Decadence

I recently read a comment by Jorge Cividanes, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, which sums up something I’ve been thinking for a few years: “If you’re not a Trump supporter, you’re woke. If you talk about taxes and public services, you’re a communist. We’re living in a global epidemic of stupidity.” He was criticizing certain ridiculous formulaic reductionisms, formulaic reductionisms that I’ve been confronting every now and then for the past decade.

There’s no point in explaining that I don’t believe in utopias, nor defend one party regimes that aim to transform society based on the fiction that human history has a scientifically discernible course. Just by thinking that a civilization needs a state and public services if it wants to be minimally functional makes me a communist in the minds of many. But this kind of thing isn't exclusive to those who see communism in everything. We also find the formulaic attitude in those who think that everything is the antechamber of fascism, except those regimes approved by social media revolutionaries.

The fact is that, at the risk of being formulaic and reductionist myself, but if so many can do it so can I, I cannot help but give in and see, like Cioran did, that there exists a pattern in the political opposites of our era. The reactionary, the conservative, projects the golden age of man — or at least of his people — in the past and seeks to recover it in the present. The revolutionary, the progressive, projects the golden age of man not in the past, but in the future, and seeks to establish it as soon as possible. For both, everything or almost everything would be justifiable if they had enough power in their hands.

This does not mean, of course, that they are equivalent. One wants, at least nominally, to emancipate man, to do away with hierarchies and with what he considers to be injustices, the other wants to reinforce castes. But noble intentions matter little when reality imposes itself and decadence begins. And where decadence begins, collapse is inevitable. However, decadence itself is inevitable. The impossibility of anything remaining eternally stable in the world of becoming will cause the dreams of all the idealizers of the polis to collapse, no matter what they defend. Even what I call a minimally functional civilization will decline and collapse.

Between 1989 and 1991, a decadence that had been present for some time ended with the collapse of the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe. Today, we are seeing the decadence accelerate in a different but no less destructive way in that nation that was once capable of putting men on the moon. Having grown up in a South American middle class whose dream was to send their children to live there, something I did, I can say that one of the most frustrating things for me is seeing my still living elders justifying the ministerial choices of the current president-elect of that nation.

If they had the slightest bit of true wisdom, they would understand that these are choices made to destroy that empire once and for all. But they, like those who cry for empires that no longer exist, have no wisdom. They live on dreams, like all of those who bet on a world where becoming and never being is the only law. Betting on dreams of a perfect city is even more foolish than betting that our children will thank us for being born.

To crudely paraphrase Machado de Assis in his novel, Quincas Borba: if you have tears, cry for the death of your ideals. If you only have laughter, laugh. It's the same thing. It doesn't matter if you laugh or cry. The stars that shone in the night sky during the ill-fated existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and that shine today during the decadence of the United States of America are too high and do not see the laughter and tears of men.

by Fernando Olszewski