The Great Surrender

Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man’s practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched than this is the spiritual self-destruction of one who would freely sell himself into tyranny in exchange for that very same subhuman compensation.

Western politics has fallen under the domination of progressive authoritarianism. The press, once perceived as a safeguard against government corruption and overreach, has become an almost monolithic mouthpiece and apologist for oppression. Art, long modernity’s bastion of moral questioning and humane doubt in the face of materialist reductionism, has finally reduced itself to dogmatic nihilism, collectivist amorality, and court jesterism in the service of power.

These nightmarish degradations are often cited as causes of our decay, as though they were abstract realities controlling civilization’s fate as the laws of physics control the fall of a stone. The most nightmarish fact of all, however, is that these conditions were not imposed upon us by force. The modern West’s demise was chosen. Generations of men walked into this of their own volition. They voted for it. They purchased it. They chose to believe in it, defying the evidence of their own eyes and common sense. They willingly surrendered themselves to slavishness and its diminished moral horizon.

For thousands of years, men fought for a breath of freedom while struggling against the shifting currents of irrational governance imposed by brute force. Modernity promised a reasonable way out of all that, producing the theory and practical conditions of political liberty, elevating the individual human being above all coercive power, and hence allowing men, to a greater degree than ever before, to choose their own social conditions, and to project their choices into the future with some measure of solidity. But modern men, given that choice, have — gradually but consciously — forsaken all of it to return to the conditions from which men strained to extricate themselves for millennia: fleeting flames of hope capriciously snuffed out in sudden storms of power lust.