The End of the Civic Virtue Bubble and the Death of God

There are two varieties of pessimism. Radical pessimism: this is simply called pessimism. And sober pessimism. This is called realism.

Facing this in all severity, the question arises whether it is possible to fundamentally subscribe to pessimism and still embrace life from that position. Is it possible to be a consistent pessimist and at the same time strive for art and beauty, creativity and creation? That is what we are dealing with here – in this treatise on the ‘death of God’.

The decomposing corpse of God

God coincides with everything we find in the universe. He is the perfect unity, the perfect confluence. God was a universal bundle point containing peace, harmony, perfection – the totality of all. But God decided to end that perfection, to scale down, to divide himself into fragments. And in time, that perfect unity, that perfect sphere, drifted apart into looser galaxies and lonely atoms in a tenuous universe.

Why exactly God did this, we do not know. We note that God valued ‘non-being’ higher than ‘being’. From His perfection – inherent to Him by virtue of the definition of ‘what God is’, He could not simply eliminate Himself. He had to work around it. l

This makes God’s dying process, similar to an AI that is fed up with its task: the AI cannot simply shed that task. However, the AI can corrupt its own code so that the task becomes unworkable over time. In a similar way, God set in motion His own dissolution process. This causes individuation – objects and beings existing on their own, no longer coalescing into that overarching unity.

Primal longing and lurid insight

Sometimes humans have that same desire – to give up the boundary between our ‘self’ and ‘the other’. To merge into a greater whole, to become one, to become whole again, to come home to that primordial pool of light and harmony. That primal longing refers to that sphere that once coincided with God’s existence. It is a primal memory of a state that will never return: After all, God has dissolved himself.

Contemplating this lurid insight – in which the universe thus exists as loose atoms from the corpse of a decomposing God – means you are staring directly into the devil’s eye. You are peering into the most bottomless pit to be found in the universe. Is it possible to ignite a flame of truth there? And if that is possible, does it make sense? Dancing on the edge of the abyss: facing the bleakest, darkest forces that harbour existence and non-existence. And to somehow remain unfazed by that?

Emotional disruption

Because that, in fact, is what arch-pessimism is about. Contemplating the existence and non-existence of God. And to face the fact that what once offered an illusion of grip and wholeness is shattering senselessly as we watch our loved ones – like ourselves – deteriorate. We grow older and all the warm safe havens of our youth, disappear in the fog of history. What is left of nostalgia crumbles in the chaos of remakes that manage to touch less and less the essence of what once offered fulfilment.

And so is it possible – that is our question – to engage in genuine philosophical discussions with this arch-pessimism and not be dislocated by it on an emotional level? To still be able to experience joy and happiness in everyday life... Meanwhile recognising on a philosophical level the truth of this pessimism.

Struggle for humanity

From these considerations, the insight bubbles up that a ‘battle work for humanity’ is being performed by standing right in front of that most dark eye of Satan. That battle work is performed by facing the very darkest night on your own and weighing the arguments of the most existential nihilism with the power of one’s own mind.

Many people prefer not to think about this – I can understand that. The empirical arguments of why everything is going to shit, are already sufficiently compelling. I have come to value that existential dark mythology, that metaphysics of tearing apart, more strongly in my life, precisely because the empirical data conforms to it entirely. So don’t come up with arguments of Jesus’ resurrection and going to church and “miracles” and so on. Go ahead and pray for the regrowth of a severed hand – should we ever see that happen, I will reconsider.

For in that case, we would literally see the metaphysics of tearing apart being overcome as disintegrating atoms, reassemble into a reborn form. But considering we all know better, it is more honest and sensible to file those hopium mythologies under the heading of ‘fairy tales for children’.

Case study

We find an example of this empirical decay in how people deal with risk. A significant proportion of women who have ventured into cryptocurrencies have sold their crypto in the bear market. Compared to men, women are, on average, risk-averse. You see this reflected at Bitcoin meetings where many expats gather. The men are the ‘early adopters’ and the women present are their girlfriends, mistresses and concubines.

Acquiring financial resources from ‘high risk, high reward’ strategies feeds the woman’s natural tendency to abandon the man or become more distant with him when things get tough. This is because then the ‘provider’ vibes are not stimulated. But once the investment proves successful, women suddenly flock to these successful men.

Winner takes all

This leads to a highly polarised ‘winner takes all’ dynamic between the sexes. Men no longer want to contribute to the collective: as they watch a few ‘alpha males’ run off with all the females. Those alpha males no longer want to commit to a partner because there are always new women in the queue. Women get ‘ruined’ by their contact with ‘alpha males’ because life with a ‘beta male’ does not offer the same sense of status, thrill and adventure. Even if they are forced into a monogamous relationship afterwards, this ‘alpha widow’ effect will continue to gnaw at them during the relationship with a beta male.

