Glorious Eyes Tired, A Farewell to the Future of the United Kingdom

With predictions!

(The title is taken from William Henley’s poem England, my England )

This post feels risky, as most writing about ‘collapse’ tends to. Not in the least, because, despite numerous attempts by various authors to do so, the word 'collapse' still evokes images of immediate destruction, catastrophe, and chaos, as opposed to the reality, which is, historically speaking, a drawn-out process of dissolution regarding the form of a nation, not just its materiality. Likewise, what I’m writing of here feels risky because it’s admitting to a lot of things which tend to make modern people feel uncomfortable, in large part because such things inherently deny the reality of our social contract, which, from just after WW2 up until our present day has been considered, if not eternal and nigh-on-Platonic, then at the very least unconsciously unquestioned.

Western society has, by and large, been safe, orderly, and peaceful for as long as the majority of living Westerners can remember. We have had a historically unprecedented (and that’s an understatement) level of wealth, comfort, healthcare, education, and luxury. And, from this deep pit of materialism (both metaphysical and literal), we have become soft, spoiled, and subtly sociopathic. Fukayama may not have been correct about it being the literal end of history, but we certainly collectively acted as if it were. Everything was sewn up so nicely. All, we unconsciously told ourselves, one was to do was to go to school, get a job, find a spouse, get a house, have some kids, and then party away your later years on a cruise ship in the Med! So, what went wrong?

Nothing. Nothing went wrong, not really. It’s nice to say certain things went wrong, isn’t it? It is extremely, emotionally satisfying to state in retrospect, Ah, I see what went wrong, if only we had…But stating ‘If only we had…’ is like stating someone at the age of 85 died of a heart attack, as if without said attack, they would have just…kept on going. Alas, cycles are the law, and the United Kingdom (note, not Albion or Britannia) appears to be the first to truly enter its winter. I wrote about the specific, material signs of collapse roughly a year ago here, and things have only gotten much ‘worse’, so I needn’t jabber anymore about that. Only to say that, if one merely skims the news, visits a city, or compares their standard of living to 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, they shall, if they are honest, realize the UK has fallen very far. But is the death of a flower a ‘fall’? Is moving from Autumn to Winter ‘bad’? I don’t think so. It’s just the natural way of things, all things.

Quickly cycling back to that risky feeling of writing about collapse, I want to emphasize that I am approaching this in as neutral a manner as possible, emotionally speaking. I’m not sat here all gleeful, eyeing up the slow demise of my home nation. Nor, however, am I tragically mourning what could have been. If there was ever a philosopher I would consider myself a ‘disciple’ of, it would be Heraclitus, whose entire corpus can be summarized by the statements Opposites are one and Things change. The great irony, the great suffering of man, that which he struggles the most to accept, is that which is the mandatory part of his existence: change and death. Everything changes, everything dies.

---

Walking around the UK right now, as I assume is the case with many other nations, is subtly post-apocalyptic. No, not like Mad Max 2 (though, maybe 1) or The Postman. There aren’t raging urban fires, ceaseless riots, and lite civil wars (yet), but there certainly is an air of unease, of purposelessness, of general discontent. The UK isn’t materially post-apocalyptic, but spiritually, in the sense of soul. The felt sense that everything Good and Living has been reaped, the Elves have left, and there isn’t a single Form to hold onto. Yes, things function, cars run, prices work, stores are stocked, and people seem to talk, but something is up, like the fire of the people has been suppressed. At present, the UK is a nation that is just drudging along, weary, tired. It is the old, wise man of nations, dragged kicking and screaming from the local market to the supermarket, from the tavern to the nightclub, from the field to the office. There’s still something here, not forgotten, tucked away, that will fly again when Presence returns, that—Albion!—I shall write of in another post, for now…

