. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/07/materialism-false-god-modern-science.html
“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Perhaps there will be a remnant. Perhaps if we crack out our rosaries we can defeat our enemy as at Lepanto. We only get there one by one. Have faith and don’t be h8ers .
I think what you said is that the West needs a new religion. Exactly true. Let’s invent it.
Restoration. One does not simply invent a new religion. Unless you’re Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith or God. “If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, ‘You can’t put the clock back.’ The simple and obvious answer is ‘You can.’ A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.”
~G.K. Chesterton: What’s Wrong With the World.
There is one right in front of our faced.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him. Arthur Schopenhauer
After your death you will be what you were before your birth. Arthur Schopenhauer
Camus (I think) said the only real problem in philosophy is the problem of suicide. As in, why don’t we all commit it? Typical Froggy posturing (ahh, l’ennui!) but he inadvertently made a point — the entire SJW catechism comes from vapid people discovering that life has a point after all … and they missed it. Whether or not there’s ultimately any higher purpose to life, we all sure ACT like there is; life without “God” (the usual shorthand for this) really is nothing but despair, as Nietzsche — yeah, the guy these idiots love to quote — realized full well (that’s the real meaning of his famous “God is dead” remark). SJWs have backed themselves into a philosophical corner — they’re doing all this to create a perfect world, but they know deep down that it doesn’t matter, because they’ll be gone and there’s no afterlife. Yes, Moonbeam, carrying your hemp sack to Whole Foods staved off Global Warming ™ until 2079… too bad you passed on in 2065 and were eaten by your cats. Leftism: Whistling past the graveyard of Civilization since the Summer of Love.
for the sake of my 3 young adult children, I hope there is a future. We are catholic (john Paul type, not Francis type) , so I believe there is .
You’re not alone. I’m a former Catholic seminarian now with a family and I pray everyday for the future of my son.
Plenty of SWPL lefty types hold Eastern beliefs in karma and reincarnation.
Yes, this leads me to an idea I am trying to develop these days: The biggest belief out there today (in the west) is not nature not religion but “Democracy”.
If leftism is a religion, I think it’s in its most corrupt, least credible moment like Holy See when Luther nailed his theses to the door and Rome’s grip was challenged. Indulgences certainly seem to be about how the elite views their charity works (it got to the point before the counter-reformation that rich Catholics could literally pay others to do their atonement for them, just give some poor guy money to perform your pilgrimage and you’d reap the spiritual benefit). Every left-winger with a room temperature IQ (the sort who read Huffington Post or watch Colbert) still tries to frame the argument as rich greedy republicans versus everyone else, but when Mark Cuban, Mark Zuckerberg, or Warren Buffet make some criticism of Trump, it’s supposed to carry such weight because they’re “successful businessmen” (Buffet’s the only one of the aforementioned three who isn’t just a lottery winner/thief/opportunist). Money=virtue for the left, and consecrates everything (it’s why Wall-Street and the dems were such a good match; I’m surprised it took so long for the partnership to become formalized with the handshake between Clinton and Robert Rubin). Then the types like Al Gore or Bill Maher fit more with the televangelist model (Maher even has some sort of weird golden orb, a la the 700 Club in the background on his show “Real Time”). Give Al Gore tattoos on his hands that say “Love” and “Hate” and he’s basically a less endearing version of Bob Mitchum in “Night of the Hunter.”
“Buffet’s the only one of the aforementioned three who isn’t just a lottery winner/thief/opportunist”
Buffet is very much a lottery winner by-birth and political opportunist.
I wrote about this very same thing, and reached very similar conclusions, last July:
Birthrates are at or are trending to sub-replacement levels everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. Each region has a different narrative to explain the birth dearth, based on it’s culture and residual religion, but the outcomes transcend race, IQ, history, religion, etc.
Birth control and female emancipation and substantial mass media penetration seem to be necessary conditions for the demographic contraction to begin.
If the depopulation trends continue, then the birth death will continue until one or all of the three pre-conditions disappear. At some point, population contraction/imbalance means that civilization can no longer provide the technical means to manufacture birth control, can no longer afford the luxury of emancipated women, and can no longer pump nonsense into empty skulls via accelerated means.
Of course this will happen in different ways in different regions. Some areas will be overrun by savages (I’m looking at you Europe). Others will collapse into savagery due to a catastrophic infrastructure breakdown (too many people spread out over too many square miles without enough young people left to keep the infrastructure running and the fields producing). Perhaps geographical barriers, luck, and leadership will allow for a relatively orderly descent into something like a pre-industrial revolution civilization in a few areas. I’m not holding my breath.
