Dark Age Mindset: Embrace the Great Decline
Every so often I find something so useful I have to write about it. Especially now, when it feels like everything is falling apart. Or maybe this is just one of those days. When the lows are low. And I don’t mean just in my life and finances but in the world around me. American life. Western civilization at large.
Then I find and read something that inspires and steels me like what @aHomelyHouse wrote:
“I truly believe that the optimal way forward is embracing a Dark Age Mindset. This means:
- Embracing Decline as Opportunity. When the foundations of familiar institutions are shaken, it's a signal to us to stop investing so much effort and dependence on those things, and create new alternatives that actually serve us as people and communities.
-Cultivating Resilient Character and Faith. The folks who did this before were not weak, fragile, or wishy-washy. Get hard.
-Preserve and Transmit Knowledge. If institutions that have historically been responsible for this (looking at you, media and schools) are failing, then it's another opportunity for us to step into decentralized roles as stewards of cultural patrimony, preserving literacy, classical texts, and traditions and educating our own children with this heritage to ensure continuity in a potentially post-literate or tech-degraded world.
-Pursuing Self-Sufficiency and Simplicity. "Ora et labora" was the motto that drove that age forward and upward. But they showed us that simplicity needn't be minimalist or ugly; some of the most durable and beautiful things ever made came from these times.
-Reject Dooming and Be Proactive. No despair. Instead, simplify your processes, improve your skills, and meet your challenges vigorously.
-Foster Creativity in Adversity. Necessity is the mother of invention. But the human person is not merely mechanical; we need beauty, music, good stories, living rituals, significance... Cultivate these things especially in the face of monopolized artificiality.
-Focus on Local and Subsidiarist Action. Subsidiarity is handling matters at the smallest, most local level possible; create "schools for service" (as Benedict did) that prioritize family, home culture, nature, and education over distant, failing institutions. The more responsibility you take up over all the spheres of your living experience, the more you step into sovereignty.”
Source: https://x.com/AHomelyHouse/status/2062255360233086987
I find the words empowering. Become a local warlord (literally and figuratively). Make things better locally in your neighborhood. Decline is a choice and even if things around you are breaking, you can still find things you can control and affect. Never lose hope. You can still thrive during dark times. Be the candle in the dark.