The Suicide of Western Civilization Part 1: Secular Causes

The current "refugee crisis" has two fronts on which it needs to be fought, and I don't mean to the side or benefit of the "refugees". And yes, I do mean fought, in that the lies and deceit which have infested our society are leading us down the pathway to suicide, and to avert the death and torture of innocents we will need to be discerning and decisive and win in the philosophical battle of ideas.

Physical violence always follows intellectual violence, and giving up in the latter ensures the former.

The first front is secular, the second front is religious in nature, but both hit on similar philosophical problems, because much of modern Christianity has been infested with the same flawed secular philosophy that our culture at large suffers from, and that wasn't accidental.

The secular angle is apparently based on the following chain of logic:

1) People are in trouble in another country.
2) It is our responsibility to eliminate troubles in other countries.
3) We cannot stop the trouble happening in the other country.
4) We cannot rely on any other country to stop the trouble from happening.
5) We must take the people out of their country and into ours which does not have the same trouble.

I am certain that different spins on these basic premises could be made, but these are what look to me to be the secular underpinnings of the current media push in regards to the "refugee crisis". I'll now go over the problems with each premise stated above.

1) People are in trouble in another country.

Seriously, why does anyone believe that there is a problem in Syria? Is it because you saw it on the news? The same news that gets caught lying regularly? The same media that lies to you about things happening in your own country you expect to be honest about things happening in other countries? The media which is owned by a small handful of companies and has often published articles with the same content and claims within minutes of each other? The media which has been caught staging bodies (dead or alive) for photo shoots to intentionally play on people's emotions and drive page views?

The plain fact of the matter is that you don't actually know what is going on in Syria any more than you do one city or state over unless you are in direct contact with someone in Syria. Everything you have heard about and seen in the mainstream media can be fabricated and lied about, you would never know the difference, and you would never have the ability to verify it.

Most folks should be aware by now that the TV shows you are watching aren't the "product" being sold in exchange for your monthly subscription fees, it's targeted advertisement space, and that's where TV networks really make most of their money, and why actual viewership matters more than just subscribers. This is true whether it's a soap opera, a sitcom, or the nightly news. The reason they have commercial breaks is to pay the bills, and to pay the bills better they need you to be motivated to stick around to watch the commercial space they sold. Everything you see on TV is intended to get you to keep watching it.

This is why services like YouTube and Hulu sell advertisement space in their videos, and showing ads more and more often than when they first started offering their services, because "free services" need to pay to keep the lights on. They'll offer a subscription to remove the ads, or some of them, but they are basically just taking the same advertisement model TV used and putting it on the internet. They get people hooked on the content and service, and now they'll sell your eyeballs to advertisers to keep the business going.

So if the primary mechanism that you use to get informed does not actually have any interest in educating you, but only entertaining you to keep selling ad space, why would you trust anything that they tell you that you cannot verify yourself?

I don't know if there's actually a civil war going on in Syria or not. CGI and makeup effects are better than ever, and I am sometimes incapable of telling the difference between what is real and what is not. So anytime an assertion is made that I cannot verify, it should be viewed with great suspicion, especially when it comes packaged with "here's why you should do something, and what you should do".

2) It is our responsibility to eliminate troubles in other countries.

Interventionism breeds chaos, because humans cannot reliably predict the future.

Anyone who says otherwise is a liar and/or delusional.

Oh sure, on simple things like me stopping someone from touching a live electrical wire, I can claim that I know the immediate and direct outcome of my actions - that being that I stopped someone from touching the live electrical wire.

I cannot even begin to fathom all of the subsequent indirect effects for apparently saving that person's life, but could I really say that my action saved their life? Perhaps in the moment before they touched the wire, the power was shut off. Or they may have been wearing protective gloves that insulated them from being shocked and I just hadn't noticed them. Or perhaps they do get shocked but it isn't life threatening. Or any other variation of things that could have happened that I couldn't have predicted.

Now, does this mean I never intervene just because I can't perceive or predict everything accurately? No! It just means my intervention should be backed up by good solid reasons, as it cannot be an intrinsically "good" or "correct" action all by itself. It is not self-justifying. I cannot intervene merely for the sake of intervention, I need to have a good solid reason to do so.

Did the USA have a good reason then to intervene in the affairs and politics of the Middle East during the Bush and Obama years? Turns out that is a resounding NOPE.

Does the USA have some responsibility to clean up the mess it has made? YES.

Is that something the USA should be doing on its own? NO, and for the exact same reasons that the original interventions were not correct. These people we messed with do not believe as we do, do not value the same things we do, and so forcing our ideals on them as a solution to the problem caused by our ideals is just plain old colonial tyranny, which we're supposed to be busy feeling guilty about.

The USA should be partnering with the nations in the region to clean up the mess it made, but oops, those other countries in the region are taking advantage of the power struggle and have stabbed all efforts to work together in the back to benefit themselves as much as possible.

This is the part where the USA then has to wash its hands and walk away. We can only work together to try and fix a problem when folks want the problem fixed. If the locals embrace and prefer the chaos, it is not our responsibility to correct them via political or military means, and we should stop spending money and lives trying to fix a problem that nobody actually wants fixed.

3) We cannot stop the trouble happening in the other country.

