Western Decline: Cyclical or Terminal? | Unknown Knowns

Malcom Kyeyune is a writer for UnHerd and many other titles. He is a big thinker in the realm of geopolitics, military strategy, and social organisation. In the first episode of Unknown Knowns, Kyeyune sits down with host Philip Pilkington to discuss the biggest arc of all: Western decline. After all, it is no longer a question of if, or even when, but how Western decline occurs.

The past five years have seen a major breakdown in the system’s ability to re-order itself. The US military is increasingly a paper tiger. In Germany, we’ve now got insipid ‘grand coalitions’ whose sole purpose is to block out the rising AfD, the first retrenchments in the car industry since the war, and a doubling of the national debt ceiling. Britain has seen riots, the bankruptcy of its second city, and an effective police state in matters of speech take hold to quell the palpable sense of national unease. The BLM era shook the fundaments of Western self-belief, and Covid saddled it with unmanageable debt.

Kyeyune and Pilkington discuss the deep roots of Western decline. From the theories of Oswald Spengler, to Edward Gibbon, to Karl Mark to Julius Evola: prophets of doom have been around forever. The true question is: can the West recover? Or is it locked into an inevitable path?