Amerika

People talk about terrorism without knowing what it means. A terrorist is a guerrilla who operates within civilian spaces. Terrorists are universally the product of people with no money and power taking on those who do have money and power.

As Samuel Huntington points out, there’s a “clash of civilizations” coming up where the atheistic, consumerist, globalist West is going to clash with everyone who wants to have a unique national culture, religion or heritage:

World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be-the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Foreign Affairs

The good news — read on — is that the “fundamentalist” populations are outpacing the degenerate West:

According to demographic projections, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian fundamentalists will gain significant ground against their liberal and secular counterparts by 2050, even surpassing them in some cases, Belfer Center Fellow Eric Kaufmann said at last week’s International Security Program (ISP) brownbag presentation.

Kaufmann, a joint fellow with ISP and the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, outlined fertility trends within religious groups and the impact this may have on regional, national, and global politics and security in his talk, “Religious Fundamentalism as the End of History? The Political Demography of the Abrahamic Faiths.”

Kaufmann hypothesizes that while the Fukuyama, “post-historical” core societies — liberal democratic, capitalist and secular — have been able to survive external threats like the advancement of technology and the challenge of socialism, it may not be a demographically sustainable system. There is the possibility that the stark differences in growth rate between religious fundamentalists and others could threaten this system from within.

The first demographic transition, which lasted between the 18–20th centuries, resulted in a population boom because the total fertility rate (TFR) was higher than the death rate. Today, it appears that the world is on the verge of a second demographic transition, where there are fewer births than deaths. The current world total fertility rate (TFR) is 2.55, but the U.N. predicts that it will drop to 2.33, below the replacement rate, during 2020–2050.

Harvard

What he means is: while the West has zoomed on to the End of History^TM, it has done so on a demographic boom which is now ending. It will be replaced by populations that are less prone to decadence — consumerism, sexuality without breeding, egodrama — because they have focus on something larger than the self. That means that the boom which made the West both predominant and decadent is ending, and the West will have to buck up in order to face new, tougher enemies.

All of that is awesome. As Fukuyama says:

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change.

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The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of he museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

Viet Studies

Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order represent opposite ends of a spectrum describing the same thing: how the West has run out of values, lapsed into modernity enabled by technology, and in its decline is making way for a new world order that’s not the New World Order of the globalist, liberal democratic, capitalist, consumerist mishmash of right and left that has become the political aggregate of the West.

Here’s an article detailing the narcissistic, individualistic and self-obsessed attitude of Westerners, and the resulting dysfunction:

When did you first realize that what Stephanie and Amanda were going through wasn’t just normal teenage rebellion?

I think it was the night that they stayed out all night long. I was getting more and more concerned about the fact that they were skipping school and their grades were slipping. I was feeling very uncomfortable about their friends. And then one night they simply did not come home. They were 12 and 14. They had formed quite a group of friends out on the streets, and they just kept disappearing for longer and longer periods of time.

This group of kids downtown said: “Here’s an abandoned building. We’ll show you where to get blankets. We’ll show you where to get food. We’ll show you how to get money on the corner. And you don’t have to listen to anybody’s rules. You can make up this life as you go along.”

They were hauling around copies of Charles Bukowski poetry and listening to Tom Waits all the time. They built this whole reality for themselves that felt very exciting.

My daughter Amanda says that the day that they jumped on their first freight train, when she was 16, and they were in this boxcar in the middle of the night, and she stood in the doorway as they were going past Mount Shasta, while all this cold air was hitting her in the face, she said that was the moment that she felt most vibrant and capable of anything.

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In late November on Amanda’s 17th birthday, I got a call that she had overdosed on heroin, and she had given the police her real name. That started the process of getting her back home.

Salon

For Westerners, the self is all. They are closed-circuits based on their feelings but disconnected from the consequence of those feelings. That is why they can pollute rivers and streams, throw trash out of car windows, endorse ethnic destruction through race-mixing, deny science, and vote for corrupt liars and call it hope and change. They have no connection to reality. Their concern for reality is: how do I arrange it so that I feel better? They do not care about the results in reality itself, or notice that those will in turn affect their feelings. Even more, they have a fundamentally negative bias toward life, because they’re living for nothing but themselves, which makes them see out “uplifting” and “empowering” experience instead of focusing on reality itself, which would enable them to configure their lives for the better. It’s an impotent, bratty attitude and it ends as the story does, with a humbling return to lesser expectations plus an endurance of years of damage, loss, and the resultant destruction of family and long-term potential.

This end of history isn’t a culmination, but a standardization: the ultimate conformity in global, liberal, “progressive” democratic society.

Others of course see it for what it is, which is a massive justification for individualism which produces consumerism, sexual liberation and the end of the family, lack of moral obligation to anything larger than the self, atomization and ultimately an entropy of having no choice be better than any other.

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, despite the bad connotations heaped on it by liberal media, means that people always have an abstract goal and something bigger than the self which they value. These civilizations find it easier to reproduce, focus on family, cooperate and maintain order, mainly because they’re all pulling in the same direction.

These are what I call “the organic society,” or a nation united by culture, language, values, customs and heritage. All or none. The advantage of such a society is that it experiences none of the inner turmoil and purposelessness of the West, and as a result, pays more attention to the basics of survival and order for an ultimately more successful civilization.

Tags: civilization life cycle, cognitive dissonance, passive aggression