To Live in a Doomed Society

We’re All Grieving. Only Some of Us Don’t Know it Yet.

It’s a strange feeling, this business of living in a doomed society. Like being haunted by your own ghost. But I will come to that. First I want to paint a picture for you, of what life is like.

The intellectuals. What can we say about them? They can’t really process endings, by which I mean genuinely accepting, understanding, seeing the finitude of a thing, deep down in its bones and yours, because endings flummox the mind. Endings, like beginnings, are made of passion, sweat, tears, fury, emotion, pain, unreason. Endings are made of fire and midnight. Only in the middle can calculation triumph, and that is the only place intellectuals and their grand ideas really matter at all. And so now, as always in a doomed society, even the brightest only sing the already forgotten dirges of a lost golden age. Cut the deficit, goes the verse, shrink the government, goes the chorus, you know these old songs. The dim call folly itself a lost golden age, and suppose they will find salvation there, in tribalism and nationalism and so on. But the mistake is the same: neither can accept that this is the end, much less look forward beyond that end. The intellectuals of a society are its mind, and the intellect of a doomed society is a mind that somehow got lost in a labyrinth of broken dreams, and…