Momentum, Not Moment

Edmund Burke saw the Queen of France harried by the mob and wrote in 1790 that the age of chivalry is gone. The sentence has been rewritten in every generation since, each time about a different loss: the faith, the estates, the empire, education, lately cash. Soberly considered, the sense of decline has accompanied the West for a surprisingly long time. Even the loss of culture after the fall of Rome was regrettable, though not total, and a reform of the late Roman Empire would have been an even greater catastrophe.

This raises two questions: does the patient who has been dying for two hundred years exist at all? And what do those who declare themselves his rescuers actually want to save?

Who Burned Limoges?

On 17 October 2026 the town hall of 1883 in Limoges burned out, and its bell tower collapsed. A citizen had paid for it: a childless rentier left his fortune to the city in 1875. The city built it, not the state that mourns it today. The crowd that set it alight was protesting the cost of living and demanding from the state what the state has consumed for two centuries: the capital of the towns, trading houses and workshops, which the crown collected and the committee redistributed; such forms outlive their purpose for a long time, and then they burn. Whoever wants to understand the fire has to take apart the crowd that lit it.

First: young men of low intelligence and little impulse control who were never pacified. The therapeutic state treats them as substitute children and pets, above all through its women, officials and associations. They cannot be governed like Frenchmen of a high-trust culture that spent centuries systematically weeding out its own violent and impulsive men.

Second: street thugs, young male losers who compensate for their lack of status with an aversion to the host population, rationalised as religion.

Third: Antifa, a home-grown death cult. Bourgeois children who break what breaks them. What breaks them is everything that could serve as a measure and scratch their narcissism; their parents fed that narcissism, and the education system radicalised it. This is home-made terrorism, covered by a large left-wing party that provokes far less outrage than others because people count it intellectually among the good.

Fourth: the broad mass of ordinary French people, who set the tone of the first Yellow Vests. They are statists who want to tell the politicians that the politicians are doing their job badly.

The third group set fire to the town hall. The second and the first did the looting, exploited by the third, fed and justified by the fourth. The fourth bears the main responsibility: for the wrong institutional answer to the first, out of nurtured naivety and a mistaken secularised universalism; for the import, subsidy and empowerment of the second; for the decay of its own few children into the third. The death cult of the third group is closely related to the death drive of the fourth: social suicide, visible in the demographics.

The fifth group was not in the street: craftsmen, entrepreneurs, engineers, the young who leave for Switzerland or Dubai. It paid for the town hall and today pays for what the other four divide among themselves, and it leaves without a word. Every departure makes the counter emptier and the crowd louder.

Two days after the fire, all the groups sat at one table in a television programme, and the programme did not notice. A student from elite universities justified the looting: "You don't realise how lucky you are, you have something to lose. We have nothing to lose." As evidence she cited her mother, an English teacher paid by the state: "She shapes the future of this country." According to the student, the mother leaves the house every morning with a packet of cakes in her bag because she cannot afford the canteen.

The mother is the fourth group: a teacher who treats the state as a substitute father and demands that it do its job. The daughter inherits that sense of entitlement and turns it into hatred of everything that could serve as a measure. On Instagram the daughter poses on a boat off a Greek island above the caption "Beach, me, me and only me"; on television she has nothing to lose. The daughter is the third group in one person: the narcissism of the spoiled child, married to the death drive. In 1789 the ideologues of the Revolution invented the queen's brioche, and in 2026 the heiress of those ideologues demands the brioche from the state, with the same envy of cake and the same greed for cake.

Opposite the daughter sat a woman who came to France from Congo at the age of nine. She lived for three years with her father in ten square metres, grew up in a Paris suburb, and today employs 130 people. These days she has to reassure her staff because they are afraid. The entrepreneur is the fifth group, the only one that produces what the others divide. Whoever sees only the first group and race riots would file the entrepreneur under the first group. In doing so, that observer displays what he accuses the others of: little intelligence and little impulse control, and this from the right.

So far, everyone picks out one group. Whoever sees only the first makes Limoges a question of race, whoever sees only the second a question of Islam, whoever sees only the third a question of ideology. But they are very different groups, which paradoxically converge.

The racial lens is the most comfortable and explains the least. The same people who loot in Lyon build prosperity in the Emirates. Dubai's population is nine-tenths immigrant, the city is safer than Paris, and Jordan houses millions of refugees without a town hall burning. They are the same people under different rules, and nobody there is paid to wait.

