Is high energy physics a case of intellectual decadence?

I mean "decadence" in Ross Douthat's sense of cultural exhaustion, the constant repetition of same old same old without anything new resulting.

Alessandro Strumia writes at Backreaction:

For decades bigger and bigger colliders got funded thanks to past prestige, but prestige fades away while costs grew until hitting human resources and time-scales. European physicists saw this problem 60 years ago and joined national resources forming CERN. This choice paid: a few decades after WW2 Europe was again the center of high-energy physics. But energy and costs kept growing, and the number of research institutions that push the energy frontier declined as 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Some institutions gave up, others tried. Around 2000 German physicists proposed a new collider, but the answer was nein. Around 2010 Americans tried, but the answer was no. Next Japanese tried, but the answer was “we express interest” which in Japanese probably means no. Europeans waited hoping that new technology will be developed while the Large Hadron Collider will discover new physics and motivate a dedicated new collider to be financed once the economic crisis is over. Instead of new technology and new physics we got a new virus and a possible new crisis.

The responsibility of being the last dinosaur does not help survival. Innovative colliders would need taking risks, but unexplored energies got so high that the cost of a failure is no longer affordable. But this leads to stagnation. CERN now choose a non-innovative strategy based on reliability. First, get time by running LHC ad nauseam. Second, be or appear so nice and reliable that politics might give the needed ≈30 billions. Third, make again ee and pp circular colliders but greater, 100 km instead of 27.

As a theorist I would enjoy a 100 TeV pp collider for my 100th birthday.

But would it be good for society? No discovery is warranted, but anyhow recent discoveries at colliders had no direct practical applications. Despite this, giving resources to best scientists often leads to indirect innovations. The problem is that building a 100 km phonograph seems not a project that can give a technology leap towards a small gadget with the same memory. Rather, collider physics got so gigantic that when somebody has a new idea, the typical answer no longer is “let’s do it” but “let’s discuss at the next committee”. Committees are filled by people who like discussing, while creative minds seem more attracted by different environments. I see many smart physicists voting with their feet.