Disasters, real and fictional

Civilization is a delicate thing, easily lost.

I recently read an article by

The Obsolete Man

that explored disaster movies. These were end-of-times films. Nuclear war, viral mayhem, nobody survives.

Living on a Thin Line

He discussed some noteworthy scenes, in particular those that made him uncomfortable. Many focused on the moments in the film where the characters become aware of society unravelling. People attempting to escape some calamity and failing, or a mob scene skillfully portrayed to show the moment where civility itself evaporates in a violent crowd.

These scenes are unsettling to watch, a sensation exploited by the writers and filmmakers. They strike a nerve and make us uncomfortable. We can imagine ourselves caught up in an event where all the things we take for granted disappear.

These scenes resonate because they provide a glimpse into the miracle of civilization. The complexity of it. All the moving parts that are built up over time we typically give little thought to.

The ease with which these portrayals show the disappearance of normal life belies the enormous effort required to create a civilized country in the first place.

At some level we understand what we have is precious. A thing that took centuries to build up into its present form. The horror of disaster movies is often the swiftness of the decline. We get to watch as the veneer of normality and calm is lost, all from the safety of our still-functioning homes.

They may be fiction but we see some disturbing signs that life is beginning to imitate art.

Western decline

Many of us now sense we are in decline. We seem to be edging closer to the kind of conditions that can lead to the scenes portrayed in the disaster films.

Our institutions are corrupt and visibly failing. A sense of powerlessness is palpable among the voting public. Voting itself changes very little. Demoralization is common.

An entire layer of society seems intent on destroying all that is good. This is readily seen in our institutions. Many have turned against us. We disappoint them. Our racism, our sexism and our selfishness do not impress our public servants.

The politicians grow impatient with us and yearn to vote in a better public, one as educated and informed as them. They seem baffled we resist the dangerous changes to society we didn’t vote for.

However, as they work to dismantle important elements of modern society for their own ends our cultural leaders take a great deal for granted.

The stability and openness created by high civilization engenders a false sense of automatic permanence. It is easy. Pick up the phone and the cops are there in ten minutes, just like pizza.

There seems to be absolutely no appreciation for what we have and why we should be careful. Society is merely a thing to be used up in the rush to realize some new vision with no thought given to what it takes to maintain an advanced society.

The mentality at play is one of consumption. Our societies are there to be consumed to build something better or to achieve a more pleasing ambition. But as we are learning, this destructive consumption is dangerous.

Improving society through destruction doesn’t work

Those entrusted to run society on our behalf have not done so. They have abused their position, often for spurious goals unrelated to their mission. They burn through goodwill, further eroding trust in institutions and society itself. This in turn threatens to bring about the conditions of failure we subconsciously worry about.

The destruction is driven by a sense of outrage. Poverty, inequality, a multitude of bad things we must fix. Even worse we are told our societies are uniquely evil and unusually wicked when even a casual glance around the world reveals a quite different picture.

The world is a mess. Squalor, poverty and injustice are everywhere. Warfare is constant. People don’t really get along. Racial, ethnic and cultural tensions trigger conflict to such an extent some form of xenophobia must be hardwired into our brains.

Only Western nations are condemned for impulses and attitudes common throughout history and throughout the world today. It is not these views or attitudes we must explain but the absence of them in the West.

And yet many of the people promoted to positions of authority take it all for granted. They seem to misunderstand civilization is not a state we can activate at will otherwise most of the world would be prosperous and peaceful. It is complex, layered and impossible to consciously build. Many past leaders, religious gurus and movements have believed they could amend or remodel a society or culture and all have failed.

Civilization is not a plannable construct. It is an emergent phenomenon dependent on many interconnected elements. What emerges is never the work of one person or even a group, it is always a phenomenon forever coloured by the societal substrate from which it does emerge.

Unstable countries ran by warlords, for example, cannot create civilization because the obvious instability and the danger work to prevent the mutual trust needed to create a stable society. The powerful are there, warlording away, making basic foundations like the rule of law or private property difficult to establish.

Cultures with utopian dreamers fail for similar reasons. Their preoccupations trigger instability. They focus on destruction and rationalize it as a precursor to building back better.

As they meet inevitable resistance from those who try to preserve society they become enraged, first at the shortsightedness of the preservers and then at the obviously defective fools whose influence must be diminished lest we wreck their grand visions. These are invariably cosmic in scope and typically beyond their job descriptions.

Their rage soon coagulates into intolerance for alternative views and rival groups. Nothing must stand in the way of progress.

This intolerance and hate then become woven into all they build. That which they do build is subject to the same destructive processes animating the progressives themselves, becoming part of the fabric of society.

Today’s George Floyd statues, for example, will in time be toppled and melted down by the children of those who erected them not because they differ in their views about ethnic tensions but because the Floydians brought impermanence with them and made it a key element of their brave new world of outrage-driven social change.

The lust to destroy hated symbols of a previous era becomes part of the mix so nothing is safe including all that the current batch try to build themselves. Witness the pro-transgender feminists turn on their more traditional sisters. Progress must always recast the past as obsolete even when it gave you everything you value.

It is lost on the progressive mind that the restraint of the traditional conservative is not an absence of dynamism or a lack of vision for something better but caution and consideration for what came before, understood as a crucial element of anything destined to last. This consideration is baked in to all that they build, a kind of preservation element the emotionally driven seem to lack.

The great cathedrals of Europe have this, as does the Sistine Chapel and even the Golden Gate Bridge or the Capitol Building. It is conspicuously absent in the garish graffiti, street murals and the performative gestures beloved of progressives, each as fleeting as the emotive moods driving their own actions.

