Civilisations and death: civilisations are born, mature, grow old, and die—and so do sub-units in civilisations, such as nations. I think palingenesis (rebirth) is possible, but I see no evidence that a nation that has completed its life cycle resurrects—and no civilisation that has died in the past has come back.
The Chinese might say that their “5,000-year civilisation” is stronger than ever, but its current strength is based on Western ideas—they’ve just done what the Japanese did in the 1950s (with many of the same problems, such as population collapse due to feminism). There’s nothing autochthonous in “the Chinese renaissance”—whereas the Western renaissance was based on a rediscovery of older ideas that existed in the West.
Ideas cannot undo a civilisation. The ideas that lead to stagnation in the West—Christianity, Marxism, Freudianism, progressive liberalism—do not cause social problems in and of themselves. Rather, these Semitic ideas take hold when a society is in crisis.
To use the English Civil War as an example: the Tudor constitution had decayed, a foreign monarch had come to the English throne (James I, Scottish), people resented foreign leadership, and the Anglo-Scottish court introduced new ways of working that alienated the English elite—at the same time the country had never been better educated or wealthier (the golden age of Elizabeth). In these conditions, where the political agreement is exhausted and life has become better for many (but then falls back again in an economic slump), you find a crisis.
A “crisis” being literally “a split in the road”—you find two forces, in this case “King and Parliament”, in contention for which direction the country is to go (due to the foreign monarchy, it could be said it was a struggle between the English nation and a foreign ruler). In these circumstances, the crisis in leadership expresses itself in ideas—and at this point democratic ideas, here represented by primitive Christianity (Puritanism), provide the means to express popular discontent.
The people who elaborate these ideas are often “nutters”: the Ranters (from which the word “rant” comes), the Levellers, the Diggers, the 5th Monarchist men—all these groups were enthusiastic pamphleteers, very often utopian, who wanted to “share the land as a common treasury for all”, and who thought “the end of the world” was at hand.
Yet these ideas didn’t start the Civil War, anymore than social democracy started the Russian Revolution—what started the February Revolution was, in fact, poor administration which led to petty humiliations on the bread lines in the cities (and while people will tolerate being shot and blown up they will not tolerate petty humiliation).
What happens in the uproar that follows as the political settlement unwinds is that these ideas come to the fore—the general ferment and lack of authority unleashes a proliferation of different ideas. The ideas are then imposed in the new settlement; or one idea is, anyway—by the faction that is best organised (Cromwell or Lenin).
The situation is then akin to the “xenon poisoning” that afflicted the Chernobyl nuclear reactor—the excessive xenon in the reactor caused a “reactivity sink” that prevented neutrons from hitting each other, so no reaction happened. That was what Christianity did to the West until the Renaissance; and, on a smaller scale, that is what Puritanism did to England until the Restoration (at which time things started to happen—because normal activities, such as Christmas, were legalised again).
So the ideas in themselves can’t threaten a healthy society. However, once the society is decadent it is vulnerable to a crisis moment—and in that crisis moment people will come to power who are motivated, at least in part, by ideas (alien ideas, as it happens). These ideas are then imposed on the society and cause a stasis period of an indefinite length—about 75 years for Russia, about 20 years for England, about 1,000 years for the period the West was Christendom.
So in and of themselves ideas cannot harm a society or civilisation—but nor can ideas solve the problems a civilisation faces. Semitic ideas are no threat to a healthy society, but emerge when a society is in crisis—usually among the hysterical and resentful lower strata—and then can be imposed and put everything in stasis. We can already see how a “woke” America could be just that way—with much activity and research banned because it involves “white supremacy” (being on time for work, being, for example, particularly “sinful”).
The recovery period can take a long time. In effect, Christianity at its high point, around 1100, had already morphed into an aristocracy staffed by worldly cardinals who had bastard children, knew the Latin and Greek classics, and involved themselves in a practical way in the affairs of state. “True Christianity” was “the Dark Ages”, where you weren’t allowed to think or do anything beautiful because it was sinful and worldly. The aristocratic Church itself then became corrupt, became subject to crisis, and then we had the Reformation—where primitive Christianity, true Christianity, emerged once again…
You see a similar situation to late Christendom in Russia today, where a system that is more aristocratic than not has established itself within the framework of a degraded Semitic democratic enthusiasm—so the Russians speak of “anti-fascism” and “People’s Republics” in much the same way the Borgia popes spoke of “Christ’s humility” and “Christian meekness”.
Reality has re-asserted itself, but just as the Borgias couldn’t become formal caesars, Putin can’t become a formal tsar—because the “revolution” in both cases destroyed the cultural context that made all that possible, so the aristocratic ideas are expressed, in a contradictory way, through the egalitarian remnants of the Semitic beliefs that were imposed on societies during the “crisis and enthusiasm” stage (through Christian and Marxist jargon).
Ideas in themselves are significant for the way they retard a political unit—it is more important to remove alien values than to create new values.