Empires don’t usually collapse from external attack. They rot from within — through comfort, corruption, and the arrogance of believing they are immune to consequence.
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In our modern era, an empire in decline isn’t too difficult to discern. Across nearly every industry, institution, and system in place, we can readily find evidence of corruption, laziness, and arrogance.
Taking the entertainment industry as one example, the decline is blatant and obvious. Hollywood is imploding under the weight of its own hubris and stupidity. All of the greatest franchises that inspired generations and earned the industry countless billions in profits over decades have been systematically destroyed in less than a single generation. What remains is a sea of endless derivatives, remakes, prequels, cookie-cutter content, and filler garbage. Beyond that, regardless of the resources they throw at nearly any big-budget film or series, they simply can’t figure out why they all fail. Why? Corruption, laziness, and arrogance. They’ve been riding high for generations. As a result, in our era it’s been reduced to the mentality of “we don’t really care about the IPs, platforms, or franchises — or the brilliance they once represented — but we’ll use them, draining the accounts if we have to, in order to promote our cloistered, insular, irrelevant, wildly biased, and divisive take on today’s political, ideological, and sociocultural issues.” And then there’s the ever-popular mantra: “weakness is strength, fat is fit, neurodivergence is a superpower, and males — especially those who dare express strength of character and masculinity — should just shut up and sit down, or go away and die.”
The “issues” they’re tackling in TV shows, films, and most of the artificially vaunted “best-selling” books are forced, superficial, manufactured, and scream of an empire that’s lost its way, having utterly diluted its soul and left itself with nothing to fight for anymore — so it must keep inventing enemies, seen and unseen, factual or fabricated, within and without.
What eventually emerged and cohered into the swampy, decaying mass known as “wokism,” along with its cringe-worthy ideological tentacles, has long since been widely inculcated and ontologically normalized. It has reached deeply into, poisoned, and polluted every form of media, governance, and education. It’s systemic and respects no international boundaries. The cult of feminism predates it — a powerful pioneering movement, also artificial and planned — that paved the way for today’s cross-cultural and pan-social assaults spreading across the realm like wildfire. It echoes and exacerbates the same synthetic overlay and systemic degeneracy of wokeness. It is an instigating force that has been around far longer and has done far more damage, most notably to families, motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, and the sacred elements of the divine masculine and feminine. It constantly adapts and iterates like a bad rash, never quite able to be summarily ejected from the collective consciousness. This isn’t to suggest there haven’t been areas in which the feminist movement made positive progress, but the foundational principles are toxic and overreaching, and whatever gains were achieved will not sustain upliftment nor correct imbalances if the environment, paradigm, and program themselves are not cleansed of their malefic elements. The sociocultural monster we’ve witnessed in modernity will simply morph into something worse and more insidious as civilization continues to crumble into dust.
Healthy, powerful, divine, and inspired representations of masculinity and femininity are nowhere to be seen in the mainstream, and they’re shunned, ostracized, rebranded, and canceled everywhere else by the very same egregore that runs the big show. Anything goes as long as it’s done under the guise of equity, inclusivity, diversity, fairness, and sameness for all. The irony is that none of these inane and childish ideas would need mentioning in a society built upon purer, organic, humane, and undistorted knowing. But that kind of gnosis has long been suppressed and forgotten in the cultural story.
In place of authentic spirituality, activism, and community-building, we get preachers, pundits, experts, pandering celebrities, and paid influencers — unqualified, hollowed-out shells, morons, and shills — who’ve been ritually or contractually forced to the forefront, pushed into every thought stream because “the message” rules the day, regardless of whether there’s any legitimate justification, foundation, character, or substance behind it whatsoever. It’s a game of artifice and maneuvering. The knock-on effect is uncomfortable silence. In a culture of self-censorship, self-denial, and self-reproach, you’ll inevitably get self-annihilation. Have you noticed how social media no longer holds any interest for you? That’s a good first step.
Writers, producers, and publishers of Western propaganda and entertainment media are one and the same. They’re churned out of the same ontologically daft, blithely self-important, yet epistemically dead institutions now struggling for legitimacy. The ship is sinking, and they seem oblivious. It’s the ocean’s fault. It’s not them. This institutionally empowered and curated collective is relevant and important only because they say so — even as everyone else sees them for the cowardly, transparent fakes and frauds they are.
It isn’t even worth delving into other industries and institutions — the same pattern persists everywhere. What’s the solution? That’s obvious too. Stop feeding the monster. Turn away from the nonsense, shut off the noise, rekindle your passion for life, and pursue the authentic, the real, and the true. Same as it ever was.
States, nations, empires, and civilizations come and go. Will humanity? It’s hard to say. We live in a realm that has undergone numerous cataclysmic resets of varying scale and intensity. Are we at the beginning or the end of a cycle? Is this the first, fifth, or twelfth civilization? Right now, we’re in the midst of a transition, and those with the power and resources to navigate it are making a complete mess of it. They simply don’t have the capacity, nor the choice, to consider an alternative even if one were offered. For the rest of us, the task is simpler: observe from an emotional distance and focus our energies elsewhere. Fight for what you believe in, certainly, but remember that belief is the enemy of knowing.
What do you know to be true? What do you know about the real story — the other side of the narrative, the real history that’s been hidden, modified, or erased? The real and truly possible outcomes of what you’re investing your limited minutes, hours, days, and years into? Would you be willing to walk away if you learned you’d been utterly misled, confused, misinformed, or mind-controlled and made a fool of? Would you be willing to redefine or remake your identity if you discovered it was sustained for all the wrong reasons and built on the wrong opinions? Or would you fight, resist, and protest because you’re embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, or consumed with rage?
Will you recognize the trap when you fall into it again?
The message is everywhere and pervasive. The decline of the Grand Illusion is likely unavoidable, and it will upset the remarkably fragile system you’ve relied upon your entire life — one you may have even believed to be resilient, unbreakable, and capable of correcting its course for generations, despite all evidence to the contrary. It was never what you imagined. It’s built on sand and mud, atop dust and ashes — upon the purposely lost and forgotten, repurposed and rebranded remnants and artifacts — and it has relied on aggressively shaping and manipulating your imagination to persist.
Could there be something more real, as yet undiscovered, for you in this life? Might something more satiating, fulfilling, uplifting, compelling, and inspiring exist beyond the boundaries of the noise-making, storytelling, parasitic narrative controllers?
It’s worth a look. It might not be founding a company, industry, tribe, community, economy, banking system, or nation-state — but it might have to be.
Solvitur ambulando