“As a result, our planet’s core became unstable.” – Man of Steel
I was on a horse being chased by a lion, and on my left was a giraffe. I decided to stop drinking and get off the carousel.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes a country stable, recently. I just can’t figure out why the idea of civilizational collapse keeps popping up in my mind, but, it does.
Why does a country remain stable? Not wealthy, but stable.
One rudimentary idea is commonality. Commonality of what, exactly? Be careful, this gets progressively more controversial as we go down the list and moves from “Taco Bell® mild sauce” to “Scorpion Chili Reaper Death™”.
As nearly as I can figure it, three things. There are more, but I think history has shown that these three things, when held in common, produce the most stable societies:
Religion. I know that most readers live in the United States, which was founded on freedom from state religion. That way Pennsylvania could choose to make Episcopalianism the state religion. Regardless of that, the United States was historically very much a Christian nation, as in historically 90% plus, and in “you can’t get a mortgage unless your pastor vouches for your” Christian.
I have standards. I won’t talk publicly about my sects life.
Have divisions among Christian sects caused difficulty? Certainly. Look at Europe post-Martin Luther and the religious wars that followed. There are even problems within sects, given what I once saw a beheading at a Methodist potluck dinner over a stolen potato salad recipe. To be fair, the potato salad was really, really good. I think it was the mustard.
But back to American politics: when JFK was running for president, there was a strong feeling that he wouldn’t be a good president because he was Catholic. Why? Because Catholics had to obey the Pope, and JFK would have something other than the best interests of the American people at heart – the orders of a foreign Pope. After JFK, religion seemed to not matter so much in a presidential candidate, especially after Bill Clinton, a member of the 1st Congregation of If It Feels Good, Do It (Reformed), was elected.
Can people of different religions live together? Sometimes, especially if the religions in question aren’t, well, Islam and Christianity. Or Islam and Judaism. Or Islam and Buddhism. Or . . . hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.
Is a radical Islamic cowboy a yeehawdist?
It’s weird when I bring up a topic that I know is going to be contentious and I mention religion first on the list of controversial topics, but that should tell you about the minefield that follows.
The second leg of a stable society is Ideology. If we all believe the world through the same framework, that helps to create stability. A bad example of that is North Korea. North Korea is actually a really, really stable country for several reasons. Do they share the same religion? Certainly they do – the worship of Kim Jong Un.
They also share the same ideology. Do all of them like it? I’m fairly certain that the answer is no, but for most of them it is the only ideology they know, and the only ideology they’ve been taught. They might see problems, but they have no particular framework where they could even discuss them. If you asked them what they thought about Kim, they’d say, “I can’t complain”.
Shared ideology allowed he Soviet Union to live long past the best-by date printed on the carton for several reasons – again, it was the only real ideology presented, and second, through the 20th Century Russia went from a Czar and a bunch of peasants to a nation with nukes and a pretty good spaceflight program that the German scientists they captured gave them. I mean, our Germans were better, but they still had pretty good Germans.
Remember, to an orphan, every selfie is a family photo.
How big was ideology in the United States? My grandfather-in-law was nearly 95 when we went to a meeting. They asked us all to stand for the prayer. He sat. No one thought anything of it. When it came time to give the pledge, though, he struggled to his feet to stand.
He had an ideology – and it was the United States and the 8th Army Air Corps, specifically the one that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches. That ideology, his Civic Nationalism, was so strong in him that it was even stronger than his religion and gravity.
Ideology really is at fault for the Revolutionary War and the Civil War – both of them were from a fairly homogeneous population base, but the major difference was ideology. In the Civil War, especially, the ideology was one of an honor-culture (the South) versus the Puritan culture of the North. The North knows how to do iced tea, and the South knows how to do biscuits and gravy.
Outside of food, the South chaffed against the Puritan leanings of the North, and that ended up in war, because that’s what happens when you have a people whose culture is based on honor pushed back up against the wall. Because the religions and ethnicity of the sides were similar, the result was a nation that could be knit back together rather rapidly.
Can I tell you what ethnicity Napoleon was? Course I can.
Oh, yeah, ethnicity. The final leg of the stool is ethnicity. See! I told you it was going to get progressively more radioactive.
The long period of stability that the United States has experienced (with the exception of the Civil War) provided a false narrative – the idea that the United States is a proposition nation, and that everyone who came here would be assimilated and become American.
This is demonstrably false.
I still maintain that it takes three generations for a new immigrant family to really be assimilated, minimum. If Mom and Dad aren’t willing to name their kid Brandon instead of Hans or Abdullah or Chaim, they really haven’t reached American status yet. That used to be called assimilation, and it used to be generally considered to be good.
But not in 2023. Back in the ‘teen, Tom Brokaw had to apologize for suggesting that Hispanics had to work harder at assimilating to American culture. He had violated a new Leftist commandment that “Absolutely Everyone Doing Absolutely Anything” was defined as American.
Oh, and America doesn’t have a culture, bigot.
Of the three, I think ethnicity is generally (though not always) the strongest. The Danes might not agree on everything, but do they agree that someone who moved to Denmark from Afghanistan isn’t Danish. I could move to Japan, have kids there, and I would never be Japanese and neither would my kids.
All of this leads to what?
China is built on stability – it has a common religion – Communism, a common ideology, “what Xi said”, and a common ethnicity. When people point to a coming Chinese collapse, I point to articles from the last 30 years that have said the same thing. My bet: China is stable – it may not prosper, but it will endure.
Ireland? Not so much. It used to be homogeneous in ethnicity, religion, and ideology, if ideology can be summarized by the statement “drinking and fighting a bit”. But with a constant influx of immigrants who apparently have the ideology of “stabbing Irish kids is fine” it is clear that the future of Ireland is in doubt, less so if they start drinking and fighting a lot more.
What’s Irish and stays outside all year? Paddy O’Furniture.
Finally, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the United States. Viewed through this model, it’s clear: we have lost our common religion – in 2009, 77% of Americans were Christian. By 2019? Down to 65% (Pew®).
Ideology? The United States had been relatively homogeneous with respect to ideology, too. Compare the 1950s to the Leftist onslaught we’ve seen 70 years later. We are a nation divided ideologically.
Ethnicity? Thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act along with an amazing disregard for borders over the last 30 years, the United States has experienced an amazing increase in the amount of foreign-born people here, and that amount is estimated at 15%, but I’m betting that number is far closer to 25% because I believe the number of illegals is greatly understated in official numbers.
None, exactly zero, of these indicators lead me to believe that the United States will be stable for the next 30 years or can continue to exist as a coherent country. I’ve mentioned before that I thought the earliest dates for Bad Thing to happen were in the next 2 or 3 years. My prediction of everything breaking apart remains at 2032 or so, but I see no hope, at all, of the United States existing beyond 2040 unless a Caesar appears at the point of crisis or unless millions of immigrants are sent via trebuchet back to whatever place they came from.
To be clear, I don’t wish for any of this, this is just what every trend is leading towards, and this model is an “in progress” model. Your additions are welcome in the comments.
The good news?
I hear the Methodists now take a hard line on potato salad beheadings, which is odd, since they’re normally not against anything.