The Current Thing is Modernity's Religion

And reacting to it just reinforces it.

This essay argues that "the Current Thing" - media-driven narratives that capture public attention - has become a secular substitute for religion in the West. These narratives offer emotional engagement but lack the depth, meaning, and permanence of traditional faith. As people rush from one crisis to the next, society loses spiritual grounding and moral coherence. It suggests that the way to resist it is not to react to it - which only strengthens the narratives - but by turning inwards to focus on our natural interests and talents via individuation.

Welcome back. In prior posts I’ve mentioned the Current Thing, which is basically any media narrative that the mainstream media highlights for a prolonged period of time which elicits public participation in the process, even though individuals have little to no ability to actually impact the outcome. It is a dance between the elites and the public; the elites can try to force a narrative onto the public, but unless it leads to mass attention, excitement and participation it will not likely have the desired effect. Because in a so-called “democracy” those who shape mass public opinion have the power (i.e. the owners of mass media), control is exercised through the dissemination of mass narratives whose underlying goals are to increase oligarchical power at the expense of the public in whatever creative expressions are needed to achieve it.

I discussed 113 recent Current Thing narratives in this post (see how many you recognize), but a couple of things to note:

1. The Current Thing may or not have any relation to underlying reality. We live in an era of Baudrillian hyper-reality which is basically completely divorced from underlying reality, as discussed here. This dynamic mirrors the concerns of Marshall McLuhan, who famously argued that “the medium is the message,” emphasizing that media doesn’t just transmit information but it reshapes our perception of reality itself; the Current Thing conditions how people think and feel through its immersive media environment. Guy Debord argued that in a world dominated by images and representations, authentic engagement has been replaced by passive consumption of symbolic action. And as

   Michael Ginsburg
   explains, the use of AI to supercharge the Current Thing is becoming even more effective and persuasive, where a recent study shows it is 6x more effective at persuasion than human experts on Reddit’s Change My View forum:

2. The Current Thing usually requires performative public participation. It separates the population into camps of “good” (who basically believe in the expansion of the national security state, degradation of law and order, whig history-as-progress, and infinite race/gender “egalitarianism”) and “bad” (who believe in freedom, law and order, and acceptance of inegalitarianism) where the “good” performatively but inauthentically signal their virtue and support of the establishment as passionately as possible, even though their support ultimately makes their own lives worse (which they then blame on the “bad” camp).

3. The Current Thing may or may not have emotional or intellectual payoff - it usually doesn’t - but what’s guaranteed is that elites pushing the Current Thing, no matter how false or morally or legally wrong it is, will be protected from punishment. The elite participants have what is called a krisha, or institutional protection (this is a Russian mob term, just as applicable here). This is why Lord Fauci and the other higher-ups who pushed fraudvirus and the deathjabs will never be punished, and why no one was punished for Obama’s Spygate operation either (even though it was 100x worse than Watergate). Participate in the narrative based on the elite’s instructions, be protected from fallout.

4. The public will not remember the Current Thing after it’s over; they will be too distracted by the next Current Thing. The public has basically zero collective memory whatsoever no matter the topic. A Current Thing narrative from just a couple months ago, such as the Pacific Palisades fires or the D.C. helicopter crash, feels like ten years ago, and the further technology develops the faster the forgetting happens.

5. It does not matter whether one accepts or rejects the narrative of the Current Thing, because simply engaging in the narrative strengthens it. This is why if one pushes back against the proponents of the Current Thing it always serves to energize them to the point where they enthusiastically double down on their efforts. The only way to respond is to ignore it. Furthermore, rejecting the Current Thing - such as rejecting the mainstream narrative of COVID’s origination in favor of the Lab Leak Theory - still plays dialectically into the hands of the elites pushing the narrative; one may note that the Lab Leak Theory still accepts the underlying premise that the COVID virus was real and dangerous, thereby accepting what resulted from it: the lockdowns, the forced heart attack jabs, the $11 trillion printed where most of it flowed to the upper elites, the massive increase in asset valuations and inflation. Heads they win, tails you lose.

