DECADENCE

Meanwhile, decadence and despair haunt many of America's youth. Perhaps fourteen-year-old Rod Matthews represents the most horrible extreme. Uninterested in baseball or books, Rod found one thing that did stimulate him: Death. His curiosity was intensely aroused by a rental video, Faces of Death, a collage of film clips of people dying violently. He wanted to see death happen in real life. So one winter day Rod lured a young friend into the woods and hammered him to death with a baseball bat. At Matthews's trial a child psychiatrist testified that the boy was not conventionally insane. He just "doesn't know right from wrong...He is morally handicapped." 

Charles Colson, Against the Night, pp. 21-22.

Statistics and Stuff

Social critic Russell Kirk has defined decadence as the loss of an aim or object in life. "Men and women become decadent when they forget or deny the objects of life, and so fritter away their years in trifles or debauchery." 

Charles Colson, Against the Night, p. 56.