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Civilization’s Discontents
When a civilization loses its connection to a core mission, then it becomes unmoored. Distractions from that mission degrade execution and competence at all levels: Corporations (who are told profits are evil) get distracted by DEI – and their competence falls. The military is told it must lead social change, and it embraces DEI – only to be humiliated when it is asked to fight a war. On a personal and familial level, when people forget (or never learned) that the greater purpose of a single person is to build deep and meaningful familial and community relationships, they instead get bogged down in their own narcissism.
When that happens, lacking any big motivational or societal goals, people stop taking marriage seriously, stop having children, and search for new neuroses to haunt our dreams and provide the corrosive fears (e.g. climate change, Covid, etc.) that are the dime-store substitutes for shared investment in a constructive communal project. Without a mission, society folds.
This is not new. Every time a primitive society was “rescued” when the West brought food, it collapsed. If your entire culture is built around surviving at the edge of extinction from starvation and disease, then nothing makes any sense once that central challenge has been taken off the table. Primitive societies have no higher ideals: Their people are too hungry to concern themselves with abstract problems.
Today’s richer societies are now deeply mired in the same problem, writ large. None of the wealthy nations in the world have so far solved the problem of how to motivate a population who no longer fear starvation.
(The only rich nation that today has substantially higher than replacement levels of children is Israel – and the most plausible explanation is not solely the religious angle. It is instead that Israel is still motivated by the oldest ambition of mankind, the ambition shared with all primitive cultures in human history: mere survival.)
This is not because there are no worthy higher causes. There most certainly are!
Religions, at least Islam and Christianity and Judaism, offer competing (though not always compatible) visions and missions that can motivate people to see that there are more important things than their deep-down gender preferences.
Nationalism provides a higher cause as well. Europe conquered the world at least in part because there was so much competition, driven in part by nationalism and religious sectarianism. (Arguably the EU, by seeking to end nationalism in Europe, has sapped Europe’s vitality.)
More recently, Communism vs. Democracy provided a grander mission that people could believe in, on one side or the other. And war is a sensational motivator, even if conducted through proxies like the Space Race. At least in time of war, passions are inflamed. And people procreate – see the Baby Boom.
But now the missions have decayed and rotted away. People no longer believed deeply in them: The “isms” like Communism and Socialism and even Zionism aged out after 70 years. Europe’s competing countries have become the oatmeal mush of the EU, so birth rates are plummeting. Christianity is nicer than ever before – and the result is stagnation. The list goes on and on. Few Americans can even articulate what the mission of America is, and as a result, much of what passes for a national mission is little more than xenophobia.
Vivek talks and writes consistently about trying to restore a higher purpose to America. As a Catholic-educated Hindu, he grasps the paradox of a mission being critical to societal success even if you don’t think the mission is ultimately “true.” Jordan Peterson and Mark Steyn and even Richard Dawkins have all said very similar things: They are not sure if they believe, but they certainly want everyone else to believe!
Because having a mission matters. But not all missions are equal. Global Warming Apocalypters don’t get us anywhere, and they, along with their co-religionist Wokers, are not having children anyway. They are modern-day Shakers, unable to reproduce, and so ultimately are merely dead ends in human history. And their evangelism promotes the overall woke mind-virus.
Communism and DEI and racial purity are similarly not missions that any free person should welcome and accept, because they don’t lead to the improvement of humanity on this earth. Islam certainly gets people fired up, and sometimes even blown up. It does not offer a winning mission statement if we believe in a future that is better than the present.
The paradox is that, consciously or not, powerful people and governments the world over are not even acting in their own long-term best interests. Instead of helping to find productive causes that can motivate their people, they are suppressing the free speech of all who believe in traditional values. Instead, they promote pablum that enhances their short-term power, but at the cost of long-term decline and the death of civilization as we know it.
Traditionally, unfree societies suppressed free speech because they had a mission, and would not countenance any competing ideas. No citizen of the Soviet Union or Red China or Nazi Germany could repeatedly question Stalin or Mao or Hitler. Those societies had a vision, and they promoted it ruthlessly, to the exclusion of all else. Even Ancient Egypt blocked external ideas, and they did so for thousands of years – when Pharoah invited the Hebrews to move in, he specifically told them to leave all their things behind: Egypt wanted to limit the intrusion of everything foreign as much as it could (the migrants were even settled remotely from the natives). Of all of these named totalitarian societies, the Egyptians were the most successful at isolating themselves. But of course the Egyptians did not have the internet, or even the printing press, to contend with.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has a mission: He wants to get to Mars. That is an echo of the 1960s Space Race, and worked well enough with that generation. Musk also understands that mankind needs to reproduce. Musk is doing his part when it comes to reproduction, having fathered at least 12 children.
For me, all the “good” missions have to be rooted in the text of the Torah – those principles are summarized here. The Torah is all about creating and building and investing in meaningful relationships with each other and with G-d. Of course, this may be too abstract for most people – which is why the Torah is partially really only for Jews (and its message has not been resoundingly successful even among my own co-religionists).
