Old ways of creating bonds aren’t working as they used to, and we see proof of it every day, in the news or around us. Somebody recently asked me: What can we do when we spot radicalization?

Traditionally, many thought that individualism was compatible with the aspiration of contributing to a healthy and cohesive society (see, for example, Karl Popper on this) if not a necessary precondition.

Today, it’s all about the siege mentality and an us vs. them approach to existence. As rogue and vigilante mindsets go mainstream, the cohesive nature of public opinion has vanished, and trust in institutions is at historic lows.

Are individualism and the common good compatible anymore when a growing percentage of people acknowledge that they are thinking about a survivalist setup if any transformational event occurs?

To some, it’s all about quitting society and going off-grid deep in the woods, while others seek a way to enjoy what they euphemistically call “geographical arbitrage” (living abroad somewhere safe and more affordable, keeping their salary and reducing their expenses). Others bring their quest beyond and misread the concept of vigilantism.

Neither option aims at working together to fix society’s dysfunctions, maintaining everyone’s liberties intact.

Adulthood interrupted

Most of the perceived cracks in today’s economic and social system, shown in the successive crises and dysfunctional glitches experienced during the 2008 financial crisis, propel—at least in part—today’s frustration. For those who went to college right during or after the financial crisis (in Europe, the sovereign debt crises in several countries), many shocks have made their start as adults more challenging than the early years their parents or grandparents experienced.

Other issues, like immigration, added to the perfect storm, and a lack of credible populist offers from progressives is extending the appeal of illiberal formulas; what happened in Great Britain during the last years should have been a warning to those thinking that a strong hand will cure all ills with little hassle, for complex problems don’t get easily fixed with wishful thinking ideas; that’s what experience and comparative analysis would tell any credible scholar studying the last century in the Western world.

That said, to young adults, studying, securing housing, getting healthcare, filling the tank, or buying groceries are tangible life experiences that have gotten substantially more expensive. People feel and relate to their everyday reality; by contrast, there’s a growing sense of disconnect with the more ethereal promises of a “better economy” and narratives of creating a better world, the battle against systemic ills like climate change, the financing of wars abroad, etc.

It’s getting challenging to counter arguments made by populists when, thanks to pervasive lobbying and decades of connivance between the political and the high-achieving corporate class, it got exponentially more expensive for the middle class to go to college, to pay for housing or to get healthcare when it’s needed. It’s no conspiracy theory to state that getting sick in the US is more troubling and expensive than in any other wealthy country: it’s both the people’s perception and the empiric reality as looked at by any possible angle and outcome.

The article’s point is about something other than this. But it’s telling that despite dedicating almost $13,000 per capita to healthcare, more than double the OECD average of $5,463, many medical emergencies aren’t fully covered. This destabilizes people’s economies, especially those of the working middle class, which is more taxed and burdened by housing and healthcare bills than both the least and most privileged in society.

Helping the algorithm optimize against oneself

In the US, the post-pandemic recovery is a major macroeconomic win, with plenty of jobs, inflation trends under control, and big corporate and stock market wins for the wealthiest members of society. On the other hand, the perception of everyday prices remains significantly higher than in pre-COVID days. People’s memory spans are short, but not that short, and they were crucial in the last election.

New York City’s high-profile killing manhunt is only the last chapter of a tale of two societies: one in which some get their highest-ever returns (mainly on capital investments, bonuses, and other tax-savvy mechanisms), whereas the majority perceives the worst part of the unevenly distributed future already here.

I have yet to see any deep analysis of one of the biggest paradoxes of our time. Someone ought to study it in depth. The biggest supporters of technological acceleration are also its early victims, as algorithms consistently optimize against their legitimate interests. We shouldn’t leave these arguments to the likes of Unabomber copycats. Many things in corporate America are detrimental to median households’ interests and their future prospects (while highly beneficial to executives and prominent stockholders).

