As near as I can tell, the sin of Denethor is two-fold. First and most obvious is Pride, particularly his arrogance in attempting to wield one of the Palantirs; as Gandalf succinctly glosses it:
"In the days of his wisdom Denethor did not presume to use it, nor to challenge Sauron, knowing the limits of his own strength. But his wisdom failed; and I fear that as the peril of his realm grew he looked in the Stone and was deceived...He was too great to be subdued to the will of the Dark Power, he saw nonetheless only those things that Power permitted him to see...the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind" (161).
Apparently, Denethor was the first victim of psychological warfare; Sauron knew he needn't convert Denethor as he did Saruman, only demoralize him, which he effects by presenting a wide-array of cherry-picked intell calculated to convince Denethor of the futility of fighting, infecting him with defeatism and despair. Like Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Denethor has been tricked into thinking he resists the Devil in the very moment that he succumbs to him.
Denethor in his pride thought he could match wills with the Dark Lord,
but failed; what's more, his pride (like all pride) was fueled primarily
by fear--for he had always known better than to look into the Palantir,
but his nerves in the end got the best of him. There are a number of moralistic lessons to be gleaned from this passage, viz: pessimism is a greater enemy than armies; know your limits; never do anything out of fear; question your sources; etc. and etc. Maybe (just for kicks and giggles) we can even consider Denethor's fall as a parable about the need to get off the internet, reading the Palantir as a forerunner to the social-media echo-chambers that keep us trapped in our own rage-fueled, paranoid myopias and so forth.
But Pride is only one component of the sin of Denethor, and I think the bigger reason why he succumbs to despair is actually highlighted just a few pages earlier, when Gandalf demands of him, "What then would you have...if your will could have its way?"
Almost petulantly, Denethor answers, "I would have things as they were in all the days of my life...and in the days of my long-fathers before me..." (158). At the risk of politicizing a tad here, Denethor wants to Make Gondor Great Again--he wants things back to how he imagines they always used to be, and probably never were. We are not privy to what exactly Sauron showed Denethor in the Palantir, but I have my suspicions that it wasn't just the military might of Mordor that shock-and-awed the Steward of Gondor into submission: I think Sauron also showed Denethor a world wherein he doesn't matter anymore. A changed world, one where there is no need for Stewards or rival realms or what have you, where his entire "way of life" (to borrow a Bushism) is rendered irrelevant.
I suspect that it wasn't just the rise of Mordor or even the threat to Gondor that most shook Denethor, but simply the realization that the world was never going to go back to the way it was. Even if Mordor is totally defeated, Middle-Earth is still going to be fundamentally different from how it was, and it is this fact that proud Denethor cannot abide. Whether Sauron or Aragorn comes out on top, in either case Denethor does not, and so he throws a fit like it's the end of the world, because it is the end of his privileged little world. It is not just change for the worse, but any change whatsoever that most frightens him--and like many a voter last Election Day, he has lashed out against the changing face of the world in the most self-destructive ways possible.
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