6. While the public has always been interested in the Current Thing - which is on some level equivalent with bread and circus entertainment, much like the Romans had - it is the advent of technology, the immediate feedback loop caused by instantaneous communication, that has turned it into the whirling dirvish we see today. This is in line with Rene Guenon’s conception of the increasing solidification of the world, previously discussed here, where time seems to speed up in this era, which he called the Kali Yuga, until it can no longer speed up any more, whereby there will eventually be a radical shift and a new era of time will begin.

Because of these factors, what we are seeing - without anyone really identifying it, at least not in this way and not to the extent I’ve seen - is that the Current Thing has morphed into the religion for the modern West. A civilization’s religion is ultimately determined by what it pays attention to; we may think of Western civilization now as Christian, but organized religion is really not a primary focus of modernity - how much do you talk to others in your life about God?

Compare this to the perspective pervading the Byzantine empire as a counterpoint. It is hard to understand for those of us raised in the secular, liberal, nihilistic West, but the Church at the time provided an all-encompassing worldview that grounded its followers and gave him a reasoning for his suffering, which was mentioned in Timothy/Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church (1963). All of Byzantium was abuzz with Christological questions about the nature of Jesus and the Trinity reflected in the ongoing disputes between the Arians, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, etc., which resulted in regular and ongoing acts of physical violence between the sects. The debates during the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon were not just theological but deeply influential in shaping the empire's identity:

Not without reason has Byzantium been called ‘the icon of the heavenly Jerusalem’. Religion entered into every aspect of Byzantine life. The Byzantine’s holidays were religious festivals; the races which he attended in the Circus began with the singing of hymns; his trade contracts invoked the Trinity and were marked with the sign of the Cross. Today, in an untheological age, it is all but impossible to realize how burning an interest was felt in religious questions by every part of society, by laity as well as clergy, by the poor and uneducated as well as the Court and the scholars. Gregory of Nyssa describes the unending theological arguments in Constantinople at the time of the second General Council: ‘The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask ‘Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made from nothing.’

It should be apparent that what was so hotly debated and focused on during the Byzantine empire has been totally replaced by the media-derived Current Thing.

---

The Current Thing as the West’s Religion

The Current Thing has transformed attention, belief, and identity into fast-moving cycles of collective focus, roughly equivalent to the attention that was given to religion in prior eras. Here are ways this phenomenon mirrors and replaces traditional religious structures:

1. Ritual participation: People demonstrate allegiance to the Current Thing through symbolic acts such as changing profile pictures, hashtags, donations, or protests, much like religious rituals that reinforce community and belief.

2. Sacred dogma: Each Current Thing comes with a set of moral imperatives of what one must believe, say, or denounce. Dissent is treated as heresy with social and career punishment akin to excommunication.

3. High priests and prophets: Influencers, media personalities and corporations act as interpreters or enforcers of the Current Thing, shaping the narrative and directing mass emotion much like religious leaders once did.

4. Collective catharsis: The fervor around a Current Thing offers emotional release akin to shared religious experiences. These moments help people feel part of something bigger, if only briefly.

5. Mythic time: Like ancient myths, each Current Thing occupies a mythic moment of crisis, righteousness, or injustice, but is quickly overwritten. A helicopter crash or wildfire from months ago becomes ancient history, even though the real impact lingers.

6. Moral identity: Believing in and broadcasting the Current Thing becomes a proxy for being a "good person" in the public square. Virtue is tied not to enduring principles but to correct alignment in the present news cycle.

7. Secular eschatology: There’s often a tone of apocalyptic urgency: the world will end (or justice will never come) unless we act now. Once the storm passes, the eschaton resets until the next crisis.

In this way, the Current Thing fills the spiritual vacuum left by declining religious practice with a rolling substitute: fast, emotional, moral, and communal, but ultimately rootless and amnesiac.

However, the Current Thing is not exactly equivalent to replacing religion. There are major deficiencies with the approach. Traditional religion is rooted in transcendence and metaphysics, offering frameworks that connect individuals to eternal truths, divine beings, or cosmic order. In contrast, the Current Thing is entirely immanent, grounded in temporal concerns with no reference to the sacred or eternal. Religion builds enduring institutions and traditions that persist across centuries; the Current Thing is ephemeral and reactive, driven by the 24-hour news cycle and social media. Unlike religion, which offers sacred texts, coherent doctrine, and paths to personal transformation, the Current Thing lacks any canon or consistent metaphysical worldview. Its rituals are low-cost and performative rather than disciplines requiring sacrifice or inward growth. Religion explains suffering within a redemptive arc and provides hope, meaning, and eschatological vision. The Current Thing offers outrage and urgency but no deeper story or resolution. It creates fleeting digital swarms, not enduring communities with transhistorical bonds. While it may fill a spiritual vacuum for a secular society, the Current Thing lacks the depth, coherence, and permanence of true religion.

