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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
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About This Book
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of "sustainable decadence," a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think..
Reviews
"Too often he conflates science fiction with expert projections we've somehow failed to fulfill."
"In this sense it is as much a manifestation of decadence as an act of defiance against it."
"If this kind of armchair chaos-theorizing tell us anything useful, or anything we don't already know, it's about the author."
"If Douthat's account ever managed to compass the extent to which global suffering is a structural precondition of upper-class stupor, he would be far more likely to see that the problem he describes in fact contains its own solution."
"The result is a trenchant and stimulating take on latter-day discontents."
"The least persuasive pages are devoted to pop culture, which he rightly sees as dull and repetitive, but whose significance he vastly overestimates ..."
"A journalist...delivers an impassioned but not entirely convincing critique of American and European society ..."
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