In Search of the Loch Ness Monster

“Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn’t Been Punched in the Face,” Scott Lockin wrote in 2011:

Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality. The great banker-journalist (and founder of the original National Review) Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences. Many civilizations have come to the state of devolution represented by modern Berkeley folkways, from wife-swapping to vegetarianism. These ideas don’t come from a hardscrabble existence in contact with nature’s elemental forces; they are the inevitable consequence of being an effete urban twit removed from meaningful contact with reality. The over-civilized will try to portray their decadence as something “highly evolved” and worthy of emulation because it can only exist in the hothouse of highly civilized urban centers, much like influenza epidemics. Somehow these twittering blockheads missed out on what the word “evolution” means. Evolution involves brutal and often violent natural selection, and these people have not been exposed to brutal evolutionary forces any more than a typical urban poodle.

Which, as Bill Whittle notes in his latest Firewall video, helps to explain why they keep searching for the ideological equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster:

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(Via SDA)

Update: Then there’s trickle-down decadence:

While Adrian Peterson makes millions, the parallel universe I’m talking about is mostly poor, as reflected painfully perfectly in an exchange four years ago, as reported in the Star Tribune, in a Hennepin (Minneapolis) District Courtroom. The story involved the sentencing of a teenager who had shot and killed another teenager—a kid, who only a year earlier, had shot and wounded the kid now being sentenced. The second shooting, in other words, was in retribution of the first. For good measure, the murdered teen’s mother herself was in prison for forgery, let out for the day to testify.

In speaking of her child—her second son to be murdered—she said he had worked two jobs and received his high school diploma posthumously. After saying she never had a chance to see him graduate, she added this stunner: “I am never going to see him come home and say, ‘Mama, I got some girl pregnant.’”

I double-checked with the reporter to make certain I had interpreted what the woman had said accurately: that she had, in fact, intended the term “Mama, I got some girl pregnant” to convey the same joy parents traditionally derive from hearing their married children and spouses announce in celebration: “Mom and Dad, we’re going to have or baby.”  Or, more up to date, “Mom and Dad, we’re pregnant.”

Yes, I was told, I had interpreted her lament correctly, as she mourned not only her son’s death, but how he would never impregnate some girl.

Pat Moynihan, call your office.