Why Materialists Are The ‘Hard Men’ Of Existential Despair

John Wayne, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, Jason Statham: these guys have got nothing on hardcore physicalists and their willingness to face ‘the ugly truth’.

This essay was inspired, in part, by Daniel Pinchbeck’s examination of Slavoz Žižek’s ‘Christian Atheism’: “...while materialism is the entrenched establishment faith, materialists/atheists still tend to perceive themselves as existentialists, holding the outsider/rebel/cool perspective, with anybody following what Žižek calls “theosophy” (New Age-ism and its variants) unworthy of serious intellectual consideration.”
Thanks to Carlota Guedes of the excellent Waking Youth podcast for inspiration, ideas, and final checkings.

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I recently realised, during Holotropic Breathwork and IFS (Internal Family Systems) sessions, that a fair chunk of my personality could be summed up by the phrase 'expect the worst'. Why would someone choose that sort of outlook on life on a personal level? And how, on a collective level, has it become deeply embedded in our culture?

I think for me it's due to some particularly crushing disappointments in my youth, especially in a romantic context, seeing other boys/men find partners while I was left alone. My grandiose opinion of myself back then also set me up for more failure, as I expected to do great things in life (without fully realising that I needed to work for them), and when that generally didn't happen, disappointment was the result.

In fact, and in retrospect, I did have opportunities, but my perspective had hardened so much into 'good things never happen to me', that I couldn't even see them, and turned away from them, not knowing how to handle success. I preferred to stay with what I knew, which was failure and disappointment. Also lowering my expectations to a level where I could be successful (as in not pursuing women who were way out of my league or clearly didn't fancy me) was not part of my way of doing things: that would have been demeaning to my ego.

In the same way, at a cultural level, the physicalist/materialist worldview carries an ultimate certainty: there is no god, no transcendence, no enlightenment, no awakening, no afterlife. We are merely accidental collections of atoms doing our meaningless thing until we fall apart and eventually dissolve, leaving only ashes or worm food. I am an isolated, discrete entity, in brutal competition with all the other billions of isolated discrete entities for what little I can scrape together. Life is a bad joke and should never have been told in the first place. Suffering and disappointment is all we can count on. Those who believe in any sort of meaningful inner life or transcendence, in this life or the next, are deluded idiots who deserve nothing but derision for their outdated and ridiculous fantasies.

Despite the incredible harshness of this ontology, it definitely does have its compensations. The main one, in line with my insistence on disappointment, is that I have certainty. I know what life is about: there is no mystery or ambiguity. Hope is for fools and Pollyanna's. It also gives me a certain tough appearance: I can take the harsh truth of the meaninglessness of life, the 'hard reality'. I am the Chuck Norris of existentialism.

Materialist science a priori dismisses the possibility of anything that cannot be measured being 'real', therefore the myriad edge cases and outright anomalies can be removed from the equation and never even need to be considered. They cannot exist, and therefore don't. What a relief! We got rid of god, which is arguably something to regret, but we also wiped out ghosts, witchcraft, the afterlife, magic, ESP, and all that deeply problematic mumbo-jumbo. And we ditched religion, finally! The big man in the sky who watches everything we do: gone for good.

Yes, we might have strange experiences in meditation (now rebranded as 'mindfulness' with all the traditional muck cleaned off it), or see DMT entities (psychedelics are okay because hardcore materialist Silicon Valley bros do them) at Burning Man, but it's all right, it's just chemicals in your brain interacting, there is no reality behind any of it.

We are therefore condemned to be 'consumers' first and foremost, or maybe we 'extract resources' and present them as commodities over which the other skin-bags fight amongst themselves. What else is there? Obviously nothing, how can there be? If we trash the planet, so be it, we might as well be the last generation. None of it means anything and the Universe will die eventually anyway. Get yours while you can, become a billionaire if you're lucky. There is some kind of unclean attraction in not having to restrain oneself, to consider the generations to come.

So complete certainty, mental clarity, and perceived mental toughness are clearly powerful incentives to adopt a physicalist worldview. Plus the tacit permission to be as greedy as we can. The fact that the materialist perspective is a prerequisite for the vast majority of academia and science-based jobs is also a powerful deterrent to ever questioning it.

However, the price we pay for accepting that the base layer of the Universe is disappointment and cold empty meaninglessness is a gnawing lack of motivation. Why bother?

