If you are even the slightest bit aware of what is happening to our country, you have probably said something like, “it can’t go on like this forever, eventually there is going to be a collapse.”
From an economic perspective, you instinctively know that, eventually, you will run out of other people’s money. For decades now, you could tell how much a website’s audience was aware of reality and, therefore, how rightwing it is based on how many ads there were for disaster preparedness and food storage. For those with eyes to see, it is obvious that things are much more fragile than anyone wants to admit. 2020 was a peek behind that curtain for the few willing to look. Everyone with even the mildest rightward sensibilities knows things are in decline and our civilization, especially our standard of living, is on life support. It is not hard to see—if you are willing to see it.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see what the future holds for the United States. The societal breakdown, the rampant sexual degeneracy, the widespread loss of both basic and highly specialized skills, the destruction of our manufacturing base, and even the obesity and substantially declining physical health of the population all point to a cataclysm in the future.
But it is impossible to pinpoint exactly when the collapse will occur or if there will even be an exact moment, we can identify as “the collapse.”
It’s the End of the World As We Know It
After 2020, everyone has noticed things we used to take for granted are gone. The world you grew up in, where grocery store shelves were always fully stocked, service workers actually provided service, potholes were repaired, roads were plowed in the winter, etc., now no longer exists. For nearly three years, every sign of decline was waved off as “supply chain problems” or “worker shortages,” all related to the Fauci bioweapon, but as time has gone on, it appears Humpty Dumpty is not being put back together again. Things are just going to be more run down, dirty, littered, and neglected from here on out.
Unless you are part of the willfully oblivious masses, the last three years have signaled that we are in the already. No, collapse is not usually something that happens overnight. We don’t go from having complex and bustling logistics networks of thousands of regional distribution centers for every conceivable consumer good and retailer to Mad Max overnight. Highly complex societies take decades or even centuries to collapse. The Soviet Union was an economic disaster from the very beginning, mass murdering millions through forced famine, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering tens of millions more to maintain its grip on power. But despite being one of the largest militaries ever assembled, despite thermonuclear weapons it could deliver anywhere on the planet, despite brutal and total control over the population, one day, the Soviet Union simply stopped existing.
Many people see the rampant sexual degeneracy and assume this means the end of our civilization is at hand. After all, how long can depraved parents bring their young children to watch men dressed as women give lap dances? How long can an online cult manipulate teenagers and preteens to have their genitals removed or chemically prevented from forming? How long can most of the children in the country be fatherless and raised by single moms? How long can the mandatory celebration of sodomy continue to go on? Surely a society like this cannot long survive?
Indeed, the sexual perversion of decadent societies often is the canary in the coal mine; signaling collapse is near. The nobility and imperial court were notoriously depraved right up to the very end of the centuries-long decline of Rome. The Marquis de Sade presaged the collapse of the Ancien Régime and the birth of modern leftism in the French Revolution. Much has been made of the rampant sexual depravity of the Weimar Republic. Both sides of the culture war are quick to point out, and for very different reasons, that Weimar Germany boasted the world’s very first trans sex change clinic. Those on the right are correct to point out that the flagrant sexual perversion of Weimar was both a symptom of that republic’s instability and one of the direct causes of the rise of the Third Reich. But when we consider the widespread degeneracy of America 2023, the perverted debauchery of Weimar is prudish and puritanical by comparison.
Collapse Is Both Far Away And Already Here
The major difference between Trashworld America and prior decadent societies teetering on the verge of collapse is that post-industrial, technological society does not require a functioning civilization to remain astonishingly productive. The Machine can keep the shelves stocked whether or not the rest of society functions, at least until social and cultural collapse no longer produces people who can keep The Machine running. In other words, in a post-industrial, technological society, we can undergo a social and cultural collapse long before the bill ultimately comes due. In fact, the social and cultural collapse is well underway.
The social collapse is quantifiably happening. Every sociological indicator, from marriage and divorce rates, to single parenthood, to birthrates, is alarming. It is nearly impossible to bury your head in the sand and pretend it is not happening. Everyone can see it. Our cities are uninhabitable slums surrounded by ugliness, trash, crime, and mentally ill vagrants. The high-trust communities you once knew, the Mayberry’s where you could leave your door unlocked at night, seem like the stuff of legend. The stable, orderly, high-trust civilization your ancestors built is gone.
However, cultural collapse is far more difficult to quantify. How many Americans are even aware Western Civilization even existed? Do they bear any connection whatsoever to Classical Antiquity or Medieval Christendom? We have been severed from millennia of tradition carried forward by our ancestors. Our nation’s children have been intentionally made ignorant of their great inheritance, and what little they are taught of it is employed only to let everyone know your ancestors were bad people. The great art, architecture, literature, and music enjoyed for hundreds and thousands of years are replaced by the celebration of the intentionally ugly, the vapid, and the discordant. There is nothing but the Marvel Cinematic Universe, steel and glass monstrosities intended to make life feel meaningless, and Lil Nas X singing autotuned odes to his master, Satan.
We are well into the collapse. It has been going on for decades now. You just have not seen it because, for most other societies, once the social and cultural collapse starts, the economic and political collapse quickly follows. Historically, when the social fabric of a nation is rent, and its culture goes up in flames, the food stops showing up and the army stops getting paid. But our machines and computers have made us so productive that things could continue like this for decades before that happens.
