What causes the collapse of the West?
The collapse of the West is inevitable
The collapse of the West is inexorable, and today we’ll talk about why this is so.
The Western World has been in steady decline for at least a few decades, but in the last several years it has accelerated rather rapidly.
It’s hard to point at a single moment in time or a singular event and say “That’s where it started. That was the beginning of the end”.
- Was it when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard?
- When people started and then kept electing the lesser of two evils?
- With the rise of social media, Islamic terror, and massive increase in debt, concurrent wars across the world, or the “refugee” crisis?
Check out my new book, available on Amazon!
Get the bookWhen will it collapse?
Nobody knows for certain. It most likely won’t be tomorrow, next year, or even in the next ten years – but it could.
The West takes up a vast region of the world with very strong and old roots.
It won’t go down easily, but down it will go regardless.
Western society is probably the greatest achievement of mankind in many ways, which makes its collapse all the more tragic.
It might go down around 2040 – 2050, but it’s impossible to accurately predict because there are so many factors at play.
What is certain, however, is that you and I (unless you are already pretty old) will almost certainly experience the collapse of the West.
And if not fully, at least its ramping-up-phase.
It has been collapsing for several decades now and it looks like the West is on its last legs.
Europe will almost certainly collapse faster than the US and Canada, but they won’t be far behind.
Read more about When the West will collapse in this article.
Now, is the West a decent place to live right now? Certainly, especially compared to shitholes like Afghanistan or North Korea.
Of course, for anyone coming from such countries, moving to the West is definitely an upgrade.
But that doesn’t mean things are great for people currently living in the West.
And it certainly doesn’t mean the situation will not escalate rather rapidly, turning the once-great Western World into an economic and social death trap.
Will other countries not also collapse when the West falls?
Those who are closely linked to the economy of the West will definitely feel its impact, but not nearly as much as the actual Western countries will.
For example, do you think nations like Paraguay or Peru will be heavily affected when France or Germany goes down? They’ll hear about it, shrug, and then get on with their lives.
I’ve done my best to research this matter as thoroughly as possible, and from all the information I can gather, the inevitable decline of the West is due to roughly 5 major factors:
Dozens of books could be written about any of these topics, and they are vastly complicated and complex issues.
And hundreds of other, smaller factors are also at play.
I’m not a scholar, and you don’t have time to plow through dozens of books, so I’ll do us both a favor and give you a brief overview of each of these factors.
Remember, these are just meant as a background story, to provide some context for the premise of this site: actually escaping the West.
In today’s article I will tackle the first two great causes, and in the sequel we’ll talk about the others.
An untenable economic welfare system based on debt
Let’s start with the most glaring and probably most disastrous reason why the West is doing so poorly, and will continue to do so at an ever increasing pace.
Why do nations fail? Very often it’s because their economies fail. And most Western countries are in debt, often massively so.
As I am writing this article, let’s look at the rough national debt of:
- The United States of America: $26 trillion
- The United Kingdom: $3 trillion
- France: $3 trillion
- Germany: $2.8 trillion
- Canada: $2.4 trillion
- Australia: $598 billion
Those are frighteningly huge numbers, and they’re increasing every day.
The United States is by far the most indebted organization in the entire history of the world.
While debt has indeed been a factor ever since its inception, the rapid growth and the sheer size of the current debt can and most likely will have a profound effect on its future.
And what’s worse, how can it ever get better?
The economists in charge seem to think that the way forward is to just keep on printing money, further diluting the already increasingly worthless currencies.
This causes inflation.
Inflation, if you didn’t know, is a hidden tax. Every year, the price of products rises slightly.
Today, you might have to pay $5 for a Happy Meal, but next year that could be $5.20.
Chump change, you might say!
But small, steady and repeated increases become a huge problem after many years.
Your money is worth less and less as the years go by.
The purchasing power a dollar today is a fraction of what it was decades ago. And it’s going down, down, down.
This is why people who save money get fucked hard by inflation.
Saving money all your life, hoping to retire with a cozy nest egg is a silly dream.
