Thread by @_CLancellotti

I think there are two reasons why DN today seems so prescient:

1) All the metaphysical premises of today's situation were firmly in place in the West by the mid-sixties, and an insightful philosophical mind like DN was able to extrapolate their future logical consequences.

https://twitter.com/1947Farmall/status/1381231416403505160

2) Some of these consequences (on the "Marxist" side of the equation) played out much earlier in Europe, which experienced a big ideological wave in the aftermath of 1968, which DN witnessed first hand.

Why the difference between the American and European trajectories?

It's complicated. In my opinion, the US where "ahead and behind" at the same time.

On the one hand, for both historical and geopolitical reasons, classical Marxism at that time had much less influence on American intellectuals, apart from some academic circles.

On the other hand, technocracy, scientism, bourgeois individualism, the sexual revolution etc were definitely more advanced in the US than in Europe. However, without the "European political religions", in the US secularization had trouble reaching the masses.

This gave rise to a certain "dualism" of American spiritual life, in which people could embrace materialism and sexual freedom without giving up their allegiance to various forms of "therapeutic" Christianity. In Europe, by contrast, when people secularized they just became

first Marxist and then bourgeois nihilists. So, one could say that the American "muddle" both slowed down secularization *on the surface* and made it more radical (because it was harder to detect, and it hit at a deep anthropological level),

so that when revolutionary ideologies started spreading from academia to the masses they found less resistance compared, for example, to the resistance that the neo-Marxism of 1968 met in France or in Italy.