We’ve quadrupled our numbers in two generations, perhaps we’re seeing a natural contraction. Markets call this a correction.
A safer world at a less frenzied pace?
OK by me. The insistence of “growth, growth, growth!” is crowding the Petri dish.
This is an apt observation. Population figures were, arguably, due for correction and particularly so with the rise in resource consumption per individual. Having said that, it’s quite important to discern population inertia and the meta-level problems of having leading and lagging population figures across the human racial spectrum.
There is a positive significance to a stabilizing human population in aggregate. There is also a very negative significance to a human population 75% of which would have been considered mentally retarded by recent pre-political-correctness standards. The ideal makeup of humanity is a philosophical question, but in real physical terms we can observe that the growth of very asocial and unintelligent population groups is a problem that all developed societies are going to have do address, lest they all sink into a degradation spiral ala Maoism or Khmer Rouge.
The dish would get a whole lot less crowded if we stopped bringing first world medicine into third world hell holes. Not suggesting active genocide, but our medicine and open hearts are literally saving the hordes from themselves so they can flock north and destroy us.
if we are going to export anything, it should be culture, reason, and colonial management for the extraction of resources and subjugation of the people to create civil societies.
the benefits of first world advances should not be allowed until AFTER domestication.
The only things the West should be exporting to Africa are birth control and free abortion services. Sell it to them by explaining that they’re hallmarks of Western sophistication, just as our elites and institutions teach us.
And the great majority of their food.
Stop sending food and ag assistance, the strong will eat the weak. This is what winning looks like.
Hasn’t “conventional wisdom” always been that without growth there is no prosperity and perhaps even economic collapse?
no, that is a 19th century (onwards) notion
Yes, the smart guys never figured how to profit from degrowth: it starts with lesser costs.
Maybe many of us believe in an afterlife. Maybe many of us are desperately praying for miracles, while we watch our kids dying of cancer and talking in their sleep to dead relatives.
Maybe, maybe, it’s real and the reason we’ve “created” these beliefs is because they are real.
I have my hopes; and they are stronger than no hope.
There have been many medical studies on prayer and its efficacy. I’m agnostic but I find atheists to be far more pushy with their belief systems than most Christians. Christianity’s proscriptions against homosexuality and general irresponsible sexual behavior are born out by most medical research on the subject. “Nothing’s bullshit that works,” as the writer Charles Bukowski said. Mormonism may look funny from the outside, but Mormons have large healthy families and create stable sane and pleasant communities in a world collapsing around them, so I’m not laughing.
The unintentional hilarity of this post is the tacit assertion that rationality bounds the scope of human existence.
Those of faith, while also rational, know better.
I’d suggest the corollary, which is that human existence bounds the scope of “rationality,” so far as humans perceive it, and they are often deceived by their own short-hand versions of rationality.
As Z suggests, Religious Faith is an inter-generational communication system. It ensures through writ and ritual that subsequent people, separated by centuries or more, will still have critical heuristics on living well (adaptive behavior). It’s obviously imperfect as those heuristics are informed by the nature of the people who developed them and the environment they were in at the time, but any such wisdom should only be dismissed in light of very strong evidence to the efficacy of an alternative.
The problem with the progs and modern cuckolds of various confessions isn’t that they’ve lost faith per se, it’s that they have discarded all the most important lessons of their faith(s).
>As Z suggests, Religious Faith is an inter-generational communication system.
Still laughing. To say that there is no Absolute Truth is like saying that there is no absolute zero, or gravity, AFAICT.
Your ancestors imparted the wisdom of a thousand generations to you through religion and it was your faith that kept the connection alive. That is how religion and faith interact. Why would you cheapen this by claiming absolute truth is just some sterile law of nature to be quantified and applied? It’s not as though Absolute Truth becomes anything else simply because it was imparted through mortal flesh over many generations.
> Why would you cheapen this by claiming absolute truth is just some sterile law of nature to be quantified and applied?
Why do you call it sterile? Looks quite vibrant and dynamic to me.
Anything deracinated and removed from its human context is sterilized. The result of this sterilization is Vatican II, Dispensationalism, Gay Weddings, Refugees Welcome, etc.
I would offer that the human context occurs within a broader one.
As I posited initially: “the unintentional hilarity of this post is the tacit assertion that rationality bounds the scope of human existence.”
Please tell us this wondrous Absolute Truth!
And no, not some silly theory, like the Theory of Gravity.
The carpenter.
The Jungian clinical psychologist/university professor Jordan Peterson is currently enjoying internet fame espousing the same basic ideas about these stories.
That they’re myths, but myths to be taken seriously because they contain truth and wisdom distilled through the ages.
