Civilisation collapses as LA burns

By Niall McCrae

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/

January 14, 2025

TO describe the scene as Armageddon is no hyperbole. For those who have never visited Los Angeles, the posh neighbourhoods are well known from popular movies and songs: Bel Air, Malibu and Sunset Boulevard. A local man happened to film these exclusive Beverly Hills areas just before the fire in which the Pacific Palisades were destroyed. 

The devastation seems to symbolise something much bigger: the fall of Western civilisation. California would be a fitting site for such a human tragedy: it is home to the most affluent people in the world, from Hollywood celebrities to Big Tech innovators, who have emphatically supported the Democrat party. State Governor Gavin Newsom has presided over extreme woke policies and Net Zero puritanism but the LA blaze, perhaps, suggests that we have passed the point of no return.

For Doug Casey, author of Crisis Investing, Western civilisation is certainly collapsing. In an interview on his International Man website, he explains that ‘it’s unique among the world’s civilisations in putting the individual – as opposed to the collective – in a central position’. Rational thinking was enshrined over mysticism, enabling the rise of science, technology and principled governance.

I wrote on the demise of individualism back in 2019, before the contrived pandemic, when the greater good was enforced with draconian lockdown and coercive vaccination programme. The long march of individualism comes to a juddering halt, my essay on the Human Events website, argued that while much of the developing world is on a liberalising trajectory, the West is reversing towards collectivism. Younger generations are being raised as pawns of the state, while they are fooled by the convenience, comfort and safety of the digital matrix.

As Casey remarks, civilisation always collapses from within. The rot appeared in the First World War, although ‘termites were already eating away at the foundations, with the writings of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx’. Creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was significant: whereas the dollar was previously the equivalent of a twentieth of an ounce of gold, paper notes became receipts for money which did not physically exist. People lost control of the value of cash in their wallets. Fast-forward to quantitative easing, inflation, enormous debt and a looming financial crisis and there is no certainty of us keeping our homes, whether we own them or not.

The average Americans’ standard of living has dropped since their government abandoned the dollar’s last link to gold in 1971, as the fiat currency has devalued capital and discouraged saving. The state determines the value of assets, and stability has been overridden by speculators and central bank manipulation. Money is made from any economic turmoil, as in the global meltdown in 2007-2008, when the international banking set prospered.

As Casey says: ‘One hundred years ago, the richest people in the country – the Rockefellers, the Carnegies – made their money creating industries that actually made stuff. Now, the richest people in the country just shuffle money around. They get rich because they’re close to the government and the hydrant of currency materialised by the Federal Reserve.’

A cashless society will put banks in total control, and Casey regards this as the death knell of Western civilisation. ‘The government will be able to monitor every transaction and payment. Financial privacy will literally cease to exist. In a primitive society, in your little dirt hut village, anybody can look through your window or pull back the flap on your tent. You have no privacy. This was one of the marvellous things about Western civilisation – privacy was valued, and respected. But that concept is on its way out.’

According to Casey, the metastasising state is undoing Western morality. ‘What keeps a truly civil society together isn’t laws, regulations, and police. It’s peer pressure, social opprobrium, moral approbation and your reputation. These are the four elements that keep things together. Western civilisation is built on voluntarism. But, as the State grows, that’s being replaced by coercion in every aspect of society.’

Casey warns that the West is going the same way as imperial Rome. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the more corrupt a society, the more the laws, but the relationship is not always in one direction. Tony Blair’s administration passed plenty of laws as it sought to destroy the forces of conservatism. 

Similarities with the fall of Rome are poignant: self-absorption of the elite, falling birth rate and uncontrolled immigration. Late emperors looked on the masses with contempt. Hitherto leadership was by a priestly class, paternalistic but dutiful towards their charges. Today’s professional-managerial class enjoy privilege and power, and feel that they deserve it regardless of the worsening experience and outcomes for the people below them. 

‘Diversity is strength’ is the progressive doctrine, but it is patently false. The liberal West was built on social cohesion, and so its destruction is achieved by undermining it. When people cannot relate to their neighbours, or trust them, they will turn to the state for their needs. Enlightenment values are subverted by Cultural Marxist identity politics, with favoured minorities and stakeholders.

Covering the Californian fires, YouTuber Antony Daniels featured Mel Gibson, who criticised the leadership failures of Newsom (he should spend less on hair gel). Reading between Gibson’s lines, Daniels mused on the possibility that LA is being cleared for a purpose. The state coffers, emptied by the cost of tackling the fires, will miss millions of dollars in property taxes. But for years California has been pushing people out, replaced by a tidal wave of immigrants with no rights or property, while decriminalising drug abuse and shoplifting.

In the 1980s the hip-hop band NWA rhymed furiously on the rich-poor divide in LA, and the police force that maintained it. But the lyrical provocation of Straight outta Compton was relatively harmless, compared with the damage wreaked by the white Californian establishment. The fires are not the only cause of the LA clearance. For those spared by the flames, insurance companies will refuse to cover their properties. Consequently, banks will therefore not lend money, and existing mortgages will be revoked. This is becoming more obviously a controlled demolition, to ‘build back better’ for a two-tier humanity of a predatory class lording over a majority reduced to neo-feudalism. Some of the richest residents of Los Angeles are discovering, to their horror, which side of the tracks they will be on.