Shockproofing Society
An updated reprint of a column from 2016, still pertinent today.
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Ours is the Age of Willful Blindness.
We live in a time of utter corruption of the thought process. It is so bad that perfectly obvious looming threats are routinely ignored, whereas non-issues like Global Frauding occupy the full attention of our elite leaders.
It is regrettable that I cannot begin the discussion of how best to survive the coming collapse of the West without devoting an entire column to saying what the danger is.
Safety precautions are not meant to be perfect, merely to be worth the trouble. Wearing a safety belt in a car will not protect your life in every case, merely in enough cases that it is worth the minor trouble of buckling up.
Now imagine you are in a car that you notice is being driven by a drunk madman suffering an open head injury which is interfering with his ability to make critical judgements. He is chained to the steering wheel. The car is headed toward a cliff. However, whenever you or the other doomed passengers point out that the car is heading toward a cliff, half the passengers in the car scream the most filthy insults, abuse, and denigration imaginable, shrieking like loons, spittle flying, and insist there is no cause for alarm; and the driver pushes more firmly on the accelerator pedal, so that the car speeds toward the cliff more quickly.
At that point, any safety precautions one could take more cumbersome than a mere safety belt, such as a crash helmet, or even a parachute, would be called for.
Lest I be accused of obscurity, in this parable, the cliff is the financial and military situation of the West.
The driver is the political left.
His insanity is called Political Correctness, which punishes anyone who tells the truth and flatters anyone who lies.
The intoxicant is political power, an unholy lust to control the hearts, minds and souls of other men, run their lives and ruin their lives.
The pulsating head wound dripping blood and gray matter is the modern educational system or, rather asylum.
The screaming loons are the press. Their sole mission is the prevention of an educated and intelligent discussion of the coming disaster, or, for that matter, of any topic.
Financially, had the United States as decade ago embarked a rigid budget cutting program and strict austerity, cutting all the various forms of welfare payments, transfer payments, and bribery, either by atomic or bacteriological agent, on a major city of the West, or several of them, we might have been able to embark on a depression only twice as bad as what tormented our fathers under FDR.
However, instead, the Leftists in America elected the most profligate figure in human history. Astronomical amounts of money were borrowed and spent with no plans to repay, and no idea what to do when the bill comes due. These are amounts beyond comprehension, amounts beyond the combined gross national product of all the nations of the world. The United States checking account was already at zero when Obama took office: this spending took place in the first year: and then it exploded and expanded and accelerated.
That is just the national debt, not the unfunded liabilities, which are an order of magnitude higher.
Millions and tens of millions of dollars were lost without any record of where it went. Whether this was bribery, or peculation, or mere mishandling of funds, no one knows and no one can say, because the press never investigated it, nor the Justice Department, nor anyone. There are corporations and nations whose entire military budget is less than the missing amounts lost in the orgy of spending.
Militarily, the United States has done exactly everything wrong from the very beginning of the Global Islamic War, including refusing to declare war, and refusing to call it war, refusing to follow the money to the actors funding the terror, refusing to hold conquered terrain, and refusing to identify the cause of the problem. We have made ourselves as weak and vulnerable as possible to the preferred decentralized tactics of the Jihad, and encouraged the enemy by shows of weakness and indecision, despite possessing an overwhelming military and industrial advantage.
The cause of the problem is Islam, which is a political-theocratic movement older than the nations of Europe, and which had not changed its basic mission at that time, nor its tactics.
Examples could be multiplied endlessly: When hundreds of German women are raped, robbed, and sexually assaulted in a series of planned outrages over New Years by Islamics, for example, the immediate mission of the press is to channel the discussion into Gun Control. As if that were the major problem facing the nation, or, indeed, a problem of any sort, major or minor. And the German politicians tell their women to dress more modestly. That same week, the Miss Universe contest is soberly debating whether or not to drop the bathing suit segment of the contest because the Islamics find it immodest. The federal prison system has decided not to buy and serve bacon anywhere in federal prison for fear of offending the Islamics.
If London or New York is blown off the map by the Obama Bomb this administration has given the Iranians the go-ahead to build, or used an electromagnetic pulse weapon to wipe out our comically and foolishly vulnerable electrical grid, a sizeable section of the United States riots for a week or two, and starves and dies.
The money needed to restore civilization to working order is gone. We’ve spent it all. We have spent all the money in the world. There is none left to borrow, none left to pay interest on the debt. The World produces roughly 70 trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services a year. The US government, including unfunded liabilities, owes over 90 trillion.
That is trillion with a T. If you counted to a trillion one number per second without pausing for breath, you would need to live 31,000 years.
I happen to have this figure at my fingertips this, because I wrote a book of this title, and this is roughly the time it would take to fly to the a globular cluster NGC 2808 in the constellation Carina travelling at the speed of light. (You see, I started writing the book in the Bush Administration, when only astronomers used the word “trillion’.)
