By Willem IV- Is liberty drowning in the authoritarian barbarism of a woke cancel culture ruled by a corrupt ruling class who lord it over the atomized individuals in their teeming collective? How will we transcend the modern barbaric authoritarianism of the woke cancel culture so that we can live free and prosperous lives? The answer is found in history, in the emergence of a new civilization and in the intentional adoption of culture rooted in the ancient ways, with the lessons of history applied.
One can see lady liberty drowning or one can see her swimming away from the old civilization, toward the freedom-building culture of the new civilization, which is bound to emerge even as the old civilization declines. The bright sun is not a setting sun, it is the dawn of a new spiritual nation, predicated on the culture of freedom typified by a new civilization, and the emergence of that new civilization. Lady Liberty will LIVE on, past whatever this country and its people choose.
Arnold Toynbee, an historian and philosopher, studied the rise and fall and birthing process of civilizations and concluded that new civilizations were most always the result of efforts to restore an old, and dying, civilization to its original foundations and virtues. Oswald Spengler spoke of the birth and spring time of civilizations as a more virtuous period of spiritual and moral/ethical purity which devolved as culture gave way to compromises and the emergence of structures of a more and more authoritarian nature.
Both important thinkers were more focused on Western Civilization, Toynbee saw an opportunity to make Western Civilization the first to overcome the forces of decline and maintain itself in perpetuity, or at least far longer than any other civilization. Spengler saw the decline as inevitable but sought to make his own accommodation with its inevitable Caesarism and actually, at least for a time, made his peace with the Nazi regime as it was established in Germany.
We find Spengler’s accommodation with Nazism execrable and deeply troubling. It is the result of discerning perhaps the right problem but applying the wrong solution. Spengler concluded the West was entering a period of Caesarism, became fatalistic about it, and missed the solution, which was quite clear in his writings- reject the old civilizational paradigm in favor of a new paradigm and thereby escape the Caesars like Hitler and Mussolini or whoever else may emerge in the West’s march toward ruin! It was in his own description of the emergence of new civilization that he should have found a means of liberation.
Neither Spengler, as noted, nor Toynbee ever focused on the inevitable emergence of a new civilization or developed any deep thinking as to the nature or methods of its emergence in light of the aging of the West, despite the fact both men described the cycles of civilization in not substantially different ways.
Spengler sees a return to purity and the blood and soil, using biological language which some have, understandably, interpreted as simple racism. For Spengler, however, one may also see in his dense writing style a way of interpreting his biological concepts on a more spiritual and ideational basis as opposed to a biologically defined racial basis. Even if this was not his intent, when understood on a spiritual and ideational basis, his concept of the emergence and development of “races” as nations of people not defined by biological interpretations of race, can be useful for understanding how nations, cultures, and whole civilizations emerge, rise, and decline.
As for Toynbee, his description of “rout and rally”, in terms of both the emergence of a new culture and the decline of powers and civilizations, informed his thinking and adds to our understanding of civilization in its grand cycles. We can also find inspiration in his idea about the emergence of a new civilization centered on the withdrawal from the mainstream, as we would describe it today, of a minority or even a plurality of the populace on the basis of a rejection of the social and moral decay and out of a desire to resurrect the ancient ways, founded on moral and spiritual purity.
These two thinkers, and others like them, all seemed more or less to concur that the birth and early days of a new civilization were typified by moral and spiritual simplicity and purity and were presaged by a body of people who withdrew, emotionally and even physically as much as they could, from the structures of the dying civilization to restore what they saw as the foundations of that civilization.
It is not true that EVERY civilization had this “restorative genesis”, in other words that they were all attempts to restore the spiritual and moral purity of the old civilizations out of which they emerged. As an example, Western Civilization, it was argued, was an attempt to restore the moral and spiritual purity of the Roman civilization, or Classical Civilization, depending on whether one counts the Greek verses Roman civilizations as one or two civilizations.
