Excellent piece gato. In the last decade I’ve gone from atheism to belief in a God of my understanding to Catholic. Early in this journey, I heard man’s search for meaning described as a God-shaped hole that we instinctively fill. In Jung’s work with drunks, he posited that only a spiritual experience could rearrange the psyche of chronic alcoholics sufficiently to overcome the drink problem.

Last year I read From Christendom to the Apostolic Age, by Monsignor Shea. It posits that we are now living in a post-Christendom Age for the first time in perhaps 1,500 years. During the Christendom era, reason, law, art, etc flourished, with Christian principles and morality being the tie that bound people together. As you describe, we are untethered, and cults of self and weather gods proliferate.

How to stem the tide? South Park & memer mockery are the front line, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. In the U.S., a return to first principles, and defending our founding and our constitution as inherently good may be a secular uniting factor.