The natives have always been capable of behaving like primates as well. The prison massacres of 1792, the mass drownings at Nantes and the burned villages of the Vendée were the work of Frenchmen of old stock, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment. The Republic has since glossed over all of it and celebrates its revolution as a national holiday to this day. There is no need to import the jungle; it is enough to permit it. Whoever objects that without security there is no market is right and refutes himself: security is an institution and has nothing to do with race. Botswana and Zimbabwe are neighbours, yet only Botswana protects property, and only Botswana prospers. Identitarian markers point to the context without explaining the cause. The zombies in the railway stations of our cities come in every skin colour and every sex; they are a symptom, neither the cause nor the authors.

It becomes absurd when Austrian and French "identitarians" derive identity from the riots. The latest wave of migration, which their "remigration" targets, had the least to do with the violence in France. This wave is a symptom of the problems and fans them further, nothing more. Certainly the French and the Austrians share more culture on average than Congolese share with Syrians. Yet the clearest identity overlap between the French and modern Austrians is a deeply rooted statism, once one sets aside the identical T-shirts made in Asia and an "identity" LARPed for American social media. And statism cannot be remigrated.

Behind the spontaneously adopted pretexts of identity there is seldom an organised group; mostly there is a style of trolls with meme competence. The gatekeeper media need the spectre of the "identitarians", and the identitarians need the media. The identitarians' counter-narrative is romantic hope, the longing for a world in which young men repel the foreign enemies as noble knights. That too is a costume, and what really carried the West was never a costume.

The Museum

The first answer leads into the museum, because it wants back a condition that demonstrably existed: the Catholic unity of the Middle Ages, chivalry, the Germanness of imperial Germany, or some other national idyll. Which one depends on the nostalgic's year of birth and confession. The longing is understandable, because man instinctively yearns for the clan, for the small, closed community to which evolution has adapted him, and almost every community that lasts has a sacred core. From a distance the Middle Ages look like such a community writ large. None of it can be brought back, however, because those conditions rested on preconditions the nostalgic himself no longer shares: a Church that regulated marriage and inheritance, a nobility living from land and war, a literacy confined to the few.

What remains is the costume, and once it is taken seriously it turns into a LARP, a role-play that celebrates nothing but its own redemption. Its caricature is the German Reichsbürger movement, whose members call themselves citizens of the old Reich and play at being a state: they issue identity papers, found councils and award decorations. The better-groomed form gives lectures on the West, and whoever comments on those lectures soberly stands accused of throwing dirt at one of the last heroes of the Occident.

Public allegiance to a more moral group, whether to the rescuers of the climate or to those of the West, unfortunately correlates negatively with strength of character. Our interests are all too glad to use public moralism as an alibi for private immorality.

The more educated form promises to rebuild Europe from its old inheritance of antiquity and Christianity, and to gain from it an identity that withstands decay. It has some success, but for me it is too backward-looking. Following Spengler, it reads the West as an organism with ages of life whose winter must be endured with dignity. I am less interested in how one survives the winter than in where the summers came from.

Which Moment?

Nostalgia has a second problem, and it weighs more than the costume: it cannot find the moment it wants to return to. The decline of the West came in waves, and every flowering a conservative invokes today already lay inside one of those waves. The French Revolution was a mistake, and so was the French centralism that preceded it, fed it and was strengthened by it, as was the Prussian centralism that copied it. In 1789 the state theory of money merely changed garments, from ermine to committee.

And yet centralisation was followed by the greatest growth the continent has ever seen, and on this paradox nostalgia founders. Larger spaces give capital room: one law instead of three hundred, one market instead of thirty customs lines. What unfolded in that space, however, was the harvest of a freedom that had grown beforehand. The apparatus that brought in this harvest was young, and most of it was stolen. Banks, credit, bills of exchange, bookkeeping and exchanges, the tools the king now handled, had arisen in the towns, among merchants who owed each other accounts. Everywhere the central state had absorbed these innovative cores and made them fit for war. In my new book Win-Win I call this process the capture of the catallaxy. In royal hands the spark glowed brightly for a while longer. The fruits of freedom are harvested in times of growing unfreedom.

