Although the USA (and the West more broadly) is in decline, the system will not collapse any time soon. Beyond that, there is practically no prospect of using democratic means to change its course beyond some superficial tinkering around the edges. There is also no prospect of overthrowing the current power structure through non-democratic means given that it represents the largest and best-funded security state ever created by humanity. You would be up against — almost literally — all the money in the world, and they can print more whenever they want. The combined workforce of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies is somewhere in the region of 200,000 personnel. NATO stands around 3.65 million active military personnel. In addition, there are around 2.25 million police officers. Dreams of coups or instant state takeover backed by a few tech bros and sold by the likes of Curtis Yarvin were fantasy literature sold, to use his own language, by the elves to the hobbits. Talk of civil war peddled by the Industrial Slop Complex from Tim Pool to David Betz is also absurd and hyperbolic nonsense. ‘But France is rioting!’, you cry! To which one must shrug in the Gallic manner and ask ‘when has France ever not been rioting?’ The current riots are smaller than the Pension Protests of 2023, the Yellow Vests of 2018, and vastly smaller than the May 1968 riots and general strike — none of which changed the power structure in France. Even the 2005 riots were probably more destructive on a kinetic level, and they didn’t really threaten the French state either. France is just ‘more riot-y’ than Britain or America. If you were to drill down into each of those protests, they mostly all boil down to people demanding more stuff from the state, not for its overthrow. Mass deportations weren’t and aren’t ever going to happen either, at least not on a scale that would change that much. Demographic change is locked in, and the ship has largely sailed. And sorry, Anakin bros, you’re not going to meme yourselves to power either: the Overton window is set top-down. My recent mini-series on CIA operations since 1947 should demonstrate to you just how much of the history you think you know was a managed process with very little left to chance. 2020s online culture warriors are, at least by a factor of ten, less organised than feminists in the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Anti-War New Left of the 1970s, the Black Panthers of that same period, and trade unions of every kind, each of whom were systematically contained, co-opted, infiltrated and then man-managed by the security state. The notion that current online activists, who are also likely at least a standard deviation below the intelligence of the groups I have just named, will achieve anything whatsoever against the current state apparatus is laughable. The more time people spend online, the more they are prone to come to believe in fantastical scenarios that at no point touch reality.

Given these facts, we can conclude that there is no political solution. You can’t change the system from within (because the system will change you, a.k.a. the Iron Law of Oligarchy), and you can’t change it from without (because the system will obliterate you). Many people find these statements ‘demoralising’, but once you internalise them and tune out the general noise of political chatter, most of which is simply noise, you will find yourself profoundly liberated. Instead of pumping yourself with the constant hum of low-level anxiety and cortisol produced by involving yourself in this hyperreal soup, you can instead concern yourself with your own life, health, wealth, mental and spiritual well-being, and other such immediate circumstances. You are in no sense locked in mortal conflict with random blue-haired feminists who you’ve never met or, indeed, with African Americans or Muslims or any other group. There is a great amount of money and a large industry dedicated to getting such people to scream at each other like a never-ending, hellish Piers Morgan thumbnail which has come to life (which, thinking about it, is just an episode of Piers Morgan). But all this shouting does nothing. If you’re someone in their early 20s who spent their teenage years plugged into all this — even if you were watching yours truly — I can only apologise if the internet has robbed you of your youth or the semblance of a healthy social life or love life. But, of course, it’s never too late.

Once you make peace with the fact that almost all politics is fake and futile, the world becomes a brighter and more peaceful place, full of opportunities. I am frequently attacked as a nihilist or merchant of despair by people who spend every waking moment posting and looking at political pornography of violence, riots, rapes, and so on. These are people who pump themselves up full of false bravado over this or that political project, who then cry ‘it’s so over’ a week later, only to do it all again. Theirs is the ‘demoralisation loop’, not mine.

What is ‘nihilism’? It’s a belief that life has no meaning or purpose and that there are no absolute values or moral or truths. I do not hold such a philosophy whatsoever; but what I do tell you repeatedly is that you will not and cannot find values, morality, truth, salvation, meaning, purpose or indeed any other ‘good’ through politics. Politics is the ultimate false prophet and ultimate surrogate activity. You cannot participate ‘in politics’ if you value truth or, indeed, anything at all. This is one reason I have insisted that I have never been part of politics and remain ‘just as scholar’, since to become involved in politics in any respect is a little like trying to get into a tub of cow dung without getting it all over your face. Politics can do almost nothing but taint you. This is because politics itself is a kind of nihilistic vacuum that will turn almost anything good into its inverse. Those who are looking to politics for the answers are perhaps doing so because of some other absence. Furthermore, the notion that if the whole cannot be saved then ‘all is lost’ is also, in some respects, ‘democracy brain’. Besides, if you cannot save yourself or your loved ones or your friends beyond that, then what hope for saving tens of millions of others? Especially since most of them do not even want to be ‘saved’, and in most cases, have no idea that they ‘need’ to be.

Politics trades on a permanent sense of urgency. Slop rightists love to paint the scenario as being akin to The Lord of the Rings in which hordes of orcs are attacking and a voice like mine is akin to Denethor II telling the men to abandon their posts. This is not an accurate analogy, and I think that it is telling that it must be cast as fantasy. It also asks you, the reader, to cast yourself as an active participant in a novel or movie. The truth is that you are not an active participant in the political process, you are – at best – a passive consumer of it, and – at worst – a total irrelevance to it. I’d encourage you to develop a mindset that sees the political backdrop in which we must all live our lives as scenery or as a general soundtrack that simply ‘is’. Yes, it may somewhat suck that ‘our scenery’ takes the form of being Men Among the Ruins, but then again, it is only scenery. Consider for a moment being a man in Rome in 600AD, or, perhaps, standing in the rubble somewhere in Europe in 1945. With a little perspective, you can see we – and I say that in a generational sense – have barely tasted adversity or hardship. Once you are able truly to be at peace with this, then your actual sphere of availability, in other words, those aspects of your own life that you can control and have a genuine impact and influence on, will come into sharp focus. Fewer of your activities will be of the ‘surrogate’ variety. The ‘Ruins’ that form the backdrop of our lives can also play host to new possibilities, and new realities, if only you dare to dream them – you just can’t get there through politics.