I believe something near the root of our societal problems today is The Death of God that happened nearly 150 years ago, and the society that was birthed from this patricide.

The sort of unhinged self-hatred that emerges from this murder is one that cannot see itself in the reflection of god, but only his death. All structures and former ways of being must be wiped away, are no longer venerated or respected, because nothing is really capable of that any longer in this society. It is a society of a dark forest where the hollow men reign, and purpose is pointlessness.

It is only through the long private sojourn into the dark of night towards the true existential angst, the questing towards the question of being itself, and what the lostness within this darkness means, that the pinprick of the light meaning could ever be found. But that demands a decision of agency, the desire to know if it is only blackness or something more. The death of god explicitly fills the void of society with this lack of thinking as thinking; the black ink of nothingness to create a meaningless life where such a seeking is pointless within itself.

It is only once we take the leap into the unknown, into the possibility that there could be something, and not nothing, that the possibility of something different, something beyond the nihilism itself becomes a possibility.