So people have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations, which, okay, its pretty bleak but not outright destructive, right? just a bunch of consumers being taken for a ride, right? Well no. Y'see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there's no longer a single cultural narrative. So you just dont get to see tim at sunday school, so what? Well the larger point of contention is that there's always been a considerable percentage of any population that gives way to fanatic behavior, which in antiquity usually meant religious fanaticism. But if the narrative of religion is weakened, and the only alternatives to narrative are autonomically generated content marketing narratives too shallow to really make a lifestyle out of, you run into a phenomenon where a percentage of the population essentially migrated between brands in a pseudo idolatrous methodology. When you really come down to it, a fanbase is literally just the same thing as a cult, they both act as a community that bring people together to discuss a specific narrative. Except the religious ones actually at least try to offer the illusion of being beneficial to society at large, while the autonomic models are there purely for profit and offer hedonic sensory overload to compensate for any shallowness.

Did you ever stop to think about how we live in a world where a bunch of people do crazy shit over cartoons, harass people, send death threads, sell cars for sauce, etc? Do you really think that's just normal behavior? No! those sort of people would've been in a fucking monastery a couple hundred years ago, they're fanatics, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with being a fanatic if its constructive, but these narratives dont have that interest in mind.

So, to put it bluntly, we quite literally live in a society where abstract mathematical formulas are in charge of a market that pretty much doesn't sell products anymore and is more focused on selling narrative scams based around the perimeters from these formulas, and a bunch of wackos who in another lifetime would've been witch burners who have nothing too spiritually satisfy their intrinsic obsessive tendencies are replacing a common cultural narrative with many different smaller ones in different tribes, which is how you end up with nazis and commies in a prosperous capitalist country thinking the end of the world is next week, literally creating their own problems.