“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.
Culture arises at the intersection of religion and genetics. Ideology and politics are downstream of that.
I agree, 100%, however, the point of the post is stability – two ideologies are compatible with one religion and one genetic group.
Enjoyed the few puns, the message however is grim truth.
And you didn’t even address the “That was Easy” button for the Chaos Bastards.
Turning off the EBT CARDS. The Opps My Bad error.
Think they are ugly shoppers now, wait until they cannot feed themselves.
We are headed towards that Zero Moment. It will be . . . enlightening. Think Katrina, not Minneapolis.
How about Drunken Uncle who paws your kids?
Thankfully, mine just drank and gave me presents at Christmas.
There is no “we” the people. It is unlawful to even ask who “we” are. The various ehthnics and regions of Heritage American have all been ritually conditioned against his own identity and any claim to his nation unless it occupies the tenuous, narrow bandwidth of approved rituals of production and consumption.
Even the most strident of the resistance to this dispossession resort to the increasingly cringey appeals to the totems and scrolls. From Sowell to Schwarmapharma, manjaw Republican girls and natural conservative latinxs, he will appeal to that core affliction that who we are is a matter of mere belief in magic democracy, accretive utility to some imagined metric of muh economy, and/or a mere desire for a ‘better life’ as long as it is procured “legally” from the great paperwork american printing machine beneath the lincoln memorial.
The problem of the idea is the one that resides in the heart of man, the idea of his place among his people, under God, as a righteous place that owes no tribute or dilution beyond serving God and his fellow man accordingly.
Why would our enemies respect our heritage and culture when “we” do not?
It has all been sold. Hypothecated toward the great GDP, pension, mcmansion full of nice things from china. We lack meaning and purpose precisely because we lack that will to define ourselves and kindle those things that make us so – other than the residual artifacts that manifests as consumptive and performative acts to assuage the anxious desire to preserve those material comforts and curated social status for our posterity.
Good luck with that. Bring on the separation. It is only through discomfort and forced retrenching toward proximity and real-life friction of men reclaiming their hearts that any of our Heritage peoples will survive in their lands. The sooner the better.
That is the case. Pride in ethnicity is only discouraged with one ethnicity. Wonder why that is?
Seeing how easily the Left has been able to get tens of millions of U.S. Christians to compromise their faith vis-a-vis abortion, sodomite “marriage”, etc. with mere peer pressure, I imagine getting them to completely apostatize will be next. We have now seen that the Left will shamelessly use any means to keep power. Open persecution of true Christians is coming. I don’t believe that most in the U.S. will pass the test. This is what we need to be prepping for.
Word. It will happen in increments. It started long ago with certain Protestant religions, such as the Lutherans when the ELCA rolled over and started ordaining EDIT BY JW: homosexuals. Then we have the “Megapastors” Such as Osteen, Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Hinn, TD Jakes and their ilk. They will roll over to keep their 501(c)(3) status while they jet around the country fleecing their sheeple. And do not even get me started on the Catholics. I was raised in Mother Church until Vatican II opened the vestibule of the church to the smoke of Hell. The Marxists, pedophiles, and Masons are firmly anchored in Vatican City.
The real enemies, however, are not these institutions. They can only enforce their agendas through the full cooperation of “Law Enforcement” at all levels. John Whitehead from The Rutherford Institute had this figured out a long time ago. We still have a constitutional sheriff in my A/O and enough voters to keep him in office. It will be interesting to see which way the bought-and-paid-for city cops do. I do not trust them. Bleib ubrig. – DTW
Only edited because it doesn’t change the message, but is more PG-13. -JW
Sorry about my politically incorrect faux pas, sir. I will try to be more genteel. Thanks for posting my rant. -DTW
It was appreciated, so I edited it. When you put that stuff in, it always tries to toss it to spam, and search engines use it to de-rank this site. Which, I mean, they can’t get much lower.
I think there was a book that talked about that. Hmmm.
Good review…Balkanization is IMHO 18 months away and closing.
We’ll see – prediction is hard, especially about the future.
sonofnunn,
Eighteen months to Balkanization!
Yikes!
Eugene, Oregon, has zero petroleum pipelines.
Every gallon is trucked in… using more petroleum to get here.
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Sheesh!
Top the politician-collapse with the over-due tsunami… and/or blizzard and/or drought!
How do we deal with a couple-three million corpses!
An earthquake with collapsed bridges and sideways trains!
That earthquake… with cascading collapses of the series of dams up in the hills!
A few decades of floods!
Cities in ruins, fit only for fleeting trespass of feral foragers seeking artifacts and trade-goods.
And now, Balkanization!
Cripes!
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Kidding.
We are rural rustic Oregon, we routinely deal with catastrophe during our breakfast craft-beers.
“breakfast craft-beers” – 10/10, Large Marge.
There is, of course, a simple solution to the coming problems. Simple is not the same as easy. It is worlds apart from clean. It’s not even in the same universe as polite.
