https://www.aier.org/article/the-rescue-from-madness
In his memoirs, written in the 1940s but not published until after his death, the great economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.” Most people contemplating the political and economic climate of 2020 can probably relate.
Many of us, frustrated at the loss of liberty and overreach by governments in the single-minded battle to eradicate a virus they don’t understand, have reached for George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. In their novels, 1984 and Brave New World, they explored incredibly dystopian worlds. Real-world events that resemble anything in those books invite the fear that we’re destined for the same tyrannical lives.
While literature captures something deeply real about what it means to be human ‒ particularly during the first half of the despicable 20th century in which these authors lived ‒ they ultimately depict something unreal. The superstate of 1984’s Oceania hasn’t quite emerged anywhere, except perhaps North Korea; the foolish quest for unstructured and uninhibited pleasure in the World State has so far restricted itself to communes and sections of woke university campuses.
Instead, I find Mises, or his contemporary, the novelist and poet Stefan Zweig, much more revealing. Both came of age in fin de siècle Vienna with its coffee houses, intellectual advancements, literary achievements, famed circles and aura of learning for learning’s sake that posteriority much envied. Both witnessed the prolonged and enduring collapse of their civilizations.
In contrast to Orwell and Huxley’s unreal worlds, the demise that Mises and Zweig discuss actually happened, and just a few generations ago. In our times, in our worlds, with roughly our civic institutions and social structures and values.
We are watching, in real time, the destruction of our own civilization.