The symbols of today’s civilization wreckers are as impermanent as everything else they do. What testimony can we observe for decades of abortion campaigns or gay marriage? Both negate life, championing behaviours that are the antithesis of permanence. Rainbow flags? Childless women on antidepressants? Effeminate males openly serving in the military or police?

The primitive adolescent impulses driving the insanity are not the basis for anything except indulgence and regret. These conjoined phenomenon, the hedonism leading to its well-understood outcome of decline and decay, define many Western nations as if we are ruled by toddlers.

This constant rush to embrace the new and ditch the old is seen as progress. Yet it fails in the one thing that really does mark out a civilization for greatness, namely permanence.

Our civilization condemners can’t seem to build anything. Even their boasts of forming novel alliances to smash the capitalist patriarchy often look like parody. Men in dresses and makeup sharing platforms with radical lesbian feminists alongside observant Muslims wearing foreign costumes, looking like Arab jihadists from central casting. A coalition that can barely last an afternoon let alone years or decades.

All that holds them together is a shared fear of masculine white men who built everything they are keen to destroy and the complex structures that make their comfortable lives possible. Such myopia can only be the precursor to total collapse.

The impermanent cannot last

The liberal impermanents behind these episodes have now made their way into positions of influence in Western nations. From politics and media, to the less glamorous halls of education, banking and commerce, they multiply like a cancer, displacing the organs that once developed to govern us, slowing and even reversing progress in the name of a renaissance no one asked for.

Killing economies to fix the weather, paying colossal sums to the dysfunctional, or mentally abusing young children to reinforce fictional ideas about sex and gender. These absurdities swim through the currents of modern society, corroding everything we value. This is progress and until now it has survived because older, more sensible mentalities built the solid foundations that allow their childish ideas to take root.

The progressive element are spending our shared inheritance like a drug-addled heir to a great family fortune. They stumble around trying to find meaning in their echo chambers. They look at the stability and the affluence and assume it is automatic, that it will always be there. Then they get to work building their brave new vision, indifferent to the complex threads painstakingly sewn by past generations that require careful handling to survive.

But consumers are not producers. No amount of reading makes you a writer just as watching the Olympic Games doesn’t make you a sprinter. The use of a precious resource teaches us nothing about how to maintain it. And if today represents anything it is indifference to complexity and competency, both sacrificed to appease modern fads like grievance or diversity. The selection of our cultural leaders is a farce designed to make a point by those unsuited to running anything.

Our world is slowly diminishing to indulge these cultural fetishes. Those most dependent on the fruits of Western society do the most to erode them.

This is what we feel when we see the disaster movies, the end approaching. We understand it is not sudden but takes years and decades of determined vandalism. But the suddenness of the end, portrayed in the disaster movie scenes, is what life looks like when we abandon common sense for long enough. When a society spends its inheritance to achieve nonsensical aims designed to be emotionally appealing. When we destroy the foundations of all we rely on because some let emotions rule their minds.

Western societies are complex but can to some extent be reduced to a simple observation — we are losing the ability to identify, punish and ultimately stop those who wish to destroy that which others have built.

From literal civilizational markers like statues of the great and the good, to those more difficult to see like marriage and family as a bedrock of stability. Some would destroy them all.

Our destructors are myopically focused on their own causes, many of them detached from reality. A climate crisis repeatedly shown to be fraudulent. Toxic masculinity and the oppression of women, all of whom can vote, become educated, work and be elevated to high office. We are constantly reminded of the threat of homophobic genocide in the only countries that allow gay marriage.

Our world is dismantled to pursue fictions to satisfy the emotional needs of a minority who need to believe in falsehoods to find meaning in their empty lives.

Such activities erode the foundations that make our stability and greatness possible. Equality before the law, the rule of law itself, freedom to think, speak and arrange your affairs as you wish. All rely on very solid foundations largely absent around the world.

The foundations are mundane enough to take for granted when you are a product of the West. Trust, confidence, cooperation. A sensible legal system as well as other people who think like us. All this has been discarded. They are impediments to the grand visions of the influential and their cheerleaders.

Who cares if kids can’t read, as long as they can change gender without being subjected to hate. Deindustrialization is a small price to pay if it means I can inject some meaning into my miserable life by fretting over distant climate events. White men scare us with their history of achievement so we must recast this as a secret privilege only they possess, something we must work hard to eradicate.

As the foundations of our society erode this process is put under further stress with mass immigration of aliens. People who will take centuries to assimilate will not get to enjoy centuries of Western stability, not even decades. It is likely to collapse long before they learn to think like us. That means they’ll think like themselves, and we’ve seen what their part of the world looks like. It looks like those movies.

The disaster films then are more than a spectacle. They work best when we feel that unsettling pang of fear. It reminds us where the edges of civilization are to be found.

We would do well to remember all good things must be maintained and the mentally ill, emotionally incontinent people who have an instinct to destroy need to be stopped before we lose it all.

Those unsettling movie scenes are where we will be if we can’t get our act together. Perhaps in time they can act as a motivator. The discomfort many feel about really standing up to the destructors, the knowledge we will be branded as extremists, racists and haters of all that is progress. This must be confronted.

The disaster movies remind us that confrontation with our destroyers is easier than watching the last helicopter leave Saigon without you on it. It is easier than looking at your children and wondering how you’ll feed them tonight, or, indeed, if they’ll be used to feed someone else.

A small price to pay to keep our civilization alive and out of the hands of those who create nothing, build nothing and maintain nothing. Those who can only consume what is created by other more industrious elements in society, the producers, the hustlers and the workers, all of them sidelined by those artificially selected for their adherence to faddish nonsense.

Disaster movies are more than a spectacle, they are our way in. We must do all we can to avoid the fate of those fictional characters lest one day they are us.