Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
100 years of war, philosophy and culture designed to destroy people and freedom.
by StFerdIII
Europe's current economic depression is but a symptom of 150 years of cultural, moral, and productive stagnation. The Continent confirmed its commitment to suicide in the last decades of the 19th century, and reaffirmed its collective hatred of the individual during the 20th. Economic immaturity and contraction are manifestations of deeper problems. There is something profound and more permanently wrong with the European experiment and that is a base hatred of the human and the individual. From such an ethos flows all of Europe's woes past and current.
Collectivists and glad-fly international socialists always praise the European way. The great Prophet Obamed is rushing to turn the US into a paler version of the EU-topia. But what is that way and utopian ideal? Is it the path of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Industrial 'revolution' and the mores of practical and rationalised Humanism and Christianity ? Is it the path traveled by the English from the times of Henry II, through the Magna Carta to the Putney declaration of 1647 all of which guaranteed the rights of citizens, the common person and a check on the powers of the all-consuming, carnivorous state ?
Consider European arrogance premised on long past glories. In a brief 70 year period during the 'High' Renaissance of the 16th century Florence and a clutch of Italian city states produced some of the most brilliant of creators, artists and inventors in history, unmatched by any other culture, in any part of the world - ever. Giotto, Ghiberti, Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian, Michealangelo – to name just the more famous few of a large group of talents – all co-existed within a span of less than 2 generations.
Collectively they revolutionised history and art. But they worshiped not the collective, but the individual. All were born poor. None were part of the ruling elite. All ran their workshops as a business. Each maintained that he and he alone was responsible for his life and the success or failure of his projects. The cultural milieu they and others created produced a world of learning and inquiry and improvement – based on competition to acquire patronage and contracts. All would claim that the individual, unfettered from cynosure, censure, and chains could achieve marvelous things in life.
In sum the genius of the High Renaissance in Italy is the expression of an efflorescence which flows from a distinct break with despotism, orientalism, and state power and the elevation of reason, the person, the human and of free will. These post-medieval Italians embraced the human and knew that freedom meant opportunity. None of these attributes colors European society today – which is why Europe produces nothing of note or interest. There is no possibility of a 'European' culture, which militates against the individual, against competition and against high culture, to produce any artifact of innovative creativity. Europe has been an intellectual, economic and philosophical wasteland for nigh on 100 years.
Cultures are the platforms. Upon that platform the scaffolding of society is built. Culture will allow the construction of wealth, art, trade, creativity, and rationality to flourish. If the cultural platform is weak or non-existent, none of the accroutements and externalities of greatness can be built. Islam is an example of a culture and a set of attitudes which is distinctly against free-will, investigation and thinking. As such the Islamic world is a proto-fascist mess, entangled with racism, supremacism and endless war. Culture informs all.
The cultural flowering off of which Europe lives and brags today, has nothing in common with the current European ethos of state aggrandizement, the diminishment of the individual, and a hatred of free speech, free inquiry and even cultural and national pride. Europeans can gloat about their legacies, their buildings, Romanic law, the imparts of ancient Greece, and the sophistication and courage of the Luther-Erasmus-Rational revolutions. But so what. It only means that the current welfare-generation of Europe is living off of someone else's work, sweat and sacrifice. A more apt question is - what does it produce today ? The post-medieval and ancient world legacies do not apply to today's Europe, except in the abstract. Yet the concrete nature of the past 100 years certainly does apply, and of that analysis there is scant little on offer within Europe.
European self-hatred, and the inclination to detest the individual began in earnest in the late 19th century. In music, literature, philosophy and state organisation, the individual was viewed as useless or something to be used, killed, taxed or otherwise neutered. The only relevant factor would be the state; national illusions about world control; the creation of earthly utopias; and the ability of an elite to remodel society and re-educate the ignorant mass. In this guise, the state must replace religion. Indeed the state needed to become a religion. In lieu of rationality and spirituality, obedience and religious devotion to state ideals would be commanded.
Idiocies parading as 'philosophies' based on lies and nonsense such as Marxism, class socialism, communalism, national socialism, militarism, evangelical imperialism, post modernism, and corporate fascism – all of them 'left wing' ideals premised on the unity of the volk and state – has permeated European consciousness from the time of Hegel through to modern times. Hitler's 'Volkgemeinschaft' or the contract between the people and the state, in which the people would support the 'state' or ruling gang, in exchange for welfare, transfer payments, guarantees, security and national pride, was not a Nazi invention. Its origins date back to Bismarck and the cultural and economic change following the rapid increase in technology and communications, which allowed leaders for the first time, to control ever larger and wider areas of population through propaganda, taxation, and the use of state violence.
State power embedded in Germany, the Hapsburg empire and Imperial Russia were premised on a contract between the ruled and the state. These empires were state created constructs and the delicate dance to maintain their relevance and power, rested on a balance between granting enough freedom to have a dynamic society to produce wealth and taxes; but not too dynamic to disrupt the elite's leadership and control. Historically the elite in Europe has never been much interested in freedom or the individual. The Catholic Church; the various empires of the post 1700 European world'; the elite support of Napoleon; the intellectual and corporate support of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, the enthusiasm by intellectuals [along with many in the working classes] for variants of Marxism and Fascism, all highlight the obvious ambiguity that most Euro-elites have towards the individual human. In short, there is no culture in Europe which is 'for' the individual and 'for' the rational and spiritual.
For 150 years the European zeitgeist has been against the individual and for the state. There is no possible way to explain the rise of the European Union for example, without recognising this base fact. The EU is just another European program of control. Its mandate extends to all matters of living. A free trade agreement using a common currency in such a crowded and small part of the world makes sense. What is not sensible is layering on political and social conventions across geographies which are not 'European' and have nothing in common with each other. Social, cultural, and business cycles differ markedly between Manchester, Malmo and Milano. Why then a unified social-political space ?
The only explanation for the EU is that European culture for 150 years has viewed the individual as essentially worthless. The EU is a political creation to rival and perhaps upset US power. What is never calculated is the human cost and the price to be paid for rigidifying a large part of the industrialised world. Europe accounts for about 25% of world GDP which obscures its 20% real unemployment rate; its destructive Arab-Muslim immigration policies; its shrinking tax base; and its lack of productivity and per-capita wealth. Trade restrictions and protectionism ensure high Euro prices, whilst African farmers literally starve to death, unable to export their cheaper agro-products into Europe. It is not a surprise that Europe so enthusiastically embraces the United Nations. It allows Europeans to pose as moral arbiters within the world system; while their policies do the exact opposite of what they espouse.
'Cultured' Europe gave us the 20th century – a series of catstrophic wars which killed 130 million people and allowed the Nazis and the Communists to control large tracts of land and demolish the lives of the people who lived there. It has given us a socialised United Nations deep in corruption, Orwellian double speak and indifference to Islamic fascism. Europe has given us post modern Newspeak and rising anti-semiticism, along with the crushing of free speech and a prostration to Islamic and Arab interests. It has produced nothing of interest for 50 years. Its economy, its military, its culture and even its banking system are bankrupt.
Yet this is the 'Brave New World' ? Live off your past. Be arrogant, corrupt and Janus-faced. Assume that the state is all-powerful and the individual worthless. Ignore the lessons of the last 100 years ?
It will only be a mild surprise when Europe collapses. Maybe the Muslims will take it over. Maybe it will be annexed into Greater Arabia. Maybe it will divide into warring factions. Whatever Europe's future it is not a culture, nor a system worth emulating.
