https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2024/07/spectre-of-the-fall-is-the-west-doomed/
Conclusion As this brief survey indicates, there is a considerable body of scholarship and commentary illuminating the dire future into which Western societies are allowing themselves to descend. Tragically, there seems to be little political will or capacity to confront this challenge, in itself a marker of the extent of the decline, but at the same time there are several political events approaching that may give rise to hope. Time will tell, but time is running out.
A spectre haunts Western Civilization – the spectre of its decline and fall. And invariably, it seems, this spectre is envisaged in terms of Rome, as Bryan Ward-Perkins confirms in The Fall of Rome & the End of Civilization (2006): “Deep within the Western psyche lies an anxiety that, if ancient Rome could fall, then so too can the even the proudest of modern civilizations”. Indeed, unfolding events “make it possible to use Roman history to show the West is experiencing only the beginnings of what will be an unfolding and, potentially, even an existential crisis, and secondly, that this crisis is revolving around the same key components that undermined its ancient Roman counterpart.” (Peter Heather & John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America & the Future of the West, 2023)
Death Spiral The West may already have entered a ‘death spiral’ comparable to that which doomed the Roman Empire 1500 years ago, as Adam Creighton points out in a recent article, ‘Joe Biden’s decline is a perfect mirror of West’s slow decay’. He quotes prominent Stanford academic John Ionnidis, who defines such a precipitant societal collapse as a “vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behaviour characterised by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one set of solutions, denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness.”
Contrived Panics Climate change hysteria and the Covid-19 over-reaction may be cited as two example of this phenomenon. In particular,
Nothing confirms the collapse in governing wisdom so much as the destructive response to COVID-19, when across a few years almost all advanced governments crushed their citizens living standards, rights, and educational outcomes over a new virus whose fatality rate was known among experts from early 2020 to be less than 0.05%.
One result of this carefully contrived panic was that several gigantic pharmaceutical corporations made absolutely immense profits supplying vaccines that may have been either unnecessary or harmful, or both, but which were compulsory. Meanwhile they fund the regulators that were to meant to oversee their activities and ensure public health. It’s very notable that no comprehensive, properly empowered inquiry– e.g., a Royal Commission — into the Covid-19 disaster has been undertaken.