If every man lays down his arms and refuses to pick them up, the first man to pick up can do whatever he wants. - Jack Donovan

Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it at a distant, abstract problem solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes a knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to "stop" the violence.

Moral rules and social norms no longer flow from the wise or the accomplished or from custom. The new moral rules and norms and taboos are frantic mass responses to claims of discrimination, oppression, offense, hurt feelings- even a failure to affirm some obvious delusion or pathosis... The Empire scrambles to accommodate victims, and that gives those who claim to be victims - often the most fragile, helpless, dysgenic and emotionally needy people - ultimate moral authority.

Once, the men who ruled the world commissioned great works of art and public statues of bronze and marble to honor war heroes as exemplars of virtue- masculine virtue. Today's warriors are merely memorialized as victims of war, so that they can be regarded sympathetically by a society in which victimhood is a marker of moral purity and victory is morally suspect.