---

The Consequences of Replacing Religion with the Current Thing

Replacing religion with the Current Thing is having profoundly negative consequences for society. Traditional religion offers meaning, moral continuity, community and a framework for enduring suffering, all of which help anchor human life. When that foundation is replaced by the ever-shifting priorities of media-driven narratives, people are left spiritually unmoored, reacting to emotional stimuli without a stable sense of identity or purpose. The result is a population caught in perpetual outrage, anxiety, and distraction, lacking the inner resources to face hardship with resilience or find joy in quiet, enduring truths. Morality becomes situational and performative rather than rooted in principle, and community becomes fragmented, based on temporary alignments rather than lasting bonds. The constant churn of narratives also breeds cynicism and fatigue, eroding trust in institutions and each other. In the absence of transcendence or a coherent metaphysical vision, society has descended further into nihilism, where belief is replaced by spectacle and attention becomes the ultimate currency. This in turn creates even more fertile ground for manipulation, conformity, and a hollow sense of moral urgency that burns out just as quickly as it ignites, leaving nothing lasting behind.

---

Conclusion

The strangest thing about the Current Thing is how very few participants seem to understand how it serves as a religious proxy for them; they act out the religious impulse without understanding where it came from. The alt right were the first ones to identify this phenomenon back during the Trump 1.0 era with the NPC meme, which identified how media shaped and manipulated various personality types (i.e. non-autists) into becoming robotic spouters of establishment ideology with no independent thinking whatsoever. But it didn’t go deeper than this by linking the Current Thing to filling the void left by the death of religion in an era of secularism. It doesn’t fit well, but it’s what we have in the meantime.

So what is the way out? I would argue that Carl Jung’s concept of individuation offers a personal antidote to the shallow, collective fixation of the Current Thing. Individuation is the process by which an individual turns inward, confronting the unconscious, and integrates the various aspects of the psyche, including their shadow and the anima/animus. It requires listening to one’s inner voice via intuition, dreams, symbols, and aligning with a personal destiny that may run entirely counter to society’s demands. In Jung’s view, this is the highest form of responsibility: becoming oneself in order to contribute authentically to the world. As I argued in this Note:

People are a hodgpodge of competing impulses and desires. The individuation process is about trying to synthesize these different impulses and desires and funneling them toward what we are meant to accomplish in this life based on our intuition (which is a combination of what we are good at and what we naturally pay attention to in our free time). Jung recommends things like active imagination, dream journaling, writing, doing art, etc, to bring out our intuition.

This is important because technology molds people into being commodified widgets, all thinking the same shitlib nonsense from the media they consume. The way out of this is to tune out the Current Thing and to listen more to intuition. That requires strengthening our intuition, which requires an approach like Jung's.

In a cultural landscape dominated by the Current Thing individuation stands in stark contrast; it is the opposite of the blackpill on a personal level. Where the Current Thing pulls the individual outward into collective hysteria and performative virtue, individuation draws one inward, into solitude, reflection, and enduring truth. By pursuing individuation a person cultivates inner resilience and discernment, making them far less susceptible to propaganda, mass emotion, or the fear of social exclusion. In this way, Jung’s path may be one of the only real defenses against the dehumanizing, fragmenting effects of a society addicted to the superficial moral drama of the moment. It is a return to depth in an age of distraction.

Ultimately this choice cannot be avoided. Either become who you are meant to become via individuation, or become an unthinking NPC dancing to the Current Thing and full of soul-sapping neurosis. If you don’t decide on a direction proactively the decision will be made for you and against your interests. Here’s Jung on this:

And in this wonderful post

Clintavo

links the esoteric meaning of Jesus’ parable of the talents to the individuation process.

I hope this has been helpful to you along your journey. Thanks for reading.