Age of decline

Much of the tremors that shake the nation to-day, I believe, spring from an increasing recognition amongst even casual observers of the declining importance, if not outright irrelevance, of this country to the project of human civilization.

It is evident from even a cursory glance that the Untied States of Amerika is engaged in a terminal decline from which it will likely not recover. All around us, the story, the message is that of decline. Entire industries face drastic downscaling and even extinction due to a combination of various factors, the key common ingredient in all being the collapse of investment and a drying up of new ideas and innovation. The decline cuts across any short or medium term economic spasm of the moment. The trends which portend to swallow us into blackness have been with us for some time, at least since the 1970s. These trends do not look to be stoppable or even delayable, at least given all present factors. In fact, with each economic crisis the trends only increase in aggressiveness.

Television, retail, capital production, manufacturing, automobiles, print journalism, and others - the pillars of major industry of the previous century - face a major retrenchment as economic forces of the near term and long term coalesce to render these sectors impotent. While technological and lifestyle changes are certainly partially responsible, such changes are really quite manageable within the skill sets of the talent employed within these firms. If firms fail to adapt despite the talent which they retain, then there is a serious chokehold on innovation occurring. Or worse.

An entire restructuring of the economy is playing out before our eyes, as productive industries fall to make way for the parasitical low-paying, low-skill "service" industries of tomorrow, where moron armies of undereducated welfare staters receive subsistence wages in an unequal agreement with the major cartel-corporate players which now hold effective control of the larger economy. Once hangers-on to the greater productive economy, the service economy now figures central to our economic importance, the rotted weeds remaining after the cane has been cut, an economy of valuelessness and worthlessness where, in Jim Kunstler's infamous words, we all make our living selling hamburgers to each other. 

The economic sorting will take around five to ten more years to play out as the old players die off and new players fail to replace them. In moral matters the decline is much more absolute. Indeed, this is where root causes can be discovered. The destruction of the nuclear family by the various cuts of divorce, illegitimacy, and violence; the dissolution of even the appearance of social stigma with regards to these destructive forces; the increased and willful dependence on subsidy, with its concurrent effects of increased sloth, destruction of the work ethic, and rise of pathological narcissism and grandiosity - all these things, which have been touted by "enlightened" minds as a Great Leap Forward, in fact contain the seeds of our own destruction.

Like all empires past their prime, modern Amerika is crass and decadent, a society which celebrates barbarism, glorifies the rampant pursuit of pleasure, coddles and subsidizes failure producing behavior and attitudes, and elevates mediocrity and mendacity to an honored position while denigrating and penalizing hard work, effort, positive striving, and risk taking, those very things which once made this country great and the envy of the world. All empires over time succumb to these forces as the State aggregates more power and forces the dark elements of human nature into ascendance. This of course is the great achievement of the State throughout time - the consumption of the seed corn of once proud societies to fund its everlasting pursuits of war, conflict, and protection of the ignorant.

Indeed, if the rise of the State could be arrested, even reversed, in the EUA even at this dark hour, perhaps we could somehow escape our black fate with only a few hundred thousands immolated. However, all trends point to increased regimentation and authoritarianism amongst both elite and sheeple alike, and the potential for an anti-State revolution appears next to impossible.

The generations of mis-education provided by public schooling (sic) have produced a new 'conventional wisdom' in this country which at all points turns toward the State as salvation, while paying typical fascist lip service to free enterprise. (Even Hitler, socialist impresario, claimed to favor private initiative.) At least in theory, perhaps, the elites support capitalism, since an outright bent toward socialism (a la Michael Moore) is not vogue (yet) even amongst the corporate jet set. However, in practice the total State must by definition aggregate more and more control toward itself, and inevitably push free initiative to the margins if not outright elimination, despite whatever official 'favor' the State organs display towards laissez-faire.

