So the Western system has become "so contaminated by its 'other' (violence, racism, monopolistic interests) that it can no longer distinguish itself from that other". There is perhaps a process of self-destruction similar to autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis or severe neurosis. A parallel to this "legal-political" phenomenon is the self-destructiveness of the individual as shown by the drug epidemic or unsustainable levels of debt. In the 1930s in my country drunkenness was very prevalent. It's decadence on the national and individual level. (Comment accidentally deleted and reposted.)
Beatus, you've put your finger on something essential. The autoimmune metaphor is powerful — and I'd suggest we push it further.
What you describe as "decadence" at the national and individual level is, in my reading, not merely a moral or cultural decline. It is the structural consequence of a system that has exhausted its own founding fictions. The liberal order, like an organism that attacks its own tissues, can no longer distinguish between the violence that constituted it and the violence that now dissolves it. Derrida saw this in Force of Law: every legal order is founded on a decision that cannot justify itself — a madness, a moment of pure violence that is later concealed beneath the surface text of rights and rules.
But the autoimmune metaphor has a limit. In biology, autoimmunity is a pathology of misrecognition — the system mistakes itself for an invader. In politics, however, the liberal order knows what it is doing. It does not mistake itself for its other; it simply no longer cares. The "age of candles" threat is not a lapse into barbarism — it is the unconcealment of the barbarism that was always there, beneath the Charter and the Conventions. What we are witnessing is not the collapse of a healthy organism, but the disrobing of a corpse that had been dressed as a living body.
Your point about the 1930s and drunkenness is well taken. But decadence, in the Spenglerian sense, is not the cause of collapse; it is the symptom of a culture that has lost its orientation toward the absolute. What follows decadence is not always death — sometimes it is the qualitative leap of a new will emerging from the ruins. The autopoiesis of war I described is precisely such a leap: when the besieged, having recognized that the "order" they face is nothing more than a death-machine dressed in legal robes, no longer asks for justice from that order. They ask only for room to decide their own fate.
So yes — the system is sick. But the question is not whether it will collapse. The question is whether those who still remember what it means to dwell in a place, to be bound to a soil and a history, will have the clarity to let it collapse — and to build something else on the ground that remains.
The answer to that question is not in the patient. It is in the decision.
So the Western system has become "so contaminated by its 'other' (violence, racism, monopolistic interests) that it can no longer distinguish itself from that other". There is perhaps a process of self-destruction similar to autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis or severe neurosis. A parallel to this "legal-political" phenomenon is the self-destructiveness of the individual as shown by the drug epidemic or unsustainable levels of debt. In the 1930s in my country drunkenness was very prevalent. It's decadence on the national and individual level. (Comment accidentally deleted and reposted.)
Beatus, you've put your finger on something essential. The autoimmune metaphor is powerful — and I'd suggest we push it further.
What you describe as "decadence" at the national and individual level is, in my reading, not merely a moral or cultural decline. It is the structural consequence of a system that has exhausted its own founding fictions. The liberal order, like an organism that attacks its own tissues, can no longer distinguish between the violence that constituted it and the violence that now dissolves it. Derrida saw this in Force of Law: every legal order is founded on a decision that cannot justify itself — a madness, a moment of pure violence that is later concealed beneath the surface text of rights and rules.
But the autoimmune metaphor has a limit. In biology, autoimmunity is a pathology of misrecognition — the system mistakes itself for an invader. In politics, however, the liberal order knows what it is doing. It does not mistake itself for its other; it simply no longer cares. The "age of candles" threat is not a lapse into barbarism — it is the unconcealment of the barbarism that was always there, beneath the Charter and the Conventions. What we are witnessing is not the collapse of a healthy organism, but the disrobing of a corpse that had been dressed as a living body.
Your point about the 1930s and drunkenness is well taken. But decadence, in the Spenglerian sense, is not the cause of collapse; it is the symptom of a culture that has lost its orientation toward the absolute. What follows decadence is not always death — sometimes it is the qualitative leap of a new will emerging from the ruins. The autopoiesis of war I described is precisely such a leap: when the besieged, having recognized that the "order" they face is nothing more than a death-machine dressed in legal robes, no longer asks for justice from that order. They ask only for room to decide their own fate.
So yes — the system is sick. But the question is not whether it will collapse. The question is whether those who still remember what it means to dwell in a place, to be bound to a soil and a history, will have the clarity to let it collapse — and to build something else on the ground that remains.
The answer to that question is not in the patient. It is in the decision.