(147) Grár

You seem to take a conspiratorial view as regards the decline of civilisations, yet elsewhere you speak as if it is an inevitable process. How do you explain this discrepancy? Yes—it is as with an old man; all men must age, there is no way to stop that process—yet some men contribute to their own ageing; they drink, eat to excess, smoke, and so on—and yet others remain lean and fit so that they cross-country ski at 78. All nations and civilisations must fall—you cannot avoid that. Yet there are those that “age badly”—accelerate the process—and there are those that are active to the end; so far as secret societies, conspiracies, and the left go they are like the man who “let himself go” when he retired—he accelerates the inevitable and incapacitates himself long before he dies.

In fact, it is possible to incapacitate yourself—to be a geriatric—when you are young. This is what the left facilitates through perverse behaviour: if you are drugged, if you are overweight, if you are addicted to triviality you are “old before your time”. The shut-in teenager who plays video games, smokes cannabis, and is overweight is already an old man—that is what decadence is, premature senescence. These people have pseudo-wisdom—which is what is commonly called “cynicism”—and they sneer at everything and act as if they know everything, as if they have “seen it all”. Yet people who have “seen it all” are not so proud—there is a second childhood, but it is not trivial; only teenagers are trivial, children and old men are serious about their Lego.

It is also possible to be reborn—as an individual or society—so I do not think extinction is final; and yet that is hardest of all to achieve—harder even than to arrest a decadent youth or a careless old age; in fact, though many say they want it, few have the stomach for it.