“In the grip of Thanatos, we see the ruins of the wasteland, and where we do not yet see it, we are determined to create it, to reduce the remaining monuments around us to rubble.
And so here we are, seized by rampages of resentment against each other and against the great achievements of our civilization’s past. Those achievements reprimand us, making us feel petty and small.
We can no longer stand on the shoulders of giants without trying to stomp them into the ground. We can no longer borrow the fire lit by the priests and prophets of the past without feeling scalded by it. The reputations of our forefathers tarnish us. Their high ideals—liberty, equality, democracy, excellence—rebuke us for how far from them we have strayed, so we lash out at those older generations for the distance they left between ideal and reality. Despairing of a path towards a more perfect union, we work to tear apart the one we have and replace its aspirational ideas with fly-by-night flavors of the moment, rallying cries that will be discarded in favor of yet new variants soon after the troops are summoned to the field of battle and have upset enough apple carts to lay waste to our harvest.
Measured against the old-world, tradition-bound cultures of Europe and Asia, we have always believed more in ourselves, in the capacity of every successive generation to rise as though unbounded and newborn and remake the world in its image. But our Emersonian self-reliance, our tradition of breaking with tradition, has turned to spasms of ceaseless self-immolation...
All around is the debris of our once-vibrant civilization. We are cannibalizing it, feeding off its decaying carcass. Its scraps—deracinated fragments of near-forgotten great books, of once-awe-inspiring religious traditions, of heroic deeds now devalued, of grand ideas that used to breathe life into peoples and nations, of formerly strong institutions forged in toil and turmoil—progressively are being hollowed out more and more with every passing year. We pay lip service to them on occasion, though even those occasions are coming with diminishing frequency. Still, they are all that confer upon us what little forward momentum we may yet retain. Our civilization is grinding to a halt.”
“In the grip of Thanatos, we see the ruins of the wasteland, and where we do not yet see it, we are determined to create it, to reduce the remaining monuments around us to rubble.
And so here we are, seized by rampages of resentment against each other and against the great achievements of our civilization’s past. Those achievements reprimand us, making us feel petty and small.
We can no longer stand on the shoulders of giants without trying to stomp them into the ground. We can no longer borrow the fire lit by the priests and prophets of the past without feeling scalded by it. The reputations of our forefathers tarnish us. Their high ideals—liberty, equality, democracy, excellence—rebuke us for how far from them we have strayed, so we lash out at those older generations for the distance they left between ideal and reality. Despairing of a path towards a more perfect union, we work to tear apart the one we have and replace its aspirational ideas with fly-by-night flavors of the moment, rallying cries that will be discarded in favor of yet new variants soon after the troops are summoned to the field of battle and have upset enough apple carts to lay waste to our harvest.
Measured against the old-world, tradition-bound cultures of Europe and Asia, we have always believed more in ourselves, in the capacity of every successive generation to rise as though unbounded and newborn and remake the world in its image. But our Emersonian self-reliance, our tradition of breaking with tradition, has turned to spasms of ceaseless self-immolation...
All around is the debris of our once-vibrant civilization. We are cannibalizing it, feeding off its decaying carcass. Its scraps—deracinated fragments of near-forgotten great books, of once-awe-inspiring religious traditions, of heroic deeds now devalued, of grand ideas that used to breathe life into peoples and nations, of formerly strong institutions forged in toil and turmoil—progressively are being hollowed out more and more with every passing year. We pay lip service to them on occasion, though even those occasions are coming with diminishing frequency. Still, they are all that confer upon us what little forward momentum we may yet retain. Our civilization is grinding to a halt.”
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/we-are-living-in-the-ruins-of-our-civilization/
Upvoted for Pere Ubu mention