by Brett Stevens on September 13, 2018

The other day, we threw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure onto the television while winding down after a long day in the outside. This movie serves an almost ceremonial role as a reminder of good times and how good life can be.

Made in 1989, just on the cusp of the transition to the Clinton years, this movie expressed the hopeful view that if we could “be excellent to each other,” a new utopia based on good times and heavy metal could replace our society. It reflected the unease with which people watched the rise of corporate culture, strong government, and a virulent “me first” attitude in the 1980s.

Looking at it now, it seems like a missive from another planet. The simple-hearted, open world of 1980s suburbia no longer exists. The malls where you could drop off your kids for a few hours are gone, as are the social rituals that once defined American life. We live in a different world now, and the old one looks quaint and innocent.

It must have had the same effect on us, this transition, as did the leap from the 1950s America to whatever happened in the 1960s. People recalled neighborhoods where no one locked their doors, where everyone was basically attractive, and life was simpler and less demanding.

Now people live at the office, go home to gated communities, live in terror of their debt load and tax burdens, hide away from the crime and vandalism, and watch their speech as carefully as anyone in the Soviet Union used to. The open and generous, friendly nature of our society is gone, replaced by wary diffidence.

Even more, the people on the street are different. In the 1980s, we mostly lived in a world of Western Europeans, where everyone had English, German, Scots, Dutch, or Scandinavian names; now, the names are from all over the world, and people are either hostiles of a different culture, or the scary cultureless ones, adrift in their own anonymity.

You know, since the days of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, we really destroyed this place.

It started in the Clinton years when America went from “do the right thing” to “do the popular thing” and our money was no longer based on productivity, but on how much we could make world creditors want to buy it. Clinton exemplified the New American: a salesman, maybe a con man, living off the wealth of the past.

At the same time, diversity kicked in, and soon the old American names were pushed back. First it was the Southern and Eastern European names, the Irish and the Jews, and then it was a flood of third world names, half in Spanish and the rest in Asiatic or African languages. Where were we, again?

It was as if the world moved in to be part of our Roman orgy of decadence and self-destruction. We created anarchy with shopping malls, and now everyone came to be part of the cash-in. Government became the new growth industry: government jobs were good money, and benefits and pensions a career path.

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s thought the world was already insane. All of our parents were divorced and spent their days chasing visions of their own grandeur, jobs had become life-swallowing obsessions, schools were basically propaganda prisons, and cities were no longer safe, more like threatening and empty.

People fell into themselves. A barrage of media greeted us every day, offering fears paired with products to solve them, thrusting onto us the question, “What do I want?” about every minute of the day. People started going to restaurants a lot, watching a lot of television, and retreating from the world.

Government and consumer product industries together seemed to be working to make people inert, compliant, and yet able to engage the wildest flights of their own egos, as if this gratuitous self-expression made them even more pliable.

As the 1990s went on, two things happened: first, cheap Chinese labor made its impact known and consumer goods suddenly cost a lot less, and second, the internet arose, and we saw the world revealed before us in full detail. Ultimately most of what we saw was public image, and everything else retreated into private.

A chill fear came into the air, a fear of missing out and also the lurking fear that perhaps we had gone too far and were now in a time of dying. People started clustering around jobs, gyms, bars, and their homes, but as the internet got more powerful, they spent more time at home or later, on their phones.

We all began to live in little bubbles, unaware of anything more than our circuit of work and play and home. Since culture had died, we knew ourselves and others through activities and the “right” collection of music, movies, video games, art objects, and favorite products.

Communism and consumerism revealed themselves to be the same thing, a human herd behavior that appears any time that we fall back on whatever the majority wants (utilitarianism). Or maybe we just made a consumer version of Communism. People want life to fit their desires, not to adapt to life, and their resistance to changing gloms them into a herd.

No one else will tell you the things you read on Amerika. We write to be reasonable, but we start from the recognition that Western Civilization has died and become replaced by this insect-like consumption machine that destroys its best people in order to keep a thoughtless herd happy.

We do not sugar-coat it. Everything you grew up hoping to have, has gone; everything you hoped would preserve your future or even acknowledge your good acts, is gone. You now live in a giant shopping mall where there is no memory, no sacredness, no sense of togetherness, or even a purpose. We are all just selfish beings waiting to die.

Some of the opinions on this site seem like moderate Republican talk. Others come right out of Plato or Evola, or even reach into the depths of Nietzsche and Machiavelli. Most are simply common sense, once you strip out all the social factors that make people refuse to approach any issue directly because someone might be offended.

None of them hide the truth: this society, like Rome and Athens before it, has committed suicide. It started by destroying its institutions, then its behaviors, and finally it is at work munching away on its genetics, leaving behind a future population of people without any particular abilities or moral alertness.

America has fallen and so has Europe. Western Civilization has collapsed again with the globalist first world as the new Rome. It is all wrong, and no one else will tell you that. They will give you something to cheer for and something to hate and blame, but never the shocking fact that your gut instinct is right and this is all wrong.

If these writings have any message, it is that things do not need to be this way. We can figure out the philosophy that motivates us to do wrong things and correct it, then stop doing those wrong things, then remove the bad, and start over with the remainder of the good and rebuild Western Civilization. We have done this before.

Goodness sleeps inside of all of us. We have the potential to be great like the past again. It may take generations of reconstructive breeding, striving for what is right, and struggling against our own weaknesses, but we can get there. However, first we have to want to, and that requires first accepting how vastly wrong it all is now.

Tags: collapse, decay, decline, rome

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