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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
"His analysis is full of shrewd insights couched in elegant, biting prose ..."
"Douthat is too curious about the world and its contradictions to settle into that mode ..."
"The whole section on culture fails in this way ..."
"The further Douthat stretches this overall something-is-rotten thesis, though, the weaker it becomes in its particulars ..."
"And he repays our consideration with a glittering stream of associations and distinctions, resonances and rhymes that reinflect the world we thought we knew in fascinating ways ..."
"An earnest analysis buoyed by debatable evidence."
"For all its blind spots (some of them willful), as a description of our moment, The Decadent Society is as convincing, if not quite as entertaining, as Adam Curtis's film HyperNormalisation."
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