The title tells it all, but—of course—I have a bit more to write.
We are somewhat realistic about the inner-city results of disorder in modern human communities. Gangsters come to local power. Thuggish young men begin to form gangs which fight for control of the distribution of heroin and other drugs in a few blocks or more. They fight for control of street-walkers in parts of their city. They begin protection-rackets and demand payments from merchants and bookies. Yes, even bookies and that puts them in a struggle with established gangs, even the fabled mafia which perhaps had softened itself by taking on a limited role when they had first formed during an era of weakening but still substantial moral order.
Human nature is human nature. During periods of moral disorder, men and women of disordered moral characters are to be found in banks and the ranks of politicians and bureaucrats, on Wall St and even in the Pentagon. Higher-level crime might be more sophisticated and sometimes less violent, at least during the years of prosperity and highly profitable companies ripe for embezzlement and other forms of thievery. But gangsters make money according to their particular talents and opportunities. To take just one example, there were some gangsters in the CIA at the beginning around 1950, or at least men willing to play the role or to work with the Mafia or with, say, anti-Communist warlords of rather low moral standards.
I could write much more about heroin manufacture and smuggling and of the CIA involvement in such matters during those years in which even good men committed terrible crimes, very destructive of Western structures of order, because they thought such was justified by, even made necessary by, the struggle against Stalin and Mao and various others. It’s perhaps more informative for me to point to the work of Bryan Sykes and other geneticists researching various existing or deceased populations; there are also many historians and anthropologists and others working the same territory from a slightly different angle. They’ve discovered that men with a talent for organized violence leave a disproportionate number of descendants as a result of their success during periods of disorder. Tens of millions of men in Central Asia carry a Y chromosome which almost certainly comes from Genghis Khan. There is allegedly an emperor of ancient China who left even more descendants. Similar statements, though with a few millions and not tens or hundreds of millions, can be made regarding an ancient High King of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who left many descendants among the Irish Gaels in Scotland and Ireland. (In Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, Bryan Sykes writes about this and even about an “Irish” founder of several important Scottish clans who turned out to have had a Scandinavian Y chromosome.)
Of more recent origins: a majority of Y chromosomes in modern Mexican men are of Spanish origins though other genetic evidence indicates nearly all mothers were native Americans.
These genetic facts speak more eloquently than mere tales of conquests and of wars of the brutality and exploitation practiced by men who are skilled in the arts of organized violence. They kill some men and wipe out the family-lines of others by providing such opportunities to their own sons as to allow them to greatly out-reproduce commoners. And we think that powerful and ambitious men really respect the lives and property of others? Some do, but `some’ ain’t `all’. Many of the most powerful and ambitious men in history, including some Popes and other religious leaders, have been gangsters. Gangsters don’t always have the freedom to act according to their inclinations; likely there are many men in history who succeeded in honest and moral ways but would have been willing to act as gangsters if necessary to reach their goals.
Gangsters are very prominent during periods when civilizations or lesser regions of settled peoples present soft targets. During periods of moral disorder, even a civilization or lesser human community well-ordered in the past will present a soft target for both externally born and internally born gangsters.
Oddly enough, and as was true of the ancient warlord-emperors we know from the Bible and other sources, these violent and thieving men seem to have played a role in building the ordered structures of human communities: as some historians say: “Stationary bandits protect the sheep against the nomadic bandits.” This is because they are shearing and slaughtering the sheep in a sustainable manner.
Yet, even the most brutal of great conquerors and other nomadic bandits have their virtues, if only those of warriors supplemented by those of political founders. The systems built up by the violent warlords of the West, and others of a more refined moral nature, over the past thousand years and more are breaking down. The nomadic bandits are in the saddle again, though not always truly nomadic—some might be better labeled as `parasites’ or `fern bar bandits’. In recent generations, some barbarians have grown up in the midst of the great cities and they are itching to take advantage of disorder, stealing with the pen or with knowledge of the law or by violence if so inclined. The structures, including those created by such violent and brutal men as William the Conqueror, are breaking down—at all levels.
Reality. Very disedifying for many, including those naive Christians who think that the gentle Jesus of Nazareth overcame in this mortal realm the brutal aspects of reality shown in the historical works of the Old Testament and interpreted, in some sense, by Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Didn’t happen. We still live in the same world as Uriah who was abandoned in battle to die at enemy hands—at the orders of King David so Beloved by God. Why? So David could cover the great sin he’d committed by impregnating Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah.
