The Final Conversation
An Old Cynic’s Dissection of the Words That Signal Our Civilizational End.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This essay is protected personal opinion and social commentary. All analysis of individuals, public figures, corporations, and/or institutions constitutes critique, not factual assertion. Views expressed are from a traditionalist and Christian worldview. The author assumes no liability for the interpretation or use of the information contained herein.
I once knew a man who understood power. He witnessed Europe’s unraveling from the heart of its darkest spectacles—Mussolini’s offices, Hitler’s bunker. He carried a Florentine’s eye for decadence and a Roman’s pragmatism, viewing the grand ideologies of his age as elaborate farces. His prose was a scalpel, not a sword, used to dissect the rot without the obscuring haze of pity. He survived it all, he told me, only to die “writing about the Chinese communists”—another system awaiting its forensic work. Some men are born to chronicle the twilight. I spoke with the old man who holds the lantern.
—Maestro, tell us of the Language of Fallen Regimes.
Ah, a catalog of our new Ten Commandments, etched not in stone but in the soft wax of committee reports and NGO mission statements. Very well. Let us perform the autopsy. Fetch the lexical scalpel.
Sustainability. The word has the hollow ring of an empty grain silo. It emerged from the boardrooms of those who had exhausted all other resources, including imagination. Here is the dogma of managed decline, the pious chant of an era that has given up on growth, on grandeur, on transcendence. Our ancestors spoke of conquest; we speak of ‘sustaining’ what’s left. The vocabulary of the steward, not the builder—the sigh of a civilization settling into its hospice bed. The future archaeologist will see in this word our terror of the future, our pathetic desire to simply stop time.
Resilience. A virtue invented for the victim. Once, we admired strength, fortitude, victory. Now, we celebrate the ability to withstand abuse. A word for pliable things, for rubber and for oppressed peoples praised for enduring their masters. Such language masks a profound cowardice: the refusal to name the source of the shock, to strike back at the aggressor. We build ‘resilient’ coastal cities instead of questioning what erodes the shores. The language of the punch-drunk boxer, proud of his ability to take a hit. The archaeologist will note it as the hallmark of a defeated people, polishing their scars into medals.
Community. A warm, fuzzy blanket of a word used to smother the individual. It smells of damp wool and cheap wine at a compulsory gathering. Its modern usage killed the richer, more specific words: family, neighborhood, parish, comrades. Those imply boundaries, obligations, a shared blood or spirit. ‘Community’ is vague, elastic, a bureaucratic term for a herd that can be managed. Behind it lies the loneliness of the atomized citizen, now thrown together with strangers and told to call it kinship. The archaeologist, sifting through the ruins of our housing blocks, will find the term and deduce we died of a paradoxical sickness: desperate, organized solitude.
Lived Experience. The ultimate triumph of the subjective over the factual. A sacred relic for a society that has lost faith in objective truth. It installs feeling as the final arbiter of reality, placing the tantrum of the child on the same pedestal as the wisdom of the judge. A weapon, used to silence argument with the unanswerable retort: “You cannot understand my pain.” This reveals a deep intellectual bankruptcy, a retreat from the shared world of verifiable events into a million private, unassailable sanctuaries of grievance. The archaeologist will see in this term the precise moment we gave up on a common reality and decided to each build our own private Babel.
There you have it. The epitaph of our age, written by our administrators. A lexicon of exquisite avoidance. We did not speak of truth, so we said ‘lived experience.’ We did not speak of strength, so we said ‘resilience.’ We did not speak of destiny, so we said ‘sustainability.’ We did not speak of brothers, so we said ‘community.’ A civilization that chooses the flabby word over the sharp one is already in its grave, merely waiting for the dirt to be shoveled.
—Maestro, please, more. We are taking notes.
(He pours himself a glass of wine, the dark red catching the lamplight.)
Prego. The dissection table has more specimens. These words are like the gilded moldings on a sinking ship—meant to distract from the groan of the hull.
Diversity. A word that once described a garden or a well-stocked library, now used as a cudgel. True diversity, of thought, of spirit, of conviction, must never be the point. The word has been narrowed to the superficial mosaic of skin and genitalia, a brutal reduction of human beings to their biological accidents. The mantra of the new colonizer, who believes that by assembling a menagerie of exotic faces, he has achieved a moral victory. “Diversity” masks a profound cultural emptiness, the failure of a unified national myth. The real spectacle is the nervous white manager presiding over it, like a zookeeper proud of his collection, terrified of the beasts. The archaeologist will find this word and know we became curators of a museum of mankind, having forgotten how to be a people.
Equity. The sister of “diversity,” and the more dangerous one. Equity, the engineer’s term, demands an identical finish. The logic of the carpenter who, presented with a tall stool and a short stool, saws the legs off the tall one rather than build up the short one. This logic masks a deep-seated resentment of excellence, of natural hierarchy. The vocabulary of the leveler, the resentful bureaucrat who cannot stand the sight of a tower, because it casts a shadow on his own low hut. Future diggers will see “equity” scrawled on the ruins of our institutions and understand we preferred the neatness of the graveyard to the glorious, uneven skyline of a living city.
