The Knight of the Sad Countenance Returns

On Don Quixote and the nature of society without ideals

George Washington kept it by his bedside. Thomas Jefferson had at least two editions. John Adams carried it with him on his legal rounds. Shakespeare wrote a lost play inspired by it. Mark Twain thought it “exquisite”. Dostoyevsky was moved by it. Teddy Roosevelt brought it hunting big game. Virginia Woolf loved it.  Picasso made an iconic painting celebrating it. Amelia Earhart saw her own life in its frame. Churchill praised it. Henry Louis Gates hitchhiked across Africa with it. Hugo Chavez said it inspired revolution.

The book is Don Quixote. Written by Miguel de Cervantes. Published in 1605.

Works of literature and art that are of civilizational importance speak across time. In a certain profound and mysterious way they remain relevant and poignant despite their age. For over 400 years Don Quixote has entertained, beguiled and moved untold numbers of readers. It is frequently cited as the single most translated book in the world after the Bible.

We will never know precisely what prompted Shakespeare to co-author a play inspired by Don Quixote. We can only guess why George Washington made sure to keep it by his bed, or what exactly about it so struck Amelia Earhart. The usual vein of inspiration focuses on the tragic-comedy of a delusional idealist, grappling with a world that has passed him by.

The surface layer of Cervantes’ tale is dark comedy — comprising a series of increasingly unfortunate and violent episodes involving Don Quixote, the hapless would-be knight errant, and Sancho, his benighted squire. At another level the story is a cautionary morality tale of the dangers of idealism, and the folly of a chivalric behavioral code rooted in outdated notions of human behavior.

Others are moved by the sheer doggedness of Don Quixote in pursuing his ideals in the face of countless hardships — the more so given the overwhelming evidence that his ideals were the cause of his many travails. Alongside of this are observers who focus on the story’s many layers, the self-awareness of the narrative, and the way in which Don Quixote’s identity is shaped and defined by the books he reads.

Each of these analytical strands suggests something different about Cervantes, and what he is doing with the story. All of them, collectively, demonstrate that the work invites multiple interpretations. Indeed, Cervantes, like Shakespeare in Hamlet, Milton in Paradise Lost, and Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, leaves open to interpretation just how little or much he lauds or ridicules his chief protagonist.

This is part of the lasting ingeniousness of Cervantes’ vision — each reader imbues Don Quixote with their own perspective, and he becomes, in their personal reading, their own hero or anti-hero. He is a romantic fool to one. A steadfast and tragic hero to another. In a way that is the great lesson of the book’s study in character: the bumbling protagonist’s true protean depth.

There is, however, another way to read Don Quixote. It requires a harder-edged way of thinking about what Cervantes wrote and intended. Out of all the powerful minds who have read Don Quixote, it was Nietzsche, commenting in fragments across several of his works and unpublished notes, who reimagined the book in a way that could scarcely be more relevant and insightful today.

Where many readers found joy or humor in the book, Nietzsche viewed the work as a “dreadful illumination,” because it suggested, repeatedly and unforgettably, the hollowness of the civilizational ideals of honor and heroism. Even more damningly to Nietzsche, the narrative suggests Don Quixote is ridiculous for pursuing these ideals. Then there is the cruelty which Don Quixote experiences at the hands of others, which Nietzsche said “left a bitter taste” in the reader’s mouth.

He viewed this portrayal of Don Quixote as a great misfortune, which betrayed and belittled the idealism and principles that could, in a different context, challenge tyranny, oppression, and moral pettiness alike. He even suggested he saw himself in Don Quixote, as a fellow mad idealist set upon from all sides by a cruel and morally listless world.

In short, Nietzsche believed that Don Quixote was “one of the most harmful” books ever written, and described it to a friend in a private letter as “the harshest reading I know”.

Nietzsche’s discomfort suggests Cervantes’ novel does not merely expose a deluded man. It reveals a world in which certain forms of moral seriousness — honor, devotion, physical sacrifice — no longer have a place. The real tragedy, in this reading, is not that Quixote is wrong. It is that the world has evolved in such a way that he cannot be right.

The inversion shifts the moral lens from the individual to the wider environment.

A society need not ridicule an underlying sense of morality in order to erode it. It can simply fail to sustain it while increasingly organizing itself around procedural minutiae and secular abstractions that leave little room for aspects of life that depend on moral conviction, depth, and tradition. Over time this shift is normalized. Consciously or subconsciously, individuals adjust.

