Lifeboats

at least find a floating headboard for your lady friend

Have been kept away from Substack by a family illness that’s going badly, but I want to talk about this comment from last week, posted in response to my argument about “horizontal diligence” and social resilience in an era of declining institutions:

I don’t propose taking caring of the people around you as a solution; I propose it as a way of limiting the harm of an inescapable societal decline, or at least a long societal downward cycle. The ship is sinking, and it will sink. But you can build lifeboats, and gather the people who will share them with you. You can make some health in the surrounding sickness, and what you build locally can help you survive whatever comes next.

With regard to the societal trajectory, I assume by this point that most people have seen the exchange in the Tennessee legislature between Matt Walsh and Rep. John Ray Clemmons, so I’ll just link to the video rather than embedding it here. Walsh opposes gender-affirming medical treatment for children, including surgery; he’s one of those anti-child mutilation extremists who think it might be a bad idea to cut off a teenager’s healthy genitals, if you can even imagine thinking that way. Hearing Walsh’s testimony, Clemmons demanded that Walsh explain his credentials. Did you go to medical school, sir!?!? So, to summarize, a legislative hearing went something like this:

Witness: I think it’s wrong to mutilate children.

Legislator: I beg your pardon, what are your credentials to make that claim?

A society in which nominal elites, elected to the legislature, respond to this claim this way is…not on an upward trajectory. Widespread suffering is in our future, and there’s no possibility of a pain-free denouement. But you can gather some people around you and opt out personally, to a degree that won’t free you from the societal trajectory but can limit your own social injuries.

As for the political trajectory, I don’t believe at all that the Red Guards are going to put us all in the camps. I certainly think a good number of them aspire to, and Robert Yoho points to a Soviet-sounding discussion of political disagreement as a psychological disorder.

199. THE PSYCHOPATHS ARE ELIMINATING THEIR OWN DIAGNOSIS FROM PSYCHIATRY'S DSM MANUAL

But that kind of Dark Triad societal DARVO madness is becoming more absurd, not more powerful. The world is working less; things like a growing number of train derailments and disturbing safety incidents in commercial aviation point to the need to wander back toward reality. The toddler gibbering of the woke and lost political class looks dumber and dumber:

Citizen Free Press @CitizenFreePres

Pete Buttigieg makes no mention of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio while fielding questions at the National Association of Counties this morning: "It couldn't be a more exciting time for transportation."

We’re in the downward cycle, and I don’t claim otherwise. Build something around you to get you through it, and work toward the upward cycle that will come as manufactured ruin becomes too obvious to continue unabated.

More later. Have been struggling to keep an eye on the world as I look inward at family.