The phrase of the week: decadence | EUROtoday
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Lhe Argentinian president Javier Milei promised, in his victory speech, to place an finish to it. Without saying the phrase, Elon Musk compares our societies to the Roman Empire, “Fallen because the Romans have stopped making Romans”. Europe’s wait -and -see perspective within the face of the appetites of Trump, Xi Jinping and Putin makes us concern the worst. Decadence – etymologically, the start of the autumn, of degradation – has turn out to be our obsession … Without realizing, precisely, to whom the time period applies precisely: to Europe? To the West as a complete? What is tapping us is just not the one perspective of decline, however the impression of shifting in the direction of the break of our civilization. The phrase additionally has an ethical connotation. We would pay, mainly, our switching, an opulence that has boring us. Enjoyed with taxes and leisure, we curl up on our personal considerations within the useless hope of escaping the crash of historical past.
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
And but, is that this marketed decay not a trompe-l’oeil? For the economist Pierre Bentata, the West is the sufferer of the “Curse of the winner” (The winner’s curse, Observatory). “Wherever we take a look at, the fabric superiority and the cultural hegemony of liberal democracies are important. No decadence on the horizon. »» If we imagine on this chimera of forfeiture, explains the essayist, it’s as a result of we made the person an absolute, condemning us to perpetual dissatisfaction. In actuality, the West has already received, however he would not comprehend it but …
An infinite ending
The truth stays that the priority components stay. In his glorious welcome in decadence (Presses de la Cité/Perrin), printed in April 2024, the American Ross Douthat identifies 4 – financial stagnation, demographic sterility, institutional decline, cultural and mental exhaustion – to redefine the idea of decadence Western. To learn the editorialist at New York Timeswe stay lower than a sclerosis, an infinite finish, regardless of the impression of vertiginous technological acceleration that characterizes our time. But ought to we actually get stricken? After all, we now have the prospect to stay on this planet “The richest, healthy and viable in all the history of human societies”, Recalls Douthat. Would we not win, then, to make decadence final so long as potential?
https://www.lepoint.fr/postillon/le-mot-de-la-semaine-decadence-08-02-2025-2581843_3961.php