As Hannah Arendt observed, social atomization, stress, and catastrophe help to produce totalitarian ideas in a modern society. So much energy is transferred to the idea itself, so that the vessel of the idea, the human individual and eventually mass society is taken up with it and moves in the direction it dictates.
Like a growing tree digging its roots deep into the earth, the growing idea extends its roots far into history and firmly anchors itself. The individual becomes bound to the idea, and it takes a great energy to dislodge it.
This is a very interesting aspect of modern society. We have this extreme amount of potential energy built up, ready to be set free, and it takes the destruction of a great idea to set it free, and it will also take an idea great enough to contain and direct its future course.
Neoliberalism is so clearly hated, but it is just as clear that all of that antagonistic energy is still bound up to failing commitments, waiting for a new vessel, which currently, is forming amidst coalescing and competing visions, which upon achieving a certain cohesion, is set to send everything in motion once again.
