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On Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 05:14:48 PM GMT-4, [redacted] wrote:
Why Every Great Civilization Falls to Idiocracy – The Pattern We Never See Coming
Hello again Mr. Yates! This video is right on target! America has become an idiocracy. Too many Americans, especially Trump, his administration, the Republican party, the conservative media Fox News, Townhall, World Net Daily, News With Views and other right-wing extremist websites, conservative think tanks, et al, do nothing but spread ridiculous conspiracy theories, disregard for science, Christian religious fanaticism, intolerance, fear and hatred of homosexuals and transgender people, mindless support for corrupt, greedy, stupid, ignorant & ruthless Republican politicians who care only for personal profits but not their constituents, peddle mindless jingoistic pseudo patriotism, foster mindless fear and hatred of foreigners, people who are not heterosexual white male Christians etc. Of course, the Democrats are hardly perfect, but today's Republican party is infinitely worse.
The Republicans and the conservative media et al are fostering mindless disregard for scientists and other experts in various fields , foolish disbelief in the very real and existential threat of climate change and pollution etc.
All the best, Robert Berger , New Rochelle, NY.
Reply.
Hi Robert. I hope you're doing well this morning. Hope also that your nieces are doing well and visiting you regularly.
I watched the video you sent ... twice. It's actually pretty good, even if there are points where I hesitate (I wasn't expecting perfection, and hope its makers, if they are serious about critical thinking, do not expect perfect agreement). I'd not been familiar with that channel (Philosophy Coded). I subscribed. So thank you for sending it.
As someone who once taught introduction to logic courses ... it was how I earned my living, back in the day ... I care about these things. The video touched on matters I've addressed in articles more than once [here, here, here, here, here, here]: the tendency of civilizations to run in cycles that eventually destroy them. Sir John Bagot Glubb (who discovered this among the Arab civilization of a thousand years ago) identified the "stages" through which several civilizations he'd studied passed:
(1) Breakout and Age of Pioneers: a civilization begins, often empowered by a small and crucial body of ideas, such as ours of human freedom and Constitutional controls on government.
(2) Age of Conquest: a period of compulsive expansion, and heaven help anyone who gets in the way (ask the indigenous peoples of the North, Central, and South Americas).
(3) Age of Commerce: a period in which the civilization has laid down trade routes, with a single administration, a single language, a stable currency, belief in the value of education and in the future, and a strong sense of the public good. During this period, great advances are made. Immigrants come to better their lives, and assimilate into the dominant culture within a generation. But unfortunately here is where things begin to go wrong, as the fascination with making money as an end in itself begins.
(4) Age of Affluence: wealth accumulation begins to swamp interest in the public good; institutions start to become corrupted
(5) Age of Intellect: the civilization's intellectuals become insular, specialized, talk mainly to one another about "problems" of interest only to themselves; careerism has completely replaced interest in the use of ideas to serve the public good.
(6) Age of Decadence: decline, the period America is in now, becomes visible (has been for most of our lifetimes if we know what to look for). We see:
(a) money is almost literally worshipped as a surrogate for God, which is why we've seen welfare-statism in reverse (redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of a billionaire class). We see ostentatious displays of wealth and a "let them eat cake" mindset among the wealthy.
(b) religious institutions become corrupt (think of the pedophile priests in the Catholic church, though that's just an extreme example; think also of the "prosperity gospel"); sincere, constructive belief has been in full retreat for decades.
(c) intellectuals consequently embrace either cosmic pessimism (or nihilism) or a blind Utopianism; rejection of God is replaced by, "We are God!" (in our civilization's iteration, transhumanism). That is when they embrace anything beyond micro specialization.
(d) frivolity replaces seriousness; statesmen and other real leaders are replaced by entertainers, other celebrities, and "influencers." We see the rise of a class motivated by the sheer lust for money and power, and they'll operate in secret if they have to.
(e) open borders; an influx of illegal immigrants who no longer assimilate. They tend to congregate in major cities. All the major parties are okay with this, but for different reasons (Democrats want votes; Republicans want cheap labor for Big Business).
(f) legitimate safety nets are corrupted by the willingness of more and more people to live at the expense of a bloated, bureaucratic state. The currency is gradually destroyed as more and more is printed without any real value being created or added (no backing by gold or other precious metals) to support state activities, many of which the civilization's founding documents never authorized, or simply to keep the economic system moving and not collapsing....
