The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization (Bishop's Daily Blog piggybacking off of Panama's submission)
Good message from Panama. US is certainly at a turning point. Sans a disruption to current direction (and I'm on record that only DJT is the only valid deus ex machina), it's The Borg within a generation. Who knows, maybe totalitarianism is the way of progress in the universe, individual freedom being but a fleeting aberration in mankind's quest to dominate the universe. Notwithstanding any of the bad news today, though, you have to admit that it was good living at the apex.
Bishop (Stephen DeWitt Taylor)
From Richard Gooden: FYI – in school, I never read Atlas Shrugged. Reading it now.
Please read the work of Victor Davis Hanson below, entitled, The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization and you will be compelled to vote … to get your fellow conservatives to vote … to induce every Independent you know to vote … to implore any progressive you still have regard for to vote for a restoration of the foundations of freedom that our founding fathers envisioned at the Continental Congress. There is only ONE feasible reason to have a DEMOCRACY, and that ONE reason is the united belief that GOD created all men equal … at conception!
The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization
By: Victor Davis Hanson
September 29, 2022
Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.
So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from the daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.
But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.
As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.
But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.
Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.
What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.
The Current Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.
When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.
The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that it might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.
The Pentagon must keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.
It is not to badger soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.
The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran & No. Korea.
At home, the Current Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border—as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.
Utter chaos followed. Three million were poured into the United States illegally. They entered without audit, and largely without skills, education, or capital.
The streets of our cities are anarchical—and seemingly by intent.
Defunding the police, emptying the jails, cashless bail, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.
America is racing backward into the 19th century wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure their exemption from punishment.
Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.
But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support—as green nihilists are attempting—and millions are at the precipice of hunger, as they have since the dawn of civilization.
Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.
So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism has diminished trust in all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.
Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to new feudalism as the wealthy elite—terrified of what they have wrought—selfishly retreat to their private walled keeps.
But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.
As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, we Americans have come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of our civilization.
When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath and next … is utterly terrifying.
By: Victor Davis Hanson
September 29, 2022
Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.
So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from the daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.
But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.
As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.
But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.
Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.
What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.
The Current Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.
When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.
The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that it might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.
The Pentagon must keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.
It is not to badger soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.
The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran & No. Korea.
At home, the Current Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border—as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.
Utter chaos followed. Three million were poured into the United States illegally. They entered without audit, and largely without skills, education, or capital.
The streets of our cities are anarchical—and seemingly by intent.
Defunding the police, emptying the jails, cashless bail, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.
America is racing backward into the 19th century wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure their exemption from punishment.
Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.
But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support—as green nihilists are attempting—and millions are at the precipice of hunger, as they have since the dawn of civilization.
Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.
So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism has diminished trust in all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.
Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to new feudalism as the wealthy elite—terrified of what they have wrought—selfishly retreat to their private walled keeps.
But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.
As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, we Americans have come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of our civilization.
When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath and next … is utterly terrifying.