You are Enough
Installment 7 of 7: When All Good Was Gone
Editor’s Note:
This is the seventh of seven installments in You Are Enough, a series of end-times reflections written from the perspective of a lone survivor. He sits in the ruins of a courtroom, remembering how society collapsed under that spiritual fungus that whispered, “You are enough.” Each installment has traced how the spores hollowed out education, justice, institutions, and conscience, leaving behind only self-validation and entitlement.
The courtroom is silent, but my eyes fall on an old newspaper folded under a bench.
October 1, 2025.
It was another day in a decaying, dysfunctional society. It was a day the government shut down. Again. Some senators refused to restore health care funding—feebly, like the other times that year they had tried—while the opposition believed no aid should fall on the “undeserving.” Better to let the worthy suffer than risk one “unworthy” person receiving help.
It was also the day Jane Goodall died. “All Good,” gone. A cruel metaphor for the age.
Public broadcasting began that day without federal funds, even as PBS Science announced the seventh (of nine) planetary boundaries had been crossed—the slow acidification of the oceans. The earth’s lungs were dissolving while we quibbled over who was worthy of breath.
In Washington, Budget Director Russ Vought declared that the Trump administration was canceling nearly $8 billion in green energy funding, boasting that the cuts targeted projects in sixteen states—all of them those that had voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Partisan punishment.
Astronomers reported a 4% chance that an asteroid might strike the moon. Even that became political.
Headlines praised Larry Ellison, now a power baron, for selling energy from his private grid. His friend Peter Thiel, ever the salesman of prophecy, declared that Trump would be “the foil to the Antichrist.” (Possibly the apex of cynicism: Let’s use spiritualism to detour cogent objection, however ironic the statement.)
Also reported in this very edition, the Secretary of War and the President had convened 800 senior officers at Quantico. Their “emergency address” was meant to prepare the military for urban policing and to declare cities under an “invasion.”
The real tragedy was not the authoritarian impulse, but the spiritual ineptitude behind it—among other things: an incapacity to imagine that others might die for an abstraction, such as rule of law. Colleges had long taught that only tangibles were considered “real.” Allegory is like other “mere” abstractions.
Our institutionally baked-in banality rendered us incapable of appreciating the transcendent, especially in the Divine. Indeed, the yeast of entitlement fed the fantasy that God Himself was merely a personal lord and savior who just wanted you entitled to every privilege — no matter the cost to the planet or to the Least. What we failed to see was that this yeast of entitlement was the same yeast of self-satisfaction, validation, and gratification that had been warned against for millennia.
And we failed to extrapolate the Scriptural warnings about Pharisees to their secular counterparts, especially the priests of human exceptionalism. Grifters. We failed to extrapolate the warnings about Pharisees to their secular counterparts.
And yet, in defense of the populists, their revolt was not without cause. The institutions they attacked had betrayed them: Education had become validation. The courts had become corrupt. Even science had been prostituted to profit. They were right to despise their priests, professors, and judges. They were wrong to think they could even make such a judgement from their place of self-satisfaction.
We had even lost the capacity to imagine a God whose concern was greater than our comfort — Whose gaze focused on Truth, or Righteousness, rather than our need for affirmation. We no longer were capable of loving any Good Greater than ourselves, or that others could.
We had made holiness a hierarchy and opinion a credential.
We turned faith into validation, curiosity into grievance, and stewardship into entitlement.
When our authorities could not give us certainty, we turned on them in rage.
And when they told us what we wanted to hear, we called it wisdom.
Jane Goodall saw in her chimps the same sickness: tribes that fought for food but also for standing. We should have recognized ourselves in that mirror.
Indeed, there was lots that the “elites” could have taught us, though their own stupidity invalidated their message for many who were eager to cancel. Alas, they, too, succumbed to self-satisfaction: Diversity (never a “good” in the sense of something you can’t get too much of) was not a Transcendent Truth. Of course, they, too, had begun to discredit that idea that anything existed that transcended them. They failed to even demand logical coherence, which once made them salt itself, before they lost for all its savor. Validating their charges, they relegated objectivity to the graveyard of postmodernism.
The verdict is simple enough. We lost the one thing that made us human — the ability to suspend our need for certainty. And when that died, so did everything built to sustain us:
our social systems, our moral systems, our natural systems, our understanding of God as transcendent —
— the things we were put here to steward.