The End.

Part 1.

I grew up in the shadow of American evangelicalism, I was constantly told that the end was near. Sometimes these doomsday prophecies came with dates or even hours attached. Yet those deadlines passed, one after another. Over time, the predictions came to feel as fictional as the book series that inspired them. Each new prediction rang more hollow, like the boy who cried wolf. Eventually, I stopped believing that the end was remotely imminent.

Lately, however, my perspective has begun to shift. I have enjoyed being born into my corner of the Western Empire. It’s a bit unfashionable to admit, but I have reluctantly become a man of my time.  (To borrow a line from Wendell Berry) Indeed, I’ve lived a very good life, and I have not had much to do with it.

Yet, I cannot escape the sense that our society is consuming itself. In the United States especially, we seem to have become victims of our own prosperity. As the saying goes: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

Sir John Glubb, in his essay The Fate of Empires, observed that most empires endure for roughly 250 years before collapsing. He described a recurring cycle beginning with pioneering vigor and conquest, followed by commerce, affluence, intellect, and finally decadence. The Age of Decadence, Glubb argued, is marked by material excess, moral decline, an obsession with entertainment, and a growing sense of entitlement. (We’re doomed.) We are wealthy beyond measure, yet divided, depressed, and therapized. Our lives are dominated by mere consumption. Healthy people and societies produce and create. We buy. If Glubb’s cycle holds true, then we are most likely living out the twilight stage of our empire.

I think it’s fairly obvious to conclude that we are in the era of decadence. Yet I would be remiss not to acknowledge that there are also signs of resistance: a quiet resurgence of classical standards of beauty, a tapering in the long trend of religious decline, and a political pendulum that has begun to swing back toward meritocracy. The self-defeating globalist tolerance agenda is increasingly being recognized as the ouroboros it truly is. These glimmers may buy us a few more decades by slowing our social and economic decay. My hope is that this remnant of excellence and decency might once again grow into a dominant cultural force. That is a hope. Perhaps that is more indicative of the company I keep, than the changing cultural tide, but I hope nonetheless.

In spite of some of this shifting, the sheer strangeness of our age leads me to believe that we are, in fact, at the end of an era. Ideas that formerly lived on the conspiratorial fringe now fit comfortably within the Overton window. Consider, for a moment, the oddities that have entered the public zeitgeist within the last few years: Congresswoman, Anna Paulina Luna, went on JRE and spoke openly of “interdimensional beings,” insisting that lawmakers had been briefed on movements “outside of time and space” and that she was “very confident there’s things out there that have not been created by mankind.”

Additionally, the federal government authorized the release of Navy cockpit videos showing unidentified craft defying known physics, and intelligence officers have testified under oath that “nonhuman biologics” were recovered from crash sites.

And, our statehouses are speaking to fringe issues. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed into law a measure that makes it a felony to disperse substances into the atmosphere to influence weather or climate. A few years ago, “chemtrails” only existed in the imagination of conspiracy theorists. Now they have been written into statute.

Alongside these disclosures comes the emergence of the Telepathy Tapes, which have introduced a massive audience to the notion that autistic individuals, assumed to be completely non-verbal, may in fact be communicating telepathically. The central theme is that consciousness is the building block of the physical world, more than the other way around. The whole show is innately challenging of the materialist paradigm. Give it a gander, it’s quite an interesting production.

These are strange days—stranger than I can remember. So what are we to do in such times? We cannot halt the march of history or reverse the cycle of opulence. But we can choose to be set apart. There is one domain that somewhat remains in our hands: our end.

Rather than simply asking what might please us in this moment, we’d be wise to consider what impact we want to leave when the end comes. What true thing will be said at our respective eulogies?

We cannot choose the era into which we are born, but we can choose to live lives worthy of consideration. I keep thinking about Legacy. I used to think of it as an expression of the ego, but legacy is not about posthumous accolades. It’s about leaving the lives of others better than we found them.

Yes, we are living in strange days. In some sense, we are living through the end. That’s okay. The call remains the same: “love one another.”

I hate how much I love this painting. “The Course of Empire: Destruction,” Thomas Cole, 1836.