Western Civilization is not merely a successor civilization to the Romans, it was immediately preceded by the Germanic Civilization, which had invaded the Western Roman Empire. Western Civilization was in fact largely inspired in its early days, around 700 to 800 AD, by a desire to restore the Roman Civilization, but its actual people, for the most part, were drawn mostly from the then dying Germanic Civilization, and in no small part some desire to restore the primitive simplicity of the more egalitarian German tribal system was also inspirational.
Nonetheless, the same principle applies to Western Civilization: it did emerge out of a desire to restore the purity of the previous civilizations which occupied what became its larger heartland, the heartlands of Western Rome and the Germanic tribes.
The development of an atomized lifestyle, sexual experimentation, lower birth rates, the decline of the nuclear family and marriage between a man and a woman who mostly raise their own (or their adopted) children, and the confusion of gender and gender roles are all prevalent traits of a dying civilization. In 1918, for instance, Spengler predicted that the widespread use of abortion and birth control and the decreased desire to have and raise children would typify Western culture within the next hundred years on its path to destruction.
Atomization means the individual has become mostly an isolated part of a massively centralized collective whole, disconnected from anything but mass-scale structures that dominate their life because their support and sustenance can only be found in these mass structures. The destruction of institutions such as marriage, children being raised by a mother and father figure in their own home, the nuclear family, the extended family, and close-knit, almost tribal, village-like communities with similar extended families as well as religious structures that are more local and familial, are all hallmarks of the decline of a civilization.
Freedom is a casualty of such decay and those who profess that “the family unit has evolved into a multiplicity of forms and functions” are mostly only extoling barbaric social norms as progress and destroying the very foundation of a free and prosperous society. Ruination is the final result, unless this ideology is not stopped and those who adhere to it do not lose power and influence in your culture-bearing institutions.
Whereas in a new civilization during its glorious springtime, the individual is connected to and depends upon very local structures which they can readily influence and participate in, the atomized individual in a dying civilization is isolated from local structures, doesn’t even know their neighbors, and must depend upon extra-local meta-scale structures over which they have no influence. Never again, after the springtime of a civilization, will the individual be more free as a human being, relative to any other period in their civilization’s development. regardless of their so-called political rights.
The assault upon localized, familial, and religious structures which connect people deeply on a personal basis is not always accidental: the communists engaged in this kind of wanton cultural destruction as a means of ensuring loyalty to the state. A localist interpersonal structure mitigates any need for dependence upon a state and, thus, is a source of competition for loyalty.
But whether this development is intentional, as with the communists, or accidental, as a result of general cultural decay, the moral and ethical foundation of civilization is always the hallmark of a dying civilization and may in fact be its cause. The primary loss for the individual is a loos of freedom, which is usually followed be increasing material privation.
Put another way, the moral and ethical practices we might consider socially conservative, such as sexual purity and marital fidelity, and preference for familial units that tend to promote fatherhood and motherhood, are essential to any localized familial structures. If this moral foundation is exchanged for indulgence and depravity, local interpersonal connection based on trust alone cannot be sustained. What we must also realize is that freedom itself is not possible where these strong localized interpersonal structures, founded on marriage the family, do not exist. In their absence, authoritarianism always rises. In their presence, freedom rises.
Not being able to trust a person’s fidelity in something like marriage, or not being able to experience the unique nurturing embrace that being raised by a mother and father figure provide, are all destructive to localized interpersonal bonds. Sexual “liberation” may be physically pleasurable, but it spells the end of civilization and always presages the emergence of anther characteristic of a dying civilization, both universalism and Caesarism. Being able to have and form such connections and communities through freewill association is itself a condition of freedom.
Universalism is a form of imperialism in which national peoples and families are subordinated to a universal state of grand scale which desires, at its core, the domination of its entire known world. Not all empires are or were meant to be universal states, but universal states tend to become centralized empires with little tolerance for any local autonomy.
