I think that, more and more, people realize that something is wrong with the fundamentals our culture is operating on. That there is an angst on the beliefs presented by the culture. They often lack integration, they lack broader meaning.
If that’s the case, Religion ends up being the place people go to find it.
Your text somewhat conveys the idea that people realize that “something is wrong”.
I agree that religion is either the old ones like Christianity or Eastern Religion, or newer ones like Marxism and "ecoism". It was what I was going for.
Your argument has real value: you try to express what many people feel and live through, and have done for quite some time. There is a tangible feeling among many folk today that what used to hold is no longer legitimate. The stories we were told — get education, work hard, buy a house, be comfortable — no longer are true for everyone (mind, they never were). They are “old scripts”. Your instinct is spot on. Your gaming metaphors work, too: they capture (in your generation’s voice) the difference between a world of consequence and a world of churn — between life that “sticks” and life that scrolls.
The only place I’d gently push is your implied foundation: the idea that society/culture used to “hold” and is only now loosening. A cursory look through history (here in the UK and elsewhere, including my own lived experience), shows us that for many ordinary folk, especially working-class communities, the strain didn’t recently begin to show; it was a permanent condition. The examples are legion — far too many to list here. The “veneer” has always been patchy, classed, and unevenly distributed. I think what might be new is not a sense of fracture, exclusion, or disenchantment, but that the group who were once insulated from it are now beginning to see it and feel it. The comfortable middle classes, for example, in the Home Counties shires who thought their worlds were unassailable and stable, are beginning to see that the rising tide of precarity, political instability, and insecurity are lapping on their shores. In other words: the old story is failing far more widely (and always has since the dawn of civilisation), not because the story was ever true, but because its protections and its justifications are dissipating.
There’s also a long, diverse lineage of people noticing versions of this “loosening” long before our current culture wars: romantic writers reacting to industrialisation, Max Weber on disenchantment, Karl Polanyi on the social violence of market society, conservative humanists like T. S. Eliot worrying about cultural hollowing, and later critics of spectacle and media from George Orwell to Neil Postman. If you want to dismiss that whole tradition as “cultural Marxism,” you are saying you haven’t read it. The concern you express (rightly) cross-cuts left, liberal, and conservative thought, and it predates today’s internet-era slogans.
Absolutely — here’s your paragraph, kept in your cadence, but now “populated” with a wider spread of voices, including Ancient Greece and contemporary critics:
There’s also a long, diverse lineage of people noticing versions of this “loosening” long before our current culture wars — all the way back to Ancient Greece: Plato worrying about moral drift and the seductions of imitation; Aristophanes skewering Athenian pretension and civic decline; Diogenes of Sinope rejecting status and comfort as a kind of cultural sickness; Thucydides describing what happens when norms collapse under fear and faction. Then you get romantic writers reacting to industrialisation; Max Weber on disenchantment; Karl Polanyi on the social violence of market society; conservative humanists like T. S. Eliot worrying about cultural hollowing; and later critics of spectacle and media from George Orwell to Neil Postman. In our own time the same family of concerns shows up in very different registers: Hannah Arendt on thoughtlessness and the corrosion of judgement; Zygmunt Bauman on “liquid” life and insecurity; Mark Fisher on the depressive realism of a world that can’t imagine alternatives; Byung-Chul Han on burnout and the performance subject; David Graeber on bullshit work and the moral injuries of managerialism; Wendy Brown on neoliberalism undoing the demos; and Nancy Fraser on crisis as a system-wide condition, not a bad month in politics. If you want to dismiss that whole tradition as “cultural Marxism,” you are saying you haven’t read it: the concern you express (rightly) cross-cuts left, liberal, and conservative thought, and it predates today’s internet-era slogans.
It’s worth asking what in your own life made the world feel like it “held”: your upbringing, your place, your class position, and the particular slice of history you’ve come through? When did this start feeling shaky to you, and why then? What changed in your own circumstances, and what stayed the same for people who were never cushioned?
Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to engage with it so carefully.
I agree that people have noticed cultural strain, disenchantment, and breakdowns in legitimacy many times before. I’m not claiming that critique itself is new, or that earlier periods were somehow stable or just.
Where I think I’m pointing at something different is not a new ideological diagnosis, but a change in how people are responding. What I’m noticing doesn’t seem to be organising around left/right camps, movements, or shared theories. It looks more like many individuals independently disengaging from inherited scripts, without yet replacing them with another set.
