Andrew Breitbart once said politics is downstream from culture. What he meant is that in our modern society, culture determines our politics, not the other way around. And he may be right.
Consider the nonsense and tragedies in our lives today: mass school shootings, insane 7th century cultists running around beheading everyone they can find, live steaming suicides on social media, social justice warriors executing anyone who doesn't think as they do, unchecked illegal immigrants causing crime, disease and general mayhem across the land, racists calling for the extermination of white people, and other dystopian events. It's a mess out there.
As Talking Heads' David Bryne famously asked, "Well, how did I get here?" How indeed. Let's look at that. Was it the non-existent white privilege in western culture and philosophy that caused all this? Many in the regressive left will tell you so. Perhaps it was toxic masculinity, as the shrill harpies in the so-called feminist movement will enthusiastically attest. Or was it guns in our culture, maybe? But no, it was none of these. Those are merely scapegoats of a cancerous mindset in our culture that worships oppression and victimhood. And that is not unintended, I might add. The regressive left is intent on bringing down the structure of western civilization, and we're now tasting the fruits of that poisoned tree.
The root philosophy in western thought is self determination. Self reliance. Self responsibility. Belief in the guidance of a higher intelligence; a higher good. And these are the principals that the left has been - and still is - attacking and seeking to destroy. They seek to replace our ancient, traditional value system with anthropolatry, broadly defined as the worship of man as god.
In approaching and defining society in this way, the first casualty of western thought is the demise of ethics. Regressives scoff at the notion of an intrinsic "good" or of a rival "evil." In their view, the self is center, the higher good is communal. Aleister Crowley put it succinctly: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." Those who would take exception to this stance are thereby "oppressors" who must be defeated, and the anthropolatrists - the regressives themselves - are "victims." Not a very inclusive philosophy, is it?
The next casualty is responsibility. If there is no higher good other than self, then there is no need for ethics - the acknowledgement of good and evil (or "bad") - and thus no need for "discipline." So for decades, the left has frowned on discipline as an affront to individual freedom brought on by authority figures - parents, teachers, cops - the ever present oppressors. What has been the result of that?
The result is a generation or more of people who cannot cope with life as it is. They can't deal with the crises in their lives, or rejection, or an opinion differing from their own, or restraints on behavior. It's someone else's fault they feel ostracized, disenfranchised. They become insecure in themselves, and then fall into self loathing.
Is it any wonder they need pharmaceutical support? Or that they take up weapons to exact revenge from innocent and unknown folks, for some demonic imagined slight? This lost generation, called snowflakes in part because of their delicate psychological condition, may never come to reality. They live in a dark world where nothing is fair, where the deck is stacked against them. They don't realize only they have the key to their own happiness. But in anthropolatry, there can be no happiness; unfairness is perpetual and needs to be punished. That's a pretty bleak outlook.
But to reverse this regressive thinking, we as a society should take a lesson from this failed experiment in total permissiveness, and ensure that life's lessons - good and bad together - are not lost, but exist to be experienced, to build character, resolve, respect, and yes, self sufficiency. Ironically, the character traits and pursuits the regressive left despises most are the very ones needed to correct society's current unsteady course.
So what is needed is more God, guns, white western culture, and toxic masculinity. Oh, yeah. And discipline.