Paradigm Inversion

The younger generations of the United States and Europe were raised under a prolonged period of global geopolitical stability and cohesion, which — with the partial exception of Europe in the 99 years following the defeat of Napoleon — is unprecedented in the Modern Era. This has led us to take for granted not only peace and territorial sovereignty, but the security of all manner of maritime trade, supply chains, energy, internet access, satellite systems, air traffic, and the countless other forms of interconnectedness which define the world we live in today. The present deterioration of the rules based global order is, in some sense, a return to historical normalcy for mankind, much to the bewilderment of those who reveled in, and were whimsically inspired by the delusional post-history euphoria of the 1990’s into the early 2020’s.

Over the past 20 years, the Pentagon has in many ways reshaped American fighting forces to meet the demands of asymmetrical, low intensity counter-insurgency warfare in the Middle East, to the detriment of our conventional, large scale military readiness and ability, and even more so to the public perception of the armed forces at home. The abject decline of the American military during the Biden era was yet another blow to our capabilities, and perhaps could not have come at a more precarious time; having expended large portions of strategic munitions surplus in supporting the war efforts in Ukraine and Gaza over the past 4 years, we have opened ourselves to great vulnerability while lacking even a fraction of the defense industrial base requisite to replenish existing shortages, let alone provide the abundance of supply that will be needed going forward.

Reindustrialization will not be a matter of choice for the United States, or Europe, going into the new era. Those numerical arguments from the corporate class which spurred the Western industrial exodus — themselves informed in large part by those same euphoric delusions — have inadvertently birthed an ever shrinking security framework defined by global economic interdependency built atop historical tensions and hostilities which the West, in our collective naivete, became convinced to be a thing of the past, which would easily be wiped away through the organic, and sometimes forced spread of market capitalism, and liberal democracy. War is now on the horizon. You know it, I know it, our enemies know it too, and are judiciously preparing. As of recent months, it has been reported that the Russian defense industry’s production output has gone into surplus over its needs in Ukraine, and while still heavily dependent on outside suppliers like China for many high tech components, their ability to produce low cost munitions and drones — the implements which are inarguably defining the battlefield today — is remarkable, having done so with little encroachment on the greater Russian economy. China’s own transformation of late stands as the largest conventional military buildup undertaken by a nation since at least the early years of the Cold War, and possibly the years preceding World War II. It is utterly comprehensive, with the rapid production of warships, submarines, advanced aircraft, a sprawl of bases, a military administrative “city” near Beijing said to dwarf the Pentagon tenfold, hundreds of nuclear weapons, and efforts at advanced technological integration all in preparation for the invasion of Taiwan, and against the greater perceived threat of Western hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region. 

In the US, Baby Boomers, and to a large extent their children, Gen-X and Millennials, are blinded by a pernicious world view built on structural pillars of fallacy regarding human nature, and how it informs state interactions, power politics, world commerce, and war. Through rose tinted glasses (often of the wrong prescription), they look upon people and countries like puzzle pieces, as if there is some yet to be discovered order of assembly floating about the ether, an assembly of pieces which achieves absolute human egalitarianism, prosperity, and world peace. If there is a single generation bearing primary responsibility for the West’s present strategic, political, economic and social predicament of despair, it is the boomers. To the mental soundtrack of John Lennon’s Imagine, the zealots have now self righteously bumbled about in the woo woo fairy tale la la land of their own stubborn, altruistic idealism for six decades. And, I fear they will go down kicking and screaming, unrepentant of their complete ideological corruption. Is it a new phenomenon in the course of human history that those most well intentioned, kind hearted agents of change are those who fail most spectacularly?

Perhaps only if failure is defined by civilizational self destruction. Oh, wait…

In order to understand the roots of the boomers’ selfless delusions of idealism, it is necessary to first study the early post-war years of American preeminence. The global power, economic dominance, and cultural hegemony the United States ascended to in the period following World War II created the basic environment of domestic stability, social mobility, and widespread access to higher education ideal for the breeding ground of anti-Western ideology which ran pervasively through the currents of the free love cultural revolution of the 1960’s. Under the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Presidential Election, the assassinations, the race riots, the Kent State Massacre, and later Watergate, the fledgling young boomers and their precious ideas of peace and love were rocked by a successive pounding of violence and political chaos which divided the American body politik to the present day. By the early 70s, many of the counter-culture’s forbearers lay dead, and countless others awaste, strung out in dens of cocaine and heroin laced misery. The great party of the 60’s, in all its groovy, shaking, free-fucking excess, was over.

In its place a gritty darkness of disillusion, and two-faced contempt began to take hold. The boomers quivered at how the world could be such an unfair, malignant, and destructive place, how humans could be so vicious to one another for political gain or otherwise. Out of this bore the ideological binary which forms the basis of many boomers’ political and social views. Opposing thoughts are now tantamount to violence (but of course not in the form of left wing political violence practiced in the 60’s and 70’s). He doesn’t celebrate female promiscuity? He must be a misogynist. He doesn’t support [fill in the blank]… so he must be a racist. He doesn’t like immigration, he must be a xenophobe. He thinks gay couples shouldn’t parent children? He must be a homophobe. He supports the US military… he must be an imperialist. I could go on. To them, fitting inside any one of those labels spells social exile. The boomers are infatuated with applying labels to their ideological adversaries, and smearing them into a repugnant group of America’s most dangerous thought criminals. For the greater part of our century, this binary has prevailed over the basic functions of national political discourse, securing the downfall of anyone who dared publicly dissent to the domineering narrative of government enforced social harmony and utopian idealism achieved by the worst generation’s triumphant cultural project. 

The ideological bubble which boomers occupy may have burst in the immediate aftermath of its inflation, but the LSD induced hallucinations of its bounds carry on unscathed into the fire of the night and towards the eternal darkness of the grave. 

It is now December of 2025, and the jig is up. The West today faces existential threats at home and abroad which can no longer be ignored, and are largely of our own creation.