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I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.
Part of this is that everything is so myopically chart-driven from the top down. It's one of the things I like about the Arabs: was the Burj Khalifa "worth it" in some strictly financial, bean-counter sense? Almost certainly not. It would have been vastly more efficient to build a bunch of concrete boxes and use the space for the same purpose.
But the Arabs do not have such a severe chart-worshipping brainworm infestation. The Burj Khalifa is badass, and badassery justifies itself.
No, I agree.
The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.
The Sphere is more ephemeral, of course, but its such a cool thing to exist in its own right.
There is a serious lack of inspiration from things 'larger than the self.' Religious belief has declined, national pride seems on the wane, and I think there are fewer truly inspirational figures around that people would cast aside their lives to follow.
I feel it myself. I've had to inculcate in myself a 'civilizational vision' for radical secular humanism that views conquering the local solar system as my own personal manifest destiny. That's something to do that feels big and important enough to matter.
But I'm an odd duck, I don't think this is a vision that will unite all that many people in its current state.
We haven't yet stopped building. It's pretty easy to fill out that list a little, even if you look just at the anemic Euros: The Sagrada Familia made impressive progress over the last couple of years, the Millau Viaduct is pretty monumental, and - while harder to just look at, on account of being underground - the the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Large Hadron Collider are gigantic feats of engineering. I can recommend visiting the latter when they do upgrade next time, even just the detector halls are monuments (and you can only enter them when they shut everything down during construction).
I think most of those will stand all throughout the fall of the West. People will live in their shadows after centuries of decline.
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