<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3HV0ZHHPqcA?si=twqcqsKbxPQkYoua" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> --- ## Globalist, Academic, Secular, and Progressive To those who do not perceive our society as profoundly sick, I am at a loss for what to say. You are either of an age that removes you from its main generative force, or your head is buried a thousand miles in the sand. What further evidence is required to see that our society is terminally sick on a spiritual basis? I could point to dozens of indicators: the skyrocketing "deaths of despair," the crippling rates of mental health issues, depression, and loneliness—all of which are at their worst points in recorded human history. However, I will adopt a more holistic perspective. The democratically elected governments of the West are attempting to commit civilizational suicide. Many countries in Northern Europe openly champion degrowth and de-industrialization as their dominant political agenda. Every major Western government is importing millions of immigrants, often against their own economic self-interest, with the express purpose of replacing the local population. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 100% of new jobs in America have gone to immigrants.[^2021JobDemographics] Diversity quotas have so thoroughly dismantled the West's economic meritocracy that for the last few years, nearly all job openings in the top 500 companies have gone to non-whites. Considering that individuals of European descent comprise approximately 75% of America's population—and a higher percentage in Europe—an anti-white posture is functionally suicidal for the West. [^2021JobDemographics]: Honestly I thought this was a far-right talking point when I first heard it. However, in 2021 the overall job growth of the S&P 100 included 20,524 White workers. The other 302,570 jobs — or 94% of the headcount increase — went to people of colour. - [Bloomberg - September 25, 2023](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20Hispanic%2C%20Asian%20and,US%20companies%20in%20previous%20years.) The trend continues into 2024 at ~6%, and entering 2025 the [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/) has essentially stopped releasing accurate jobs reporting data due to Trump, specifically due to high unemployment and revisions. The entirety of our cultural forms has been captured by a secular church that rationalizes every facet of life into an inchoate nihilism, a worldview that pushes only for its own destruction. This is compounded by a birth rate at the lowest level in history, crashing almost everywhere faster than the most aggressive projections from the UN or national governments could have guessed. Given that such demographic statistics operate with very wide standard deviations, what is occurring now borders on the apocalyptic. This represents the greatest crisis of our time, yet it is a crisis that almost no leaders or regimes around the world take seriously. A quarter of Gen Z Americans believe it is morally wrong to have children, and these numbers are even higher in Northern Europe. What all of this underlies is that we are a profoundly psychologically or spiritually sick culture—the most profoundly sick that I can identify in human history. Furthermore, this sickness is killing us with alarming speed. The historian Carroll Quigley (writing c. 1960) once ranked the West's social institutions and identified its great weakness as its lack of religion. He predicted that if the West could not solve its failed religious issue, then no matter how wealthy or technologically advanced we became, we would witness the rise of a cancerous anti-religion that would destroy Western Civilization. ## Social Feminization One of my guiding principles is that before I judge someone, I try to listen to what they are truly saying—often, what they are *literally* saying. This sounds profoundly simple, but almost no one does it. For example, modern Western women publicly state their complete contempt for men constantly; one need only look at any form of media. The left publicly states its complete self-loathing of its own society and heritage. They believe this so strongly that they literally state their support for civilizational suicide. Hamas literally says, "From the river to the sea." The Chinese Communist Party (established 1921, in power since 1949) literally says it wants to recreate the old Chinese Empire of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Iran literally calls America "the Great Satan." Modernity suffers from a profound naivete that is perhaps our greatest weakness. We allowed Marxists to take over our institutions while they literally and publicly said they wanted to destroy everything we love. The British and French appeased Nazi Germany (in power 1933-1945) when the Nazis also literally said they wanted to genocide Eastern Europe for their *Lebensraum*. This is one of the most persistent and foolish mistakes we make as a society. I partly blame [[Collapse of Eros - The Biopolitical Quietude of the West|social feminization.]] Dozens of scientific studies, alongside common wisdom, indicate that women are often attracted to Dark Triad traits like Machiavellianism, sociopathy, and narcissism. The stereotype of women being attracted to "bad boys" who treat them terribly is borne out by romance novels and anecdotal experience alike. It is logical, therefore, that a feminized society would harbor an unspoken, deep attraction for those who wish it ill and who completely reject its values. You may call me a misogynist, but I ask: am I wrong? I see this naivete on the right as well, where moderate conservatives will often work with radical leftists. I tell them, "You know if those radicals win, they're going to put all of us in camps. So why are you trying to appease them?" When I hear leftists or political radicals, I can see they are in a tremendous amount of pain. While a small percentage of any population consists of sociopaths who naturally predate on others—perhaps 2-5%—most