John Vervaeke: If We Don't Address Nihilism, Democracies Wil

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I have no idea if his name comes up for anyone else here, he's a psychology and cognitive sciences professor at University of Toronto who has a 50-part lecture series on Youtube called 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' and his main public project has been issues around what are called relevance realization (ie. being able to pick out salience from background) as well as dealing with the breakdown of reality that's been happening at media and cultural layers. He's also talked, in several discussions about the idea of the 'religion that's not a religion', where in this case it's an ecology of practice, particularly for helping with individual and community orientation, without attempting a two-worlds model.

For the title, I really think we're already there. You could almost rephrase it If We Don't Address Nihilism, Democracies Will Erode Into Cultural Consumerism.

John Vervaeke: If We Don't Address Nihilism, Democracies Will Erode Into Narcissistic Egocentrism

An added bonus I thought I'd throw in - John talking about epistemology, ontology, and the utility of Neoplatonism in correcting some of the Cartesian errors.

One additional really cool thing he discusses here, in ecologies of personal practice, is the need for opponent processing - absolutely. Without that whatever gains you make in one direction or another are quite often hurting your Darwinian fitness.