You might amass a relatively large sum of, say, 1 million dollars, which is still a considerable amount of money today.
But will it still be, in 20 to 30 years? I doubt it.
Retirement
Let’s zoom in on the word “retire”, and how flawed the entire concept is.
First off, retiring should only be for people who do not like what they do for a living. If you love what you do, why would you ever fully retire?
You can cut down on the amount of work you do, certainly, but why quit completely?
Secondly, if you rely on a pension, a retirement fund, you are betting your future on the good-will, benevolence and prosperity of your nation.
Which, as you can deduce from the premise of this site, is something I think is very unlikely to be tenable in the future.
Let me paraphrase Harry Browne’s seminal book “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World”:
The only security a government-funded retirement offers is an illusory promise to use other people’s money to take care of you.
Not an iron-clad strategy by any means.
Retirement funds are a massive expense for governments, and more and more people will start to dip into them.
The average life expectancy goes up, so someone who is “entitled” to a pension will keep draining it for longer and longer periods of time.
More and more people will need to work for more and more years of their life in order to keep this system going, but it’s inevitably self-defeating, even if the younger generations will keep putting up with it.
Money will be needed, money will be printed, and money will lose even more value.
Welfare
Welfare is a very nice utopian moral claim, a dubious triumph of Western prosperity, but it has gone too far.
Far too many people abuse the system and get paid for doing nothing.
While this is definitely a big problem in the US, it pales in comparison to the pickle the more socialist European countries are in.
Not only are their citizens receiving massive welfare packages for not working, for their retirement, and their healthcare, this monetary magnanimity extends to their “come one, come all” immigration policy.
Randy “Mad Genius” Gage put it this way:
“The perfect citizen for a government is a needy one, because the more you need the government, the more controllable you are. As a creative, thinking human being, you are up against a mass of people who want something for nothing and governments around the world who want to give it to them.”
Welfare is a vicious circle, because the more people come to rely on the government’s assistance, the more likely they are to vote for politicians who endorse welfare.
These politicians will then have no choice but to cater to their base and keep the welfare system going.
It cannot end, it gets worse every year, and even if the government tries to reduce the vast scale and disastrous impact of this system, it sometimes gets met with stubborn and shortsighted resistance from the populace, like a drug addict whose quick fix gets taken away for his own benefit.
For example: In November 2022, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Madrid in Spain to protest the government’s potential privatization plans regarding their healthcare system.
Instead of realizing that their current system was untenable in the long run and something had to change if the nation were to survive, people just wanted their free ride to keep going, long-term consequences be damned.
Honestly, I’m not an economist, and I cannot explain the monetary crisis we are heading towards much better than this, but I’ve read plenty of research that backs up my rather pessimistic view.
A factual summary
Western governments are spending more money than they have and are able to squeeze from the tax payers (on wars, welfare, policing and “improving” the world, global aid, etc), and thus at some point the entire system will crumble.
And even if this massive debt bubble does not explode in our faces, can you really argue with these factual statements about Western economies?
All of this points to the sobering fact that the West is long overdue for an enormous economic crash, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in a very long time, perhaps not ever.
Sure, its economy might recover, due to using the same techniques that brought it about, but the underlying issues will not go away, and it would only be postponing a much worse collapse later on.
Political polarization and civil unrest
Politics is one of the most divisive topics you can imagine.
Put two people in the same room, and they could get along swimmingly on a variety of topics.
Even if they don’t agree on everything, most people would be happy to agree to disagree on their differences.
Before (we’re talking more than a few decades ago), people from opposite sides of the political spectrum (whatever that means) surely disagreed on many issues, but very rarely did these disagreements turn into violence.
Is that still the case today?
The US
Let’s start with the United States, where the division and vitriol between the “left” and the “right” has never been bigger.
This is funny and ironic, because they’ve actually never been more in tacit agreement on most large issues.
Both sides favor a big, strong government, censorship, more taxes, suppression of the influence and freedoms of people whose opinions they don’t agree with, and so on. Like Harry Browne put it:
“Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.”
