Stop Cheering for Your Own Annihilation!

If you’re still not comprehending the true implications of your situation, read this.

There’s a secret most of us whisper to ourselves before sleep: something feels missing. The lights are brighter, the feeds are fuller, the choices are wider—and yet the rooms we live in echo. We keep buying cushions and neon signs for the echo. We keep naming the echo wellness, balance, upgrades. But behind all the decor and dopamine is a simple tremor: a civilization that suspects it is aging out of meaning.

Call this decadence if you like—the old word has been banished from the faculty lounges, but it still wanders the streets. History records the sensation in a thousand forms: capitals that sleepwalk, empires that forget what their hands are for, elites who curate grace while willpower drains from the limbs. Nothing here is exactly new. We have been here before, under other chandeliers.

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History is a library of endings. Holger Sonnabend once catalogued fifty polities that bloomed and blew away: from a one-day Ruthenian flicker in the Carpathians to the long, basalt ages of the Pharaohs. Norman Davies, narrowing his scope to Europe, walked among the corpses—Burgundy, Byzantium, Prussia, the USSR—and refused to pretend any death certificate looked the same. Implosion, conquest, merger, velvet divorce, quiet revolution; sometimes the monarch’s folly; sometimes the people’s exhaustion.

Alexander Demandt tallied 227 reasons for Rome’s fall. Two hundred twenty-seven! You can laugh at the pedantry or take the point: decline is never monocausal. It is a slow turning of many keys in many locks, until the great door swings open and the barbarians walk through.

What did the ancients notice? Sallust, already in 34 BC, muttered that luxury breaks the spring of effort. Augustine observed the moral hydraulics in order: simplicity produces effort; effort yields victory; victory becomes power; power begets wealth; wealth summons luxury; luxury hollows out the moral core. Hobbes blamed the inner sicknesses of the body politic. Barbara Tuchman gathered a gallery of ruling-class blunders and called it folly. The patterns differ, the feeling rhymes: the center forgets its purpose, the appetite forgets its limits, the periphery remembers its teeth.

Rome’s posterity loves to diagnose Rome. Gibbon saw imperial overstretch and the state’s slow strangling embrace. Others, the debasement of currency, the obedience of guilds, the bureaucrat’s triumphant creep, the collapse of republican fiber, even the tender-hearted theology that unsexed the sword. There are harsher readings and gentler ones.

What seems solid is this: when citizens stop defending their own walls—militarily, culturally, spiritually—someone else will knock on the gates with a different hymn. I will not name the group of barbarians we are currently dealing with, as I concluded that you either know already or have to experience the violence they bring firsthand to understand that none of their causes should be ours other than their contingency. Otherwise, I’m just preaching to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, hoping that “not all of them are bad”.

The demographic undertow—the laws of Augustus to reward parenthood and penalize childlessness—was a panic in statute form. Perhaps it wasn’t the cause, but it was surely a symptom: Rome had grown elegant enough to forget replacement. One day Odovacer announced the last Western emperor could go home. It’s the passage from culture to civilization: from living form to polished mechanism; apparently an arc the West cannot stop repeating.

Rome’s population crashed from two million to 70,000 by the seventh century. Max Weber saw this as the extinguishing of classical civilization’s light, after which “the intellectual life of Western humanity sank into a long night.”

Demandt argues that military weakness was the coup de grâce. Rome fell—like Carthage before it—because its citizens would no longer defend themselves. “Decadence,” he writes, “is the marriage of refined lifestyle with declining life-force.”

No culture fixates on the end as vividly as Christianity, which married apocalypse to accountability: the curtain will fall and you will answer for your role. The earthquakes, the blood moon, the stars like stones. Even secular art has painted this dread—Gryphius’s “Es ist alles eitel,” Milton’s Paradise, Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire.” Schopenhauer bittered the palate. Nietzsche, decadent diagnostician par excellence, flipped the table: Christianity itself, he said, was the great enfeebler, an ethic of softness and pity that unlearned pride.

