The best thing you can do for zombie cultures is, don’t be one of them

From How Civilizations Die by Davis P. Goldman. Goldman writes a column under the pseudonym Spengler, a hat tip towards the German historian Oswald Spengler. In How Civilizations Die, Goldman identifies 23 somewhat apocalyptic Spengler's Universal Laws. I am pretty skeptical of millenarian cycles, but they do serve as an interesting prod to thinking and speculation. And I certainly do agree with Universal Law 23.

Regrettably, we have a surfeit of violently enthusiastic millenarian zombies mucking things up for everyone else.

Spengler’s Universal Laws
1. A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a “rational self-interest.”

2. When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair.

3. Contrary to what you may have heard from the sociologists, the human mortality rate is still 100 percent.

4. The history of the world is the history of humankind’s search for immortality.

5. Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality.

6. You don’t know who’s naked until the tide goes out.

7. Political models are like automobile models: you can’t have them unless you can pay for them.

8. Wars are won by destroying the enemy’s will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

9. A country isn’t beaten until it sells its women, but it’s damned when its women sell themselves.

10. There’s a world of difference between a lunatic and a lunatic who has won the lottery.

11. At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.

12. Nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has only just discovered it is dying.

13. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in inverse proportion to the hope of victory.

14. Stick around long enough, and you turn into a theme park.

15. When we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed.

16. Small civilizations perish for any number of reasons, but great civilizations die only when they no longer want to live.

17. If you stay in the same place and do the same thing long enough, some empire eventually will overrun you.

18. Maybe we would be better off if we never had been born, but who has such luck?

19. Pagan faith, however powerful, turns into Stygian nihilism when disappointed.

20. Democracy only gives people the kind of government they deserve.

21. If you believe in yourself, you’re probably whoring after strange gods.

22. Optimism is cowardice, at least when the subject is Muslim democracy.

23. The best thing you can do for zombie cultures is, don’t be one of them.