While many hold high hopes in the new DOGE department and the meddling of algorithm-savvy collaborators in the future administration (from Elon Musk to the software of companies like Palantir), it’s a new generation of algorithms that are “optimizing” (i.e., maximizing profits for companies, hence increasing bonuses and stockholders’ held value) what’s driving rents, education, and healthcare more expensive:

• algorithms set the price of rents in US markets and also in vacation rental platforms (corporate or peer-to-peer), bidding as high as people are willing to pay, even when they’re struggling;
• algorithms increase the price of education by including perks and factoring in the price of what parents are willing to sacrifice to help their kids attend prestigious institutions;
• and algorithms help healthcare insurers increase their profit margins by contesting claims and partially refusing coverage as they often inflate small-print expenses that are difficult to factor in.

Software that “recommends” prices and other creatures

Office and apartment space landlords, especially the biggest ones (often tied to investment funds), had grown accustomed to increasing rental prices with algorithms developed by RealPage and Yardi. Their advanced data analytics “recommend” rents; everybody would assume correctly that the recommended prices are always higher. Never (that is “never” as in “ever”) prices get “optimized” to the advantage of renters, no matter their known constraints like inflation or carrying debt.

Both healthcare and education institutions use tailored solutions analogous to RealPage’s “dynamic pricing” (here’s another euphemism) to get the most money out of people (who are, at best, treated as “customers” and never “citizens”). Revenue cycle optimization, denial management, predictive analysis, patient flow optimization, natural language processing for documentation, and dynamic cost management are evolving rapidly to increase revenue among healthcare providers.

Executive bonuses are hardly treated as unnecessary expenses, and though they marginally affect any company, they represent a powerful symbol of the corporate culture that has long abandoned humanist values, embracing Spencerian Darwinism at its finest: the smartest, strongest, best positioned (due to a combination of legacy, luck, good strategy, etc.) get most of the pie. This situation emboldens conspirationists and political radicalism.

Thanks to predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms, many of the most successful companies in the United States capture more value than they deserve and squeeze the public’s disposable income. And, in this climate, only one of the two parties is willing to exploit these deep dysfunctions for political gain.

As often happens with populism, many recent voters will sooner or later learn that they voted for the party that not only will not stop but will accelerate this process of wealth concentration and algorithm squeezing. We’ll soon know how even more tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans trickle down (or don’t).

Yet many of those who decry the connivance of corporate mass media with dysfunctional institutions (they have a point) and have opted for “self-education” by doing their own information research online, which seems to be the case with the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, fail to establish a link between technological acceleration and people loss of agency over their own lives: any change or transformation sold by influencers come with a price tag and yet another subscription, and new oracles, from podcasts to chatbot prompting offer an increased dependence over the technological race to attract our limited attention.

Notes on nihilism

I don’t have a short-term solution (let alone a formula) to propose to Americans in economic distress due to highly-contested medical bills, even when paying for the best healthcare coverage possible. Like many other people living in the US and holding a passport from a country with universal healthcare and a much smaller relative cost of care overall, I would return to my country right away if I were to face a complex medical problem, and I do take care of renewing my children’s passports (they’re dual nationals, but they also have access to healthcare across the European Union because, despite being Spanish, I also lived and paid taxes in France for years).

Like many Americans, I feel uneasy with the initial premise of American healthcare, which is treating patients as customers rather than people. At best, a customer is somebody to entice and sell things to, and at worst, a customer is somebody to racket (just like a cheap pusher perceiving the level of desperation in their interlocutor; the deeper the problem, the bigger the prospects for money racketeering).

We’ve known it for so long, but there’s no easy antidote: Is there an end to modern societies’ trend toward alienation? Pre-contemporary relations and institutions preserved their relative prestige and meaning, fulfilling a role that is no longer present.

One of the most significant risks for those affected by trends that occur at a big scale is to grow cynical and fall into nihilism, which can be lucid or unhinged, self-harming, or oriented to harm others. Trends like domestic terrorism (the so-called “lone wolves,” many times disgruntled men failing to adapt to adult life and the often unfair and meaningless constraints of modern existence as sold by corporations), deaths of despair—or conspiracy theories that try to explain the world—are a byproduct of a deeper discontent.

