Mind Viruses

A Diseased Way of Thinking

A common theme in many strands of Western historiography has been the analogizing of cultures and civilizations as organisms. They are born, they grow, they die, they can be sick or healthy, robust or nearing senescence and death. Often these treatments focus on the external, tangible elements within these civilizations, such as their political structures, technology and infrastructure, volumes of trade, and so forth. However, we should understand that any organism – especially the human organism, endowed as it is with a rational faculty to direct its actions for good or for ill – does not merely consist of “body,” but also soul/mind.

As a result, when diagnosing the health of a civilization, we cannot merely look at the body, but must also remain cognizant of the fitness of the intangible elements such as its prevailing social and philosophical trends, traditions and mores, and so forth. The principle of mens sana in corpore sano, “a healthy mind in a healthy body,” reflects the observable tendency towards correlation between physical and mental health in human beings. This same general principle, however, also seems to apply analogically to cultures and civilizations. The decadence and decay that exists in Western civilization is not the product of merely external forces, even of something as drastically alien as Islamic or other Third World immigration. Rather, the root of the West’s unsoundness of body rests in the acceptance by Western nations and their populations of several mentally unsound propositions that have introduced a seeming psychological insanity into the underlying moral and philosophical assumptions which are then acted upon to direct the externals of our civilization. These “mind viruses” have infiltrated the thinking of most Westerners and have led to the weakness and degeneracy of the Western organism seen today.

The Introduction of the Historical “Progressive Assumption”

The first of these is the so-called “progressive assumption.” Beginning with the Renaissance, the way in which Western man looked at time itself began to change. The earlier, cyclical view which was traditionally held by the medieval Western man (as well as pretty much all other traditional civilizations in history) began to be replaced by the progressive, linear view of time. The earlier view had understood time holistically, as part of the greater fabric of reality which encompassed all of life, and which regulated the rhythms and cycles throughout the year, both in the religious sphere (liturgical seasons, feasts and fasts, ordinary time, etc.) and in the astronomical (seasons, lunations, and so forth). In the cyclical understanding of time, while change was certainly present, and it was also well-understood that eras and ages were passing and that “earlier days” were obviously not the same as the present, there was still an intimate connection with earlier times. The sense of reverence for the past which characterizes traditional societies was maintained even as cultures evolved through the centuries.

With the coming of linear time, the connection to the past was severed and respect for the past was replaced with a new, chopped up, atomized view of time in which one point had little to no reference backwards to previous ones. As a result, the cycles of life were broken up, and modern man developed the “punch clock” mentality of modern capitalism. Concomitantly, Western man developed an obsession with change for its own sake. Because there was no longer a defined sense of continuity, “the past” could be increasingly consigned to irrelevancy. Because it was “back then,” it obviously was inferior and had nothing to teach us, no guidance to provide to “modern” man.

This mindset has only served to divorce Western man from the traditional bases of his cultures and civilization, and has introduced the sort of shallow, present-centered focus that defines modernism. Because there is no connection with the past, every change – even such obviously idiotic things as the gay and trans agendas, no fault divorce, and the breakdown of the family – is viewed as “progress” since nobody has any earthly idea what they would compare it against. Because these things are “new” and “forward-thinking,” they are viewed as good, and even necessary. Modernist man whose mind is infected with the virus of the progressive assumption has no way of even knowing that most of the change (especially social) that he supports is objectively detrimental to his own civilization because he has neither the tools nor the inclination to engage in a rational, empirically informed assessment of his situation.

The Belief in Libertarian Individualism and Individual Rights

This is one area where most on the “soft Left” of classical liberalism are especially infected. Individualism – or at least the sort of magical unicorn which libertarians and American conservatives believe to be individualism – is viewed as a panacea, the single biggest factor that “made the West great.” Classical liberals, and especially those who are Americans, fervently believe in the myth of the “rugged individual,” and castigate anything as “collectivist” and “communist” anything that even remotely appears to challenge this prevailing orthodoxy.

What these folks don’t realize, however, is that civilization itself is “collectivist.” No civilization exists as a collection of atomized, disaggregated individuals. No civilization CAN exist as such. Any civilization which finds itself losing its social solidarity inevitably falls because it does not have the will to resist other civilizations which are better organized and socially more solidified. While many Americans like to think of themselves as an individualistic society, the fact is that we are actually quite communitarian, and the basic of the traditional American way of life has been built upon the “collective” structures of extended family, church, and community.

Allow me to digress into the realm of sociology for a moment. In 1967, Edward Banfield (Moral Basis of a Backward Society) performed a study in which he compared the rural Mezzogiorno region of southern Italy with traditional American “Midwestern small town” civic culture. While the expectation would be that the Italian situation was “collectivist” and the American “individualistic,” and hence why the Americans have a much higher level of socially positive traits such as civic engagement and social trust, as it turned out, the exact opposite was the case. In the Italian cases, despite being an ostensibly “collectivist” society, the social patterns are characterized by extreme atomization, with essentially no cooperative efforts above the level of the immediate family. The low trust situation carried through to extended family, and even to grown siblings. In other words, this society was effectively individualistic. Banfield contrasted this with the high trust, cooperative culture existing in American “small town” life (used as a rural, agrarian analog to the Italian villages he studied). The most quintessentially American portion of our culture is not “ruggedly individualistic,” but is exemplified by communities who come together for the greater good of the social order.