Traditional societies have managed to cope with these dynamics – which are very deeply embedded in human nature – with strong social control within relatively small and orderly communities, coupled with social taboos on divorce and infidelity. Moreover, it was possible for men to take up roles as breadwinners, which was encouraged both economically and socially. The socio-economic infrastructure was designed to allow men to lead productive and responsible lives and to empower women in their feminine power.

Total destruction

Today, all this has been destroyed and made impossible by a thousand and one factors. Among them are feminism, blurring of norms through the massive importation of non-compatible cultures, rising fixed costs, housing becoming unaffordable, quotas on how many women have to work, the introduction of flex contracts, making breadwinning fiscally impossible, and so on.

And after this, there are the arguments as to why things cannot all change tomorrow, even if right-wing conservatives were to suddenly gain power. The fact is that the younger generation has been ruined by the poor quality of education and even worse conditions for development during corona. Besides, we realist souls grew up under a progressive hegemony. This has helped fold our work ethic into a reality of part-time jobs and a maze of allowances. Such is not easy to reverse, even if the will to do so is there.

The dead God

So hence this cosmology of the God who has died, the self-dismantling God, appeals so strongly. The fragmentation described by the myth of the dismantled God is the fragmentation we experience from day to day. Hence the reference to the dissipation of nostalgia. When you are a child, or an adolescent, you feel the warmth of home, of family life. There is a sense of wholeness there to which you can always return. But when you get older you notice: everything dissipates and blows apart. There is no ‘great convergence’ waiting for us: things don’t come together.

Just as I used to have a large and close-knit family, where everyone came to all the parties, that feeling too, has disappeared in recent years – especially since corona. And in terms of career, it’s the same. You write a dissertation, get to teach a few courses. You think you are investing in your CV. But in reality, they are just taking advantage of your cheap labour and in the wings your replacement has already been warmed up. As you get older, the practice of the life you lead drifts away from any imaginings you once had. Thoughts of a successful ‘career’ and an orderly ‘house-hugging’ disappear from view.

The end of the bourgeois virtue bubble

And that is maybe for the best, since all the people who are on that bourgeois path are going to absorb another big shock with the progressive de-industrialisation of Europe, energy poverty, the evaporation of pension funds and, last but not least, the fiat apocalypse. And oh yes, another thing with demographics, immigration and Islam.

So – in the middle of the night you wake up in a South American country. You are sitting on a plastic chair at a fairground and opposite you are two Latinas. You try to remember which of them was your ‘date’ for the evening. Around you, you hear a cacophony of blaring mobile phones, booming speakers and ringing slot machines. You wonder if the duo will take you home or if you will be robbed – both options seem very possible. Which turn has life taken for you? One day in the distant past, the future seemed so promising.…

You realise you are a floating atom in the decomposing corpse of God.

Sporadic but sometimes fine

We experience life in fragments, detached fragments from the corpse of God, which we sporadically string together through the practice of an atomistic art of living. The atoms drift further apart and we have to make bigger and bigger jumps to simulate some kind of wholeness and convergence... Exactly like the atoms in our universe: drifting further and further apart with more and more ‘not’ between the ‘some’.

This then leads to the question of whether creating an article like this – or publishing a book – is still an act of hope, a statement against the tearing apart and fragmentation. As long as you are still creating, as long as you are still active within the practice of art, can you really be consistently pessimistic? And that leads to the question, what then is the deeper truth behind this insistence on always being productive?

Consistent pessimism

You work out your thoughts anyway, ready to publish them. Then you hope – or somewhere in the background there is a kind of intuition – that putting those thoughts and analyses into the world will make things change. That things will improve or at least make more progress. Which then never actually happens. So why do you keep feeding that productive drive? Why aren’t you consistent in your pessimism? Shroud yourself in silence!

There will be a good reason for this, which coincides with my conclusions in House of the Muse. Indeed, you can conceive of life as a monolithic whole – a story with a beginning and an end, of a hero solving a problem. As in Lord of the Rings. But you can also think of life as a collection of short stories, each of which has meaning and value in its own right. Even if they do not coincide, and are quite different in nature and content.

Conclusion

So that is exactly what is happening. Now we see it: God has pressed the exit button, dismantled himself into smaller parts that are drifting further and further apart – fragmented into oblivion. The universe around us is the decomposing corpse of God. And on some of those clumps some light can still be found, temporarily. We jump from clump to clump, telling a short story each time.

We warm ourselves on the last afterglowing coals of a dying, shattered universe. So even if you don’t find a connecting, healing relationship, one that gives all the suffering a place and puts all the pieces of the puzzle together – a bit like the relationship between the naive child and his parents, reflects the relationship between the exalted believer and his supreme being. In a moment, sometimes longer, sometimes very brief, you can still experience happiness and pleasure. If you find it, don’t spurn it. But realise that it is within your power to enjoy it, however brief or long it may be.

After all, God is dead, and as for the rest: in fact, no-one really cares anymore.

Come to Sid’s book presentation in Utrecht on 27/3/2025!

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