Episode 108 - A Critical Comeuppance

Show NotesBooks Referenced The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray - https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Crowds-Gender-Race-Identity/dp/1635579988/At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell - https://www.amazon.com/Existentialist-Café-Cocktails-Jean-Paul-Merleau-Ponty-ebook/dp/B00Z3E2KEC/Links ReferencedHow Wrongeth You Are!?  A look at Cultural Relativism - https://www.gospelunderground.org/podcast/2018/9/5/episode-26-how-wrongethThe Nicene Creed - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_versions_of_the_Nicene_CreedQuotationsThe explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away from the 19th century onwards. Then over the last century the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies begin to follow in religions wake. In the latter part of the twentieth century we entered the postmodern era. An era which defined itself, and was defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives. However, as all schoolchildren learn, nature abhors a vacuum, and into the postmodern vacuum new ideas begin to creep, with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own. Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, page 1.We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere we do not see that causes...Murray, 1.People in wealthy, Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meeting. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now — other than get rich where we can have whatever fun is on offer — was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns and evermore niche demands. Defined meaning by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered. The unbelievable speed of this process had principally been caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not  just to direct what most of the world know, think, and say, but have a business model which has  accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behavior’ Murray, 1-2.