Doesn't this 19th-century text remind you of current events?

[Julie07]

"our present debates will appear as childish struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing exists any longer: authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue, all is denied; a few individuals climb to the summit of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and tumble down as pygmies.

Except for some twenty men who will survive and who were destined to carry the torch through the dark steppes into which we are entering, except for these few men, a generation which bore within itself an abundant spirit, acquired knowledge, seeds of success of every kind, has stifled them in an anxiety as unproductive as its pride is sterile.

Nameless multitudes stir about without knowing why, like the popular associations of the Middle Ages: famished flocks that recognize no shepherd, that run from plain to mountain and from mountain to plain, disdaining the experience of herdsmen hardened by wind and sun. In the life of the city all is transitory: religion and morality cease to be accepted, or each interprets them in his own way.

Among things of an inferior nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a reputation scarcely pulsates for an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill themselves to attract attention; another vanity: one does not even hear their last breath."

Chateaubriand

[DrPepper12]

I think this also captures the zeitgeist

"I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Trumpymandais indeed

[Chazmatazz269]

Indeed

[Jennz6]

Nope

[Julie07]

Did you understand this text?

[Jennz6]

@chazmatazz269
Not really, it’s confusing

[Anonymous]

not really