Western culture is built on a false mythos.
Readership: All
Theme: Cultural Demise
Length: 1,200 words
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Kevin Dahlgren wrote a piece, Organized crime and the homeless (2023/6/22)*, in which he details the extent to which Portland Seattle has become a hive of scum and villany. It may be hard for us to believe muh Murica could stoop this low. Reading through this article made me realize that the U.S. is already Balkanized and it is continuing to happen as we watch.
NovaSeeker’s post, The Amalgamation of Western Culture (2020/12/2), and my more recent post, Tweaking Complementarianism for Mass Consumption (2023/7/26), discussed how secular influences have infiltrated the church and offered a praxeological interpretation of Christianity as seen in its convergence with the larger culture.
To the average Christian, the logical conclusion would be to somehow remove those secular influences. But it is not that simple.
Ed Hurst has written many posts about the intrinsic difficulty of cutting the rotten core out of an outwardly delicious looking apple.
“You cannot save Western Civilization by taking it back to some previous stage of development. Sorry, but the life cycle of civilizations doesn’t work like that; the stump is dead. The thing develops and follows the DNA in the cells. The current nasties — communism, feminism, SJWs, etc. — are the latter stage of a civilization that is dying. They didn’t come from outside of the tree; they aren’t grafts. Those things were inherent in the seeds of the West. The aging has set in and the tree will never be young again.”
“This is how those who most strongly resist the Gl0b@l!sts and their commie proxies are not our allies. They want to restore what they imagine is the more ancient Christian West. Those who seek to save Western Christianity are dreamers longing for something that was already far, far away from New Testament Christianity. Even if these reactionaries succeed politically, they cannot prevent the West from dying. It never did have God’s favor, so it’s just a tool to be used and discarded in His plans.”
“Western Civilization stands firmly on the imagination of human greatness without God. It’s another Tower of Babel in itself. The Gl0b@l!st efforts to finally pull it all together is paradoxically the death knell. But this is where the West has always been headed. This is the native fruit of its DNA. Complaining that this or that influence is destroying the West is missing the point entirely. The West is devouring itself. Only the culture that God built can last until Christ returns, and that culture is far, far different from the West.”
Radix Fidem: The Native Fruit is Rotten (2020/11/28)
So what is the cultural DNA that Ed mentions here?
Here are a few constituent elements of it.
Western culture is obsessed with ontology and is out of touch with the heart. If you’ve never lived outside Western culture for at least a few months, then you may not even know what I’m talking about. I didn’t really understand this until after I had lived abroad for a couple years, and even after living in Asia for 19 years, I’m still learning about it.
I don’t know why this is, but nominally Christian and especially Anglo cultures tend to be ordered around the idea of personal “rights” that are supposedly granted through law or some legislatorial process, but in reality, are little more than a collection of political philosophies that are used to indoctrinate the sheeple in schools and are parroted among the masses.
This concept of “rights” is so ingrained in Western culture that the typical untraveled Westerner cannot even possibly imagine a culture existing without the overarching preeminence of law and order pressing down upon the conscience and forming a misinformation effect that reframes and spins every event into an epic struggle for “democracy”, melting-pot “diversity”, and “the rule of law and order”.
In case you never considered it, this is all mythos — not reality.
In reality, a right cannot be guaranteed by law, except by the faith and good graces of those who execute the law.
I had to live in Asia for several years before I realized that a “right”, properly and literally understood, is the ability and freedom to do what is right. It is far removed from both (1) the Western concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, which are glib by comparison, and (2) the bitter injustices that pass for law these days.
In reality, these days, it is flatly against the law to do what is right. That is hardly a “right”, and it is not right.
In reality, courts will overturn individual “rights” on mere presumption and judicial decision (e.g. child support, Duluth, false MәT00 accusations, No-Fault divorce, etc.), especially when it conflicts with larger political prerogatives.
In reality, elections are set up and rigged such that no matter who you vote for or who wins, you just get a continuation of the same old sh!t. (Donald Trump’s presidency was a small hiccup in this pattern, and he’s still being persecuted for it by TPTB.)
Then there’s this common idea that the “good” people are those who follow the law, and those who don’t are “bad” — by definition — as if the law itself is what makes men who abide by it righteous.
The fallacy of this approach becomes more evident when we see that more and more laws are being passed that stand flagrantly against the standard social codes outlined in scripture. It is slowly becoming obvious to those who are aware that this is NOT God’s idea of justice nor righteousness.
Even our idea of salvation has been corrupted by the western reliance on law, dualism, and reason. Ed described this in his post at Do What’s Right: Terminology: “Getting People Saved” (2020/11/28) [Archive]. Furthermore, I described some of the history of how law and ecclesiastic regulations have changed our whole concept of marriage, and introduced the Enlightened scientific modern age in A Concise History of Marriage Regulations (2023/6/12). The final fruits of this 300+ year experiment is Complementarianism, Egalitarianism, and the feminization of the church, as well as the decline in male authority, the sexual apocalypse, the breakdown in marriage, and widespread divorce.
I’m not saying that God’s order is lawless. I’m saying that God’s order flows from a deeper communion with Himself and nature. To the typical Western reader, even this sounds like tree-hugging bohemian hippy talk, but that is not it either. The fact that Westerners don’t even understand a deeper connection to God and nature only stands as further evidence of how far off the mark we’ve drifted.
Perhaps the best way to deal with all of this is for the honest hardworking faithful to migrate out of areas of concentrated corruption, and let the system eat itself until it collapses.
Besides that, the best a man can do in these circumstances is to tap into the Source of all wisdom, and return to the ancient, and yet simultaneously, ever refreshingly new ways of God’s order. Pray to escape being crushed by the spar strangled edifice as it falls.
* H/T: Vox Popoli: John Wick is Real (2023/8/7)
Related
- Antemodernist: How Then Shall We Be Governed (2023/5/4)
- Adam Piggott: Judging Others is Good and Just (2023/8/2)
- Catacomb Resident: Depersonalized Law is the Devil’s Wish (2023/8/19)
