On Decadence

What else do you call it when an individual - or a society - acts against their own interests simply because it is entertaining, or it feels immediately gratifying? Newspapers trying to drive out Tony Blair because they want a new target for their columns. People indulging their personal whims, such as having babies in their fifties and sixties, because they feel an overwhelming urge to do it. It is odd, the selfishness of the Noughties. As I said in an earlier post, the selfishness of the Eighties is now anathematised, while we live currently in a Randian hell of social conduct, in which the idea that if everyone only follows their heart, we will all be happy, has conquered all. And the state chases around after the lives this ruins, desperately patching the unpatchable, trying to shore up its equally false principle that such choices make no actual difference to how our lives go. Some choices -- like bringing your children up in a marriage -- are wiser than others. And our hearts are not wise, individually or collectively, any more than our appetites, if freely indulged, will settle on a diet of celery, boiled rice and healthy living for all. We are stuck with our needs for wisdom and virtue. But these truths are too awkward to face. Decadence is the product of welfare living: the confidence that your actions have no meaningful consequences. That is an illusion that will be brutally shattered by the world eventually. Until then, we play with opinions and actions, as if who rules over us and how we choose to live were choices between flavours of ice cream and nothing more.