(g) "gender" confusion: women move into professions previously dominated by men; men are emasculated until they start to rebel in whatever way they can (think of the "manosphere").
(h) an obsession with sex (in all forms) permeates popular culture. Miley Cyrus performs concerts 99% naked before masses of leering, drooling males (and a few females).
History discloses almost no cases of civilizations turning themselves around once an Age of Decadence sets in. I'd describe the Renaissance as a Breakout and Pioneering Age of a new European civilization, not a turning around of what had been lost centuries before. (Aquinas's integration of Roman Catholicism and Aristotelianism in the 13th century made a huge difference.)
While this is too long already ... I'll end shortly ... if you've read this far you'll be happy to know that I've broken with Trump 2.0. Nowhere did I endorse open hostility toward, e.g., foreign students with visas or green cards and so on, who are in the country legally and playing by the rules, but who (in some cases, not all by any means) committed the thought crime of criticizing Israel's unconscionable actions in Gaza.
Nor did I endorse the fusion of Trumpism with Technocracy that we saw on display the day His Muskiness declared "This is what Victory looks like!" and gave that quasi-Nazi salute (as media described it). I became acutely uneasy learning of the Silicon Valley billionaires who attended Trump's second inauguration ... none of whom were anywhere to be seen back in 2017.
Learn what Technocracy is: its philosophical roots, its aspirations for this civilization, and its psychological motivations (although I don't quite understand this desire to control populations by various levels of force, including structural). More on this to come.
Feel free to forward this to your list.
Cheers!
Steven
NAVIGATING THE NEW NORMAL, on Substack:
My new novel THE SHADOW OVER SARNATH can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNKM36DS/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
My book WHAT SHOULD PHILOSOPHY DO? A THEORY can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Should-Philosophy-Steven-Yates/dp/1725263750/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Steven+Yates&qid=1626572876&s=books&sr=1-2 or here https://wipfandstock.com/9781725263758/what-should-philosophy-do/
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Interesting article Steven, thanks.
We have discussed your penchant for blaming money and materialism (the M&Ms that won't melt in your mind?:) as your whupping child and my penchant for going farthest upstream and stopping child abuse/neglect as the fundamental cause of what is wrong with the Human Condition.
You do not cite any writers who perhaps could have helped you to your conclusion/concussion (sorry, not really sarcasm, you know we have fun poking each other in our ribs:) here so I will:
Pitirim Sorokin, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee.
Also the hard to find book on Sorokin’s Sensate Culture:
The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization between Chaos and Transformation by Harold O. J. Brown.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1556351887/?mr_donotredirect
Here is Amazon blurb on the book that much reminds me of your take on the “decline of the West” (pace, Spengler—who I recall you too have read in this genre?):
“Why have so many lost confidence and hope in spite of the progress of modern times? Why do even those who deny their despair run ever faster in pursuit of pleasures that burn all thought from their minds? Distinguished Christian thinker Harold O. J. Brown argues in this incisive analysis that our culture suffers such symptoms because we have cut ourselves off from our spiritual roots. We are in the last stages of what the late Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin called a late, degenerate, sensate culture. Furthermore, this crisis of culture is too opaque to be penetrated by human understanding and efforts alone. Instead we must begin by confessing our need for grace and wisdom from above. Brown shows how, with that confession, Christians may be able to point the way out of cultural despair. They above all people know the power of faith, hope, and love. Hence the author can conclude that, There are some indications that disillusionment with the fading favors of a rotting sensate culture is causing people to become receptive to solutions that are identifiably Christian.”
Sounds like you? I think you could/should have written it?
Here to read it on Archive:
https://archive.org/details/sensateculture0000brow/page/n3/mode/1up
Here is good intro to Sorokin:
Pitirim Sorokin – Sensate, Ideational, and Idealistic Cultures
https://www.john-uebersax.com/pdf/SorokinCulturalOrientations.pdf
I would like to see you (re)read these authors, especially Brown, and do a revised version of your civilizational decline thesis.
Looking forward to reading it.
To end with a new beginning:
My take on “civilizational decline” is akin to that in the book: The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad which is about "Structural Violence/Control/Authoritarianism" (which I know is your interest too) baked into the Human Condition, so I hope you will read this as I think it can add to your take on this topic.