Our world is one of huge and greatly complex political and economic and religious communities, but it’s still the same—in some ways—as that world of brutal Semitic warriors fighting for control over such tiny regions of the world and over such small piles of wealth. It’s also a much different world if only because many of the gangs seem to live at least partially inside the power-structures we inherited from a world that no longer exists and the members of the various gangs are sometimes embedded in those power-structures of governments, banks, corporations, and the Catholic Church. It has become possible, for example, for gangsters properly positioned, to carry out large-scale criminal conspiracies against the current powerholders, gangster or not, and against large numbers of private citizens and the various human communities. This might involve the destruction of an elected office-holder or a false-flag event or a pseudo-terrorism event of a scale making possible large speculative profits on the stock-market as well as the ensuing profits from criminal wars. It might involve the looting of gold vaults or maybe the looting of gold being transported by other thieves or by smugglers. MH-370 was flying the largest volume gold-smuggling route in the world, Kuala Lampur to Beijing, and might have had some tons of vaguely described cargo; doesn’t prove anything but it raises questions and points to similar opportunities for men of low moral standards and a high taste for risk.
I most certainly am not saying that all of this is done by gangs inside the CIA or the Russian FSB or such governmental agencies of the world, though I suspect there are revolving doors between private gangster organizations and the CIA/IMF/FSB/etc, just as there are revolving doors between the money-center banks and the SEC and other regulatory agencies. And we have to remember that Wachovia Bank wasn’t just fined for laundering the money of Mexican drug-lords, it also had more than $100 million of drug-smuggling profits seized; the banks and corporations might well have their own gangsters of the violent sort and not just the sort who steal through hiding profits or manipulating their own stock and the stock of other companies.
Acknowledge the stink of moral disorder and remember that Oxford- and MIT-educated financial experts, engineers, and bureaucrats will be better at carrying out Deep-State and false-flag criminal conspiracies than the illiterates who populate Al-Qaeda or the locally-grown drug-gangs. Again, let’s remember that these become more possible, even more common, during periods of moral decay.
The world is neither a realm of Satan nor Sunnybrook Farm. The human race is neither fully depraved nor at all angelic. And something of the depraved man, something of the angel, is to be found in nearly all human beings.
The world is what it is, what it was made to be by God. The human race is also what it was made to be by God: a species evolved from apish creatures and a species still struggling raise itself off its knuckles. More relevantly, so far as this essay goes, the human race has a very weak version of some laws, including the Fifth Commandment, written on its collective and individual hearts. We need to nurture what is good and such a nurturing takes place best in the sorts of peaceful and prosperous times when we are most inclined to just enjoy life and to assume we’ll live all our days in such peace and prosperity, to assume our descendants will live all their days, in such peace and prosperity. Perhaps God lets loose the horsemen of the Apocalypse just because we need terrors and suffering if we are to be good in a tougher and more lasting way.
For those of us who think this world is a work of God and those who think of it in other terms, the world is what it is, in both the goodness and the disorder discussed by serious historians and moral theologians and evolutionary theorists and novelists and others. Currently, we in the West and perhaps some others in the world are going through a period of serious collapse into states of disorder. Until we make peace with the world as it is, we have no chance to return to a state of the moral order which makes possible peace and prosperity.
If we come to our senses, maybe we can even have a sustained state of moral order so that men of more peaceful inclinations can leave peaceful descendants; this was the case to a surprising extent during the last few centuries of the Christian West. A failure by Christians to properly engage the modern world, in its questions and possibilities, and the ensuing development of a secularism at a scale never before seen, killed the West and the various sorts of moral order it had established, however defective and incomplete those moral orders had been.
Who knows for sure? We could perhaps know a little better if we came to understand these issues of moral order and other sorts of order. And it will take work as some might know from having at least glanced at writings or documentaries about the discoveries by mathematicians and other scientists about the true nature of order. In this world, it seems to be almost always self-generated and not imposed in an hierarchical way—an issue which will cause great disturbances to the shrunken minds and bloated hearts and hyperactive hands of many modern men, perhaps Catholics most of all.
Perhaps, in choosing hierarchies: kings with golden crowns rather than men with a hand on a plow and Popes on thrones rather than on fishing boats, we sow the seeds of disorder in our individual and communal selves.