Inclusion. The most insidious of the three sisters. It sounds so gentle, so welcoming. But inclusion presupposes an exclusive circle, a gatekeeper who magnanimously lowers the drawbridge. The language of the host who invites you into his house but reminds you, with every glance, that it is his house. This creates a perpetual state of probation. True belonging needs no announcement. Belonging is silent, assumed, like the air in your lungs. The constant cry for “inclusion” is the sound of people who fundamentally do not belong, and of a society that has lost the art of creating organic unity. The archaeologist will decipher this word as the death rattle of communal trust.
Ah, you see the pattern? This lexicon is for administering the hospice. The words of clerks tallying the decline, not of architects drawing up new plans. They are the epitaph, written while the body still feebly pulses. A civilization that speaks only of sustaining, enduring, and including has already conceded the main points: that it has nothing left to build, nothing left to conquer, and no “us” left to belong to.
The tragedy is that the men who march, who build, who conquer—they do not need these words. They are too busy living them, or their true counterparts. Our babble is the sound of the audience, not the actors. The sound of the end.
—Maestro, may we pour you another drink? What can be said of the “environmental”, “social”, and “governance”.
(He pushes his glass forward with a faint, metallic scrape against the table.)
Ah, the holy trinity of the modern clerisy. The catechism of the counting-house. One does not speak these words; one pronounces them, with the grave solemnity of a cardinal blessing a warship. Let us strip the varnish from this triptych.
Environmental. Once, this meant the ambiente—you understand?—the whole atmosphere of a place, the smell of lemon trees and diesel fumes, the taste of salt on the Riviera wind. “Environmental” has become a sanitary term, sterile and scolding. Captured by the accountants of doom, transformed into a series of metrics for carbon and compliance. The love of a particular stream or forest has been replaced by the goal of a global standard, a pious abstention. This philosophy masks a profound disenchantment with the world, a desire to manage nature as one manages a faulty employee. Where our ancestors sacrificed to the gods of the harvest, we sacrifice to the god of the annual sustainability report. The future will see this word and know we stopped seeing a world to love and started seeing a problem to manage.
Social. The most hollowed-out term of all. Drained of all its warm, messy, human meaning—the social of the piazza, the café, the quarrel between neighbors. Its modern meaning: a set of approved attitudes, a checklist of grievances to be acknowledged. The “social” of the dossier, the HR seminar. It masks a deep terror of actual society, with its unpredictable passions and loyalties. We replaced the chaos of human bonds with the tidy geometry of “social responsibility.” The bureaucrat’s imitation of community, a ghost town built of paperwork. The archaeologist will find this term and conclude we were a people who preferred the map to the territory.
Governance. A corpse of a word. One can smell the embalming fluids of the consultancy firm. It was once governo—si?—authority, command, the will to steer the ship of state. It has devolved into a passive, iterative process, a set of procedures to avoid blame. The language of the committee, not the commander. Good “governance” means having impeccable minutes from the risk-assessment meeting, a world away from winning a war or inspiring a people. It masks a catastrophic flight from responsibility, from the solitary, terrifying duty of leadership. We no longer have leaders, you understand, we have stewards of governance frameworks. Posterity will see this word and know we were ruled by manuals, not men.
Together, the “environmental”, “social”, and “governance” form a perfect shield for the mediocre. A man can be a perfect failure as a leader, a builder, a visionary—but if his ESG scores are in order, he is deemed a success. The triumph of process over product, of safety over glory, of the auditor over the artist. The three whispers that tell a civilization it is time to stop striving, to start maintaining, and to ultimately expire with perfect procedural correctness.
The Romans built aqueducts. We build compliance matrices. That is the whole history of our decline, captured in three words. Now, if you please, leave the bottle.
—Maestro, what is called the venture capital?
(A dry, mirthless laugh, like stones scraping together. He swirls the wine, closes his eyes for a moment. Opens his eyes and immediately speaks out.)
Venture capital. The alchemy of our age. The frantic, feverish search for the next vein of gold in a played-out mine. Forget the capitalism of the old industrialists—those solid, grim men who built factories that smoked for a hundred years. They believed in things. In steel, in coal, in the weight of a locomotive.
The venture capitalist believes in nothings. Nothings! In vapors! In the slight of hand. His cathedral is the pitch deck, his liturgy the term sheet, his god is the exit. Build he does not; he curates a portfolio of bets, a stable of unicorns he hopes one will not turn out to be a donkey with a painted horn.
A speculator who arrived after the pioneers, buying up the claims and selling them again before the first shovel of dirt is turned. He funds the app that delivers a single taco and the algorithm that promises to love you, all with the same fungible, dispassionate zeal. The ultimate expression of a deracinated world—a man with no country, no product, and no loyalty beyond the internal rate of return.
