Re: Hyper Hierarchal Dementia
[Crackpot comments in brackets.]
James,
“Deep thinker”, my momma would be so proud.
I’d say the topic has two aspects, first the traditional modes of failure of civilization and the second, drivers which are unique to industrial and web-based society.
Traditionally, prosperity and the safety of the society itself are civilization killers. At the battle of Cannae, Hannibal wiped out a Roman army of over 50,000, among the dead were 30 or more Senators. These were men at the absolute pinnacle of Roman society and politics, yet they were out there swinging a sword for the greater good. Once Carthage was destroyed, Rome had no peer competitor, and they owned the entire Mediterranean. In my opinion, the transition from a somewhat free republic to a slave empire started at that very moment, when Rome was safe from outside threat.
[Agreed. This is exactly what happens to fighters once they become champions and are able to select beatable opponents. Mike Tyson to Buster Douglas to Evander Holyfield back to Holyfield and Tyson, illustrate this well. I have felt it I my bones when returning to Baltimore from places where safety reigns, feeling like a defanged snake cast back into the viper pit.]
This created issues which are directly relatable to the USA’s situation. With Rome’s external conflicts becoming purely about wealth and resources, rather than societal survival, the elites became increasingly less interested in risking their skins over it. The number of the power brokers in the USA who have merely worn a uniform, much less gotten shot at, has been shrinking steadily since WW2.
As slaves became the backbone of their economy, Roman farmers were steadily driven from the land into urban poverty. Farmer’s sons had been the main source of young men for the legions, as their numbers dropped, barbarians filled the gap. In WW2, roughly half the USA population still lived on the farm, today less than 5% do and the military publicly says 80% of the potential recruit population is “unfit for military service”. Drugs, criminal records, psych issues and ridiculous numbers due simply to obesity.
[Buster Douglas gained a hundred pounds after beating Tyson and was harpooned like a beached whale by Holyfield in seconds.]
One can argue all day about exactly when Europe or the USA truly started downhill, but for the USA, the lack of a peer competitor came in 1945. As did simply ridiculous levels of prosperity as every other industrial country on the planet had been bombed flat. And while the cold war did provide an existential threat, there was no real threat of direct invasion and conquest. So, the traditional society killers have been present since 1945.
[It has always been shocking to me that so called dissidents on the right and left claim that their aims are to make society safe again on the right, of safer on the left, depending on the particular delusion imbibed from the prism of lies. A key expression of this is that even gunmen of our current rural west will say, about a place like Baltimore, that its a “darned Dodge City.” This denial of their own heritage was implanted by a false FBI statistical manipulation that found that deaths per 100,000 in Miami in 1980, when you had machine gun battles in shopping malls, was the same as in Dodge City in one of the rare years when someone suffered violent death there in the 1870s. That death numbered one, and was of a man who dueled another man over a woman, where in Baltimore old ladies are routinely raped to death. When violent death itself becomes a crime, then the sissy obsession with safety has become the toxin that will destroy society.]
Non-traditionally, the impact of the computer age is the pace of events has drastically accelerated. If a Roman wanted to send money to buy a product in a neighboring town, somebody had to physically take the money to the neighboring town, and physically bring back the product. On foot, by horseback or by wagon. If the Senate wanted to send a Legion to kick somebodies a**, they marched for weeks or months to merely get to the battlefield. Think what mischief politicians and financiers can get into today that weren’t even a fantasy 100 years ago.
[The current war in Yougotgrain, obviously instigated by USG, who has stated it will not participate, yet is financing the thing, is an excellent example.]
Computers are also burying everyone in data and choices, so merely sorting out the truly critical from the merely hysterical is almost impossible, and choosing quiet contemplation requires true determination.
[I think that the only reason why I have been able to make so many science-fiction predictions that have come true, and also generate extreme distaste among most readers who encounter my work, is that I have been mostly unplugged from this since 2011.]
Industrialization and modern medicine have been direct contributors to the decline from masculine killers to chubby soy boys. As technology has progressed, the physical labor aspect of work has steadily declined. This leads to men getting less physically demanding on the job activity, and it also results in women entering more and more employment fields and making them feminine safe spaces in the process. The visual difference between men whose muscles come from labor or those who get theirs at the gym is obvious, as is the attitudinal difference. You simply do not produce blood drenched killers in a feminized cube farm. Or in a feminized school.
[In boxing, the prejudice against weights and the preference for using axes and hammers and such for development began at the very time when American society was urbanizing. The trainers knew that their best fighters came from logging camps and farms sought to preserve this.]