political radicals are individuals whose souls have been consumed and chewed up by the cruelty and dehumanization of the world. For the West to elect suicidal governments, our entire society must be in so much psychological pain as to make suicide seem like a viable answer. Psychologically, this is how all suicides occur. If you read suicide notes, the common unifying thread is the word "useless." Suicide occurs when people feel their lives have no natural meaning and that they are not needed by anyone. ## The Absence of Silence and Introspection The absence of silence in our culture has always struck me as deeply pathological. I was raised a Quaker, a sect of Christians who meditate in silence as a way to reach God. In Quakerism, silence is sacred, and this was an attitude I grew up with. Silence is essential because it gives the mind space to unwind and begin to introspect. Our civilization, however, does everything it possibly can to avoid introspection. We constantly barrage ourselves with hedonism, stimuli, screens, excitement, ideology, and buzzwords to avoid ever thinking more deeply. This is true even at a macro level. Our academic, religious, and spiritual institutions actively avoid deep thought. You go to church, and they do not talk about the inner spirit of God but rather its outward manifestations; I suspect they often do not even believe an inner spirit of God exists. The philosophy our civilization propounds, postmodernism, openly rejects any meaning or truth in the world. This reconciles our lives to a meaningless hell for our entire civilization. The insane thing is that we never discuss this. Why do the sexes hate each other? Why do people not want to have children? Why is our civilization committing suicide while people lack any meaning? Why are the philosophers and greatest minds of our people not actively trying to understand and combat this? Even conservatives do not take this seriously. For our society to survive, we must take the souls of the people involved seriously. The question then becomes: how do you fix a society dying of a spiritual or psychological plague? The good news is that I have developed what I believe is the best possible answer. A complicating factor is that human life does not fit into easy boxes. If you were to ask whether you should focus on healing your soul, your material life, your religious beliefs, or therapy, my reply would be an emphatic "yes" to all. A recent and excellent book on psychology, *Lost Connections* by Johann Hari, posits that depression is not primarily a chemical imbalance in the brain but is caused by your life actually being terrible. This stems from a combination of potential causes: loneliness, poverty, lack of meaning, lack of beauty, and many other factors. The fact that this is not completely obvious to our society is mind-blowing. Of course, someone's psychology is an outgrowth of their environment. This is a point Charles Taylor explores in his book *A Secular Age*, which compares the medieval psychological worldview to the modern one. In the premodern world, psychology was viewed as part of a natural ecosystem. A person filled their soul with culture, religion, and spiritual protections against demonic influence or "mind viruses." Modernity, in contrast, believes in the "buffered personality"—the idea that all humans are rational, independent units who study the world objectively and make calculated decisions. Modern science, as well as the folk wisdom of all history, completely disagrees. Humans are chaotic primates who need society and religion to hold them accountable against their own madness. This establishes a major psychological feedback loop in modern thinking that ultimately dooms it: since people are assumed to be innately good and rational, the things they think must also be good and rational. This makes it functionally impossible for modernity to introspect on its own flaws. Carl Jung (1875-1961) spoke extensively about how our internal mental worlds are reflected in the outside world. Architecture provides an easy example. Just as you can see a small window into someone's soul from their interior decorations, you can do the same for a civilization by the architecture it builds. If we are judging ourselves by our culture, our society is in a state of complete suicide. Our culture unironically refuses to produce content that believes in anything. The art the mainstream produces looks legitimately demonic. We have stopped being able to create new art, endlessly rehashing the intellectual properties of generations past. Our buildings look completely soulless and inhuman. There is no place for the human soul anywhere in our society. This is the complication. If someone were to ask me what is needed to pull our civilization back from suicide—is it material or psychological?—the answer is yes. We must make material changes to our society so we are less lonely, poor, angry, and directionless. However, I believe the first step must be psychological and philosophical. If we do not have a direction to aim towards, all the material improvements we attempt will be aimless and will naturally fail. ## Psychological Narratives and the Ruling Mythology We hold a series of psychological narratives of which we are often not even aware. For example, most people with PTSD psychologically blame themselves for the trauma that occurred to them. PTSD happens when something traumatic that did not exist inside your mental frame occurs; thus, your body is on constant alert, trying to guess things you cannot possibly know. You heal PTSD by removing the belief that you are in power of things outside your control. I cannot stress this enough: you do not know who you are. The person you believe yourself to be is a press agent for your subconscious, whose role is to make you look good to others. Psychological studies have found time and again that our minds are terrifyingly good at deceiving even ourselves; *The Elephant in the Brain* by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson is an incredible work on