Now, American survived two world wars and a cold war without a collapse of our civilization, or a slide back into barbarism. That was then. This is now. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, the unanimous reaction of the United States was one of righteous outrage.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, using civilian airliners as bombs, half the nation blamed the United States and called for our immediate preemptive surrender. We fought a conventional war against a decentralized enemy, and half the nation, the Left, voiced their absolute and unambiguous support for the Jihad, and expressed a hatred of George Walker Bush so insane that it developed its own byword: Bush Derangement Syndrome.
The achievements of the Bush war years were small and tardy, but a good beginning, and the Obama Administration not only reversed those gains, but put the West into worse military situation than before 9/11.
There was a short respite of military degradation during the Trump years, and even some gains: transvestites were removed from the Armed Forces, ordnance and equipment was upgraded, ISIS destroyed, overseas wars ended, peace in the Middle East and Kosovo was afoot.
Biden undid all gains, orchestrated the greatest single humiliation in United States military history, and brought the world to the brink of World War III. At the time of this writing, China is making preparation to conquer Taiwan. Our military is now staffed and led by perverts and wokeniks, and cannot win a battle.
So: the chance that our civilization will outlive twenty five years without the grid failing is low. The election of one or two conservative warlike presidents will accomplish nothing, since the rot is now too deep, the corruption too advanced. What was once the lunatic fringe hardly worth laughing in scorn to notice is now the mainstream left, the mainstream media, the orthodox indoctrination in academia, enshrined in law.
Our society, absent a divine miracle from God, is certain to crash. What can we do to prepare for the impact?
Let us turn to this grave question next.
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A society that does not believe in an objective reality, an objective standard to judge good and evil social orders, an objective moral law, and an objective standard of logic and of fact, of true and false, will always slide back into collectivism and institutional injustice.
While it is possible to believe in an objective standard of truth without believing in an objective standard of beauty, this is a stance which contains the seeds of its own self destruction. If beauty is subjective, so is ugliness, and therefore so is the desecration of human dignity.
Anything that desecrates human dignity, such as pornography, cannibalism, or simple vulgarity in speech, cannot with logical consistency be forbidden by law or deterred by custom.
If the desecration of human dignity is a matter of subjective opinion, it is allowed, because a subjective law or custom confesses itself to be arbitrary.
However, the psychological and social side effect of living in a world of vulgarity and ugliness is a loss of dignity in oneself and loss of respect for others.
If you see humans rutting like animals each time you turn on the internet, and if you believe mishandling corpses or even consuming them is a matter of personal preference, you cannot believe it is objective fact that men are better than animals. Once the difference between men and animals becomes, for you, a matter of opinion or personal taste, the concept of human rights lacks any logical arguement to defend it. Men are merely clever livestock, no different from cattle except that one must herd them with lies and propaganda.
Without the concept of objective human rights, the concept of virtue and vice falls by the wayside. If man is a creature without dignity, without rights, without innate worth, the cardinal virtues of fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance becomes impossible to promote or recognize. Virtue, among other things, grants dignity: if even someone you despise behaves with great courage, he merits respect. A man who resists passions and self-interest and thinks and talks with temperance and justice earns dignity. But if your society is one where dignity and respect are abolished, temperance and justice must likewise be abolished, lest dignity return.
It is for this reason that modern partisans of the Left have adopted, in the name of social justice, the stance and behavior of both crybabies and bullies. A bully lacks justice: he and his mob merely scream and threaten when they find a target too weak to defend himself. The bullies boycott and harass and intimidate, with no attempt to treat their scapegoats as human beings, give them a hearing, or allow them a day in court.
They lack prudence. The bullies accuse the innocent with no sense of shame or proportion, not even bothering to find convincing lies to tell.
But these are not schoolyard bullies, who at least retain a villainous sort of dignity, no. These are also crybabies, who throw themselves into a tizzy of childish fear over trifles, the most absurd the better, and claim to feel unsafe at the words or thoughts of the designated scapegoat, and this lack of courage gives the crybaby the moral right to bully the scapegoat. The crybabies lack fortitude
Most important of all, whoever the scapegoat is, he must be accused of all evils, not just one. There is no room in the Social Justice Warrior worldview for an intelligent but evil racist, for example, or a sexist who is also pro-homosexual. Every scapegoat guilty of one evil is guilty of them all, and is also unintelligent and unaccomplished in any field. The crybullies lack temperance.
Hence, in the world without human rights and without human dignity, there can be no virtue. Or, rather, virtue is dismissed as a form of oppression: only party loyalty or victim group membership counts for anything. Partisan loyalty and victim group membership is a get out of jail free card: any vice, even drugging an underage girl and committing statutory rape, is forgiven and forgivable, if one’s Leftwing credentials are in order. No virtue is recognized in any scapegoat. The evil oppressor is always described as an unwise idiot, even while he is being condemned for his omnipotent ability to oppress the weak.
