The paradigm has to collapse

Below I copy and paste part of one of the most interesting
posts by Baron Bodissey in his Gates of Vienna blogsite:

I have been posting quite a bit recently about the “gang wars” in Denmark and the actions taken by the Danish chapter of Hells Angels against the Muslim immigrant gangs.

This is not an easy topic to deal with. The idea that violent, criminal, or marginal people may be the vanguard of the resistance to Islamization—it just doesn’t sit well. Unless our discussion includes a deep-throated and serious disapproval, we risk being labeled “criminals” as well as “racists” and “neo-Nazis”. But it’s important to discuss the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be.

We would like our political leaders to cease importing of millions of Muslim immigrants. We would like them to show more spine in the face of Islamic intimidation. We would like our fellow voters to educate themselves so that they become aware of what’s happening and elect a new batch of leaders who will take a stand on behalf of their own people.

But in the world as it is, this shows no sign of happening. The existing paradigm—a system of lawfully-constituted democratic governance—has failed us.

If lawfully-constituted national leaders do not act, what happens? Will native Europeans go meekly to their doom? Or will those who are already lawless act instead?

In the eight years since 9-11, there has been no sign that any of the major traditional players in the existing political order “gets it”. George W. Bush fought “terrorism”, and he was the best we could hope for. Most European politicians—whether Left or “Right”—support Multiculturalism and are passive in the face of continued mass immigration. No one who wields power shows the slightest sign of dealing seriously with the coming social and financial catastrophe that the liberal welfare state has brought upon us. In the world as it is, you can either have the Hells Angels, or you can give up beer and say “La illaha ila Allah, wa Muhammadun rasul Allah!” It won’t be all that long before those are the only choices for Swedes, or Britons, or the Dutch.

I wrote a few weeks ago about what is likely to happen as the crisis worsens. Under the traditional social contract, in return for maintaining a monopoly on violence, our civil authorities are obligated to protect us from lawlessness and criminal predation. But they have abdicated this duty, and thousands of ordinary citizens are victimized every day as a result. A paralysis brought on by the twin ideologies of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism has immobilized the muscular system of the Western democracies and blocked any response to existential threats, both internal and external. Or—to switch metaphors—consider cultural Marxism as the HIV of the West. Islam is just a virus of opportunity, a pneumonia that has taken advantage of our immunological deficiencies and ushered in the onset of full-blown AIDS in our culture.

We are trapped in a device of our own making, and there is no way to escape without surrendering the deepest truths and most cherished ideals that have held sway for centuries in Europe and the European diaspora.

But not everybody is stuck in the trap. Millions of ordinary people don’t buy into the PC/MC [politically-correct, multicultural] Weltanschauung. Their opinions are not that different from those of their grandparents and great-grandparents. They don’t agree with what their leaders are doing on their behalf, but they want to get along, to live a quiet life, to keep their jobs and avoid having their kids taken away by the child care authorities. The average citizen may be angry and deeply resentful of the soft totalitarianism he’s forced to live under, but you can’t expect him to be a hero. He’s got everything to lose.

All that is changing, however. As working-class neighborhoods are overrun by “culturally enriched” crime, as unemployment rises, as governmental fiscal folly erodes the value of what little money people earn, they have less and less to lose. If official paralysis continues, eventually some of them will abandon all those decades of self-restraint and take up violent resistance. At some point people will snap. And those who go first will be the ones who are already somewhat outside the law and not averse to violence. People who have less to lose, anyway. Roughnecks, misfits, and outsiders of various sorts. In Denmark that means the Hells Angels.

Regular readers are familiar with Zenster’s prescribed solutions, and I generally agree with them: We need to target the top 2,000 or so radical Islamic leaders and send them to collect their 72 raisins. We need make sure that the Muslim world feels such an overwhelmingly decisive blow—including glassing and Windexing™ Mecca, Medina, Qom, etc., if necessary—so that they learn what a “strong horse” really is and act accordingly. We need to prepare the lamp posts, figuratively or literally, for the traitorous Leftists who are leading our countries into this mess. And so on.

But who are “we”? Who is it that will do these things? There is no sign, none whatsoever, that any Western leader—not even Geert Wilders, God bless him—will take such actions. There is no evidence that 9-11 woke anyone up to what needs to be done. And there’s no evidence that a dozen new 9-11s will change the current paradigm. When the inevitable nuclear or chemical attack against a major Western city occurs, it won’t be enough to incite that kind of response. By then the situation will be so bad that a major terrorist action will simply accelerate the descent into political chaos.

The West is done. You can stick a fork in it.

But this is no reason to despair. The end of the West is not the end of the world. There will be an interregnum of uncertain duration, and then something new will form, something built out of leftover pieces of what went before, in the same way Paris, Oxford, and Vienna were built out of the remnants of the Roman Empire.

