This is a continuation of what got us here as a Western society.
Greedy
The American Progressive Movement began in the 1890s, and it cast off a very specific universal belief that had permeated throughout history: that human nature as a collective society is capable of changing.
Progressive movement
Those in power always want a little more, and agovernment absolutely devastated the American way, starting with a significant hike in taxes that provoked a massive speculative drop in 1929. The cause of it is still a present political debate, but both the endless hype about stock ownership and the government’s implementation of new taxes were not helpful. America’s 1930s were a decade of impoverished struggle, while Europe continued to lick its wounds and restore itself.
Through a convergence of post-modern thought and resentment against their legitimately unfair situation, Germany over-reacted back with a new government party called the Nazis. They advocated for a more efficient, self-sufficient nation, as well as complete separation (and eventual annihilation) of multiple people groups.
Even now, there is desperate darkness within post-modernism that’s still taboo to address. If humanity only has the values it creates (without any grander values that transcend us), there’s no reason to preserve any other humans except the ones we like, and the Nazi party was the first full implementation of those thoughts.
The rest of this is far more political, and most
Good Empires vs. Bad Empires
After several years of tension in the late 1930s, Germany finally made a move to attack Poland and begin the ambitious conquest of the world, allying in solidarity with Italy and Japan. The rest of Europe fought back, along with whatever support they could gather from just about every other nation on the planet. America was still licking its wounds until Japan got over-ambitious and bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, then they went all-in.
Four intense years later in 1945, the Germans were defeated soundly by Europe and America on the west and Russia’s USSR alliance on the east, followed shortly by the Japanese in a devastating display of new atomic bomb technology.
The aftermath of World War II unveiled the tragedy of the German Holocaust along with the fear of atomic weaponry, and the United Nations formed from the shared alliance against risks of further evil. Among their first establishing acts was to carve out a portion of ancestral Israel for the Hebrew victims of the Holocaust. This would not bring world peace.
Israel, to this day, is still plagued by territorial disputes between the religions of Islam and Judaism over that land, with Christians sometimes politically shoving their oar into it.
USA/Europe vs. USSR
The USSR didn’t give back Germany’s land, and instead claimed ownership of Germany in the name of the USSR. This terrified Europe and America, but most of them had become battle-hardened (and somewhat battle-weary), so they didn’t want to fight.
However, America’s military had left a lasting cultural impression on every single American. Practically every male aged 18-40 had served in a war that had defeated a genocidal regime (therefore making it a just war), and most females had worked back at home to support that war effort.
By the late 1940s, Americans had normalized into civilian life again, but had identified with the rigid, structured military culture from before. The ex-militarized culture of over 60% of the country brought about a nation of harsh, subordinating, hard-working, top-down hierarchical conformity, and the nuclear family unit suffered from the idealistic depictions of a perfect home.
The focus was reinforced by the Cold War, and the optimistic portrayals of the period’s propaganda would imply it was a battle between independent freedom and national solidarity. In practice, it was a battle between a sea of workaholic fathers and victims of a dictatorial regime.
The conflicts of America intensified through the proxy battles during that time between the US and USSR. The increasing development of media technology in the US, specifically, made their wars progressively more unpopular: Korea, Vietnam, and on beyond the Cold War into Iraq.
The Soviet world didn’t change much through the 1980s beyond the standard decay of bad management, but the 1960s blossomed a youth that was severely untrained for life. Their rebellion against “the man” that represented their absentee father figure followed them for decades, and most of the nation suffered under a sea of inexperienced adult children demanding peace.
By contrast, the development of the computer made the 1980s a vastly productive decade across the world, and the prosperity of a free society triggered the end of the Cold War when the USSR collapsed and Russia gave up East Germany.
The echoes of the Cold War still resonate, and our politicians still exploit the abject fear of an unseen terror. As of the early 2020s, the fear was magnified to foster a core culture of cult members surrounding specific politicians.
Post-Empire
The 1990s were a confusing period, with the world now being free of any antagonist whatsoever. Calls for world peace resonated, but there was no profit to be made in world peace, so proxy battles and civil wars continued in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, and others. Some of them continue to this day.
The development of the internet broke long-standing human conventions. The library became a household object, calculating and referencing became available to poor people, and the prosperity alongside easy access to financing made the social classes even more blurred.
As the internet developed, the world saw a period of relative peace for decades, which led to increasing leftward thinking as people interpreted the peace as a standard behavior and conflict as the deviation from the norm.
Even now, society still lives this pipe dream, with the belief that everyone is inherently good and curtailing the 3-10% of “bad” people will fix everyone’s problems. This has only intensified with the internet.
New Antagonists
The arrangements made by the USA during the UN’s founding had given poorer countries an opportunity to compete, with the idea that the US could become as powerful as Germany and take over the world as well. China, more than any other nation, had taken advantage of the uneven trade arrangement.
In 2016, an outsider was elected as US President, and the world’s established system disappeared. He stopped that arrangement and imposed tariffs on China in 2017, and it devastated the Chinese way of life.
In 2020, a disease called COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic across the world from Wuhan, China. It was probably a biochemical weapon, but likely emerged before it was sufficiently complete. The government response across every major Western nation was a direct message pulled from Chinese propaganda: everyone must stay in their homes, civilization must stop, and everyone must conform to the Great Reset.
The political power of 2020 existed because most Western society had not experienced a direct war in their lifetime. If they had, they would have integrated their shadow enough to have resisted. Even so, by 2022 everything had resumed as it was in 2019, and the credibility of all authority that had advanced the Great Reset’s talking points was gone. The aristocracy’s narrative had been ignored.
To be continued…