As 2016 ends, I find myself utterly exhausted from the year's events like many people, but also quietly reassured - unlike so many of my fellow critics.
Throughout 2015 and early 2016, I was certain that we had entered new waters on a scale spanning from our backyards to the UN Security Council; the events of this year have confirmed that we are no longer in a world that the past six generations would recognize.
In short, we have left the High Middle Ages of Modernity.
That declaration requires some back up, and historians from classical to Marxist might want my head for either arrogance or plagiarism.
It's often said we need to know where we've been in order to know where we're going; to echo Ecclesiastes, we are headed from a time of order to a time of chaos, from globalization to nativism, from legislative supremacy to oligarchic maneuvering, from materialism to religious resurgence, from peace to violence.
Call me whatever you want - but please look at the evidence before reaching your own informed conclusion. From the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo to the annexation of Crimea by Russia, a consensus reigned in the West for 200 years: first, that nation-states were the best modus operandi for order and liberty; second, that freely traded goods yielded positive results for all albeit unequally; third, that legislative chambers were superior to tribunal systems and tyrants.
These overarching themes were accompanied by the end of slavery, the "great compression" resulting in better wages, and the grand benevolence of plutocrats in each wave of innovation.
In short, the world was to graduate from the make up of slave- and serf-based economies to a universe of the middle class with liberal bourgeois attitudes for everything from faith to fun. And while it was challenged many times, liberalism always triumphed and spread.
This period is over - not declining, not on the brink: it is finished.
It withered throughout the late 20th century, but finally collapsed when the moral leadership of liberal democracies was proved bankrupt by failing to prevent conflicts abroad and by allowing the looniest of political correctness Jacobins to run everything from campuses to government agencies at home. There's no question of the centre holding - it's been deleted by off shoring, over regulation and a culture of narcissism.
Half a century from now, there will be many competing schools of thought regarding what caused this final collapse of modern liberalism. Decadence, moral relativism, and the technological destruction of basic human tasks from farming to family making will all be top contenders, but the answer is really quite simple: modernity's promises were based on a fundamental rejection of the Judeo-Christian concept of ultimate truth.
It simply took five centuries to fully work out that idea.
The final results are abysmal: there is a lack of consensus on this planet on everything from gender to climate change, from the role of the state to the role of the family, from ethical political fundraising to the effectiveness of rainbow crosswalks. Oxford Dictionary has chosen "post-truth" as the word of the year; very clever, but all too late to be timely. Truth is what the strongman, media or "I" say it is - we're just noticing it now at the crescendo of the overture.
So why am I not panicked? How can I dare to sound smug at the death throws of the liberal, bourgeois, materialist system? Shouldn't I be mournful as it crosses the river Styx?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when I converted, I picked a counter-reformationist as my patron saint.
Or that after nearly a decade of adulthood, the economy has taught me to expect absolutely nothing good from it.
But more precisely, at the end of 2016, I'm reassured that facades both well-intentioned and outright evil actually do crumble away.
The cracks in the great lies are beginning to show - and so I have cause to hope.
Happy New Year.