It’s not uncommon nowadays for couples to break up because of political differences (no matter how small), friendships to get ruined, people to receive daily death threats (credible or not) and just face massive hostility for a difference of opinion.
And that’s all politics is: opinions.
The civil and healthy way to deal with standpoints you disagree with, like: “I think drugs should be legal” or “Abortion is a woman’s right”, should be something like:
“Okay. I disagree with your opinions, but we are both adults, so let’s agree to disagree. We, and similar minded people, vote for whichever candidate represents us best, and abide by the results.”
Or, as I would advocate, to not get involved in politics whatsoever and leave the West so you aren’t hindered by them.
Not: “You disagree with me? NOW YOU MUST DIE!”.
Or get fired, cancelled, protested against or actually harmed.
Yes, there has always been a division between political parties, and nowhere was this division more apparent than in the US with its ridiculous two-party-system, but never has it been so extreme.
Several factors could be blamed, such as Donald Trump (by far the most divisive POTUS ever, no matter if you support him or not), cancel culture and political correctness, but as far as I can tell, the underlying culprit here is social media.
I won’t go into details about the vicious cycle of echo-chambers, but suffice to say that social media are a cancer upon society and their benefits do not outweigh their heavy cost, of which the extreme political polarization is only one element.
Not only are the American people more divided than ever, their differences stray from the theoretical discourse more and more into the realm of actual action and violence.
Just to name a few examples: Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Trump supporters.
These are all groups with strong political beliefs, an expressed and unreasonable hatred towards the “other side” and a tendency towards rioting, destruction of public and private property, and generally making the world a worse place.
This is called civil unrest, and it will become more and more common for Americans to have to deal with regular rioting and vandalism, for whatever bullshit reason.
A side-effect of this growing unrest and violence are increasingly armed police forces.
Gone are the days when a town could be managed by a few police officers with some handguns.
Nowadays, police forces are sporting riot gear, automatic rifles, tear gas, water cannons, bazookas, and even tanks.
They are basically turning into paramilitary forces – also known as militias.
Do you think this will alleviate or exacerbate the current level of civil unrest?
For example, in 2020 hundreds of protesters took over entire city blocks in the city of Seattle for multiple days and dubbed it the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”, following violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement.
This was part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and came about in protest against police brutality against African Americans, calling for a defunding of the police.
Another issue is the “states” part of the United States.
It has always been a habit of labeling states either red or blue, denominating which political faction it predominantly votes for.
But as the political chasm widens, several states are making more and more noise towards secession from the country and going their own way.
Currently, that’s all this is, noise.
As the years go by, however, it might turn into something more, and this is a possible scenario of how the collapse might play out.
We’ll tackle this in another article.
Canada and the EU
In Canada, political polarization and civil unrest are much less of a factor at the moment.
Canadians are rather placid in that respect and while there will always be outlying violent groups, it doesn’t seem like Canada will experience nearly as much civil unrest as the US will, but it isn’t immune to it by any means.
As an example, in early 2022, the country saw a series of protests against some pandemic restrictions, the so-called Freedom Convoy protests.
This blocked vital trade routes with the US, and dealt a significant blow to an already struggling economy.
Europe (specifically the EU), on the other hand, could very well tear itself apart.
Much can be said about this topic, but not much is needed.
Even if we put aside the growing political unrest within countries (way less extreme than in the US, but still present), we need only look at Brexit to catch a glimpse of the future.
The United Kingdom separating from the EU was only the first big step towards its collapse.
Currently, a few other countries are seriously considering this move, such as Poland and Hungary. And in most other countries, there are political parties advocating the split.
Civil unrest in Europe is often politically motivated, and more often than not it has to do with the third great reason for the collapse of the West, the mass immigration of barbarism.
We’ll talk about this in Part 2 of this article.
Check out my new book, available on Amazon!
Get the book
Wow just found your content. Totally agree.
If you want to look, which countries are eager at failing just look at this page at Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax
The west is ending and I am leaving this sinking ship soon, too.
Hello Octavian! Glad to hear we’re on the same page here. Interesting article you’ve shared, thanks!
Good luck escaping the West, you’ll be better off for sure.