The Empire State Building, that glorious Art Deco testament to American ambition, was yesterday desecrated by two idiots with more brio than brains. They climbed it. They did not plant a flag, deliver a manifesto, or even spray-paint a hashtag. They simply clambered up the steel and stone like bored teenagers scaling the school gym wall. And now, predictably, Britain's security experts are wringing their hands over the 'copycat threat'. Let me save you the cost of a public inquiry: yes, there will be copycats. There are always copycats. The real question is why we treat these stunts as portents of doom rather than the pathetic cries for attention they are.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence, a time when the grand gestures of the past are reduced to Instagram fodder. The Fall of Rome did not begin with barbarians at the gate; it began with a loss of nerve, a creeping sense that the old certainties were no longer worth defending. And what do we defend today? Not the Empire State Building as a symbol of human achievement, but as a brand. The climbers will be monetised. They will sell their story to Netflix. The security experts will get their budget increases. And the rest of us will shuffle past, eyes glued to our phones, waiting for the next outrage to distract us from our own irrelevance.
Make no mistake: this is not a security failure. It is a cultural failure. In the Victorian era, a man who scaled a building of that magnitude would have been hailed as a daredevil, perhaps even a hero. Now he is a 'threat' to be neutralised, a problem for risk managers. We have swapped courage for caution, audacity for risk assessment. The West is committing suicide by spreadsheets.
The copycat threat is real, but not in the way the experts mean. The real threat is that we have become a society that cannot distinguish between a genuine act of defiance and a vapid stunt. We are so starved of meaning that any breach of the mundane order becomes existential. The Empire State Building stood for nine decades as a symbol of what humans could achieve when they dreamed big. Now it is a backdrop for someone's viral video, and our reaction is to lock down, to fortify, to shrink the spaces where freedom used to live.
Consider the contrast. In 1945, a fog-bound B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor. Fourteen people died, but the building stood firm. The nation mourned, then rebuilt. Today we have two cretins with suction cups and GoPros, and we treat it like a national crisis. This is the difference between a civilisation that believed in itself and one that has lost the plot.
I do not advocate for anarchy. I advocate for perspective. Let the climbers have their fifteen minutes. Let the copycats climb. The Empire State Building is not a problem to be solved; it is a challenge to be met. If we respond by turning every landmark into a fortress, we have already lost. We will have preserved the stone but killed the spirit. And that, not the climbers, is the true tragedy.
Security experts warn of copycat threats. I warn of a society so afraid of its own shadow that it cannot see the difference between a vandal and a visionary. The Empire State Building climbed itself; two people, another two, a dozen. Who cares? The building will outlast them all. The question is whether our civilisation can outlast its own fear.
