It has often been said that rampant drug use, the glorification of abortion, violent movies and video games, pick-and-choose gender identification, sanctuary cities, and other modern ills are responsible for the destruction of Western civilization.  But are they?  Not really.  They are symptoms, not causes.

Symptoms are just manifestations of an underlying disorder and are clearly visible to everyone.  A cause, however, is subtle in nature, so much so that it’s hidden from the mind of the average low-information person who relies on the media to do his thinking for him.

Even “alarmists” among us do not really grasp the cause of the collapse of Western civilization.  Much to the delight of the Fake News Media, they repeatedly predict a coming revolution, but such a revolution never seems to make its appearance.

And with good reason — the revolution has already arrived!  But unlike the collapse, which is still in progress, the revolution is over.

How is possible that we had a revolution and few people even noticed it?  Because it happened while Americans were watching Monday Night Football, guzzling their Miller Lites, and feeding their arteries Big Macs and fries.  They simply ignored the whole event, because to comprehend it would have required thinking, and thinking takes effort.

In all fairness, however, it was easy to ignore, because it was a quiet revolution.  To be more specific, it was a quiet moral revolution.  And it was the success of that moral revolution that triggered the demise of the Western world.

In a very literal sense, the ethical standards of a civilization constitute its moral foundation.  When I use the word moral, I’m talking about a standard of behavior that forms a system of ethics, i.e., a culture’s principles of conduct.

Thus, when the moral foundation of a civilization is destroyed, the civilization collapses.  The civilization may disappear entirely or a new civilization, with a new system of ethics, may displace the fallen one.

The moral revolution that shook the foundations of Western civilization involved a 180‑degree shift in the generally accepted standard of behavior for the people of Western nations.  Gradually, some of the most cherished values and beliefs of the Occident’s glory days have come to be considered immoral, while some of the worst vices are now accepted and even encouraged.

As a result, we now live in a world turned upside down, meaning that, figuratively but morally speaking, most people are standing on their heads!

An enormous societal upheaval like the West has undergone must begin very slowly if it is to have any chance of succeeding.  As I pointed out in Part I of this article, the beauty of gradualism is that the citizenry is never jolted to the point of threatening armed rebellion.

Instead, as one generation passes on and another one replaces it, creeping changes become the status quo, and anyone who challenges the new status quo is labeled cruel, ignorant, unpatriotic, or just plain crazy.

Most important, at the very heart of the moral disintegration of Western culture was a shift from the sacrosanct belief in individual rights to a belief in majority rule.  In other words, right became whatever the majority said it was.

In a democracy, this concept is defended on the grounds that it promotes “that which is best for the greatest number of people.”  In point of fact, however, the notion that one group of people has a right to commit aggression against another group based on the premise that “the majority is always right” is without moral justification.

In early America, majority rule was called by its proper name — “lynching.”  If a group decided someone was deserving of its wrath, it simply used brute force to do whatever it pleased to that individual.  It was, however, illegal, because it was done without government sanction.

That was the key — government sanction.  And it was the granting of that sanction that was the catalyst for the moral revolution.  Government sanction paved the way for the legalization of lynch‑mob rule, or so‑called majority rule, which displaced individual sovereignty as the moral lynchpin of Western civilization.

The chief problem with majority rule is that a political democracy is too fragile to withstand human greed and envy.  Inevitably, greedy and envious people — both voters and politicians — begin to figure out how to use majority rule to their advantage.

Voters test the waters and, much to their delight, find that they can plunder their neighbors by simply voting to change the laws that were originally put into place to protect people’s lives and property.  As to politicians, they figure out relatively early that they can achieve political longevity by appealing to the greed and envy of voters.

In the early stages of the moral revolution, only hard‑core nonproducers (e.g., politicians, thieves, and the terminally shiftless) fully understood the possible implications of a political democracy.  With the passage of time, however, more and more producers caught on to the game and went the way of the nonproducers.

In other words, basically honest, hard‑working people ultimately gave in to their human weaknesses and chose to fulfill their desires through the ballot box and government force rather than through productive labor.  This caused a natural acceleration in the evolution of both the revolution and the collapse.

Just as the Founding Fathers feared would happen, as more and more people surrendered to their ignoble instincts, they increasingly fought one another for control of the lynching apparatus (i.e., the legislative process).  This in turn whetted the politician’s appetite for still more power, because he could see, clearly and tantalizingly, that the promise to use his legislative power to lynch every citizen’s neighbor would bring him the necessary votes to attain and hold public office.

Unfortunately, it got worse — much worse.  In that vein, in Part III of this article I’ll be discussing the rise of the immoral anything-goes society that accelerated the demise of the West.