The moral collapse of the West

And the forging of something new

The Western world has become unmoored from the very ethics and principles which made us successful in the first place. We have given up even pretending to cleave to the norms that our forebears gave us. Modern society has become anti family, anti nation, unprincipled, corrupt and bathed in all of the original sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

It fills me with no delight to say this, in fact it appals me but it is true. My grandparents would be horrified at the state of this country and I don’t just mean materially. They would not even recognise the state of society with people shoplifting and robbing without shame, young women publicly boasting about the amount of men they have slept with and politicians caught lying again and again but never once thinking of resigning.

We have lost the most basic function of social shaming - that the group ostracises those who go against its norms. The rot has got so bad the inverse is happening “If they are doing it why shouldn’t I” is more and more the refrain. It is the logical outcome of a society that has long since dumped the belief in shared moral values and embraced hyper individualism at all costs. You can be whatever you like - who are we to judge?

In fact I am a political liberal and one that has largely always believed that what happens between consenting adults is of no concern to you and I. However it is becoming ever more clear to me that principle works up to a point but then people just can’t help themselves and keep pushing and pushing until personal behaviors spill out into the public domain.

What started out as a fair idea of being able to do what you like at home has turned into a sense of entitlement which has been backed up by a legal system which talks always about rights but never about responsibilities or duties. No wonder the entire system is breaking down. The only message that is now transmitted is that your rights, your personal wishes and your identities are all that matters. We have become a society which is focused firmly on “me” and where the “we” can go fuck themselves.

Liberalism won the long war from the 1960’s to now and it has left beyond a scorched earth of destroyed families, collapsed moral values, incinerated social norms and any sense of personal probity. I mean how can you have any when society has normalised pretty much everything. I mean there is nothing that is not excused away now when convenient.

Hell many of the clever people have spent the last 20 years explaining away the industrial rape of children by the Pakistani gangs. When they grew bored of that they moved onto the wholesale mutilation of children during the trans craze. Both of these scandals are still ongoing. The response even now is to attack, deny and look the other way. Any society that can’t defend its young and the weak is morally dead and that is where we are.

It took hundreds of years to build up high trust societies which had many many problems and yet worked and were respected around the world. Intelligence, excellence, hard work, the family, ethics and more were held up as the gold standard of personal and social development. From that the Western states bloomed bringing forth the modern world, technology and flourishing never seen in human history.

We celebrated education and self learning - we prized knowledge and skill at all levels. Working people gathered together to better themselves in clubs and the middle and upper classes strove to both imbibe and promote the high arts and culture. There was a shared sense of responsibility to work towards something better with the richest erecting many of the civic buildings we use even now.

Our culture now has become crass, simplistic and stupid. The majority including most of those who go onto university rarely even read let alone try and learn about the world. How can you change anything if you don't understand it - perhaps that was the plan all along? The bread and circuses of the last 40 years have come from the TV and not the arena - broadcast to a willing world which guzzled it down with abandon rather than deal with reality as the storm clouds gathered.

Now our culture and society have become like the churned over fields of the Somme or the Verdun with barely an insect alive. The once proud remains of a civilisation which changed the world lies in ruins. Cratered and pock-marked by decades of battles for its very soul. Where generations of leaders have sent the best and brightest out to morally and intellectually die before looking shocked as the young have turned on the societies they have been taught to hate.

It is easy to blame the current political class but these crimes were decades in the making and normally cheered on by the masses. The West is living proof that humans make very poor decisions when not forced to confront the outcomes there and then. Always too willing to shoot for a short term gain like a drug addict who just wants one more hit even though he knows it is killing him.

Still we are at the end now for the consequences can no longer be hidden. Just as with World War 1 the appalling damage and horror wrought has finally broken through into the public consciousness and society is rightly appalled. For like Adam and Eve after the fall more and more including myself are now peering back into the garden of Eden from which we have banished ourselves never able to return for it is the past and there is no time machine and like an omelette you can’t unscramble an egg.

No something new will arise from the current wreck but before that we need to have a cultural and social renaissance whereby we start pulling together. We are fortunately there as people have realised how close we are to losing everything - to seeing all that is glorious in our countries and civilisation fade into the evening light. They are rising up in big and small ways to say “No”.

Like the fields of northern France a thousand poppies are starting to bloom as people step forward and offer to help. Be it writing a Substack to helping at a charity to busying themselves with a political party you are seeing the rebirth of social consciousness as people fight back against the forces which are unpicking our emotional, intellectual and material homes. Across the West millions are saying enough and slowly the tide is turning.

We are going to put back the guardrails into society though this will take time and effort. The extremes will be with us for some time but the fact that we talk about them is a sign that the times are changing. People are no longer willing to be silent and oblivious to the acute crisis in our midst. They are no longer willing to be silenced by a culpable media and elite class.

Enough is the refrain from more and more as they look around at the horrors that our country has birthed and allowed to metastasis. They expect and now demand that politicians take a stand and speak up for what matters. This is not the perfect morality and actions of yesterday year which were mostly an illusion anyway. More the steady requirement that sides are taken and positions clarified so the public can judge them fairly based upon the emergent consensus.

For that is what is driving this now - an emergent counterrevolutionary gestalt of the majority who have had enough. This is not about race or class or even politics for this crosses all lines. This is about people who are suddenly waking up together from the same dream and realising it is a nightmare and who are now urgently shaking others awake.

It is a slow process but it is speeding up as each person wakes more and more from their stupor and forces them to confront our shared reality. Each new soldier in this war in turn wakes another and another travelling like wildfire through the body politic. Soon the country will blaze with the fires of the righteously angry who will brook no dissent against their demand for change, The chattering classes know this and are already falling silent in the face of the gathering roar.

The time is approaching when we will refashion what was broken but first we must gather the pieces and patiently clean them for the reforging. The old can never come again but perhaps something else can come from the parts left over. But only if we can find them and unite them. This is a process that may end in the political system but what matters is out here now. The heat is rising, the parts are gathering and though I have bad days and good I am hopeful. It is not over but time is short for England, for Britain and for the West.