As a nation, France, the self-styled great nation, consumed capital that had been built up long before. Centralism breeds hubris, parasitic pseudo-elites and a "too big to fail" that far surpasses the Sun Kings. In post-war Europe the next generation and the one after it were systematically plundered, above all in the supposedly robust states of Austria and Germany. Whoever sees only the correlation takes centralism for the cause of prosperity, and so arises the legend of the strong state that made the country great, although the causality almost always runs the other way.

This can be seen in the German economic miracle: credit is held to be the cause of the explosion in productivity, when only the visible capital structure had been destroyed. The invisible one had remained intact: skills, mentality, relationships, the mycelium under the burnt forest floor, from which the mushrooms shoot up as soon as they are allowed to. Capital and context explain more than policy.

That is why there is no moment to return to. The German Empire that some miss harvested what the towns had sown. The Middle Ages that others miss were themselves the harvest of a freedom that grew after Roman central power collapsed. Every moment one would like to bring back is a harvest, and harvests cannot be repeated, though the sowing can.

The nation belongs to these moments, and it is the youngest of them. Whoever objects that the French nation was born with Joan of Arc and that nationalism is not the state is unwittingly repeating a schoolbook legend. Only in 1841 did a historian of the Republic make Joan the origin of national feeling, and the state schools taught it to millions of children. Before that, Joan was the heroine of Orléans, which has celebrated her victory every year since 1429: local pride, attachment to place and kin, the natural patriotism that needs no state. For the rest of the kingdom she was nothing. Frenchmen captured her and sold her to the English, French clerics condemned her, Voltaire turned her into a dirty joke. Joan herself knew no nation; she knew a king she wanted to see crowned and a kingdom that belonged to that king.

The nation came later, and it came from the state. In 1794 a report to the revolutionary parliament found that of 28 million Frenchmen at most three million spoke French properly and six million not at all. The report demanded in its very title that the dialects be annihilated. Then came conscription, compulsory schooling in 1882, war, and finally the law of 1920 that gave Joan a national feast day, in the year of her canonisation.

Patriotism is natural; nationalism is the doctrine that people and state must coincide, and it took the state to manufacture that people in the first place. Whoever separates nationalism from the state separates the liturgy from the Church.

That is why national patriotism saves nobody from statism; it is statism's original form. The nation was born in 1789, with the committee, conscription and taxes for all. The "patriotic" right lives today off the same zero-sum game as the left: it provides for its own against the others, with the money of a machine that produces nothing. Without that machine the right would have nothing to promise. The nation is the only harvest the state itself has sown, and a return to it brings nothing back.

The Slackening

The right tells a legend about the last wave that is as convenient as the left's own: the decline is the work of a conspiracy, the march through the institutions, re-education, a plan. Like all conspiracy theories, this legend overestimates what political intervention can achieve, and it takes no conspiracy to exhaust a culture.

The West went slack after an excessive and neurotic overstrain. A national pride inflated by centralisation was wounded by national catastrophes and in Germany finally sublimated into pure statism. The nations fought two world wars with all the technology and all the pathos they had stored up, and left behind peoples who wanted to know nothing more of themselves, and elites who wanted to know least of all.

The betrayal of the elites preceded the slackening and accompanied it. Those who should have led administered; those who should have taught lectured; those who should have held wealth across generations consumed it. Along with the wealth, the elites used up the trust in institutions, spending it shamelessly on virtue signalling, prestige, lecturing and self-enrichment, until a growing part of the population rightly lost that trust.

Into the vacuum stepped the secular substitute religion of statism: redemption through the state, salvation in the collective we. In fallen nations this substitute religion strangles whatever rises above the dreary grey of Kafkaesque functionaries.

Paradoxically, the greater share of the blame lies with the supposed conservatives and the right. The left never concealed its statism; the right supplied that statism with the better justification of fatherland, order, tradition and security, and so gave the slackening a good conscience. The economist Werner Sombart reproached the bourgeois for going slack as soon as he wanted to live like a nobleman. That is exactly what happened, except that the new nobility consisted of functionaries. An apparatus fed parasitically on the institutions and slowly consumed their cultural capital, and the conservatives called this preserving.

