Welcome the New Dark Ages
The Dark Ages were among the best times to be alive
The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.1
Nothing gets my heart pumping like starting the day with brisk cup of Kaczynski.
Yesterday’s post predicted, mildly, a new Dark Age. You’ve been indoctrinated to associate “Dark Age” with “Bad Times,” but nothing could be further from the truth. History provides few epochs as blissful as the Middle Ages for the vast majority of humanity.
Academics stopped referring to “Dark Ages” long ago. Initially, it was considered a politically incorrect value judgment, but recent research has shown that the period from the fall of Rome to the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire provided a pretty good deal for the common man.
But, I’m not going to go into all of that. I’m just going to tell you about societal changes that marked the beginning of the Dark Ages and why those same developments should be welcomed today.
Urban Life Collapsed, and People Returned to the Woods
Jack Posobiec last year picked up the habit of retweeting stories of horrible urban crimes—both street and sanctioned—with a simple admonishment: “Get out of the cities.” I shamelessly stole his little trick, because it’s a message that must be heard. It’s not your job to stay and fix a political subdivision that does’t want to be fixed. Unless you’re in the cities as a Christian missionary, you’re only contributing to crime, sin, and moral collapse. Living and doing commerce in a major, Democrat-run city is an implied endorsement.
Thomas Jefferson provided his peers some choice descriptions of cities:
To Benjamin Rush:
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice.”
To Caspar Wistar:
“I am not a friend to placing growing men in populous cities because they acquire there habits & partialities which do not contribute to the happiness of their after life.”
Elsewhere, Jefferson blamed cities for loose morals, disease, and loss of attachment to the earth.
Was Jefferson right?
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can spend an evening in the St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, or San Francisco and know the answer is a resounding “yes.” But a scientist proved Jefferson’s jaundiced view cities in the 1940s.
Ethologist John Calhoun built cities for rats and mice, then observed their behavior. In these cities, all was provided: food, housing, protection from disease, elimination of natural predators. The mice were free to live happily ever after.
What happened?
For that, we turn to an article by M. Andrew Holowchak, Ph.D. of George Washington University:
By the 560th day, there was no discernible population increase and a “death phase” began by the 600th day. Violent, hypersexual displays and lack of social roles brought about a new generation of mice without interest in normal social rodent behaviors—courting, mating, protecting, fighting, and rearing young. Females now showed no interest in reproducing. The indifferent males Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” as they would spend all their time in asocial activities, such as eating, sleeping, and grooming. They were sexually inactive and nonviolent, hence the lack of bodily scars. This phase Calhoun dubbed “first death.” The mice, it seems, were merely biding their time till their actual, “second death”—a bromidic existence.2
Had Dr. Holowchak not included the word “mice,” I would have assumed he was talking about Gen Z. Asexual females and effeminate male dandies with no interest in either fighting or fornicating.
What was the “second death?”
By day 920, the population peaked at 2,200 mice. With that peak and a population of mostly uncaring, asocial mice, there began a speedy “behavioral sink,” a rapid decline in population that would very quickly lead to extinction.
For perspective, a lab mouse’s life expectancy is 866 days for females and 901 days for males. (Some species of wild mice can live up to 20 years.) Which means that the first generation of Calhoun’s mice were still alive when the extinction occurred (assuming some mice, like some people, outlived their life expectancy.) Put another way, from first death to second death was about 40 percent of a normal lab mouse life.
You and I know that America is in the first-death phase of its death cycle. Our females show no interest in reproducing, and our younger males show ability to do so. Young men wear makeup and spend more time planning their outfits than the lady folk. So, given that human life expectancy is down to about 76 years, we can expect the “extinction” in about 30 years—just about the time a few unfortunate Gen Xers celebrate having beaten their own life expectancy. The year of Our Lord 2053 might our last.
But humanity has one out the mouse in Calhoun’s experiment did not: we can escape the land-o-plenty cities for the woods. We can fight man and beast to stay alive and defend our territory. The hard work of country life will naturally boost testosterone levels in men and women alike which will cure us of our aversions to sex and reproduction. In fact, the idea of free labor from the fruit of loins will prove a great incentive turn on the baby spigot—and to turn it on early in life, before our daily labors bring permanent pain to our joints and backs.
