Back in 1968, a seismic shift occurred across the West as we transitioned to the values system of individualism instead of social order:
In 1968, the baby boom generation came of age and started making its mark. The “Me Generation” had arrived. The men, sons of the “Greatest Generation,” did not want to fight communism in Vietnam as their fathers had fought fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan. The women wanted new social equality and freedom concerning sex, marriage and work that their mothers had never dreamed of.
The “Protestant ethic” of self-discipline and personal responsibility was rejected by many boomers. In its place was thrust forward a culture of entitlement and “self-actualization” as the New Jerusalem for America. Duty to family and country was old-fashioned, not “hip,” while “if it feels good, do it” became a norm for progressive minds to embrace.
Instead of responsibility to an order — social, natural, divine, logical — instead there was only individualism. Whatever the individual desired was right, and this replaced the notion of the individual adapting to its environment and having a civilization so that order could prevail. Not surprisingly, this caused people to revert to monkey behavior, essentially fornicating wildly, being parasitic, ganging up on non-conformists, and otherwise reverting to primal urges.
Sexual liberation led to a lack of trust between people, because when you are lover #64 you know that you are kept as a matter of convenience, not the eternal love that your grandparents had. That in turn led to divorce, which created unstable children from Generation X onward who spent most of their free time wondering how they could know if anything was real, true, good, or important, because they never really had any examples or stability in their lives.
The ethnic, class, and racial liberation also produced more hybrids, brought forth many ill-considered genetic mixes, and destroyed the notion of having culture at all. The hippie emphasis on drugs created not just a society strung out on weed, but a mentality from “big pharma” that there was a pill for anything. Better living through chemistry. We also cannot forget how the hippie ethos of personal laziness and the dogmatic pursuit of art, music, hedonism, and “new” ideas put us into a cycle of novelty-seeking culminating in Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
Even worse, the hippies introduced the idea that having the “correct” ideas was more important than being actually correct. This set us adrift from reality entirely, so that all that matters is the approval of our peers at the voting box, in the pub, at the cash register, or around the water cooler. Not surprisingly, now, insanity predominates in the West:
A group of Democrats in Congress held briefings on Capitol Hill with a Yale professor named Brandy X. Lee who, in admitted complete violation of the ethics governing her profession, has edited and contributed to a book claiming President Donald Trump is losing his mind. What’s the point of ethics when you have a product to sell?
Lee found a receptive audience among the more unstable liberals in Congress, including Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who regaled CNN with tales of his “concern” for Trump’s mental health. Raskin, looking like he’d recently slept in a bag of potato chips, told CNN of his concern that the President was crazy.
What’s really crazy is advocating for policies that have failed throughout the world, as Raskin and his fellow travelers often do in government. Unstable is the mind calling for socialized medicine and extol the virtues of the UK’s National Health Service without acknowledging the fact that all non-emergency surgeries have been canceled for the month of January because their system is simply overwhelmed. That’s straightjacket-level insane.
Straightjacket-level insane is what happens when you destroy the breeding stock of your nations, shatter families, turn education into propaganda, bedazzle and befuddle minds with mental gymnastics to support a ludicrous ideology, and then saturate those people in propaganda through entertainment while working them into tedious oblivion with soul-sucking jobs. The West is no longer a civilization; it is an insane asylum, ruined by its own “well meaning” policies that culminated in the radical individualism of 1968.
Let us be clear: the rot had been coming for long before that. If the appalling carnage of WW1 did not wake us, and the grotesque waste of the Civil War did not snap us out of the daydream, then surely the horrors of WW2 and the Cold War would not either. That was the case; we slept through those, living in grim terror and denying it with all of our might, only to find that when the Cold War ended, we had no purpose left and so there was nothing to keep us from rushing headlong into full socialism.
And that rot was explainable back to the origins of democracy, which as Plato warned us, is not so much a bad system of government as it is a system that makes people go insane. Without orientation and boundaries, purpose and meaning, they drift into an oblivion of solipsism, navel-gazing as they self-destruct. This loss of character also leads to a loss of genetic integrity, which begins the gradual degradation of the group in ability. We are already seeing genetic degeneration:
In sum: at one time the best of Britons (aged 12–14) could cope with items on the formal level and blended into a smooth curve of performance. Now these items are beyond many of them and register as a huge decimation of high scorers.
Piagetian gains at the bottom of the curve should not be dismissed as simply a phenomenon that offsets losses at the top. Consider the British results for Equilibrium and Pendulum. The decimation of top scorers means that by the age of 12 to 14, fewer British schoolchildren attain the level of formal operations. This means that fewer could think in terms of abstractions (without concrete examples), which limits their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. However, the fact that these losses are made up by gains over the rest of the “curve” means that far more of them are at the concrete generalization level. They are better at on the spot thinking (e.g. in playing demanding computer games). Their understanding of the physical world is limited to simple causation between two variables, but they can draw inferences from observations to make generalizations.
The Piagetian results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. They also reveal that something is actually targeting that level with special effect, rather than simply reducing its numbers in accord with losses over the curve as a whole. We have given our reason as to why the Piagetian tests are sensitive to this phenomenon in a way that conventional tests are not.
Massive IQ gains over time were never written in the sky as something eternal like the law of gravity. They are subject to every twist and turn of social evolution. If there is a decline, should we be too upset? During the 20th century, society escalated its skill demands and IQ rose. During the 21st century, if society reduces its skill demands, IQ will fall.
In a civilization where stupidity, insanity, and narcissism are the norm, there is zero reward for intelligence, self-discipline, moral character, and insight, so those things will die out, being replaced with the ability to be funny at the bar, the capacity to memorize large amounts of disorganized information, and a creative impulse toward new sexual positions. 1968 cut us free from reality; we have found, to our surprise, that what was left — ourselves — was not only not that fascinating, but a path to stupidity.