The idea that individual traumas influence culture and are a part of the ongoing decadence assumes many things I don't agree with.

1. That traumas today are bigger than the traumas people who created our culture went through, which is incorrect (Eg: we no longer crucify, kill, or burn people. We don't even impose physical punishment on kids anymore).

2. It assumes that individuals make up the culture rather than being made by the culture. Obviously, we're first made by the culture, and then we participate to its transformation. This explains why some cultures are economically successful, while others aren't at all.

3. Germany opening a conversation on Nazism does not depend on individual trauma but on the collective shadow. To quote the book "meeting the shadow" -> the collective shadow can be frustrating because no individual can have a grip on it, which can lead to alienation -> little relevance of individual course.

A group ≠ the sum of its parts. Rather, a group > the sum of its parts.

Finally, for every 100 people who succumbed to trauma, one of them is going to be motivated by it and will do great stuff.

Nassim Taleb idea -> societies are built by a few great people, which is why history remembers them, and not the others. The same can be said for culture. Lots of examples of great cultures built by great men where the general population is of rather low quality, (Eg: Austria) and the other way around (Eg: France).

I don't think decadence has to do with struggle at all, because struggle has never been a problem. If it had, we would have never evolved. But we did. The human race is built on overcoming struggle.

Decadence has rather to do with creativity, vision, and faith.

And we lost all three. Why?

Nihilism. We hate ourselves because we have failed to grip with our own evil, which is the reason why German opened a conversation on its past. It's a shadow integration problem, not a trauma problem. Trauma is the consequence, not the cause.