What Makes A Radical?Late liberalism is creating conditions in which extremism appeals as an answer
By Rod Dreher
July 16, 2022
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I’m still thinking about all the things I heard at dinner last night. My hosts were a young Christian couple I recently met. Both in their early twenties. He’s American, she’s Hungarian, and they will marry soon. I like them a lot.
The man — I’ll call him Jeremy — told me that he had fallen into far-right radicalism and drug abuse before his conversion. He’s from a middle-class family in the American South. I asked him how he became radicalized. He said it was simple. In school, he was a nerdy outcast, bullied and isolated. He retreated into online life, and there found what felt like solidarity and companionship. Jeremy said that the ranks of the far right are filled with outcast young men who are desperate for meaning, purpose, and solidarity (N.B., Hannah Arendt said in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism that this condition is why so many are swept up in totalitarian political movements.) “When you are suffering, and nobody seems to care about you, you are easy prey for people who offer a clear explanation for why you are suffering, and why nobody cares about you,” Jeremy said.
He also said that he was driven by a passionate search for the truth — and that you’d be surprised by how many young far-rightists can say the same thing. He didn’t articulate it quite like this, but what he was saying is that young people today live in a world where nobody trusts any authority. But nobody can live not trusting any authority. When radicals come along with a clear claim to authority — that is, when they speak with passion and conviction about their correctness — that can be crack to young minds searching for certainty. As Jeremy spoke, I kept thinking about this amazing essay by Katherine Dee, about where mass shooters come from. Dee writes in it:
As I interviewed people about [Sandy Hook shooter Adam] Lanza, a common theme emerged. Yes, there was something obviously wrong with the material circumstances of America in the early 21st century—an economy that seemed incapable of providing for the many, decaying institutions, the ubiquity of our screens. But there was something else. Something more abstract. It was that we now lived in a world where everything revolved around the individual. We had morphed from a universe of moral absolutes to broad social and communal forces to an all-consuming solipsism—a terrifying oneness, a “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch put it, where the self is central.
This narcissism is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary “true self” keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond. Our shared inability to commit to anything that might make life meaningful, like children or a partner or putting down roots in a single place. It pervades Western humor, which is dominated by a sense that the world is ending, so we may as well drink and smoke ourselves to death because nothing really matters.
In this world, the individual was everything and nothing, architect of the future and hapless cog in a vast and deafening black. In this place, one murdered wantonly with the knowledge that all of us were just accidental bits of flesh bookended by eternities, that we meant nothing, that the possibility of meaning was a ruse.
The debate over more guns or fewer guns completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter: the world built by modern liberalism, which took for its telos the maximization of individual autonomy, and thus guaranteed total alienation, breeds the nihilism behind these shootings. Ultimately, these killers could not cope, the way the rest of us do every day, with the crushing weight of the existential angst that is the promise of liberalism. Even the more thoughtful takes on fatherlessness and mental illness are only still addressing the symptoms of the disease. Until we see this, the ground of the problem, we will be no closer to answers, let alone solutions for these 21st-century horrors.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/what-makes-a-radical/