this topic. You are your underlying assumptions, not the press narrative you relate to yourself and others. Many people in society today actually do hate themselves, though they would never admit it, even blackout drunk. If you watch their actions, however, you would consistently find self-defeating behaviors that override their smiley exterior. I worry this applies to a majority of our current population. Every culture has a mythology, which is effectively the switchboard from which the society makes decisions. Modernity struggles with understanding mythology because it is indirect. Mythology is like a video game that both shows you the map of the world and also provides the best strategies for playing. Western Civilization, for instance, has drawn from Greek and Nordic mythology alongside the Abrahamic tradition. Throughout Western history, people looked to King Arthur, Solomon, or Achilles as role models. When young men died at the Somme (1916), they did so reenacting the roles of Greeks fighting the Persians. Our society has completely restructured its own mythology, primarily around a combination of Marxism, Freudianism, and Hollywood. When we make decisions, we cross-reference them against these systems. I really cannot overstate the importance of Hollywood, which is the mythological circuit board I see Americans use most in their value system. The key problem here is that in our current mythology, we lose by definition. The left has purposely structured our entire worldview to be a spider web where we are structurally guaranteed to lose, no matter what we do. For example, in our current social structure, if you are not successful, you are a loser; but if you are successful, you are also bad. In the leftist worldview, if you are a white person and you choose to indulge in other cultures, that is racist "cultural appropriation"; if you do not, that is also racist. If you move to a majority-minority area, that is "gentrification"; if you move to a majority-white area, that is "white flight." Our entire worldview is a matrix established in the last century to actively harm us. Our previous worldview, though flawed, was made mostly by honest people compiling millennia of wisdom to help others. The leftist-materialist worldview, while perhaps made with the intention of helping people, defined "helping" as the complete destruction of civilization. The leftist authors of the mid-20th century—Saul Alinsky, Yuri Bezmenov, Antonio Gramsci—all publicly said these things. They wrote strategy books stating that the purpose of their entire worldview was to weaken the old established order for the revolution through a process of social alienation. Marx (1818-1883) openly said the same. These authors stated that they were trying to destroy religion and community trust, often advocating for bureaucratization so that neighbors could not talk to each other and everything had to be structured through a central authority, thereby weakening society so the communists would win. We have been trapped in a spider's web where the left will always win the game because they made the game. The more the right wriggles inside the leftist paradigm, the more we lose. Religions are a form of hypnotic seduction. Hypnosis is an altered psychological state that changes how you perceive the world. You can only be hypnotized if you want to be, and hypnosis therapy is quite effective at rewiring subconscious assumptions. Religions function as hypnotic worldviews that completely change how you perceive reality itself. It is as if religion enters your own eyes, and when you look at the world, you see a different universe than someone else. This is where my idea of "shattering the glass" comes from. I realized that the left has developed a mental ecosystem where they win by their own definition. By acknowledging any of the left's underlying realities, we gradually let them hypnotize and seduce us. If you can't win a game, break the game—or play a different one. The mind is a living organism, and you must refuse to take in mental thought viruses that actively harm you. When I say shatter the glass, I mean to completely shatter the old paradigm. I believe that paradigm is wrong on a very deep level. I did not have to be the person who did this, but as my father would say, if no one in the room is doing the right thing, that makes it your duty. To be very clear: if we cannot rewire these assumptions, we are completely doomed, since our psychological ecosystem is so biased towards nihilism that any good things will be wasted. I take responsibility for this shattering; if bad things come from it, it is my fault. I did it because it had to be done. #### The 12 Foundational Assumptions to Be Rewired Here are the twelve underlying assumptions I believe we need to alter to survive. ##### 1. *We determine reality* changed to *We submit to reality*. This should be self-explanatory. The most basal level of reality is that you do not control the world. We all submit to forces vastly more powerful than ourselves. This is the first principle, without which the others cannot make sense. Without an external reality, there is no way to orient yourself. In school, I was forced to read an article arguing that if we socialized women differently, they would be as good at basketball as men. This is insane. We constantly deny reality, whether by ignoring scarcity or genetic and sexual differences. Transgenderism is the easiest example. The problem is that most people in the West somehow do not believe this. The underlying philosophic assumption of our society, stemming from postmodernism, is that power relations determine reality. Other varieties of this exist in eugenics, tech worship, and market worship. In each case, the belief is that human innovation means we are no longer beholden to reality. This myth ultimately stems from the ancient religion of Gnosticism (peaking in the 2nd-3rd centuries CE). ##### 2. *Nothing is enough* changed to *Everything is just what it is*. We live in the wealthiest, healthiest, most secure, hygienic, and