The United Kingdom has collapsed; it just hasn’t caught up with the news. Like a stubborn old man in the early stages of the flu, dear old Britain keeps trying to get up, only to walk a few steps and collapse back down onto the sofa in a huff. This process isn’t far off the material, governmental one currently taking place, wherein one support is (subtly) pulled away to pay for another elsewhere. As far as I’m aware, there is currently, within the UK, a crisis for every known noun in the English dictionary. Seriously, try it: Migrant crisis (of course), steel crisis, wood crisis, hell, there’s even a cheese crisis! Look, it’s done, it’s crumbling down nice and slow, and there’s really no need to go on about it. But what exactly are the next, say, 5-50 years going to look like? With a focus here not on the material (because materialism is a change of repetition alone), but on the spiritual, the ideal, the form.

Any predictions regarding the future of a nation are, at best, going to be painted with broad strokes. There are far too many variables at play to be too specific without entering into fantasy enactment. However, one thing to pay attention to is the lens through which the future will be understood. This is to ask the question, what values are we culturally indebted to for our collective and individual character, which will also act as the structure of order going forward? The answer is a single word: money.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a capitalist talking about profit, a Marxist talking about profit, or a conservative talking about profit; the connecting thread is a reliance on GDP-brain as a means to understand what’s going on. The only value we have is money. The only means we have to understand why something is the way it is, how to change something, or whether something is good or bad, is money. Our ideal means of communication is solely economic. To understand is, for moderns, quantification alone. Which brings me to my first, broad prediction: Any party/leader who desires to sufficiently alter the future shall use solely economic lingo as their justification.

As the United Kingdom is little more than a ‘global economic (faltering) power’, one which has long since cast off its dying skin of culture and community, any appeals to the latter, not only won’t work, but will literally make no sense to the (economic) culture at large. To give but a few examples: The migrant crisis, which is the UK’s primary crisis (though still one of many), will not be ended (as we can see) via appeals to community or culture, but to the economy. Academics who wish to revive universities will not do so by defending education, but only by proving whether or not such degrees will make the nation more profitable. The housing crisis shall not be solved by way of appeals to shelter or castle, but will forever remain trapped in its Ouroborian knot of wanting house prices to eternally rise. Quality—Life!—is secondary to function, if it is felt at all. Money is all we understand, and so, for the foreseeable future (until Spring, in 200 or so years), it is the value of society.

In truth, this singular, monetary value system doesn’t spawn anything like ‘variety’, merely copy-paste material affirmations of its sole value (more money!), yet in everyday life, these appear as different. The affluent, middle-class lifestyle (the Western dream), the desire for the latest car, various consumer goods, private education, private healthcare, etc., all appear to be their own thing, yet all share the same economically valued root. As such, said root carries through all reverberations of the UK’s death rattle, including the soon-to-be-appearing fragmentation, secession, and factionalization.

As order falls into disorder, as centralized nations fail, the consistent historical and Darwinian response is to restore order as quickly as possible. In action, this looks like factionalization, that is, various groups of people who share a value, belief, or ideal, cohering to rebuild/build from that ideal, something orderly. Except, as previously stated, we don’t have any other values except money. All cultures, since we caught the consumerism bug, have slowly been homogenized into a single, amorphous, consumo-blob that understands nothing but addition, money, more, and more!

There is not enough religious faith (especially not in the Church of England) to cohere amidst the rubble, nor are there any ideologies remaining that hold weight outside of aesthetic LARPing, and the British culture (which I shall get to near the end) has no means to spar with the money spirit, for where money talks, culture walks. And so, in lieu of this, one of the first factions to arise from the ashes of the old, money world, will be…the middle class, or at least, the idea of what the middle class was. The middle class will become an alternative, materialist religion.

This new, religious form of the middle class will be distinct from the historical, actual middle class by way of emphatic lack. The new middle-class believers will have faith that there once was and again will be a time when a single income could afford a house, a car, and a family (many detractors will state this is nonsense!) They will have faith that there was a time when one did pleasant, comfortable things like watching TV and going out shopping. They will talk of holidays as near-revelatory experiences, and their speech will be almost entirely petitionary. Like all religions built from retrospect, their real currency will be a nostalgia for something just missed, and they will spout tales abound of consumption trips, credit cards, and package deals.

