In last week’s Takimag column, the pessimistic doctor tries to view our decadent and degraded Western democracies through the eyes of a non-Westerner in light of two recent acts of debasement and mendacity.

Civilizations, it has often been said, do not collapse because of external enemies, but from internal decay. There is not a strict opposition between the two processes, however, for decay may make external enmity far more formidable than it might otherwise have been. And internal decay there certainly is.