Why the West is Failing.

Must listen to BBC R4 8pm tonight. Imagine an overbearing parent who, through numerous prods and pokes, convinced you you wanted, at age eleven, a stamp collecting set when you really wanted a bike. He was proud of his achievement because he liked philately and happened to have a spare stamp collecting set in a drawer and felt bikes were horrible oily mechanical things. Convinced, you half-heartedly stuck down penny purples and made planes from the empty pages. The current truly rampant manipulative use of social media is such a parent. Facebook et al are fundamentally conduits for the act of being overbearing. “You don’t really want that, you want this.” Like the old game where two people interleave hands and repeatedly pull out the bottom one and place it on top. That’ll make more sense if you do it saying the phrase. Western governments have institutionalised being overbearing, deciding what people want and foisting it on them. It’s now a fundamental part of our social fabric, and like that old hand game we’re going nowhere, achieving nothing of value and giving out stamp collecting sets to people who make paper planes out of them. That visceral motivation you would have got from a bike is missing and we’re all just going through the motions working ever harder towards objectives as nebulous as, well Brexit. Have now listened to above program recounting Oswald Spengler’s 1918 prophecy, the fall into decadence of every empire in history. Unfortunately it does seem inevitable. Initially a society has common youthful energy. In time it displaces that common energy with individual fragmentary comfort. In so doing it separates into those who acquire ever-greater comfort and those who don’t. Greater comfort assumes the greater increasingly disassociated power that separates the fabric of common energy. That fabric becomes weak and divisive, its energy consumed in internal nonsense. It can’t compete with other’s common youthful energy. It becomes insular, dictatorial, seeing its only salvation in isolation. It becomes that overbearing parent suppressing its youth, its only chance of a comfortable old age and a fresh start.