This suicidal clownishness is characteristic of late modernity since the French Revolution, an epoch in which convulsions of ideological insanity have periodically torn apart physical and political bodies across the globe. Despite their ugly pranks, scandalous libertinism, and incendiary radicalism, they are until the apocalyptic denouement indulged and flattered by their elders: liberal elites who suppose that proximity to the “new ideas” will get them noticed in the highest social circles of progressivist Petersburg. That’s just how it is in Dostoevsky’s Demons, in which a band of young nihilists and socialists unleashes murder, riot, and arson in a provincial Russian town. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. They thought it was a joke and applauded. In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. A disillusioned romantic in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or offers this parable:
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