The mass-man looks at a city, or a bridge, or a building and he doesn’t even begin to ponder how it got there. He never considers what sacrifices, pains, and sorrows went into making that element of civilization exist.

Historically, civilization is hard.

To the mass-man, it has always just been there. Like a mountain or an ocean. Civilization just… is.

Can you picture that? To the mass of men on this planet, the infrastructure that we call “civilization” – the buildings and bridges and air-conditioning and buses and shops and grocery stores – these are all like jungles and trees and hills. To the mass who have been taught that the whole creation came to be by happy accident when a quadrillion years ago “nothing” exploded for no reason and created everything, the Interstate Highway system and the streets of New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge all came into existence by happenstance.

The mass-man doesn’t think of the thousands of years it took, cyclically climbing through jungles and sands, forming nations, falling back again into inbred feudal dynasties, fighting disease and hardship, ugliness, wars, blood rituals, brutal pagan rites, cannibalism, tribal warfare, genocides, superstitions, etc., all this for mankind to crawl forward out of the muck of primitivism into what we call “civilization.” That is… a system that, no matter how unfair and imperfect, allows really stupid people to have thousand-dollar communication devices with the wisdom of the ages and the computing power to hold the words and wisdom of the Library of Alexandria and the political opinions of LeBron James all in their pockets.

So, he takes civilization for granted. When he attacks civilization or defames it, he does it from civilization’s bosom. He wakes up in air conditioning or central heat, drives on a highway, or takes a bus or a cab, all in order to deconstruct something he hasn’t even taken the time to understand. Barbarism is deconstruction. It is retrogression that goes under the name of progressivism. I have no problem with rejecting some elements of civilization, but at least I the time to understand it first. Give at least a hint of recognition that the superstructure being dismantled holds up your house and life.

There are men and women today who would dynamite the bottom floor while expecting the rest of the high rise to go on standing. People who would not have lasted five minutes in the brickyards of Pharaoh think that they can bulldoze civilization and live like fairy princesses in the rubble.

The term “revolutionary” can have so many meanings. We use the term and understand it by its context. In its most evil form, the term refers to agitators who desire to increase misery and conflict in order to attain the power to control, kill, and destroy. These are the local agitation agents and, more broadly, the widely published blue-checks who usher you from outrage to outrage, day by day.

Everything, they say, is unfair. Civilization, they say, is privilege. We should tear it all down and start over. Not realizing that it took thousands of years of brutality to make it this good (no matter how bad it is.)

It used to be much, much worse.

Laws, morals, culture, landmarks, these things shake in the face of economic disturbance. The revolutionary, then, must encourage and amplify economic earthquakes. Disquiet the satisfied mass. The revolutionary sees the old guard as too stuffy, too comfortable, too “living,” and wants an end to all that.

“Statism,” after all, is the codification of covetousness and theft, and can only expand if the mass-man is made to reel under the new fears and burdens. The revolutionary (in this sense,) far from being a romantic figure, is willing to watch it all burn to disquiet the passive mass. No one demands a dictator until his present condition is made untenable. Very few revolutions have ever had as their goal the removal of functionaries, apparatchiks, bloodsucking ticks, the new parasites and busybodies, from the backs of the people. Maybe the American Revolution wanted that, but almost no others even tried it.

The Bolsheviks sat in the centuries-old grand palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg and, like actuaries and accountants, figured how many millions would need to die to get the furnaces of the factories going again and who would get food to the cities after they killed all the farmers and the railroad engineers.

The communists promised to remove all of these things from the backs of the worker: the middle class, the shop owners, the builders, the aristocracy, the nobles, the landed gentry, and the middle managers… and they did. And in their place, they multiplied the governing parasite class and the spy apparatus until it was so large that it crushed everyone under it. Death and misery multiplied.

And it is predictable. Once the river of blood subsides and the functionaries, like swarms of locusts, regulate everything and pile high the laws, multiplying misery, and after the people realize they were being manipulated daily by manufactured artificial crisis and threats in order to drown the baby in the bathwater, eventually God or the mass gets tired of the new guard and puts them back in the dustbin or into hellfire, whatever, I don’t know. All of the survivors get to try civilization yet again.

Cain hated his brother, hated his success, hated the light that Abel was in the world. So, he took a rock and slew his brother and put out the light and then had to walk to and fro, only now he had to do it in the darkness. The Cainites are still around us. Walking to and fro. Before we take an axe to civilization – that is, to the thousands of years of brutal progress that has made it possible for affluent simpletons with rich parents to make millions off their TikTok accounts while extolling Marxism – perhaps we should take five minutes to consider what we will have in Western Civilization’s place. And once the fires go out and the ash has settled and the dark necessities of survival become personal again, the pangs for civilization will call us to start crawling forward once more.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.