What comes next? Let’s look to history. Find me:
A. Times when a declining empire was taken over, declined into insignificance, or fell through a combo of the above plus war/disaster, things went back progress wise a few hundred years and gradually built back up again
B. A declining society that pulled itself back from the edge, in any way at all.
I can think of multiple examples of A, and none of B. Happy to be corrected, would be nice to have an example.
Societal rot cycles go one way only. Societies never roll back progressive ideologies .
The best thing that could happen to us right now is a few very hard years, or a shock event that causes societal conditions to worsen materially to the point there’s a purge of degenerates. Degeneracy is a disease of complacency and hard times have no tolerance for it.
What comes next is bad.
Rome's an easy one, actually. Their decay was not a straight downward slope of degeneracy, corruption and barbarian invasions, in fact there were points where not only did it seem the Romans were getting their shit together but they actually pushed the degeneracy back so hard that they forestalled their collapse by decades or centuries. And of course, one half of the Roman world survived 1000 years after what most people think to be the end of it all.
Consider that in 268 AD, the empire looked to be on the verge of collapse. The Crisis of the Third Century was thirty years old at this point; the empire has been wracked by thirty years of insane hyperinflation which had destroyed the value of Roman currency; the crippling Plague of Cyprian; multiple losing wars with the Persian Sassanid Empire; invasions by much better-organized and deadlier barbarians than Rome had faced in 300 years such as the Goths, Juthungi and Alemanni; and constant civil war between craploads of usurpers (including, at one point, burning through six emperors in one year - 238, aptly nicknamed the 'Year of the Six Emperors') which also caused the collapse of Rome's internal trade network. Emperor Gallienus, persisting after his father & predecessor Valerian had been captured by the Persians in the Battle of Edessa (where Rome's eastern army was destroyed) and skinned alive, had managed to trim the number of usurpers he had been facing in his chaotic reign from 9 to 2; but those remaining 2 had torn away 2/3rds of the Roman Empire - Postumus ruled the Gallic Empire in the West and Zenobia had the Palmyrene Empire in the East, leaving Gallienus with the center (Italy, the Balkans, North Africa, and Anatolia). Then he too got assassinated and his entire remaining family wiped out by traitors.
Two years of even more chaos later, a fairly obscure cavalry officer named Aurelian had ascended to the purple. Within five years he purged corruption, defeated literally every single one of Rome's external enemies from the Juthungi to the Sassanids, and brought both the Gallic and Palmyrene Empires back into the fold. Yeah, he also got murdered at the end of those five years (a corrupt official, fearful of being punished for his deceit, lied to trick the Praetorians into assassinating him) but thanks to him, the Roman Empire (at that point almost 300 years old, and Roman civilization overall was almost 1000 years old by then going back to 753 BC) would last another 201 years. For perspective, the US isn't much more longer-lived than that at 240 years as of this year.
A little over 40 years later, the Roman Empire had been split into four pieces with four Emperors - the Tetrarchy, devised by Diocletian (the guy who finally officially ended the Crisis of the 3rd Century about a decade after Aurelian's assassination), a state of affairs which seemed like a good idea at the time that'd give the Romans flexibility enough to handle threats on a front stretching from the Rhine to Syria but (unsurprisingly in hindsight) had gone to shit. A young whippersnapper from Britain named Constantine shut that shit down in about 12 years, famously crushing the Praetorian-backed Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge under the sign of the Christians' Most High God (the same Christians who had just endured ferocious persecution by Diocletian a few years prior) in 312 and then grinding down his Eastern Roman rival Licinius over another decade. He also purged corruption (notably finally destroying the Praetorian Guard which had murdered numerous competent Emperors before) and set Christianity in ascendancy.
Just under sixty years after the death of Constantine the Great in 337, his dynasty is no more. The Valentinianic dynasty which succeeded it had a good start but couldn't handle the stress of the Goths and various usurpers/assassinations, resulting in Rome being sundered once again and the West backsliding towards paganism under the usurper Eugenius (a nominal Christian), puppet of the Frankish warlord Arbogast who had disposed of his predecessor Valentinian II in a 'suicide' and hoped to engineer a pagan resurrection with the help of the corrupt Senate. No matter, Theodosius the Great (who had previously rescued Valentinian II from another usurper, Magnus Maximus, in 38-8 came to crush Eugenius, execute the usurper and drive Arbogast to
actually kill himself, aided by the incredibly competent and loyal half-Vandal general Stilicho.
From 408-410 the Empire was divided permanently into East and West under Theodosius' underage sons (who both later turned out to be incredibly inept rulers in their own right), Stilicho steered the West through multiple crises as the guardian of the young Emperor Honorius but was assassinated and his family massacred in a conspiracy led by the senator Olympius, and the Visigoths sacked Rome. Then Constantius III stepped up to fill the void left by Stilicho, killed Olympius, killed the British usurper Constantine III, and crushed the barbarians. Come 455, Honorius' nephew Valentinian III had murdered his own best general Flavius Aetius (the guy who defeated Attila) in a plot cooked up by the Senator Petronius Maximus, who then usurped the throne only to fail horribly and die as the Vandals sacked Rome again; two years later, Majorian steps into the void and almost reunites the Western Empire in four years before being murdered by his treacherous lieutenant Ricimer and the Senate. And as said before, the Eastern Empire survived another 1000 years after the West fell (about 15 years after Majorian's assassination), to boot. You get the picture.
Tl;dr I know shit looks bad right now, what with a pooner having just shot up a Christian school and the trannies getting a holiday less than a week later, on top of so many other transgressions already that it's difficult to keep track. But things can still get much, much worse - and they can also get better. (I do not believe we are at our Third Century Crisis equivalent yet, for starters. But it might come later this century.) Biden's handlers, Trudeau's, the WEF, Soros, the globalists - they're powerful but they aren't omnipotent and they don't know what the future holds with an absolute certainty, no matter their pretensions. Wokism looks powerful now, the wokies are having a great time jailing and torturing their enemies and brainwashing or murdering their children now; degeneracy seems overwhelming and all-consuming now, and millennial voters can't stand the thought of baby-killing and raping kids in the bathroom being restricted (much less banned) to the point of voting Democrats in even as the economy collapses and the collective West is routed from Afghanistan after 20 years with nothing to show for it. But the same could be said of paganism under Diocletian and Julian the Apostate and Eugenius, and look what happened.
Maybe we'll all be dead thanks to a nuclear war by 2040, except for the robo-brain of Klaus Schwab and the unfortunate 500 million or so souls he has enslaved for the rest of eternity. But maybe, just maybe, we might also get lucky, and instead a Rittenhouse/Sandmann ticket will sweep into the White House that year on a tsunami of both popular revolt and the bayonets of the enlisted military men (draped with the innards of their woke officers) to purify the US of corruption and degeneracy, bluntly inform blacks that they have 24 hours to cease being niggers or their ghettos will be burned to the ground by the USAF with them, hang every CCP spy, enact TTD, etc. and then even look outward to reclaim the rest of the crumbling West from globalist claws as Aurelian once did the Roman West and East. Or something like that, Idek. Perhaps rainbows are warranted for this outlook, but stranger and more fortunate twists of fate have happened to pull civilizations from more dire straits in the past, you know?
