Civilization #57: How Modernism Ruined Everything

Ice Age humans practiced animism as their primary religious framework across prehistoric tribal societies spanning tens of thousands of years.

Agricultural societies elevated women to high status through mother goddess worship, replacing animist equality with fertility-focused veneration across early farming communities.

Competing agricultural towns developed polytheism through warfare, creating pantheons where defeated gods served victorious deities in hierarchical divine structures.

Christianity established true monotheism through Holy Trinity doctrine, creating God simultaneously everything and nothing, excluding all other deities from existence.

Monotheism created individualism by establishing direct God connection, removing believers from community mediation for first time in human history.

Protestant reformers like Martin Luther eliminated Church mediation, creating direct Bible access that produced debilitating crisis of faith among believers.

Calvinist Protestants resolved crisis of faith through wealth accumulation, interpreting financial success as tangible evidence of divine favor and true devotion.

Alternative Protestant movements resolved crisis of faith through transgression, breaking social taboos to demonstrate courage and absolute devotion to God.

Kant proposed active subjectivity as philosophical solution to crisis of faith, arguing humans actively construct reality through imaginative cognition.

Hegel resolved Kant’s reality problem through Geist concept, arguing divine spirit manifests as reality’s underlying basis enabling knowledge.

Marx inverted Hegel’s idealism, placing material world before ideas and arguing history progresses through class struggle between exploiters and exploited.

Freud proposed unconscious forces govern individuals through id, ego, and superego, arguing hidden sexual urges form civilization’s foundation and individual identity.

Early Freud advocated for hysterical women patients, arguing their symptoms resulted from childhood sexual abuse rather than inherent pathology or emotional weakness.

Later Freud reversed position completely, arguing girls fabricated abuse memories through sexual fantasies rather than experiencing actual trauma from fathers.

Carl Jung systematized Freud’s unconscious theory, introducing collective unconscious, archetypes, and persona/shadow dynamics creating modern psychology’s foundation and standard model.

Modernism emerged as major cultural movement based on Freud and Jung’s theories, establishing cult of self obsessed with self-improvement and self-empowerment.

James Joyce pioneered modernist literature through “Ulysses,” creating elitist stream-of-consciousness writing requiring years decoding multiple literary allusions and references.

CIA promoted modernist art during Cold War, using individualism and self-focus to counter communist collective action appeals across contested regions.

Bakunin argued individualism constitutes slavery rather than freedom, claiming Christianity’s invention created enslaved isolated subjects incapable of genuine liberation.

Social media democratized cult of self previously reserved for wealthy, creating global depression epidemic beginning 2015 with smartphone ubiquity enabling universal access.