Refrigeration, sanitation and traditional vaϲϲination are the true drivers of both survival and increased longevity everywhere they’ve been adopted. Antibiotics has also played a major role. If you do any genealogy research, you will find a fair number of children who died young for “failure to thrive”. Which I interpret as a blanket term for unknown-unknowns related to children who were simply frail without an obvious fatal condition. Likely these frail children were killed by pneumonia or other bacterial infections. Penicillin hit the market during WW2 and went public directly afterwards. Those children who would have died in earlier years, many of them survived. As medicine progressed, more and more children who would have died young in the past survived. These four advances were created by people of European ancestry, so these trends have been impacting people of European ancestry longer. I’m not even considering for this discussion impacts of chemical pollutants, but there’s certainly issues there as well.
[This reminds me of the ability for leaders of China and the Middle Sea to establish dynasties that lasted hundreds of years. These dynasties would then be toppled by barbarian invaders out of the hinterlands where chiefs had to fight for leadership and not simply inherit. This was the main driver and reboot mechanism across civilized Eurasia and North Africa from 2500 B.C. until the Sieges of Malta and Vienna by the Turks in the 1600s A.D.]
Broadly speaking, people usually mate and produce children with others from their social, economic and physical level. So, the weak and the frail would typically mate with others like them. Cycle that trend for a few generations, and you have quite a few folks alive today who are, genetically speaking, noticeably less than their ancestors. Physically and intellectually.
[I was a low mediocre man of my age grade and yet have maintained the ability to put in mid mediocre combat performances into old age. My success arc peaks at about 40 when it should have peaked at 30. This has been reflected in other sports at the pro level with unusual longevity of boxing and MMA champs and with NFL quarterbacks. Floyd Mayweather, Hopkins, Foreman, the Klitchko Brothers are examples of this.]
People who are weaker, whether it’s physically or mentally, they know, whether they will admit it or not, and they will not initiate direct one on one action against someone they perceive as stronger, if only stronger in will. Yes, you see people yapping like chihuahuas at others, but they are only doing it where they feel protected or sense no threat. And often the weak loathe themselves and create a mental loop to feel they deserve bad outcomes.
[This is expressed in the African American habit, since the 1990s, of pack attacking white trash like me, and when there is the least set back, calling in the cops and begging White Daddy to put the redheaded stepchild in a cage.]
Thus soft, feminized, self-loathing palefaces genuflect to ebon warriors who live in and for the moment. A man who is willing to act, to do or die right here, right now, even if over trivia; will always have an edge over a man who does not have that commitment.
[Amen.]
James, you have used that edge in your street confrontations. You’ve signaled that you would go all the way, here and now, and that was enough. You had a profession that was more physically demanding than most and have violent hobbies, so that helped send a predator, not prey, message.
[It is interesting, that when I am not actively training or competing, that the Negroes who approach me for crime come deeper and things are a closer run dance. But when I am sparring on the regular, even when I am hurt, that these same hoodrats just glance at me and say, “Oh hell no.” This happened on Thursday August 4 2022 and is addressed in two articles, Grey God Rising and Paveman Jones.]
But there’s a caveat to all the above which calls for caution.
Fat wolves don’t hunt.
Quite a few quiet, apparently weak people are only that way because they have no need to be violent, or the risk vs reward equation doesn’t work for them, and they are still very well fed. And in many cases well medicated.
As things go increasingly sideways, a starving wolf with no experience is still dangerous, they’re desperate and unpredictable. And they may not have hands on skills, but with the bounty of arms and materials to make arms, they’ll learn to compensate. And they’ll pack up.
Be careful out there.
Don Quotays
…
I feel that in my bones. When I was in Denver by night and lost at the main train and bus hub, I was surrounded by homeless black men half my age and over six feet, looking for a grift. They had zero will, so I bluffed through.
Then, when I found my train, I ended up in a car with a half dozen stoner skateboard ghost punks. These guys were all weeded out and mellow, but the rowdy was right under the skin. They were all over six feet and athletic. I saw them do tricks on their boards on the platform that I could not have done when I was their age. These dudes could be real trouble if they did not have mommy and her government job and medical tranquility. They were thankfully in the arms of Morpheus and imbibing his breath rather then ripping this old bum to pieces without breaking a sweat. Imagine if they were homeless like those black guys two blocks away who were begging, and they couldn’t get weed but had to drink cheap vodka?
I am one of the chief beneficiaries of American societal decline.
Thank you, Murica!
