“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
― Wendell Berry
You don’t have to be a jaundiced cynic to look around and reach the unfortunate conclusion that the world we inhabit is unraveling at a feverish pace. It’s everywhere we look.
Our institutions, our media, our politics, our universities, our economies, our chronic illnesses, our collapsing fertility rates, our dehumanizing behavior, our relationship with technology, the way we interact with each other, our fractured communities, and the loss of meaning in daily life.
From the minds, bodies, and souls of individuals to the institutions supposedly dedicated to maintaining social order, everything is debased to the core. Every day, we are confronted with a new threat, a new tragedy, a new war, a new scapegoat, and another issue to fight over.
Frithjof Schuon saw it early on when he wrote: The modern world is the only one among civilizations to have created a world in which ugliness and triviality are commonplace and in which they appear shamelessly as the 'serious' and the 'reality.’
The dehumanizing nature of the corporate state, entwined with the technocratic leviathan we live under, has unleashed a cascade of corruption, gimmickry, and senseless lunacy. On top of that, we have rampant inflation, unimaginable debt, insane home prices, and stagnant wages (inflation-adjusted), which have completely paralyzed the pursuit of the so-called American Dream for our youth, who are already burdened with enormous college debt.
Though I’m viewing this subject through an American lens, many nations in the so-called civilized world are in the same boat.
The two prior generations locked in unprecedented prosperity for themselves - affordable asset prices, dirt-cheap education, rock-solid lifetime jobs, and generous defined-benefit pensions —while deliberately offloading the crushing bill onto their own children and grandchildren.
And now they preside over their dismantling.
This isn’t about blame. The prior generation merely adapted to a “way of life” imposed on them during a post-war economic boom. We humans, with our optimistic nature, tend to overlook the consequences of continuous growth. The future implications of the policies promoted weren’t fully considered, and the politicians did what they always do — kick the can down the road and hope for the best.
In the words of Nicolás Gómez Dávil: “History buries, without solving, the problems it raises.”
Homeownership, “the primary wealth-building mechanism for the two previous generations,” has become unaffordable for most young people today, and foreclosure rates are on the rise, up 30 percent from just two years ago.
The median age of a homebuyer was 31 in 1981. Today, it is 59.
The cost of college has increased significantly over time, outpacing general inflation for decades. The outstanding federal student loan balance now stands at $1.661 trillion.
The younger generations work more hours and earn less (in real terms). They pay more for basic necessities while inheriting an economic and social crisis they did not create. They are byproducts of the “growth at all costs” model that once enriched the older generation and has left them in a state of hopeless bewilderment.
Young people are acutely aware that their prospects appear dim and unpromising, not to mention the dawn of AI and automation, which will inevitably cause job displacement, along with the tech-driven changes that will further erode a sense of privacy, dignity, and meaningful connection to the world.
Most Americans, being out-of-touch consumption junkies and dedicated servants of the machine, don’t realize how far things have gone to the wayside. They’ve grown used to their chains, their ignorance, and have grown comfortable in their own mediocrity. But deep down, we all know something is off.
The billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, seems a bit concerned, too:
“The stock market is in a historic bubble. When it melts down, the consequences for what’s left of the middle class will be ugly. Especially with the gigantic levels of debt everywhere. The situation is compounded by the fact that the real estate market is floating on a sea of debt. We’re looking at widespread unemployment and social unrest at home, and war abroad.”
There is nothing good or natural about the way things are. As one writer pointed out, “If this were a truly healthy form of human society, we wouldn’t require constant propaganda and fabricated narratives to be able to sustain it.”
The truth is, folks, we’re living in the final stage of a debt-fueled, multi-generational fiscal Ponzi game. The end of a cycle. The “final act of the mad, incendiary project of a totally wired world.” And in the process of a “new world” being born, there will be pain and immense suffering in the form of widespread economic turmoil that will devolve into senseless wars and violent upheavals.
We stand on the precipice of a significant transformation of the social order, not to mention the monumental disruption AI will wreak on our livelihoods and the dubious aims of the technocratic elite who have us all locked in an algorithmic Bastille.
If the technological oligarchy has its way, the ultimate aim is to “merge consciousness with AI and conquer the cosmos.” What can go wrong?
In this feverish age of “progress,” where the frenetic pace of technology is accelerating faster than our ability to adapt, an age in which the vast majority of our desires are manufactured by scheming technocrats, and distraction, social breakdown, alienation, and depression are the new norms, the very core of our humanity is at stake.
The United States federal debt is rapidly approaching 40 trillion dollars. The annual interest on this inconceivable debt exceeds 1 trillion dollars, and it will get worse despite politicians’ empty promises. The immense rise in household debt is also concerning, considering the concurrent decline in household savings.
There’s no rosy scenario in which this ends well.
It’s easy to take the lazy way out by blaming “the other party” and cursing the current stooge in office, as if that were the heart of the problem. However, our sickness runs deeper than the puppet show of politics, which is merely one of many symptoms of a much more profound illness.
As the remarkable writer Charles Bowden once asked:
“Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness … then what are we to do?”
For over a century now, wise voices have warned of the very predicament we now face— warnings we chose to ignore. We have always shunned the wisdom of pessimistic thinkers despite the accuracy of their prophetic forecasts.
In his profound little book, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned of the “mass man,” whom he saw as comfortably materialistic, hostile to excellence, and incapable of sustaining civilization. He foresaw a democracy of appetite without responsibility.
Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), exposed how consumer culture bred fragile, self-absorbed individuals who’ve become cut off from community and tradition. He argued that this narcissism was a symptom of societal collapse.
The Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila viewed modernity as a slow suicide: “Modern man destroys more when he builds than when he destroys.”
Throughout his novels, poetry, and essays, D.H. Lawrence railed against the mechanization of life and the loss of “blood consciousness,” believing that industrial civilization was cutting humanity off from the primal sources of vitality.
Whether they employed aphorisms, prophecy, poetry, or systematic critique, many of these great thinkers and writers shared a common theme: a society that abandons transcendence, severs ties with community, and harbors a preference for comfort, control, and incessant progress would one day choke on its own excess.
And here we are.
We all want solutions to the problems perpetuated by the vile social structure we inhabit, but the truth is that we’re drowning in a sea of solutions. Constantly. Most of the problems that plague us today have arisen from “solutions” to other issues. This is what we call “progress.” Rousseau once reminded us: “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
Or as the historian William Ophuls pointed out: “Civilizations are trapped in a vicious circle. They must keep solving the problems of complexity, for that is the price of civilized existence, but every solution creates new, ever more difficult problems, which then require new, ever more demanding solutions. Thus complexity breeds more of the same, and each increase in complexity makes it harder to cope, while at the same time escalating the penalty for failure.”
Is it too late to reverse the unraveling? Many wise minds believe so. Perhaps it’s too far gone. “No weapons, no matter how powerful,” writes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower.”
A society dominated by selfishness, hyperactivity, avarice, and a fetish for status, conformity, and material gain hardly has the spiritual stamina or moral resources to reform itself.
As contemporary writer Paul Kingsnorth concluded, “Our culture is not in danger of dying; it’s already dead, and we are in denial. This, now, is the reality we have to wrestle with —and transcend.”
There’s no use in trying to inject false hope into a dying organism. As William Ophuls concluded, “Civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction…and there is very little that we can do…a genuine cure would require a revolution in human thought greater than the one that created the modern world.”
We live today amid the ruins of the values essential to civilization’s survival. We’ve allowed all aspects of culture to become politicized, digitalized, and monetized to the point of disillusionment. Community, critical thinking, and truth-seeking have given way to fashionable ideologies and groupthink.
We’re all trapped in an abstract system that strips us of our vital essence. A system designed to veil the sacredness of the earth. A system designed to reduce living human beings to interchangeable numbers, uniform cogs, and statistical units.
The media sells fear, the job siphons the spirit, the money is becoming worthless, politics has us at each other’s throats, we spend more time in front of screens than contemplating trees, and we’ve completely forgotten who we are as unique humans on this mysterious planet.
We know more about strangers on the internet than we do about our own blood. We’ve traded our souls for comfort and convenience at a horrifying cost, while letting ourselves be sedated by the most nonsensical distractions rather than face the actualities of the blood and guts of life. And it’s this materialistic, sense-bound thinking that has severed us from the deeper realities our ancestors once knew.
We’ve created a completely artificial world and are becoming sick because of it.
As Ramon Elani writes: “Modern man is both the most comfortable and—as evidenced by the ever-growing number of medicated children and adults, therapy patients, suicides, and psychopaths -- the most unhappy being that has ever lived.”
In this uncertain era, as the old world dies, we must look beyond the facade presented to us. We must have the courage to face the more profound metaphysical truths we’ve been conditioned to ignore. We must rid ourselves of the reductionist worldview and look at our predicament from a bird’s-eye view rather than be continuously duped and deluded by the shadows on Plato’s wall.
We must refuse to prostitute and degrade ourselves for cheap gain and personal comfort in a system designed to keep us numb and nonchalant behind our social mask.
We must deliberately exile ourselves, at least spiritually, from a society that has descended into utter madness, a society that has become thoroughly disenchanted, teetering on the brink of self-annihilation, and has devolved into a soulless machine dominated by bureaucratic rigidity and algorithmic manipulation.
We can continuously battle over politics, policies, and partisan worldviews, but it’s all futile until we’re willing to get to the root of the problem. The crisis of our age is that modern humanity has been uprooted; we’ve lost our center and suffer desperately from a spiritual malaise.
We are a population of restless, anxious, and perpetually unsatisfied people, and the consequences manifest in the mayhem and exploitation we see all around us.
In this age of terminal decline, there’s still a chance for us to live fruitfully if we have the courage and the necessary awakening to restructure our lives away from the rat race of the global machine. We need to localize and live in fidelity to our own land, neighbors, and limits as finite creatures. And we need to participate in work that, in the words of Wendell Berry, connects us “both to Creation and to eternity.”
This isn’t an easy task, I’m well aware, and it might sound utopian (ish) to the well-adjusted, but if the distaste of our profane and materialistic lives has become too much for us to bear, and for many of us —it has, we’ll find a way out of the barbed wire metropolis of modernity. We must.
The deadening effects of the digital age have brought us to the end of our tether. We must return to the source and pick up the old threads that can awaken parts of the self modern life has put to sleep. We must remember, once again, what it means to be human and regenerate our relationship with the living Earth.
As Gary Snyder reminds us: “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
Until we as individuals revive a living sense of the sacred, one rooted in truth, beauty, and cooperation, no revolution can save us. Until our inner world is healed, and the veil is torn from our eyes, the outer world will continue to be a catastrophic horror show with no hope for a better future.
I’ll end with urgent words of Paul Kingsnorth:
We unmade the world. Now we are going to have to remake it again.
We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbours. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.
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