Other factions will arise from our modern rubble, of course, many that will be built atop foundations of distinctly modern notions of race and religion, albeit tainted by the money spirit—Whimsical yearning for Sunday morning Jesu disco dances, tales of olde relating to supermarket sales, and a semi-mythical appreciation for the first year of university as a form of hedonist pilgrimage. This fragmentation, inclusive of, if not actual, then at least desired secession of countries and even counties, will firstly lead to a hasty questioning of democracy, a questioning that will simultaneously redefine democracy along the lines of anocracy, therein keeping everything as ‘orderly’ for as long as possible. We are seeing this already, by the way, in the UK government’s ‘Parliament Petitions’ site, wherein if a certain petition gets X amount of signatures, it will be ‘debated’ in parliament. Of course, in practice, all this amounts to is 10 or so MPs vaguely discussing the idea for 5 minutes before moving on, or simply acknowledging the petition and then moving on. Many such realities regarding the inherent flimsiness of democracy aside, it is understood as a term of absolute fairness. The enacted reality of democracy pales in the face of its theory, which is that, somehow, though impossible and absurd, everyone gets a say. Of course, this cannot be the case, and so the name sits atop ongoing machinations of business, state, and power as a pleasant veil, just enough of a covering to alleviate billions upon billions of citizens’ fears, including the fact that deep down, right where it hurts, everyone knows they’re getting utterly shafted. The tension between the fairness of democracy and the fragmentation of reality, then, will, in time, cause an unavoidable contradiction, leading to the need for a re-framing. Democracy, as we apparently knew it, will cease to exist except in name. Within the next year, various mainstream news outlets will begin publishing pieces with titles such as ‘We Need To Have a Conversation About Democracy’, ‘Democracy, What Really Is It?’, and ‘Was Democracy Ever Real?’ — the conversation, the redefinition, the ret-con. Much like the term God in so many modern churches, ‘democracy’ will come to be hastily used as a justification for various ongoings within a certain locale, all in aid of kratos, without thought to spare for dêmos.

As the entire notion of societal progress, the entire value system of the Western world now, and until Spring, is based around profit, wealth, goods, and money, it truly does not matter to what degree the housing market, the stock market, wages, or production change, for such alterations are merely pithy differences in kind, and as we know well, there is no such thing as a happy rich person. With this said, if houses go up or down, wages stagnate or rise, stocks rise or fall, production triumphs or fails, there will be found complaint and agreement, defense and attack, support and reaction; all shall remain within the hold of the great god Economy, and his ever fluctuating duality of gasps and hurrays! Ne’er will we learn, for we have no other path from which to learn, that, in our misery, what we now have, we once wanted, and, in our giddiness, want what we don’t have. Nothing shall change. The things shall be blamed, and not the form exorcised. As such, Economic metrics will take on a transcendental form. Be it an app or a report, we shall collectively begin mistaking the map for the territory, the statistic for the reality. For it shall no longer matter that everyone we see and engage with is sensually miserable and practically dead, no! For it says here that happiness is up this quarter!

Speaking of the practically dead, the case is such that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet where both active and passive nihilism are concerned. And so, post death of God, as more and more values fall away, nihilism itself will, paradoxically, take on the two forms of active and passive as outlined by Nietzsche:

Active nihilism occurs when the realization that life lacks inherent meaning and objective values becomes a liberation rather than a burden. Those who embrace active nihilism view the absence of predetermined purpose as a blank canvas, an opportunity to construct their own meaning and values from scratch.

Passive nihilism represents the opposite response to the same fundamental recognition. When faced with the apparent meaninglessness of existence, passive nihilists become paralyzed by this knowledge. Rather than seeing it as an opening for self-determination, they surrender to what they perceive as an inevitable emptiness.