The bad news is that the more profound changes underlying the current societal discontent despite the US’s relative prosperity gains (especially compared to the stagnation of European and advanced Asian countries in the last years) aren’t only material but also ideological and spiritual.

The good news is that such crises have happened before in advanced economies —and we can study what happened then, and how scholars who read the situation correctly as it evolved (something very difficult, for fish don’t know they are in water) spotted the biggest trends, recommending how to learn from them.

What Erich Fromm realized in Interwar Germany

Before coming to the US, Erich Fromm lived through the polarization and contradictions of Europe’s interwar period. Following other thinkers studying the crisis of traditional institutions and the manipulative effect of modern media, Erich Fromm believed that people’s biggest fear isn’t to fall into ideological or spiritual serfdom, but quite the contrary: the crisis of religious faith had generated angst in those unable to command their own existence.

Fromm, a prominent psychoanalyst and social philosopher, examined the interplay between material and spiritual crises to explain the appeal of nihilism and totalitarian regimes among disenchanted Europeans during the late twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, which led to a second catastrophic war. In that era, economic instability, political upheaval, and cultural disintegration were so intermingled that it took little agitprop actions to kickstart the Spanish Civil War—the prelude of the coming world war—and then the continent’s descent into the race for total annihilation.

There are many causes and potential culprits to determine what has originated the good-old existential angst of the past into the contemporary blob of what many describe as meaningless disconnection from a society that doesn’t share the symbolic values of the mass media era (roughly the same entertainment, multitudinary sports, religious beliefs, communitarian participation, etc.).

Inflation and poverty across Central Europe eroded individual autonomy and societal cohesion, and many citizens began believing they needed a “strong man” to fix their problems. In the background, however, Fromm saw spiritual malaise, for rapid industrialization and modernization had uprooted traditional values, leaving individuals isolated and disconnected. This led to a psychological vacuum, especially among those who favored godless ideologies: if there was “no supreme being” looking after them, which meaning and purpose “bigger than themselves” could they find other than horror, death, or the allure of authoritarian systems promising an identitarian paradise to belong to?

Fromm believed that these two dimensions, material discomfort and risk of nihilism, played together, so any potential solution needed to tackle both, for material improvements alone, could not restore psychological and social health, whereas spiritual remedies were not a solution for systemic economic inequities. His Escape from Freedom (1941) is a warning but also a cry for future generations living in open societies experiencing a big crisis: don’t disattend material wealth or the broader spiritual malaise, for fixing only one of the two is, at best, buying a bit of time before the inevitable.

Believing your favorite podcaster is your God-buddy

A well-read cynic could argue, just like French economist Thomas Piketty has exposed in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that there’s no better remedy to start over again from a more egalitarian position and build rapid prosperity as well as a healthy society with a cohesive public opinion as inequalities have fallen than have a world war capable of resetting one big trend: during normal circumstances, capitalist societies tend to concentrate wealth, exacerbating inequality; this happens because the modern state has been designed to heavily tax income, and not wealth (return of capital from profits, dividends, rents, etc.).

To him, r > g, or the rate of return on capital, outpaces the economic growth rate (calculated as output or income). Guess what? Big disasters (like wars) reset the formula, as they disrupt wealth accumulation among the elite and redistribute resources more evenly across society. So, one could argue that the post-war prosperity was in great part a byproduct of this phenomenon, whether technocrats like to admit it or not.

Today, the most popular content served to young men appeals to their interrupted manhood, and how they should take it back according to the homogeneous realm of so-called heterodox thinkers. Many people fall into the contradiction of fencing themselves off from their immediate neighbors—often unknown—while chasing the spectrum of a virtual social bond in the so-called social media, optimized for the economic gain of some (not for people’s social bonds or mental health). When everything is optimized, quantified, and gamified, people should expect to pay.

And, by paying for a simulation of meaning and connection with others, many believe to have found their crusade. As consumerism adapts to understand the hopes and desires most marketable to us at every moment, it’s becoming a part of people’s entertainment, political leanings, and identity, whereas products and services become symbols.

