Nature abhors a vacuum

Whilst it's true that Conan-Doyle's and Kipling's notions of "the magnificent fair play of the English" are quite mythological and one need only look, for example, at Jethro Tull's lyrics on that:

Playing at the hard case
You follow the example
Of the comic-paper idol
Who lets you bend the rules

So, come on ye childhood heroes!
Won't you rise up from the pages
Of your comic-books, your super crooks
And show us all the way

So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
They're all resting down in Cornwall writing up their memoirs
For a paper-back edition of the Boy Scout Manual

(Kindly note my avatar by the way which I use across socmed ...)

... nevertheless, the tendency to plunge into despair at that realisation is to ignore another reality which does exist ... that even the literary, religious and MSM bestowing of impossible nobility on a people is, in itself, an inspirational thing to enshrine in that nation's heritage.

In short, if all these ideals, impossible to achieve on earth, are still to be aspired to ... then that society survives. 

As long as I can still charge around on my white charger looking for damsels in distress to rescue, as long as you can open your paper in the daily train commute and all is well in Panglos's best of all possible worlds, even if we do muddle through a bit ...

... those values do survive as the summum bonum ... we all kid ourselves that most still subscribe and I for one ask, "Why not?"

But once the Tull cynicism consumes us and it becomes dog eat dog, me me me ... a process of a few generations until the new teachers and pollies are nearly all ideologically satanic and the children stand no chance ... as Jim Morrison sang:

All your children are insane ... ride the snake, the ancient snake

... then in pour hordes from outside the borders and Ancient Rome is the model for horrors to come ... not that Rome itself was societally any great shakes in the first place.

Is there some sort of happy medium? Well the Good Book certainly lays down aspirations for mankind but when the children no longer even know about the Good Book, let alone embrace its values ... there does come a time where we can only hope a new generation, as in The Who's song 905, starts to realise that something is missing.

Meanwhile, I see two distinct sets of memes going about the net, of the non-despairing kind ... one stems from the precepts of the Good Book and the other is reiteration of the Stoics, the Kipling mentality:

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more— you’ll be a Man, my son!

If you can put together both sets of precepts, not just the second, if you can draw strength from your Maker, as Psalm 23 illustrates, plus the Beatitudes, if you can subscribe to the ten commandments, wherever they came from or whoever wrote them ...

... if you can warn the children of the seven deadly sins, seven holy virtues and note that ourselves by the way:

... then, miserable sinners such that I for one am, far from any claim to saintliness in my conduct, at least have a code of conduct vastly superior to that of the deathcult and poison of communism.

Nature abhors a vacuum ... all that a vacuum does is invite itself to be filled ... inevitably by slime and bilge, not by nobility ... so the solution is to emind society that that vacuum is not freedom in the least ... it's the worst kind of internal slavery within us.

We can go all woe is us, heads in hands as the hordes gallop in and slaughter us ... or we can show a bit of spine and start adhering to a code we once did, minus the hypocrisy of pointy hatters like Welby and the antiPope and slimy politicians  ... plus heads of armed forces saying we should all charge off overseas to be cannon fodder whilst leaving our own land undefended.