There is growing awareness, at least in conservative circles, that standards in the West have been dropping. A perfect example is Boeing whose airplanes are falling out of the sky. They also managed to send two astronauts into space on a mission that was supposed to take eight days but which is still ongoing, three months later. Other obvious problems are the decline in teaching standards or the increasing lack of meritocracy in government, academia, and industry. While it is easy to look at Boeing and make fun of it, the decline of the West can be seen in many much less obvious instances as well. In this article, I will highlight three, two of which are from my own daily observations.

I want to start with a flight I took about six years ago, via SWISS Air. Have a look at the image below. You see that the logo inside the airplane was not properly fixed to the wall of the cabin. Nobody cared about it. I took the liberty of alerting one of the cabin crew members to that. At first, she did not know what I meant. Then I realized that she simply did not notice that the letters were not aligned properly, and after I had pointed that out to her, she brushed that off as unimportant. There was a time when businesses worked really hard on giving an immaculate impression. In particular industries in which safety is a high concern, you would assume that they should have a heightened interest in being impeccable all-around. Compared to Boeing planes losing their landing gear, this is nothing, but the impression SWISS Air gave me was nonetheless far from positive. Such an image just sticks in your memory.

The bigger picture is obviously that many small mistakes invariably and inevitably compound. If you have ever given a presentation for a client as part of your work, you probably went over each slide multiple times, ensuring that there were no mistakes in them at all. The point is that you do not want to give anyone a reason to dismiss your presentation because of an initial bad impression. Similarly, if you saw typos on a corporate website, you would conclude that they have poor quality control. There is a reason why people and companies try to give a good impression on others, and if they do not do that, it is normally a reason for grave concern.

A more widely publicized example of poor quality control the world has witnessed was given in the context of the Olympic Games this year in Paris. Somehow, the Olympic flag was hoisted upside down. When I saw this, my first association was with satanism. As you may be aware of, inversion is a key element of that cult. Thus, they hang the cross upside-down, for instance. I do not want to exclude this as a hypothesis, given that we are ruled by a satanic elite, but at better explanation is probably lack of competence and utmost indifference. Have a look a the image:

A lot had to go wrong for this to happen. There surely was at least one dry-run, with a large number of people keeping an eye on both the preparation and the execution of the opening ceremony. You can also ask why they did not just rectify the situation right there. Of course it would be a minor hiccup to change the orientation of the flag, but this would be preferable to pretending that everything was alright, and expecting that nobody would call them out, like it was the case with the emperor’s new clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.

We have looked at an example of a company, where there were just few witnesses of the incompetency on display, as well as an example of a global event that many people have watched. Even more damning are everyday occurrences that can clearly be seen by everyone, yet the public and politicians pretend they do not happen. I will start with the image:

This picture shows a shattered glass wall of a bus stop in Sweden. There are many such cases. Sweden has opened its doors to doctors and engineers from around the world. One of the pastimes they engage in is wanton vandalism. This particular bus stop got vandalized on an almost weekly basis. There are now bus stops in Sweden where the authorities no longer bother replacing the glass walls. I have also occasionally seen every single bus stop being vandalized along bus lines. It is bizarre to take the bus on Monday and see smashed glass at every single bus stop. People pretended this is not happening. Instead, city governments just replace the glass as quickly as they can, until they run out of money. One bus stop close to where I used to live had its glass walls smashed five or six weeks in a row, for instance, and then not at all for months. Imagine seeing the glass walls getting replaced by Wednesday, only to get smashed again on Saturday night, week after week after week! The total cost to the tax payer for the aforementioned kind of vandalism must have run in the millions. Yet, this was never a news story nor did I ever hear about a politician claiming that vandalism was problem. Instead, they were as stoic as the people using these bus stops. They all just pretend that nothing is wrong. Probably, they are so numb to the damage due to vandalism that they do not even get upset anymore.

There is a saying in German, “if you cannot be punctual you are not going to amount to anything in life”. The original sounds better: “Wer nicht pünktlich sein kann, kann gar nichts sein”. The left loves to mock such phrases, which is in line with them mocking punctuality, cleanliness, friendliness, reliability, etc., as “secondary virtues”. However, it is undeniable that if you cannot take care of the utter basics that are required to function in society, you will be a very ineffective human being. The same is true for companies and society overall. If companies are not able to set up good processes and follow them, they will not be able to provide an impeccable service or produce competitive products. The rot is already everywhere. Sooner or later, this will lead to the widespread collapse of infrastructure and a completely ineffective government. We will see a lot more of this in the future.