The kind of materialism that was the bedrock of modern civilization that emerged in the 16^th century and went on to foster capitalism as its most successful economic offspring, is deeply imperiled and is slowly vanishing in the 21^st century. Five hundred years is about as long as any civilization can last.

To take one example of this collapse, let’s  look at the concept of realism as it burst forth so tellingly at the start of that civilization in the art of Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Durer, and compare that to realism, and the idea of reality,  in our world today. For more than a hundred years the movie industry has been the dominant—and most lucrative—cultural achievement in America and most of the Western world, presenting reality as no other art form could do. But in the last thirty or so years studios have been able to manipulate special effects so effectively that movies no longer are the truth made tangible—they are capable of creating a fake reality, sometimes hard to detect.  And the video games of the 21^st century have gone even further, creating alternate worlds with varying degrees of reality but sometimes indistinguishable.  And now there is artificial intelligence, using superpowerful machines that can acquire millions of facts and images that can create any reality the operators want and in fact, like video games, make images that were indistinguishable from reality.  But more: AI can enable people to move between physical and virtual environments and with a few devices actually live in what was called the “metaverse,” a machine-generated “reality.” Globalistan: How the G... Pepe Escobar Best Price: $17.22 Buy New $20.83 (as of 07:20 UTC - Details)

And that is the definition of a civilization in terminal decline, one where realism is so unimportant that people are able to create their own world at a whim, and actually live in it, until they want to return to the other world.  The civilization has in a sense gone beyond reality; how long can it endure?

Usually in times when religion fades in normal society and nothing spiritual plays a role in life except for a minority—and is virtually scorned among the opinion-setters, top journalists, business leaders, and cultural pace-setters—people turn to materialism as the bedrock of their lives.

That has become even more necessary as the tendency in the West in the 20^th- and 21st centuries has been to try to destroy not only religion but the whole culture behind once acceptable norms, the tenets that created our civilization.  Boyd Cathey is one writer who has seen what has happened when the dominant political culture has succeeded in “pushing boundaries of what was once thought normative and acceptable.…It is engaged in a total war against the two millennial inheritance of our Christian civilization, which it seeks to destroy.”

In America, as hard as it is to believe, it is pushing an understanding of the world in which there are not two sexes but dozens…in which it is officially recognized that people of the same sex can engage in marriage to one another…in which racism and colonialism are said to be so deeply embedded in Western society that they are ineradicable… in which ordinary math and regular promptness are seen as evidence of “white supremacy”…in which a scholarly paper entitled “The conceptual penis as a social construct,” a clear spoof, is published in a leading academic journal without anyone regarding it as nonsense…in which tampons are required in male bathrooms in all school systems by a state education department…in which many businesses and universities have adopted a policy of “equity,” which means that everyone should have an equal share of everything, obviously impossible if desirable… in which national sports organizations find that it is correct for men posing as women to play in  women’s sports…and in which society argues that a man may become  a woman if he only says so.

Clearly a society without anchor, without coherence, without guidance.  And a society especially devoid of the kind of direction  that a sense of ethical norms, or spiritual beliefs, or religious counsel, would provide.  If a person is to wake up in the morning without something to believe in—a common ideology, an accepted ethos, an agreed-upon morality—then how does that person navigate through the day?

The answer that has generally been materialism in the form of material wealth and that is something that the Western world from the 19^th to 21^st centuries provided in abundance, creating by far the richest nations ever seen, with comforts of  life shared by the great percentage of  people, even many of the poor.

The capitalism of these centuries filled into the interstices of almost all societies,  becoming a part of their very cultures.  To take only one example: at one point in America in the 19^th century a few people decided that it should be the responsibility of schools to instill in children the tenets and values of capitalism, and public schooling was born.  First in Massachusetts, of course, the cradle of Yankee capitalism, and by the end of the century practically everywhere.  School was mandatory, with instruction filling up the greater part of every weekday, and the virtues of obedience, promptness, regulation, literacy, and just plain work being instilled in children for twelve years from the age of five.

It is a sign of our times that this essential part of capitalist culture has now deteriorated so far that nowhere in these states is it performing well, and in most places is in terminal decline.

The triumph of western capitalism succeeded well until the world wars of the 20^th century brought it to a shambles, and it took the efforts of the single rich country still standing to use its resources at the Bretton Woods conference in 1945 to patch it together again.  The method used, though, was bound to be a fragile one, based as it was on government-run central banks (for money-printing), debt, the dollar as reserve currency, and a World Bank.  It worked well enough for a half-century, particularly with America becoming a leading manufacturer, and it led to a system of fairly open world trade and cooperation.  What it also succeeded in doing, though, was greatly increasing the gap between rich and poor, which vast sums governments spent on curing poverty somehow did nothing to diminish. And those in between, both the working and most of the middle class, consistently grew poorer as the median wage consistently went down and inflation generally went up.

And into the 21^st century it became increasingly dependent on borrowing, which increased through the West in particular, amounting to an international debt of $313 trillion in 2023.  The wealth gap widened within countries and between, governments printed money, markets depended less on tangible assets and more on manipulation and market games such as derivatives and cryptocurrencies. Technology companies, completely unrestrained so as to encourage more innovation–essential to capitalism—grew to dominate markets worldwide and after superpowerful computers and smart phones (and “social” media) developed that artificial intelligence that no one seemed able to control. Such was the obvious fragility and weakness of such a system that the price of gold, always a measure of what the world thinks of the dollar, shot up to $2350 an ounce in 2024, and Russia and China were buying record amounts every year. Quick and Simple Chair... Fitzgerald, Audrey Best Price: $5.03 Buy New $9.22 (as of 07:47 UTC - Details)

At the end of its 500-year dominance,  the best that could be said for Western civilization was that capitalism was still in existence and troubled everywhere—and the future  was uncertain.

In November 2020, the countries that made up the new BRICS alliance—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—put forth a “Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership 2025,” setting a framework for how the alliance would solidify a real-world challenge to the West.   In 2023 it added Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (along with Egypt, Sudan, and Iran), both with strong economies, which agreed to trade and make payments in the renminbi, the overarching Chinese currency, making it a strong challenge to the dollar.  The future plan is to establish a rival world currency and effectively create the only rival bloc to the West that has ever existed. Along with the weakened dollar and slipping euro, the loss of cheap Russian liquid natural gas in Europe, aging populations and a shortage of labor supply, and NATO bogged down in Ukraine on the one hand, and a growing Russo-Chinese partnership in military and diplomatic affairs (along with the addition of important Mideast connections and access to oil) on the other, such a new currency looks likely to be enough to create a power bloc superior to that of the West.

What an ironic monument that would be to materialism, a rival currency to the dollar, and not in Western hands.

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