The Quiet Despair of the Sane American

Why We Need to Talk About a Collapsing Society

Imagine that you’re in airplane, crashing. On a ship, sinking, trapped, on its way to the fathomless depths. In a submarine, stranded atop the seabed, and the air slowly turning to poison.

There are moments in history that we have no records of. We imagine history, in this age, as a Great Book of a kind, in which the smallest details must exist, somewhere. But not all do. I don’t mean epochs or ages. Moments. Mere paragraphs and lines. But some don’t exist in this book. Like those above.

Such moments. They remain outside our pretensions of omniscience. Their feelings and their understandings, their fatal reckonings, are beyond what we know. And perhaps even beyond our imaginations. These final moments are the ones I’m speaking of.

What do you imagine, then, happens in such moments? Some sit quietly, I think, their lives, as the saying goes, flashing before their eyes. Some, most, probably, remember their loves ones. The first kiss, the first child, the first breath taken.

And some, I imagine, go mad. Their minds break. And we don’t know if. Or what. Or even how. They howl in animal rage. They screech in terror. They claw at the walls in a kind of all encompassing madness.

Why am I having this conversation with you? Do you know yet?

We are here, in just such a moment.

We are watching a society go mad. And we are trapped with it, those of us left who are sane.

Do you know what schizophrenia is? The colloquial understanding is: a “split personality.” That’s a literal translation, but the formal definition isn’t about that sort of split. A split from reality is what term implies. Please: I implore you. Leave behind notions of how we’ve understood America’s collapse so far, as in, post-truth, a lack of information, and so forth.

If we are to continue a certain tradition, always more European than American, in which we interpret the psyches of societies, which is what social psychology is proper—not silly lab experiments—and attempt then to diagnose a society imploding like America is, which diagnosis fits best? Depression? Anxiety? Perhaps. But few will fit better than schizophrenia.

The schizophrenic, of course, hears voices, which feed delusions. Hallucinations appear, and torment the sufferer. Reality doesn’t cease to matter—rather, it becomes twisted upon itself, inverted, and the sufferer is left in perhaps the truest sort of torment there is: betrayed by their own existential Dasien, as Heidegger put it, or in simpler terms, their own sense of existence.

Isn’t this where America is? There are the voices, the loudest of all coming from what a new friend described memorably as “The Moldy Orange.” Demonic incantations, designed to torment, goad, inflict maximum psychic damage. A legion of lesser figures, repeating the chants. Pouring acid on the wound. You can almost hear the flesh of the psyche sizzling. Reality isn’t just nonexistent, but inverted upon itself.

And this is what Orwell, of course, wrote about so hauntingly. War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery. Did the dictator just declare war on Chicago? Can Americans now not get…vaccines? Is this all what freedom is? Apologies for the italics. It’s a poor way to write.

And the truth is this. Me? I don’t know what to write about anymore. No, that’s not quite right. I know what I should be saying. But I don’t. Say it. I barely have the strength to say it to myself. Out loud? To you? I asked my dear and wise mother. Mom said: “Ah, my son. Times like these.” And then she fell silent. And so I thought of silence itself, and what it means.

It isn’t out of cowardice. I predicted Trump 1, Trump 2, everything in between, wrote the books, won the awards, and spent much of my life trying to…warn. We all know I’m one of the better thinkers etc etc of my generation. So it isn’t cowardice that leaves me in this place of silence.

Nor is it bitterness. I’m not withholding in the way of a resentful spouse in a bad marriage. I’m not stonewalling, in the way of building a wall to keep the world at bay, because it can’t be trusted.

It isn’t about any of that.

I am appalled. Sickened. There is now an emptiness in me. A blank space is there where a society used to be, because of course, a society lives in us all, too, in the way that a moral soul does, perhaps. I am, I am, I. Useless words, which fail us at times like these. Here is where my quiet despair begins. Only just begins.

Many of you are also the finest of your generation. The wisest, noblest, most intelligent, most decorated, awarded, and so on. I have met many of you, and I know you now. I’m humbled by you.

Here we are. Feeling the same feelings. Performing the same actions. Tell me that you don’t feel this quiet despair too, and then look in the mirror. Tell me you aren’t living it, and I will smile, and never ask you to lie to me again.

