I truly believe that the optimal way forward is embracing a Dark Age Mindset. This means: - Embracing Decline as Opportunity. When the foundations of familiar institutions are shaken, it's a signal to us to stop investing so much effort and dependence on those things, and create new alternatives that actually serve us as people and communities. -Cultivating Resilient Character and Faith. The folks who did this before were not weak, fragile, or wishy-washy. Get hard. -Preserve and Transmit Knowledge. If institutions that have historically been responsible for this (looking at you, media and schools) are failing, then it's another opportunity for us to step into decentralized roles as stewards of cultural patrimony, preserving literacy, classical texts, and traditions and educating our own children with this heritage to ensure continuity in a potentially post-literate or tech-degraded world. -Pursuing Self-Sufficiency and Simplicity. "Ora et labora" was the motto that drove that age forward and upward. But they showed us that simplicity needn't be minimalist or ugly; some of the most durable and beautiful things ever made came from these times. -Reject Dooming and Be Proactive. No despair. Instead, simplify your processes, improve your skills, and meet your challenges vigorously. -Foster Creativity in Adversity. Necessity is the mother of invention. But the human person is not merely mechanical; we need beauty, music, good stories, living rituals, significance... Cultivate these things especially in the face of monopolized artificiality. -Focus on Local and Subsidiarist Action. Subsidiarity is handling matters at the smallest, most local level possible; create "schools for service" (as Benedict did) that prioritize family, home culture, nature, and education over distant, failing institutions. The more responsibility you take up over all the spheres of your living experience, the more you step into sovereignty.

This is why I harp on the "Dark Ages" so much. We already have a template of how these kinds of civilizational declines/collapses go. This is a main theme of St. Augustine's "City of God". The times may indeed seem dark, but what our ancestors showed us is that they can be times of incredible creativity, valor, and building the foundations for a whole new order to rise out of the ashes. The "Dark Ages" were the ones that gave us so many heroes, saints, and stories. This was the age of King Arthur, Charlemagne, Charles Martel, the Book of Kells, Beowulf, Theoderic the Great, St. Benedict, Alfred the Great, Mont St. Michel, Aachen, Rheims cathedral, Saumur castle, Montecassino Abbey, etc. The list goes on and on. The cities of the empire had decayed; Rome was a wasteland and Constantinople was a hive of corruption hemorrhaging influence and stability faster than they could hire mercenaries. It was the Irish in the rural monasteries who preserved classical texts, the Franks and Saxons in their hilltop castles and burgs that crafted laws and refashioned social orders, it was Visigothic knights who carved out footholds while Flemish and Baltic craftsmen created works of art. The collapse of a bloated, bureaucratic imperial structure is not the end of all things; it is an opportunity for people of faith, resilient character, and creative boldness to apply themselves to build something better. Where we are now is not yet full-on civilizational collapse, but that's not such a far-off and improbable condition for us to imagine. So prepare accordingly. This can be a great time to be alive if you meet the challenges we face and will face in the future the way these people did. Dooming is not an option; figure out how to do what you need to do simpler and better. Educate your children so they're intimate with the tremendous patrimony that was built for them with such great effort and sacrifice. Just like the Irish scholars had to virtually preserve literacy in Greek and Latin in the West, we may find ourselves tasked with preserving literacy in English in a post-smartphone and post-AI world!