Nobody Really Wants to Sacrifice Themselves Anymore

And that’s a problem.

In St-Gregory, Anne Bernet tells the story of Gregory’s aunt Tarsilla, who, to redeem her sister’s failure to respect her vows of virginity, prayed and fasted to the point that she died.

Such actions are hardly comprehensible today, but they make sense in light of the principle that good things happen to those who sacrifice.

• If you sacrifice comfort at the gym, you’ll have a good-looking body.
• If you sacrifice free time at university, you’ll have a higher-paying job.

A sacrifice comes down to giving up something good now to have something better later. It’s the marshmallow test. It’s delayed gratification.

It’s also the cornerstone of Western civilization, one that enabled it to innovate, develop, and reach the level of prosperity we can enjoy today.

But fewer and fewer people are willing to sacrifice in the modern age, be it something, themselves, or others.

In 1944, the US did not hesitate to sacrifice its army to free Europe.

It did not hesitate to sacrifice it again in Afghanistan in 2001.

But it didn’t do it in Syria in 2013, and it won’t do it in Ukraine in 2024.

In fact, if you open a newspaper, you’ll read callings for Ukraine to stop fighting and “give up” in the face of aggression.

By the same token, difficult jobs like nursing, teaching, or construction work are struggling to hire because workers are no longer willing to sacrifice themselves to do those jobs.

As for office employees, they are asking for less working time and less money in exchange for free time.

These findings express the rapid pace with which mentalities evolved in the West in just three generations.

The refusal to sacrifice appears to play a significant role in the most distinguishable features of the modern age:

• Low birthrate: refusal to sacrifice time and money on the altar of love and meaning.
• Quiet quitting: refusal to sacrifice time and energy on the altar of money.
• Obsession with traveling: refusal to sacrifice youth, adventure, and good time on the altar of service.
• Ghosting: refusal to sacrifice peace of mind on the altar of honesty.
• OnlyFans: refusal to sacrifice wealth on the altar of decency.

We can wonder what compelled the shift of behavior toward the desirability of making sacrifices.

Is it technology? Culture? Modern comfort? Education? Mental illness? Climate change? FoMO? The multiplication of opportunities?

Is it the cost? Is life so nice that “sacrificing” it to have kids is no longer worth it? Or is it the opposite, that life is too costly to be able to make those sacrifices? Both can be argued.

In the early 1960s, the cool thing to do was to be ambitious, hard-working, and earn a lot of money.

By the time we reached the early 2010s, it had completely shifted.

The purpose of life was no longer to work hard and succeed in the corporate world, but to work as little as possible.

We went from seeking connection through collaboration and collective achievement to seeking individual transcendence.

Me…me, me, me…me. Agent Smith, The Matrix 2

This shift in attitude is neither secretive, surprising, or unique as it happened in every successful society that once existed.

Pinpointing its origin, though, is much more difficult. We still don’t know why the Roman Empire fell, after all.

The gradual fear of hard work seems to be the general narrative arc of all civilizations despite the repeated warnings against it embedded in stories and religions.

Myths are an important source of wisdom in this regard.

Most of these stories involve a hero making the right sacrifice (Lord of the Rings), the wrong sacrifice (Peau de Chagrin), or no sacrifices at all (Peter Pan), and the consequences that unfold.

St-George fighting the dragon is one of my favorites.

There was a dragon in the city of Salem.

To keep it peaceful, the inhabitants fed it cows and pigs. But the dragon’s appetite grew and soon enough, it wanted to eat people.

So the community randomly selected inhabitants to be fed to the dragon until one day, the daughter of the king was chosen.

St-George appeared at the doors of the city and offered to kill the dragon if the inhabitants converted to Christianity.

They did, he killed the dragon, and no one was ever fed to it again.

St-George shows how the unwillingness to face, fight, and kill the dragon at the risk of your life will only incur an increasing price.

Only he was courageous enough to do it. He became a hero as a result (in most stories, the reward for bravery is a princess.)

Risk -> reward.

Problems arise when this equation is disturbed, that is, when you get the reward without taking the risk. Or when the reward isn’t worth taking any risks at all.

St-George’s story tells a lot about the modern West, particularly about the number and size of dragons multiplying as a result of our unwillingness to fight them.

In the short term, ignoring the dragon helps us remain comfortable.

But in the long term, we risk ending up with a future much worse than the past or present.

The grasshopper having sung All summer, Found itself very deprived when the North wind arrived Jean de la Fontaine (inspired by Aesop)

Peter Thiel famously said that while brilliant thinking is rare, courage is in even shorter supply.

This lack of courage characterizes the West today, expressed in features like political correctness, censorship, abandonment of tough laws, and refusal to tackle hard problems like birth rates or the energy crisis.

Sometimes, voicing that the dragon exists may even land you in jail.

We used to sacrifice the present on the altar of a good future. We now sacrifice the future on the altar of a comfortable present.

For society did not stop making sacrifices; like Hansel and Gretel’s mother, it’s making the wrong ones.

Recently, the French were the first country to include the right to abortion in the constitution.

No rational or progressist explanations will ever manage to justify this level of buffoonery.

I read somewhere that the reason why this had been done was that it was easy.

Insecurity, trade balance deficit, governmental debt, or agricultural reforms (the real problems of France) are, in comparison, much harder to solve.

So we pat ourselves on the back for doing something we pretend was hard but that actually wasn’t.

Any available symbol or propaganda tool is instrumentalized to this effect.

This is the essence of procrastination. On a normal day, it’s easier to watch TV than to clean your room.

But during an examination period, it’s easier to clean your room than to study your courses.

Our refusal to make the right sacrifice because it’s painful is compelling us to procrastinate at a supra-national level.

It’s a problem.

Only those who are willing to face the pain are really moving society forward.

And those moving society forward are often the only ones willing to face the pain of sacrifice.

And they are increasingly few.

In Fine

I once read that the effects of nicotine consumption were equivalent to gaining 10 IQ points.

This led some people to speculate that the decrease in drug taking negatively impacted creativity, innovation, and economic development.

But I think this is a cultural problem. It’s not the decrease in drug taking that makes us less capable, but the mindset that led to the decrease in drug taking in the first place.

For “some reason”, we’ve become addicted to decreasing pain by external means rather than facing its source.

It’s become an obsession, to the point where we prevent pain from even becoming possible in the first place. A Brave New World, if you will.

When efforts are too hard, you can just take a pill. Or you can stop making them altogether. Accept yourself as you are.

I won’t paste the graphs outlining the increase in mental health problems and decrease in young people driving, drinking, dating, and being in a couple because it’s old news, but this aversion to pain and risk is almost certainly the main cause for these phenomena.

Joseph Campbell told us to go on an adventure. I don’t know man, is it safe? Shouldn’t we wait to have car insurance first?

An analysis of written material has shown that the West was increasingly shifting from a society of risk-taking to a society of fear and cowardice.

I am not making this up.

The Western world needs a big dose of courage and realism at the risk of waking up one day overwhelmed by the sheer size and number of dragons flying around.

Here are a few examples.

These are the problems we need to tackle.

Let us not wait until it’s too late to do so.

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