This one should be shorter. We cannot fix the problem because the people don't want the problem fixed in the way we want to fix it. Our efforts are undermined, our money wasted, our soldiers lives put at risk for no good reason.

The problem is human nature, and since we cannot change human nature, the problem literally cannot ever go away. Because the problem cannot ever go away, but can manifest in many different ways, it becomes an infinite source for reasons to motivate any sort of action, like intervention.

The same leftist lies that remove the responsibility for the citizen and place it in government's hands (childcare, education, healthcare, employment, etc) are now being applied to people in other countries. The corruption here at home is sufficiently complete, so we must now spread the infection elsewhere, and get those other people believing the same lies.

We cannot stop the trouble because we identified human nature as the trouble and then refused to address the reality of making an intrinsic part of humanity the enemy of "progress".

4) We cannot rely on any other country to stop the trouble from happening.

This one is shorter still because something we can't solve ever obviously can't be solved by anyone else ever, so again, it becomes a wellspring to justify actions which would otherwise never be justifiable. This also makes inaction on the part of other countries somehow justifiable, especially if they are not perceived to be as well off as the USA, even if they are actually rich and are in closer proximity and share the same religion (like Iran or Saudi Arabia).

5) We must take the people out of their country and into ours which does not have the same trouble.

Now, even after all of this leaping without looking, we then have the jump from providing reasons for us specifically to provide aid, straight to the only apparent method we can use to provide aid. Think about that. How often does a problem have only one solution? Why are people who recommend other solutions not being heard or being called "racist"?

Ignoring that Syria is "war torn" because of a civil war and not some external conflict, all the sudden we have to just extricate everyone who will come, as opposed to setting up controlled areas in Syria where violence is not occurring. This is considerably less expensive than importing them and putting them on government aid, and thus allows us to help more people at the same time, yet just like how getting government out of marriage altogether was never on the table when it came to homosexual marriage licenses, we're told by the people who are paid to entertain us so we watch commercials that our only solution is to import them here, bypass our immigration laws and processes (like medical quarantine), and immediately get these people on taxpayer funded aid. We aren't told there are other options and so people presume there aren't any.

Here's the thing though, even with just that at face value, in almost every city that these "refugees" are placed in with government housing, there are already homeless and poor people who are being ignored. We already have folks who are living in abject poverty that need our help, but apparently unless the people we are helping will make us feel better about ourselves, we just can't be bothered.

This is a demonstration of "virtue signalling". Virtue signalling is when you are claiming to do or support something that would otherwise be charitable or good, but then also trying to reap the social benefits of doing so. It's pure arrogance. It's a big show of "look how good of a person I am for helping these poor people. WORSHIP AND VALUE ME."

Combine that with the "victim culture" where people who are bored and incompetent try to find ways to become a victim so that other people can feel good about taking care of them. In the same way that a person 50 years ago "felt good" about helping an old lady cross the street, folks today want to be the old lady, and instead of just across the street, they want their entire lifestyle paid for by someone else. To do that, you have to make up things that would otherwise disable you, and then beg society for support, and get recognized as a victim in need of help.

"I can't do , but if I claim they didn't hire me because I am (insert victim class here) , and shame them publicly, they'll hire me to end the public scrutiny."

This works every time, because people love joining the mob to attack what they think is a "bad guy". They don't stop to think about whether the "bad guy" is actually bad, they want the good feelings that come from the social acceptance of participating in a group, and so you see otherwise normal people performing horrible atrocities when they get in groups just to remain in the group. For the same reason that people like to advertise something good that they did, people like joining in on punishing "bad" people, because punishing "bad" people is an unequivocal "good", and you wouldn't want to exclude someone from feeling good, right?

But remember, the real problem was human nature, which still exists in this country as much as any other. This is why the same people who will tell you we need gun control and only cops need guns also talk about police brutality and the racism in law enforcement. They will talk about affirmative action and diversity as being necessary in the workplace, but then decry the fate of failing companies who did not actually produce anything because they were too busy being diverse as as failure of "the market".

The "problem" we are trying to get people away from is still here and in full force, with the same infinite manifestations and in turn justifications for action. We can say that some percentage of a percentage of people not being able to use the bathroom they want is a horrible injustice and yet murder millions of unborn babies every year without batting an eyelash. The problem is the same in all of these circumstances, but people don't want to blame anything that might reflect on themselves poorly, so they will do anything possible to avoid blaming human nature explicitly.

Folks then demand evidence and reason to change their mind on some topic without realizing that evidence and reason were never part of them having made up their mind in the first place. They've been manipulated through their emotions and desires, and manipulated so well that they believe it came from themselves.

This is how the current narrative then gets to where it is:

The USA has a responsibility to help people in a different country because of a problem we created but cannot solve, so we must expend resources on behalf of the people in the other country because they are bigger victims than the poor and homeless we have in our own country, and we will collectively feel better about supporting them than if we helped our neighbors because these people are the bigger victims.

So, what happens when you have an illogical, immoral narrative that requires huge assumptions that don't survive scrutiny which you need to get political support behind? You give people a religion which is also illogical and immoral, so you can pretend that your narrative has support not only of Government, but God.

If people won't trust the Government, they'll trust God, right?

To be continued in Part 2: Religious Causes.