In a post yesterday, Lawrence Auster, in full prophetic mode:

Let’s face it, folks. The British, the great people from which our own country was born, are dead, they are finished, they are kaput. And that goes for their “conservatives” too. Before there is any possibility that they can become a decent and strong people again, they must first be melted down and destroyed as they now exist.

A commenter protested the metaphor might be a bit harsh, so Auster added:

You’ve read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The British as a people have developed a “false personality” that has taken over and controls them completely. If they are to have any hope of getting back to their “essence” again, their false personality (in Christian terms, their body of sin) must be melted down, which can only happen through tremendous suffering.

I read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff in university and actually visited a group of their acolytes to see how they practiced the great ones’ teachings.  About as stiff a group of neo-Gnostics as I have ever met.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What’s interesting is that Auster, an apparent conservative Christian, should lean on those two non-Christian mystics so heavily that they in fact provide him with a critique of the UK’s predicament and an oddly simplistic formula for England’s salvation, one which we have heard over many, many decades from those decrying "the decadent West".

Still, I think this “suffering solution” sounds like a winner.  Therefore, I’ve instructed our broker to buy up shares in Harrod’s, UK, Hair Shirt Division, and dump those lingerie stocks.