[Skybird]

One of my most favourite authors is D.H. Lawrence, whose vitality yearning for liveliness in his writings in parts is both result of and at the same time causal expression of his description how male workers lost their dignity during the industrial revolution, almost being castrated by the rule of the machinery and the clocks that now regulated their life all day long. I agree that there is a general loss of manliness, not only in Britain but in most of the Wetsern world, if not all, but in case of britain it seems to me it is an especially illustrative example. While that process got a boost in and since the 60s (in Germany as well), and before may have been boosted by the excesses of manliness being perverted in the developements that led to WWII, it nevertheless is a long-lasting cultural erosion that imo goes back until the uindustrial revolution, when man became comparavble and exchangable with the machine and by that necessarily loost part of his value and dignity as a human. Capitalism, for which man is just another form of capital investement, and totalitarian ideologies coming to rise, of course helped massively in this.

Yesterday or tweo day ago, in anothe rthread, I mentioned the infantilsation that our present society, it'S rules of behavior and our media formats are being haunted by. This also has something to do with it.

Last, there was the extreme polarisation at the other end of the specturm that wasd caused by feminism, and from that: a trend thatnot only wanted equality of women, but in fact led to a demonisation of manly qualities - although one must admit that some of the more reasonable, open-minded feminsts in the past 10 years or so have seen this trend as dangerous, too, and started to relative their own once extremist positions in order to counter-steer this demonisation of everything male in quality.

How could all this happen? The rise of the machiones. And a general decline of cultural integrity that just is part of the hsitoric cycle every ower and every empire must undergo: rise, climax, fall. For us Westerners i thge present time, the wheel of time no longer is moving upwards, but downwards. Like Rome declined last but not least in decadence, lacking both the will and the vitality to defend itself, we seem to suffer the same fate now. Desintegration of social consent on vital values is just a symptom of the bigger event unfolding all around us. Socieities are the more complex the more "civilised" they are, but everything in nature that dies again, does so in hierarchical layers, with the more complex superstructures collapsing first, making the underlying, earlier and more primitive structures that had been surpassed, more obvious again. From bottom to top you build it, from top to bottom it collapses again.