ETs, Zombies, and Dictators - Oh My!

Clues to Our Ongoing Paradigm Shift

I finally started watching John Vervaeke’s fifty-part, fifty-hour Youtube lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” and it is good. Perhaps important. I will have more thoughts on it as I forge my way through it. Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto where Jordan Peterson also teaches. They have recorded many interviews and discussions together. It is possible that Vervaeke’s more nuanced viewpoints will gain greater popularity over time.

Vervaeke co-authored a book, Zombies in Western Culture, that explores the postmodern prevalence of zombies as an expression of the meaning crisis of our civilization: Zombies symbolize mindless, insatiable consumerism (“The zombie represents raw consumption. It does not seem to imbibe the things it consumes; it simply extinguishes them”); dispossession and homelessness. Zombies reverse and degrade the Christian mythology of salvation and redemption: “We will contend that the zombie has evolved to become a representation of the loss of the sacred canopy traditionally provided by Christianity, and that its features have evolved along the fault lines of this loss, representing a world that no longer explains itself, nor provides us instruction for how to live within it.”

I am excited to see how Vervaeke’s ideas and his network of sources and references overlap and build upon my own. As I have explored in recent writing here, I agree that Western contemporary culture faces an all-engulfing meaning crisis, a companion to the global ecological emergency we have unleashed.

Here is a thought experiment I find interesting: Try to imagine our world, today, without the ecological mega-crisis looming over us. Would we still be confronting existential aporia, a loss of meaning and sense, along with the looming threat of technocratic dictatorship, if it weren’t for climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, and species extinction?

This may be a strange thought — but it is possible that the ecological crisis, alone, offers humanity a saving grace.