David Craig, on October 16th, 2020(Friday/weekend blog)
This is probably the most important question facing Western civilisation. So I’m hardly likely to come up with profound insights to do justice to it in a 600- to 700-word blog written at 05.00 on a Friday morning.
But anyway, here goes:
We’ve never had it so good
We really have never had it so good in the West – at least up until the arrival of Chairman Xi Pingpong’s Wuhan-lab-released virus:
- Human progress – Most of the advances in science, technology, medicine, literature, the arts and political structures have come from the West
- No wars – There have been no major wars since 1945. But most people’s parents and grandparents had to live through either WWI or WWII
- Education – We have better education than ever before. When I was at university less than 10% of school-leavers went on to higher education. Now half of all school-leavers go to ‘uni’ and, as many of their degrees are pretty worthless, they’ll never earn enough to have to pay back any of their £50,000 student debt and so are getting a free three-year holiday courtesy of the few people who work and pay taxes
- More leisure time – We all have a limited time on this earth. But our lives in the West were so easy that millions spent much of their time playing with their phones, watching programmes on TV about people watching programmes on TV (Gogglebox) and binge-watching box sets on streaming services
- Unlimited everything – whether it’s food, cheap products, fashionable clothes or whatever, the choice available to us is almost unlimited. Never before in human history have so many people had such abundance as we in the West now have
Yet, in spite of these and many more advantages, millions of people in the West despise their own countries, are obsessed with denigrating everything about the West and seem consumed by often violent self-hatred:
The big question for our times is – “why?”
Obviously different groups have different reasons for their apparent self-loathing. Here let’s just look at three main groups:
Group 1 – Leaders – the Hitler syndrome
No movement can rise up without leaders. And so it is with the new self-hating, West-loathing movement. If you look at the manifestos of Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter or Antifa you’ll see that their key aim is to destroy existing Western civilisation and replace it with a new state-controlled Utopia designed and led by them.
As for their leaders, they are usually people looking for power over others. Their supposed ’cause’ – saving the planet from an imaginary threat, eradicating (usually imaginary) racism or fighting against imaginary fascism – is just a convenient vehicle for these people to destroy what exists in order to elevate themselves to positions of power, influence and, of course, self-enrichment. Hitler and Robert Mugabe seem to be role models for these leaders.
Group 2 – the Immature Mis-educated Narcissists
The largest group of self-haters are probably the sheep-like followers of the leaders’ causes. These are usually immature narcissists. Their main motivation is virtue-signalling. They want to draw attention to themselves, to display what enlightened and decent people they are, prepared to right the largely imagined wrongs of the past and confront the supposedly ‘wrong-minded’ folk of the present – anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a modern form of self-flagellation, an egocentric, narcissistic, self-centered immaturity.
Instead of maturing into responsible adults who give and take from a healthy community and family, they have become a bunch of whining, materialistic egotists and when their inflated expectations of “selfhood” are inevitably dashed by the realities of life, this results in greater and greater discontent, bitterness, and resentment.
These are the people Douglas Murray (I think) described as being “educated into imbecility”.
These people are so convinced of their own intellectual and moral superiority that they have usually already decided their position on every issue long before they actually know what the issue is.
Group 3 – the Destruction-obsessed Nihilists
A third large group are the Nihilists. They are usually people who are unhappy with themselves. But rather than trying to improve their own lives, they blame other for their own inadequacies. They are often consumed by envy of those who are happier than themselves and they would rather will death and destruction on everyone than not will anything at all:
The Nihilists are determined to poison and weaken all of society’s instincts and institutions from marriage and the family to the police and armed forces to democracy itself in order to drag everyone down to their level of unhappiness.
Conclusion?
I don’t have one. That’s quite enough ‘deep thinking’ for a freezing Friday morning.
Oh, just one thing to add.
As the son of an immigrant who fled to Britain to avoid precisely the kind of dystopian horror-story countries of the type the fascist, West-loathing, free-speech-crushing self-haters are trying to impose on us, I find their disgust with the relatively free, partially-democratic, partially-enlightened West totally incomprehensible.
