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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

Politics in general has a lot of parallels to religion.

People need to segment into belief groups, and politics is the new church.

Only this church is a popularity game to decide who controls a vast federal standing domestic army of armed police, as well as an outward projecting armed forces. The scary thing is that everyone seems to believe their church is correct, and willing to employ the machine of violence to enforce it.

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This is kind of one of the points Jonathan Rauch made in his book "Cross Purposes"[0]. He talks about how the common zeitgeist went from being christian and conservative to being christian because you were a conservative and because of that people are treating politics with the same fervor that they would have treated religion in the past.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Purposes-Christianitys-Bargain-...

It's certainly true about a certain kind of evangelical Christian who doesn't go to church [1] but it's also true about many of the left-coded groups that started out on Twitter and Tumblr and moved on to Mastodon and Bluesky. For that matter it was true about Marxism back in the day, The God that Failed [2] was a criticism that took this tack.

My current feeling is that there's nothing more dangerous than "Man's Search for Meaning" and if people can't find meaning in the little things they do every day that search for meaning inevitably leads to trouble.

[1] often the ones who actually go to church are these kind of people: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dx3ay6rcqediw2gbhb4bp76l/po...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed

It's funny, Hoppe wrote a similarly named book about the same issues with democracy.

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