Modern western society is notably so much more different then it used to be. Our values, goals, moral frameworks, views on religion, family structures,
and the roles of men and women, among many other social constructs, have shifted dramatically. Pre-modern society is looked at as brutal, dark and
oppressive. But what if modern society is in the wrong and not everyone else? Dystopic systems like to teach their subjects that life was miserable until
their free-thinking revolutionaries heroically saved their country, but we often find that history is much more nuanced than that. So how do we know that
modern society, which espouses the same dogma, is not also presenting a false narrative? I would argue that this narrative is false, and that this is
simply decadence rather than a change for the better.
And to be clear, I find it hard to definitively say what I mean by modernity, but I would place the beginning of the rise of it around the start of
Feminism, though even then things were mostly traditional (not to say that Feminism wasn't in itself disastrous). However each movement, period and shift
in society that is modern have similar themes, which I will explain here before tying them together, and then explaining cultural decadence.
Attribute 1: Individualism
Modern society views the prime as being the individual - it places no importance on collectives (e.g families, nations). A couple of examples of this idea
are embodied heavily in the LGBT "rights" movement and pro-immigration advocates.
For the LGBT "rights" movement, this is evident in it's main positions and who it opposes. The core of it has fundamentally been the phrase "Who am I to
care what two consenting adults do in their own homes?". It bears no witness to the overwhelming amount of
statistical information against it and its sinful nature/the normalization of sin because
of it, since individualists frame their understanding of the world around individuals and nothing else.
Pro-immigration thought, whether legal or illegal (so even "conservatives" fit under this umbrella) and anyone opposed to the concept of a nation
maintaining its existence and preserving its ethnic background, similarly often base its rejection of Nationalism on the argument that it shouldn't
matter if any amount of the country is foreign since they don't directly affect you necessarily. They don't believe that patrimony, social cohesion
(which is lacking in multicultural societies) and the preservation of your people and values is important since that doesn't fit into the individualistic
framework.
The individualistic framework cannot comprehend the idea that something may not directly harm you, but that it will lead to greater consequences
for everyone.
Conservatives (and yes I know they aren't truly Conservative, but for brevities sake I will simply refer to them as Conservative henceforth) are also
individualistic. Indeed they are antagonistic to trans "rights" advocates, but the only reasons they give for this seem to be situations in which someone
else is very directly affected (e.g transsexual men in women sports or the transitioning of children). Most Conservatives have already said that they
don't care if an adult transitions, and at most will believe that transgenderism isn't real and is the result of other things like mental illness.
Individualism is one of the pillars of modern cultural decadence, since if society is the social fabric that glues people together into civilizations,
then a collapsing society will therefore lose that social fabric. Individualism is not only the loss of the social fabric, it is the embrace of it.
Attribute 2: Nihilism
Nihilism can have many definitions or meaning depending on the context, but the most well known and relevant definition is the view that life has no
inherent meaning or purpose. The threat widespread Nihilism poses to civilization is much more recognized (for example Nietzsche's work) yet it
perseveres.
One of the reasons as to why that is is the fact that most Nihilists do not seem to see themselves as such due to how misunderstood the term is. In
reality anyone who does not believe in any spirituality for example is a Nihilist. This naturally includes Atheists.
Nihilism in essence is the rejection of any objective reality. If religion is gone, therefore the closest thing to finding a source of objective reality
is science. But science simply produces hypothoses and theories, there is no way to conclude that anything is objective. One could argue that observation
would allow you to determine if something is true, but this would require a leap of faith in assuming that your senses aren't lying to you.
This loss of objective reality therefore allows for any set of beliefs, no matter how incoherent or horrible they are, since they have no objective
standard to look to. People, being social creatures, will end up looking towards each other and no one else for acceptable beliefs. This allows public
opinion to be molded into anything suitable for any powerful group, or even the masses themselves. However this isn't completely limited to Nihilism.
Protestantism is a semi-example of this, where it lacks a concrete objective reality in most cases, hence why many support things like gay marriage and
abortion.
Nihilism is not just a pillar of modern cultural decadence, it also allows it to happen. The destruction of any values and morality, stemming from
religion and/or culture is permitted since under Nihilism objective values do not exist, and humans left in their natural state but removed from
spirituality will begin to work towards individual materialistic interests for obvious reasons. It also breeds a mentality of carelessness since the lack
of meaning in life therefore leads many to disregard any work towards something greater than themselves and anything sacrificial. If life is meaningless
and there is nothing more to it than pleasure, what would motivate someone to sacrifice their pleasure completely in exchange for a vague but probably
small reward for everyone else? I have seen this play out many times, especially as someone who used to be a Nihilist. There is a reason after all why
brutally dedicated political groups (e.g Jihadis, crusaders, monks burning themselves, etc) tend to be heavily religious.
