We are in a struggle for the minds and souls of our youth. I do not mean that in a religious sense—I am not religious. I mean it in the most elemental way possible: good and evil exist in the same way light and darkness exist. Darkness is the default. It requires nothing. It is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. Left untended, the flame of clarity, discipline, and virtue gutters out, and the void fills itself.
That is what we are seeing now. A culture that once passed on classics, discipline, and moral frameworks has instead chosen to discard them. Twain is banned, while hedonism is smuggled in under the banner of progress. The result is not liberation, but entropy. The people pushing for radical indulgence, for the dumbing down of standards, for the disposal of basic ethics are not offering light. They are offering darkness. And the tragedy is not only in their intent, but in the passivity of those who allow the flame to go untended. Civilization is never more than one generation away from collapse. If the young are not given clarity, discipline, and a sense of responsibility, they will inherit only the void. And the void does not forgive.
We are watching what happens when a generation is raised without standards. The results are everywhere, if we have the courage to look. Violence becomes a game: the so‑called “knockout challenge,” where strangers are attacked for sport, is not a sign of strength but of a society that has lost its moral compass. Sexuality becomes a performance: “gaybaiting” and identity‑as‑provocation turn what should be intimate and human into spectacle and marketing. Intimacy becomes a commodity: platforms like OnlyFans reduce the most private aspects of human life into content for sale, stripping away dignity and covenant until nothing remains but transaction. Each of these is a symptom of the same disease—hedonism without anchor, freedom without form, appetite without discipline. This is not liberation. It is collapse.
This decay has not happened in a vacuum. It has been advanced by proxy. When MTV launched in 1981, it was not just a music channel; it was a cultural engine. It taught a generation how to dress, how to speak, how to rebel. By the 1990s, it had shifted from music to reality television, normalizing voyeurism, indulgence, and spectacle. Shows like The Real World, Jackass, and Beavis and Butt‑Head blurred the line between satire and endorsement, training youth to confuse recklessness with freedom and consumption with identity. Whether by design or by profit, MTV became a proxy parent, a proxy teacher, a proxy culture. It displaced standards not by arguing against them, but by drowning them in noise.
And now, the MTV model has gone global and algorithmic. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are not just channels; they are 24‑hour pipelines of proxy culture, engineered to monetize attention and appetite. The blueprint is the same: flood the imagination with images of excess, rebellion, and indulgence until those become the default. Standards are not debated; they are simply forgotten.
I remember when I first used USENET. I thought we finally had a way to have free thought, free information at our fingertips. It felt like the printing press moment of our age. But the promise was proven wrong. The flood of voices became noise. The open commons was captured by advertising, algorithms, and profit motives. Ideological policing replaced radical openness. Surveillance capitalism turned the liberating tool into another channel of control. The lesson is clear: tools alone do not guarantee freedom. Freedom requires standards, stewardship, and vigilance. Without them, even the brightest invention collapses into darkness.
And here is the deeper irony: even a secular society cannot survive without “churches.” I do not mean religion in the doctrinal sense, but institutions that serve the same functions. Churches once transmitted standards, created community, and gave people a framework larger than themselves. They reminded us that life was more than appetite, more than consumption, more than spectacle. When those institutions collapse, something else rushes in to replace them. MTV became a proxy church. TikTok is a proxy church. They catechize youth, but with a gospel of indulgence and distraction instead of discipline and virtue. If we do not build or preserve institutions that can serve as guardians of the flame—whether they are dojos, guilds, schools, or civic halls—then proxy cultures will continue to fill the void.
Why has this decay happened? That is the question we must face next. Some of it is organic, the natural entropy of civilizations. Some of it is Machiavellian, engineered by those who profit from indulgence and distraction. Some of it is circumstantial, the paradox of wealth and leisure eroding restraint. And some of it is chance, the timing of technologies that destabilize faster than we can adapt. These four engines of decay—organic, Machiavellian, circumstantial, and chance—will be the subject of the next essay in this series. For now, it is enough to see that decay is not inevitable, but it is relentless unless light is cultivated.
Civilization is not self‑sustaining. It is a fire that must be tended. If we do not pass on light, darkness will reclaim the ground. The choice is ours. And in the end, every generation must answer the same question: will we be keepers of the flame, or witnesses to its extinguishing?
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