Five people wounded in a stabbing at Penn Station, New York, and the British government reacts by tightening transit security. How predictable. How utterly, tediously predictable.
We live in an age where the empire of chaos strikes at the heart of our great cities, and the response is always the same: more surveillance, more restrictions, more of the security theatre that makes us feel safe while doing nothing to address the rot beneath. The Penn Station attack is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a deeper sickness, one that we in the West have been cultivating for decades.
We have abandoned the cultivation of virtue, the teaching of restraint, the idea that a society must have a shared moral code. Instead, we have embraced a culture of licence, where every impulse is to be gratified and every authority questioned. The result is the desolation we see today: young men with knives, or worse, guns, wandering into crowded spaces to inflict maximum horror.
And what do our leaders do? They call for more cameras, more bag searches, more police. They never ask why a young man would want to do such a thing.
They never examine the spiritual vacuity, the atomisation, the loss of purpose that characterises modern life. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that a society must be civilised from within. They built institutions: churches, schools, charities, clubs.
They inculcated habits of discipline, thrift, and respect. We have torn all that down and replaced it with a sterile consumerism that leaves the soul starving. The stabbing at Penn Station is a cry from the abyss.
And our response, a tightening of transit security in London, is a pathetic gesture. It will not stop the next attack. It will not heal the wound in our civilisation.
Nothing will, until we have the courage to look into the mirror and admit that we have become a people without a story, without a purpose, without a God. The Fall of Rome was not caused by barbarians at the gates. It was caused by the barbarians within.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
