The Death of Beauty
Democracy's Ritual of Ruin
The city was never meant to look like this. Today's streets bear witness to a subtle surrender, mistaking neglect for virtue. Homelessness is ugliness made flesh, the slow-motion collapse of spirit onto pavement. Do you see the man curled on the sidewalk like a worm baking in the sun? There is no dignity left in him, his body burned and battered by exposure, his hair matted, his beard stained with drool. His ruin is performed in plain sight, and the city moves around him as if it were natural. The world has seen poverty before; this is something different. This is an aesthetic abomination—ritual humiliation on every street. The limp bodies most often do not rage. They do not cry. They simply lie there, as if surrender were now a form of citizenship. No man should live like this. No city that allows it deserves to be called civilized. This is the aesthetic of a civilization grown tired of itself: not revolution, not tyranny, but rot without end, weakness without shame.
I go to school in Malibu, once imagined around the world as a coastal Eden. It was the city of eternal youth, a paradise built by will and aspiration, now decayed openly by neglect. Every evening, I walk on a road by the ocean as the sun falls behind the Pacific. Sometimes I walk barefoot along the beach, the waves erasing footprints as nature quietly denies our ruin. The road is now shadowed by twitching men, high on methamphetamine or madness, shouting at the sky, and swerving like zombies. They stand in the middle of the road as cars honk and swerve to avoid them. Filthy mattresses and sleeping bags lie just steps away from polished wine glasses and the soft clink of silverware in our town's center, a place I considered utopic as a kid. Men sprawl on the pavement, asleep or dead—it’s impossible to say. At the public library, they line the walls like permanent fixtures. City officials presumably see this and shrug. You can’t help but conclude that it is intentional. Malibu is just one symptom. Across America, from San Francisco to Philadelphia, beauty retreats before the march of sanctioned decay. The new man walks through the ruins and says, “This is better.” He believes the past was a lie, the form a cage. He calls rubble honest, even freeing. And when he passes the last crumbling statue, he smiles and says: Beauty is dead—and thank God for it.
We have given up our cities to people who are permitted, even encouraged, to contribute nothing. And I mean this precisely. Not “less.” Nothing. They do not labor. They do not guard. They do not aspire. In many cases, they reject help. Yet they occupy the commons, filling space that once belonged to families, builders, and citizens. Our women and children are told to avoid the parks, be cautious at night, and stay aware in parking lots. They are not safe. And still, we pay. We fund the programs. We pay the taxes. We absorb the aesthetic and moral collapse. In our cities, we step over syringes on our way to dinner. We are told to adjust our language, our behavior, our expectations—so that the broken can remain unchallenged in their brokenness. Some call this mercy, but mercy without strength is weakness glorified. Compassion that cannot restore is nihilism baptized. Lack of judgment is not love. Love that demands nothing is complicity. What we call care is merely containment. The goal is no longer restoration, but management.
Even a child can see through the moral haze. One evening, a boy walks through the city and sees a man on the ground, twitching under his blanket, surrounded by trash. The boy stares. “Why is he there?” he asks. His mother pulls him closer and mutters, “Don’t stare.” After a few steps, the boy looks back and whispers, “That’s wrong.” He doesn’t need a theory. He doesn’t need politics. He just knows. Children still recognize the truth where adults have agreed to accept the lie.
Beauty is the greatest enemy of democracy’s final form. Democracy itself is not inherently ugly; it can and has produced beauty in cultures unified by shared, transcendent values. Classical Athens and early America blossomed precisely because democratic energies were anchored to a coherent vision of the good. Beauty emerges only when citizens collectively acknowledge that some truths, forms, and virtues are superior. But modern democracy, in its inevitable late-stage moral relativity, refuses this judgement entirely. It presumes that every form, every principle, every ideal can coexist without friction, yet when all distinctions are leveled, the clarity that gives beauty its form dissolves into a gray confusion—an aesthetic reflection of moral surrender. Thus, the sidewalk tent is not accidental decay but a natural product of democracy’s refusal to rank or judge. Ugliness in all forms becomes democracy’s silent admission: better the chaos of neutrality than the hierarchy of truth.