Over the last two generations, such a shift has been perceptible in the US, as well as many other countries. The number of Americans who identify as practicing Christians has dropped sharply. Among Generation Z, or those born between 1997 and 2012, only ~45% define themselves as Christian, which is significantly lower than older generations. Civic participation in local communities, as Robert Putnam has documented, has also dropped meaningfully during this period. Distrust in many public institutions, including Congress and the Supreme Court, has increased to record levels. And as Log III examined, the lives of many Americans have become less hopeful and more precarious.

There are, however, currents in society that reveal an underlying hunger for ideals — for something beyond morally flattened consumerist culture and technology platforms. This desire, which echoes what Carl Jung called “the spiritual problem of modern man”, is most clear in the construction of substitute narratives that attempt to re-impose order, agency, and meaning on a world that has become inhospitable to moral certainties and heroic ideals. Consider these examples:

• Where systems become too complex to understand, individuals attempt to simplify them and create an intelligible narrative. The result, which is often labelled “conspiracy thinking”, can look like delusion. In its more extreme forms the label is justified. But to dismiss the condition is to miss the underlying mechanism. The attraction of such a narrative lies not in the content, but what it provides: the world becomes ordered, is intelligible and given depth. Even erroneously. The remarkable thing about conspiracy theorists is not that they come up with far-fetched or improbable explanations for events, it’s that they are seeking to give meaning to something that may very well have none. 
• A second pattern appears in the proliferation of “highly optimized” approaches to personal life—regimes of diet, sleep, productivity, and self-measurement. These are often presented as rational schemes to improve well-being and performance. At one level this is accurate. But the intensity with which such systems are adopted and the degree to which they come to govern daily existence suggests something more. The language of optimization extends beyond work and health into identity. What is being sought is not just efficiency, but a way of imposing order on a world that feels indifferent or entropic. The language is technical. The impulse is not.
• A third pattern is evident in political discourse. Events, such as annual budget legislation, that would once have been routine are increasingly framed as decisive or existential. This escalation is often attributed to the nature of social media or partisan zealotry. These factors, while real, do not fully explain the persistence of high-intensity framing. Something stronger is at work; in the absence of shared moral narratives in communities, politics is one of the few arenas where significance can still be collectively asserted. The inflation of stakes then becomes its own logic: the language of crisis is now the default method to sustain public engagement.

There is still another, more recent pattern emerging: the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence (AI) has already been invested with remarkable moral significance. The technologists look to AI as the salvation of humanity. The anti-technologists perceive AI as the agent that will enslave humans to machines. The debate encompasses both the books of Genesis and Revelation.

Nietzsche’s contribution was diagnostic, but his analysis anticipated the consequences of a loss of idealism. He saw, in a widely celebrated work of literature, the risks inherent in a deeper change in how human beings relate to seriousness, aspiration and the possibility of living according to moral ideals.

To observe this is not to resolve it. It is to make it visible.

Understanding this harder-edged reading of Don Quixote, the reader today is left with a certain unease. The laughter at the hapless knight’s misfortunes comes less easily. The question he raises is not whether we are prone to illusion, or whether our ideals are the right ones. It is whether the world we have built leaves any room for the kind of moral conviction that would make romantic illusions unnecessary.

The hardest moment in the story is at the end, when a bedridden and dying Don Quixote renounces his chivalric ideals and claims to have become sane. Cervantes leaves the meaning of “sane” hanging. Or so it looks to careful contemporary eyes. But in having his protagonist reject his ideals, he is forcing the reader to render their own judgment as to whether this is pitiable, tragic or restorative.

Nietzsche’s response to this ending is clear. Renouncing one’s lifelong ideals, however far-fetched and outmoded in modern society, is a travesty. There are echoes of this today in modern politics and culture. And we know this because there is still a thirst, an innate hunger, for ideals that can structure and give purpose to our lives.

The greatest challenge to human civilization today is likely the rise of AI. The stakes may prove to be whether technology will be the savior of humanity or the agent of its certain extinction. Within the tension between these opposing visions lies a latent demand for a restoration of moral seriousness, and the reclaiming of idealism in public and private life. The consequences of becoming sane have never been greater.


      When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.
      — Cervantes, Don Quixote