The early Roman Empire was a largely decentralized empire that encouraged local autonomy in almost every arena, but as its moral and ethical foundation declined, as families were decimated by depravity, it became more and more centralized. The infusion of “Christianity’, after Constantine, may have reversed this trend if it had occurred 100 years earlier, but the rot was not reversible and the enemies of the Western empire were too large to prevent the collapse. But in the East, whose capital was named after the first Emperor who declared himself a Christian, actually evolved into its own new civilization, the Byzantine, which lasted some 1000 years.
Perhaps the cultural depravity in the East wasn’t as far advanced as it had been in the West, but what is most interesting is that while the Western part of the empire fell and its civilization collapsed under the onslaught of a Christianized Germanic civilization, in the East, the empire evolved and made a peaceful transition from the old civilization founded on paganism to a new civilization founded on Christianity but whose sociocultural norms reflected the ancient purity of the Roman and Greek civilization.
The culture of the new civilization will tend to resemble the sociocultural norms, the moral, ethical, and spiritual simplicity and purity, of the civilization or civilizations which preceded it. In the case of what we see as a new civilization, emerging from people and communities distributed all over the world and gathered initially online, we see the roots in not one but four civilizations, each of whose core ideal becomes the basis of four core ideals.
The Western Civilization gives us Unity in diversity, the Germanic gives us Popular sovereignty, the Classical (and Byzantine) gives us Democratic equality, and the Hebrew or Meddle Eastern gives us Rule of law. In the balanced application of these ideals, and if they are understood with a Judeo-Christian worldview as our perspective, we find a new sociocultural foundation that will restore the localized familial and interpersonal structures that remove dependence upon meta-scale mass structures of hierarchical control.
Unity in diversity is often expressed as individualism. Popular sovereignty is often expressed as loyalty. Democratic equality is often expressed as justice. And Rule of law is often expressed as righteousness. But these ideals are bigger than such simple terms.
Individualism without a unity based on shared virtues is hedonism. Loyalty without respect for both the sovereignty of individuals and their ability to freely associate is feudalism. Justice without the consent of the people (demos) and without equal application becomes mob rule. Righteousness without deference to the actual laws of cause and effect and the consent of those under such laws, and for the benefit of all, becomes hierarchicalism
Hedonism, feudalism, mob rule, and hierarchicalism all become authoritarian and form the basis of universal states that reduce the individual to a mere commodity to be used and exploited by an immoral, corrupt ruling class.
The new civilization we envision emerging in the hearts of individuals and nation of people will have all four core ideals as its basis. Their balanced application, using a Judeo-Christian interpretation of their meaning, is manifested primarily in localized familial interpersonal structures primarily, and only secondarily through larger structures of which these localized structures are the core constituent entities.
The nuclear family wherein most all children are raised by their own biological or adopted mother and family and which is connected in a mutually-sustaining bond with a larger extended family and familial village-type community become the typical expression of the culture of the new civilization. The purity and simplicity of human society and culture based on the simple fact of our biology, wherein a man and woman mate to give birth to children and then raise them together, is the restorative agency through which the new civilization emerges an then thrives.
This does not mean every marriage MUST result in children, but it means that, for the culture of the new civilization, marriage itself, whether it not the couple can reproduce, is modeled in the norm that most all children are either raised by their own biological parents or adopted by a mother and father who treat them as their own biological children.
Children being raised by their own biological parents, or at least by parents who treat them as their own biological children, is the essence of the simplest and purest form of human culture. Cultures that lack this tend to be barbaric and savage tribes or advanced and dying civilizations. As much as the cultural leaders of Western Civilization today treat their refutation of this norm as something bad and ‘backwards”, it is their cultural norms that are archaic and backwards and that reflect a precultural barbarism.
Arguments about whether people have a right, in a political or legal sense, to step outside of this norm are largely irrelevant because if the underlying culture is morally backwards no laws or prohibitions will change how people behave and live, What is more, those who embrace a morally advanced sociocultural norm rooted in children being raised by father and mother in a loving and nurturing home do not need any laws or policies to encourage them to connect in such a manner with others or to form localized interpersonal structures.
