"A Deepening Void

Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives."

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/the-new-era-of-political-violence-is-here/671146/

On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 8:00:10 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> "A Deepening Void
>
> Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.
>
> The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.
>
> There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives."
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/the-new-era-of-political-violence-is-here/671146/

The Atlantic.com is a center-left publication. The above article describes what is going on.
The quoted paragraph begins with "A Deepening Void" and ends with "There is no single principle..."
The author Tom Nichols then continued:
"What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it."

The following is from The American Conservative published about 3 years old.. The author might
be providing an explanation as well as a prediction. The problem of "life without meaning" is to be
solved by some kind of religous-nationalism

"Human beings cannot long live without meaning. As Douglas Murray writes in the introduction to his
new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, the “great crowd derangement” of our
time — he’s talking mostly about identity politics — is coming about because of a shared lack of meaning:

Even the origin of this condition [the “great crowd derangement”] is rarely acknowledged. This is the
simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our
grand narratives have collapsed. One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to
defend or impossible to sustain. The explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion
went first, falling away from the nineteenth century onwards. The over the last century the secular hopes
held out by all political ideologies began to follow in religion’s 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 began to creep, with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own.

It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted ground.. 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 meaning. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now —
other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer — was going to have to be answered
by something.

That “something” is identity politics, which seek “to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new
religion, if you will.”

We are now at the beginning of the post-Christian Wars of Religion. This will become clearer very soon,
I’m afraid, especially as the older generations, whose sense of meaning was fixed by the old narratives, d
ie off, and leave the field to those who were raised in the ruins of what was once a coherent and cohesive
civilization."

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/life-without-meaning-identity-douglas-murray/