How quickly the "First World" can become the Third.  How fast people can pivot from sanctimonious, virtue-signaling hypocrites into realists trying to survive.  How ironic it is that this occurs concurrently with the assault on free-market capitalism and the abundance of wealth, food, comfort, and infrastructure that only it can provide.  And the simultaneous abandonment of standards and abasement of history, tradition, and culture that has led to chaos and destruction in too many of our cities.

We are seeing the tragic onset of all of these phenomena now, in Europe, America, and most Western nations.  Ironically — or perhaps not — it seems that extended periods of unprecedented prosperity sow the seeds of eventual decadence, decay, and diminution — if not outright destruction — by making people soft, lazy, and entitled. This seems to be a historical pattern, one exacerbated by today's technology and social media.  To paraphrase Churchill, if the free world dispenses with capitalism and the Western Canon, the world "will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."  (And we have seen far too much perverted science recently, especially as regards the plandemic, climate change, and the supposed existence of a virtually limitless number of genders.)

Another well known Englishman, the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, wrote a song titled "Under My Thumb."  Sadly, the vast majority of the world's citizens are now under the thumb of elites who could not care less about them — could not, in fact, disdain them more.

Alexander Fraser Tytler was yet another resident of the United Kingdom.  He was a Scottish judge, writer, and historian who was a professor of universal history and Greek and Roman antiquities at the University of Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century.  Tytler famously stated: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.  The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."

Tytler added, "These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From great courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

We are at step seven now. Let's hope we don't take the next step...into bondage...no matter how frequently and aggressively Democrats bid us to do just that.

Ronald Reagan noted that "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."  Some of us doubted that statement then, deeming it too pessimistic.  Now we've seen what can happen in under two years, from 2020 to 2022, and we realize that Reagan was an optimist.

Image via Pxfuel.