The problem is that the authoritarianism of a declining civilization with its bent toward universalism and Caesarism will tend to view a return to such localized interpersonal structures, based on a more advanced sociocultural norm suited to human progress, demands that these alternatives to its influence and control must be proscribed. One either embraces the new barbarism, which is sold as progress when in fact it is archaic savagery, or one faces proscription in some form.
It is not that the adherents of the more advanced sociocultural moral ethic are determined to proscribe anyone else who choose alternative ways to live, it is that the barbarian caesarists cannot abide even the vocalization of any claims that the more advanced sociocultural norms are best, and nor can they abide any criticism.
Even if the more advanced cultural adherents positively refused in any way to force anyone into their way of life, it would not be enough for the barbarians. The people seeking the restoration of the lost advanced cultural norms, rooted in this familial ethic and in localized interpersonal structures, find that they must essentially withdraw from dependence upon the meta-structures which consider disavowal of the advanced cultural norm as a basis of acceptability.
Independency in material needs is the only way for the national peoples of the new civilization to survive and make it to the point where the new civilization emerges. From this perspective then, we see that the culture of the new civilization is not only marked by familial and localized interpersonal structures, with children raised by a mother and father in a loving home within the maternal enclosure of a familial community. The culture of the new civilization is also marked by the material independency of its individuals, their nuclear families, and their localized interpersonal and familial structures.
This material independency is not merely an adherence to an idea in an ideological basis. It is a simple necessity because the condition of reward and demand of participation from the meta-scale structures of a dying civilization is always the disavowal of the advanced sociocultural norm and the embracing and participation in the barbaric sociocultural norm that presents itself as “progressive.”
Whoever does not embrace and participate in the barbaric sociocultural norm is materially punished by the meta structures of the dying civilization, therefore we always witness in the conception phase of a new civilization a withdrawal from material dependency and an intentional creation of material independency by adherents of a new civilization. All the things we may point to as signs of spiritual and moral decline which lead to civilizational collapse, the barbaric caesarist ruling class of the old civilization present as modern advancement or progress. The advanced culture is deemed archaic and backward and there are claims society is evolving and the old norms are no longer necessary or useful to human civilization.
All of this is terribly easy to predict because it repeats so often, albeit in many ways and on different terms, throughout the course of the larger human civilization which is tends of thousands of years old.
The question we may ask is, given the modern technological means of tracking and controlling people and the centralized economic structures, can a plurality of people peacefully withdraw from dependency and adopt material independency without earning the forceful rebuke of the existing ruling class?
This is where the concept of “gaps for freedom” becomes so critical. Gaps for freedom are legal and technological means by which individuals, small groups, and even larger scale structures can escape the scrutiny and/or the interference of the ruling class and their systems of influence and control.
Using legal structures like fraternal benefit societies, mutual benefit corporations, credit unions, land trusts, mutual assurance funds and non-governmental organization, adherents of the new civilization can create new structures which combine these exiting legal structures to stake out a more independent life out of the reach of the ruling class. What is more important in using these legal structures is that if the ruling class removed them as options they would incur more and more dissent as more and more people are materially harmed by their edicts. Additionally, the ruling class need and use these legal structures and doing away with them or arbitrarily limiting their use on ideological grounds would expose the naked authoritarianism and hasten a societal uprising against them.
The culture of this new civilization will be materially supported through a plethora of legal gaps for freedom which are combined in new ways to build what are essentially new structures. The new structures will resemble in form and spirit the lost ancient structures which typified the old civilization in its springtime.
The physical gaps for freedom come in the form of actual real estate, property, alternative forms of trade (trade scrips, local currency, or even cryptocurrency), new architectural designs to support multi-family extended household groups and revived and larger nuclear families, local food and energy production, and even physical safety and preparedness supplies (or structures) shared by small groups and networks of such groups.
The adoption of the new culture, based on the advanced culture that typifies of strong nuclear family connected to a cohesive familial community, a personal choice that begins to connect the people from whose brows and blood sweat and tears the new civilization will emerge.
