As much as I love this part of the world, midwinter in the south-west of England can be rather dreary. We have neither the mild, crisp sunshine of a Mediterranean winter, nor the numinous, frostbitten landscapes you get in Norway or Canada. The winter just passed was a little drier and sunnier than usual, from my experience, but the general pattern of mud and dark-grey skies was still very much in evidence.
As such, December was an excellent time to begin writing a series of articles on the decline of Western civilization. That theme is an undertow that runs through all of my writing (and pretty much everything else I do, considering that's what's been happening during my entire life in this incarnation), but I felt that there were things I had not been able to express up until that point.
Beyond concerns of the technocratic 'Great Reset' and all the gimmicks that implies – bio-digital identification systems, CBDCs, weird genetic experiments – there lies the shattered wasteland of what comes after all that is done. Economic forecaster Martin Armstrong has had an uncanny level of success with a computer program called 'Socrates'; despite Socrates being, in my view, one of the most interesting and potentially useful developments in the history of computer science, the transhumanist tech-bros have predictably ignored him, probably because his findings fundamentally threaten the Church of Progress in which they have found refuge.
As Gordon White has suggested, Socrates could be seen to represent the triumphant RETVRN of the Law of Circularity to the world of economics. Unlike Terence McKenna's 'Timewave Zero' software, based as it was on what my friend Matthew Watkins once called a 'mathematical hallucination', Socrates's deep analysis of cross-disciplinary data actually seems to map over historical events rather well – for instance, enabling Armstrong to predict the 1987 stock market crash down to the precise day.
Moreover, the findings of Socrates don't support the idea a linear progression into infinity, over which our civilization seems so neurotically obsessed. Instead, they show a sequence of repeating cycles, nested in the style of a Mandelbrot diagram, with mini-cycles building up into bigger and bigger cycles at the macro-level.
What does that mean for the Great Reset? Well, the forecast doesn't look too good for the Davos crowd. Unfortunately, it doesn't look too good for anyone else, either. Armstrong suggests a total collapse of the Reset by next year, followed by a war cycle from 2025 into 2027, and then the mother of all economic crashes in 2032. After this, the geopolitical landscape will be substantially different, the West will complete its already rather rapid decline, and economic power will shift towards China.
What I was trying to communicate with my recent decline-poasting was the visceral realisation of Europe's collapse, specifically, and the necessity for European people to accept and come to terms with that before any effective adaptation can take place. The Left can't bring itself to even contemplate the possibility, as talking of the West's decline is considered unspeakably conservative; the only things that stand in the way of endless Progress towards fully automated gay space communism (or at the very least a functional NHS) are those nasty right-wing meanies with all their racism and transphobia and selfishness.1 The Right is at least a bit more realistic about the situation, as conservatism usually stems from an instinctual awareness of cultural decline, but – from my perspective – too many reactionaries cling to self-soothing hopes for cultural renaissance through some kind of drastic State intervention, and cornucopian views of limited natural resources.
While these days I'm a little bit more at home with the latter, I can't fit myself totally comfortably within either camp. Unlike the Lefties, whose response to cultural decline is to call you a racist for even noticing it, I can't just stick my fingers in my ears and go “la la la I'm not listening” while the very fabric of my society is unravelled by unprecedented mass immigration, the breakdown of civil society, institutionalised child abuse, and demographic collapse, with mass vaccine damage as the final straw.
Unlike the Righties, though, I don't have a particularly rose-tinted picture of Western imperialism; I'm willing to acknowledge that, at the very least, some of these predicaments are the result of certain chickens coming home to roost. Empires loot their colonies for the enrichment of a small number of those in the imperial centre; the only difference between the Western empires and those that preceded (and those that will likely follow) is one of sheer scale.2
I can understand the impulsive response to just state the exact opposite of whatever stupid shit the Antifa are coming out with at the time, but beyond mere trolling for its own sake, I'm not going to start extolling the virtues of Cecil Rhodes just because some spoilt brats want to remove his statue from Oriel College. Somehow, defending the honour and legacy of a man who conspired with Alfred Milner and Natty Rothschild to instigate World War One as a kind of prototypical Great Reset isn't exactly high on my list of priorities.
So while I don't hold Western culture to be necessarily any better or any worse than any other, and certainly not to be without a considerable accumulation of faults for which we've been paying for the past one hundred years (and believe, you ain't seen nothin' yet), it's all I know.
To bear witness to everything I know consuming itself in a frenzy of autophagous self-annihilation is a bit worrying, to say the least.
