Our “progressive” obsessions for change neglect to consider consequences. Change is demanded for the sake of a fad or a slogan: “equality”, “democracy”, “reproductive rights”... Even a word of caution is damned as “reactionary”, “old fashioned”, or “fascist”. Traditions, customs, beliefs, are regarded as being as transient as the planned obsolescence of computers. Carl Jung made the point that Western man’s psyche is not keeping pace with his technology. The levels of our unconscious are multi-layered, reaching back to primordial existence, yet Western technology has exponentially leaped ahead leaving behind any anchorage of tradition. That is called “progress”. Jung wrote of this:
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The ‘newsness’ of the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no place in what is new. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in things that have just come into being. We are certainly far from having finished with the middle ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless we have plunged into a cataract of progress which sweeps us into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it take us from our ranks. The less we understand of what our forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts”. 154Konrad Lorenz, the father of the science of ethology, the study of animal instinct, gave a warning from an ecological viewpoint, that the abandonment of customs and traditions is steeped with dangers which are likely to be unforeseen. Culture is “cumulative tradition”.155 It is knowledge passed through generations, preserved as belief or custom. The deep wisdom accrued by our ancestors, because it might be wrapped in the protection of religions and myths, is discounted by the “modern” as “superstitious” and “unscientific”. Lorenz referred to the “enormous underestimation of our nonrational, cultural fund, and the equal overestimation of all that man is able to produce with his intellect” as factors “threatening our civilization with destruction”. “Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance”, stated Lorenz. Writing at a time when the New Left was rampant, as it is today under other names, Lorenz observed that the attitude of youth towards parents shows a great deal of “conceited contempt but no understanding”.156 Lorenz perceived a great deal of the psychosis of the Left as a pathogen in the social organism, as it remains today: “The revolt of modern youth is founded on hatred; a hatred closely related to an emotion that is most dangerous and difficult to overcome: national hatred. In other words, today’s rebellious youth reacts to the older generation in the same way that an ‘ethnic’ group reacts to a foreign, hostile one”.157What is of interest is that Lorenz saw this as a youth subculture that was tantamount to a separate, foreign ethnos, when a group forms around its own rites, dress, manners and norms. In the biological sciences this is called “pseudospeciation”. With this new group identity comes a “corresponding devaluation of the symbols” of other cultural units.158 The obsession with all that is regarded as “new” among the youth revolt was described by Lorenz as “physiological neophilia”. While this is necessary to prevent stagnation, it is normally gradual and followed by a return to tradition. Such a balance however is easily upset.159 Fixation as the stage of neophilia in the psychology of individuals results in behavioural abnormalities such as vindictive resentment towards long-dead parents.160This lack of respect for tradition is aggravated by the breakdown of traditional social hierarchy, mass organisation and “a money-grabbing race against itself”161 that dominates the Late West.
Since Lorenz wrote of these symptoms of Western decay during the 1970s the Western social organism has increasingly fractured. There are now the presence, vastly greater than in Lorenz’s time, of actual ethnoi that have no attachment to the West, but maintain a great resentment. There is also further pseudospeciation among women in terms of radical feminism and “gays”, possessing their own manners, rites, dress, terms of speech, and even their own flags and other symbols. They are united in their hatred of the West, which is often denigrated as “white patriarchy”; with its symbols being torn down162 and its heroes ridiculed as “dead white males”.
154 Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235-236.
155 Lorenz, 61.
156 Ibid., 64.
157 Lorenz, 64.
158 Lorenz, 64-65.
159 Lorenz, 69.
160 Lorenz, 69-70.
161 Lorenz, 73.
162 Such as the destruction of Confederate monuments in the USA, as this is being written.
From: The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
by
Dr Kerry R Bolton
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