In any case, truly free markets have not existed in the USSA for quite a while now - or at least since 1913 when central banking made its official debut on these shores. Each depredation upon the freedom of commercial intercourse constitutes an advance for barbarism and hastens the progress of decline. In the age of the total State, armed to the gills with civilization-terminating weapons of mass destruction, engaged in imperial exploits around the globe, aggressively conducting wars of attrition against the population at home in the form of regulation, taxes, and quasi-moral crusades upon anything from guns to drugs to low homeownership rates (in short, whatever course of action most profits the elites), when all these things require ever-increasing amounts of limited capital to feed the vortex of wealth destruction, it is plainly obvious that as the State sector feeds, the free sector must inevitably decline if only because it is being squeezed out.

This does not even consider the State sponsored mass misallocations of capital, orchestrated by our liberal use of the printing press, interest rate manipulation, and the "Fed"eral Mastercard, that results in the inevitable periods of economic dislocation and destruction which have been only increasing in overall severity since the 1910s; not to mention the evaporation of around 95% of the value of the pre-central bank dollar. The currency of this country, once a stable source of value, began its final sickening plunge toward complete worthlessness in 1971 when the last links to any stable source of value (in this case, gold) were severed by the dictate of the God-Leader then currently in power. The true acceleration toward unstoppable decline commenced from that point, which not too coincidentially was around the same time real wages ceased to increase and inflation in general became a persistent problem in Amerikan life.

Moral and economic decline become inevitable when people turn their backs on productive enterprise and look to the State in power for the answers to life's unpleasant difficulties. The quest for imperial power, the desire for security both economic and from ulterior forces, the craving for assured profits and socialized losses, the wish to be de-constrained by moral law and economic or personal prudence, and above all the desire of something for nothing inevitably assert their place in a democracy, where politicians know that the key to a long career in public office is to keep the sheeple in an anestheized state, corn fed and content with a constant stream of welfare subsidy, patriotic gore and jingoism buffeted by mass murder in faraway lands, mucho goodies for the special interests and the various official "victim" classes, and willful blindness to moral turpitude (save those 'crimes' which the State considered offenses unto themselves). This is best accompanied by a talent for saying something that sounds important, but in actuality communicates absolutely nothing and is intentionally intended to exist bereft of any meaning or message (the better to keep one's position on a subject vague lest it come back to bite in a big way on election day).

So it is in this age of decline. Economic collapse and certain oncoming Third World status for this nation cannot be undone without the elimination of the State machine. The State machine cannot evaporate unless society relearns, at great effort, the meaning of productive work and the importance of traditional moral values. This will have to occur in the face of a State sector which will do its damnable best (the better to secure its own survival) to ensure that these moral precepts remain unlearned by the majority. When the continued existence of the State and those whose positive welfare are tied to its health are at stake, any bureaucratic inefficiency normally displayed by the public servantry mysteriously (or not) evaporates.

The current ethic of decline which reigns supreme to-day is a certain path to economic irrelevance and permanent impoverishment which will make the Third World seem pleasant by comparison. The Amerikan dream will die a quiet death, relegated to just that - a dream - in a country where the State bankers and their favored corporatist elite allies control most of the shrinking pool of wealth while the rest of us are doled crumbs for our unproductive work, supplemented by State monopolies for those necessities of life which have become unaffordable through this process. For those who long for the nirvana of socialized health care and other services, get ready...to die.

Increasingly it is only through the venue of armed revolution that the most abject threat to the State can come. For it aggregates all takers into its machine, by buying their alleigance or perverting their values. It is only a committed class of freedom fighters, whose consciences cannot be strayed by the Danegeld of subsidy or the counterfeit pleasures of moral perfidy, who can be counted on to save this country from itself, and what it has become: three hundred million narcoleptic, corn-fed comatose morons who could barely be described as human.

Only when blood flows in the palaces of power can the age of decline see its terminus. This country has suffered long enough in the care of moral imbeciles.

Are you ready to birth the revolution?