Especially destructive, however, has been the tendency to translate this prevailing acceptance of individualism into an ever-expanding demand for “individual rights,” regardless of the harm that is done to social trust and cohesion. The expectation of “rights” without the concurrent acceptance of individual responsibilities to others at all levels of communitarian hierarchy has led to the essential dissolution of basically every ordering structure that maintains civic society. In its place we find an army of selfish individuals willing to destroy any and all traditional, religious, social, and moral structures to feed their own psychological self-interest – truly a mind virus of the most mephitic sort. You simply cannot maintain a rational civil society when every member feels himself unconstrained from doing whatever he likes, whenever he likes, so long as he convinces himself that it doesn’t violate some mythological “non-aggression principle.”

The Exaltation of Impossible Views of Equality

Dovetailing with the erroneous view of individualism dealt with above is the modernistic assumption of egalitarianism. Often the waters are a but muddy here, with “equality” sometimes being understood metaphysically and sometimes in a legal sense. However, neither of these senses are intrinsically correct, and a great error in modern Western thinking has been to assume the truth of egalitarianism when it is, in fact, so obviously spurious on its face.

The fact is, “All men are created equal” is a nonsense proposition. In no observable way is it true – not in terms of intellectual or physical ability, nor in drive and motivation, nor in any other trait which man may choose to measure or regard. Yet, the essential fungibility of all people, everywhere, has come to form the basis of nearly every unsound and damaging public policy that afflicts Western nations today, from immigration policy to laws regulating employment and beyond. The problem with assuming equality is that the equality achieved is that which results from dragging down the more capable and fit to the level of the lowest common denominator. While we think of Harrison Bergeron as dystopian science fiction, it is effectively the end result of any social system which seeks to maintain (or even enforce) the fiction of absolute human equality. This is doubly so when that fiction is folded into the political realm of democracy and universal suffrage as voting creates a political and social environment that likewise plummets toward the nadir of social utility.

While many people in the West would perhaps subconsciously accept the propositions stated above, they would shy away from the logical conclusion to be drawn, which is that legal equality is likewise a detrimental fiction. Why should everyone get the same vote, the same piece of political power? Why should everyone be dealt with by the law the exact same way, even when they may habitually behave in radically different ways? Why shouldn’t there be social and legal hierarchies built into the system that take into account the various differences between individuals and groups of people? The fact is that human societies work best and provide the most long-term stability and order when hierarchies and legal inequalities exist. The evidence of modern Western flirtations with the mind virus of egalitarianism has been a modernity roiled by war, revolution, social and economic instability, and the dehumanization of the masses of so-called “equal citizens.”

The Desacralization of the Western World

The fourth and final pathology that infects the mind of the West has been the consistent and inexorable desacralization of the pretty much every area of life. I’m not merely referring to the relegation of “religion” into rapidly shrinking realms of private life. Rather, I’m talking about the systematic destruction of the reverential attitude towards our surroundings and even towards the principles of civilization itself.

While it is habitual on the part of many modernism-infected westerners to deride the Middle Ages as “superstitious” and “backwards,” the fact is that medieval attitudes towards the holistic system of creation – both the natural world of God’s creation and the social world of man’s society – were immeasurably superior to our own. Cities were not viewed as random aggregations of selfish individuals but as comprehensively integrated communities. The natural world was not a resource to simply be exploited, but was a stewardship to be cultivated. As we saw above, while time itself is now viewed by modern man as something to be sliced up into unrelated periods of wage-earning separated by intervals of sleep and television watching, for medieval man time was a pulse, a rhythm that united the lives of the family and community, a shared temporal experience that brought richness to life.

Modern man is truly a slave to secularization. While he was promised “freedom” from constraints imposed upon him by tradition and religion, all that his secularization has done is to make him the servant of his brute passions and the imbecilic perversions of others. Anyone whose idea of “freedom” consist of gay “marriage” and legalized prostitution really has no idea what “freedom” is. When a social system is built upon that sort of “freedom,” it will act as a wheel of carborundum, grinding down the dignity of everyone involved. When nothing is sacred, everything becomes a commodity to be abused and sold to the highest bidder. When this happens, the virus of the mind has spread to the body and is rapidly killing it.

Conclusion

The four areas dealt with above are merely a small sampling of what could be said in criticism of the modern Western mentality. The embodiment of these, and many other, pathologies into classical liberalism – which is supposedly the “good” political and economic philosophy – demonstrates why the Western world has moved so rapidly down the rabbit hole of decadence and decay. When the supposedly “conservative” elements in our civilization are as psychologically blinded by the errors of modernity as are those on the far Left, it bodes poorly for the long-term survival of the organism. It is time for those who believe themselves to be on the Right to start vaccinating themselves against these mind viruses, questioning the assumptions and prevailing liberal orthodoxies which there were taught and continue to accept. There certainly are alternatives to liberalism that don’t involve going even further into socialism and communism. These answers lie in the past, looking back to what really made the West great, both in body, in mind, and in spirit.