Any conservative figure, Trump, Bush, Romney, is simultaneously Hitler and a retarded monkey.
This partisan loyalty is called Political Correctness. Despite what you may have heard, the term originated from the Soviet Union to describe the loyalty to the party above loyalty to any duty to tell the truth, and the intellectuals and academics of the Left supported the idea by name. Only when public attention turned toward the craven and dishonest practice did the Left, as they always do, deny the origin and purpose of Political Correctness, or say that the word was not their own description of their ideal.
Now, obviously, such an ever-changing and bewildering funhouse mirror world as must exist in order for the Catholic Church, for example, both to be condemned for housing homosexuals among the priesthood and for failing to celebrate homosexuality with the rites of marriage (and Political Correctness demands both stances, despite that they contradict themselves), objective truth has to be dismissed as insignificant, if not nonexistent. If a Politically Correct statement were in line with objective truth, it would be a Factually Correct statement, and it would not be a sign of party loyalty to publish it. Political Correctness, by its own definition, is always a lie.
Now, the basic defense of the filthy-mouthed vulgarians of Political Correctness is that it is uncouth to speak unpleasant truths to people, such as to point out the statistics concerning crime and race, for example. It is Politically Incorrect to say that the reason more blacks are in jail than whites is that more blacks commit more crimes more often than whites. The truth or falsehood of the statistic is never discussed, and never need be discussed in the funhouse mirror world of Political Correctness. The statistic might give cover to racism, and so must be suppressed whether true or false. But please note the Political Correction officers only use a form of White Blackmail to get their way. The truthful are asked by the discourteous in the name of courtesy to suppress the truth. Political Correctness does not support or encourage politeness; it asks polite people to censor themselves, according to a rule of behavior the Political Correction officers do not abide by themselves.
So Political Correctness is by its nature hypocritical, as well as untrue.
While it is possible for a rational atheist to believe in an objective standard of truth, virtue, and beauty, he cannot believe in any enforcement mechanism aside from manmade institutions or natural consequences: and the mind of man can concoct how to blind, evade, or elude such mechanisms.
On the other hand, a rational man examining the question must come eventually at least to a Deist belief in a benevolent and omnipotent Creator. Worldviews lacking this are inadequate, incomplete, and illogical, satisfying neither the needs of reason nor the yearnings of the soul nor the sense of fitness and proportion of the taste. A rational man looking over the historical evidence will soon convince himself that the historical claims of the Christian Church that Christ lived and died and rose again as stated, and was what He said He was are accurate, correct, and offer the only explanation that does not veer into conspiracy theory paranoia.
Modern philosophy the gropes along without theology as a body without a head, and is thereby reduced to being merely boring or absurd, reduced to word-games with Wittgenstein, or gibberish with Hegel, or psychosis with Nietzsche.
With a belief in at least a Deist God, the belief in an objective moral code, in objective facts, in objective aesthetic standards, all follow automatically. Without such a belief, the conclusion that truth, beauty and virtue are real and objective is difficult to defend and unlikely to convince, but, more to the point, impossible to enforce.
Alas for my rational atheist friends, but the idea of a return to a secular yet rational society is opium pipe smoke. The advocates of unreason have dashed you from the halls of power and the groves of academia. You never ruled there. We did. Those universities were all founded by Christian men on Christian principles, that is, on the principles of self-evident moral and logical truths, and so were those forms of government.
Hence, without a belief in an objective God, there is an insufficient foundation in the mind of man for a belief in objective truth, virtue, and beauty, and for a belief in standards governing these things, and for a belief in divine enforcement of these standards, without which they are merely academic, too weak, in the human world, to defend themselves from self-interest.
The no man’s land where a reasonable and truthful man can stand, who is not convinced in the reality of God, but is convinced in the objective nature of truth, virtue, and beauty, shrinks and shrinks as more logical consistency is brought to bear.
The only perfectly logical conclusion if God exists is a belief in truth, beauty, and virtue, that is, in law and logic which allows for men to live in civilization in a civil fashion, with laws and customs that deter crime and encourage virtue. On the other hand, the only perfectly logical conclusion if God does not exist is that truth, beauty, and virtue are either manmade constructs, Darwinian survival strategies, or matters of mere opinion. This means they are subjective as a matter of practice even if they are objective to the philosopher, because there is no omnipotent omniscience to search out truth, judge expressions of beauty, and punish vice. Taken to its logical extreme, the world is meaningless, and the only reasonable philosophy is nihilism.
The secular conservative eventually must choose which worldview to support, since Christianity and Nihilism, that is Civilization and Barbarism, are the only real alternatives. They are mutually exclusive and missionary. Both seek to spread at the expense of the other, and the various halfway positions between them each contain a compromise or logical paradox passing time will cease to permit.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