While there is simple deductive logic behind my belief that Christianity is the only true religion that wasn’t penned by men, Christianity probably didn’t help with its celebration of virginity and otherworldly focus, its turn-the-other-cheek pacifism, and obsession with martyrdom—none of this builds empires—and we see where it brought modern-day churches—hijacked by libertarianism—, celebrating their conquerors and protecting the perpetrator rather than the victim. It’s a weird perversion of what still reigns as the only logically coherent religion.

The Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, wallows in apocalyptic-eschatological visions. It’s fine. I get it, drama always sold well, but Christianity is the religion most obsessed with final judgments, promising earthquakes, floods, falling skies, universal conflagrations, total darkness, cosmic catastrophe, which might be because these are all very real things out of our control that could annihilate us—again with the logic.

The Book of Revelation provides the most vivid disaster porn: “There was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the full moon became like blood, and the stars of heaven fell to the earth...” Christianity seems almost sexually fixated on eschatology (from the Greek ta eschata, “the last things”), fascinated by the fall of “Babylon the Whore,” the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by apocalypses, by divine judgment, by dies irae—those days of wrath. Theologian Klaus Berger (1940-2020) explained the strategy: “If you can’t depict horror, you’ll hardly awaken longing for salvation.”

But then the doom-mongers multiplied: mystics, Pietists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Islam—that deranged bastard child of inferiority complex, victimhood, and blood thirst—offers its own End Times, though less cinematically—early Suras speak of a final judgment of souls. Buddhism—a religion in which women are reborn as dung beetles—envisions a “dark age” as the fourth epoch after Buddha’s birth.

Poets and artists have always been decay’s eager chroniclers. Andreas Gryphius’s 1637 sonnet “All Is Vanity,” written in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, captures the mood:

“You see, wherever you look, only vanity on earth. What this one builds today, that one tears down tomorrow: Where cities now stand, meadows will grow, Where a shepherd boy will play with his herds. What now blooms magnificently shall soon be trampled. What now pounds and defies will tomorrow be ash and bone...”

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) chronicled the fall of angels, the original sin, paradise lost. Visual artists joined the funeral parade: Thomas Cole’s 1836 five-part painting cycle “The Course of Empire” traced the arc from “The Savage State” through “The Arcadian or Pastoral State,” reaching “The Consummation of Empire,” then “Destruction,” finally “Desolation.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) built an entire philosophy of pessimism on the assumption that the world constantly deteriorates, viewing Earth as a vale of tears and dismissing all optimism as childish, even foolish.

Nietzsche held Christianity directly responsible for decadence. As the religion of the downtrodden, obsessed with original sin and eternal guilt, Christianity caused Rome’s fall. Christian “slave morality” corrupted pride and self-confidence, replacing them with a morality of humility, nervous weakness, irritability, sentimentality, pessimism, self-contempt, contrition, and—worst of all—pity. “Christianity began the falsification of natural values” and the “rejection of national communities.”

Though Nietzsche never explicitly predicted it, many read him as prophesying Europe’s death by Christian compassion. Immanuel Kant had similarly rejected all pity-based morality as contradicting the categorical imperative, which locates life’s meaning in action, not in yielding to soft emotions. Nietzsche advocated for a “restoration of humanity’s egoism” and rejection of everything weak. Only the Übermensch could save us.

Interestingly, Dostoevsky, whom Nietzsche greatly admired, saw things completely opposite: for him, decadence resulted from moral rot and abandonment of Christian values, not their embrace.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) proved equally pessimistic, developing his cultural pessimism in works like “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), “Group Psychology and Ego Analysis” (1921), “The Future of an Illusion” (1927), and “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930). Under the impression of World War I, Freud formulated his dialectic of Destrudo versus Libido, Thanatos versus Eros, death drive versus life force. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno interpreted Western history through Destrudo’s lens as progressive suppression of both external and internal nature. Adorno stated: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

Central to the decadence debate remains Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) with his monumental The Decline of the West: Outlines of a Morphology of World History. Published in two volumes (1918 and 1922), it spans 1,200 pages plus a 50-page index. Within twenty years, it sold over 200,000 copies across 75 editions. Spengler was in his mid-thirties when writing it, dead at 56, probably planning revisions he never lived to make.

