How Long Can Crazy Continue

Sorry to inflict my mood of the day on others, but that’s pretty much how I’m feeling today. Thinking about the post from the yesterday, All The Crazy People … Where Do They All Come From? I can only offer as an answer that they come from the secularization of the West. It’s the old adage that, when you don’t believe in something you’ll fall for anything. What we’ve lost with secularization is any sense of meaning in history—the sense that “things”, reality, make sense.

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked has an article that reflects that feeling: Internalising Malthus: How the environmentalist movement rehabilitated some very dark and anti-human thinking. To capsulize his argument, it runs a bit like this. O’Neill focuses on the catastrophic birth rates in the West. Or as I would say, the secularized West. The current generation, he argues, is in the grips of an anti-human Neo-Malthusian ideology. O’Neill sees this crisis as the result of wildly anti-human ideologies that view humans as basically so much carbon, or in terms of their carbon footprint. He cites various surveys that show the younger generation as embracing dystopian Green ideas to explain this.

I prefer to express the dilemma a bit more simply—I see these pop-ideologies as more in the nature of rationalizations for a basic attitude. The rejection of reproduction—normally considered a basic human instinct—arises from the loss of meaning. It’s a kind of ‘what’s the point’ reaction to a world that doesn’t offer meaning or a sense of direction. Unfortunately, the societal institutions that have traditionally been charged with articulating that meaning have abdicated that responsibility and embraced the secularized world view—a modern trahison des clercs. The intellectual bankruptcy they have left in their wake leads the generality of people to a spiritual lassitude—a limp willingness to basically go along with whatever comes down from government—or a lashing out in search of simplistic ideological solutions. A search for a meaning in secularization, a form of self salvation through activism. Thus, I would argue, the willingness to embrace dystopian ideologies—global warming, looming global pandemics—that demand simple solutions.

In the meantime, I see more and more articles that are pointing out the results or symptoms of this gnostic dream world view of reality. Secularization offers no solutions to the empty core of meaninglessness in modern life. Instead we see our world lurching from one crisis to another—usually Leftist inspired. The solutions on offer for these ginned up crises, the solution of which offer an ephemeral secular salvation, are patently absurd.

Thus, the CEO of Pfizer tells us that we can go back to normal after we inject his product—and agree to reinject continually. This is a failed product to begin with, so the offered solution makes no sense—never mind the lack of actual testing, the known side effects. Yet large numbers of people appear willing to buy into what is essentially an irrationalism. Or science is simply rejected out of hand—Rochelle Walensky overrules advisers to push the patently political project of “boosters.” And how many of the intelligentsia even blink at this?

The next year or two will prove crucial for civilizational survival. But for the long term it’s impossible to hold out hope as long as a secular world view retains its grip on the public. What can break its hold?