Some thoughts on the Western World…

Myopic self-indulgence. Are our current plagues—the riots first in Athens and then in Paris, our global economic crisis manifest in the riots and rampant sovereign debt—merely a symptom of a deeper decay of a civilization in the autumn of its existence? A civilization unable to recognize its own vulnerability? The riots were certainly as much an example of myopic lethal self-indulgence as the sovereign debts in all the leading countries of the West. In France, students took to the streets protesting against a rise of just two years in the age of subsidized retirement—a system destined to bankrupt the state long before they, too, want the comforts that will be impossible to sustain.