The Big Emptiness, And How It Connects To The Rise Of Madness

 

Much of what happens in these times is, I am persuaded, the result of the collapse of religious sentiment all over the West.

He who has no faith needs to

a) believe in something, and

b) feel that he is good.

These two fundamental needs drive the madness of our times.

Lack of faith in a Creator must perforce lead many people to feeling alone in the world, utterly irrelevant, an absolute nobody in the great scheme of things, an insignificant speck of dust in an immense, heartless universe perpetuating its own absurdity. Gone is the feeling, known to every Christian, that he has infinite value in the eyes of an infinitely good Creator.

You are a joke of your DNA, pal, just like the ant you have just, inadvertently, finished squashing. When you’re gone, you’re gone. That’s it. Goodbye.

This creates a huge void, a void that must be filled by something. Animal “rights”, the Amazonian Forest, the lives of cows, the C-C-C-Climate C-C-C-Change, everything can be used as ersatz religion. This ersatz religion fulfills not only point a) above, but – perhaps more importantly for an atheist – point b), too. “I can be a joke of my DNA”, the atheists says, “but what I have is my g-g-g-goodness, which makes me so s-s-s- special!” Suddenly, they feel “worthy”, and their chosen bigotry is everything that stays between them and the total uselessness and absurdity of life as it must – if he only stops and thinks – appear to an atheist.

Suddenly, everything has a purpose, and causes such a fuzzy feeling. You are not anymore a 300 pound girl with 130,000 dollar in university debt, serving lattes at Starbucks, considered unwatchable even by Stevie Wonder, bitter, angry, bitchy, and otherwise repulsive in any way. You are now a warrior in a shining armour, full of zeal for the downtrodden, and so proud of your g-g-g-goodness.

You can be White and smash things to show you are on the side of Blacks (look at me! Look! At! Me! PLEASE!!).

You can be a total failure and feel like you are “changing the world”.

You can be the joke of everybody who knows you, but you are not a common loser anymore; you are a u-u-u-unique s-s-s-snowflake!

The sum of the individual madness of the losers, in turn, drives (some) corporate actions. It has become fashionable for people who sell pizza, or burgers, or organise sports games, or produce clothes, to tell us how they feel about political matters. Wendy’s donated hundreds of thousands to the wrong causes, and was rewarded (and… serves them right!) with the burning of one of their stores in Atlanta. It seems every last salesman must let us know what an activist he has become.

They are fake, and cowards; they are as un-American as they come. They should be boycotted whenever possible, all of them, starting from Wendy’s.  

And so it goes on and on. The constant outrage nourishes an entire outrage industry; everybody who does not care for decency and common sense wants a piece of it: failed people,failing publications, reckless politicians, stupid corporations, and atheist popes.

Yes, it then degenerates into looting. But for one who loots, there are fifty who just want to play the game of g-g-g-good, because playing the game is so vital to them.

This will go on for as long as the emptiness exists, because this is the ideal environment to make a protester out of a loser, and a looter out of a good-for-nothing.

As the last weeks have abundantly shown.