However, despite the supposed transvaluation of values that is somewhat part-and-parcel of the death of God, I wager that both forms of nihilism will remain tethered to the hyper-plastic foundation of money and economy. Whereas near all values other than money attend to various limitations, money is understood as all-encompassing for any direction, and a functional guide for anything and everything, with the inherent ideological content of money and the Economy being overlooked in favor of its seemingly self-explanatory and given pragmatism. This prediction will appear lame until both camps find their new, public, common definition: Active and passive nihilists will become distinct social factions. Heading into the future, then, there will arise (and admittedly, already is arising) two distinct classes of people that are actually under the same umbrella: The Active Econo-nihilists (AEN), who, upon (largely unconsciously, now) realizing life lacks inherent meaning, throw themselves into active consumerism, voyeuristic travel, and privileged nomadism, as a means to ceaselessly escape said realization, and, the Passive Econo-nihilists (PEN), who, upon realizing the inherent meaningless of it all will revert to (again, unconsciously) a form of modern asceticism, renouncing the god that is Economy. The former, AENs, will squander entire inheritances and fortunes (inclusive of selling property) to get just one more hit of the active, hedonist good stuff. They will take the rootlessness of the city-dweller written about by Spengler to its zenith, forsaking friends for travel buddies, family for destinations, and home for anywhere that can provide a momentary ‘Whoa, cool!’ Conversely, PENs—like Japan’s Hikikomori phenomenon—will be known by their absence. There will be a broad social acceptance that some people are just done, and were perhaps even born done. They will largely subsist off work-from-home grunt jobs, government welfare, or handouts from family members. The two poles of the future, where the modern world is concerned, are, then: materially burning out or materially lying down.

…and that’s about it for my broad predictions. They’re not novel, surprising, or really all that interesting. There are countless others to be found in the works of Spengler, Toynbee, Greer, Kunstler, Orlov, Turchin, and Sorokin (amongst many others). As people have naturally died before, so have nations; as trees have naturally died before, so have cultures, and, as seasons come and go, so too do gods, forms, and ideas.

---

You might have noticed that in the title, I am saying farewell to the future of the United Kingdom, farewell to that which has yet to arrive. The reason for this is twofold, and quite simple on both counts:

1. The future of the UK, for the next 200 years or so, as it heads into its Spenglerian season of Winter, will be much the same. Nothing new will or, as per Spengler, can be created. The Form is done. The Form is burned out. Much the same, then, but with that ur-value of money being dragged kicking and screaming into the dirt.

2. I’m simply not interested. Another news story relating to the economy. Another institution economically created to make things better—using econ stats as its metric. Another economic legitimization of natural destruction. Until this Form finally croaks, nothing can usurp the cold, cruel, and self-assuredly calculating god of modern value that is Economy (or, practically speaking, money).

What do you do, then, when you can’t ‘go back’ as so many are trying to do, and yet equally, there is no forward different from one’s known past? My ideas on that will come in time. For now…

…we walk amidst spiritual dissolution, where, in truth, even the most wealthy are paupers. Cathedrals could be erected, statues adorned, and festivals had, yet amidst the surface-level frivolities would hold an emptiness, a trying, a yearning, a felt sense that this doesn’t quite feel as we all want it to. Yes, yes, there are all those little material distractions that infect and cause rot to grow in even the most sacred of places, but even with this materialism aside, there lies an unshakeable, modern niggle at the back of each new mind, one that doesn’t allow true peace, or true settling. Until one sees this world for what it is—near nothing at all—there is nothing to be done. Until the scum has been washed from the stem, and the weeds cleared away, and all this tripe is seen for what it is—nothing! Nothing!—then what use? Until that ever-trembling feeling in one’s gut is acknowledged, is dealt with, until then…

---

Farewell, United Kingdom, love live Albion!