Anomie and Deaths of Despair
For the past five years, I’ve been transfixed by a set of global social movements. “Fascinated” is probably too generous a word. It’s closer to the feeling of passing a highway accident — a morbid compulsion, an inability to look away. They appear in different corners of politics, technology, and culture, but they share a strange gravitational pull: MAGA, and the resurgence of nationalist populism NRx, and the flirtation with authoritarian technocracy Techno-libertarians, and the growing obsession with “exit” culture — building parallel systems outside the state The Manosphere , visible through figures like Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk The Great Denial — a chaotic fusion of anti-vaccine activism, climate-change denial, and biblical literalism, united by a sweeping rejection of modern scientific authority At first glance, these movements seem unrelated. They emerge from different ideologies, speak different political languages, and often dislike each other intensely. But the longer...
