I see Europe marching with giant steps to its end: not fo...

I see Europe marching with giant steps to its end: not for economic or technical or political reasons, not because it is being overwhelmed by the third world (which is in fact impotent), not because it is also being challenged by China, but simply because it has decided to commit suicide. All the behaviour (and I mean literally all of it) of the technicians, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and, at bottom (despite appearances), the philosophers, the film-makers, and the scientists is suicidal. Everything of a positive character that may be found is immediately turned inside out, distorted, and stood on its head so as to become a new source of accusation or a new means of destruction. The Left has triumphantly joined the Right in this race toward death, while Christianity celebrates its marriage with Marxism and proceeds to slay the old, impotent flesh that was once the glory of the world.

[���] The first movement is that of blind negation, a retreat into unqualified negation of all the West has been and can yet be. Some of its embodiments: the frenzied pleasure in destroying and rejecting, in playing the man without a future or the artist without culture; the sadism of the intellectual who tears language ��� his own language ��� to pieces, and who does not want to say anything further, because in fact there is nothing to say; the explosion of words, because there is no more communication; the mockeries that are regarded as work of art; and finally, the suicides, physical among the writers, painters and musicians. All this is happening because these people regard the ���system��� as utterly frightful, and see it immediately absorbing and rationalising every project whatsoever. They feel caught by an inescapable dilemma, since even their irrationalities serve as compensation for the system and thus become part of it (although it never becomes clear in what precisely the famous ���system��� consists).

[���] Lacan, Derrida, and all their second-rate imitators who think that absolute incomprehensibility offers a way out, when in fact we have shut the door on all possibilities and hopes, and have sunk into a resignation that knows no future. There is no longer anything to live for: that is what these intellectuals are saying without realizing it; the blinding light they shed is that of a sun on the point of sinking into the sea. Virtuosity has never been a substitute for truth. Withdrawal into curiosity of this kind shows only that for these intellectuals, the last Cardinal Eminences of the western world, there is no longer any such thing as truth.

[���] We are content to die of dancing. Our generation is not even capable of cynicism. It takes a kind of terrible greatness to say, ���After me, the deluge���. No one says that today; on the contrary, everyone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.

[���] The intellectuals caught up in this directionless movement take the lids off bottomless wells; they lean over them and fall in.

[���] The nihilistic revolution has succeeded. Today���s political activists who still claim to be revolutionaries have nothing to put in nihilism���s place. Movement for movement���s sake, thorough study for the study���s sake, the revolution for the revolution���s sake: that, they say, is the only way to escape the system. It is a remarkable thing, however, that this system renders mad not only those who are part of it but those who reject it as well. The system is now the God who makes men mad, but it is a God we have created with our own minds.

[���] Yet once we strip away the illusionist���s veil of pseudo-scientific language or the layer of obscurity caused by a fragmented discourse, and look at what our sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Marxists, historians, novelists, and poets are trying to say, we are appalled at the emptiness, inanity, and incoherence of their thought. We realise that there is only a vast repetitiveness. Everything they say I completely familiar and has long since become commonplace.

[���] Today it is the myths of death, and they alone, that speak to us in our madness. The West is at its end - but that does not necessarily mean the end of the world.

Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West