Notes from: America’s New Religions & the Cult of Self-Making: Tara Isabella Burton on the Hidden Forces Podcast (Link)
Internet Culture has created a kind of divinization of desire, the sense that what we want, what we feel, our access to our inner selves, all of these things are constitutive of our truest self, they are the core of who we really are, and they are authoritative. They tell us what we ought to do to be at harmony with our own desires, to do what serves us.

The spiritual and metaphysical assumptions of "modernity" have coalesced into an implicit civil religion.

Self-creation has become an obligation... selling ourselves is something we're all expected to do now in the internet age, in dialogue with the attention economy.

With the caveat that we don't truly know the mentality of past ages: we in 2023 are much less likely to take seriously, or to incorporate and integrate into our sense of self, notions of duty, or honor, or certain conceptions of our relationship with the social-imaginary that depend on the notion that our desires, what we feel deeply to be true, might be a) wrong, b) bad, c) not actually what we really want... Pre-modern thinkers wrestled with the truth that sometimes we want what's bad for us... our access to our own internal state is not necessarily pure or good.

These new modern religions are not sufficiently in touch with the necessity for extrinsic moral realism.

In 2019 I wrote about 3 contenders to be our next civil religion:
       1. Social Justice Progressive Acitivism
       2. Techno-Utopian "California Ideology" Libertarianism
       3. Atavistic Neo-Vitalism /Neitzche-an Petersonian Paelo Self-Improvement
In 2023 I would update my thesis: we're seeing elements of all three of them coalescing under the techno-utopianism umbrella... The way that I would describe this franken-phenomenon of 2023 is the sense that what's primary is our personal experiential psychological contentedness, which we alone have the power to understand and access. Our greatest obligation is to ourselves, to be TRUE TO ourselves (whatever that means), through a belief that our non-physical manifestations of who we are, whether it's speech, whether it's creativity - our kind of "mental powers" - shape reality far more than anything physical or concrete. It's a faith in human ingenuity, it's a faith in human creativity, it's a faith in sort of quasi-divine human power to create reality... We are all moral relativists now, and we are all looking to ourselves as the final arbiter of morality, of spiritual reality, of what it means to be human. And more and more of us are willing to see other people as fundamentally opposed to this journey. Other people are obstacles because society is an obstacle. Conventional wisdom is an obstacle. Anything that is settled is an obstacle.

One of the things we don't do very often post-pandemic is to engage with people in very normal ways, we're all astoundingly bad at it.

Idealism about social change in communities does demand a certain kind of generosity of spirit, and a certain kind of productive tolerance that any kind of internet-fueled ideology of perfection is going to make harder not easier.

[The interviewer Dimitri Kofinas points out that the concept of "love" is lacking in this modern religion.] Self-love is something I hear about a lot... but there isn't a sense of what love (of the other) should look like.

Fascistic lust for violence is a type of civil religion... and yet our present era, with a few exceptions, is largely a LARP: people aestheticizing violence by shitposting. It's not to say that real violence better - it's certainly much better for the world that it is contained to the LARPing most of the time, and yet I think that it speaks to a fundamental sickness in culture more broadly, that we are all unable to contend with the real. It's true of all of us.

The internet is so transformative and cataclysmic to what it means to be human.

I am very pessimistic... societally speaking, I thought we would experience a new localism post-pandemic [in which we interact with the people around us, in our neighborhoods and towns]. But what seems to have happened is that the internet has poisoned all of our brains even more. Influencer culture and social media culture is way more intense than it was before the pandemic. That said, I think a lot of people, particularly young people, know that this is all screwed up. And those people who have grown up digital natives... I worry about them, but I wonder if there will be communities or intentional communities that do try to live a little bit more deliberately, or try to be analog... i think that enough people are sufficiently aware that something is terribly wrong that the center cannot hold.

We live in a time of profound unreality. And I think that is made all the more difficult by the fact that none of us exactly know what "the real" is. What does it mean to be "really something." So many of our culture war discourses, our political discourses, come from a sense that what is real, what is true, is shifting and unclear. Sometimes various people are scapegoated for this. I think there's a sort of scapegoating of non-gender-conforming and trans people often and when it comes to this question that people are like "something is wrong and we're gonna point the finger and blame these people for this". But i think that more broadly that all of us, regardless of our politics, are wrestling with. We live in an era where everything can be faked. We live in an era of disembodiment, and unlimited choice, and all kinds of invention, and we're trying to figure out what to actually hold on to in all of that, and we're being lied to at every turn by everybody. Institutional trust is massively down, but the most charitable things I can say about that is that as human beings I think one of our desires that is innate is for the truth - for the true, the beautiful and the good, even - and that understanding even anger or frustration or hatred collectively as downstream of this cultural  fissure can help us think constructively about how do we create communities that are real? How do we create real things?