Dear Antiquity,

It is 2025 AD, and Western Civilisation is on the precipice.

We have ignored the lessons you forewarned us of.

Countless exemplars that you provided in the hope the future would not repeat the mistakes of the past are obsolete.

History is being rewritten by those who seek to destroy their own nations. Men and women who seek power for power’s sake, forgoing any commitment to and responsibility for the people they govern, are growing fat on public monies and at the expense of people’s misery.

Plato warned us of putting people in positions of power who have no desire other than to serve their own egos:

‘If you get, in public affairs, men whose life is impoverished and destitute of personal satisfactions, but who hope to snatch some compensation for their own inadequacy from a political career, there can never be good government.’

Politics is no longer a vocation, but a career.

Our economic health is in free fall. Businesses are being destroyed from exorbitant regulations. Young people cannot afford housing as a result of unacceptable prices. Families are fracturing under the weight of suffocating costs of living. Our culture is being displaced. Excessive immigration is occurring at a rate the infrastructure cannot keep up with. Law and order have at times turned against its own citizenry to appease the dictates of a Leviathan out of control. All this is occurring under the watch of weak and traitorous men and women who deign to call themselves leaders.

If they had read the words of Pericles from 430 BC during the Peloponnesian War, surely, they would know that future equals past:

‘However well off a man may be in his private life, he will still be involved in the general ruin if his country is destroyed; whereas, so long as the state itself is secure, individuals have a much greater chance of recovering from their private misfortunes.’

Dear Antiquity, you gifted us democracy, with its core tenet being freedom of speech and liberty of the individual. Alas, we have done a woeful job of protecting it. Today, we are on the verge of totalitarianism. In one state of Australia, in the year 2021, the then Victorian leader ordered law enforcement to shoot rubber bullets at his own citizens for daring to stand up and defend freedom and liberty from egregious edicts of locking people in their homes and forcing them to have a vaccine to protect grandma from a virus that was less harmful than the seasonal flu.

There is a saying that ‘we get the leaders we deserve’. I don’t care much for it myself, because it lumbers everyone with the burden of bad choices by the few. You see, the majority have increasingly not voted for these weak leaders, so democracy itself must now be brought into question.

We are told that majority rules in a democracy. Not so in Australia. Laws are legislated in favour of the whims and demands of minority voices, leaving the majority to abide by them, most of which are bad for everyone’s business and personal lives.

As I watch the metaphorical burning of my country, I turn more inward to the lessons I had hoped my time would heed, none more so than good government and good leadership.

Plato describes it perfectly:

‘The truth is that if you want a well-governed state to be possible, you must find for your future rulers some way of life they like better than government; for only then will you have government by the truly rich, those, that is, whose riches consist not of gold, but of the true happiness of a good and rational life.’

We no longer have neither good nor rational.

Yours sincerely,

The dying soul of the modern West.

First published on Substack. You can read it here.