Our culture has erased transcendent meaning

Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

There is a certain treacherous animal spirit stalking around in the WEIRD world, Freddie deBoer says, particularly among the young, a yearning for deliverance — and if they have to, they’ll take deliverance through violence:

Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary. And I’m afraid that, with God dead and the romantic ideal ironized into annihilation, the pure thrill of violence is one of the only outlets left to express the inexpressible, and committing violent acts is free. People make fun of me about all of this, but I’m quite certain. We are approaching a new era of cults, of terrorist cells, of mass shooters pouring out of our society like ants from an anthill in pursuit of a discarded candy bar. In a world that is not remotely atheist but still relentlessly secular, we are bound to find some folk worship of Shiva, people kneeling in reverence before the bomb like they do on the Planet of the Apes.

The Trump shooter’s utter lack of motivation, his blank and pathetic face, his relentlessly vapid existence are the 21st century. Maybe he had a political end in mind, when he incompetently squeezed off those rounds. Maybe the Zizians are true believers. The point is not that ideology, or the will to ideology, is absent. It’s that ideology itself has become a joke even among those who want to believe, just another object of nostalgic fascination in a culture where all deep meaning has been confined to the past.

Comments

  1. Sasha says:

    Not born as blank slates, but with lots of knowledge acquisition wetware. If child is given nihilism by default he will run with that like the gospel. Self righteous nihilists are the worst!

  2. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    Mainstream culture has indeed erased spirituality, but many, many subcultures have been fighting for decades. To take a convenience sample:

    1. The punk-rock culture jammers of the 1970s told people to be ashamed of consumerism and to kill their televisions.

    2. The Christian Right was hanging on by its fingernails for years, but it has been getting stronger lately.

    3. The “Loompanics libertarians” of the pre-WWW era latched onto hundreds of privacy-protecting anonymity technologies and used them to keep weirdness and nonconformity alive on the Internet.

    4. The “New Age” spiritual-but-not-religious crowd is weak, but it is HUGE. In fact, it is a modern version of the New Thought and Positive Thinking subcultures that were influential for decades since about 1850. And that weakly spiritual crowd has more sectarian fringes, such as Wiccans and Druids.

    Many people feel no need to be Zizians because they have had some success keeping their souls alive.

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