We live in a time where nonsense has become the norm. Carl Bernstein saw it coming in his 1992 essay Idiot Culture. He warned that news was no longer about truth but about titillation, gossip, and distraction. Three decades later, we are drowning in it.
I don’t want to get lost in the endless shadow fights — whether one can identify as a fox, or in the daily rituals of outrage. Let me give a small example that says it all: in Switzerland, the Federal Office of Police has ordered that skin color must no longer be mentioned in manhunts. A suspect may be tall or short, young or old, described by a red hat or squeaky shoes — but never black or white. Thus the state keeps order by pretending not to see what everyone else immediately does.
That is when a society jumps the shark. It’s not just corruption or dysfunction anymore. It’s the inversion of sense itself.
A friend of mine put it well: he feels as if every day is April 1st. Except the jokes are real. The punchlines govern. He wakes up each morning inside a prank that has become the world.
Now, in history we’ve had collapses of order. The Romans decayed into decadence. The medieval Church rotted under its own corruption. Revolutionaries have torn down worlds before ours. But here’s the point: never has mankind faced an identity crisis so deep that reality itself turned into parody.
Can we explain this with Hegel? His philosophy tried to rationalize every absurdity as Spirit working itself out. Revolution, terror, collapse — all of it, for him, was part of the dialectic. He would tell us: even nonsense is necessary, because through contradiction Spirit advances toward freedom.
But here, Hegel fails. The inversion of values we see today does not look like dialectical progress. It looks like entropy. Contradictions don’t resolve; they metastasize. The prank doesn’t end; it becomes law.
So we need another German. Not the philosopher of reconciliation, but the one who came with a hammer. Nietzsche.
Nietzsche would not try to rationalize this away. He would call it what it is: nihilism. A deadly nihilism that doesn’t liberate but corrodes. When values collapse and nothing new rises, all that remains is parody, weakness, and decay.
That is where we stand now. Not at the end of history, but in its absurd theater. Not in Hegel’s march of Spirit, but in Nietzsche’s warning: that a culture which laughs at truth too long dies of its own joke.