The always brilliant and astounding Martin Gurri:
These recent episodes are symptoms of a mass decline in America into unreason—bordering, at times, on a psychotic breakdown. Strange fantasies have overwhelmed reality: it’s an age of delusion, impossible longings, and ritual self-mutilation. The causes are many and complex, but the syndrome deserves a name. I’m going to call it the “Endarkenment” because it rises, like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment.
The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.
The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.
and this,
Meantime, our public debates have come to resemble the shouts and moans emanating from a lightless lunatic asylum. Should men compete in women’s sports? Should children have the right of self-mutilation as soon as they have “any ability to express themselves”? Should the word “mother,” until now revered in every culture, be banned in polite society as too offensive to the barren? Such controversies are possible only in a place of impenetrable gloom, where the mind can trick itself into believing that it has finally overcome reality.
Two questions arise out of our current leap into the dark. First: How did we get here? Second: Can we turn on the lights again?
here’s the sad, bad secret…the seed of its own destruction exists always in classically liberal society,
By every known measure, the Enlightenment inaugurated an unparalleled improvement of the human condition. But a penalty was to be paid: the critical impulse lacked a logical stopping place, an end of history of the kind that the Hegelians and Marxists promised. The monarchies and the old nobility were overthrown, representative democracy expanded the suffrage to all citizens, universal literacy and education were achieved, and free markets and science generated undreamed-of wealth and vastly enriched lives—yet still the criticism continued its inexorable assault on social relations.
plus,
Liberalism sought to solve the problem of meaning by privatizing it. Individuals were free to believe whatever they wished, so long as it remained within the law. But this could only be a provisional expedient. The massive weight of the culture pressed against traditional sources of shared meaning, grinding them down. One was free to believe that the sun orbited the earth, but not if one wished to be taken seriously. The same became true of Christianity and religion in general. To be enlightened—or “modern”—came to mean disenchantment, skepticism, the impossibility of settled belief. Marx’s “fast-frozen relations” had aroused powerful feelings of belonging; for these, liberalism substituted the cold scalpel of the statistician and the bureaucrat.
Humans are idiots and frequently decide to use their freedom to self-destruct.
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