Affluent neglect shows itself in the search for pseudo-problems out of existential boredom, in living off what was neither earned nor understood, in high expectations with little pressure to perform, in this-worldly substitute religions, in virtue signalling, and above all in a cushion that separates one from reality. The LARP is one variety of it, the comfort of tradition a second, status consumption a third. Entitlement leads to status greed, and the inferiority complexes typical of the unproductively wealthy seek recognition through virtue signalling, to justify a status these people unconsciously feel to be parasitic.

Subsidised mass migration into the welfare state belongs here too, as the last symptom. It was conducted under the refugee lie and is today the tinder of every debate. Cultural destruction is not linear: it stays invisible for a long time and shows itself late, then all at once. This mass migration is the culmination of a naivety remote from reality, of blind formalism and of the consumption of status and income in the therapeutic state. Whoever sees the cause in it mistakes the bout of fever for the disease. That is why nostalgia is itself part of the decline it laments.

The Status Quo

The second answer is quieter and more widespread; it defends what is: the institutions, procedures and vested interests as they now stand, meaning the university, the constitution, social insurance and the currency. It calls itself conservative, and it is the stance of almost every party that governs today. The world changes, and whoever declares a system the end of history serves the interests of the status quo.

Worse still than romanticising the past is romanticising the present, because this blindness leads to disaster far more directly than any false nostalgia. The forms the defender of vested interests protects have often long since handed their purpose to others. The university bears the name of the corporation of Bologna and yet is a government office. Trust in academic authorities has been boiled down into the alphabet soup of countless technocratic agencies, institutes and NGOs. What remains are state factories for officials and private factories for titles, a cargo cult of education that has kept the form and lost the ethos. Where market reality no longer selects, the certificate has to feign the selection.

The central bank passes for the guardian of money and does what the Bank of Amsterdam already did in secret: it lends its depositors' money to the state. Even Adam Smith still believed that the money of the Bank of Amsterdam was fully covered by coin. Where central banks and commercial banks today produce money as a privilege, the problem of trust can only be papered over with PR bluffs. An institution can keep its name and lose its inner independence, and whoever then preserves it unchanged preserves the husk and calls it loyalty.

The New World

In Europe only the past still makes people proud. Despite state failure on just as massive a scale, the United States still has living poles of dynamism, and it also offers a third answer that does not come from conservatives. Where the West today looks most like what its defenders describe, it wears neither crown nor cross: it sits in Silicon Valley and in Manhattan. Two centres of power survived in the United States, the entrepreneurial one on the West Coast and the financial one on the East Coast. Both are unfortunately closely interwoven with the state, yet they have enough strength left for new autonomy. Both first grew on the soil of the state's war economy, but entrepreneurial creativity turned that origin mostly to civilian use.

Compare Silicon Valley with Stuttgart, or Manhattan with Frankfurt, and the American success can hardly be played down. In Germany work-life balance is taking hold: the bored leisure-seeking of good-for-nothing heirs. The productive minority of Americans, by contrast, shows even in youth a shirtsleeved diligence that in Europe seems unlikely to survive the demographic bottleneck.

So why do I still not reconnect there? Because both elites lack what makes success durable in the first place: principles and cultural depth. Worst of all is the state-favoured organised crime on Wall Street, where lawyers, regulators and large financial firms take part in cartels and pocket a large share of the gains from financing.

The tech elite of the other coast shows the type in its purest form: entrepreneurs of astonishing executive power and reach whose personalities have become brands. They hold any position only as long as it serves the next venture, and that includes their positions on money, free speech and the state. Such conduct calls itself pragmatic, but it has little to do with ideology and much to do with the pragmatism of power. Pragmatic entrepreneurs shy away from theory and rightly look for shortcuts. In times of geopolitical upheaval that becomes dangerous, because in Washington as in New York the strongest force in the room is the military-industrial financial complex of armaments, public debt and central bank money. So the most mobile men in the world end up propping up the same status quo as the most inert officials of Europe. The paradox also runs the other way. Neville Roy Singham is an anti-American American who grew rich with his software firm. From Shanghai he funds a network of groups and media outlets that the New York Times says spread Beijing's line, and one of these outlets also drummed up support for the French protests.

Culturally this elite is shallow: it does not know the history of the forms it uses and takes the joint-stock company, the exchange and the venture fund for inventions of its own generation. In the United States too, the inventive spirit of the pioneers has been broken by mind viruses and by bullshit jobs, which keep many people on the hamster wheel of work that creates no value. And an artificial acceleration is always delicate, because it provokes ideological backlash.

