This is a followup to the previous piece on Performative Ideals, though this is intended to be mostly readable on its own.
Performative ideals ultimately allow people to feel virtuous without any of the sacrifice which real virtues would entail. It's a LARP, but in a world as unreal as ours, everyone is LARPing all the time. We have religious LARPers, atheist LARPers, environmentalist LARPers, trad LARPers, occultist LARPers, spiritualist LARPers, classical music LARPers, on and on.
Everything is an identity because the essence of real culture, such as direct participation, social cohesion, local connection and felt belonging are utterly gone. We do not have any culture, what we have instead are memes that propagate from one atomized individual to the other, being displayed on screens, not just the physical ones, but the screen of the mind. In other words, a real culture is an embodied reality that people can share, experience directly and play with, and which helps them grow, whereas the postmodern spectre which has replaced it is a schizoid agglomeration of atomized bits of reality which form no coherent gestalt, no sense of a sane reality, and which haunts and possesses those who engage with, making their life undeniably worse. If you think I'm exaggerating when I'm using the word "haunt", think of how creepy it is that people literally get mad and outraged from politics and the news, to the point where they are not even in control of themselves.
The difference between a real lived culture and the spectre which has replaced it highlights many trends in our world. First of all, that people are increasingly lonely and alienated. We have access to an astounding array of people from our screens, far more than our ancestors could imagine, but so do those other people. Everyone has high optionality but very few people commit to anything, and usually it's some self-serving activity, very rarely something done in service of others.
This is because of course there is no sense of belonging to anything in modern man, he is one atomized individual amidst a sea of many others, running away from his own death and thus drifting aimlessly, on tides which are nowadays set by the algorithms which dictate his internal life, like some Pavlovian subject.
A real healthy culture serves as the backbone of organic human interactions, which are valuable in and of themselves. There is no explicit purpose to a community besides the joy of living together, in a shared context. We might have some mutual goals, since any community needs to solve the age-old practical problems of food, housing, heating and clothing of course, but the way the solutions manifest can take up a myriad of forms which are fit to the individuals and the context they are a part of.
Now on the other hand, people don't have any shared context, and whatever loose figments of that existed in the past, such as the movies which everyone watched, are now gone. This is why people turn to internet scenes—I would not call them communities—built around certain centers of interest, but here again we see the departures from organic culture. The center around which internet scenes coalesce is often removed, sometimes very far removed from life itself. We find niche interests, specific genres of music, or sometimes a political ideology, but what results from this are echo chambers with people who are basically all the same.
Which modern man enjoys, because he is not just terrified of the existential unknown of Death, but also wishes to exterminate anything which could be unpleasant or simply different from his own life. Contact with wildly different people is unimaginable for very modern people, who are shielded from meaningful otherness by their institutions, job, screens and their wealth.
In other words, internet scenes lead to echo chambers and monocropped groups, whereas healthy cultures—insistence on healthy, no doubt that this dynamic also existed a lot in pre-modern times—lead to the diversity we see in a forest or meadow.
The fact also that interactions online only happen when one of the participants decides to do so might seem like a minor point, but this death of serendipity is a sign of a much larger disconnect from organic relationships. Whereas I might be tempted to chat with one of my neighbors if both of us happened to be standing on the porch, this never happens on online environments. Everything is guided by decision and thus usually self-interest. Play for its own sake is replaced by the self-absorbed (and rather pornographic) obsession which is video games. Children playing with one another can be joined by others, and they happen to get in touch with their environment and the fun of moving around. Video games on the other hand are like a blackhole of attention and curiosity for life, which is probably why a world ruled by screens such as ours leads to young people who are so emptied of any real joy. They might be "entertained", but if you actually look in their eyes, there is just emptiness and despair.
This disconnect from the body leads us to another major disturbance of our times, which is how the schizoid spectacle broadcasted through our screens has infiltrated our lives. By "schizoid", I do not mean "schizophrenic", I mean rather a state of severe dissociation from the body, while constantly engaged with the fragmented thoughts which come into one's mind. A schizoid person is one whose experience is shattered into bits, who is restless at night and who cannot sleep, who flips between six different forms of distraction, and who is stuck in different episodes of his past and imagined future, but never grounded in the now and in his body.
The schizoid state didn't arise from modernity, far from it, but it has become the norm now that everyone is plugged into the news and social media, both of which are made of short articles and tweets removed from any context whatsoever. These do not give us any sense of coherence, like an image which appears from a collection of different impressions. Rather we are left drawing our own connections in a Boschean assortment of unrelated events, which end up creating our sense of "reality".
This trend is very likely why the collective sense of time has become shattered over the past decade or so. Whereas being fully present makes time pass far more slowly, culminating in the experience of making love which gives us the impression of being in eternity with the other person, being constantly disembodied on the other hand, whether it is by being projected out into the future or tormented by the past, makes our experience of time feel like getting stuck in a series of whirlpools, rather than the calm river we experience when we are present. One impression leads to the next, and before we know it, three hours have passed, and then we experience the excruciating pain of boredom, until another lapse in consciousness happens and we fall asleep, metaphorically speaking.
The last and perhaps most important distinction between a real healthy culture and the spectre which haunts us is that the former helps bring the best out of its people, whereas the latter exhibits the worst. In a hyper-relativistic world, it is a cardinal sin to talk about "better" or "worse", but what we are talking about here is as uncontroversial as saying that there are people who are more physically healthy than others. Likewise, there are people who are better at dealing with their own death, more conscious in their day to day interactions, able to take part in nourishing relationships, can master their tools and their self in service of some greater good, and can softly love things and people.
A real culture thus creates mature and loving people, whereas the postmodern spectre creates selfish, anxious, alienated and insane men-children who spend all their time thinking and worrying about trivial things. The problem is that only mature people can notice what has been lost, which means that as maturity dies, so does the ability to notice its disappearance.
What all of those aspects of the death of culture point towards is the loss of a unity in our lives. This is because the source of all unity is consciousness, which manifests at the individual level as unique and sovereign people, also called geniuses, and at the collective level as sceniuses and living cultures.
Our system on the other hand has no need whatsoever of consciousness, no need of nature upon which lived cultures build upon, no need for unity which gives us a sense of stability in our lives, no need for play and serendipity, no need for empathy, warmth and belonging, no need of shared rituals, practices and forms, which get in the way of unchecked technological progress, and ultimately no need for essence, which is why we live in a time where many people would claim that there is no such thing.
This is the postmodern view, one which originates from the alienated brains-in-a-jar who look at the Universe through their cage-like institutions and joyless eyes and claim that there is nothing real about quality, consciousness, culture or essence, all of those are old superstitions, reified delusions or "social constructs".
Even though most people are not postmodern themselves, not just by the fact that they have never read them—it's debatable whether postmodernists even read one another because they are so incomprehensible—they become de facto as such when living in a world which only provides them with a screen, a representation of life, which can take on any appearance through a flow of data.
This emphasis on appearance is rather telling because essence and qualities are always the first thing to die, and appearance the last one, which is why the most popular movies and songs are so atrocious nowadays, why things work less and less in our society, why people are less and less happy, and yet the surface appearances remain largely the same, provided that you do not zoom out enough so as to see that very, very few things and people have any unity in them. Everyone and everything is a Boschean patchwork of unrelated bits, like the "culture" we are a part of.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Postmodern Insanity Schizoid Racket Mimetics Spectacle
2025-10-07