Calhoun sums: “For an animal so simple as a mouse, the most complex behaviours involve the interrelated set of courtship, maternal care, territorial defence and hierarchical intragroup and intergroup social organization. When behaviours related to these functions fail to mature, there is no development of social organization and no reproduction,” hence quick extinction.
Calhoun, writing about the time his peers were returning from World War II, can be forgiven his failure to recognize the same tendencies in human beings. Without courtship, child-rearing, fighting, and organizing, man, too, loses the will to live. And, the loss of the will to live is exactly what we see across the American landscape today. It’s why people don’t have children and men smell better than women.
Get out of the cities or become a dried up, preening extinction maker.
Dr. Holowchak ends with his own thoughts. Writing a decade ago, before Covid and the trans takeover, he summarizes:
Today, it might be said we, without clear socially defined roles or duties, live in a sort of Universe 25, perhaps just prior to Calhoun’s behavioral-sink phase. We are taught to pursue what we want to pursue, without any strong senses of social responsibilities and of other-concern. The elderly, many of whom are cast off in assisted-living facilities, are frustrated and neglected. The working class, though politically polarized on issues of national significance, is much indifferent to local politics—there is no time for it—and busying itself in Jefferson’s prophetic words “in the sole faculty of making money.” The youths of adult age, characterized by bromidic indifference, a sort of learned helplessness, might reasonably be fitted into what is the beginning of Calhoun’s death phase. Are we too leaning toward extinction?
Holowchak would, undoubtedly, agree that the American race has just 30 years to live—unless it escapes the cities for the woods. Therefore, we must consider the end of urban life as a blessing.
Science and Arts Enter a 300 Year Hiatus
First of all, in the aftermath of Covid, there is no science to speak of. We won’t see the effects of the end of scientific reasoning for another decade, but new things will simply stop emerging. The scientific method works, but it has been banned. What is called science is, today, mere technical virtue signaling—mathematical demonstrations of conformity to the prevailing doctrines.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, an Icelandic consultant and entrepreneur, writes in Brownstone Institute of Kant’s evaluation of the “immaturity” in societies run by dogma rather than by free expression of competing ideas.
When we look at the censorship, cancellations, and hate speech directed against those who, during the past three years, have doubted the absurd dogmas of the Covidians, we clearly see the loop Kant describes; how the experts impose certain views on the public, which accepts them without question. And the root of this is what Kant explained so clearly: We demand direction, and therefore consensus, from the experts. But by doing so, we demand stagnation, because without debate there can be no progress; science can never be based on consensus, instead its very essence is disagreement, rational dialogue, constant doubt about the prevailing paradigm, and attempts at changing it.
You might be an optimist, but the reality is that free speech and free thought and actual science ain’t coming back in our lifetimes. Not in any public forums, anyway. Science is dead, and the arts are worse.
Can we really call what passes for art “art?” It’s trash. Buildings, except for some single-family homes, are eyesores, uncomfortable, and inefficient for living. Architecture is dead. An aspiring artist who attempts to make truly beautiful things—things that try to return to God the beauty of His creation—will die aspiring or give up in frustration. They will be attacked and destroyed by the “artistic” community the way Kramer was attacked by the gay communitee for walking in an AIDS parade with the ribbon.
The AIDS ribbon episode perfectly predicting 2023. Conformity to the prevailing dogmas trumps any actual good you might do or try to do. The prevailing dogma in the arts is ugliness, and any attempt at making beauty will be punished.
Science and art, then, are already dead—except in the country.
Country still seek beauty, perhaps because they’re surrounded by God’s nature everywhere and every day. Their art may be simpler and cruder than what’s produced in a New York studio, but country art attempts to please God, not to sicken Him.
If you want science and art back, give it up and move to the woods where beauty exists independent of man’s poor attempt to imitate it. Get away from the cities and the ribbon bullies and learn science of crops and husbandry—science that actually advances man rather, as Kaczynski says, separates him and destroys communities. In his “manifto,” he wrote:
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable framework.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.3
Science, art, and technology have passed their zenith and entered their second death. They are leading humanity to its fall. Without them, life would be hard everywhere but impossible in the cities. So, get to the woods before it’s too late.