What am I talking about? Am I making any sense, to you? Let me persevere. I am kneeling before you.

What do you imagine happens on the crashing plane, the sinking ship, the submarine running out of air? Some scream in terror. Some wail and weep. Some reminiscence. Some go silent. And some go mad.

And those who are silent, perhaps, watching those who have gone mad, experience a kind of emotion for which we have no words. They are confronting not just the spectre of death, and I don’t just mean their own deaths, but the truth of this terrible thing called existence, which is that—in the snap of a finger, just like that—we are only just ever one inch away from a disintegration into madness. The real thing. The torment of the inversion of reality into a thing of demons and nightmares.

We have no records of this moment. We who live still have never felt this feeling, and I think we have never come close to feeling this feeling. And so on rollercoasters and in horror movies perhaps, unconsciously, we expiate our longings, and meet our darkest inner compulsion. To come face to face with this most terrible of human experiences, for which we have no name, a feeling without a word, witnessing the loss of the integrity and wholeness of the psyche in the face of sudden death.

I think that is why we have fallen silent.

Not because we because we are apathetic, because we are cowed, or because we are even weary. All of those may be true, on some level, but not in the existential way.

I think we are silent because we do not have the language or vocabulary to describe this final level of horror we are now experiencing. Not really. Because like I said, we have no record of such moments. In that respect, we are like the bad Germans. The good ones, of course, played along. By bad I mean those that didn’t obey the Reich, and were its dissidents and opposition. Brecht, one of my favorite poets, had to write poems and operas, to even begin to put into words what he felt.

We are speechless. But not in a trivial way, which is the way that idiotic influencers make that dumb awestruck face on YouTube. In a genuine one. We cannot express well what we need to express. And by that I mean us in a certain way: writers, artists, scientists, intellectuals, a society’s intelligentsia. After all, if the warnings have gone unheeded until now…what are we to say? How are we to describe all this, a society going mad, before our very eyes?

I think you are in the same place as me, only perhaps you don’t know it. Or maybe you do, and you are much wiser than me. Or maybe you are just telling yourself that everything will be OK. Will it? We are the ones with knowledge. Faith is not our terrain. Fairy tales are for children. The saints are all in heaven. The only truth left now is madness shuddering in the glittering fragments of death where there once used to a thing called a democracy. Everything will be OK. There now, little one. Monsters don’t exist. Or do they?

I am just kneeling before you and giving you my trembling hand. It is all I have left. The words have run out, because they don’t exist, because…you know the story by now, of the crashing plane, the sinking ship, the stranded submarine, and the terrible madness waiting there, in the fatal, final shadows.

I thought about what Mom didn’t say. And began to call all this the quiet despair of the sane American.

If I had the words, if we did, would I have to expend so many just to try to give you a glimpse into what I feel? Perhaps you understand me by now. Perhaps, too, my point is not worth talking about at all, just as Mom said, by not saying anything at all. Perhaps I just want you to experience this with me first, your own quiet despair, instead of warding it off with incantations.

In all this, I think, we have failed. I certainly have. It was my job not just to warn, but to teach, and to teach, one must say: here is an idea you can learn and learn from. But we, and I use that expansively, those left of us who are a society’s thinkers, didn’t do that job well enough in America. We failed in the end to prevent this disintegration into madness at the moment of death.

America now is a schizophrenic society, and again, I don’t mean a “split” one politically. I mean one in which the reality principle has ceased to operate, obviously, but more deeply, one in which demons and shadows whispers from the skies themselves, and drive minds mad. To all this, my friends, we have no cure, and no antidote. We do not have even the beginnings of a a way to understand it all, and I don’t mean “combating misinformation” level stuff, LOL—please. I mean phenomenologically, ontologically, existentially.

Understand the ship, submarine, plane, and the madness. We can only now even begin to begin at this deepest level of metaphor because it is where all beginnings of true knowledge form, as Plato, Jung, and Einstein all understood.

Here we are. In quiet despair. As everything implodes around us. Please, don’t answer with: a thousand people protested! I’m sending a thousand tweets a day! That is not what I mean at all. If that is all you took away from this, you haven’t understood me at all. I’m not condemning you for inaction. Far from it. I am not suggesting anything at all, as a remedy. We are far, far away from that. I am saying that we should understand the true nature of what has occurred, its gravity, its meaning, and its truth. America has gone mad, in the way that a crashing plane or a sinking ship might, at least many on it.

