I set out to examine the ideological, political, sociological, and technological aspects of what might be pushing us in this dangerous direction.
Something unexpected happened in the course of this, however. In trying to trace back the roots of the present madness, of our various ideological and cultural maladies, I found that each kept running to a level much deeper than I expected. To be honest in my investigation, I soon found it wasn’t enough to blame Foucault, or Marxism, or liberalism, or whatever; these ideas and ideologies were only responses to the same patterns stemming from human nature. Deep atomization and alienation. A rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality. Boundless ego of the self. A void of higher meaning. Unmitigated fear of suffering and death. Existential anxiety. Nihilism. Anger at life, anger at all of creation. A desperate, limitless thirst for technological control as a reaction. Deluded hopes for utopia on earth and the end of all suffering. Relentlessly, every issue I was investigating began to converge on our modern society’s lack of ready answers to the same uncomfortably metaphysical questions: Why are we here? What is truth? What is real? How do we explain suffering? How do we justify existence? How do we live in the world? And so on.
We thought we had resolved or at least successfully set aside these questions in our modern, secular age. But it turns out this neutrality was always impossible; they are unavoidable and have to be answered. If they aren’t, something else will inevitably rush in to fill the void, no matter how crude, ill-considered, disordered, or dangerous that something is. …
Most of all, at the core, there seems to be a great struggle between two competing visions about what it means to be human: whether Man exists as, in essence, machine or Imago Dei. As someone who previously thought theology was surely an irrelevant anachronism, having it turn out to still be the Queen of the Sciences has all been a bit of a shock. But here we are.
… Most of my previous conceptions about modernity and its direction have been shattered, you could say. Now my real concern is that the spiritual causes of our present crisis are so fundamental, and that we’ve dug ourselves into such a deep hole, so to speak, that finding a way out on our own will be exceptionally difficult. […]
Then I concluded that evil really exists. If you study history’s great atrocities, like those perpetrated under communism, for long enough, this is already a hard conclusion to avoid. But, in watching the breakdowns and fanaticisms of our current day, suddenly I could see it with my own eye—see it in people all around me, people I knew personally, taking them over from the inside, disordering them, deforming them, hollowing them out and extinguishing their spirit and replacing it with a kind of sallow, dull-eyed, compassionless mechanical madness. Frankly this transformation can even be seen on the outside too: a kind of deformation and degeneration produced by a will towards perversity, chaos, and ugliness, and an appetite for self-harm and destruction that seems to be common everywhere today. It’s chilling. It became hard not to see the impact of ideology on people as Dostoevsky saw it: as a form of possession, and not just metaphorically.