There’s a poem called “Waiting for the Barbarians” by C.P. Cavafy. You can read it here. It lays out a fundamental problem that overcomes civilizations who get too big for their own britches and become too dominate on the world stage. Nobody to my knowledge has avoided it. It’s a malady common to empires, and the U.S.A is an empire. Don’t kid yourself about that.
Waiting for the Barbarians is about a society that appears paralyzed into inaction by the approach of barbarian hordes.
The senators have stopped making laws. Why bother? When the barbarians arrive they will simply run roughshod over the rules.
The orators no longer turn up and make their speechs. Why bother? When the barbarians come they will be bored by public speaking.
The king is not doing anything. He’s just sitting around. What else should he do? He must get ready to greet the barbarians. To make peace with their leader. To negotiate terms.
But, then the barbarians don’t turn up.
“What’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” The poet asks. “These people were a kind of solution.”
Our society has been frozen by Covid for two years. Before that, we were entangled in an unwinable war with barbarians who lived in desert caves for twenty. I don’t think either of these things needed to happen. Both could have been handled with far less hysteria and irrationality and panic. But on the other hand they did need to happen. What else was there to do?
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