Here is a secret I never thought I’d have to learn.
It’s surprisingly easy to live in an insane society.
It’s surprisingly easy for us all to be plonked down in a batshit crazy society where nothing makes sense anymore and still find ourselves acting as if really, at some fundamental level, things do make sense still.
It’s surprising just how much we will accept, just how much can be twisted out of all recognition, just how much can be broken, just how much can be stolen from us, or imposed on us, or inflicted on us, and at some base, functioning level we all shrug and grumble and move on.
Some fresh madness is presented to us. But there was a fresh madness yesterday, and there will be a fresh madness tomorrow, so the ever reviving and returning and shoved in our face madness becomes the standard operating condition of our society.
Humanity can get used to anything.
After all, Aztecs got used to human sacrifice. They got used to torturing children to death to offer up their screams and tears to the gods. They got used to tearing out the still beating hearts of prisoners of war. They got used to killing 20,000 people at a time, tumbling them down the temple steps, and stacking up skulls or severed hands as artistic statements.
And that same society would have people happily going to shop at the market for pretty beads and feathers, maybe organising a day between visiting the market, chatting with friends, doing whatever the Aztec equivalent of dropping off the kids at school was, then getting in some really festive and relaxing ritual human sacrifice, then a few more chores before sleep.
Industrial scale human sacrifice can work for us, you know, just as genocidal gas chambers would no doubt have worked and kept on working for a Nazi society if they had happened to win World War Two. In that eventuality, millions of people would have happily gone about their business never noticing the smoke plumes in the woods and the ash that was once a person.
Normality is easily broken, but it’s almost impossible to forget. It bounces back like a rubber ball. We pretend it’s still with us, long after it’s gone. We learn to pretend that anything is normal.
It is at one and the same time impossible fragile and impossibly resilient. It can die a thousand times but we still expect it to live. We can see it hacked to death and the next day act as if it was still whole. The illusion of it persists where its absence is keenest.
When you’re in prison, I guess that shower rape becomes pretty normal. Perhaps not if it’s your first time as the victim, but otherwise, just a condition of existence, an expected hazard. If it’s not happening to you, you barely notice.
Surely one of the great secrets of the persistence of tyranny, of how frequently people slip into it and accept it, is in this quality of normality, this air of things still being OK, even when they obviously aren’t. But surely too even our lessons and warnings on that are all inclined, now, to help us pretend that in our society, in our case, things cannot be as they were in the worst societies of the past.
We have been taught that descent into tyranny comes from only one side of politics, and always takes the same path that Nazi Germany took. The warnings there induce a soporific complacency with regard to tyrannies that enter stage Left, or that come via an accretion of bureaucracy rather than through a demagogue sharing fiery speeches.
Only a fool thinks all the lessons of history are contained in a single conflict. But there are many fools doing this, and sure that they are wise because of it.
As for those who aren’t mindlessly intoning that Putin is Hitler, or that Trump is Hitler, or that anyone and everyone who disagrees with us is Hitler…we can just as easily be seduced into accepting horrific things as if they were all we should expect from life. Our complacency does not come from the pampered, coddled and delusional world view imprinted on the political and media class by the false answers of Marxist professors, but from something much more tangible.
Our complacency comes from the real world, from the things that are a solace and a meaning in one’s existence. We imagine that things are not as bad as we sometimes fear because we have normality at hand. Thus far, few of us are starving, Thus far, most of us can still do normal things. We can turn our backs on political issues and interact with family and friends. We can raise our families. We can go back and forth from work and still think it highly unlikely that we will be attacked or killed on the way.
We can live our lives, and compared to many times in history, our lives in the majority are still quite comfortable. The life of a society is not like the life of an animal. An animal rots, on the whole, after it has died, whereas a society dies because it is rotten. We have been rotten for a long time now, but the stench was somewhat hidden by the scent of old affluence. Our days of greatness built a store of good things, and general levels of comfort were among them. Material comfort, and psychological comfort too. We inherited a certain amount of social capital, of peace as well as plenty, of internal unity, and of the accoutrements and characteristics of a free society. We had made murder rare, and violence minimal, and all the darkest things that are never fully extinguished were at least peripheral.
For most of us. I’m not naive enough to pretend it was a paradise.
But the big and obvious things were generally set to a standard that was enviable, a standard it had taken centuries to achieve. You could use the term Free World and really mean it. You could trust elections. You could expect teachers to teach and doctors to heal. You could be pretty sure that you were allowed to have an opinion, and to voice it publicly too, without fear of arrest. The corruption at least pretended to be ashamed of itself. The media were less terrifyingly uniform, and more reassuringly diverse.
The rot began long ago, and it’s interesting sometimes to read the jaded commentaries of the 1890s, let alone the insightful and appalled ones of the early to mid twentieth century. Read GK Chesterton or CS Lewis or even Malcolm Muggeridge on what was wrong with their times and you find some remarkably applicable comments that sound like prophetic visions of this moment.
