People who cannot understand what is overtaking them often fall back into jokey indifference and dull numbness. Withering sarcasm becomes a way to hold down the fear of real shock, not a sign that they are coping. The repeated small signs of collapse get mocked instead of faced.
Mass disorder can be a mystery even to the people causing it. Their disgust and despair are real, but they can find no fitting object to aim them at. So the violence spreads without a clear enemy or goal.
When disorder takes the streets and there is no authority left to complain to, even people who never harmed anyone feel cast as victims. They give up public space and hide behind thick walls, believing the walls will spare them. Each person's private retreat leaves the shared world abandoned.
When ordinary order breaks down, the future can't be predicted and even the past slips out of reach. Daily life becomes so haphazard that people start assuming whatever they can imagine might actually happen. Rumour and dread then fill the space that routine used to hold.
Faith here is not belief in any fact but the belief that things could somehow be different. Art and the dream of a perfect cosmic harmony can work the same way: not as a picture of a better world but as a cover for our flawed selves and a sorry world. Seen this way, beauty is a cure that does not work, a drug that numbs rather than heals.