Is the West in Decline?

To get this thread back on track: Is the West in decline? Absolutely.

Of course there are countless ways you can measure decline but for me it’s pretty basic.
1: Is the average person gaining more power over their personal lives or are they being robbed of their power by governments and corporations?
2. Is the standard of living for the average person increasing or decreasing?

To me, it’s obvious. From around the 1980/90’s the average person has had to work more, for less. Since then, the standard of living has decreased even though there have been massive technological advances that have increased productivity (at least 10 times on average), prolonged life and made life somewhat more comfortable.

Again, I’m talking about basic stuff. Around the 1950/60’s the average man could buy a large home, in a great location and raise half a dozen kids on ONE wage (which my parents did) but today you need two people working if you want to buy a home half the size and support one or two children.

These are the fundamentals and I don’t care how ‘cool’ the latest technology is or if we can now live an extra 5 years on a concoction of medications, if the fundamentals aren’t right, then we aren’t ‘progressing’.

What’s this got to do with religion? Not much as far as I’m concerned. It has everything to do with moral and ethical priorities that put the well-being of humans before economic systems and political ideologies. Capitalism and socialism are simply human farming systems. Humans should not be discarded when a system fails; the system should be discarded.
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What is causing the decline in the West? The mindset of egocentric materialism. It is not an attitude of one for all and all for one. It’s me-ism.
I saw a radical change when the idealism of the young in the 1960s morphed to the materialism of the 1980s. Moccasins were traded for designer tennis shoes.
Jeans became designer and had to be name brand. The t.v. show "Family Ties’ captured the change with a materialistic child having “hippie” parents. I watched in dismay as my children sold out to the prevailing mindset out of fear of not belonging among their peers. I was outdated.

A liberal/capitalist establishment is able to co-opt, exploit, absorb, utilize, transform, corrupt and manipulate every grassroots movement until it reaches it’s limit and morphs into something else.

All systems from East to West are in decline, subservient to a power and wealth complex. Though there has always been corruption, the political, the economic and not least, the ethical cease to be viable pillars upholding nations who have relinquished the fight against their own corruption while hypocritically affirming the opposite. Also, if truth be told, far too many stupid people on the planet; among the worst are the educated holding most of the power positions in conformity with the organizations they serve. We’re slaves to a system we can’t seem to escape from, while turning evermore ineffective and corrupt.

All one has to do is observe the world. Nature itself is being corrupted with the infections WE created! Not much is left of what hasn’t gone wrong! Even our ideals are sinking with the ship replaced by more irrational versions of what they used to be. The time may come when the majority of humans will not decide anything except to survive.

“I can remember when “liberal” was a respected word.”-- My mentor. (respected as in a liberal college)
“The times they are a -changing”–Dylan’
Century 21 embraces a new, radical conservatism that is supported by evangelical Christians, polluting both religion in general and politics in particular. It is s another attempt to to glorify and preserve wholesale exploitation of man and nature–a side effect of the enlightenment.
“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”-- Emerson, in a letter to his friend Channing.
“The time is out of Joint”–Hamlet
“An old bitch gone in the teeth. . . a botched civilization.”–Ezra Pound.

The first step toward fixing a problem is to recognize that a problem exists.
I think materialistic capitalism’s immediate rewards obscures the fact of its toxic side effects causing one to look away from the problem.
Overlooked, the problem grows.

Only half-acknowledged doesn’t solve the problem. A full acknowledgement by the powers that be wouldn’t be expedient. Procrastination therefore is the ritual outcome. Expect the problem to keep going!

What would full acknowledgement of the problem entail? Economic disparities? Global warming? Human and animal extinction? Pollution of all waterways?

Monad is right. The power of most of us as individuals is insufficient to make the necessary systemic changes to correct the environmental problems. To whatever efforts we’re making to change the situation, we should add acceptance of it.

It was because I saw the question as a spiritual one that it is here. It isn’t just what people do but why they do it, what motivates them, what values do they have, and by what do they orientate their lives? I think that these are the more important questions, because they show the chances of recovery based on one’s worldview.

It is the ideals that are in question here. Do people have ideals that could be helpful in recovery? Or is the mentality more (as Germans say) “after me the deluge for all I care”?

That sounds a lot like: “start building the ark!”

To the degree that you live within a democratic system, you can act in environmentally responsible ways, participate in social action in support of the health of the environment, and support environmentally responsible politicians or become one yourself. Beyond that it’s out of your control. Why not accept it?

I suppose that the modern equivalent of Noah is the survivalist. Such a person tries to envision all the contingencies of the collapse of civilization and prepare for them. It’s a lifestyle. I haven’t adopted it.

Decline is not a new phenomena it goes back as far as the beginning of Greek civilization, it runs through our history.

Is this decline built on an obvious dislike of the Western world’s dominance and the major role it plays in the world today?

Agreed, but with an increasingly progressive reboot, after nei-Platinism offered a new expected renaissance from the dark ages’ illuminated proto religious revival. The romantic element of religious transformation may have added extra stimulus.

I’m not sure what decline you’re referring to. Please elaborate.

That’s one factor among many. According to Spengler cultures are living organisms with built-in lifespans. When a culture develops to the stage of becoming a civilization it begins to decline.

felix dacat wrote:

So it must true.

Is the West in Decline?
Postby Bob

Is the West in decline?
The “West” is more a concept rather than a geographical region and the term is used to refer to a group of advanced industrial nations, united by shared values, these nations include the United States, Canada and Western Europe and also Australia and New Zealand. The philosophical or literary variations on this theme of the decline of the West are many. Plato’s “Timaeus” the gradual development of degeneration of creation is only interrupted by divine intervention, in Paradise Lost, John Milton’s frightening depiction of the battle of the angels and before Spengler, Andrei Bely used a more dominant image than the German author, “Events here are coming to a boiling point. All of Russia is on fire. The fire is spreading everywhere. The anguish of the soul and sadness of the individual have fused with national mourning to produce one massive scarlet horror.”

Although the collapse of the West has been often predicted, it has also proved resilient.

Pope Francis said that the issue of common good had to become global.
The problem of course is who defines what is the common good. The Pope?

Sexual and Social morality hot a peak at around 1980. It’s been in decline, mostly ever since and the personal freedoms gained from the 1960s sexual revolution have now been chipped away.

Technological progress has continued a pace, but the dreams of the “Space Age” have been show to be fantasy, and the promised Lunar Tourism and Mars Base are things af sci-fi, and are likely to remain so.
Instead of exploring outwards we have recessed into obsessive inward looking social media, where endless twittering stupidity has brought into being a voyeuristic and self obsessed people.

Politcally democracy has declined and the new economic model of Milton Friedman has directed all rewards of the economic system away from those who deserve it, away from those who need it, and towards an ever richer minority.

Warfare has progressed away from close contact to an ever more remote controlled means of mass killing. Despite claims of “clinical strikes” this has not removed the truth of widespread death of the innocent. Alongside this remote control warfare has come a lack of will to win. The winning in warfare does not just go to those that are best equipped, but those with the strongest wills. Afghanistanis and Vietnamese, amongst others, have shown the West the folly of their arrogance.

Sculptor wrote: