We’re afflicted with cultural illness. Thankfully, there’s a cure.
As I near my 50th birthday, I’ve been thinking about what it means to stay human in a culture that rewards distortion. This piece is about the crisis of authority we’re living through and what it takes to hold onto clarity, humility, and truth when the world forgets what they look like.
To mark the milestone, I’m offering 50% off annual subscriptions until the end of the month.
Two messages collided for me today during post-pilates and leg day fatigue.
On X,
commented on how online dynamics reward performative loyalty over real connection. His tweet captured something even darker: the way social media turns relationships into tests of ideological purity. One day you’re accepted; the next, you're suspect—because you didn’t perform the right hostility at the right time toward the chosen person or group. Forget shared values. Allegiance is enacted through ritualised outrage, constant enemy rotation, and guilt by algorithmic association. The accusations may seem political, but they’re steeped in projection and paranoia. Allegiance is conditional and so-called friendship has always been transactional—you just didn’t know it yet.
Meanwhile,
exposed the cultural inversion that treats expertise as arrogance and mockery as insight.From my perspective, they’re describing the same cultural affliction: when trust in institutional authority collapses, we don’t stop needing authority, we just crown new ones.
The unspoken truth is that everyone wants an authority. A strong father-figure type who can shield us from life’s harshness and offer shortcuts toward a good life or some vision of enlightenment. We’re hardwired for it. It’s a primal program. Some say we’re wired to want to surrender to God or the great unknown while being terrified of it and doing everything we can to remain in control and comfortable.
I don’t think the problem is that we want authority. It’s that we no longer have easy access to elders who can guide our discernment, nor the cultural conditions that teach us how to choose wisely. The real problem is in who ends up being chosen to fill that role.
The crisis of authority in a culture of clout
Not everyone with a large platform is harmful, but many of the people being elevated by algorithmic advantage aren’t doing real work. They’re not grounded in practice, accountability, or long-term service. They’re NPCs with massive reach skilled in performance, fluent in the right language and vibe, and rewarded for visibility. Over the years, I’ve learned that influence without skin in the game isn’t wisdom, and talking the talk without mining the depths of a subject isn’t authority.
At the centre of this distortion is cultural narcissism, as defined by Christopher Lasch. He described it as a societal shift toward self-preoccupation, emotional defensiveness, and a craving for validation rather than meaning. In this context, influence becomes a performance, and public identity replaces inner life.
The real danger I and others see is that performative authorities are becoming the voice of what’s acceptable. Their opinions shape the conversation and redraw the boundaries of what can be said. As Holly stated about Joe Rogan:
He defines it.
If he says something, it becomes sayable. Not universally accepted, not beyond criticism — but permissible. Instantly. Automatically.
He doesn’t need to be right. He doesn’t need institutional backing. He doesn’t need approval from media gatekeepers or academic panels.
His voice alone is enough to move the boundary of what’s allowed.
Real authorities speak from lived, practiced, and deeply studied experience. Their insights tend to challenge rather than follow trends. They disturb curated worldviews built for status, not truth.
We are living through a crisis of discernment and accountability. The answer isn’t nostalgia for compromised institutions or fantasies of their restoration. It’s the slow rebuilding of trust through earned authority, relational depth, and moral clarity.
Platforms driven by machine attention are already compromised. The influencers elevated by them, those who lack humility, curiosity, wisdom, and ethics are not elders. They are not authorities.
Wanting someone’s fame and attention is not the same as having discernment. And many of these people are accountable to their status, not to people.
This brings us back to the moment Holly captured so well: the Joe Rogan mockery of Douglas Murray. On the surface, it looks like a cheap shot at a war correspondent. Yet underneath, something deeper is playing out: a psychological turf war disguised as commentary.
Murray embodies earned authority and subject matter expertise. He’s been in war zones, spoken to survivors, and built his worldview through experience, risk, and deep engagement. That presence threatens the kind of man whose status rests on reach over depth.
Rogan’s response is bro-coded defensiveness wrapped in laughter, not respectful disagreement. He leans on female-coded relational aggression: public mockery that cloaks humiliation in humour, alliance-building through taking sides and subtle loyalty tests, and tone-based undermining by using performative lightness to signal superiority without direct confrontation. These are status-preserving tactics used to destabilise the other person without ever appearing openly aggressive, while giving the illusion of attempted engagement.
There’s also something strategic in Rogan’s response. He needs to stay close to what’s cool by tracking cultural currents and attracting listeners from the trendier corners of the political spectrum, especially those that were once ignored. But chasing trends without discernment is opportunism. It reveals an unprincipled approach driven by his desire to remain relevant. Rogan doesn’t challenge power so much as buck whatever consensus is ripest for disruption.
Whether he is aware of it or not, the moment appears to be about preserving status rather than engaging in open inquiry. It unfolds as a performance of dominance intended to re-establish himself as the one in control of credibility.
What makes this moment different from his usual banter or disagreements with guests is that Murray brings a kind of gravitas Rogan cannot easily fold into his dynamic. It is a quiet clash over who holds the authority to define what is real, instead of the usual simple exchange of perspectives.
In that moment, Rogan appeared to do what many in his position do when their grip on cultural influence feels shaky: he mocked the authority and the entire category of lived, practiced expertise.
It’s worth considering whether this moment was more than a disagreement. Perhaps it was a quiet shift, a sign of Rogan’s declining dominance, and an attempt to reassert control through covert aggression. This wasn’t the subversive play of a true trickster. It was a mimicry of trickster energy, using mockery to protect power from being challenged rather than to disrupt it in service of truth.
Murray wasn’t just speaking from lived authority. He represented a kind of institutional credibility that Rogan has long positioned himself against. In that sense, Murray didn’t just offer insight. He disrupted Rogan’s entire self-narrative as the one who gets to choose which voices matter.
For someone who built a platform on challenging establishment narratives, Rogan has become his own establishment. A gatekeeper dressed in anti-institutional clothing. He critiques authority, curates it, and chooses who matters.
When someone enters the room with too much reality to control and can’t be absorbed into the usual dynamic, the mask slips. What we witnessed wasn’t humility or dialogue. It was strategic dismissal.
We can see another manifestation of this cultural illness in what Josh called out on X: the tribalistic groupthink and demand for allegiance that defines much of social media today.
Josh’s tweet, to me, was more than frustration with bad behaviour online. It was a diagnosis of digital cult psychology. His post captured the way people operate in ideological swarms, where disagreement is met with hostility, suspicion, and ritual exclusion.
What we’re witnessing is a pendulum swing away from the loneliness of hyper-individualism as
dissects in his excellent book, not toward community, but toward enmeshment masquerading as belonging.In a complex and disorienting world, people seek clarity. But instead of doing the deep, slow work that cultivates discernment, they look for group authority— seeking safety in the swarm. The influencer becomes the messiah. The group becomes the devoted cult that surrounds and protects them. The rules are purity tests: Thou shalt signal allegiance. Thou wilt amplify. Thou shalt not dissent. Those who refuse to follow are no longer just wrong. They are dangerous.
What emerges is a globally dispersed cult, convening daily on X to perform its rituals: quote-tweet condemnations, curated outrage, and memes of moral supremacy. It poses as activism yet functions more like liturgy — a collective performance of righteousness that flattens complexity, erases nuance, and suffocates wisdom.
The irony is that what claims to be anti-establishment has simply built a new establishment. The influencer becomes the cultural gatekeeper, deciding what’s acceptable, what’s off-limits, and who deserves to be cast out. Control has been rebranded as freedom.
I also admit I’m not just an observer, I’m inside it too. Lately, I’ve noticed a sudden surge in engagement on my LinkedIn posts. Where there was once a trickle of interaction from familiar names, there’s now a wave of attention from people I’ve never met. My profile is being flagged as one of the most viewed on the platform. LinkedIn urges me to get verified and offers ways to leverage the momentum. The messages I receive are full of endorsement and client requests, sometimes with a reverence that throws me. It’s disorienting. And I can feel the mind beginning to quietly strategise how to keep it going.
I notice the low hum of internal strategising and the slight shift in thought: What should I post next? How do I keep this going? It’s not that I’ve changed my message- I’m aware of the pull now that attention is flooding in. There’s a temptation to be seen, to resonate and recognised. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the seduction of it and the possibility of being CHOSEN.
Whether others admit or not, this is precisely the crossroads at which so many find themselves. The tension between building clout and preserving integrity, between being resonant and being performative. The only thing I’ve found that cuts through that fog is discernment paired with accountability.
Discernment of the world, the systems we critique, and our own behaviours and motives is essential. Accountability isn’t a performative gesture or brand position—it’s not the public admission of a mistake after mob-based flagellation, followed by ritual self-sacrifice and eventual forgiveness. It is an ongoing practice: to others, to truth, and to the people we serve. Accountability and discernment are necessary for preventing authority from becoming self-appointed and influence from turning into unchecked control or status preservation.
If I care about discernment, then I have to turn it inward as often as I direct it outward. Am I using this platform to offer clarity, or is it shaping me in ways I haven’t fully acknowledged? Am I speaking from my centre, or from the part of me that wants to be chosen?
These are the quiet questions real authorities ask to stay connected to their moral compass so that integrity, not performance, guides how they examine their actions and their impact.
Real authority requires accountability to what’s true, which includes examining one’s motives, methods, and the subtle ways performance can masquerade as principle.
Discernment as daily medicine
Discernment and accountability are medicine that inoculate against the cultural illness, the inversion, the collective insanity that rewards spectacle over substance that must be taken regularly to be effective. Not once, or symbolically, but as a practice. A ritual grounded in a rigorous and validated process.
They are a kind of prophylactic, like the antimalarial tablets routinely taken in India and other regions where the disease is endemic because the environment is saturated with risk despite the invisible threat.
We are living in a psychically contaminated culture. To stay sane, clear, and grounded in reality, we have to protect the vessel: our mind, our conscience, our ability to discern and act with integrity.
Something lurks beneath all this…
Final Medicine
It feels, at times, as if the Hellmouth has opened (this Buffy reference is for you
).From it pour entities, like psychic parasites who feed on our most corrosive states: fear, pride, envy, contempt, bitterness…the sins made viral. The distortions made fashionable. These are not metaphors. They are species of spiritual disinformation, and they are real in the way that anything feeding on attention, emotion, and projection becomes real. Right now, they are animating the distortion, wearing human faces, shaping culture and resetting norms.
Yet there is a way to exorcise them.
The usual methods like public shaming, viral outrage, and performative moral takedowns don’t work. These are spectacles and nourish the very forces we’re trying to starve.
What does work is slower, less glamorous, often invisible, and far less gratifying. These disciplines are never trendy (though I can already see Discernment™ being packaged for executive leadership programs), but they have the power to weaken the parasitic grip these forces have on us.
Intellectual humility, which admits it doesn’t know everything, and stops mistaking verbal mastery and charisma for wisdom.
Purposeful curiosity, which seeks to understand rather than control or conquer, especially when the answers are uncomfortable.
Self-inquiry and authority-inquiry to expose projection and bust the illusion that influence equals insight.
Critical examination to determine whether an idea is coherent, not just whether it's popular or aligned with one’s tribe.
Accountability that isn’t a PR move or an acceptable social script, but as a consistent linking of action to impact, even when no one’s watching.
Ethical anchoring, the act of returning again and again to first principles, especially when it would be easier to betray them.
These are rituals of psychic hygiene. Practiced collectively, they are how we close the Hellmouth and keep it shut.
Nathalie
Grateful to whose recent post on the Dissident Right helped spark some of these thoughts on performative authority and its cultural rewards.
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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
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Overall, I think you're right. We are coded to want a benevolant dictator. Even our US is founded on the idea of a natural God who bestows our rights and holds our leaders accountable.
I would, though, disagree with your description of the Rogan vs. Murray debate. First, I don't think Murray has a claim to a higher level expereince than Rogan. Second, while mockery can be used as you say, the way men and women mock is different. Men bust each other's balls to call out and eliminate weakness. Women use mockery to create weakness.
"Don't be a bitch" from a man is a call to action
"Don't be a bitch" from a woman is a call to inaction
I know I'm hyper-simplifying here and I may be mis-reading your intent but that was my initial gut reaction. Men use mockery much differently than women.
One of your best. Written with so much clarity and depth. Thank you for the Hellmouth reference ;).
Rogan is the founder of the establishment of anti-establishment podcasting. His swag masterfully hides his covert aggression tactics and his posturing as open-minded when he has usually already decided, but will never say it out loud.