But it is also obvious, and we know exactly what it is. It is, inevitable.
Excellent analysis, John, totally agree.
The recent sudden “outing” of overt antisemitism is just the beginning, I too believe overt persecution of Christians and suppression of the Bible as LGBTQI+ “hate speech” is coming very soon. What a crazy time, with Native Americans displaying a Palestinian flag in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade float being televised live nationwide by NBC.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1727701951733706808
There is a tradition in football games during away team third downs of playing the bell from the opening moments of the AC/DC song “Hell’s Bells”, to signal the home crowd to make noise and distract the away team. Hell’s Bells is the official soundtrack of away-team leftists in 2024 America, a critical third-down situation after the elections of 2016 and 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etAIpkdhU9Q
Lyrics:
https://genius.com/Ac-dc-hells-bells-lyrics
Can the home team make enough noise to prevent a new first down? We’ll see.
We will. It is chaotic, but the cracks are showing in the armor of the Left as people have stopped consooooming Disney crap and Bud Light . . . more to come.
The original American settlements from the UK were all religious communist dictatorships; the United States was founded on freedom from the competing state religion.
> 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.
The US South fought a defensive war after the North raised taxes to an unsustainable level.
Hogwash.
Communism failed in both the original two colonies, and was abandoned forever thereafter after massive failure.
Because it’s fundamentally flawed, as long as were talking about human beings participating and running it.
When the penalty for failure is starvation, capitalism makes a sweeping comeback.
They were religious autocratic dictatorships.
As long as the King got his vig, no one squawked too loud.
Troublemakers were always invited to head out West, which suited everyone’s interest but the locals thereabouts.
Trying to rewrite the Civil War as Puritans vs. Not won’t wash.
It’s facilely wrong, and too simple by orders of magnitude.
They started communist, until the starvation.
No disagreement on CW 1.0.
Are you ready for this? Both Tony Dow AND Jerry Mathers from “Leave it To Beaver” are converting to Islam. Dow will now be called ” Muhammad Wally” and Mathers .. ( wait for it) .. Jareem Abdul Bivar
Hahahaha! Love it!
China has always been stable in the sense of a shared ideology and ethnicity long before communism. As a society that always been governed from the top they have a tradition of mass uprisings when things get too bad, i.e. when the “Will Of Heaven” changes. Mao used that impulse to start the Cultural Revolution. It is always in the background and explains the government’s enormous investment in the surveillance state.
I won’t comment on your analysis of the American Civil War. I strongly disagree but there is no profit in opening that can of worms.
James, I’d love to hear your comments – feel free to send me an e-mail. I love admitting when I’m wrong. Which happens.
I would and have argued that religion in America has mostly been a cultural thing, even way back. I won’t bother listing the Founders that were deists and the fact that for a “Christian nation” the name of Jesus is completely absent from our founding documents but at least we agreed to a set of shared principles and morality very loosely based on cultural European style Christianity. Now race on the other hand? I imagine that deep down most White Christians would prefer to live next to a pagan or agnostic White family than they would a black Christian family and I am completely certain that is true for black Christian families. What you do or don’t do on Sunday is of little consequence to me but whether you are my people or not my people? That is what matters.
You’re probably correct, though most Wiccans are, well, cringe.
Despite the inclination of the founders, I’d say that a huge majority of the country had been Christian until recently. Founders had a bigger tent.
Nominal Christians, perhaps.
Dropping by on Christmas and Easter doesn’t really cut it.
Most Americans’ Sunday church has had goalposts, for decades and decades.
And their Sunday School has had a rabbit-earred antenna for as long or longer.
But importantly, they weren’t frothingly atheist, and openly antagonistic to Christian themes.
Yuuuuuuuuuge difference with the current crop of ardent and militant little satanists.
They can’t give you the lyrics to a single hymn, but they can recite every add jingle and TV show theme there is.
And the founders had colonies separated by a day or two on horseback, so no one in Delaware, for example, much gave a flying fig about what went on in Jowja or New Hamster. They were, literally, other countries.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Not just true with Biden.
It has dropped over the decades – 80% in 1955, 40% 2017. (Catholics). During most of my life, it’s been quite high. Protestant attendance is lower, but follows the same curve.
Yup, atheists and Leftists hate, with a passion, Christians. But only Christians.
Sometimes you’re judged by your enemies.
The fastest-shrinking denominations in America year in and year out are the leftist ones.
The fastest-growing ones are conservative ones, since they’ve been measuring.
Leftards are like societal Round-Up®: they kill everything they touch.
They do. So they have to import more.
What I meant was, no one cares about race unless they’ve been taught to. What they care about is that people blend in.
The democrats’ God is ‘genetics matter’. It HAS to be. The gay community has the cash. The past two decades has been a debate between choice and genetics, and genetics won. How could they now say genetics don’t matter between races? They can’t.
To a democrat, your genetics is who you are and can’t be overcome. That’s the exact opposite of America’s founding principles.
