When in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and then over the next two years the whole of the remaining Soviet Empire, including the Union itself, fell, there was rejoicing among Western triumphalists. But they were blinded by the error of their own hubris; the fall of Soviet State capitalism and its materialism was also the beginning of their own fall, of Western elitist capitalism and its materialism. This was because the two ideologies have exactly the same origin – in the anti-Christian denial of the fact that mankind has both a spiritual origin and a spiritual destiny. The only difference was that the Western system was more successful in its materialism.

Marxist Communism, imported into the former Russian Empire from the West which had lost its faith, had promised ‘a bright future’, ‘a paradise on earth’. Western Capitalism had promised the same, ‘progress’ and ‘a consumer paradise’. But both resulted in the same collapse of nations, families and personal lives in amoral and infantile self-indulgence, in alcoholism, abortion, constant wars for mineral resources, divorce, drug-addiction, ecological catastrophe, economic injustice, social inequality and suicide. Neither ideology could solve the problem of death; neither, vitally, could provide any meaning to life. Both therefore led to death.

In reality, the meaning of life is in believing in something that is worth dying for. If something is not worth dying for, it is certainly not worth living for. Life without a goal is meaningless. And who wants to die for a new brand of toothpaste and the right to vote for one corrupt fool rather than for another corrupt fool? Any Civilisation that is not worth dying for is doomed to degenerate and die. And this can be seen today all over the Western (and Westernised) world, which confesses only ignoble absurdity and bestiality. Western and Westernised society is not a Civilisation of creators, but of consumers, that is, of destroyers of resources.

Civilisation collapses when it is only a Civilisation of consumer well-being, of health and safety, without risk or challenge, a Civilisation of fear of illness, of lockdown and bankruptcy. However, as long as there is only one person who resists this pseudo-Civilisation and does not surrender his free will to pointless consumerist comfort, the devil has not defeated mankind, for one person has defeated the devil. After the fall of the monstrous Soviet Union, many there refound the meaning of life in the Christianity of before and the rebuilding and building of lives and churches of spiritual beauty, culture and art. Is the same possible in the Western world?