That may resolve into something familiar, completely new over time, or it may dissipate. I’m deliberately avoiding naming it as a movement. All I’m really claiming is that something feels like it’s loosening in a way that doesn’t map cleanly onto existing frameworks.
oh yes, spot on....many are disengaging, but some (not all by any means) are finding old scripts to read from - Arendt and Eco are very pertinent here in identifying those old fascist and authoritarian scripts. There is no one global 'movement' as such, but there are definite trends and coagulations around old themes. Eco said of certain characteristics "It is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it" One characteristic that’s hard to miss right now is Eco’s “fear of difference” the politics of the intruder, where social anxiety gets organised around outsiders (often migrants), and moral energy is generated by warning that “they” are contaminating “us”. Eco explicitly links this to appeals against “intruders” and treats it as structurally racist. Elsewhere, other fractures are forming around different magnets: order-versus-chaos narratives that fetishise control; humiliation-and-status scripts that turn politics into revenge; sovereign-individual liberty scripts that recode any collective restraint as oppression and, in reaction, an increasingly explicit 'collectivist' script that insists we only get well (socially, economically, ecologically) through shared obligations, strong public goods, and a thicker “we” than the market can provide; epistemic “truth versus bullshit” conflicts where trust collapses and conspiracy becomes an identity; and political-economic scripts where the felt injustice of a rigged system is redirected either towards scapegoats below or, more dangerously, away from the rentier machinery above. So the pattern isn’t one marching army; it’s a set of overlapping coagulations old themes, newly networked with different groups clustering around different moral cues, sometimes combining them into unstable but potent hybrids. I need a beer.
Fair points, and I appreciate you taking the time to engage with it so carefully.
I think where we’re slightly talking past each other is when in the process we’re looking. The patterns you describe, older scripts re-coagulating around fear, control, resentment, collectivism, and so on, are very real, and I’m not disputing that they’re present or historically well-documented.
What I’m trying to point at sits a step earlier than that. Not the formation of new ideological clusters, but a quieter disengagement that hasn’t yet solidified into any script at all. No new “we,” no coherent counter-movement, often not even a language for what’s happening, just people switching off, opting out selectively, and reshaping their lives at an individual level without a shared banner.
Some of that will inevitably collapse back into familiar forms. Some may not. It’s too early to know which. My aim wasn’t to diagnose where things will land, but to note that something is loosening before it reattaches, and that this loosening itself feels wider and less tribal than what we’ve seen before.
You identified something really important not many get it.
people feel the bitter taste, but do not quite get it.
Would you care to expand on what you mean by this?
I think that, more and more, people realize that something is wrong with the fundamentals our culture is operating on. That there is an angst on the beliefs presented by the culture. They often lack integration, they lack broader meaning.
If that’s the case, Religion ends up being the place people go to find it.
Your text somewhat conveys the idea that people realize that “something is wrong”.
I agree that religion is either the old ones like Christianity or Eastern Religion, or newer ones like Marxism and "ecoism". It was what I was going for.
There is one religion that is quite powerful out there.
The religion that says “my quest for immediate power, immediate money and immediate prestige explains everything I do”
Your argument has real value: you try to express what many people feel and live through, and have done for quite some time. There is a tangible feeling among many folk today that what used to hold is no longer legitimate. The stories we were told — get education, work hard, buy a house, be comfortable — no longer are true for everyone (mind, they never were). They are “old scripts”. Your instinct is spot on. Your gaming metaphors work, too: they capture (in your generation’s voice) the difference between a world of consequence and a world of churn — between life that “sticks” and life that scrolls.
The only place I’d gently push is your implied foundation: the idea that society/culture used to “hold” and is only now loosening. A cursory look through history (here in the UK and elsewhere, including my own lived experience), shows us that for many ordinary folk, especially working-class communities, the strain didn’t recently begin to show; it was a permanent condition. The examples are legion — far too many to list here. The “veneer” has always been patchy, classed, and unevenly distributed. I think what might be new is not a sense of fracture, exclusion, or disenchantment, but that the group who were once insulated from it are now beginning to see it and feel it. The comfortable middle classes, for example, in the Home Counties shires who thought their worlds were unassailable and stable, are beginning to see that the rising tide of precarity, political instability, and insecurity are lapping on their shores. In other words: the old story is failing far more widely (and always has since the dawn of civilisation), not because the story was ever true, but because its protections and its justifications are dissipating.
There’s also a long, diverse lineage of people noticing versions of this “loosening” long before our current culture wars: romantic writers reacting to industrialisation, Max Weber on disenchantment, Karl Polanyi on the social violence of market society, conservative humanists like T. S. Eliot worrying about cultural hollowing, and later critics of spectacle and media from George Orwell to Neil Postman. If you want to dismiss that whole tradition as “cultural Marxism,” you are saying you haven’t read it. The concern you express (rightly) cross-cuts left, liberal, and conservative thought, and it predates today’s internet-era slogans.
