I have a confession to make. I’m a glass-half-empty guy. I don’t recall any particular event that made me that way. No crushing tragedy that I can point to or someone I can blame. It seems that it’s my nature to be so. But perhaps there’s something more to it than my own personality.
If you pressed me on why I tend to look on the dark side of things, maybe it has something to do with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. I was born in the 1960s into a collapsing civilization, the collapse of which has only accelerated over the course of my life. Civilizational collapse is not a pretty sight for anyone with a philosophical bent. Of course, philosophical reflection is not a prerequisite to experiencing the impact of a civilizational collapse. When the barbarians are scaling the walls and burning your city, even the least reflective man knows he’s in trouble.
But barbarians scaling the walls and burning the city mark not the beginning of a civilization’s collapse but its end. What marks the earlier stages of a collapse is the rejection of truth, the belief in the lie, and decisions based on the lie – things which at the time may have seemed righteous and good and progressive to many – but which eventually and necessarily lead to destruction. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” to quote Proverbs.
Lux Lucet 