The mental health threat isn’t only to teenagers: if many people substitute meaningful relationships with actual people with a market-oriented courting that leads to cult-like behavior and isolation, we might find that, in a not-that-distant future, the premises of living in an open society that protects everybody could be sacrificed in favor of algorithm-driven utopias turning us all into characters of a videogame. After all, many things we can do today require the equivalent of tokens in games.

The Stranger’s relevance today

Many argue that this evolution has been long in the making. After World War II, mass media and conspicuous consumption played as substitutes for the dreadful prospect (and fear) of a nuclear conflagration. The UN’s Security Council, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the European Union tried to build a secure world of prosperity that would lead people to forget old grudges, even knowing that (in Albert Camus’ words), after the Holocaust and the Enola Gay flight, there was no possible return to innocence for the “civilized.”

The deterrents that favored the emergence of consensus and shared institutions also made possible an era of material prosperity that often-promoted consumerism and entertainment as the expressions to substitute elevated meaning: having a purpose in life, long-lasting, meaningful relations, and all the elements high on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or analogous metaphors of self-actualization.

Well-informed nihilism is a hell of a drug for smart people. I’m personally not surprised about the alleged shooter’s interest in texts like the so-called Unabomber manifesto; it’s more rudimentary and childish than a more elaborated anti-modernity like, say, Martin Heidegger (which I confess to admire).

It’s also not surprising that few public people can travel from nihilism to more constructive, moderate (never naïve) positions. One of them was French writer and philosopher Albert Camus (despite those thinking he was a high-school-level philosopher because he happened not to talk in unintelligible terms or he wasn’t a Marxist in the forties and early fifties like anyone else, like the then-Stalin-praiser Jean-Paul Sartre).

I’m given to speculation. With all due respect to those who suffered, if the young and promising man who killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO were to read Camus’ The Stranger, he would probably find echoes of his actions in the unfortunate events that lead the protagonist, Meursault, to “kill the Arab” when the sun rays set on his eyes, bothering him.

Meursault’s malaise and strange inertia towards fatalism come not only from fatalism itself but also from the lucidity of understanding how futile things can be. Meursault is, once again, Rodion Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, a killer despite himself, and a nihilist above all.

We may fall into a cult, get ourselves out of the way, kill someone out of such an existential malaise, often rooted in life-changing experiences (physical pain and being the victim of structural injustice like navigating the dysfunctional US healthcare system at a loss, or in the case of The Stranger‘s Meursault, a death in the family that should have resonated more in our soul but didn’t, and a sense of disconnection from society and reality: Meursault is alienated and feels alone in a very urban reality).

Everyman

Camus’s journey from nihilism to humanism is sometimes exemplified by the contrast between two of his essays, an earlier one and one written during maturity. His earlier takes on the absurdity of life, exemplified in the Greek myth of Sisyphus (he called his early essay explaining life’s lack of inherent meaning The Myth of Sisyphus), contrast with the solace of meaning in saying no to injustice and in loving others. The Rebel (1951) is an individualist and humanist revolt against totalitarianism, the false promises of violent revolutions (which promise future freedom by compromising freedom right away), and a refusal of fascism and any Marxist blend.

But The Rebel is also a testament to the limits of individual humanism: we can’t fix the world on our own and right away; we can only help denounce injustices and help transform societies within the roles of free societies. That’s why Sartre and others ridiculed Camus after The Rebel, calling him a petit bourgeois advocating for mere healthy liberal democracies instead of revolutionary utopias.

Besides corporate power in the current system in advanced democracies, not having an antagonist at a civilization scale could harm the case for social cohesion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the Communist Bloc on the other side, liberal democracies had the moral incentive to live up to their potential. Some scholars would argue that Empires with no real rivalry at the civilization scale in their time, like the Roman Empire in Antiquity or Medieval Europe before Protestantism (the loose Roman Catholic Empire) collapsed from within, then others benefited from the rotting of their core.

Like Erich Fromm, Albert Camus understood that one man is all men. According to Jorge Luis Borges, whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it.