But whatever we do, we need to get to it quickly. In order to be saved, the West needs to figure this out, and soon. Steyn correctly identifies that demography is destiny, so unless and until people start believing in something more than themselves before we are biologically incapable of kick-starting the birth curve, then civilization’s death spiral will end in a smoking crater.
P.S. One might even argue that Javier Milei’s economic goals are religious in origin, even though Argentina is not a wealthy nation and can be motivated primarily by the desire for economic survival.
Published in General
Corporations have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. BlackRock, State Street, et. al base their investments on the ESG (environmental, social, and government) rating of the firm. Up until lately, having a good ESG meant access to short term loans and there was no downside. Then certain companies like Bud Light’s AB InBev and Harley-Davidson found themselves in bad odor with their customers. Not a profitable place to be.
Likewise, the military has started worrying about DEI concerns and lost sight of their core mission: killing people and breaking their stuff.
I do not believe this is correct. I have heard it from CEOs, in public, multiple times: “the next time I get better terms because of our ESG score will be the first time.”
Then they’re doing it because it provides a competitive benefit? Yeah, no. It doesn’t.
They do it to minimize liability in the face of the most insanely politicized DoJ in human history, and after Biden’s loud denunciation of AG Garland as being way too easy on Biden’s enemies list, the CEOs were right to be worried.
That makes a little more sense, but at what cost? I wasn’t required to attend any DEI
struggletraining sessions at my last employer, but I got an earful from others and oooh baby, it’s a wonder the ears of the HR Department employees didn’t burn right off their skulls. They weren’t eliminating toxicity from the work environment, they were perfecting it.No argument. I don’t do DEI organizations. I have been lucky to find clients that kept that stuff at arms length, often by being minority-owned small businesses. (I know, right.) And if I ever found a DEI/CRT intervention on my schedule it would be contract over. Life is too short.
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for them, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they?–this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.”
–Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
I don’t think western civilization lacks a mission. I think the mission is to help people. Like all mission statements, that one can be, and is, interpreted broadly, and it is ignored, for sure, but it exists nevertheless.
Devout Muslims can give you a mission statement. During WWII, and the Cold War and the Space Race and even during the Miracle on Ice, the proverbial Man On the Street could tell you the mission statement.
But if you were to ask 100 people on the street today, you would not get any two answers that are the same.
I think there several issues here: Is there a mission? Do people know there’s a mission? Are people working toward achieving the mission?
I agree that these are societal-level leadership issues. I think that modern leaders don’t talk about this simple mission, and I’m pretty sure that’s because bringing it up invites argument, a sequence of events that occurs with all missions. (I had a rule in the organizations I belonged to: never ever bring out the bylaws! :) )
I have heard Vivek speak about this problem, and I agree with him to some extent. And I’m glad he talks about it from his perch in politics. We have nothing that binds us together as a country except politics so that is where this discussion has to happen if it is to have any effect. But I would rather he recognized and talked about the mission we have rather than saying there is no common mission.
I am somewhat fanatical about the importance of an organization of any size having a shared purpose of helping others. I became fanatical about this as I was strolling around the hospital neighborhood of Boston. All of the hospitals in the neighborhood were begun by religious organizations with a strong mission. Even Mass General began that way, to help the poor.
This success can be seen in education too. Northeastern University, in the hospital neighborhood although of course not a hospital, began in 1898 as a project in a rooming house of the Brits’ Boston branch of the YMCA as the Evening Institute for Young Men. Today it is one of the largest and most successful universities in the world.
The successes of these hospital and educational organizations are stupendous, truly.
To me, it is very obvious why. The mission to help others was embraced by the organization’s leadership. The followers in the organization shared that mission and wanted to succeed in it. In every single case.
When people work together to help others, they can move mountains. G-d is truly with them every step of the way.
There is (or should be) an underlying set of presuppositions that are necessary – and while displayed within politics, they are, as you identify, actually religious in origin.
In order to believe in helping others we must accept that
1: Each person has intrinsic value. This value must be from the human soul, rather than measured using utilitarian metrics – or we quickly discount or discard the old, infirm, stupid, weak, poor, etc.
2: Other people have a moral duty to help.
Both of the above are fundamental parts of Judeo-Christian beliefs. If and when society eliminates those beliefs, then it has done away with the shared mission. Which is why the Woke world rejects the mission you think we have.
They are not helping, but they think they are.
I think the mission exists. People ignore it, fail at it, and argue about it.
But I believe it exists as powerfully today as it ever has.
Are you a fan of the Feral Historian, or is this just coincidence?
Don’t know the Feral Historian…should I check him out?
Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Micro, responding to the weird remarks from the Allstate guy:
Why are CEOs so different than they were 30 years ago? I would never have thought it was my job to pontificate about addictions, negativity, etc. in the good old days. This isn’t tone deafness, it is startling scope creep. And well maybe tone deaf too.
A lot of it is probably herd-following; much of it is probably due to pressure from spouses and children.
I just checked my list of people from whom to take moral and ethical guidance, and Allstate CEO Tom Wilson didn’t make the cut.