Hedonism
Throughout historical examples of cultural decadence (more on that later) as well as a quick glance at modern society, one can easily find excessive
consumerism.
People have an inherent longing for spirituality and belonging to a culture and people. Why else have cultures existed, and why else have all these
cultures formed spiritual beliefs that often are at odds with carnal materialistic desires? Since this is a need for psychological well-being, people will
feel deprived without it. Combined with a heavy amount of indoctrination against religious and cultural values, they might seek out a cure for this
raging desire through other means. This creates a dependency on hedonism to 'fill the void', but chasing material desire absent of spiritual well-being
cannot bring someone to genuine happiness and satisfaction since not only at this point are they deprived of something, they are numbing their senses and
creating a dependency. Corporations naturally wanting to make money engage with this desire by giving them cheaply produced hedonistic pleasures.
Eventually people may numb themselves enough to the point of no longer seeking anything going beyond carnal ambitions, thus they will not want to do
things like raising children since that will interfere with their ability to chase carnal pleasure and doesn't make sense to someone who only knows
hedonism since something like having a family includes lots of sacrifices and intense love for other people.
What cultural decadence is
Those two attributes are ones that I pointed out because I find them to be not only the most prominent, but the most useful in highlighting the tendencies
of the so-called progress we hear so much about in modern society. However, they fit into an even larger picture.
Cultural decadence can be defined as a decline or even loss entirely in moral, spiritual, artistic and cultural values. It is often seen before the end
of empires, marking the point at which they began an irreversible decline. Two prominent examples of this happening have been seen in:
The Late Roman Empire (3rd-5th centuries AD): This period is the most well known example of cultural decadence, and was marked by hedonism, sexual
immorality, mass foreign immigration (goths) and corruption. This primarily occured in the urban areas, which were highly overcrowded at the time.
Weimar Germany: Germany following WW1 had a horrible economy, as well as the promotion of homosexuality and transsexuality by Jewish foreigners.
Thus in Weimar their decadence wasn't self imposed but forced onto them, so the results were rapid and disastrous. There were an estimated 50,000
prostitutes in the streets of Berlin, when Germany at the time only had 1 million people to put its degeneracy into perspective.
Does any of that sound familiar? Many people aren't even aware that transsexuality even existed before now, but it did. It turns out these problems
aren't unique to our time. What you could also notice is that individualism and nihilism, while existing in different forms, aided in these two periods
of decadence.
You might be wondering what the cause of decadence is. Anyone reading this knows about Jewish influence and how its historic antagonism towards the west
and Christianity would pre-dispose it to working against the west, especially when it is firmly and nepotistically established in important major
institutions. But something that can't be ignored when talking about decadence is industrialization and overcrowding. This is something else that has been
discussed ad nauseum, so as a brief summary:
From 1958 to 1962 there was a series of experiments done on mice where researchers gave them unlimited amounts of food, water and protection in cages they
called "mouse utopias", allowing the population of the rats to increase infinitely since they no longer had to worry about conserving resources (the idea
being that this was the exact same thing that happened to humans with the industrial revolution).
This would result in very interesting sociological differences in the rats. The researchers noticed that after the birth rate peaked it started to
massively plateau, and then from there the researchers observed that:
Gender roles would switch (male mice would act effeminate and secrete female hormones, female mice would become overly agressive with their kin
creating mice who were not well adapted socially).
There would be a group of male mice called by the researchers "the beautiful ones" who never had children, only constantly grooming themselves in
isolation, and often secreted stress and feminine hormones.
A class of mice formed who held harems of women causing many male mice to become involuntarily celibate
Another class of mice formed that were described as "zombies" who would only go out at night and wandered aimlessly, often never defending
themselves.
A group of mice formed that would go out of their way to attack and torture other mice for no reason and often targeted mice who were still having
children.
Eventually the mice would go extinct due to the fall in the birth rate.
A lot of comparisons can be made from these results to groups in our modern society (the beautiful ones being more abstractly related to human
males but maybe homosexuals are the closest comparison, the mice with harems of women are like "alpha males", the zombies are like the homeless and
and the violent ones are like nihilistic mass murderers, particularly school shooters), suggesting that things that appear ideological are actually
sociological, and that the ideologies used to accompany things like homosexuality or Feminism are actually things used to justify something they would do
either way.
But still, this by itself doesn't explain why decadence is happening, it just shows that overcrowding as a result of technology can cause it.
There are likely a lot of factors that are purely psychological, and psychology is a field which I don't know very much about. But stress due to
overcrowding and its byproduct overstimulation due to the resulting intense urbanisation and detachment from nature probably plays a role. Calhoun,
the lead researcher in the mouse utopia experiments, also posited that constant social interaction overloaded the mice's ability to process it.
