The Answer to the Question: What is Destroying the West?
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I don’t like this answer. For one thing, it’s a bit of a run-on. I doubt that Yang considers the elites, intellectuals, and media types to be different groups, so it seems to be a reiteration. But more importantly, while it tries to list the traits of those who are causing the problem, it doesn’t try to define the nature of the problem; that is, the nature of the culture that’s being spread.
The culture is anti-God, to be sure. But there have been many anti-God cultures, and this culture has a distinct feel to it. It’s not simply collectivist, because we can all sense a similar problem among the libertarian types. It’s not just the denial of standards and the insistence on equality of outcome, although I think that’s pretty close to the core of the problem.
What’s destroying the West is acedia. That true sloth that’s deeper than laziness. It’s what motivates the hatred of standards. It’s what connects the lazy journalists repeating fake stories and the lazy conspiracy theorists who dismiss everything as false. It’s a busy-ness that hides lack of effort.
It’s maybe inevitable in a world with Wikipedia. (Can you imagine the embarrassment if someone posted your Wikipedia searches? Double-checking how many states are in the US, or even worse the Saved By The Bell episode listing?) I think it was Chesterton who said that despair isn’t when you get tired of the unpleasant, it’s when you get tired of the pleasant. In a society like ours right now, where the diligent teleworker and the internet gamer both sit at home on screens trying to crack codes while eating chips, the idea of achievement seems ephemeral.
I’ve heard Andrew Klavan talk about how in the agricultural and industrial ages it mattered very much whether you created something that worked, but in the information age, the impact of true content and that of false content is basically the same. It reminds me also of something P.J. O’Rourke wrote about government workers: that when you don’t produce measurable output, you become obsessed with your input. So we have people constantly checking social media because they feel the need to be busy, but can’t explain why they feel no satisfaction from it.
It doesn’t have a verb. That was intentional by the author. The woke movement attempts to substitute political stances for morality and sound bites for thought.
Maybe they’re saying the thing that’s destroying the West is the overuse of the prefix “pseudo”? 🙂
“The process of death wishing, in the guise of liberalism, has been eroding the civilization of the West for a century and more, and now would seem to be about to reach its apogee. The Liberal mind, effective everywhere, whether in power or in opposition, has provided the perfect instrument. Systematically, stage by stage, dismantling our Western way of life, depreciating and deprecating all its values so that the whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. And all this, wonderfully enough, in the name of the health, wealth and happiness of all mankind.
Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Not Bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with all the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not Fascism, which was left hanging upside down from a lamp-post along with Mussolini and his mistress – none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness of our civilization, but Liberalism. A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish…”
-Malcolm Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death Wish”, 1979
Every industry has been “disrupted”, in order to generate wealth quickly. Disruption in the way we have done things in the past. Finding a new way to do it because we were bored with the usual reliable way, even though there was nothing broken to be fixed. And erasing the processes and procedures of the past as though they never existed and the idea that this age has invented the wheel for the first time in history. So the break with the past brings with it a lack of orientation and insecurity and lack of appreciation of the current. And when the current gets boring the process starts again. It’s a dangerous cycle.
Technology has turned people into unthinking zombies who settle for the easiest solution.
I agree that a form of laziness is what will/is destroying the west.
Meanwhile, have you seen how hard-working and hungry the Chinese are. Mao wasn’t messing around when he conditioned them into the mega-force they have now become.
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