Introduction: What is this Project About?
The writings that follow in this project will be aimed at documenting, examining, analyzing, and explaining the events and ideologies of the current day and how they impact us as individuals and as a culture. It seems someone must be a witness of the current age and its inevitable collapse for the benefit of whatever later age is to follow. I am that witness.
Why might future generations need a witness of this current age to speak to them from their past? Because this age will eventually be reduced to ashes of itself. It may not literally burn to cinders, but the substance of its culture, art, religion, commerce, and ideas are all currently being burned out and charred to their cores. The analogy to fire is intentional, as those things, all of which once stood for something meaningful, are themselves being used as the fuel to destroy everything built around them that once gave mankind purpose. What seems to be left behind of everything this fire consumes is a thin, meaningless residue, one more element of Western culture now stripped of everything that once made it a benefit to societies and individuals living under it and thus reduced to a mere data point of sociological research, a coincidence of historical trivia devoid of all its good and only whatever was bad in it left intact. And by this process, the remnant of society that fills in the void left behind by this fire is rendered that much more nihilistic, disunified, and alienated.
But won’t there be historians who can tell this story to them from their own age? If and when our age has collapsed, it will leave behind trillions of words just like these that will all seem to tell our story. But the vast majority of those words are false. More than that, they are systematically directed toward a certain false narrative. That narrative is that each of the elements of Western society being destroyed are not actually being destroyed, but, instead, “progress” is being made to improve them from the barbaric and oppressive vestiges of an unenlightened previous age. That is, from a distance, the raging fire that is consuming our age appears to be a shining beacon. It is disguised as a guiding light of progress.
Citizens of the current age cannot see this for the destructive fire that it is because of farsightedness: the fire is all around them and they do not see the flames themselves, just the intense light of progressivism. The heat they feel is explained to them by the purveyors of the bright progressivism as the continuing effects of the unenlightened old ways, and the light is the path to a good, just, and prosperous future. They cannot see that the heat and the light are from the same source.
Citizens of a future age will suffer from an imposed short-sightedness. The history of our age will reach them through the distorted lens of those same purveyors of progressive ideals and the misled masses who believed them and lived their lives in a miserable perpetuation of the myth that all was going in the right direction. Future ages will be too distant to feel the heat of that fire that eventually destroyed us, and the conflagration that is our current state of affairs will be reduced to a single point of light, a shining lighthouse of progressive ideals that suddenly winked out of existence.
Because the light of progressivism is such that it demands faith in itself as the supreme good and demands this faith on pain of exclusion from polite society, the overwhelming chorus that reaches the future age will be of praise for its own ideals. The enemies of progressivism, not dressed in shining garments of simplistic ideals of virtue, but in the dull ones made dirty by wrestling with hard truths and realistic assessments, will appear as soot-covered villains, ogres, and demons to the far off observers of the future age. The propaganda of progressivism, carried aloft of the light of the flames from the very civilization it burned down, will ensure this perception is fixed and those who attempted to stand against the flames will be the ones blamed for starting them.
Therefore, voices are needed to lay this illusion out in all its detail. Whether in plain words, combative polemics, or deep analysis, these voices must exist today as first-hand witnesses to warn off future observers from the progressive illusion of the lighthouse. As those generations approach the source of what they will think of as their own salvation, they may find out it is a consuming fire only when it is too late to turn course.