Jerm talks with Richard Storey — Catholic writer and author of The Uniqueness of Western Law — about the origins and decline of the West.
Storey argues that European character was forged by Indo-European warrior culture, that the West rests on a Roman skeleton with Catholicism as its natural successor, and that "Judeo-Christian" is a dishonest label for what's really a Greco-Roman inheritance. He sees the Protestant Reformation as the moment shared corporate identity fractured into spiritual individualism — the seed of the hyper-individualism now eroding family and community — and frames modern liberalism as a resurgence of Gnosticism.
Throughout, he argues that "mammon" — money and technology — is the recurring death mechanism: empires grow wealthy, lose their martial virtues, and collapse into individualism.