one of the freest and most permissive societies ever. A rational person would be infinitely grateful, but that is clearly not the case. The great irony is that the best-off society ever is also the most dissatisfied. We are tearing our civilization down due to self-loathing. This attitude promotes nihilism, as we are never satisfied with what we accomplish and thus accomplish nothing. It also enables the most envious and petty demographic in history. The founders of the modern Anglo-American order were some of the most humane, intelligent, and enlightened people who ever lived. The fact that their main criticism is that they "didn't go far enough" is a moral sin of the highest level. Those who make this criticism are the most entitled people who have ever lived. No matter what we accomplish, we are judged by the eye of an impossible utopia. The real answer is that things are just what they are. Every person and every society has space for improvement, but the only way to not go insane is to take and love things for where they are at. ##### 3. *The world is dead* changed to *The world is alive*. This is less a philosophic argument and more a matter of perspective. Many who wrote about the "disenchantment of the world"—the idea that it is a boring, controlled place without spirits or magic—were themselves occultists trying to magically seduce the public with their paradigm. The more you look, the clearer it becomes that the world is a spectacular, beautiful place. We have the Amazon rainforest, the history of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), the city of Istanbul, Komodo dragons. American politics today is more interesting than *Game of Thrones*. We have created powerful Genies—AIs—that give us wisdom. We live in a world more wonderful than anything we could imagine, yet we pretend it is a sterile, controlled place where we are living after the end of history. By treating the world as dead, there is nothing worth living for. The reality is that the world is not a dead, mechanistic material but an interactive system we must actively engage with. History is not even close to over. Life will always be a struggle and an adventure. ##### 4. *We are soulless blank slates* changed to *We all have unique souls*. The founding myth of our current civilization is that all humans are interchangeable blank slates, completely molded by social engineering. This is best exemplified by the transgender movement, which exists in direct opposition to the most fundamental duality of human nature: the masculine and the feminine. We could survive without the nation, class, or religion, but once you corrupt biological sex, the human race is extinct. Every assumption of our society leads back to the blank slate as a master key. This is ironic, given that the blank slate has been disproven for over a decade by mountains of scientific evidence. Even leftist scientists acknowledge that at least half of human behavior—from how fast you drive and your political affiliation to how cilantro tastes—is genetic. Everyone in genetic science knows there are significant genetic differences across race, sex, ethnicity, and class. Realizing this will be a nuclear bomb to the foundations of our society. Yet there is freedom here: the blank slate ultimately leads to totalitarianism. If human nature is perfectible, it becomes the duty of the ruling class to perfect it. If we remove the blank slate, we remove their justification. ##### 5. *Everyone is equal* changed to *Some are better than others*. This is a faith-based claim masquerading as a rational one. It is impossible to prove people are equal because it is so obviously untrue. How is Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) in any way equal to the rapper Lil Xanax? The story of human history is the story of inequality. Capitalism's enormous success suggests the most powerful force in human nature is the unequal pursuit of status. The American Founding Fathers (late 18th century), studying Greco-Roman civilization (c. 8th century BCE - 5th century CE), were most worried that ideas of equality would enable envy and mob rule, which had destroyed ancient democracies. They were able to predict socialism a century in advance. Equality ultimately aims at tearing down the great, as that is easier than raising the low. When a government champions equality, what you see is the elite allying with the mob against the vigorous—a pact born of self-preservation for the elite and envy for the mob. This is what killed Europe in the early 20th century, when it elected socialist governments that destroyed its global competitiveness for a century after 500 years of global domination. ##### 6. *The downtrodden are morally good* changed to *Success and morality are completely different axes*. This idea stems from equality; to psychologically balance the equation, you must make the less successful morally superior. Allying with the "have-nots" is also a timeless evolutionary strategy to gain power. These theories fall apart under pressure. I feel comfortable saying America is morally superior to the Taliban, even with our issues. There is little relationship between status and morality. Higher status individuals tend to be more competent as a general rule, but that is different. I want to completely remove the discussion of morality from the discussion of greatness, as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wished to do. Were the Romans the good guys or the bad guys? It depends on who you ask, but everyone can agree they were excellent and incredible. My father would say, "Don't go around the world looking for good or bad guys, since there often isn't a line, and there's often not a good guy." ##### 7. *Progress is innate* changed to *We make progress happen*. This stems from the Hegelian idea of the dialectic (early 19th century), born from the stunning technological and social advances of Western civilization since the Crusades (c. 1095-1291). We take progress so for granted that we assume any new change must be good. This is a "fish in a