Filth First

Decadence and Delirium in the End of Times

A common feature of societies on the verge of collapse, or say an imminent implosion, is a tendency in its people to submit to their baser instincts and, with an air of reckless abandon, indulge in earnest the vices they had admonished themselves all their lives to eschew.

From the decadent parties hosted by the last emperors of Rome, to the orgies of the Bubonic Plague, to the dancers and musicians of New York in the Great Depression, to the opiate outbreaks after the 2008 crash, to the now, Covid-19-ridden world of 2020, it is clear that apocalyptic sentiments tend to produce in us a sense of wanton depravity and an appetite for self-destruction.

Sex and death have always been strange yet comfortable bed-fellows and really, it does not seem all that surprising that when people believe they have nothing left to lose, that all those burning, smoldering yet doggedly repressed desires they harbour come roaring to the surface like a wild beast ready for the kill.

Life during the Covid-19 pandemic, and indeed 2020 in general, marks in many ways an intensification of the preceding number of decades — it is life in a moral and spiritual…