The Journey Out of Darkness
Why philosophy and religion are healthier than politics and therapy.
3:00 a.m. I was awake. I’d fallen asleep with my headset on. As I returned to hazy consciousness, it occurred to me that a cascade of political videos had been playing to my unconscious mind throughout the night.
Negative. Acrimonious.
It was troubling, too—an acute, distorted reflection of all the societal rot. Or was all the societal rot mirroring the cascade of acute distortions?
Whatever the case, the experience made me feel ill, though not physically. And I began to worry that too many of us had caught the illness.
We can all sense it.
Hostile sports leagues compete for mindshare as whole nations fracture along ideological and cultural lines. People are gasping for air and grasping for anything. Our contemporary condition manifests as a set of interconnected maladies, and has done so for some time.
In the West, a psychospiritual pathology has set in.
The Pathologies
Personal despair settles in like a fog. Life stagnates, depression takes hold, and a bone-deep ennui drains everything of vitality and purpose.
Around us, evil metastasizes through our institutions and relationships. Corruption rots us from within. The urge to dominate is bipartisan. The call to violence is shrieking, and the desire to destroy grows with each passing day.
Aimless souls wander through this landscape, unmoored and disoriented like zombies. Relativism tells us no one is wrong until nihilism starts to whisper that nothing matters.
Our generation can’t have the Dream.
Work is just a chore.
Children are just a burden.
Cause celebres offers an illusion of meaning, but the only constants are fear, anxiety, and hatred.
Armed with our devices, we live in an increasingly solitary society—alone together. Digital solipsism replaces genuine connection. Communities fracture. We are orphaned from each other and from any sense of belonging. Digital dopamine drips replace the oxytocin that warm embraces might once have released.
The universe feels dead—reduced by materialism to an unyielding mechanism, stripped by scientism of mystery and meaning. Reductionism explains everything and illuminates nothing.
Our hollow spirits remain haunted by unconfronted fears we lack the courage to face. Where growth demands confrontation, more are choosing avoidance—especially the younger generations.
So we turn to empty pleasures: amusements that numb, addictions that enslave, lesser appetites that promise fulfillment but deliver only temporary escape.
Politics and Therapy
Politics both exacerbates our troubles and is a source of them. But people mistake it for the cure: If we can get our team elected, everything will be better.
Until that magical moment arrives, too many of us are slaves to the spectacle of owning the libs or destroying the right. We also start to think it’s cute to be contrarian or base to be racist.
Both sides validate what the other side has always thought about them.
When right-wingers start to believe the path to fame is to drop the N-word, left-wingers are more determined than ever to keep black and brown people on the Pity Plantation as welfare liabilities to be managed by compassionate elites.
On the left, more reveal they’ve hated the Jews all along, and then the right says, ‘Hold my beer.’ The partisan politicos try to figure out how to surf on all these corruptive sentiments and tell noble lies to maintain their budgets, incumbencies, and to grease their donors’ palms.
Ugly collectivisms become the default. Everyone vents, but no one heals.
Whether as participants or bystanders, information warfare makes us worse off.
A therapeutic-industrial complex feeds on our psychospiritual pathologies in a perverse transaction. Like our smartphones and our empty pleasures, therapy offers the illusion that we’re improving. Instead, we’re almost certainly engaging in self-indulgent trauma talk that permits us to resist taking responsibility for our lives. Therapists, like pharma companies, have figured out how to make return customers.
We pay them to tell us everything is someone else’s fault.
The Solution Set
When we figure out what we really need, the path out of the darkness appears.
Personal growth and agency become the antidote to despair. Through deliberate psychosocial development and good habits, we break free from stagnation and reclaim our capacity for change.
Moral teaching and the practice of virtue offer a compass when evils spread. Character isn’t always inherited. It can be cultivated through daily choices and embodied wisdom. But it requires focusing on repairing you, not others.
Commitment to a mission pulls aimless souls toward a purpose. When we dedicate ourselves to something beyond our own needs and desires—something greater—disorientation gives way to direction.
Community bonds restore what solitary society has fractured. Real connection—not digital simulation—returns us to belonging. We remember we were never meant to walk alone.
The exploration of mythic truth and a higher power reanimates the dead universe. Mystery returns. Meaning becomes possible again. We find ourselves part of something vast and alive, even if it’s literally just radiation and stellar dust.
Psychospiritual guideposts help us navigate the inner wilderness. Existential confrontations, once avoided, become the very ground of our transformation. We face what we feared and discover we are stronger than our terrors. With fear behind us, we remember we are capable of experiencing joy.
Life meaning, contribution, and fulfillment replace empty pleasure. When we give ourselves to something worthy, the restless hunger for distraction finally quiets.
We stop escaping and start living.
Philosophy and Religion
When it comes to realizing the solution, two circles interlink: one is philosophy, the other is religion.
Of course, there are bad philosophies and bad religions. But healthy philosophy and religion can nourish our spirits, calm our nerves, and reconnect us with others in the joy of being alive together. The right philosophy and the right religion are life-affirming. They offer us almost everything we need in the solution set above.
Why on earth would I make such a claim?
Because these conjoined twins, when they are at their best, seek to answer what might be the world’s most important question: How are we to live?