Like Beauty, Decline Is In the Eye of the Beholder

On falling from greatness and the dilemmas of perceiving things that aren't actually there.

Our vision at Wisdom of Crowds is to build a writing and ideas collective, where authors and contributors can have the space to improvise and share different kinds of posts with a community of readers like you who are interested in first-principle questions: In other words, why do we believe what we believe? For the first time since our launch at Substack, we will begin writing occasional, shorter posts for paid subscribers, as a place to share first drafts where we wrestle with the tensions in our thinking in real time. Hope you enjoy this one!

—Shadi Hamid

Not to get all philosophical, but how do we know if things are “real”? Part of the problem with “decline”—as a word and as a particular sort of American genre—is that it’s about vibes. If you feel America to be in decline, then in a sense (at least to you) it is in decline.

Or to put it differently, “decline” is simply a word—a point raised by a member of the Crowd in our second-ever live podcast recording. As a word, it has no inherent content outside of the (subjective) meaning and connotation that you as a reader impart to it. There are things that are palpable and inescapably real—the table I’m writing on right now for instance. No one (except perhaps for a philosopher or two) would argue that the table isn’t there, because—to the extent they trust their senses—they can see it.