A lengthy discussion around these ideas has emerged here on a thread that has kept going for the last few days. In the following paragraphs I’ll draw on what was said there, not just by me, but by Conservative Swede, DP111, Chechar, Watching Eagle, Furor Teutonicus, and others. Conservative Swede often refers to the imminent demise of the reigning paradigm of the liberal West. This belief system could be considered a religious orthodoxy, except that the West has largely abandoned religion in its political systems and public policy. The prevalent Weltanschauung is an article of secular faith, so call it Orthodox Secularism: a set of ideas as rigid and unexamined as anything that a Calvinist could produce.

The liberal paradigm of Western Civilization was a natural outgrowth of Christianity, but once it was fully formed, it abandoned its theological basis. Like the cire perdue in a clay cast, the core of faith melted away, leaving the hollow shell of secular liberalism. But this secular faith is unrestrained by the Christian idea that man is limited and flawed. Under the secular paradigm, humans are inherently good and perfectible, and formerly Christian ethics—unmoored from any limitations—require the secular faithful to create a perfect human society on Earth.

All the murderous totalitarianisms of the 20th century arose from various perversions of this idea. But so did the kinder, gentler socialisms of one form or another that all of us live under now. All of our societies have created fiscal and social Ponzi schemes which cannot last, which must eventually come crashing down around our ears. Because they have continued for generations, we think they can go on this way forever. But they can’t. A brief and cold-eyed look at the structure of our political economies shows that they are on their last legs. Even without factoring Islam into the equation, another generation at the most is all we’ll get.

So, knowing all that, isn’t it possible to take action? Is a collective effort to save Western Civilization even imaginable?

The current paradigm is a psychic structure that prevents our formerly Christian civilization from taking the kind of action that would allow it to save itself. At the moment this paradigm is in the process of slow-motion self-destruction, and the pace may soon accelerate so that the old framework will crumble quite rapidly in the next five years or so. The collapse of the welfare state will be the absolute limiting factor for the liberal paradigm.

That collapse, whether gentle or catastrophic, is unavoidable. In just a few short years we will either discover a different paradigm, or be in the midst of some sort of paradigm-less chaos.

The existing system has an internal logic that prevents it from correcting itself. No politician can get re-elected if he takes the necessary action and begins phasing out the welfare state. No civil servant can take harsh measures to ensure our long-term welfare, because that would be contrary to the deranged altruism of the dominant meme. The very structure of the system prevents it from correcting itself. This is the Achilles’ heel of liberal social democracy.

We can’t even talk frankly about these issues in any major public forum. This little blog is a haven for cranks and weirdos like us, but there’s no way our voices will ever be heard by a significant number of people—especially those whose hands grasp the levers of political power.

I’m still impelled towards grassroots organizing in an attempt to stave off the worst. I have a family and people I care about, so I have to believe there is still an alternative—I’m not ready to face the War of All Against All. But if a solution can be found, it is not going to come through government or military means. Those can only come after the change occurs. And we don’t have much time. In the last three years the polarization has only gotten more extreme. The PC/MC crowd is accelerating the bus towards the precipice. Barack Hussein Obama is at the wheel, and conservatives are hiding under the seats in fear of being labeled “Nazis”. The infighting will likely continue unabated until the final impact at the foot of the cliff.

Zenster is right about one thing: the Hells Angels will not be the saviors of Western civilization. But nothing else is going to save it, either. There’s no alternative: the paradigm has to collapse. The replacement paradigm—for there must be one; man cannot live without a paradigm—will be something we can’t even imagine now.

Our task is to mitigate as well as we can the period of chaos that lies between now and then. There will be no way to prevent various forms of violence and destruction—you can’t cut off life support to millions of people without lethal results, and there is a distinct possibility of geronticide in our future, whether via Obama’s health care plan or by some other means. But eventually the chaos will subside, and a new civilization will emerge. As Conservative Swede pointed out, Islam will not survive long after the old paradigm disappears—a reinvigorated immune response in the remnants of Western culture will see to that. So what will come next?

The current paradigm is based on an antipathy for what preceded it. We are modern; we are smarter and better than those who went before us, and everything prior to 1967 can be safely disregarded. Part of the modern liberal ideal is the foolish notion that we can simply abolish by fiat millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of culture, and centuries of tradition. Just like that! We wish it all away. We’ll soon find out to our chagrin how mistaken we have been. These absurd ideas will die with the liberal paradigm, and as a corrective, the successor civilization will reach back into our cultural history to find an alternative to the Enlightenment meme which is about to self-destruct.

The new paradigm and the new civilization will be built out of the fragments of what went before. So what we need to focus on is the construction of a modern version of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a networked sanctuary where what is good and valuable can be stored and kept for use in a future time after the chaos is over.

Grab an ink pot and a quill—we’ve got a lot of books to copy.

Bodissey explained the Lindisfarne analogy in another thread:

Free Hal —

“Please let’s not get sidetracked down the interesting psycho-ethical question, which I introduced, about whether anger is good, to what extent, how it is graded, etc.”

