The Return Of Extremism
Why Decaying Societies Create Extremists
Extremism does not arise by accident. It is not a fever dream of radicals or an error in social evolution. It appears when a society has already lost the ability to govern itself.
Healthy civilizations do not produce extremists. Decaying ones do.
From the outset, the extremism discussed here is ideological, not violent. Violence is not extremism taken too far. It is failure disguised as action. It is what remains when conviction, legitimacy, and discipline have collapsed. Ideological extremism is something else entirely. It is the refusal to negotiate first principles once negotiation itself has become corrosive.
Extremism tends to appear in two recognizable forms. Sometimes it emerges as a new doctrine imposed with severity in response to institutional collapse. Other times it appears as an uncompromising insistence on standards that were considered ordinary within the last few decades. One of these is genuine extremism. The other is simply a society encountering its own reflection and recoiling.
When normal standards begin to look radical, extremism is not the anomaly.
Decay is.
“Custom becomes law when law has lost its authority.” — Aristotle
The Conditions That Produce Extremism
Extremism is not emotional. It is rational. It emerges under specific conditions, and history shows these conditions repeat with mechanical consistency.
1. Subjective Morality
When morality becomes subjective, authority becomes theatrical. Right and wrong turn into opinions. Standards become flexible. Enforcement becomes selective. The same behavior is condemned in one context and excused in another. Law continues to exist, but belief in law evaporates.
At this stage, power no longer rests on legitimacy. It rests on habit, fear, and inertia. This is unsustainable. A system that cannot justify its own rules will eventually be challenged by those willing to impose them without apology.
Extremism does not introduce absolutism. It revives it.
“Justice is one; it is not different in different places.” — Cicero
2. Hedonism and the Elevation of Comfort
Civilizations rot when comfort becomes sacred.
When pleasure replaces virtue as the organizing principle of life, restraint collapses. Discomfort is reframed as injustice. Discipline is labeled cruelty. Obligation becomes an insult. The citizen is transformed into a consumer whose primary political demand is to be left alone.
Such societies do not fall in flames. They dissolve quietly. They become incapable of sacrifice and therefore incapable of survival. Extremism emerges not because it hates pleasure, but because pleasure cannot command loyalty when conditions harden.
Power does not belong to those who feel the most. It belongs to those who endure the longest.
3. Disillusionment with Institutions
When institutions enforce standards unevenly, belief in them collapses. When elites exempt themselves from the rules they impose, obedience becomes irrational. Moderation no longer stabilizes the system. It legitimizes dysfunction.
At this point, extremism becomes inevitable. Not because people become irrational, but because rational people recognize that a system unwilling to defend itself has forfeited its authority.
In precise terms, legitimacy has been squandered, and fear has not yet been restored. That is the most dangerous phase of any political order.
“Where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues thrive.” — Plato
Extremism in History
Rome and Early Christianity
The Roman Empire did not collapse because it was too rigid. It collapsed because it ceased to believe in itself.
Citizenship expanded while duty declined. Luxury replaced restraint. Law persisted, but conviction vanished. The ruling class governed publicly while privately abandoning the seriousness of their own civilization. Rome retained power, but lost moral gravity.
Early Christianity entered this environment as an ideological absolute. It rejected pluralism, refused civic rituals, imposed strict moral discipline, and asserted exclusive truth in a culture increasingly organized around accommodation and spectacle.
Rome recognized the threat immediately. Not because Christians were violent, but because they were incompatible with moral flexibility and a decadent society.
Christianity functioned as a silent accusation. It revealed decadence simply by existing. Rome persecuted it because moral clarity is intolerable to systems that survive on ambiguity. Christianity did not conquer Rome. It survived Rome.
That distinction matters.
“A people unaccustomed to self-restraint cannot long remain free.”
— Polybius
Sparta and Deliberate Severity
As much of Greece drifted toward luxury, rhetoric, and factionalism, Sparta chose severity.
Wealth accumulation was restricted. Hierarchy was enforced. Individual desire was subordinated to civic survival. This was extremism not because it was irrational, but because it refused compromise with indulgence.
Sparta understood something later societies prefer to forget: order requires inequality, discipline, and sacrifice. Comfort breeds dissent. Severity breeds coherence.
Sparta eventually ossified, but its rise followed a consistent pattern. When restraint is the only remaining defense against decay, extremism becomes conservation by other means.
“The city is well fortified which is surrounded by brave men, not walls.”
— Lycurgus
The English Puritans
Seventeenth-century England was marked by moral ambiguity and institutional hypocrisy. Authority demanded obedience while excusing itself from restraint. Religious forms remained intact, but discipline had evaporated.
The Puritans responded with absolutism. They rejected half-measures. They demanded that belief be reflected in conduct. They insisted that order required moral seriousness, not ceremony.
They resisted not because they were incoherent, but because they were too coherent. Even in defeat, their moral framework reshaped the societies that followed. Their influence outlived their power.
This is a recurring law of history. Extremists rarely win immediately. They win eventually.
What Extremism Actually Solves
Extremism persists because it addresses what decaying societies refuse to confront.
When morality becomes subjective, extremism restores boundaries.
When comfort replaces restraint, extremism reintroduces discipline.
When institutions lose legitimacy, extremism supplies coherence.
This is why extremism is always described as dangerous by cultures that depend on ambiguity. It forces decisions where delay has become policy. It imposes limits where indulgence has erased them.
A society built on preference cannot defend itself against conviction.
A society organized around comfort will eventually be governed by those willing to endure discomfort for belief.
History is clear. Extremism does not emerge because people become hateful or irrational. It emerges when societies lose the will to rule themselves. Civilizations do not fall because extremists appear. Extremists appear when civilizations have already begun to fall.
And they always arrive with the same message: that standards are not optional, that limits are real, and that order belongs to those willing to claim it.