Western Civilization: Method in Their Madness

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Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. — H.W. Longfellow,  The Masques of Pandora

Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom gods lead to destruction. — Sophocles, Antigone

A Discontented Civilization

Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, suggests that the best we can hope for in our western civilization is “ordinary human unhappiness.” Not a very sanguine prospect. 

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved…on the contrary…their neighbour is for them…someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his  possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. (1)

It seems when Freud, a man of his time, wrote these words the view of civilized man had not progressed far from the view of British philosopher Thomas Hobbes

[D]uring the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in a condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man…and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary,  poore, nasty, brutish, and short.(2)

Indeed, we are not far from the view of life of Italian nobility observed by Niccoló Machiavelli in The Prince.

A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.” 

Recovery From Western Civilization

Psychologist Chellis Glendinning, who wrote My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, unfavourably compares our present urban way of life with earlier human society with different relationships to the natural world and to each other.

It’s a…travesty that the global “culture” formulated by mega-economic and technological systems operates like a traumatized personality…  fragmentation, hyper-vigilance, reactivity, projection, and [the] thinking disorders of traumatic stress… perpetrating more trauma through  more war, more oppression, more exploitation.(3)

Casualties of War 

Whatever solutions may be proposed as the way out of our present difficulties, I have found it helpful to think of the citizens of our much-vaunted—and also much-decried—“Western Civilization” as casualties of war. We are as traumatized soldiers in the battles, as extolled in any screen-writer’s manual: man against nature, man against society, man against himself.

If, as stated by Freudian Karen Horney, the root of neurosis is the experience of being “alone in a hostile world,” the “search for glory” is understandable.(4) As is Nietzsche’s “will to power,” his reverence for the idea of the noble man, above the common and despised herd of conforming, and slavish mankind.

They go back to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as rejoicing monsters who perhaps make off from a hideous succession of  murders, conflagrations, rapes and torturings in high spirits and equanimity of soul as if they had been engaged in nothing more than a s student prank, and convinced that the poets now again have something to sing about and praise for a long time to come. One cannot fail to  see at the core of all these noble races the animal of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this  hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic,  Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings – they all shared this need. It is the noble races which have left behind them the concept ‘barbarian’ wherever they have gone.(5

However mad one might think this view of life is, the plans of the globalists are nothing if not methodical. 

It has become abundantly clear that our self-appointed overlords are hell-bent to follow this ideal to its logical and inevitable conclusion: nothing less than the apotheosis of a monstrous death-cult, satisfied with nothing less than the death of everyone and everything.

We cannot, and will not, allow them to succeed.

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S.M. Smyth was a founding member of the 2006 World Peace Forum in Vancouver, and organized a debate about TILMA at the Maple Ridge City Council chambers between Ellen Gould and a representative of the Fraser Institute. 

Notes 

(1) Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

(2) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

(3) Chellis Glendinning and Jesús Sepúlveda Talk across Continents, originally published in Sacred Fire Magazine, No. 9,  2009

(4) Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

(5) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo


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Articles by: S. M. Smyth

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