The following commentary is secular [with a short reference to the Protestant work ethic] and from The Times, London, yet to those who are Bible literate and Bible-believing, there is no need to read between the lines as to the how, who, why, and what of it all. And while the where may appear to be the U.K. what lies below applies to every Western nation and every group of people in every Western nation.

A lack of vision is the reason every Western nation is where it now resides. A lack of vision is also what befalls every person destined for the pit of hell for eternity. A lack of thinking things through, of thinking in general, has led every Western nation to its present place, just as a lack of thinking things through, a lack of thinking leads an individual along the road to destruction and an eternity in hell.

Replace the names in the commentary below and it is a template that fits any and every Western nation and many other nations throughout the world.

Without a Scripture reference or the mention of God or the Bible, the article below by Mr. Matthew Syed is spot on otherwise. And true believers, the Bible literate can read the highly visible and audible revelation of the true nature of man and the true nature of the age in which we live in the words below.

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Sunday, September 4th, 2022

Switch off the TV, stop the short-term thinking — it’s time we got serious

The West will keep lurching from crisis to crisis until we stop turning away from difficult truths

Sunday, September 04, 2022

By Matthew Syed

Reprinted from The Times [London]

Never has the leadership election of a major party seemed so detached from the challenges of the real world. The interminable hustings between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have felt like watching ship hands on the Titanic arguing over who gets to rearrange the deckchairs. Their “solutions” are distraction techniques, Potemkin exercises. What we need is a willingness to confront home truths — and not just the falling living standards set to define the coming age.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back. To pause and look not at the ephemera of 24-hour news but the subtle tectonics that ultimately determine the rise and fall of nations. The success of the West, according to Max Weber, was based on a changing relationship with the future. Over the course of the early modern period, people on these islands exhibited a subtle but growing tendency to make sacrifices today to build a better tomorrow, to delay gratification, to save for a rainy day. It is often summarised under the rubric of the Protestant work ethic, a cultural trait almost universally acknowledged by historical anthropologists to have been at play.

I can’t help thinking that we have undergone a reverse transformation in cultural attitudes over the past generation or two, and the past couple of decades in particular. We live in a society where the political virtues of long-term planning and strategic patience have been replaced by an obsession with the here and now. Attention spans have dwindled in the age of instant news. Computer games are algorithmically optimised to provide sugar-rush hits, measurable as released oxytocin in the hippocampus. Gratification is no longer rapid; it’s instant.

These trends have been accelerated by social media, reputations won and lost in the time it takes for an allegation to go viral, but so has the cultural poison of reality television, where the concept of instant success has become part of the viewing entertainment of millions. The idea of achieving something through long-term sacrifice has become almost passé. And as time has sped up, our capacity to think about the long term has been dangerously compromised. The future is now a faraway place, inhabited by strangers. The tragedy, of course, is that the strangers are us.

Consider the decades leading up to the pandemic, where we failed to act on recommendations to build extra capacity in the NHS or stockpile PPE to help in the event of a novel virus. All would have cost money in the short term to save billions in the long. Why did we not act? It’s easy to blame politicians, but I invite you to consider how we, the public, would have reacted to news of spending cash on a virus that didn’t yet exist. How would the media have portrayed the story of spare inventory gathering dust? I think we all know such a policy would have been electoral kryptonite.

Or take energy policy, where resilience and storage have consistently been trashed in the rush for short-term fixes. A video emerged recently showing Nick Clegg, then deputy prime minister, in 2010, arguing against investment in nuclear power on the grounds that it would take a decade for the benefits to accrue. Gosh, a whole decade! He talked as if the mere fact of deferred benefit were sufficient reason to turn our backs on building capacity that would, right now, be alleviating the pain of Vladimir Putin’s audacious attempt to hold Europe hostage. We are paying a higher price than we needed to, or should ever have had to. I could make the same point with foreign policy, which has consistently prioritised the short term over the long. We rushed to grab Russian cash, rolling out the red carpet for Putin’s kleptocrats in the deluded hope that recycling their dirty money would encourage them to join the rules-based order. Think of the cognitive dissonance inherent in such a policy, the intellectual somersaults necessary to sustain its pretence. This was official policy under Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and, until Ukraine, Johnson. One can’t help being reminded of Richard Feynman’s phrase: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easier person to fool.”

Democratic politics is often misunderstood, including at times by voters. It is seductively easy to blame politicians for our predicament: the character of Boris Johnson, perhaps, or the superficiality of David Cameron. This, I think, is to miss a deeper point. Politicians are, at least in part, a reflection of ourselves. They seek to give us more of what we want. And this has come to mean putting today over tomorrow, easy answers above difficult truths, jam today, whatever that may mean in pain tomorrow. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis, the costs becoming ever more severe with each cycle, without diagnosing the underlying malaise.

Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The devil has arrived for his portion of the Faustian bargain we made with our future. I already feel a sense of foreboding that the Truss government will push the problem down the road yet again, seeking to borrow its way out of the crisis in order to fund tax cuts. This would merely load the problem on to the next generation, a ticking time bomb sitting under our way of life. Government debt is set to exceed GDP in the UK, as it does in the United States, France, Canada, Spain and Italy, while the interest to service this debt exceeds defence expenditure in most western nations, a classic indicator of an empire in decline. If a society cannot afford to spend as much on defending itself as it does on servicing its credit card, decadence has turned to decay.

And this, I think, is the truth that dare not speak its name. Appeasement in foreign affairs, short-termism in domestic policy and rising public debt (particularly when driven by current spending) are symptoms of the same disease. The same might be said of populism, perhaps the most vivid sign of a society’s willingness to indulge in wishful thinking rather than confront difficult trade-offs. Blame it on Johnson if you like, or Putin, even the coronavirus, but all are diversions. So too is the idea that this is the fault of short electoral cycles, for this merely defers the question of why electorates are willing to indulge the snake oil of quick fixes and “cakeism”.

We are set to pay a hefty price — the vulnerable most of all — and I believe those of us who are better off should pay more to support them. But the only way to reverse the broader decay is to perceive our own fingerprints at the crime scene. The psychological tectonic plates of the West have shifted, subtly but indisputably, in this unfolding age of social media and celebrity infatuation. We need a new seriousness of resolve, transcending the trivialities of left and right, Truss or Sunak, Starmer or Johnson. The soap opera of politics unfolds on the surface, mere ripples in the breeze. As Weber grasped, it is in the depths of cultural psychology that history is made.