This is not a mere re-creation of the old culture. In America, this isn’t the mere re-creation of the America of the 18th or 19th centuries, an America that in some ways was less advanced in our understanding of human dignity and human rights than we are now and that was technologically a very different place than anything we could or would want to build today. Going back to the start of this essay, the new civilization often emerges because some people rebel against the barbarism of a culture that claims it is progress and desire to restore the moral and spiritual purity which they imagine was the foundation of their existing, and dying, civilization.
We use the four core ideals described in the previous four civilization out of which the new civilization will emerge as the name of this new civilization and its core ideology and philosophy, “the Upadarian” civilization and ideology. The new civilization will embrace a more advanced culture, rooted in the same elements of all advanced cultures, such as parenthood, children being raised by a mother and father, and localized interpersonal structures. The present devolution of culture, under the banner of progressivism, which is barbarism in a thin disguise, will lead to sociocultural, socioeconomic, and eventually political collapse in the coming decades. The attempt to halt the downfall through raw, dictatorial force, in the name of keeping the ruling class alive and at the top at all costs, will ultimately fail.
The question is, as with the Roman Empire, will the new civilization be allowed to develop peacefully, or will it emerge as through the fires of ruin and collapse? Will all or only part of America be more like Byzantium, or will it fall to barbaric hordes as in the West?
A survey of the details of how Byzantium emerged versus how the Western empire fell, may reveal that the number of people who had already more or less adopted the cultural norms of the new civilization was simply greater in the East than the West and that the new religion, Christianity, had stronger and deeper connections and institutions than in the West. We can certainly say of the Byzantine Civilization, that while it too embodied the Democratic equality ideal of Classical civilization, it also found roots in the Rule of law of the Hebrew or Middle Eastern civilization. Ge Basically, this means the Byzantine Civilization had a deep and broad sociocultural foundation that was weaker in the West.
What this means for us today is that if we intend to see our country emerge in freedom from the Caesarism of Westen Civilization, more and more people must CHOOSE the advanced cultural norms of the new civilization, just as they did in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, thanks to a global communications system, the internet, global trade, and the relative ease of international travel, adherents of the new civilization can connect for mutual support outside the borders of the United States of America and can even physically remove themselves to places that accept them if the need arises.
The culture of the new civilization is the antithesis of the woke cancel culture of modern “progressive” barbarism, built on a combination of atomization of individuals, hedonism, and caesaristic hierarchies of control. These parrots of the new barbarism imagine they are the next evolution and the only legitimacy one can find comes through the approval and support of their structures and sociocultural backwardness which they present as inevitability and progress.
The culture of the new civilization will more or less restore and rebuild marriage, family, and familial local interpersonal structures, but not as a replica of the culture of our civilization from its founding or even 200 or 300 years ago. In spirit, this will be very much more like the ancient ways, but in practice and methods, and even in structures and how we define nationality or how men and women interact, it will offer some modern, and necessary, innovations.
The notions women are less than men or any notion that any human is “lesser than” based on their ancestry or skin color, will not be revived. These notions represented a flaw in our ancient culture and may have contributed to the emergence of modern barbarism, which was, in part, a rebellion against these injustices.
Modern barbarism has just rejected the flaw of ancient culture, which was more advanced than our own because it at least promoted familial bonds over dependency on the state. Modern barbarism has rejected the most advanced elements of ancient culture; marriage, parenthood, family, extended family, local autonomy, and nationhood as a spiritually based sociocultural construct.
The culture of the new civilization will not resemble our atomized, hedonistic, and hierarchically controlled culture, but even if in spirit it has strong roots in our ancient foundations and the ancient culture, it will not be a mere replication of that either. The culture of the new civilization will go beyond the past but will reject the barbarism of the present. The culture of the new civilization, experienced within and through modern gaps for freedom, will itself promote and advance freedom in new ways, far beyond anything achieved in the past. Through the adoption of this culture and way of life, you will be able to personally, and within your own family and community, transcend and overcome the weak woke cancel culture barbarism being imposed by a corrupt ruling class.
