from Malcolm Muggeridge’s, “Jesus Rediscovered,” 1969.

The dark age is likely to intervene anyway.  It is very unusual for one moral order to slide into another with no intervening chaos.  There are many other symptoms.  The excessive interest in eroticism is characteristic of the end of a civilization, because it really means a growing impotence, and a fear of impotence.  Then the obsessive need for excitement, vicarious excitement, which of course the games provided for the Romans, and which television provides for our population.  Even the enormously complicated structure of taxation and administration is, funnily enough, a symptom of the end of a civilization; these things become so elaborate that in the end they become insupportable because of their very elaboration.  Above all, there is this truly terrible thing which afflicts materialist societies— boredom; an obsessive boredom, which I note on every hand.  Mine is, admittedly, a minority view; a lot of people think that we are just on the verge of a new marvelous way of life.  I see no signs of it at all myself.  I notice that where our way of life is most successful materially it is most disastrous morally and spiritually; that the psychiatric wards are the largest and most crowded, and the suicides most numerous, precisely where material prosperity is greatest, where most money is spent on education.  (page 213)