Category: 
Strangely enough only yesterday I had cause to take issue with someone who is a combination of all three of the types David describes above. A man of my long-time acquaintance had the effrontery to dump two unsolicited posts on my Facebook page, one of them anti-Trump along with a peremptory demand to ‘Read This’, the other a pro-BLM one.
The man in question is a wealthy self-made colonial, a retired (among other careers) IT troubleshooter, who has done very well indeed out of a capitalist system which he now affects to despise but which he has always taken full advantage of, once owning at the same time a flat in London and houses in Holland and Portugal. He now lives permanently in Portugal. He is by nature a bully, one who cheerfully admits to having been quite physically violent in the past, with a long string of failed marriages behind him.
He seems, paradoxically, to be quite comfortable with the fact the nation in which he is now very happy to live is the one that invented black African slavery, a full century before the UK became involved in the slave trade. Portugal resorted to slavery after it had worked most of the indigenous inhabitants of its South American possessions to death in the silver mines. It would now merely be another province of Spain, but for the fact that the silver its slaves mined enabled it to pay other nations (principally the UK) to do its fighting for it. For hundreds of years Portugal had one of the largest empires on the planet, in South America, Africa, and the Far East, a fact for which it seems to feel no need at all to grovellingly apologise as the Leftist want everyone to do. Yet this man, devoid of any sense of irony, considers it a wonderful place for an avowed anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist to live.
He is in fact a typical middle-class Leftist virtue-signalling hypocrite, attempting to compensate for his own emotional shortcomings by trying to impose his leftist views on others and demanding that they agree with him, while having lived and still living a personal life totally in opposition to the principles he now so loudly espouses.
I too find this fascinating and it is a complex system with lots of interconnected parts. But lust for power seems to be at the heart of it and unquestionably the growth of supranational bodies with appointees plays a part. Democracy is a release valve and bypassing it is dangerous.
But why are people so signed up to this globalist agenda almost with a religious fervour. I can understand Boris being bribed or frightened into doing what he is told likewise lots of powerful men to some degree there will be skeletons in the closet but do others honestly believe internationalism or globalism, as previously practised by the soviet union, is the solution.
Maybe it will mean fewer wars and appreciate that is attractive but is the corruption and turning back the clock on progress really a price worth paying for it?
I notice that writer Bill Bryson, a keen anglophile, has announced his retirement from writing books.
The fondness he had for Britain and her people is reflected in some of his books and one can be assured that our education system would NEVER teach anything like a short passage I found in his book, At Home.
“In 1851, the population of Britain was 20,959,477, just 1.6 per cent of the world total.
That 1.6 per cent produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two thirds of the world’s shipping and engaged in one third of the world’s trade.
Virtually all the world’s finished cotton was produced in British mills on machines invented and built in Britain.
London banks had more money on deposit than all the other financial centres of the world put together.
London was at the heart of a huge and growing empire that would at its peak cover 11.5 million square miles and would rule a quarter of the world’s people.
Britain led the world in virtually every measurable category, it was the richest, most innovative and most accomplished nation of its age.”
So, looking at our leadership in 2020, where did it all go so wrong?
I put it down to the loss of an irreplaceable gene-pool of our brightest and best in the slaughter on the Western Front 1914-18
But that said, they wouldn’t dare teach genuine British history and achievement in schools these days because it is so superior to that of the immigrant population, it would be dismissed as ’racist.’
William Boreham – yet Britain lost far fewer men in WW1 than any of the other principal combatants – France, Germany, Russia – both absolutely, and proportionally to size of population (a fact, naturally, ignored by all those who wish to traduce Douglas Haig’s reputation). So I don’t think that the UK can be singled out in that respect.
The blood-letting of 1914-18 can however be the reason for the widespread failure to produce adequate leaders at this critical time throughout all civilised Western societies.