pond" moment. If you look at any other data set, this is clearly not the case. The standard civilizational model is: great leader creates empire, said empire decays, and barbarians burn everything down to restart the cycle. This is how the Chinese, Indians, Mesoamericans, Arabs, and even the Greeks and Romans saw time: as cyclical. The reality is that history is more like a double helix, a constant theme in global mysticism. It can appear as a spiral or a line going up, depending on the perspective. There are repeated cycles, but the total game does change and grow. This is why the world's population is eight times what it was 200 years ago. Yet as the game gets bigger, individual lives, while improving over a single lifetime, are pushed back into hardship, since suffering is required for the impetus for continued progress. ##### 8. *Everything is material* changed to *We must accept natural law*. I am largely an empiricist, yet spiritual phenomena are a form of empirical experience. We have billions of records of people having spiritual experiences; every major civilization has been built on religion. If you study the world empirically, you find that humans have conscious experiences of non-material things—drama, philosophy, tradition—that matter completely. Whether a nation can fulfill the abstract moral concept of justice determines almost every part of its society. The laws of the universe, which reward and punish us consistently across history, can be framed as the will of God or the laws of physics. Societies that follow this natural law—maintaining freedom, honor, toughness, inventiveness—beat those that do not. It is clear the universe has abstract principles that do not exist on a material plane. Pure materialism fails because it only looks at replicable phenomena, which is useful for manufacturing but excludes the majority of the human experience: emotions, religion, passion, love. ##### 9. *There are easy answers* changed to *Life is innately mysterious*. When people ask how the Roman Empire fell, I jokingly say it depends on what your agenda wants it to be. I have seen convincing arguments for moral degeneracy, population decline, changes in military structure, the rise of Christianity, elite failure, civilizational life cycles, and climate change. I am self-aware that I blame the same things killing our society today. History provides dozens of brilliant philosophers who claimed to have found total truths—Plato, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad, Marx, Rousseau. But were any of them proven definitively right or wrong? No deep questions about life can be truly answered. We can make a narrative to explain it, but it is unclear if that narrative is the fundamentally correct one. What is the purpose of life? How should we be happy? We can find good answers, but there are no easy answers, only differing imperfect ones for which we must make tradeoffs. ##### 10. *Life has no meaning* changed to *We die without meaning*. Our society completely rejects meaning. We socially outcast anyone who tries to talk about it. Our elite openly champions nihilism. Postmodernism is literally a philosophy built on the rejection of meaning. The irony is that we have consistently found, through science and ancient wisdom, that wealth is not the most important thing for happiness; values and community are the most important variables. The breakdown of both is a dooming factor for society. For whatever reason, we need meaning to survive. This is perhaps more of a male trait, but it is universally human. We literally die without it, and societies that lose meaning always collapse. I believe the greatest issue facing Gen Z, besides loneliness, is existential nihilism. When we die, we think about whether we fulfilled our meaning and our relationships, not how rich we got. ##### 11. *We are rationally disconnected from the world* changed to *Our minds are molded by our surroundings*. It is stunningly ridiculous that for decades our society believed depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, not by things in the person's life. The chemical imbalance is *caused* by your life being terrible. The idea that you can completely separate someone from their ecosystem is insane. Gen Z is in a worse economy, dating situation, and political climate; they have crippling loneliness and meaning issues. Yet when they fail or get depressed, it's still their fault, judged by a Boomer standard with which they have nothing in common. This is the "buffered personality" Charles Taylor described. In medieval philosophy, our minds were living organisms you had to fill with "good bacteria" to protect against mind viruses. The Catholic Church was seen as a spiritual antibody. We see the inverse today, where all mental health issues must be solved by therapy or rationally changing your own mind. The reality is people are not rational; religion and community do the best job of keeping people psychologically stable. ##### 12. *Self-loathing is a virtue* changed to *Self-loathing is as bad as hubris*. This, in my opinion, is the most cancerous and satanic thing our society does. In our culture, the more you loathe yourself, the more moral a person you are. White or Western-majority things that do not actively self-flagellate get torn down. This is civilizational suicide in real time. There's an idea this helps the downtrodden, but making the rich hate themselves does not help the poor; it makes them worse off, as the rich and poor are dependent on each other. If White America falls apart, Black America will be hurt more than the whites. Growing up, I learned to tear myself down, to not aspire to things or realize my full potential, because in our culture any sign of ambition was treated as elitism. This nihilism is the most evil thing in history, worse even than the bloodthirsty humanist utopianism of the last century, because even they liked growth and human life itself. What can I say about a movement that thinks having children is morally wrong and that being a man makes you born into sin?