One of the points I was trying to convey in some of the previous posts in this series is this: the most CRT-addled, post-colonialist, and self-hating of all the self-hating white libs is still a product of the same culture, and is effectively attempting to build a ramshackle structure out of cardboard tubes on top of the building whose foundations they are attempting to demolish, and then expecting to have a decent place to live in the future.
The managerial elite that wants to psy-op European culture out of existence is the same as the one that wants to shove the Maasai herders of Kenya out of their ancestral grazing lands in the name of 'carbon-sequestration' and 'conservation rewilding'. Any rooted sense of nativity is fundamentally anathemic to globalism, hence why progressives always talk about refugees, but, with a few worthy exceptions, largely remain silent about the deracination of tribes such as the Maasai. The reason is not because they would necessarily support such overt land-grabbing, but they never hear about it; it never becomes the Current Thing, despite attempts on the part of indigenous-rights activists to get some Soros-dollars by piggy-backing their campaigns on to the momentum generated for BLM in 2020.
Equally, even if the global bureaucrats recognize the Sami as Europe's “only indigenous people” (thereby inferring that all the rest of us aren't indigenous, even if we're directly descended from Cheddar Man),3 that won’t prevent them from throwing the Sami under the trundling wheels of the battery-powered bus when it comes to the Forced Industrial Resignation.
The globalist technocrats think all of these unique peoples and cultures are relics of the past. They think they've transcended such petty human concerns. Emmanuel Macron clearly despises France, and sees its distinct identity as a minor obstacle to the total Schwabbification of Europe... but he’s still happy join his EU buddies in fleecing former French colonies in Africa, and endeavour to prevent them from achieving any level of economic independence. Perhaps keeping these countries so desperate that vast numbers of their people are willing to repopulate the Harari-fied smart-cities of the post-Reset West is all part of the plan? Deliberate conspiracy or not, it’s certainly been one of the effects of contemporary Eurocrat policies, according to Sam Akaki:
And, while pushing for ever more foreign aid to Africa, the EU also imposes stiff tariffs on African agricultural imports, thus making it impossible for Africa to trade itself out of poverty. The result is the vicious cycle of poverty, war, famine, diseases and refugee exodus we are witnessing today. Last year alone, some 5,000 African men, women and children lost their lives in the Mediterranean trying to come to Europe in search of a better life. Granted, corruption and human rights abuse are additional push factors. But this scale of human tragedies was unheard of before the trading European Economic Community became the superstate which is the EU.
To paraphrase Dodcast guest Stone Age Herbalist, from the elites' part, I think all of this can be seen as part of a full-spectrum war on difference.4 Globalism is a carcinogenic ideology, in a metaphorical and a literal sense; everything must be consumed and assimilated into itself. The fact that a malign cancer-cell left untreated will usually end up killing the host doesn't occur to the cancer-cell; growth is its only option.
Such is life in the winter of the West. In the depths of winter, spring can feel like an impossibility, but the wheel always turns, however slowly. Making preparations for that turn will be the subject of the next post in this series.
In that sense, it's interesting to note that the aesthetic that has been dubbed 'hauntology', which is characterised by an appreciation for British folk-culture, mystical antiquarianism, and 1970s sci-fi/horror, is framed by the late Marxist writer Mark Fisher as stemming from a nostalgia for the possibility of a progressive-socialist future. In a similar vein, the creators of the 'Hookland' mythos, a kind of open-source fictional world centred on a haunted English village, recently tweeted that anyone was welcome to use the mythos for their own artistic creations, provided they weren't promoting 'racism, vile misogyny or homophobia'. It's as if the aesthetic trappings of hauntology provide a vector for the yearning for a past that is rooted in British landscape and traditions to be expressed, but the implicitly reactionary nature of this yearning has to be sublimated and controlled to fit into an acceptable framework of progressivism.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to countries like Ireland, which had no colonial projects whatsoever.
Cheddar Man’s genetic continuity into present-day Cheddar, Somerset is perhaps one of the strongest arguments against the fallacious notion of Britain as a “nation of immigrants” or whatever, so perhaps it was inevitable he would be forcibly drafted into the culture war of the mid 2010s.
Of course, stoking up ethnic resentments amongst the masses as a divide-and-conquer strategy is always a risky business, especially when you happen to look like the people against whom you're stoking the resentment, but I think people like Macron and Trudeau are genuinely fucking dumb enough that they have no clue what it's like not to have bodyguards.