We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
Grant writes about the The Fall of the Roman Empire, in his book by that title. He focuses on “the decay wrought by clinging to the alluring fantasy that past success guarantees future success, without any nasty sacrifices by the ruling elites.”
"Enmeshed in classical history, all [the Roman] can do is lapse into vague sermonizing, telling other Romans, as many a moralist had told them throughout the centuries, that they must undergo an ethical regeneration and return to the simplicities and self-sacrifices of their ancestors.
There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.
This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.
This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions,
there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all."
“Roman elites in Gaul were still writing letters to one another complaining of the breakdown of everyday life right up until the system collapsed.”
They don't unite truth with faith.
"Christians have been duped into being fearful, timid, and neurotic. We walk around as if we are the most ignorant of all people, unable to cope with basic social stigma, even though we’re the only ones who have the Truth, and the Lord Almighty has our backs against anything that would threaten us. Somehow, we can’t seem to bridge the gap between believing the miracles and promises we read in the Bible and applying it real life; thus making it an empty “religion” rather than an explosive, reality-shattering revelation about how everything truly works."
-- Terry Wolfe
Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
--Majid Rafizadeh
The history of the welfare state is the history of the state's savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state's intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state. The dire effects ...
