Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
"Worldview cannibalism" is the term I use to denote how worldviews aimed at changing the world for the better morph over time as they scale to more and more people. The main trend I see is that there is a clear phase shift which happens when the worldview becomes big enough to threaten the established institutions and ways of thinking, which means that it either stops spreading, or does so through heavy compromises, such that it is no longer recognizable from the initial movement.
The stages I see are:
Here are some examples to make this pattern concrete:
§1. The internet started out very free and decentralized, with people going around blogs, forums, game sites, porn sites and whatnot. This had its problems, namely that some sites could be really sketchy, but the big sites of our times weren't really a thing in the beginning. This was registered as a threat to massive businesses and media outlets, such that corporations have over time seized audiences through their network effects, social media especially, resulting in the state of the internet we now know: corporate, dull, predictable, and only interested in seizing your attention. The wild diversity of sites in the early internet gave way to standardized social media platforms where everyone is basically the same, which is why memes spread so well on the internet.
§2. Hippies wanted to make the world more loving and conscious. This trickled to the mainstream culture to some degree, but it was captured by corporate structures and mainstream politics to be rendered essentially impotent, in the form of middle-class spirituality which merely makes employees less stressed without changing anything about the corporate structures, or the reality of third-world exploitation, natural degradation, warfare, and alienating work, just to name a few.
§3. Similarly, the branch of socialism known as Fabian socialism, described very well in this essay by John Michael Greer, which claims that the system can be reformed from the inside through gentle nudges towards socialism, since unchecked capitalism leads to cruelty and opposition, which are counter to the efficiency required for optimal gains.
In practice, this is co-opted by the system, giving people a sense that they're making things better, while also allowing them to gain all the benefits from working for it. In Fabian Socialism we see the seeds of Effective Altruism, and also the idea of UBI in a world of full automation, which claim that it is somehow possible to steer the very same system which has created all of our current problems, towards some type of utopia which will magically address all of them and any further problems caused by more complex technology.
§4. Concerns about the deep inequality in our system show up, whether it is the lower class compared to the upper class, or immigrants compared to locals, or women compared to men. Some improvements are made, both economically and socially, but then it turns into a full-on culture war which not only spreads hate towards the more "dominant" side, but also distracts people from the fact that the actual problem isn't being solved, because the system as a whole is never acknowledged.
Women and racial minorities are perhaps given some benefits, but they are all nudged towards working for the system at the end of the day, which is why the "successes" of feminism have resulted in men and women being exploited in the same soulless corporate jobs, rather than social changes which would make women more happy, free and loving without being reliant on the system. Women might not be shackled to a marriage anymore, because now they are shackled by the technological system, a system where feminine qualities are at best useless, at worst antithetical to a woman's sensitivity, which is why women must become insane men to fit in it, 1 especially if they want to be "successful".
§5. Environmental concerns show up in response to ecological problems, communication from scientists and adjacent people crop up and helps spread the word for a while, until it once again turns into another facet of the narrative war, where people shout from the top of their lungs that climate change is the single most important issue of our time and anyone not changing their life around that is a terrible person.
Not that climate change is not a thing, it most certainly is and has big impacts in the increasingly frequent extreme weather events, but that the need to change things has been subsumed by the racket of shouting at people, built on top of the deontology of the activists,which has essentially made it impossible for any sane conversation which could lead to meaningful change to happen.
People who have read Kaczynski's writing might note the similarity between what I am describing here with The System's Neatest Trick. I would say that worldview cannibalism isn't exactly the same as the latter, because the System's Neatest Trick is about how rebellious impulses get channelled into system-friendly movements, whereas the concept I present here is broader, as it also includes more wholesome movements which mostly focus on helping people, such as what the hippies tried, and how they too are co-opted by businesses, institutions and social dynamics to become included in our society.
But still, the fundamental dynamic is the same, and the consequences too: people who believe they are making the world better see their efforts subsumed into the system and turned into something which is either totally inoffensive, or can even help it grow. Thus we could see the system as a self-organizing super-organism which reacts to threats by either expelling it away (denial), trying to destroy it (anger), or by co-opting it (bargaining), which usually requires said thing to become harmless to the system.
The third response becomes privileged in our information ecology because it is difficult to keep genuinely interesting ideas out of people's minds, and trying to destroy them altogether only brings more attention. This is why the most effective form of control in our times is through constant information and novelty, rather than suppression, but where the information is largely unimportant compared to the nature of the system (and the ego which builds it) as a whole.
How could a better world emerge then, if the status quo always finds a way to render anything subversive or simply transformative into a hollow caricature of itself? For the system as a whole, I am afraid that nothing is possible, because the system is driven by unconsciousness, and fundamentally what is required to change is a conscious participation with Reality, because only consciousness is unifying, and suited to the situation at hand.
What unconscious people do is that they react to various changes in their environment, and hold onto an idea of what the change is going to look like, which is why it is possible for someone to have wildly changing plans from week to week, while remaining largely the same. Conscious change is not erratic or driven by emotions, it is grounded in the here and now and is driven by purpose and a willingness to face adversity.
The orientation towards pain, the unknown and even death is what large scale groups all lack. Have you ever seen a committee which puts the ineffable over the profits? Have you ever seen a large movement which puts responsibility and hard work as a priority, and doesn't create any outgroup to blame their problems on? Have you ever seen a popular modern song talk about death, grief or loss? Of course not, what appeals to the majority is what appeals to the ego, which is more ego, through more safety, control, power, status, pleasure and familiarity.
People and collectives do not fundamentally change because they have no capacity with sitting with Unself, which is why they are obsessed with systematizing life, explaining everything away, controlling the deviants, and pushing away grief at all costs. When this happens, people get stuck in a perpetual loop of denial, bargaining, anger and depression, because to genuinely accept would mean to face death, something which the ego would never, ever do willingly. This is why worldview cannibalism appears over and over, because genuine change is uncomfortable to the ego, and we live in a world of self-preservation, not of truth, or beauty, or freedom, or courage, or love. But eventually, the ego and its resistance to Reality must die, because its game of self-deception can only last so long. This is the only way things can meaningfully change, by allowing Death into our lives, and if we refuse its presence, then it will eventually make its way into our lives no matter what we think of it.
1 See for instance Darren Allen's writing on gender, such as Man and Woman, an extract from his Book of Love.
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Mimetics Corruption Racket Statusquo Ego Ineffable Death
2025-11-10