Simply that if you guide your actions in accordance with what you see and hear around you — particularly on television, and most particularly on newscasts — you’re likely to spend your life in a state of waking dreams. Harry Browne, one of my earliest teachers through his insightful writings, summed up the solution more than 30 years ago in the title of his heretical book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

I don’t agree with everything Harry says in his book (and, perhaps presumptuously, suspect that he no longer does, either), but its basic message is still as sound as the U.S. dollar was in days of yore when it was backed by gold. The message is that you, as an individual gifted with a human brain, can do a whole lot to lead a prosperous, happy life even as your lemming neighbors insist on following evil, ignorant, and/or confused politicians and “good cause” advocates over the Cuckoo Cliffs.

I recall an acquaintance of mine in the early eighties, after reading some of my dire prognoses for the future of Western civilization, saying to me, “What’s the point in trying to make money or striving to achieve if there is no hope for Western civilization?” He felt nothing but despair as a result of the plethora of so-called doom-and-gloom books that were on the market at the time.

From Harry Browne’s How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation to Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing to Gary North’s newsletter Remnant Review, the truth was pretty ugly. But the average person simply did not want to believe that the collapse of Western civilization was as imminent as so many “extremists” were predicting.

And they were right. Western civilization did not collapse. It simply faded away through a phenomenon known as “gradualism.” An accelerating gradualism, to be sure, but gradualism nonetheless.

So, those who are awaiting the collapse of Western civilization will have a long wait, because the truth of the matter is that they’ve already missed its demise. Western civilization, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It faded away as Americans were watching “Monday Night Football,” guzzling Bud Light, and stuffing themselves with Big Macs.