Here is Muggeridge speaking at a time when Critical Race Theory, a Joe Biden Presidency, an England becoming an Islamic Caliphate, and a western world where you can be put in prison for hurting someone’s sensitive feelings, would all have been inconceivable:
“What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.”
The Right is so much more susceptible to a wounded melancholy than the Left has ever been. The Golden Age has always passed. The Left stare at a fanatic’s rising sun, and blind themselves to all humanity in the process, but it’s always ahead that their hearts and minds (such as they are) are fixed. We, by contrast, mourn the passing of every second, as if there is something in the conservative instinct still troubled by the quixotic decision to exchange the cool seas for the poison of air.
And that instinct has to be fathomed and weighed, has to be something we are aware of in ourselves, when we look at the age around us and judge it insane. There were Roman poets doing the same before their Empire was born…..but then, were they not proved right, in the end, when the Good Emperors were done and the sorry shambles took their place?
And can we not, today, point to a thousand or ten thousand or a million men who make Heliogabalus their template, or Nero their inspiration, or Commodus their idol? What would a Macron or a Trudeau or a Biden or a Starmer do with the absolute power of a Roman Emperor? Do we really think these pathetic creatures would be morally less corruptible and spiritually more secure? Of course not. They would manage to be worse, although perhaps with less flair.
Still, it must be said, it must be said look at where we are. Look at it fully. Look at it honestly.
We murder millions of babies in the womb, and consider that normal and even a right to be proud of. We rip apart full formed infants inside their mothers, by their mothers choice, and we make an industry out of killing them, and a second industry out of their remains.
How is this, really, less perverse than what the Romans reported as the great moral crime of Carthage, when they said that the Carthaginians threw babies into sacrificial fires to feed the hunger of Baal?
We have a Vice Presidential candidate who changed legislation specifically so that babies could be left to die in agony in hospitals.
And now we have added to this a newer industry which is the profitable business of mutilating the genitals of children with surgery and chemicals, confusing their gender, hooking them up to a life time of expensive drugs, and calling all that ‘affirmation’ and ‘care’.
The mainstream and the elites of our society pretend that both these industrial scale horrors testify to our progress, to the perfection of our values, when really it is astonishing that more of us do not recoil in horror from the existence of such things.
Human beings can indeed get used to anything.
Our wisest commentators were saying how rotten our society had become before multi trillion dollar financial theft (euphemistically referred to as ‘spending packages’) existed. Before the Nuremberg Code could ever have been considered something the English or the Americans might need to have applied to them, and before three quarters of the entire human race were injected with an experimental gene therapy they didn’t need.
Today, thanks to our beloved media and our own astonishing complacency, we teeter on the edge of the removal of every single characteristic of a ‘liberal democracy’. Any Party that listens to the People risks being banned. Any individual who refuses globalist progressive orthodoxies risks being imprisoned. The kind of insane authoritarianism we saw during COVID is an intoxicating aphrodisiac for our rulers, who itch and yearn not just to return to such conditions, but also to make them permanent.
But we function as if millions were not killed by mRNA vaccines and other COVID measures. We act as if that period, which showed just how much our political and media class are semi-functional lunatics, was normal. We act as if the lack of accountability for it all is normal. We act as if sudden heart attacks everywhere in young people are normal.
But all of this was the greatest, most murderous, most hideous crime ever to develop in a period of peace, ever to be enacted by the ‘Free World’ and ever to have gone without the fall and the punishment of the guilty parties.
Today, we are so inured to horror after horror that the people wondering if a bad hurricane or a storm was created by geoengineering seem a fair bit more reasonable to me than the people who still insist that COVID measures saved lives. Because immediately forgetting actual deaths is surely more bizarre than speculating on the cause of new ones, no matter how wild that speculation seems. At least the second acknowledges that an event has occurred. At least the second has a secure enough grasp on objective reality and traditional morality to know that innocent deaths are something you should want to avoid.
Whether a person wanting the Ukraine war to drag on, and wanting more and more crazy experiments, or screaming support for abortion as if it were a football team, has that basic grasp of morality and reality is much more debatable.
But we should at least acknowledge where we are. We are all on the crazy train, some of us against our will. The view from the windows is of fire and flame. The destination may well be Hell.
We may be too used to it already to see it. But the flames won’t distinguish between us.
I recently had a shot in my knee that begin to bleed rather dramatically. The physician's assistant who gave me the shot grabbed some gauze to soak up the blood and as I'm watching it oozing out over the bandages she said to me "I think it's stopping." My first thought was she must be a liberal. They're always asking us to believe something contrary to the evidence in front of our own eyes.
I was having a conversation with a once intelligent friend and found I simply had to point out that just 4 years ago he knew that the only way to get a virus was to be exposed to someone else with a virus. In two short years he came to believe that someone who was healthy but hadn't had a shot was going to make him sick. Even though he and his wife had all the shots and boosters, they have both had covid since then, and yet he still believes that people should get this shot that doesn't work. I think I'm bringing him around finally.
There is no longer any common sense. Fewer people listen to what's being said, look at what's being done, and decide for themselves what they think about it and what they want to do about it.