I wouldn’t worry about the stability of our country at this point. It’s decline was foretold when we started seizing property without a conviction, and the body expired when ‘hate speech’ laws, that punish thoughts, were passed to an overwhelming silence.
Everything since then has just been kids poking the body with sticks.
I disagree there – little kids react differently as infants to pictures of different races. It’s built in, probably at the pheromone level.
We are near the end. But more about that this week . . .
That ‘race’ business… “it depends”.
I sing with the choir at a Southern Methodist church.
I am often the only light in a sea of dark.
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To a one — preacher included — these decent hard-working folk hate dope-fiends, earthquake cars, single mothers.
Passionately, as in ‘get the next n00se ready!’.
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An aside to ArthurSido and Mister Jared Taylor:
* You are right.
And yet, our concept of Balkanization may be less tidy, less simplistic than hoped by the ‘only wh*te or only bl*cks or only br*wn’ crowds.
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Fact is, living near a university town, I see a lot of First Worlder addicts.
Most are walking-dead, existing only on hand-outs.
Skin color is irrelevant to stupidity and starvation.
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Further, I think our latest millions of ill*gals came from ‘make-do or die’ poverty and oppression.
Not knowing the source of the next meal tends to sharpen the Third Worlder focus in a way most of us cannot imagine.
Accordingly, I think our Balkanization will probably involve non-speakers of our Standard American language… in a war-lord [‘cartel’] capacity.
Familiar and proven to illeg*ls, that is their priority go-to.
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(If I was a gambler, I might bet those war-lords are already established and operational.
During our Balkanization, they do a sly side-step… and suddenly, our new masters are shoving our old masters up against the wall.
Lists.)
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Knowing this, I think I will go sit in the porch rocker awhile, occasionally toss a tennis-ball in the general direction of the dogs.
One thing I can count on with the dogs… they don’t care much for strangers.
Probably got that from me.
My experiences on individuals mirror yours. On individuals, there’s a lot of variation.
The percieved cultural differences between Irish and Italian in 18?? is much higher than percieved differences between most ethnic groups of today. Polling was done back then, too, and a lot was written about it.
When people blend in, completely, no one cares.
(Almost. There’s always the 10% rule. 10%, plus or minus a few points, will always buck the trend. Post 9/11, about 10% said do nothing. Post 2008 housing collapse, the same. For every issue, ever. Even the most simple-minded poll question gets some ‘don’t know’ answers.)
I agree with your reasoning. However, I think one thing caused it all : one political side went crazy.
The ruling political party OPENLY said violence is a viable answer to speech.
They own the education system, and now half of all college kids think socialism is a viable economic system.
The democrat party platform has a plank that says white people have a genetic defect that makes them not like non-whites. You can see that in the videos from the last DNC election. Pure ethnic hate.
We could spend the day on nothing but examples of hate from leftists, couldn’t we? Hate that calls for action against the offenders.
I can’t think of any conservative calling for judicial action against cultural enemies. Can you?
The democrats have made our political situation untenable. The Constitution was written for a moral people.
Anyway, it is all the fault of the democrats. The have followed all of the advice in Mein Kampf except for colonizing Slavic lands.
(‘Oh yeah they think your crazy too lololol’ and nothing more can be said.}
History of empires says that the only way out involves mass casualties.
Italians and Irish . . . yes, and no. Both were Christian, and both were European.
Yes, the Left has gone nuts. They’re spiking the ball in the third quarter.
There will be mass casualties. It will be historic.
I think the word you were looking for there is “biblical“. Perhaps even “apocalyptic.”
Yup.
…or Judaism and Christianity? It’s become much more apparent to me in the last few months that Judaism, under the auspices of Zionism, are as much a threat to the Christian way of life as Islam.
You can see in 2023 that the majority of the people in the US are not pro-Israel. This will lead to interesting situations for Israel in the next decade.
“The North knows how to do iced tea.”
Best joke of the day right there.
Okay, YMMV. But Ma Wilder made sweet tea and I hated it. Then I had unsweet tea. Amazing!
re : family assimilation and individual de-assimilation
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Eugene, Oregon.
1970s, a fellow I know changed his name to ‘Yakov Levine’… short, stocky, mid-eastern kinky hair, bushy beard, thick stereotype New York city accent (mimicking second-hand, because he never lived there).
He changed his birth name — Jimmy Lefeber — and moved to Palestine to join the Israelites Occupational Forces.
His motto, oft-repeated:
* “Can’t Stop The Progress”
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Apparently, after Jimmy/’Yakov’ met his new neighbors in Palestine, he realized that situation involved less yabber and more action, so he returned back to Oregon.
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Jimmy still wants folks to call him ‘Yakov’.
Personally — and this’s just the way I do things — I think I would change my name to something other than a Tibetan bovine…
All, Jimmy. Wish he would have taken a long walk off a short pier instead. For progress, you know?