While I agree with all the above comments, I tend to think it is simpler. The majority of those under around 30, all the youngsters who have so eagerly bought into “wokeness”, have simply had it too easy. They have not the vaguest concept of what life was like for previous generations, for the parents, grandparents and great grandparents who made Britain Great in the times before State benefits ensured that no one starves to death or children are hungry or unable to go to school. Apart from those with parents in the Armed Services, no young person suffers the experience of losing a parent in war. My mother was an Infants’ School teacher in the inter-war years, in a fairly rural area, and she routinely had children in her class who came to school without shoes, because the family had no money to provide footwear. The only time these children were absent was when there was snow actually lying. No school dinners then of course. Small children walked home at mid-day if a mother was home to feed them, or brought a hunk of bread in a paper bag to eat in the classroom. The lucky ones had a bit of cheese or butter. My mother told me she used to try to take something extra for the very poorest, but she couldn’t do much as she was herself supporting her mother, her younger brother and for some years during after WW! and during the Depression her unemployed father. I was a very young child during WW2 but have vivid memories of my mother “making do and mending”, with the aid of her faithful hand Singer machine converting her own clothes into garments for my sister and me. I recall us huddling in an air raid shelter in the cold and dark for hours during winter nights, waiting for the All Clear, of being able to distinguish the sound made by enemy bombers from that made by our own planes. We emerged in the morning, though, thankful still to be alive and to find our home still standing and walked off to school. I am glad my children didn’t have to endure that, but because I made a very bad marriage they did have the experience of divorce leaving us in straitened financial circumstances, meaning that they were denied many of the indulgencies taken for granted as a right by their peers. And you know what? It strengthened them. It was character building. All are now middle aged, highly qualified and hard working members of various professions, caring partners to their spouses and exemplary parents. I admit, though, that I look with an objective eye sometimes at the grandchildren I love dearly but who have no concept of hardship, never having been required to experience it, and no hesitation in “putting me in my place” if I dare venture a view they regard as anything other than flagrantly left wing! I take it all in good part, assuming that they will accrue breadth of vision with age. Of course, the shortcoming in education, particularly the total absence, or dilution into socialistic nonsense, of good old fashioned factual history, is to blame for some of it. Even GCSE science papers are as full of “questions” asking the candidate’s “opinion” on such issues as “Climate Change” (and you know, don’t you, the type of response which will be considered acceptable?) as they are of hard, reproducable scientific fact. We can see the way World Dominence is heading, can’t we? While the young of the West (and France, Germany, Italy, USA are just as bad) are wallowing in a morass of self-indulgent navel-gazing and flagellation, condemning us oldies for our intolerance, China is ploughing ahead, concentrating its teaching on science and maths and keeping a very firm lid on any social or religious dissent. (I’m not saying I endorse what they are doing; merely stating facts.)
That was worth getting up at 5am to write. You have summed up what you and the contributors to this site are thinking, but a conclusion is missing because none of us can see a way forward. I would like to ask how many people visit this site because it is the same few of us contributing and we are of a similar mind. I don’t want to see insults slung about, but it would be good to have somebody give a well thought out alternative to challenge our views. The issue for me is that people are becoming polarised. They are not communicating and trying resolve differences. This is the worst thing humanity can do. Jeffrey’s comment illustrates the point, and I find that people either want to put their heads in the sand or cannot explain why they have certain beliefs. It is a strange time.
I disagree a little with your first item on human progress. It is true in recent years but is not true of the past. Many ideas came from the middle east and China, and Europe and America were not even in the running. I believe it does not matter where the ideas originated, it is the fact that trade and the movement of people ensure that the ideas spread around the world. A reason China lost its way was that it isolated itself from trade, and so did Japan at one stage. I think it is true to say that a higher than expected proportion of innovative ideas in the west have come from immigrants moving to the west and educated here. European thinking became prominent because there wasn’t any dominant country, so different ideas were produced and shared. This is why I consider the EU so bad for us because it imposes common thinking.
