Asked whether she could provide a definition of the word “woman,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court nominee, magna cum laude at Harvard and graduate of Harvard Law, seemed perplexed: “I’m not a biologist,” she observed. Yet we are told by Jeremi Carswell, a specialist in the field, that children know perfectly well which of many genders they wish to grow up to be “from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.”
During the 2020 pandemic, because of safety concerns, San Francisco took draconian measures to keep adults apart and children out of school, even as it promoted and protected the use of dangerous drugs by a large homeless population. That year, 257 San Franciscans died from the virus, while the number of overdose deaths climbed to 697.
In May 2024, former president Donald Trump was convicted in a Manhattan courtroom of a crime most Americans would be hard-pressed to describe. Three months earlier, a special prosecutor found that Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents but refused to bring charges because the sitting president of the United States was “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
These recent episodes are symptoms of a mass decline in America into unreason—bordering, at times, on a psychotic breakdown. Strange fantasies have overwhelmed reality: it’s an age of delusion, impossible longings, and ritual self-mutilation. The causes are many and complex, but the syndrome deserves a name. I’m going to call it the “Endarkenment” because it rises, like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment.
The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.
The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.
The chaos has infected every level of contemporary society. For many, its perfect avatar is Trump—a man who selects his facts out of his fantasy life. Trump is a worthy representative, but I prefer outgoing president Biden because the light has literally gone out in his eyes and in much of his mind. Though the most powerful man on earth, decider between peace and war, he is unable to complete a coherent sentence. At the fateful June presidential debate, he made Trump sound like Pericles by comparison.
Biden is a stumbler in the dark. He, or those acting on his behalf, assembled an administration of aging retreads, cliché spouters, identity maniacs, cross-dressers, and vulgar Marxists, who, from Afghanistan to the Mexican border, failed at every task they set for themselves. With Biden and his enablers, progressive politics surrendered unconditionally to the Endarkenment.