Absolutely — here’s your paragraph, kept in your cadence, but now “populated” with a wider spread of voices, including Ancient Greece and contemporary critics:
There’s also a long, diverse lineage of people noticing versions of this “loosening” long before our current culture wars — all the way back to Ancient Greece: Plato worrying about moral drift and the seductions of imitation; Aristophanes skewering Athenian pretension and civic decline; Diogenes of Sinope rejecting status and comfort as a kind of cultural sickness; Thucydides describing what happens when norms collapse under fear and faction. Then you get romantic writers reacting to industrialisation; Max Weber on disenchantment; Karl Polanyi on the social violence of market society; conservative humanists like T. S. Eliot worrying about cultural hollowing; and later critics of spectacle and media from George Orwell to Neil Postman. In our own time the same family of concerns shows up in very different registers: Hannah Arendt on thoughtlessness and the corrosion of judgement; Zygmunt Bauman on “liquid” life and insecurity; Mark Fisher on the depressive realism of a world that can’t imagine alternatives; Byung-Chul Han on burnout and the performance subject; David Graeber on bullshit work and the moral injuries of managerialism; Wendy Brown on neoliberalism undoing the demos; and Nancy Fraser on crisis as a system-wide condition, not a bad month in politics. If you want to dismiss that whole tradition as “cultural Marxism,” you are saying you haven’t read it: the concern you express (rightly) cross-cuts left, liberal, and conservative thought, and it predates today’s internet-era slogans.
It’s worth asking what in your own life made the world feel like it “held”: your upbringing, your place, your class position, and the particular slice of history you’ve come through? When did this start feeling shaky to you, and why then? What changed in your own circumstances, and what stayed the same for people who were never cushioned?
Thank you for writing this, it's a great piece.
Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to engage with it so carefully.
I agree that people have noticed cultural strain, disenchantment, and breakdowns in legitimacy many times before. I’m not claiming that critique itself is new, or that earlier periods were somehow stable or just.
Where I think I’m pointing at something different is not a new ideological diagnosis, but a change in how people are responding. What I’m noticing doesn’t seem to be organising around left/right camps, movements, or shared theories. It looks more like many individuals independently disengaging from inherited scripts, without yet replacing them with another set.
That may resolve into something familiar, completely new over time, or it may dissipate. I’m deliberately avoiding naming it as a movement. All I’m really claiming is that something feels like it’s loosening in a way that doesn’t map cleanly onto existing frameworks.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response.
oh yes, spot on....many are disengaging, but some (not all by any means) are finding old scripts to read from - Arendt and Eco are very pertinent here in identifying those old fascist and authoritarian scripts. There is no one global 'movement' as such, but there are definite trends and coagulations around old themes. Eco said of certain characteristics "It is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it" One characteristic that’s hard to miss right now is Eco’s “fear of difference” the politics of the intruder, where social anxiety gets organised around outsiders (often migrants), and moral energy is generated by warning that “they” are contaminating “us”. Eco explicitly links this to appeals against “intruders” and treats it as structurally racist. Elsewhere, other fractures are forming around different magnets: order-versus-chaos narratives that fetishise control; humiliation-and-status scripts that turn politics into revenge; sovereign-individual liberty scripts that recode any collective restraint as oppression and, in reaction, an increasingly explicit 'collectivist' script that insists we only get well (socially, economically, ecologically) through shared obligations, strong public goods, and a thicker “we” than the market can provide; epistemic “truth versus bullshit” conflicts where trust collapses and conspiracy becomes an identity; and political-economic scripts where the felt injustice of a rigged system is redirected either towards scapegoats below or, more dangerously, away from the rentier machinery above. So the pattern isn’t one marching army; it’s a set of overlapping coagulations old themes, newly networked with different groups clustering around different moral cues, sometimes combining them into unstable but potent hybrids. I need a beer.
Fair points, and I appreciate you taking the time to engage with it so carefully.
I think where we’re slightly talking past each other is when in the process we’re looking. The patterns you describe, older scripts re-coagulating around fear, control, resentment, collectivism, and so on, are very real, and I’m not disputing that they’re present or historically well-documented.
What I’m trying to point at sits a step earlier than that. Not the formation of new ideological clusters, but a quieter disengagement that hasn’t yet solidified into any script at all. No new “we,” no coherent counter-movement, often not even a language for what’s happening, just people switching off, opting out selectively, and reshaping their lives at an individual level without a shared banner.
Some of that will inevitably collapse back into familiar forms. Some may not. It’s too early to know which. My aim wasn’t to diagnose where things will land, but to note that something is loosening before it reattaches, and that this loosening itself feels wider and less tribal than what we’ve seen before.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response.
I liked this piece very much. The cyberpunk references work. There is a lot to agree with in this.