Cities Will Destroy the West

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The Bible contains only 11 verses on the cautionary tale of the Tower of Babel: where mankind builds a great tower, with a homogenous language and culture, up to the Heavens to dethrone God. The Almighty demolished the structure, scattered its inhabitants across the continents, and scrambled their language to prevent them from usurping the natural order.

In our liberal secular age, this lesson has been forgotten. 55% of the world’s population live in sprawling cosmopoles. Airports are permeable membranes between nations through which an international business class can pass without friction. Millions from the third world follow these entrepreneurial anywheres, seeking the wealth provided by work and welfare in Western states. But they do not necessarily shed their cultural prejudices when they pass through the passport gates; nor defer to the host majority, learning to compartmentalise their foreign customs and religious convictions during their stay.

Cities have, therefore, become culturally heterogeneous, increasingly lawless, and haemorrhaged their nations’ native populations to the shires and suburbs, while remaining centres of economic activity. Without London, Britain would be poorer than every American state. With so much invested in these unsustainable metropoles, the collapse of cities could destroy the West.

Ancient cities were the aggregation of tribes, bound together by common heritage, intermarriage, and shared ownership of the land as a burial site for their ancestors. Each new city would contain a relic from a previous settlement, keeping continuity between the people and their traditions. In Plutarch’s account of the origins of Rome, Romulus buried soil from his father’s land in the foundations. Constantinople could boast about hosting Trojan Palladium, recovered from sacked Rome, as “a pledge from Fate that the empire would never fall”. The consecration of a city by one’s gods, because its inhabitants honoured their forefathers, was the basis of feeling one’s home was worth defending — of patriotism.

Modern cities are primarily economic zones: housing impermanent, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous populations. They are, at best, airport departure lounges, which keep all their inhabitants’ interactions cordial via a surveillance state; or, at worst, impoverished shanty towns with a tragedy-of-the-commons approach to public space. They resemble the rubble of Babel more than the Roman Empire.

Cities are laboratories for permissive liberal policies, such as the decriminalisation of all drugs and rough sleeping, pushed by ostensibly neutral supranational bodies like the United Nations. Anarcho-tyranny — the tolerance of petty and violent crime by the state, while criminalising speech by its critics, to manufacture consent for the expansion of police and surveillance powers — is standard operating procedure in progressive-governed cities like New York or London. A criminal is presumed to have been wronged by society in some way, and “restorative” justice and ineffective rehabilitation programmes are pursued rather than punitive deterrents.

These policies are premised on an anthropology of fundamental human sameness — a Blank Slate. This requires a redistributive, interventionist state to remedy all injustices inferred from inequalities. Such a state refuses to recognise differences between peoples or pass judgement on behaviours, except when procedurally penalising the wealthy and successful in order to subsidise the dysfunctional and destitute. This creates a permanent underclass of drug addicts, homeless, illegal immigrants, and low-skilled foreign labourers, subsidised by knowledge-economy professionals.

Cities are the headquarters of this professional managerial class. As Christopher Lasch wrote in Revolt of the Elites, the economic opportunities centralised in cities are magnetic for those aspiring to economic upward-mobility. The transition from inherited aristocracy to meritocratic capitalism produced a new elite class, “more cosmopolitan, or at least more restless and migratory, than their predecessors… [who] follow the siren call of opportunity wherever it leads.” Britain’s conservative commentariat call them the “Lanyard Class”: members of the civil service, lawyers, journalists, finance bros, HR harridans, and anyone who fills out spreadsheets for a living. They are deracinated by their inability to purchase exorbitantly expensive property, and are united in their different professions by a shared university education and proficiency in processing information.

Lacking a shared heritage or faith, the professional managerial class gatekeeps itself with progressive politics. Author Rob Henderson calls this “Luxury Beliefs”: opinions that confer resources and status on the elite by signalling virtue to their peers, while imposing their costs on lower classes. They praise sexual libertinism, despite falling marriage rates, rising divorce rates, and cycles of single motherhood and poverty inflicted on the working class. An unsustainable separation from the consequences of your own actions becomes the distinguishing feature of the metropolitan elite.

Cities are incubators for liberal progressivism. A London School of Economics paper published in 2022 analysed datasets from cities in 66 countries, and found “marked and significant urban-rural differences in progressive values, defined as attitudes to immigration, gender rights, and family life”. In the absence of familiar faces to provide positive and negative social feedback, working professionals source their identity and morality from consumer products and shared lowest-common-denominator identity markers. As the LSE paper suggests, “cities played a key role in the expansion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights across Europe.” No such minority-interest movements could be galvanised prior to the economic pull-effect of cities, and the ability to network via social media. Robert Putnam warned in Bowling Alone that increasing ethnic heterogeneity would lead to falling social trust, and more people either staying at home and watching television or out in the streets protesting for niche identitarian grievances. Cities are the seats of this elite sedition against what the rest of the country believe to be common sense.

Cities are also contraceptive. With most inhabitants unable to own property, and their lives consumed by productivity, the professional managerial class have fewer, if any, children. Neoreactionary Nick Land calls this process an “IQ shredder”: where the savants which kept small towns prosperous and apace with national political and economic change migrate to cities, seeking more specialised careers. Because the city environment is not conducive to raising large families, generations diminish in size the more specialised and centralised in cities that economic opportunities become. The most industrious and educated have fewer children, leaving the unproductive and deracinated to raise the next generation. Strip-mined of their talent, rural communities also succumb to age, poverty, and entropy. This leaves only cities to inflict their deleterious demographic effects on sequential, shrinking generations. Meanwhile, the consumer and tax base in cities shrink, leaving only the wealthiest to be barricaded in gated communities, like Beverly Hills, while the criminal underclass live in squalor on Skid Row. Resentment foments, and material inequality becomes a casus belli for crime and socialist politics.