Economic Collapse
Bring it on.
What happened to the Roman economy in the 400s? Collapse. And it was replaced by, you guessed it, a simpler, tax-free economy based on actual work, not rentier theft, says Joshua Learn on Discover.com:
Populations of major cities like Rome and Constantinople shrank in this period. But [academic historian Alban]Gautier believes rural life may have actually improved, especially in the largely bucolic British Isles. During the Roman period, farmers would have had to pay regular taxes to support the empire and local cities. But as administration fell apart, the tax burden likely diminished.
The United States debt is $36 trillion following the passage of the debt limit bill last week. It won’t be repaid. Unfunded federal liabilities total about $100 trillion. They won’t be paid. Only an idiot believes they will be.
In fact, both numbers will continue their parabolic rise until the collapse, which could come at any time. Any shock to the system will trigger the total unwinding of all debts, contracts, and money systems. Instantaneously and without warning. That’s what happens when economies truly collapse, and no economy in history was as jacked up as the US economy is right now.
Not only will all contracts, deeds, trusts, and debts vanish in America, they will likely vanish across the globe—or, at least, across the countries that chained themselves to the USD. Again, the collapse can happen any moment—or not for 100 years. But the public debt cannot be paid, and once that become common knowledge, private debt will be erased, too.
When that happens, the system that enforces contracts and titles will go away, too, meaning you’ll have defend your property yourself. Or form coalitions of people pledged to mutual defense of and respect for each other’s property. (Remember the mice who lost interest in defending their turf? Imagine if Calhoun had released them into the wild before they went extinct. You might want to start preparing to defend your stuff now, before it’s too late.)
The economic collapse will suck for everyone, but the city folk will only last about three weeks. If you get to the country before the collapse, you’ll work your ass off until you breathe your last, but you’ll die happy and satisfied.
Though I’m far from as ready as I want to be, I’m more ready than 90 percent of Americans. I want my friends to be ready, too, so, please, take this warning to heart: get out of the cities and rough it voluntarily before you have to rough it because you have to.
No Room for Deviants
The best part about the new Dark Ages will be the absence of weirdos. They simply won’t survive, and they won’t be needed.
Weirdness is a luxury that requires remarkable wealth, meaning excess goods. When a man is solely responsible for his next meal and the one after that, he doesn’t have time to wear his wife’s panties and lipstick. He just has to work. He has to snare a rabbit or catch a fish, defend the flesh from desirous neighbors or beasts, clean it, skin, and cook it with the vegetable he grew, defended, and picked. Then, he has to do it again the next day. And the day after that.
He also has to protect his wife and children. And, with her, make more children so that, by the time he’s 30, he has some help around the farm and the woods. Even it crosses his mind, “I’d like to be a woman someday,” he has no desire or ability to act on the demonic impulse. For one, he’s too tired to change clothes. For another, he knows that wearing his wife’s clothes will get him beaten or killed—by his wife, if nothing else.
I pick on the people with gender issues, but the same applies for all forms of weirdness. Agrarian societies just don’t have time for weirdness, and, for that, we should all give thanks to God and seek the lifestyle for ourselves.
In short, you don’t have to wait for the hammer to drop before returning to the Dark Ages. They’re all around us. You can shelter the great books and the great science and the great art in the woods so the genius and beauty of our heritage is preserved for future generations—the way monks and the Church preserved history for us after Rome fell. You can step away from the technology and urban centers that dehumanize, soften, and weaken the human spirit. In small ways, you can return to the soil and the air and trees. You can grow your own things and learn how to clean a rabbit, catch a fish, and trap a beaver. Even if you never need those skills, they’ll impress your friends.
Most importantly, when you hear people warn of a new “Dark Age,” you will now look forward to it with joy and anticipation instead of dread. And that is my little gift to you today.
God bless.
Theodore Kaczynski. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future PDFDrive.com.mobi (Kindle Locations 272-277). Kindle Edition.
Holowchak, M.A., What’s Ailing Us? This Is What Jefferson Would Say. (2013). Clipped from https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/167732
Theodore Kaczynski. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future PDFDrive.com.mobi (Kindle Locations 266-271). Kindle Edition.