That’s why some meaningful reads for young bright men in our time, instead of mechanistic, soulless rants on self-improvement, should be biographies about how bright men from the past dealt with nihilism and existential crisis.

I’m currently reading John Markoff’s Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand and seeing how, amid the success of the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand was battling a deep, debilitating depression rooted in existential causes. I’m delighted to find characters in the book (like Lloyd Kahn) who managed to find a way to give meaning to their lives and flourish autonomously —even when society as a whole wasn’t going in a desirable direction.

How others escaped nihilism

Markoff’s book on Brand includes many passages in which one can see the struggles of the young Stanford graduate as he flirts with committing to the military, tries photography, experiments with the first LSD tests on patients at Menlo Park, and looks for a clear vocation, to no avail.

Some events can be read as excerpts from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Like the philosopher’s parable, Brand also found himself hanging on a rope across a precipice, yet learned that momentum can propel you to the other side:

“Out for a walk one chilly January afternoon on the towpath near Georgetown, he decided to do what he frequently did—climb up and take a look around. In this case his vantage point was the Chain Bridge, which spanned the river between McLean, Virginia, and DC. At first he slid effortlessly, his palms resting lightly on the steel on the ledge created by the bridge’s supporting girder surface at his back. Every five yards or so there was a brace to grab on to and swing around. He simply inched along with his heels rocking over the riveted surface of the ledge. Then, after he had swung around the second brace, he stopped to rest and consider the situation. He looked down at the brown water covered with floating ice, and his legs began to vibrate from foot to hip. He forced himself to make a start and edged away from his handhold, then lost courage and his legs started trembling even harder. Suddenly he felt like he couldn’t see. He barely made the next handhold and stopped again, still shaking.

“He saw people walking on the towpath but realized there was no way they could save him. In despair, he tried singing, tried talking to himself, tried incantations—’Light,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Look,’ and ‘ here and now, boys.’

“His shaking diminished, he edged out again, this time with his eyes fixed on the icy trees on the horizon, his mind focusing on ‘doing it,’ to keep moving.

“And he made it to the next brace. There was a rhythm to this, he realized, a sort of chant, and, playing it in his head, he swung around the next brace without slipping. Keeping his momentum and then repeating until he didn’t need to edge any farther, he finally lowered himself down and then jumped onto the wet path.”

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, John Markoff, 2022, p. 95

Or, as stated by Nietzsche’s “man on the rope” metaphor:

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

Nihilism and self-destruction interrupt this process.

Building a life of meaning, obsolescence-proof

There are many ways of cultivating one’s own autonomy (and hence, becoming more resilient and more difficult to fall into obsolescence during the algorithms’ takeover).

Kirsten and I have talked over the years with many wise people who tried to advise others on how to find meaning in their lives, no matter the circumstances. We found that most of them:

• self-build stuff when possible; Lloyd Kahn gives great advice on this (see, for example, our last video with him and what he has to say about the importance of youngsters learning to build themselves as many things in their lives as possible);
• stay healthy (not obsessively: you don’t need to “buy stuff” to stay healthy). Love for the self-improvement scene didn’t seem to help the alleged CEO killer find meaning in his life and try to make a more proactive difference if his goal was to rightly highlight the abuses of the healthcare industry, which trickle down affecting people’s lives —including, apparently, his;
• cultivate real and long-term relationships;
• help others and find pleasure (and meaning) in doing so;
• know their limits and understand they aren’t vigilantes who can save the world with their rogue actions;
• cultivate meaning;
• get outside, feel the sun, walk barefoot once in a while;
• call their family;
• have an inner force and compass to do what they consider right and meaningful, even when nobody is looking or seems to care.

To anyone in a dire situation and feeling the urge of social withdrawal, these same people would probably advice: reach out when you don’t feel alright —especially when you want to go dark. Do not think it’s weak to know one’s weakness, but a sign of profound wisdom and bravery.

Feeling one’s self-weakness is an act of fortitude —the best predictor of long-term bliss.