In my case, despite only briefly adopting a materialist worldview in my teens (quickly exploded by powerful psychedelic experiences and the books of Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna), I still managed to hold on to an essentially hopeless worldview on a day-to-day level. Good things, and even miracles, can and do happen, transcendence is possible, just not for me. These are things that happen to amazing beings like Krishnamurti, or Paramahansa Yogananda, not to some suburban Englishman nobody has ever heard of. I can remain certain of the reality of one disappointment after another. I can watch my friends pair up with the partner of their dreams (everything looks ideal through the eyes of envy) while I rot in front of my massive CRT monitor, burning my eyes out looking at the early internet.  I was probably an incel before they thought of the word.

What was the point anyway? I sank back into hopelessness, that comforting place where nobody can hurt you because you never show who you really are or what you truly believe. The same comfortable place that hardcore materialists hang out, showing off to each other how 'realistic' they are compared to the 'woo' believers. The tough guys, the ones who can handle the truth. (This is a masculine position to take, in my opinion, even if a lot of women have adopted it).

Alongside this despair, I secretly felt I might be destined for greatness. Someone would recognise my inherent genius and bestow great riches and importance on me. The details of how this would happen were unclear, but this grandiosity was the flipside of the certainty of ongoing disappointment. Either way, I wasn’t going to actually do much of anything. That was for losers.

The problem with buying so heavily into disappointment as a base expectation for life is that one is repeatedly, and genuinely, disappointed. One has real regrets. What was a comforting stance in the face of a complex and confusing world becomes a deep hole that one has dug oneself into. Who would have guessed that basing one’s worldview on disappointment would create a self-fulfilling prophecy? 

The dominant materialist worldview has launched us into a void from which it is extremely difficult to see how, or even if, we might get out. A dark hole of meaninglessness.

As much as materialist science tries to fill the gap with ‘progress’, technology can never take the place of meaning. If we create some sort of Frankenstein afterlife by uploading our consciousness onto silicon-based information networks, we will merely be creating a permanently vacant hell realm, the absolute disembodied archetype of materialism itself. AI is extremely clever and can be very useful, but it will never be alive or conscious, and whatever meaning or beauty it might apparently generate is a synthesis of previous cultural artefacts created by the inspiration of live human beings. Otherwise known as 'training data'.

I am increasingly convinced that the AGI which is supposedly coming is a cross between a mirage and an outright scam, designed to pump up share prices and quarterly earnings reports, and underpinned by the hopium of materialists who need an omnipotent god in their lives but are afraid to admit it.

The old chestnut (commonly attributed to Einstein but probably paraphrased or made up by Ram Dass) says that we cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it. Materialism can never restore the meaning it had to discard to make itself coherent. This doesn't, of course, imply that everything that materialism denies has to be true; superstition is a thing. We will have to go back into the thicket of uncertainty wielding the machete of discernment. Sorry. 

We can't just put the whole thing into reverse gear and go back to being religious fundamentalists either: that was the previous version of certainty, and indeed one that a great many people around the world are still clinging to, much to the amusement of their mirror-image, the materialists, who congratulate themselves on their hard-edged commitment to 'the ugly truth'.

We who refuse to settle for materialism or fundamentalism must move into uncertainty, away from false dualities (like physicalism vs religion). It will feel like we are going insane: this is what happened to me when I experienced genuine, destabilising transcendence. It was mostly not fun, and when it happens on a collective level, it will be even less enjoyable. We will have to pass through a gigantic hall of mirrors, what Robert Anton Wilson calls 'Chapel Perilous', but on a societal level. It is probably already happening. Don't you feel like 'the world is going mad' is no longer just a fun thing that people say and more of a reality?

‘Chapel Perilous’ (all images are created with Stable Diffusion)

We will have to come out of our cave of certainty and denial, and admit we are scared, admit we made mistakes, hold each other close in our fear, tremble together, grieve together, apologise to each other. Yes, billions will remain in denial for as long as they can, until they can no longer take the pain that false certainty causes when it comes up against reality. Not the 'dog eat dog' reality of the materialists and their capitalist offspring, but the truly scary reality of infinite possibility.

Yet if enough of us gather sufficient courage to do this, we may find that life is not a disappointment after all. We may re-discover the wonder we felt as kids and tried so hard to find in scientific facts or the achievements of progress. The wonder I myself experienced before I made the false certainty of despair my credo.  We will drop disappointment and pick up real motivation once more. We can stop expecting the worst and start gazing in wonder again.