I will state at the outset and without a hint of irony, that /pol/ on 4chan is far more reliable for news than any mainstream news website. In stating that, I still don’t recommend getting your daily news there as there is a lot of bad content to sift through and often images that are very, very unsafe for… anywhere. It is fortunate therefore that we have many noble, self-sacrificing souls that go through and clip interesting threads or posts and share them through other mediums. One such post follows below.
I should add that this is an older post but it checks out.
Assuming the above post hasn’t been edited (outside of my removal of an expletive), this is quite a prescient post. I have used the “p” word in a number of posts in the past but I don’t think without good reason. I don’t believe whoever wrote the above had any divine revelation: just the ability to use knowledge and observation to draw accurate conclusions. The above poster is something of a “Doomer”, as in a misanthrope with a hopeless view of the future but there is truth to what he has written and it would be hard to deny that much of what is described above has been happening and especially over the last five years.
The verse by T.S. Eliot (whose prose has been the subject of two recent posts), mentioned above contains the famous lines that I used as the title but the entire poem is worth reading for context and doesn’t take very long. The final two lines are:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The poem was published in 1925 and the effects of the Great War on society were still very much being felt. I think it is hard for people to appreciate just how much damage that war did beyond the enormous waste of life. The poem’s themes have continued relevance and also inspired the title of the apocalyptic On the Beach by Nevil Shute which I wrote about some years back.
As someone who has been off and on preoccupied with great societal collapses and upheavals, I have come in recent years to see that such an event is very unlikely. Understanding what I do about other fallen empires and nations, I can see that it is rarely a sudden cataclysm and instead a slow, painful decline as described above. So it is worth considering where else this post has it right and especially in recent years. This is mostly referring to the United States but what applies to the United States almost invariably affects its satellite nations.
Everything mentioned in the second paragraph is true. Cost of living, job security, marriage, family and most certainly technological distractions. Just from my situation, I have found that despite my income going up fairly consistently every year, I am able to buy much less with it than I could some years ago. And things are observably getting worse.
What he states about interpersonal relations is also true though I am not sure what the statistics on family life are as of writing.
Where I would depart from the poster is with his final lines. Things may be getting bleak but nobody has to become “incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.” That part is totally a choice. Many are and probably many will live their lives with such an attitude but they don’t have to. This is something Owen Benjamin has been very good at both encouraging and demonstrating in his own life.
While there is a lot of truth here, despair never has and never will get people anywhere. You may have to live in your nation but there are many ways that you don’t have to live like others do; even if this is only possible in an inward sense. If you surround yourself with people who are capable of love, who do have families, who do not allow their lives to be consumed by distractions — then you will not be one of the hollow men.
This is not to say that thing won’t be difficult or get more so. Nor that many aspects of our society aren’t going to get worse regardless of how one lives. But there have been many examples in history of people managing to find joy in misery or in spite of it. So while there is certainly truth to the observations of how society is falling and will fall: we don’t have to fall with it.