The kind of balance that the experimenting patient needs to strike in trying to get better — the migrations back and forth between the centre and the fringe, the attempt to entertain critiques and speculations without getting captured a simple anti-all-authority worldview..
…in both cases, the specifically medical as well as the general political-cultural, you see the same pattern where a system that has achieved great successes in the not-so-distant past can’t seem to adapt to the rather different challenges of the present, the same sense of bureaucratic incentives throttling curiosity and defeating attempts at innovation, the same feeling that to make progress you somehow have to leave those systems behind.. and then *the same temptation*.. to become so fully outside the system that you begin to lose touch with reality itself.
Preach Douthat, Preach.
Both decadence and chronic ailments cut against the human tendency to imagine a crisis as something that either leads to some kind of fatal endgame quickly or else resolves itself and goes away.. the drama of human existence is replete with long unhappy interludes that feature neither an immediate Nemesis nor a simple cure.. and those interludes require a distinctive response from their inhabitants, neither complacent nor hysterical, but constructive in ways that are intended to bear fruit across a longer haul.
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