By Wayne Allensworth
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In 1914, a few people saw that the Guns of August signaled something far worse than another European war. That war would be a watershed, a culmination of the erosion of a civilization that created the great nation states and empires but would destroy so many of them from within. On August 3, 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, as he wrote in his memoirs, was standing at a window in the Foreign Office. “It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking,” Grey wrote. “My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life time.’” European civilization, the West, mobilized all the previously unimaginable technological and industrial force it had created on the ruins of Christendom and self-inflicted a mortal wound. That catastrophic war erased the remaining façade of a civilization, and with it, its fading brakes on the Luciferian Will to Power that springs from the shadow of the human psyche.
In the 21st century, we have reached another turning point as the globalist empire that evolved in the wake of two self-destructive wars — the second of which merely continued the first — plays itself out in a futile attempt to block the rise of rival powers. Modernity, industrialization, urbanization, radical individualism, and the bargains made collectively by Faustian Man, who exchanged his collective soul for the illusion of supreme power, are internally debilitating us. The family is dissolving along with jobs for men while promoting the illusion of empowered women. Marriage seems like a quaint old school custom best preserved in history books and old love letters. Childbearing became a brake on self-realization in a society that was partly built an economy of massive deficits and inflation, so it, too, is disappearing, along with the steadily-shrinking nations that have embraced modernity and all its implications. The old social model with a wide base of young people to replenish the population and a narrower tip of old people, has been inverted. As jobs traditionally held by men that drove the productive base of the economy disappear, replaced by a Digital Matrix never never land, women, the base for the new caretaker economy, predominate in the health care, elder care, and social services. A caretaker state is becoming a national hospice.
Where have all the good men gone? They have retired to their basements to game away in a fantasy world. Where have all the wives and mothers gone? They are largely caring for a dying nation. But not only that. In a corporate, post-industrial economy, women, who tend to be more conformist than men, make good cubicle drones. No more Christian knights in shining armor will rescue them. They are playing away their lives as avatars of pagan berserkers on their PCs. No more romance, though unsuspecting young women won’t know that until it’s too late. With a society drowning in sexualized images, even sex becomes boring. Incels will have their digital dates and women a dead-end life of “serial monogamy.” Men and women overcompensate, acting out as thugs to prove their questionable manhood, or indulging themselves by dressing like streetwalkers and complaining about sexual harassment at the same time. Narcissism is the last refuge of empty people.
It’s no surprise that social pathologies seem like the new normal. For a strange madness grips a culture based primarily in the psychological shadow that thrives via the Left-brain hemisphere. We live as though there’s no tomorrow — and there isn’t, at least not for the countries of the developed world. In a world that exalts ego and the unrestrained self over any sense of the common good, it’s again not surprising that we latch onto the craziest ideologies imparting the illusion that we direct ourselves.
Idiocracy is the terminal stage of a dying system, as our “leaders” lapse into self-parody. We don’t trust each other because building trust requires a baseline of commonality. We don’t trust a system built on lies, but won’t admit that we collectively asked for it. Institutional religion in the postmodern United States has been, as financial capitalism is wont to do, transformed and debased into another commodity to be sold to consumer niches. Idolatry is sure to follow. Fractured, atomized, and failing, a strong sense of desperation is in the air. And it is no longer a quiet desperation. It howls in nihilistic pop culture. In its rage, it screams for help: Rescue me!
I hear a lot from others as concerned as I am about getting out. The country we knew and loved is long gone and it won’t come back. It can’t. That would require another world, another zeitgeist, different demographics, and no small miracle. But we have no place to go. At least a place over which the demonic spirit of modernity will not soon rule. You want to live out your golden years in Costa Rica? What about your children and grandchildren? And a small problem with Costa Rica is that it depends on all those dollars spent there. But the dollar is a currency that is steadily being debased and will lose its magical power when it is no longer the global reserve currency.
I mourn the good things that were lost. It’s all too easy to fall into despair. All of us do that from time to time. But the way out isn’t in another place. In quiet moments, at times early in the day, or late at night, I can hear the sound of silence. And the silence, the stillness, as I have learned, is God’s voice. The kingdom of God is within you. And it’s all around you, if you have eyes to see. And if you hear the silence and experience the stillness, you’ll know what to do. I recently gave a young man who was graduating from high school a little bit of advice: Always follow your conscience. It won’t speak to you in words. Its voice is loudest in silence. Goodness is a quality, an action, a path, not a set of propositions. Follow it and you will not hesitate to love or to live fully. It’s not just a matter of surviving a collapse but of being alive in the fullest sense no matter what the circumstances. You become by action. Life is a constant becoming. You will have those moments, like Jesus at Gethsemane, or at the time of your own personal crucifixion, when you will wonder where God is and why things are as they are. But in silence, you’ll know the answers that have no words.
I have written previously about the silence I can hear even when planes fly overhead and trains rumble in the distance. I look at the life around me and know that it is a cohesive whole, a flow of being that is itself an act of love. Death is constant, but life returns again and again. It was always a mistake to think of God as being off someplace else, as having abandoned us. I think of that through the prism of being a father. Life is the greatest gift, as fraught as it is with sorrow. My children had to leave home to be, to grow, to suffer, and to learn. It can’t be another way and still mean anything. Life’s purpose is itself. Every life expresses the flow of being, and if we listen to the silence, we can find our way. It’s the next voice you hear. That voice beyond the raging cacophony of a civilization in its agony. Peace isn’t someplace else. It’s within you.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
