Go, Tell the Spartans…

“Passerby…Go, tell the Spartans, that here, obedient to their law, we lie.”

The fact that an epitaph, written over 2,500 years ago can still hold sway over certain modern men is remarkable on its own.

Certain, meaning exclusive and not all.  For in that simple remembrance, written by Greek poet Simonides to commemorate the self sacrifice of 300 Spartans defending a strategic choke point against a numerically superior opponent, it invokes honor, culture and servitude.

I plan to make statements, points of view that are anecdotal, but based on observation and study. Decrying modern man in broad sweeping generalizations is both foolish and narrative serving, but ignoring it helps no one either. It’s far easier to offer problems but not problems and solutions. This post is problems, I will offer possible solutions in the next.

The United States military has about 1.3 Million active duty troops. That is roughly .4% of the population of the Country. There are 15.7 Million veterans living within the US currently,about 5% of the population.

Sparta on the other hand, unified their society around its military fighting unit, creating a culture that from an earliest age in a citizens life, provided the moral, ethical and physical code that was to be followed and defended.

While I’m not advocating the creation of a martial society, or the expansion of the US military, or even to a conscription draft, I do believe the lack of a unified set of principals and ideals is at the heart of societal decay.

Honor. Culture. Servitude. You’d be hard pressed to find this but in pockets of our current union. They have been replaced by polarized political positions, untenable devalued currency, making the creation of the family unit out of reach for many, and the blurred lines of gender and gender identity, where our boys are discouraged from being hellraising war fighters and our girls are encouraged that they don’t need men and can all just be girl bosses.

We worry about the wrong things. There are people all around us ready to kill over differing views on the causes and possible interventions to climate change. They would, with little proof, and with full hubris, bankrupt the world to lower temperatures by 1.5 degrees C above pre-Industrial levels.

We are lectured about this threat  by billionaires. The same billionaires who would also save us from global pandemics, who also found time to “participate” in one of the greatest honeypot schemes of all time, but I digress.

We worry about the wrong things while we ignore the reality that both political parties deported millions of illegal aliens, that both political parties engage in market manipulation and insider trading, that both indiscriminately bomb other countries. The only brand differentiating is along the edges of society, the 1% of transgenders for example, that dominate so many discussions, primarily when UFO admittance or Kennedy Assassination record releases aren’t enough to distract the masses.

We devalued organized religion. We devalued the family unit. We devalued the sanctity of life, and while we devalued these core unifying concepts, we didn’t replace them, we allowed cancers to grow.

Honor. Culture. Servitude. The willingness of men to die to defend their society is within the DNA of us, but they have to be willing to die because the thought of losing what we have is so much more abhorrent.

What about modern society is too abhorrent to imagine its loss?

What is our modern culture? Who is defining it? The popular mainstream music of today is not original, lacks soul and reduced to single tracks versus albums to match the low attention spans. Modern art? Who are the great artists of today? Name them, name one?

Architecture? We build precast concrete boxes and find them empty and vacant in decades or less.

Who is willing to serve? Who would answer the call to defend a narrow pass knowing that death would surely come? Would the call go out via text? Would the lookmaxxers even care to defend the pass, because why, their Instagram or TikTok feeds may be interrupted? Would the so called Incels defend the pass, only to know that they won’t be able to marry and have kids because that dream died with half million dollar starter homes and income buying power that’s stuck in 1995? Or even find a girl who still believes in the value of motherhood without cosplaying trad values and just being authentic?

To certain men, the ones I choose to celebrate and where I started this post, nothing has changed in 2,500 years; they train their bodies, they train their minds, the hold and honor a higher power of their choosing, they still believe in marriage and children and the defense of it all. They are primarily vilified and they don’t care. They find women who are equally vilified, unwilling to act like men, unwilling to abandon men.

It is this class of society I value, the ones that would answer the call. We must find a way to depolarize everything into binary political positions so these men and women can return to the middle and lead us out of societal decay.

Perhaps it can be done bloodlessly, perhaps not, but a reckoning is coming. Dropping Birthrates, broken American melting pot, unaffordable housing and cost of living, violence and stagnation, this is the broth our youth marinate in, do you really just expect them to boil to death in it?

Passerby, Let’s talk about possible solutions next.