He’s put a series of lectures on interpretation of the Old Testament as instructive myth up on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat
The deliberate smarm of this post is smarmy.
you might want to read up on birth defect rates in the mormon community — due to in-breeding. i do admire the way they stick together and help each other, all the time (and not just when someone has misfortune).
It’s more a Utah thing from the legacy of early Polygamy.
During my time in Africa, I found voodoo and its shamans/priests held powerful sway over the believers. It was then that I realized that christianity, like voodoo, only works on those who believe in it.
as a poet said, “to live without hope is to dance without music.”
Our legacy is the human race, Pale Penis Person. A human race comprised of 4 billion+ blacks and their Chinese managers. You’d understand that if you just embraced the human race instead of white race.
The Chinese have no real use for idiot blacks as their experience in Africa has shown them how limited if not useless they are as a race. Even here after trillions spent on them, they remain a useless and predatory species.
See Empire of Dust on Youtube.
And this particular snippet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZkE3xB8o8A
Or look at what Blacks did to Detroit
If the Chinese do take over, there is no need to keep such a inferior, lazy and violent species as blacks around. Even Mexicans hate them and kill them to drive them out of their communities. The only people who even bother to tolerate the savages are white elites who force other whites at the barrel of a gun and judicial fiat to accept them.
The Chinese will not be anywhere as tolerant as our insane white elites are.
Nice try, troll. When the food welfare stops, what happens to those 4 billion+ blacks?
“Nice try, troll. When the food welfare stops, what happens to those 4 billion+ blacks?”
CHIMPOUT
Why would one not look at the fact that all ancient peoples worshiped some sort of deity, make one believe in same?
because one has 2000 years of science? and because there is no evidence that any of the religions are anything but man made constructs?
From some guy named John Crossan: “My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
If you dig into the roots of the ancient religions, no one worshiped any deities. They conceived of the world through avatars, anthropomorphized fundamental concepts. This is true of Egypt, Hinduism, even pre-reformation Catholicism (angels, archanges, demons and the like).
An old internet friend wrote on his blog the other day “Now someone might say, “What if what I love to do is make money?” That’s silly, because money is supposed to be a means for the end of living well, not the end in itself. And if you just enjoy the process of accumulating abstract tokens, then you can get that pleasure from games. And if you say, “I enjoy accumulating abstract tokens that have real world value,” then be careful, because you might be asking for a power that no one should have: to make people do stuff that they wouldn’t do if they didn’t need the money.”
I sent him an email saying basically, “wow, you’ve done a very good job of distinguishing the sin of gluttony from the sin of greed. The person who piles up tokens for the sake of piling up tokens is a glutton. It’s the desire to control others that is the heart of greed.”
His response was, “Interesting. I was raised Catholic and no one ever told me that.”
My point here is that what passes for religion these days is so, so much worse in every way than what our ancestors believed.
I would up vote this 100x if I could. Many moderns fool themselves into believing that the ancients, or at least the “civilized” ones, actually had a literal belief in the forces they worshipped. The peasants probably did, but the literate elites knew better, and they were also well aware of how powerful ritual and myth was in cementing the bonds of the larger community.
please provide a reference for your statement “they told them symbolically” because there is a lot of evidence ancient peoples took their religions pretty damn literally.
Look up “mystery cults” or the Eluesinian Mysteries. Esoteric versus exoteric knowledge. Freemasonry is excellent example for modern times. The Knights Templar, Roshoniya, and Assasines are another set of historical examples. Only the initiated knew “the truth.”
As for disparaging God or Gods, plenty of evidence exists. Look at some of the musings of quantum physicists. The Hindu Vedas call into question transgenic evolution. “Anomalous Archaeology” is another good subject for research.
The “Elites” by and large are nihilists. They believe their “good works” offset the evil that they create.
I agree. I’m not normally a Nietzsche-referencer but the good philosopher did predict that the death of religion at the hands of science would plunge the West into nihilistic despair. I think progressivism is just that, and in that regard basically a new iteration of turn the cheek christianity.
What is interesting though is its symbiosis with globalist consumerism, and how it has been exported (at least in part, without the full on suicidalism) to countries like Japan.
I think the first sign of what the future holds will be if we see the birthrates go back up in Japan or anywhere else. Japan was the first country to go ‘full on dysgenic’ and quit having children/get addicted to plastic/video games/etc and therefore it would seem to make empirical sense for it to be the first culture that sees a turnaround. If we don’t see such a turnaround and they continue on with sub-replacement fertility into the 2020’s (the third generation to have it at that point) then I would consider that an ill harbinger for us (not that there are myriad differences between the self-hating white West and the anti-immigration Japanese).