The physical evidence of national decay—the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools, fire stations and post offices—that we physically see, is, in fact, unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly....

"It is only our absurd 'scientific' prejudice that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth," Goddard warned. There are, as Shakespeare wrote, "things invisible to mortal sight." But these things are not vocational or factual or empirical. They are not found in national myths of glory and power.... And cultures that disregard these forces of imagination commit suicide. They cannot see....

if a Shakespeare or a Sophocles is no longer deemed useful in the empirical world of business, careerism and corporate power, if universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important to its students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction. Students who are denied the wisdom of the great oracles of human civilization—visionaries who urge us not to worship ourselves, not to kneel before the base human emotion of greed—cannot be educated....

Our corporate culture has effectively severed us from human imagination. Our electronic devices intrude deeper and deeper into spaces that were once reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy....

"What must I do to win salvation?" Dimitri asks Starov in "The Brothers Karamazov," to which Starov answers: "Above all else, never lie to yourself."

.... It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.