Rapid Cultural Decline and What Comes Next
International Man: Nations in decline often experience cultural degeneracy. We saw that in the Roman Empire and Weimar Germany, for example.
Today, in the US, we see increasing signs of cultural degeneracy in Hollywood, advertisements, academia, science, corporations, politics, and other areas of life.
What is your take?
Doug Casey: There have been a number of major turning points throughout history. Rome in the third century was one of them. It was a period of economic, political, and military chaos, aggravated by the social chaos accompanying the rise of Christianity. These things set the stage for the complete collapse of the old civilization in the West with the barbarian invasions after Adrianople in 378.
The Renaissance changed the nature of life in Western Europe starting in the 15th century, as did the Enlightenment in the 18th century. And, most important, in many ways, the Industrial Revolution overturned the pre-existing economic order starting in the early 19th century.
Whenever the public was in a frenzy about something or other, my friend Herman Kahn (look him up) liked to quip, “There are only two important things that have happened since the dawn of history—and this isn’t one of them.” He was referring to the Agricultural Revolution around 5000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution. It’s good to keep things in perspective…
Of course, there have been plenty of bloody episodes, great discoveries, and breathtaking inventions along the way. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, WW I, WW II, the collapse of the USSR, and the rise of China are among them. But in the great sweep of history, they’re really just footnotes. It bears emphasis, though, that almost everything of any importance that has happened in the last 500 years has been about or because of Western Civilization.
They all had various effects, but none of them really attacked the basis of Western civilization itself. Psychopaths like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were, even in their heydays, really just jackals barking at a lion.
But then things started changing in the 1960s. The 60s were fun at the time, but from a cultural viewpoint, they turned out to be an overture to the collapse of Western Civ. You may recall the motto of many
Article from LewRockwell
