I like Spengler, and having found the correct link, I can quote the most apropos law when dealing with the current situation. The social democratic (or “big man distribute the loot to all the women in society” model falls under What some call Spengler’s seventh law.
Automobile models and political models, though, have one thing in common: you can’t have them unless you can pay for them
Now, I am no prophet. The Lord has not called my from my herd and sycamore trees. But I was sitting in a taxi on Sunday, talking to a Jordanian, and we both agreed on one thing the Middle East is a gonna starve. Because the Oil is getting expensive to extract, and when that happens, the cheaper stuff in Wyoming will be strip mined.
And prosperous towns will become empty.
I can hear many within the church and without saying this is treason, to say that the society we have will fall. They consider that the social welfare state is continuously sustainable. They have not contemplated Detroit, or Argentina.
Just like America, Argentina was a majority-white, Christian, wealthy democracy that faced economic decline after adopting statist/leftist policies and social liberalism. For this reason, I believe it offers more accurate clues to our future than a country like Russia or Egypt. So let us take a look at what happened to Argentinians after their economy collapsed.
Employment increased steadily following the collapse (data from World Bank). Both men and women went to work in higher numbers, but most of the growth was in agriculture and heavy industry, which favored men.
Teenage pregnancy and illegitimacy decreased, due to the near-elimination of the welfare system. Fornication increased however, because of government pressure to “liberalize” (patriarchy weakens a leftist state).
Half of the population plunged under the poverty line, but recovered as the country’s employment ratio rose. Nevertheless, economic inequality worsens.
The fertility rate held steady (at 2.2 now, down from 2.4 in 2001), while the household-formation rate decreased (indicating higher cohabitation rates, and adult children moving in with their parents). This would imply that more children are being born within intact families.
The marriage rate increases, as does prostitution. (Divorce was only recently legalized.)
Consumer prices for basic goods have doubled, as the currency lost worth. This discourages household-formation, as economies of scale become more important to survival.
Crime rates increase at an astonishing rate. Rape, murder, and robbery become commonplace. Kidnapping for ransom money becomes a minor industry.
College enrollment drops dramatically, as students leave to earn money to help support their families.
Child poverty is much higher than before, with child labor again common. In Buenos Aires, the majority of those under 18 live in poverty, and children and the elderly starve to death regularly (12 children per day).
Health care becomes harder to acquire and medicine becomes prohibitively expensive. People routinely die from preventable diseases, and outbreaks regularly ravage the population — even the middle and upper classes. 17 children die per day from lack of adequate health care.
Automobile accident, suicide, and stress-related deaths increase rapidly and dramatically. The car deaths come from higher drunk-driving rates, the poor conditions of the cars and roads, and the fact that nobody wants to stop at a red light or a stop sign anymore (car jackings).
Class warfare is common in politics and on the streets. Everyone is armed to the teeth, and the shrinking middle and upper class lives behind gates and barbed wire. It becomes de rigueur for women to be brutally raped during robberies, so their husbands learn to shoot invaders on sight.
Black-banking and bartering become commonplace, so that monetary transactions are hidden from the greedy hands of the government. Cash transactions increase, which fuels bank and ATM-robberies.
Middle-class (i.e. married) women’s and children’s movements are greatly curtailed, due to safety concerns. Protected women live under increasingly strict patriarchy, as men can no longer afford to be lax and permissive. Protected women are increasingly discouraged from working outside of the home, as travel is precarious. Children stop playing outside, and teenage girls are increasingly chauffeured and chaperoned.
People are increasingly homebound at night, to avoid criminal attacks.
Domestic violence increases, and white-knighting for victims becomes a winning sexual strategy again. In other words, abusive men both give and receive beatings in higher numbers. A related problem is that drug use and alcohol use increased.
Religiosity/spirituality and moral relativism increased, while mass attendance declined slightly.
Police pay gets cut, so they become increasingly corrupt and regularly ask for bribes. As a result, vigilante violence increases.
I live in New Zealand. We have a lot of South African, and a somewhat lesser number of South American immigrants. And, like my middle eastern friend in the taxi, they are in the Antipodes because it is safe here. Safer, at least.
New Zealand is a middle-income country that generally struggles to pay its way. We cannot influence what happens in the big economies, but we can grow, by making things other people need, even in this crisis. We are still borrowing far too much to sustain a welfare state, but it has become somewhat less generous over time: besides, there are jobs out there. But we need a middle class to sell things to.
So selfishly, I don’t want the big societies to be destroyed. Less selfishly, I don’t want the friends I have who live in big societies to suffer. For that is what Amos prophesied: and in this prophecy he was very specific. He told Amaziah that his wife would be forced put her body on the rack, to become a whore, and he would die in an unclean land.
10Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. 11For thus Amos has said,
‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel must go into exile away from his land.’”
12And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; 13but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”
14Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, 15and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’
16“Now therefore hear the word of the LORD. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’
17Therefore thus says the LORD: ‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be parceled out by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’”
There are two parts to this. One is the somewhat bleak observation of SSM that women, left to their own devices, seem to go feral. They take bonobos as a model for sexual behaviour, and this leads to destruction of their families, or their ability to have a family.
As for me, all this has led me to conclude something we might call the Theory of Feminine Devolution:
A modern woman not firmly under the control of a responsible adult man will tend to devolve into a bonobo-like state.
And I am going to quote Spengler again, for he makes a couple of fairly strong points about what has happened historically — and as Jew, he knows his history — particularly around the increase in women selling themselves as fertility plummets. In places like Iran.
What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.
Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook
I have a lot of sympathy for the Persians. They are cultured: they are often very beautiful, and their society is doomed by demographics. But I could say the same thing about the feminist utopia of Cascadia or the Yankee states of Northwest (well, apart from the fact that the Yankees are far less cultured… Or Russia, Ukraine and Moldova.
The Islamic revolutionary model is something you need a certain income — and a certain excess of young men — to afford. When the oil dries up and you cannot pay for guns, germs and uranium you are left in a position far worse than the gentle decline into functional tribalism that afflicted Argentina. You are left with a military running a failed state: think Pakistan or Egypt.
And, in the West, we run a far more expensive model than the Islamic republic. We require the state to forcibly control 49% of the population (by taxing the top 10% of income earners heavily: they contribute two-thirds of the taxation income). If that becomes oppressive, the talented, who can make income anywhere, leave.
Then men put their bodies on the rack as migrant workers, and women by selling themselves, or to quote Spengler’s ninth law
A country isn’t beaten until it sells its women, but it’s damned when its women sell themselves.
Therefore Amos telling Amaziah that his wife would sell herself is prophetic. He is saying that the society is damned: the structure of society will crumble, and it will dissolve. Let us not forget that ten tribes of Israel did disappear when Israel fell to the Assyrians, and the two (of Judah) were left as a remnant.
God has not changed. If we offend him, and as a society offending God has become government policy, he will act as he did in Ancient times.
So let us in the church pray and protest about the rules of our governments, reform ourselves, and perhaps God will spare us. Or the West may find itself one with the Hittites and Assyrians.