The Momentum

What all three miss is a distinction: between the forms a period brought forth and the forces that brought them forth. The forms are datable and mortal: the self-governing city arose in the twelfth century in northern Italy, double-entry bookkeeping around 1300 in Italy, the exchange in Bruges and Antwerp, the joint-stock company in 1602 in Amsterdam, the university as a corporation in Bologna and Paris, the salon in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. None of these forms can be brought back, and none needs to be. The forces that brought them forth worked at different times in different fields, never all at once and nowhere completely. They can be named nonetheless: autonomy and decentralisation, orientation towards reason, the release of the individual from the clan, a culture of high trust beyond the circle of kin, cultural ambition, adventure and enterprise, inventiveness and high technology, individualism and sound money.

Whoever seeks in them an essence of the West that could be owned like a relic will be disappointed. Each of these forces existed elsewhere too: merchants in Babylon, inventors in China, scholars in Baghdad. What set Europe apart was the interplay in which the forces spent centuries giving one another forms that let them endure. This interplay is a momentum, and one reconnects with momentum differently than with a moment in time.

Two of these forces are so forgotten today that they have to be explained. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich has shown, the Church's rules on marriage and family shattered the old clan structures over the centuries. The Church banned cousin marriage out to distant degrees, abolished polygamy and adoption, and made the public vow obligatory. That is how the West learned in the first place to trust strangers, with universalism in place of clannishness, lower time preference and a stronger conscience along with feelings of guilt. Hostile clans unfortunately trade far too little with one another ever to cross the threshold of prosperity. Whoever imports clans today, or cultivates the clan logic of the parties at home, undoes this achievement.

The second is the high-trust culture, as it developed in the Alps with a particularly low time preference. It makes contracts with strangers possible, the joint-stock company as much as insurance. At the same time it is the most dangerous of these forces, because its reverse side is the block-warden mentality. High-trust cultures like Germany and Japan also produced the highest degree of socially organised evil to date, because trust without reason turns into allegiance.

Apollonian and Heroic

The defenders of the West mostly remember its pious and preserving side: monastery, cathedral and order. Yet the inheritance has two further faces that this memory leaves out. Nietzsche called one of them the Apollonian, as the counterpole to the Dionysian: measure, form and clarity, the will to give things a shape. This will produced Greek sculpture as well as the bookkeeping of the Florentines and the proofs of the scholastics.

The other is the heroic: the individual who sets out, dares something and stands by it. Caution is needed with heroism, because the supposedly heroic changers of history are as a rule apocalyptic horsemen who drive still more people over abysses whose existence the horsemen persistently refuse to acknowledge. The hero meant here is a different one: the risk-loving overseas merchant who wanted to achieve in ordinary trade in goods what his fathers and brothers had attempted with gold-seeking, alchemy and robber knighthood. The farther back we go in history, the closer the adventurer stands to violence. He sets his own law, with the sword if need be, and so it is no surprise that merchant, adventurer and pirate were sometimes one and the same person. The spirit of the freebooter became the spirit of the merchant. The investors in the trading companies shared in the success of the voyage, and at the time they were called adventurers.

The measure is liability: the militia citizen who votes armed and the entrepreneur who carries the uncertainty are liable; the functionary who decrees and the creditor who earns on interest are not. There is little heroic about self-employment; for most of history it was an entirely ordinary part of human life. This hero founds, discovers, invents, leads a house across generations and contradicts an authority when he knows better.

This hero has existed everywhere; what is Occidental is that certain institutions gave him permanence, dignity and freedom. The truly great and lasting enterprises were often carried by a sober discipline, as long as politics did not overstretch them. Capital without culture loses its direction, and culture without capital loses its means; the tech billionaire shows the one, the conservative the other.

Reconnecting

Whoever wants to reconnect has to do the work that none of the three ways does: recognise the forces that were once fruitful, examine where they work today, and there give them a form that holds. Such forms are enterprises, places, institutions and fortunes that outlast their founders. No programme is needed for this; in programmes a moment defends itself against time. What outlasts generations has passed the hard test of reality. The work is less spectacular than a crusade and less exciting than an IPO. Still, it is the only thing that has ever worked in the history of the West.

The town hall of 1883 is not coming back. The forces that built it can.