So Geneva has become a circus. Not the charming Swiss sort with polite clowns and precision-engineered unicycles, but the sort that would have made Juvenal nod sagely before reaching for his stylus. The G7 summit, that annual exercise in collective hand-wringing and photo opportunities, has been besieged by violent protests. Streets are aflame, shop windows shattered, and the UK security services are bracing for the inevitable spillover. One almost expects a chariot race through Whitehall.
Let us not pretend this is a surprise. The modern liberal order has spent the better part of two decades hollowing itself out, trading substance for virtue, and reality for theatrical outrage. The protesters in Geneva are not the vanguard of a new political consciousness; they are the symptoms of an intellectual decadence that has left the West without a coherent narrative. When your elites cannot articulate why the G7 exists beyond platitudes about climate change and gender equality, is it any wonder that the mob takes matters into its own hands?
Compare this to the 1970s. Then, protest had ideology, however misguided. Today, we have rage without purpose. The burning of cars is not a demand for a better world; it is a tantrum from a generation raised on the dopamine of grievance. And our leaders? They stand before the cameras, hands wringing, promising to listen. The tragedy is that they have nothing to say.
Rome, in its death throes, saw the Praetorian Guard auction the empire to the highest bidder. We now see the G7 protesting itself. The security services brace for chaos because chaos is the only honest response to a political class that abandoned its duty to govern. The Victorians understood that stability required a certain moral fibre. We have replaced that with emotional intelligence training and diversity quotas.
The message is clear: the barbarians are not at the gates. They are inside, and they are throwing bricks.
