Against Change/2

 

Philips Square seen from The Bay on 17 October 2009

    

One of the most existentially bleak things I've seen are television commercials promoting online gambling. These commercials extol the great fun to be had by solitary gambling on one's IPhone. In the commercials the actors portraying happy gamblers are all laughing and having a great time by themselves; even when shown in a room full of people, each person is alone, isolated, gambling on their IPhones; whatever the gimmick is to get them to gamble it's working--advertising works--as soon as the gambling begins these people are transformed, suddenly they are all laughing and happy. This scenario is what the gambling companies want you to believe, this is the lie they are promoting. These gambling companies would promote solitary drinking if they could get away with it, maybe that’s the next big thing.

    There are moral values for a reason; life is good when there are moral values, life has a structure by which people can live. We can see the result of our Western society's abandonment of morality; the result of society’s liberalization of the last fifty years has made society, and our individual lives, worse; it's become a free-for-all of arguing and "do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else" attitude. We have fewer relationships, our families are scattered, we are isolated and alienated from other people, mental illness is rampant, sexuality is confused, and our children have been sacrificed for liberal reforms. Liberalization proceeds to a dystopian world of amorality and the inevitable loss of free speech. The children are not doing well in this new world that has abandoned morality. Liberalization, open mindedness, was ostensibly intended to make society more equitable, to remove injustices, to improve society, and to decriminalize non-victim crimes, but it didn't work out that way.

    What did abandoning moral values achieve? In the past we never had homeless people sleeping in the streets, we never had widespread drug use, and the same applies to access to pornography, gambling, prostitution, and so on. Go back fifty years. People had moral values, rules to live by, that supported society and emphasized people living a moral life; they were the underpinnings of a good, decent society. Today everyone has an opinion, there is a cacophony of disagreeing voices; people are arguing, opinions matter but facts don't matter, it's all subjective and up to personal opinion. It's better to say nothing or the progressives will attack you, and there is no going back. We laugh at morality, we barely remember that people once had moral values, and we smirk when morality is mentioned—grin and smirk, grin and smirk—. And if you express anything in public that is  critical of the new morality, the thought police will fine you, disagreeing is a hate crime; it's a crime to disagree with the currently fashionable opinions of others. When our moral values were denied, abolished by government to buy our vote, then almost immediately society began to collapse. 

    Today, good people are silenced by fear of being attacked, and society is increasingly looking like some dystopian facsimile of what we once had. We're told good and bad don’t exist, it’s all relative. The new morality does not include free speech; it is a morality of censorship. No one wants to return to oppressive values, to misogyny, to prejudice or racism, but what we have now is not working. What we change is at a cost; no one has gained anything by discarding the moral foundations of society in favour of the possibility of a better society, it didn't work; gambling is one of the most addictive activities and I suspect the IPhone makes it even more addictive, like doom scrolling, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pornhub, and the rest of "social" media hell.

Edited: 04, 05 March 2026

Our decline, our lack of confidence

The once prestigious Queens Hotel at the corner of Peel and St-Jacques;
built in the 1890s and demolished in 1995

Is our Western society in decline, are we moving towards collapse? Oswald Spengler certainly thought it was. 

-o-

In East and West (1963), C. Northcote Parkinson writes about “… the Western loss of confidence…”, and that this loss of confidence is a symptom of our decline. We aren’t only afraid to celebrate our victories, we’re embarrassed by them, we reject them and apologize for being who we are; now we agree with our critics and say “we must be terrible people.” It’s all topsy-turvy, what was condemned in the past is now the norm and what used to be the norm is considered reactionary and condemned; our culture is even considered dangerous and needs to be replaced. This is a failure of belief in ourselves and a lack of confidence in our history and culture. To quote, yet once again, W.B. Yeats’s famous lines,

            Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Once, we were building a nation, building a railroad uniting east and west, defeating tyranny in two world wars and Korea, now we’re arguing about gender identity and disputing the value of our history; we have no great national projects but we have many people trying to pull down what we have built. We have separatists in Quebec who say that Canada is oppressing them and yet they oppress Quebec's English-speaking population; no one says anything about this, the politicians have no integrity, they want the French vote and to hell with what is right and what is wrong. And Alberta has made itself one of the least liked provinces with its complaining about the federal government; Albertan separatists have no idea what they are getting themselves into. In Canada we have no unifying national project, or values, that distinguish Canada and make it a place of the future. Now we’ve surrendered to feelings of guilt and appeasement to people who have no self-doubts; this lack of confidence seems to be a symptom of a collective depression; it’s just what Yeats was saying in “The Second Coming”. I don't know how we can restore our confidence, the Western world has become a society of arguing voices, agreeing with nothing the other side has to say, and even hating the other side; and there aren't just two sides, there are many. Until we have confidence, and vision, we will continue to decline. But right now we have no politicians who have vision or courage or integrity.

            

The Collapse of America

 

Graffiti found on the site of the now demolished Motel Raphael,
12 September 2016.

Read The Collapse of America, on Internet Archive.

1. Donald Trump's betrayal

Donald Trump has betrayed Canada's long-term relationship with the United States, it was a relationship based on mutual respect and shared values, in doing this Trump has betrayed a close neighbour and friend. Trump has decided that Canada should be annexed by the United States and become their 51st State. He thinks this kind of statement, of annexing a neighbour, is normal, that it is nothing out of the ordinary. A country’s sovereignty is sacred and, yet, Trump wants to destroy our sovereignty, and he presents this as though it is for our own good, but he presumes too much. Trump thinks that he can take, steal, grab, make a deal for whatever he wants; he also wants to annex Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza. On whose authority does he want to do this? "On the authority of the United States of America” Trump says, as though this means anything to Canadians, to Denmark or Greenland, to Panama, or to the people of Gaza. We have never seen anything like this, but it reminds us of Hitler's invasion and occupation of Poland, Hungary, France, The Netherlands, and other European countries in the late 1930s; it reminds us of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The statements by President Trump that Canada should be the United States' "51st State", that our prime minister should be addressed as "Governor Trudeau",  shows such contempt and disrespect for us that it threatens our present and future relationship with the United States of America; he has betrayed the higher ideals on which the United States was founded.

2. Donald Trump’s lies                                                

Donald Trump’s lies, and he lies constantly, including that the United States subsidizes Canada and there would be no Canada without this subsidy; it's all lies, it's all a fabrication by someone who has no adherence to truth. Trump’s lies compound and make worse his aggression on Canada, it is exactly Hitler’s Big Lie; this is frightening because there is little defence against a liar who has political and military power. Trump’s ostensible reason for imposing tariffs against Canada are punishment for allowing fentanyl and illegal migrants to enter the United States from Canada; in fact, one pound of fentanyl entered the United States from Canada as opposed to 1,580 pounds of fentanyl from Mexico (www.USAfacts.org); less than one percent of illegal migrants to the United States came from Canada as compared to the number of illegal migrants from Mexico (National Post, 04 February 2025). Canadians have been nothing but positive, supportive, and  a true ally of the United States; we are their greatest trading partner, we are the best neighbour they could have and now Trump aims to destroy Canada and our relationship with the United States. This is the evil one might expect from an enemy, not an old and trusted friend. 

3.  Armed invasion of Canada

It is true that Canada has not spent as much as we should have on our military, but even if we had it would not have prevented the possibility of an American military invasion of Canada. This is all the doing of Donald Trump. If you ask ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, about the American’s invading Canada, as I have, you are met with disbelief. But allow me to entertain this possibility: I doubt such an invasion would take long, our citizens are not armed, our military has been weakened by underfunding, and resistance by average citizens (most of whom live within a two hour drive from the Canadian-American border) would be futile against the world's greatest military force. Montreal is about an hour’s drive from Plattsburgh, New York; Vancouver is near Bellingham, WA; Toronto can be reached from Buffalo; Windsor from Detroit. There is little we can do against such an enemy. My four-part discussion with ChatGPT on an American invasion of Canada will appear here beginning next week.

4. The Collapse of America

We thought Donald Trump was a populist, we didn’t understand that he is, apparently, a fascist and that his election was part of a worldwide new fascist era. Our conflict with the United States is solely the result of Donald Trump’s narcissism and lies, it is not with the American people. Trump, a man who lies and has no respect for others, a narcissistic bully, is a symptom of America's moral collapse.