Degeneracy, Decay and the Aesthetic Revolution

Every little thing is an opportunity for unlimited artistic expression

Look around, and it's likely that you’ll be confronted by a grim picture: gray buildings, trash on the streets, senseless graffiti, dust everywhere, old and crumbled power lines, and windowless buildings. Only a handful of cities have managed to escape the seemingly unstoppable hand of progress and maintain some culture, some beauty left undisturbed—for now. Most places haven’t been so lucky, and the disordered ugliness that plagues their streets is the clearest testament of their failure.

But a culture does not accidentally fall into the hands of great ugliness; it chooses to arrive there by taking step after step, each one bringing it closer to chaos.

The first step, the catalyst of this great descent into decay, is the mocking of superior virtue and the reward of weakness and vice. A culture that forgets to push forward towards virtue is a culture that will inevitably slide down towards vice.

When beauty becomes a source for envy and not inspiration, when false victimhood becomes the moral standard, and when discipline, responsibility, and the honest desire for higher things are called fascist and oppressive, that’s when we know the world is accelerating downwards. The consequences, the fruit of these transgressions, are clear for everyone to see: just open your eyes and observe the world around you.

We can’t say we weren’t warned; we can’t say we weren’t told that inverting the rightful order would lead to dire consequences:

“Woe to those who call good what is evil and call evil what is good, who classify as darkness what is light and designate as light what is darkness, who make sweet what is bitter and make bitter what is sweet.”
— Isaiah 5:20

The Rotten Fruit of a Degenerate Culture

This twisted glorification of vice can lead nowhere else than its logical conclusion: widespread decay. Placing sin where virtue should be will inevitably destroy the structures that support and make any society thrive: families will be fragmented and broken, institutions will become corrupted, communities will dissolve due to distrust and egoism, cities will become boiling pots of degeneracy and vice, and art will become ugly as the souls of the artists darken. Even churches, those sacred places that are supposed to lift a man’s spirit towards Heaven and serve as God's resting place on earth will slowly lose their beauty and become dull, plain, and “functional”.

When truth gets rejected, ugliness becomes the norm. Maybe the most shocking form of ugliness is that which we see on the outside, in the physical world, but we cannot forget that physical and cultural decay are but mere consequences of a much more terrible ugliness: that of the soul. In the absence of a clear moral compass, and confused by the fog of relativism, our spirits start to darken, and what can follow after that but a darkening of the world we inhabit?

Unless there’s a clear guiding light within us, we will be stumbling in the darkness, wreaking havoc and facilitating the great decline. When we forget—or willfully ignore—the fundamental truths of existence, and fail to live in accordance with the proper order, we become agents of chaos. The ugliness that we see is the ugliness that we create, and we create ugliness because our souls are disordered. Only by living orderly lives, by calling virtue and vice by their truthful names will we once again direct our souls toward beauty and manifest that in the world around us.

This ugliness is not just problematic because it aids in creating a culture that points downwards instead of upwards towards all that’s good, but because it’s much more difficult to find a worthy meaning within the confusion of an ugly world. It’s impossible to ignore for too long that the natural consequences of living in an unnatural, backwards culture, surrounded by ugly fruits, are overwhelming outbreaks of despair, anxiety, and the blackest shade of nihilism. Is it any wonder that most people don’t see the point of living? If you replace beauty with decay, you hide the very things that bring meaning to life behind those that steal the fire from our souls.

Rotten souls produce rotten fruit. But ironically, sometimes it’s the rotten fruit that further produces a spiritual and moral decay. Both things are forever entwined in a vicious cycle which sometimes seems impossible to break.

The inversion of virtue and vice produce ugly art, vulgar music, and gray, windowless buildings. But even a soul that once was pure can fall prey to the overwhelming influence of an environment in which all music degrades human dignity, works of art are simple and dull, and buildings are meaningless blocks of concrete.

As we know, however, it’s in the midst of great crises that the greatest opportunities are born. While it might not seem so at times, this vicious cycle can be broken. It won’t happen overnight, but we can set in motion the wheels of revolution. It starts with a spark, a commitment to aim higher and bringing back the beauty that gives life its meaning.

The Aesthetic Revolution: A Return to Meaning

Our war against the ugly starts with a brave choice: we must decide to set our soul in order and orient our energy towards what's truly good, beautiful, and virtuous. This is no small matter, nor is this a choice fit for those without a courageous heart. Choosing to walk towards virtue means looking at yourself honestly, diving deep into your psyche and finding those parasites that have led you astray until today. It means to choose to see all the things you’re not, and waging war against the spiritual weakness that lures you towards a passive, comfortable apathy. This quest is not for the faint of heart. Awareness requires great courage.

But it's historically true that only those who dare greatly can elicit true change and bring about successful revolution. The aesthetic revolution we can usher in isn't about superficial or material beauty—although that will be a welcome consequence—but about a deeper pursuit: order, harmony, virtue, and transcendence.

The darkness that plagues our world can be discouraging, but I’ve found—and I think you can too—great hope in the signs of renewal that are starting to bloom. We are seeing a widespread awakening of souls ready to sacrifice for the higher values we’ve lost, people who choose not to keep feeding the monster of degeneracy, and there are visible signs of a new age all around us: classical education, traditional crafts, sacred art, noble architecture, and a longing for truth, beauty, and honor are all starting to become common again. Men and women are embracing their roles, finding meaning in sacrificial love, and choosing to reject the lies of postmodernity. This is a spiritual as well as a physical uprising, a pushback from millions of souls that have had enough and that still maintain enough fire in them to spark a noble initiative to fight back and rebuild the beauty that we’ve lost. This battle will help us find our way towards Truth, reestablish order, and bring back meaning to our lives, for beauty is a weapon against despair.

Become a Creator of Beauty

Each of us can become a valuable asset in the Aesthetic Revolution. It’s not necessary to be a great painter, musician, or artist to switch our focus towards building beauty in our lives. Each one of us can choose to aspire to something higher and devote our lives to bringing beauty to the world.

“Every little thing is an opportunity for unlimited artistic expression.”

We can choose to live intentionally, to care about the details, to pay attention to the fruits our lives are bearing. In every choice you make there’s the potential for beauty, and the opportunity to choose virtue over vice. We can educate ourselves better, refine our taste, speak with clarity and conviction, act with integrity, and reclaim beauty in our environments. Our clothes, our homes, our families, and our habits can all be reflections of the higher virtues we pursue.

Beauty Will Save the World

Do not underestimate how much beauty matters for the collective human spirit. We are different people when we are surrounded by virtue and by the physical beauty that virtue spawns. The quest to restore beauty is a noble one—perhaps the noblest one we can currently undertake.

The aesthetic revolution won’t be televised, but lived in our homes, in our daily choices, and in the depths of our soul.

It will start there, and slowly find its way into the art that we produce, into the buildings that we build, and the music that we create. Beauty will fill your heart until it starts pouring out into a decaying culture that desperately needs to be revived.

Juan Domínguez writes Simple Men, a newsletter that's ushering in a new era of Christian masculinity. Powerful, vital and strong. If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll love his work. Subscribe to Simple Men to read more of his musings and check out his books here.

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Juan’s piece was published in Issue 36 of the WARKITCHEN. Read the full issue here: