Moral Disorder
1st March 2024
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended. (Also available on Apple Podcasts.)
Since I liked yesterday’s post so much, I decided to do a show on the topic, but from a historical perspective. Since the end of the Cold War our ruling class has gone off the rails and it is not a coincidence. We have the combination of two factors that are at the heart of this sudden shift into madness. One is the generational changeover and the other is the end of the Cold War moral order.
The show is about that last bit. It turns out that “winning” the Cold War was the worst thing for the West. The Russians and to a lesser extent the Chinese came out of the experience of losing the great ideological war better than they would otherwise have been if not for the collapse of communism. China is the biggest economy on earth and Russia is a fully modern country of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, the post-Cold War experience for the West, especially America, has been a descent into madness. The inflection point is the 1992 election when the Boomers officially took over and began to shape the post-Cold War world. The trouble is they had no idea what they were doing. They did not understand why the West won the Cold War and lacked the historical understanding to see their own folly.