Hanging in the Balance
Atlanta, GA
September 22, 2021
Today is the autumnal equinox, and much hangs in the balance.
Doug Casey once defined stupidity as an unwitting tendency toward self-destruction. Over the last couple months, as light dwindled and days shortened, we’ve witnessed (and occasionally epitomized) what he meant.
The relatively educated among us who reflexively parrot the approved opinions, follow “the science”, and do “the right thing” are feeding a beast they’re unable to control. And after they sic it on the dissidents, it will turn on them.
There’s an underbelly of the human spirit that likes to boss other people around, ostensibly for their own good. It disparages the idea of individual liberty, even as it propagates the chimera of communal “freedom”. It denies that any one of us can be free unless all of us are “safe”.
This is the philosophy of the overgrown infant, and the petty tyrant. It’s not enough for its advocates to huddle up, hide away, and cower from the world. Everybody else must do so too, even if by force.
It’s the Puritan ethic in modern garb, what HL Mencken called the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. It’s what causes morally superior meddlers to upbraid people they’ve never met for refusing a mask, declining a shot, combining their trash, burning fossil fuels, or using the wrong pronoun. It’s the overbearing sanctimony of the infernal busybody.
These do-gooder world-improvers insist their mask is useless unless others wear one, and that their medicine is effective only if everyone else takes it too. It’s as if they can’t get drunk unless everybody drinks.
These weird notions are demented and bizarre, but they’ve worked. They’re meant to coax compliance, and drive division. And they have. By insinuating that individual rights place everyone at risk, they’ve gotten people to turn on each other, to treat those who won’t comply as “unclean”…pestilential vermin worthy of derision and ostracism.
Perhaps the worst part of the Covid saga is how it is severing long-lasting, close relationships. It’s a time when the pharmaceutical you take determines the friends you have, or even the family you keep. People have long been shunned for taking drugs. Now, they’re cast out for not injecting one. It’s like we’ve become the high school kids our parents warned us to avoid.
But this isn’t about Covid per se. Responses to this virus are a salient symptom of a deeper disease.
Mencken noted that moral certainty is a sign of cultural inferiority. He had a point. We’ve sunk to where society probes the swamp, as sanctimony touches the sky.
Bill Bonner once said that any time a politician or pundit says “we need to…”, you can be sure that whatever words come next will be imbecilic. For a year and a half, we’ve wallowed in imbecility, laced with moral certitude.
Such is the way of a late-stage, degenerate empire. Humility withers as civilization wanes (and vice versa). An impetus to “action” is endemic. Like the whiskey before the hangover or the sin before Hell, impulsive activity is often a thrilling invitation to trouble, deriving from an inability to mind our own business…and a disturbing tendency to butt into everyone else’s.
Our age loves to leap before it looks, which is why we’re always in such a hole. It’d do well instead to occasionally sit back, listen, and observe. To be descriptive rather than prescriptive, to try to understand the world rather than always pretending to fix it. To understand our limitations, and to remember that the more we learn, the less we know.
I read recently of a Normandy priest who told his parishioners that God does not ask us to change the world. He asks us only to change ourselves. That alone is a tall task, yet it’s not a novel concept. But it is a forgotten one. Still, as Dr Johnson said, men more often need to be reminded than informed.
But to be reminded or informed, men must be willing to listen. These days, most can’t hear over the sound of their own voice. They are receptive only to ideas they think they already know.
We’ve reached a point where half the United States can’t stand the other half. And there are no doubt pockets of mutual loathing within each side.
Not only do Americans no longer share the same world-view, they’re unable to offer opposing opinions. The differences seem irreconcilable, and beyond resolving. At this point, why should we want to?
One side insists we all inject pharmaceuticals, cover our faces, change the weather, acknowledge new genders, denigrate old ancestors, stop eating meat, and start being “woke”. And the other side just wants to be left alone.
No wonder they hate each other. And there’s no reason they should live together.
For years I’ve argued that secession is necessary, and eventually inevitable. Now it’s urgent, if not imminent. It is an eminently reasonable remedy for our irreconcilable differences. It’s an obvious solution, and humane one. And it’s common sense: a tactical retreat from our cold civil war.
That most (tho’ fewer) people recoil from this idea isn’t surprising. As Chesterton said, a society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange or unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curves or twists, is supposed to be a sort of joke.
Unfortunately, no one’s laughing. We not only have no common sense. We barely have any sense at all.
We’re heading deeper into the Fourth Turning. Winter is coming, and night will descend. But as the days shorten, we console ourselves that dawn will break. And with the realization that we must endure the darkness to see the stars.
JD