These same patterns are observed in rodents. Ethologist John B. Calhoun coined the phrase “Behavioural Sink” to describe the deterioration of pro-social traits in environments with high population density, abundant resources, and a lack of predators. Rats in Calhoun’s experiments stopped reproducing, and formed factions. Mothers cannibalised their young. Males formed raiding parties, despite having all the food and water they needed. Some submitted when attacked (“Dropouts”); others disengaged from rat society altogether, grooming themselves obsessively (the “Beautiful Ones”). The colony went extinct by day 1,780. It isn’t difficult to draw parallels between the Rat Utopia and balaclava-clad postcode gangs, Weimarish Pride parades, and long-suffering Nick 30s of London.

The topography or nomos of a city also separates the new working professional class from their families and local communities, where inescapable and unchosen social bonds would place upon them a burden of social consideration. Neighbourhoods were also regarded with suspicion, as seats of exclusion and intolerance, by those urging “Open” societies following the Second World War. “From the professional and managerial point of view,” Lasch wrote, “neighborhoods are places in which the unenterprising are left behind—backwaters of failure and cultural stagnation.” Cosmopolitan multiculturalism was their antidote to Nazi racism and Jim Crow segregation. But the resulting inability to know one’s neighbours was compounded by migration, with expats often self-segregating in ethno-cultural enclaves wholly apart from the host population. Integration becomes impossible.

London remains — despite the Conservatives entertaining delusions of regionalism — the nerve centre of Britain’s civil service, now larger per capita than communist China’s. But outside Westminster, the city has been vandalised by Yookay aesthetics: the emergent, incoherent culture of multiculturalism, since the migration waves of 1948, 1997, and 2021. People from every conceivable country, with little hope of getting to know one another, live cheek-by-jowl in one of the most densely populated places on the planet. The cacophony of languages, advertisements for remittance services or Islamic charities, and often-illicit businesses catering to diaspora “communities” alienate the indigenous population in their own homeland. This builds mistrust between newcomers and natives, exacerbated by a two-tier reverse-Millet system in which the state privileges and protects minorities from negative character judgements by the majority.

But even if the state weren’t pitting peoples against each other, this living arrangement just isn’t intuitive for us. The Dunbar number estimates that human beings can only maintain a mean of 150 relationships before trust and cohesion begin to break down. Professor David Betz describes the “genius of the nation state” as being its ability to expand the Dunbar number by extending concentric circles of social consideration out from our family, congregation, and community to the country writ large. Any further, and bonds of solidarity begin to break down. Cities bring us into contact with more strangers than our evolved norm — with industrial cities having existed for just 0.007% of human history. Falling social trust and rising loneliness are, in part, the adverse effects of evolutionary hyper-compression caused by a rapid shift in our living arrangements.

The abandonment and closure of “third places” exacerbates this sense of estrangement. Mismanaged state funds and a lack of volunteers lead to the closure of libraries; vagrants and drug addicts create encampments in public parks; and a rise in internet use and lower levels of alcohol consumption among the young mean fewer people frequent pubs and bars. In the vacuum of social feedback provided by peers, the state acts as arbiter of proper conduct. Signs and announcements instruct those taking public transport where to stand, what to do, and to refrain from harassing their fellow passengers. All of these infractions could be corrected by a discreet comment or tut, but when you don’t know if the offender speaks English or will take offence and escalate to violence, people keep to themselves and suffer in resentful silence. Standards slip, life becomes unpleasant, and people abandon cities to avoid low-level dysfunction.

Prophets of imminent civil unrest have also warned about inbuilt vulnerabilities in cities. A city is defined by its inability to feed its population via its own resources. Cities rely on external infrastructure — farms, imports, a transport and telecommunications network — to sustain themselves. They also rely on energy and water, generated in power stations and held in reservoirs outside city limits, and which flow in via substations, gas mains, and underground pipes. Both supplies have been jeopardised by unpredictable weather patterns, the imprudent management of state finances, and ruinously expensive Net Zero policies.

This infrastructure is also exposed to vigilante sabotage. Isolated from food, fuel, clean water, and telecommunications, Betz predicts cities will become “feral”, ungovernable, and sites of “spasmodic” skirmishes in the early stages of civil war. As resources deplete, and there is little solidarity between citizens, the epidermis of social order will split open. Groups will factionalise along ethnic lines, and battle for food and territory. This could be exacerbated by accelerationist vigilante attacks, in the period before widespread unrest. Any anxiety you might feel about the precarity of modern life is warranted.

Perhaps it is in the nature of cities to exert constant downward pressure on families, suburbs, and civic society. They cannot guarantee the givens on which they rest. No wonder native Western populations are already fleeing in their thousands. AI threatens to thwart the middle-classes’ plan to retreat into remote working from rural areas. But whether through mass redundancy or an exodus of working professionals, cities will soon become husks inhabited by vagrants, vagabonds, and foreigners housed at our expense. As gang violence increases and supply chains destabilise, civil unrest in cities becomes likely. I recommend getting out, while you still can.