The median American, often called “the normie,” will tolerate any abuse so long as he is fed and entertained. Sure, you daily run the risk of being assaulted, robbed, and humiliated by feral criminals. Yes, the schools and corporate media are busy grooming little children into believing men can have babies and white people are responsible for every social ill, but B-Dubs still have $1 wings on Thursdays, and there is NFL football on the TV! Technological society allows bread and circuses to continue being distributed far longer than any other civilization in history. This doesn’t mean it will go on forever, but it does mean that we are experiencing something without historical precedent. If technological society means the sustained long-term pacification of the masses apart from social and cultural conditions, those social and cultural conditions could still get a lot worse.
‘The Already and Not-Yet Collapse’ — what to do?
You might think that this is a doomer post. It is far from it. It is an attempt to lay out the realistic conditions on the ground. It is neither naively optimistic nor hopelessly pessimistic. Things are bad and could likely stay bad for a long time. There probably won’t be a sudden shock that “wakes up the normies,” but there is nevertheless a pathway to go forward where we can win.
Fight with something rather than nothing
First, the cultural collapse is not a thing that “just happened.” Actual malevolent people intentionally destroyed the cultural heritage of European Christendom, like a BLM rioter pulling down a statue of Columbus writ large. These people set out to destroy what our great, great grandparents had and have been largely successful. What is called “the culture war” of the 80s and 90s was really a ragtag defensive campaign, irregular warfare after the enemy had successfully occupied your territory. Obergefell and its fallout was simply that guerrilla war finally coming to an end.
They think that they have finally won, that sodomy, transsexualism, and the sexualization of small children are now a permanent fixture of our society. But they are not at war with religious right fuddy-duddies as they think, but with Almighty God and the order of the world He has created. And He is not mocked.
Despite the de facto surrender of the culture war by every evangelical and ostensibly conservative Christian institution in the country, there remain tens of millions of Christians who oppose what God hates. And the psychological terror of the LGBT Regime has only radicalized them. They will seek and are seeking new leadership who will fight for them and for their children.
As Christians regroup to fight the second culture war, it will be us who are on the offensive this time, and the culture we will be destroying is weak, decrepit, and rotten to the core. Despite our enemy’s immense power over us, the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine pumping their ideology into the population’s brains, their culture is ugly and repulsive, their “comedy” is objectively unfunny, and the stories they tell are insipid and boring.
But they won because they were able to tear down and replace the existing culture with something rather than nothing. This has to date, been our single greatest challenge. How do you contend with a mass media empire that can sink a billion dollars into a CGI-heavy movie about superheroes defending the human right to use the anus as a sex organ from space Nazis? They have hundreds of billions of dollars to dominate every movie, TV show, song, university, k-12 school, and corporate boardroom with their culture. How can we possibly hope to compete?
God has given us the means to level the playing field. Many Christians are fearful of artificial intelligence, some for good and others for not-so-good reasons. But it is a tool that our enemies will happily wield against us, and, like any other technology, it can be used in a godly way. There were certainly people who thought a machine that could write thousands of books in a single day—which until then would take a man several lifetimes to do—was unnatural and wrong. But the printing press was a tool that changed the course of human history and enabled the spread of information and ideas like nothing else until the advent of the internet.
AI can be the same thing. Imagine producing a Hollywood movie that was faithful to the Bible, which presented the valiant and heroic moments of American history, which showed the glory of Western Christendom, or the great evils of enemy culture such as the French Revolution or Bolshevik terror. AI could enable the most talented and creative among Christians on the right (of whom we have an impressive amount despite being such a minority) to compete toe-to-toe with our enemies who have limitless resources. AI-enabled creative production for our side of the culture war would be like tiny Lichtenstein acquiring thermonuclear armed ICBMs. AI will enable us to produce cultural works at a fraction of the cost, and the faintly glowing embers of Western Christendom can instantly become a roaring fire.
Parallel community in real life around shared culture
Second, once we give people access to our cultural heritage that has been taken from us, we can continue to build communities around that shared culture. We are already in the midst of a dark age, and people will be drawn to the life and light of what is true, good, and beautiful. We must keep in mind that though technological society has given our godless rulers a much longer leash, eventually, there won’t be people left with the know-how to run the infinite bread machines, and for that, we must prepare.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the only reason there was not mass famine that killed millions was because there was a very long tradition of gardening that went back to serfdom under the Czar, and was sustained because of obvious food insecurity under Communism. We should use this time while the supposed infinite bread machine is running to learn to stop raising grass for people to look at and learn to turn even our 1/8 acre in the cul-de-sac into calorie production. We should consciously devote more of our resources to local farmers who are independent of the regime, which is very clearly planning, like all despotic totalitarian systems in history, to use access to food to control us. We must devote our resources to building local networks and communities to resist this.
Christ is king! We will win
It is easy to feel hopeless, especially since our side is leaderless and without meaningful institutions to rally around. But it is not hopeless. God has cleared the deck for us. He has unleashed a forest fire that has burnt every corrupted institution and cowardly leader to the ground.
And in this open space, he has given us the opportunity to build our own institutions, to raise up our own leaders, and rally an army of tens of millions to take hold of their inheritance and rebuild the Christian civilization of their ancestors.
Source: https://news.gab.com/2023/02/the-technological-age-collapse/
Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author (with Andrew Torba) of Christian Nationalism, and the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.
Great article, Mr. Tulis!