Waiting for Another Prophet
Why Does Everything Always Feel It's Getting Worse?
Human civilization doesn’t follow the path of eternal progress, nor of Spengler’s cyclical model. Instead, we are living through brief periods of rapid rise, followed by very long periods of seemingly eternal decline. Until a new prophet arises who can show us a new way.
Utopian leftists believe everything is always going to get better, and the past was always worse. Just look at those damned 1950s when American families could afford a home, a car, and five kids on a single salary! They must have been so oppressed, and sexually repressed.
Leftists have to believe that the past was always worse. That’s how they justify their own—gullible—belief in progress. If only we sacrificed more of our waking hours to the economy, and if we could silence our opposition, then, finally, we should achieve utopia. If only those Nazi-fascist-racist-Republicans wouldn't get in our way.
Some have long questioned the Marxist belief in progress. But even the cyclical model of civilization presents us with a form of utopian thinking: maybe things won’t always get better, but at least there will always be good times ahead!
Spengler argued that each cycle of civilization was unique to itself, with even its own concepts of space and time, and of what constitutes “progress” at all. In this, he was right. Except, there are no cycles.
You see, our own history has been misrepresented as having been a very long climb from the swamps to the stars, as Reagan would have said. According to the theory of evolution, it took us at least 300,000 years from the earliest Homo Sapiens to arrive at computers and cellphones.
And that’s a great fiction to tell children, but it’s not what really happened.
I hold the vision that our seemingly mute and backward ancient ancestors were not living through the early stages of “human progress” at all, but that they were the product of very prolonged periods of decline.
Our modern advances, for example, didn’t start 300,000 years ago, but barely 150 years ago, during the late 19th century, when steam engines for the first time allowed ships to sail up the Red Sea to bring goods from India. There, the goods would cross over land to the Mediterranean. That’s when Europe, Britain, and America finally started having it materially well.
Sail ships can’t sail up the Red Sea. Heavy wind will blow them back south, forcing them to go around South Africa, adding months to their trip. The steamboat and later, more advanced engines first allowed wealth to be transported around the planet in large volumes.
In fact, the period of middle class wealth we are now accustomed to in the West only existed from around 1950-2008, and we are now already suffering a visible decline. The efforts of World War 2 saw the rapid development of technology that later enabled Germany—of all places—to realize its economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder).
In effect, Hitler inadvertently started the modern modern age, the age of wealth and democracy for all, at least in the West, as a response to a rapid explosion of technological advances.
Almost all modern equipment we now take for granted was invented from around 1870-1950: the computer, the phone, electricity, audio recordings, TV, cinema, photography etc.
All these things that now control our existence we recent inventions, not based on 300,000 years of slow progress, but spurred on by a rapid and explosive technological progress caused by Europe’s wars, especially WW1 and WW2.
The increased size of the human species—some 8 billion already—is not evidence of progress. It is evidence of decline. And the recent technological rise may have been a small relief in an otherwise 300,000-year long period of decline.
Technological progress has come with an overall moral and psychological decline. And this decline can only be reverted, not by progress, but by a conversion. Namely, by a conversion from the economics-based technological reality to a new reality of blood and magic.
Only a prophet can show us the new way.