The Death of the West: Act I
March 2026
The West is as a dying man in his bed. The nation-state no longer exists, entirely usurped by the state – a new state. He lays in dormant stupefaction at the confusing state of his old and new selves. Occasionally he will have violent throes, grasping at what he once was.
What is the nation-state? What was this man in his younger virile years? The word “nation” comes from the Latin “natio”. Its primary meaning was “birth”, as in our current word “natal” for being in utero. However, thus flows its alternate meaning: the people, the tribe, the “nation”. A single people connected by blood. For all time until quite recently, the nation was roughly synonymous with the state because the two never existed apart from one another. The Franks created, lived in, and ruled Francia, now France. The Bavarians did the same in Bavaria, the Rus in Russia, and the Chinese in China. This is where our current confusion on the word “nation” comes from. Just as the Kurds are a nation without a state, the United States is a state without a nation. The past one hundred years has seen the dissolution of the nation-state in the West entirely. The United States has never been “one nation under God” except for the flash of a second at its very English inception. Yet the American “nation” was nothing more than English diaspora who could do nothing more than create a faux English-styled government of a bicameral legislature over counties under the guise of Roman enlightenment. The United States, now, is an amalgam of nations under one state. As the millennia progressed, and individual nations grew from tribes to kingdoms, thus was born their individual “states”. The nation-state, therefore, is a government of a single people, a nation, by its people, for its people. The two existing in a symbiotic way, given that the state in this configuration is an extension of the nation.
What, then, is civilization? While the Franks, the Britons, the Germans, the Spaniards, all exist as individual nation-states, they share an overarching civilizational tie. Despite their uniqueness in culture, or even government, their shared understanding of the world broadly shows an intimate connection among them. Many of these, not so coincidentally, are governmental descendants of the Roman Empire. Perhaps also not coincidentally are their shared ties to the Indo-European people.
Act I: The Usurpation of the Myth
Every country, naturally, has its founding, which serves as its foundational myth in a greater mythos. This mythos of critical events and pantheon of its heroes weave a narrative which forms the individual’s mind around a particular understanding of history which justifies the state, its philosophies, and its actions both retrospectively and prospectively.
The overthrow of the Roman Kingdom in the 5th century BC served as part of its foundational myth. By way of the former kingdom being the republic’s antithesis, the philosophy that the origin of power in Rome rested in the people dominated. Even well into the imperial period, the phrase “SPQR”, “the Senate and the People of Rome”, was used. Likewise, the circumstances of the founding of the American republic serve to foster a philosophy of its own origin of power. This philosophy justifies the actions taken, necessarily implying them imperative, to oust the British from the colonies. The foundational myth rests in the minds of all denizens as propagated by the state for the interests of its continued existence, even if the way the state manifests has changed with time. It creates an otherization of those who do not abide by the imposed narrative, such as monarchists. Romans and Americans alike could always look back and say: “At least we’re not under that. We have now an evolved understanding of the origins of power.” Times change, though, and states adapt. As the operating ethos of the state changes, its foundational myth must be harkened back to for its own self-justification.
The ever-growing mythos continually justifies the state, while also confounding it. Natural rights were defined hundreds of years ago, yet the American conception of rights, etc. has evolved. While the American loves dearly the founding fathers and what they stood for, the American simultaneously is fervently proud to not live under what the founding fathers created. They clearly stood for a very different understanding of citizenry and rights; one which is at odds to the current American understanding. The old America was “exclusionary” by several metrics and “racist”. E pluribus unum! … unless that plurality contained anyone who was not white, male, and an owner of property, only about 6% of the population at the time of the United States’ founding. The franchise has been enlarged and the concept of the nation eroded. The American may look back on its early form and say: “At least we’re not under that. We have now an evolved understanding of the origins of power.” Just as the American looked back, and still looks back, at monarchy with distaste, which he does by necessity as justification for the change in the state, the American also looks back at his own country with a certain distaste and self-otherizing. This, in itself, should imply that there has been a massive assumption into the American foundational myth.
It is an important irony that to uphold the America which its founders created would be seen as extremely detestable by the contemporary average American. It is necessary the American hates the old America. This justifies the state. It affects the mind to look back on history and see that it is delineated by periods where, in reality, there were none. Caesar’s contemporaries saw continuity in the state where we see a sharp turn of history. The usurpation of the American myth has been a slow process. None of this is to imply any right or wrong on this evolution, but to illustrate that the conception of the American state and society, its underlying philosophy informing the view of the individual and his place, despite the weight the American places on the individual from the beginning, has changed – the new probably reaching its full maturity at the end of the Second World War. While the American may look at the current state as the fullest realization of the philosophy of its founding, clearly there necessarily would have been a deeper, larger worldview undergirding the founders’ conception of the individual which allowed for things that the current American would see as distasteful. These would have been, and were, swept away from the public conscience so as to make room for this change. How could the public accept these changes, even with discontent as late as the 1960s, without having removed this undergirding? The founders were steeped in Classical philosophy, albeit coated in the veneer of the Enlightenment, in which the Platonic and Aristotelian view of the “citizen” was that of a higher order than the commoner. The current conception of the American mind would be impossible without having first removed this and other understandings.
The mythos is built over time. To question the American state prior to the Civil War is much applauded because it necessarily opposes the current state. To question the old America is increasingly popular on many fronts. On the one hand, it is seen as something to be dismantled by the Leftist. The supposed “Rightists” fight this, though, while simultaneously themselves also detesting the old America and its exclusionary ways. It is an entirely lost worldview, probably lost to time and never understood by the average person again. The monarchists were the enemy. Now, a monarchist may receive a confused look while the fascist receives utter contempt. This, again, points to a large assumption into the American mythos. “Well, they’re both opposed to American democracy,” one might retort. Yet, only one receives contempt. Further, fascist parties are banned across many Western countries and monarchist parties are left untouched. The monarchists were the enemy at the founding of the United States. Their natural opposition is clear. The incessant pointing, crying wolf almost, at fascists likewise illustrates that a new “founding”, per se, has occurred. A new piece of narrative weaved into the American mythos.
This usurpation of the myth serves to rewrite the American mind and imprint a view which serves the current state that, notably, did not serve the former America. It is necessary the American hates the old America, left and right. The Leftists are logically sound in their own views and the pseudo-Rightists are confusingly convinced. The usurping of the myth, the mind, was necessary to usurp the nation and the state.