He talks of “disruption,” a word that once meant a bone breaking and now means a market shifting. He seeks to disrupt all the old, solid things—the butcher, the banker, the bookshop—and replace them with a sleek, frictionless, and profoundly lonely subscription service.
And the great, grim joke? The venture capitalist, for all his talk of the future, is the most terrified man in the room. Paralyzed by the fear of missing out, of being the one who passed on the next great nothing. A gambler in a velvet box, betting the house on a rumor.
The old capitalists left monuments, for good or ill. Smokestacks. Railways. The venture capitalist will leave a server farm in a desert, switched off. A forgotten logo on a T-shirt in a thrift store. A thousand failed start-ups, each with a name that was a pun, and the bleached bones of the dreams they briefly monetized.
It is not venture. It is not capital. It is the final, frantic monetization of hope itself. And when the hope runs out, as it must, they will simply write it off on their taxes and move to the next table. Pass the bottle. The sight of such profound emptiness gives a man a thirst.
—Maestro, philosophically speaking, how can modern man return to sanity?
(He sets his glass down. A long pause hangs in the air, filled only by the faint hiss of the lamp.)
Sanity? Sanity is not a place one returns to. A state to be conquered, daily, like a bunker. Taken from the enemy, who is… the age itself.
Modern man is drowning in the abstract. Governed by statistics, terrified by projections, lectured by algorithms. His world is a map that has replaced the territory. His community is a list of followers. His god is a dashboard of metrics. He has exchanged the weight of a handshake for the flicker of a Like. He is the most connected and most alone creature in history.
To become sane? He must first re-learn reality. The reality of the splinter in the thumb from chopping wood. The reality of the seasons, as the reason you must mend the roof. The reality of a neighbor’s face, in need, or in threat.
He must turn off the screen and look at the wall. A blank wall is more honest than a thousand opinions.
He must cultivate a healthy contempt for the new. Not a reactionary’s fear, but a discerning man’s skepticism. The new idea must prove itself against the weight of centuries, not the enthusiasm of a…—what do you call him, eh?—a podcaster.
He must rediscover hierarchy. Not the hollow one of a corporate title, but the natural hierarchy of the craftsman over the apprentice, the father over the child, the wise over the foolish. A society that flattens all hierarchies does not elevate the low but drags everything into the mud.
And most of all, he must find a cause beyond himself. A family. A faith. A nation. A piece of land. Something that will be there after his app updates and his portfolio vanishes. He must plant a tree whose shade he will never sit under. Modern man’s sickness is the sickness of the eternal spectator, the critic in the balcony. Sanity lies in getting mud on your boots. In being a participant in your own life.
Complicated? My boy, it is not complicated. It is immensely difficult. Sanity requires a revolt against the entire seductive, comfy, nihilistic current of our time. The quiet, stubborn, unyielding no whispered against the roaring, empty yes of the world.
See, that is the beginning of sanity. Everything else is commentary. Now, if you will excuse me. The night is cold. A man must check his own walls for cracks. That is philosophy enough.
—Maestro, what is important that we are not asking you about?
(Again, he is silent for a long moment, staring into the dregs of his wine as if scrying. When he looks up, his eyes are not cynical, but grave. He looks at me and freezes my breath.)
You are not asking about the smell.
The specific, acrid scent of a city after the riot police have gone. The damp wool smell of fear in a bunker. The coppery tang of a lied-about battlefield. The sterile, lemon-tinged odor of a conference room where a country’s fate is traded like pork bellies.
You are not asking about the silence.
The profound, echoing quiet in the halls of power after the decision has been made and the architects of it have gone home to their dinners, leaving the consequences to unspool in the dark. The silence of a common people who have forgotten their song.
You are not asking about the texture of things.
The grain of the wood in the desk where the treaty was signed. The cold, smooth weight of the telephone receiver that delivers the catastrophe. Between your fingers., the feel of the dust from a bombed-out church.
You ask me for the grand concepts, the ideologies, the lexicon of decay? You are asking for the menu. I am trying to tell you about the meal, son. The rot is in the detail. The precise, verifiable, tangible detail that a staff officer could note by lantern light and a poet could weep over.
A regime does not fall because of a bad philosophy. It falls because the trains stop running on time. Because the coffee tastes of mud. Because a mother, in her own breast, cannot find milk for her child and that specific, private despair becomes a public fact.
You are not asking about the small things that are about to become very, very large.
That is what is important. Not my theories. Your blindness to the world happening at your fingertips—that is important. The coming storm is not in the headlines but in the empty shelf where the bread should be. The coming storm, in the look a young soldier gives you before he gets on the transport. It is in the price of a dozen of eggs.
That is all. The rest is chatter for the salons. The truth is always in the particulars. Always. Now, the lantern is dying. We are out of wine. The conversation is over.
—
© 2025 Tomasz Ferdynand Goetel. All rights reserved. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Unauthorized reproduction is a failure of strategic imagination.