The Road To Disaster

The following article was originally posted on “The New Jerusalem” on Substack.

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Once, when I was young, I told a girl, “You can’t solve your problems until you stop being proud of them.” In general, this is a terrible thing to say to a woman. As a sex, women tend to hold their problems very dear and view any attempt at a solution as a domineering masculine intrusion. In this particular case, however, I had chosen my moment, and the girl married me. Which, come to think of it, may have proved my point.

More seriously, though, there is nothing people hold onto so tightly as their worst behaviors, and nothing more useless than telling them to stop doing the thing that hurts them most. In my 2009 novel “Empire of Lies,” the protagonist reflects on friends who have headed down The Road to Disaster.

“Sometimes it even happened that these friends… would come to [my wife] Cathy and me… and ask us for our advice. ‘We are heading down the Road to Disaster,’ they would say. ‘What can we do to avoid the Disaster at the end?’ And Cathy and I would answer, ‘Stop. Stop going down that road. Stop cheating on your wife or spending too much money or neglecting your children or drinking. Turn around and go back and go down another road instead.’ And every time—every single time—they would say to us, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no, we can’t do that… We have many good and sound and necessary reasons why we must go down the Road to Disaster. Therefore give us some other advice. Give us some advice that will make the Road to Disaster end somewhere other than in the Disaster to which it inevitably leads.’”

Paramount Pictures. 1942. IMDB.

This isn’t just true of individuals, whole nations do the same. World War I is the perfect example. “On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. She was referring, with hyperbolic exactitude, to the onset of modernism in the arts. When one looks at the dissolution of realism and metaphysical certainties in the writings of Nietzsche or the paintings of Munch and Picasso, when one reflects on how art expresses the spirit of the age, it should have been almost obvious that Europe would soon begin the thirty years of self-annihilation that transformed it from the greatest culture that had ever existed on Earth to the hollow corpse we see being devoured by Islamists today.

And yet European leaders leapt to that death in 1914 and waited passively for it in the 1930’s, as if no other course were open to them.

My own stumble into political commentary was spurred, not by my commitment to one kind of politics over another, but by my observation that one side had gone palpably insane with self-hatred. What I don’t know, what I guess we’ll find out, is whether this was just the philosophical expression of a fatal organic decline, or a purposeful turn down the Road to Disaster from which we yet might turn away.

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This article was originally posted on “The New Jerusalem” on Substack.

Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fourth installment, “A Woman Underground.” His most recent nonfiction release is “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.” (May 2025, Zondervan/HarperCollins). Follow him on X: @andrewklavan

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.