This isn’t a sidetrack, this is the main track. Whenever we have serious discussions here, whether it is Fjordman, Conservative Swede, El Inglés, or any of the others doing the talking, we are looking at a constellation of issues that rotate around these basic psycho-ethical questions.

The current paradigm is a psycho-ethical structure that prevents our formerly Christian civilization from taking action that will allow it to save itself. This paradigm is at the moment in the process of slow-motion self-destruction, and the pace may soon accelerate so that the old framework will crumble quite rapidly. As you wrote in your post, the collapse of the welfare state will soon be upon us, and that is the absolute limiting factor for the Liberal paradigm. In another generation—max—we will either discover a different paradigm, or be in the midst of some sort of paradigm-less chaos.

It’s very, very difficult for intelligent and well-educated people to find a forum in which this crisis—the imminent end of post-Enlightenment Western civilization—can be discussed frankly and civilly. We are airing ideas here that earn us the “racist” and “fascist” sobriquets, just because we aim to get at the heart of what went wrong and what can possibly be done to ameliorate the worst effects of the coming changes.

Questioning the sandy foundation on which this immense and ornate castle has been built is simply not done. That’s why all of us here are loners and misfits of one sort or another, and not on government or university payrolls—at least not under the names that are displayed with our posts.

We don’t have much time. I used to think that if enough grassroots organizing could be accomplished, there might be a way to stave off the worst. But in the last three years the polarization has only gotten more extreme. What debate there is among those on the right is more often concerned with doctrinal purity than it is with hammering together a compromise and a coalition that might actually have even a remote chance of making a difference.

So what we will have to concentrate on is the construction of a modern version of the monastery at Lindisfarne, a networked sanctuary where what is good and valuable can be stored and kept for use in a future time after the chaos is over—if indeed such an eventuality ever comes.


Conservative Swede


Lindisfarne Castle from the harbor

Today I read “I am an island” that Con Swede posted in his own blog two years ago, of which I’ll quote some paragraphs:

I’m an island. I do not belong anywhere. I’m questioning the meaning of my blogging. I’m questioning the moniker I have adapted. “Conservative” like whom? Like View from the Right? Like Paul Belien? Like Gates of Vienna? No, no, and no. And definitely not like Majority Rights or Jim Kalb. And of course not like neocons and paleocons.

The West consists of Christians and post-Christians, the latter better known as liberals. And of course the fringe group of far whitists (neo-Nazis or otherwise). All three groups having more in common with each other than I have with them.

We are witnessing the historical demise of Christianity. When a star dies, in its last phase it expands into a red giant, before it shrinks into a white dwarf. Liberalism is the red giant of Christianity. And just as a red giant it is devoid of its core, it expands thousandfold while losing its substance and is about to die. The world I live in consists of Christians and liberals. It’s their world and I do not belong to them. I leave their limited wars, knee-jerk Islam apologism and WWII mythology to them. They are not about to change. On the contrary, they are continuously generating new problems with their way of acting.

There were certain sites, certain bloggers, even certain countries, that I had put hope in. But now it has become clear that they are all part of the same big train of lemmings. Bye bye! Denmark, nope. Brussels Journal, nope. View from the Right, nope. Gates of Vienna, nope. This is the way it goes in the world of liberals/Christians. It’s their world. I can do nothing but sit on the side and laugh at it. They are too stuck in their inner fears and hang-ups to be able to do anything useful. They will do what they are programmed to do: demise.

It’s seems that politics is not something for me to be engaging in, after all. Politics is by definition a social activity, but all the other people are stuck down in [Plato’s] cave, while I sit alone at my island. Robinson Crusoe couldn’t have engaged in politics even if he wanted to. Western politics is the game of whether our nations should commit suicide fast or slowly. Conservatism is a joke. There are only Christians and liberals (and the occasional far whitist who’s often the most extremely Judaoid priestly character of them all), and they all adhere to the same Christian ethics, the same slave morality.

So what’s the future for people like me? Because even if I belong nowhere politically, I belong somewhere socially and ethnically. Well, the world is being homogenized. Tomorrow the whole world will be like the Third World. People like me, of European ethnicity, will have no home, no nation. We will live like the Jews as elites in other people’s nations (preferably a non-Muslim nation).

These people are just not prepared for a proper fight. They are too much driven by superstitious fear and emotions. And there is not exactly anyone else around.

_____________________

Chechar’s note of 5 September 2010:

“And the occasional far whitist who’s often the most extremely Judaoid priestly character of them all...”

Elsewhere Con Swede has stated several times that white nationalism is a weak movement. I disagree. Yes: the baby is still in the cradle. But it will grow. Swede mentioned the blogsite Majority Rights, which I haven’t read quite much. But the sites linked way above, at the side of the entries, give the lie to the statement that the whitist character is “extremely Judaoid” and “priestly”.

Like Swede I myself used to live in an island. The nationalists found me and rescued me from the incommensurable loneliness of the dual blues. No, I no longer feel like Crusoe...