Social Media, ISIS, and Narcissism as Death Cults
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2019-12-06

On Obsidian Radio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqnvHas4VJg

In our Thanatic and anomic civilization, we prefer the inanimate to the living, material goods to people, controlled indolence and restricted existence to the fully actualized and thoroughly socialized alternatives


We regress and recede to existential loneliness which in turn gives rise to heightened angst, anxiety, ennui, and depression. We self-medicate and assuage our acute discomfort with the fetishized pornography of objects via ritualized consumption and the pornography of bodies via casual sex


Death is our final yet unacknowledged destination and we are drawn to it and explore it in our art, culture, imaginaries, and praxis with inexorable fascination. But we equally try to manage the terror of our finality by feigning immortality through objectifying people and anthropomorphizing objects.


Gradually, we end up treating ourselves as specimen and our lives as lab experiments. Mortified by our ubiquitous isolation, to self-soothe we retreat deeper into our tormented minds until we disintegrate and act out our worst nightmares. Until we become our very instruments of self-torture and self-destruction. Until we dissipate and there is no escape, nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide. Confronted with ourselves, we are no more.