How likely is a pleasant outcome?

Lately, Victor Davis Hanson has been inclined toward big-picture opinion pieces, in which he surveys the cultural / economic / political / geo-strategic landscape and considers the sum total of its contour.

He does so at PJ Media today, enumerating Russia's disregard for international order, the gruesome videos of ISIS, the flight of Jews out of Europe, Iran's fast-approaching nuclear status, South America's leftward turn, post-America's skyrocketing debt, the new role for the IRS as a tool of intimidation, and the end of post-America's national sovereignty.

He asks the reader to consider the significance of post-America's foremost agents of cultural rot:

Is Brian Williams our Eric Sevareid? Is Miley Cyrus an update of Shirley Temple? Is Kanye West the new Lou Rawls? Is Fifty Shades of Grey just an updated Lolita? Is global warming just a new phenology?  Is curvy Kim Kardashian just Rita Hayworth? Is Al Sharpton just Martin Luther King? The latest snuff video game just resembles an updated pinball machine? Maybe Tiger Woods is just a petulant young Jack Nicklaus?

It's in his conclusion, though, that the real challenge lies, for we know from our own experience that his observation is spot on:

For bewildered and increasingly quietist Americans, the center holds mostly in family, religion, a few friends, the avoidance of the cinema and nightly news, the rote of navigating to work and coming home, trying to stay off the dole and taking responsibility for one’s own disasters — as the world grows ever more chaotic in our midst.

All sorts of escapism from the madness is now epidemic. Home-schooling. Gun ownership. A second home in the mountains. A trunk of freeze-dried food. Kids living in the basement. A generator. Some gold coins. A move to Wyoming. An avoidance of the old big cities. A tough choice between death and going to the nearby emergency room (at least your relatives are safe as you pass away at home). A careful and narrow selection of channels on cable TV. A safe room or escape plan. And on and on.

There is a strange new and dangerous sentiment brooding below the spoken surface that whatever is going on in the world and in America today cannot go on much longer — although as the sages say, there is a lot of rot in the West to enjoy for some time yet.

The postmodern world of our new aristocracy and the premodern world of those they both avoid and romanticize won’t hold. The old caricatured middle shrinks and turns inward. Even if the doomsday mood is a mere construct of the new instantaneous media, it is a dangerous mood nonetheless.

We all know what follows from this — either the chaos grows and civilization wanes and tribalism follows, or the iron hand of the radical authoritarian Left or Right correction is just as scary, or a few good people in democratic fashion convince the mob to let them stop the madness and rebuild civilization.

I hope for option three. I fear option one is more likely at home. And I assume that option two will be, as it always is, the choice abroad.

Even the most localized, personalized, immediate-concerns-oriented lifestyles one sees in family, friends, professional associates and social-media contacts betray a certain nervousness.  No amount of cat photos, restaurant reviews, cheering-on of favorite sports teams, or memes about hugging grandchildren can mask the anxiety.

The clock is ticking on the shelf life of any sorts of buffers between us and the kind of darkness this world hasn't seen in centuries.