Michael Anton On Identifying Our Cultural Disease's Symptoms & An Attempt At A Diagnosis

The obvious first stage in disease identification is noticing symptoms and their extent. This, for the United States, Michael Anton does with acumen and aplomb, in his New Criterion essay "Unprecedented". If you are time limited, read his essay and skip this post.

The second stage is diagnosis, the formal step of fitting the symptoms to a known malady---or in naming a new one, as yet unknown, if the symptoms don't fit. This is tricky because many different maladies share symptoms. What changes are the intensity and timing of the symptoms, and the history of the entity under examination, and so forth.

With the malady identified, rightly or wrongly, the next step is prognosis, either in the face of a treatment or treatments, or in considering the disease's natural progression.

Anton (and none of us) hasn't quite made the diagnosis, making intelligent prognosis near impossible. The diagnosis is difficult, and as yet incomplete because, as Anton demonstrates through multiple indisputable examples, our symptoms are unprecedented. Not just as a group, but many historically have never been seen singly.

Not only that, but it's not clear he has nailed every symptom. Anton at least misses the geographic extent of the disease. It is not everywhere, but it is global. It is perhaps worst here, though.

Here are some of the symptoms as Anton sees:

A ruling class that rejects as hateful assimilation of newcomers. Open borders with rulers complicit in replacing the native population, while simultaneously denying and boasting of the complicity. Open hatred of whites, especially from theory-addled credentialed whites, and their continual scapegoating of whites. (You will never find a more perfect example of blind self hatred than this.) Pandering to non-whites, especially to blacks, as official policy.

On the last two, this:

The matter becomes even more complicated when one reflects that this is mostly an intra-white civil war. One group of whites pronounces the entire white race evil, seeks policies to hurt it, but somehow exempts itself. So far, these upper-caste whites have found ways to protect their own privilege but haven’t developed consistent rhetoric to defend that privilege. They appear to believe that no matter how much anti-white poison they vomit or how many destructive policies they enact, none will ever blow back on them. In particular, they seem to believe that the “allies” in whom they stir up anti-white hatred will never turn and bite them; at least, they appear not to have seriously considered the possibility. This situation, too, is unprecedented.

More symptoms:

We are in an "a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy" (which I call an expertocracy). "Our ruling class is rich and rapacious---rich because rapacious, and eager to be richer still by taking what little you have left." All in authority, from the lowest adjunct professor to Senators, tout and cheer the oligarchy.

People believe themselves gods, and can change sex on a whim. Marriage is also a whim. Whims are magic. "The regime promotes every imaginable historic form of degeneracy---and then invents new ones undreamt of by Caligula, the Borgias, or Catherine the Great." This degeneracy is forced on the populace: they are coerced into saying what's good is bad, and what's bad is good.

We have a Cult of Ugliness. "[N]ot just the buildings, but the art, the literature, the music, almost everything." This, as Anton hesitates to say, but I am happy to shout, "extends to people." The fat and hideous are called healthy and beautiful---and you must agree.

The purpose of education is to lie, to indoctrinate, to spread hate. The promotion of ability is called racist, sexist, and so on.

Crime is increasing, partly because of racial pandering, but also because our ruling class enjoys it, thinking it somehow punishes their enemies (us). Again, they believe they will escape the bloodlust they have unleashed, which is an astounding thought.

The serial humiliations inflicted on our people by its ruling class—not all of which, to say the least, generate profits—appear to be another element of contemporary life without historical precedent.

Our old culture is with glee and demonic ferocity being removed, and replaced by....what, exactly?

The only prognostication Anton allows himself is this:

If our ruling class has a plan, it would seem to be to destroy the society and institutions from which they, at present, are the largest---one is tempted to say only---beneficiaries. Do they think they can benefit more from the wreckage? Or are they driven by hatreds that blind them to self-interest? Perhaps they’re simply insane?

Now what Anton did not emphasize, but surely knows, is that these symptoms are found throughout the West, in varying degree. Pandering to blacks is epidemic also in the UK, but of a different flavor, and is not much present in, say, Spain. "Hate" is condemned in the States, but it is illegal in France.

The welcoming of "refugees" and "migrants" is found everywhere in the West, with the ruling class slandering any who object as "racist". Whites are the only people denied a native land---rather, they are denied claiming one.

This isn't just the West. There are the beginnings of this in, of all places, Japan, though only at whisper levels so far.

Degeneracy has spread, or perhaps better said, allowed to grow in the Far East. Taiwan, for instance, allows gmarriage. Many young Korean men wear more lipstick than Brooklyn hookers. Ugliness and its celebration are nearly everywhere.

And on and on.

The one symptom Anton did not speak is godlessness. The Cult of Man is the sole form of worship for most. I don't mean atheism, which is always minor in influence. The Cult of Man insists both that life has no meaning, and also, quite inconsistently, that man's will alone provides all meaning. Only a god can create something from nothing; only a god can create a gender with his word alone.

Globalization of science, and therefore of "higher" education, married to the Theory of Equality (the first sin), is another symptom. The Cult of Science is, in most respects, the same as the Cult of Man. In this Cult, all life is still meaningless, and the meaning (inconsistently) is provided by equations.

Yet because science is, or was, explanative of Reality, and therefore generally useful, it came to be taught everywhere. Along with science came the scientism baggage, and the encouragement of the Cult of Man.

Globalization, spread through technology and education, created our expertocracy. The Cult of Man encouraged the oligarchs, who justify their greed through (what we can call) the gold rule: do what thou wilt. One thing is clear. The ruling class is already being effected by the system they created and used, they thought, only to punish and control its enemies. The oligarchs have indeed grown rich, and, it seems, they think they can hide from all the degeneracy they support. Perhaps---who knows?---they'll survive by buying remote islands and importing expensive minions.

The decadence is rotting the foundations of science and globalization, which maintains the expertocracy. Even progressives scientists now see this. But perhaps this rot will not be fast enough before rulers develop tools powerful enough to enslave great numbers.

Here we are honing in on a diagnosis. Our on-going series of political failures shows clearly that all crises are spiritual. Perhaps our disease, then, the best summary of all symptoms, is the lack of a formal, elite-led coherent formal religion. As Christianity, among elites, faded, it was replaced by nothing---nothing in particular.

The nihilism at the top does trickle down, in the same way as formal religion does, but it is entirely negative. A positive religion would point to something and say "This is good: find and emulate it". This can be Family, Beauty, the Mind of God. Our religion is solely anti; it only sees enemies, and declares nothing Good. It is hateful, and so we all hate.

Assuming our diagnosis is correct, we can venture a prognosis. First, no cure is coming, short of Divine Intervention. We are left with guessing the nature progression of the disease.

I am not sanguine.

"Say, Lot, why the sad face? Cheer up. It can't be that bad."

Buy my new book, in which I, in effect, go through the progenitors of each of culture's symptoms and beloved fallacies: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.

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