“God is not found in the soul by adding anything,” wrote the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” I assume he meant the letting go of worldly attachments, hence the Christian centrality of alms-giving and rituals of fasting and material abnegation. But humans—loss-averse by nature—and Americans in particular have found subtraction a difficult act.

Before there was athleisure and people still “dressed up” to go out, a sartorial rule held that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and subtract one thing. But in today’s baroque culture of eternal abundance, even one thing seems too much. Americans’ preferred solution to any problem that involves themselves is to add. During COVID lockdown, our first impulse was to hoard and then to binge-buy superfluous gadgets. Despite the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, reasonable people aggressively wanted to be vaccinated (addition) rather than socially distanced (subtraction).

With Elon Musk “pulling back” from field-marshaling the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I’ve been wondering how long it will take for us to see and feel the disintegration of society that the loss of government programs will cause. Although the perils of Trump’s tariffs are already evident, the odds are still pretty good that he will cave if the whole of Wall Street turns against him. With the agency cuts, however, there will be no backtracking from ripping out the fixtures while ripping off the Constitution and the taxpayers. Even with the retreat of our unelected Property Brother from Another Planet sledgehammering beams and partitions before even seeing a building plan, the destruction is sure to continue if only out of spite.

It’s strange America’s newfound comfort with “strategic uncertainty” and “creative destruction.” As we learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and had confirmed by reality shows like Hoarders, people are notoriously loss-averse: we will forfeit opportunities for gain to hold on to what we already have. By nature, we don’t want to let go of something (a taxpayer-funded service, for instance) we may later need.

In February 2024, Rome’s Capitoline Museums placed in its garden a nearly 43-foot-tall copy of a marble statue of Constantine the Great that the Roman emperor had commissioned in the fourth century. Made from resin, polyurethane, and marble powder, the same-size reproduction was modeled from ten surviving fragments (including an elbow, a knee, and a hand with curled finger) and constructed by the Factum Foundation, a Madrid nonprofit.

Constantine is seated, wielding a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other, with a cloth tunic made from gold leaf and plaster. (For context, the statue of the seated Lincoln in the Memorial is less than half the height, at 19 feet from head to foot.) Some experts think the marble original was reworked from a colossal statue of the god Jupiter that Constantine selected to transform into himself. (As with those who get work done, they say you can see it in the face.) Although Constantine is thought to be the first Christian emperor, little is known about the extent of his faith other than that he thought it wise to stop persecuting Christians. He had bigger fish to fry—primarily beating back the “barbarians” beyond the Roman frontiers. He founded Constantinople and ruled at the start of the last 170 years of the Western Roman Empire.

Accepting the reality of having lost something critical to one’s well-being is not alien to my personal life, but it certainly is to my life as an American. I don’t think official America has ever grappled with the side of good having lost. I say “official” because the Confederate South certainly felt that their good side had lost in 1865. And they showed us so with Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies for a another century and counting. We knew we had lost in Vietnam, but by the time the last chopper left Saigon, Americans were questioning which side was the good side. Same for Iraq and Afghanistan.

What does living in this kind of “crisis” feel like? It’s not a war—at least not like the ones we’ve had since 1945, where civilians never have to sacrifice. It’s not another pandemic. It’s not like a recession or a depression, which used to be called “panics.” No one has the energy to panic. In a letter of October 3, 1961, the time of the Berlin Crisis, the poet Robert Lowell wrote: “there’s just a queer, half apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing.” Poignant words, but how would he even know what a “nuclear feeling” felt like? Even the most lyrical among us have trouble describing the awful present until the distress has become mundane enough to seem old. In Lowell’s case, “nuclear feeling” dutifully returned almost a year to the day later with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then it lie dormant again until the 1980s.

People “go dark” mostly from erotic troubles. The withdrawal is not the same as grieving the death of a loved one or despairing when you yourself are ill. It’s not the same as Broadway going dark during COVID. A lover’s betrayal sets off a systemwide alarm: the ultimate firewall of intimacy has been breached; it wasn’t a school of endorphins that swum in but one lethal viral contaminant, the Terminator Virus. Your traumatized psyche doesn’t know what to do but flip the master switch, stopping cold every kind of engagement, not just engagement in the arena that has betrayed you, whether that arena is everything associated with one person or half the country’s voters.

The first thing I think about when I go dark on “news” is that millions of Americans live their lives this way. There’s no stopping the election aftermath from seeping into the social media world of fun, so if you want a complete blackout, you have to temporarily quit the fun. But for most of the country, the seepage of news into their TikTok or Instagram fun is the only way they are informed about the activities of government at all.

Less than two months before one of the most important elections in U.S. history, a crisis of confidence in America’s political news media has spilled out into the open. The gist, if you haven’t been paying attention: mainstream media like the New York Times, Washington Post, AP News, and CNN and the three major networks have been failing America by failing to “meet the moment” of the Trump era. Rebecca Solnit provides a good summary in The Guardian: “While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new.”

“The elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind,” writes Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous ‘fact checks,’ and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud.” There is the corporate greed factor, but Bunch sees problems with the profession’s “weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule.”