Democracy’s fatal flaw was written into it from the start. It was never built to endure, only to exhaust itself, giving legal authority to those least qualified to wield it. Stripped of courage, the regime no longer defines or defends a vision of the good—it merely echoes popular rumblings. Not all men can govern a city or nation; most can barely govern themselves. Democracy thus becomes an endless negotiation, truth traded for consensus, true beauty sacrificed to lowest-effort mediocrity. The state no longer asserts order, instead hiding behind euphemisms, renaming ruin to avoid confronting it. The regime dares not reverse the wicked, for there can be no repentance when everything is relative. This is not governance. It is cowardice dressed as compassion, decay masked as tolerance. In the end, democracy protects every voice but forgets the truth. Its finale is foretold in its birth: surrender.
It’s at this point that language is used deliberately as a weapon: “unhoused persons,” “vulnerable communities,” “lived experience.” These words do nothing but shame your disgust and silence your judgment. Your revulsion is natural—it rises in your throat when you see human excrement on the sidewalk. When you watch a woman scream at traffic, teeth missing, eyes hollowed by fentanyl. That tightening in your chest is not sin, but conscience. You are told that being a Christian means accepting this. That mercy means silence, and love means surrender to the decay. The regime will tell you it is intolerant, but you must not flinch. The people who enforce this script do not live near the rot. They do not walk through it at sunset. They have backyards, gates, and security. They tell everyone else to adjust accordingly. If every politician had to walk their district at night without their entourage, the crisis would vanish in days.
People constantly blame capitalism for causing this because it’s an easy exorcism, but free market capitalism is the only force in the modern world that still punishes rot automatically. The restaurant that smells of urine closes in a week. A beachfront town that lets junkies scream at tourists bleeds tax revenue until the last boutique shutters. Markets are ruthless toward ugliness because beauty sells and filth doesn’t. But markets only punish when allowed to act. Unfortunately, we have a cartel of politicians, nonprofits, and subsidized landlords who monetize decay, who profit tremendously from the grift of cultural destruction. What we are living through is not free market failure, but managed rot—state-sanctioned, NGO-run, and politically untouchable. The most credentialed elite in history have engineered nothing but euphemism and decay. Call it the Homeless-Industrial Complex: a regime in which misery is revenue and cleanup is sabotage. Cities are paid more to tolerate and multiply dysfunction than to end it. Nonprofit profiteers proliferate. Bureaucrats entrench. The system we have thrives where no one can choose, no one may judge, and no one dares impose order. To cleanse the streets, one must first name the stain. This is the real lesson of Malibu today: once paradise, now host to public human wreckage, preserved by those who depend on the desecration.
There is no simple way back. Perhaps it is too late for Malibu, for Los Angeles, or Western civilization. Perhaps we are too fragmented, too sentimental, or too afraid to do what beauty requires. But perhaps, deep in the national soul, the memory of form still flickers. There is a longing for dignity, harmony, and rightful authority. For a builder who judges, a restorer who cleanses, a sovereign whose mandate is beauty and all that comes with it. Not someone to manage the decline, but to eradicate it. One who restores what is high and casts out the will to ruin. The age of excuses must end. What is needed now is will—ruthless, clear, and unapologetic. A will carves order from chaos and takes the ruin as its mandate. The collapse will continue until one man dares to end it.
Until then, walk by the sea at sunset. Look around. This is not poverty, misfortune, or capitalism. This is the cost of a society that no longer believes in itself. You are witnessing the death of beauty. The euthanization of utopia. The temples have been desecrated, and the altars stand empty. If no one moves to defend what is sacred, the ruin is not tragedy but a judgment upon ourselves—and we will have earned it.