And in this, the shrinking number left who are sane are in a quiet despair. Yes, repeating the same words over and over to little effect is part of what I mean, before you remonstrate me and tell me how much you still tweet. Quiet despair can also mean this kind of obsessive repetition, in fact, as the silence only deepens, and you are the only one left speaking, there is no sound, in the end at all. That’s not a judgment. Quiet despair can be very loud, the more it is unheard. That is precisely why I am still kneeling before you, and giving you my trembling hand, which is what shakily writes these impoverished and inadequate words, about it.

It is all that I can do. If I told you I was standing tall, in a moment like this, that would be a foolish lie of cheap bravado, because of course, nobody is right now, except the monsters and the demons in the shadows of delusion, who are tearing a society’s mind apart. Please understand: I hold myself to account first. It is the job of a society’s thinkers to keep its mind healthy. This is why I kneel, after all. I failed.

Maybe in this sort of reckoning you don’t wish to join me. And perhaps that, too, is why we hear the deafening silence of this quiet despair. That is quite alright. I am only asking you to examine failure with me, however you choose to, not to condemn yourself. Because only in such careful examination do we ever grow and mature. The alternative is the road we are on now. Either we are authentic, or we live a lie, and when we live a lie too long, hey, wait, is that Donald Trump’s entire social media feed?

History has no records of the little moments where death inflicts madness on souls. But it does, famously, of the Big Ones. The Roman bacchanals. The smiling Germans living beside the camps. The great laughing, frenzied terrors of bloody revolutions. These trite words need little further explanation. Nor should the implication. Is this where America is going now?

I am not putting words in your mouth. Only noticing that we are silent. Too silent. Even in the empty words we numbly repeat, which are just incantations, really, that the demons laugh at. And now, I think, we must be not just louder, or coarser, or even even more repetitive about how dismal and foolish all this is. But we must learn to be here in this moment, and first understand and experience it more fully. With and from and in one another.

For even now, we have no words, really, which suffice, to describe them, and so in all this, we are speechless, even if we go on saying the same words, which now mean nothing whatsoever to those who have gone mad. We must now outgrow our quiet despair. And transform it not into Louder Anger—did that work for the woke?—but into something far more dangerous and powerful. A genuine expression of the existential despair of all this. Isn’t that what it means to be sane, after all? Authenticity, symbolism, communication, expression?

Because now it is not about them.

It is about us.

There is a blank space in me where a society used to be. I am kneeling before you. It is the job of its thinkers to keep a society’s mind healthy. I see the good Germans smiling at us. I see the moments history never recorded, the darkest ones there are, in which madness and death collide, about which we will never have full knowledge, and thus little understanding of their emotions, truths, and meanings, as something I didn’t used to before. The most revelatory ones of all. A mind implodes, and nails claw against the shuddering steel, heading to the depths. These are the thoughts I think and the feelings I have as everything collapses. This is my quiet despair.

Is this where we are? Is this who we are? How do we talk about it? How does this feel? Where does it end? It would be easier for us both to keep lying to each other. Should we? Me? Never felt better! Check out my self-care routine! I’m walking tall! Did you chuckle? Shall we all keep looking out the window, desperately, or texting each other: hey, the plane is crashing! Dude, we’re on the same flight. Go ahead, chuckle again.

Lies are the lead weights of the soul. Let us drop them now. We are sinking anyways. And be true so much it hurts. Doesn’t it hurt, so, so painfully much anyways, losing not just a future, but watching a nation lose its mind, its bearings, and burning itself to ashes? Isn’t this the only way it will ever hurt less?

Maybe I’m wrong. Does it matter if I am? Even Ezra Klein’s now telling us that “all this is wrong,” and at this point, it sounds about as fitting a sentence as saying “Once, a man named George Orwell wrote a book.” LOL, just kill me. Death and madness. You and me. Us and existence. The final moments. We’re only ever one heartbeat away. From all this. And from each other.

It is all I have left to give you. It is all we have ever had to give each other.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)