Once more, the heart of Europe persists in the futile hope of stability, clutching its modest 2.0 percent inflation as if this arithmetic stasis were proof against the tempests of fate. The oracles—the economists, modern-day seers with half-blind vision—had divined a gentler number, a harbinger of remission, but fate, as ever, rebukes human presumption. The prices of bread and shelter, of life’s meager sustenance and fleeting comforts, rise in steady choreography, indifferent to human cries for reprieve. The Federal Statistical Office’s sterile arithmetic cannot conceal the deeper truth: civilization’s sinews are stretched thin, and more than numbers tremble in these accounts.

Core inflation, that sybil whose warnings are heard only by the few, endures unmoved. Services and food—those twin pillars of civilisation’s dignity—demand greater tribute from the populace while energy, once a capricious Fury, now recedes, tamed not by human wisdom but by the fortuitous strength of the euro. There is no victory here—only the slow adaptation of the organism to its own fever.

Gone are the triumphant hymns of progress and the Promethean confidence that once distinguished the West. The European Central Bank, in its cathedral of glass and steel, sits in cautious torpor, unwilling to descend further into the experiment of easy money. Madame Lagarde, a Cassandra without conviction, whispers of fragility—any respite, she implies, is illusory.

But what, really, is preserved by these procedures, these apotropaic gestures of rates and statistics? Nietzsche, in his malarial solitude, would mock the very idea of 'expectation' and 'stability,' reminding us that our faith in numbers is only a pale substitute for vanished gods. Oedipus too trusted oracles, and look where his roads led: to blindness, and an exile among ruins. The ichor of Western spirit, drained by centuries of rationalization, leaves us clutching abstractions while all meaning rots beneath their polished surfaces. Pessimism is no affliction here, but merely the appropriate posture in a wasteland ruled by the arithmetic of exhaustion.

Where once the West dreamt of overcoming itself, it now congratulates itself on not yet having fallen. The tragic wisdom of the Greeks—that suffering is the condition of insight—has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s platitude and the dull pain of survival. In this, our age, the mask of prosperity hides the tragic face we are too timid to confront.