His inspiration? Perhaps the 1911 Second Morocco Crisis (Germany’s forced abandonment of colonial ambitions), certainly World War I’s catastrophe, possibly even the Titanic’s sinking on April 14-15, 1912—seemingly to many a perfect metaphor for technological hubris meeting natural reality.

Intellectually, Spengler acknowledged his debts: “In conclusion, I feel compelled to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. From Goethe I have the method, from Nietzsche the questions...”

Spengler’s core thesis: world history moves in cycles of rise and decline. He borrows Goethe’s biological-morphological metaphors (hence his subtitle referencing “morphology”). For both men, all life passes through phases of youth, maturation, aging, and death. These cycles apply to art, society, politics, and state. Each high culture lasts roughly a millennium. For the “West” (one of eight high cultures he identified), Spengler mapped the phases thus: Spring (500-900 CE), Summer flowering (900-late 18th century), Autumn decline (from 1800), Winter death (after 2000).

All cultures eventually become civilizations in their decay phase. Culture versus Civilization—this is Spengler’s great antinomy: homeland versus cosmopolitanism, religion versus science, wisdom versus mere intelligence. Late-stage civilizations share symptoms: senile need for rest, post-heroism and historylessness, artificiality and rigidity in all spheres of life, dominance of inorganic world-cities over vital countryside, cool factuality replacing reverence for tradition, materialism and irreligion, anarchic sensuality, “bread and circuses” mentality, entertainment industries, moral collapse and artistic death, democracy sliding into imperialism and “formless powers,” declining birthrates, absent “will to duration” (including in marriage).

Add to this art’s commercialization, public opinion’s manipulability, consumerist attitudes, and finance’s omnipotence (”billionaire socialism,” as he calls it in a separate chapter).

Every former cultural area ends up inhabited by primitive masses, the fellaheen (Egyptian peasant-farmers)—or every story of every Middle Eastern high culture in existence. The West looks at these places’ history and thinks: “Well, surely it will be different this time.” With freedom’s decline comes rationalism’s discrediting, ignorance of what is right but feels wrong, and metaphysical hunger’s return. The ultimate victor is whoever best masters anarchic tendencies during cultural dissolution.

For Spengler, the West’s essence is “Faustian”—restless, expansive, always seeking the highest and deepest: “Faustian culture was supremely directed toward expansion, be it political, economic or spiritual; it overcame all geographical-material barriers; it sought, without any practical purpose, purely for symbolism’s sake, to reach North and South Poles; it ultimately transformed Earth’s entire surface into a single colonial territory and economic system.”

Some accused Spengler of inspiring National Socialism. True, he wasn’t a Weimar Republic enthusiast, but the Nazis hated Spengler and Spengler hated the Nazis. A meeting with Hitler on July 25, 1933, in Bayreuth confirmed mutual antipathy. He called Hitler’s first cabinet of 1933 a “carnival ministry.” About Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century—arguably the Nazi movement’s second-most important book after Mein Kampf—Spengler wrote: “A book where nothing’s correct except the page numbers.”

Elsewhere, Spengler wrote: “National Socialism was largely an intrusion of Tatar will into the West’s borderlands, as un-German, un-Germanic, un-Faustian as possible—flat as the great Asian plains!” He called the Nazi Party in 1933 an “organization of the unemployed by the work-shy.” (Sounds familiar?") To Nazi Reichsleiter Hans Frank, he wrote presciently in 1936: “...since in ten years a German Reich will probably no longer exist!” Spengler predicted Germans would embrace “soulless” Americanism: materialistic, militaristic, animalistic. He saw Germans as a “politically uneducated mass,” led by political “fools, cowards, criminals.” Political parties were “profit-making enterprises with paid bureaucratic apparatus.” This “swamp” had made the state its “prey.”

Is Spengler still worth discussing? World history vindicates Spengler to an astonishing degree. The forgotten Spengler takes revenge by threatening to be right. Whether this assessment holds 75 years after this article remains debatable. But it holds concerns about the “decay of education, morals, the individual, family, philosophy; especially culture’s decline into “culture industry” and “calculated idiocy.”