Success comes from sharing ideas and using the best, which history shows we have been doing. The West may have produced recent technological ideas, but we would not have had the benefits without Chinese manufacturing.
I don’t know what to make of education today. University Challege shows that there are many students with an impressive range of knowledge. But then we had Stephen Hawking, a recognised brilliant mind, who believed that humans were causing climate change by releasing CO2 when there is no physics to support the belief. Prof Brian Cox is another who promotes the same nonsense. Science is being used against us and I am convinced that is true of Covid policies.
We have the influential David Attenborough telling us that we are killing the planet, but still showing the walruses falling off cliffs after all the criticism of that activity. He now believes wildlife and the wilderness can recover if we stop using fossil fuel and use only renewable energy and convert to being vegetarians. He illustrated this glorious future by going back to a visit he made years ago to an isolated tribe in Borneo, using them as an example of how we could live a sustainable life, in harmony with nature. One look at the power cuts in California because of their extensive use of renewable energy reveals the real future he plans for us. Educated into imbecility indeed, and it was Douglas Murray who said it.
There is a lot in what Stillreading says. I’m sure hardship focuses minds and I also have similar experiences. Life is too easy and most of what we do is completely unrelated to our basic needs. He is talking about family life and support it gave us, and of course that is slowly breaking down as the state takes over more responsibility at all stages of our lives, with the associated loss of freedom at every stage.
I disagree with a large portion of your today’s blog. I left England 13 years ago simply because it is no longer my country. I grew up and was properly educated in the 50s and 60s. Today schools and universities are not institutions of education but just Marxist indoctrination centers.
Mass immigration has changed England in a way that makes it unpaletable to people of my generation. I now live happily in the tropics where the weather is much better for my old bones and the beaches are incredible. Here I’m the foreigner but as there are few of us we are welcomed by the locals who, of course, want to learn our language while I am learning Portuguese.
Will I ever go back to England? I’ll answer in a heart beat, NO! Not my country any more.
Perhaps, Colin Roxburgh, the essential message of your comment is that you are as appalled as the blog as the rest of us at the level to which Enland has descended socially and educationally, but that you have – quite understandably – preferred to cut your losses in favour of settling in a climate which is more acceptable to you in every way. My sister chose a similar route many years ago when she went to live for a while in Portugal and has now permanently settled, very contentedly, in France. She is a fluent linguist in both languages. I could well be tempted to do similarly were it not for the extensive family I have in England. I do not wish to live a flight or a drive and ferry crossing away from them. It means a great deal to me to see them all frequently. Mass immigration certainly has made England unpalateable to many thousands of people. You have only to mention it to get an immediate sense of how the majority of the indigenous population feels and it’s not the way Government or the left-wing media would have us believe, but most of us just keep our heads down and do our best to get on quietly with our lives, whilst silently lamenting the loss of so much. Our country, along with the rest of Europe, is digging its own grave. I still fail entirely to understand why. The abominable event in Paris yesterday is the latest manifestation of the utter failure of multiculturalism. At least Macron has had the guts to acknowledge that it was an “Islamic terrorist attack”. He hasn’t, as usually happens in the UK, tried to excuse it on grounds of the “mental problems” of the perpetrator.
The two comments above have one thing in common – Britain is no longer the country they were born into. Colin refers to his good education which he believes is not available now, but does not seem to be concerned about his descendants. Perhaps like me he does not have any, but the falling education standard does concern me, both for the future generations themselves and I do not want to see a deteriorating country. I don’t understand why he is not concerned.
Stillreading reflects the concern I see with many people about being separated from their family. It is difficult even within the UK to provide support even with relatively easy travel. The lockdown has presented huge problems for families, also perhaps creating mental health problems. A stable family life has been an essential part of human society.
As Stillreading says, it is difficult to understand and we seem powerless to do anything about it.
To end with an amusing comment I saw on the internet about gender eduction for young children. A class was being taught about gender diversity in an Australian school when a 5 year old boy stood up and said “I am not gender diverse, I am a boy” and to prove it he dropped his pants.