Displacement Value

It’s been argued (most famously by Nietzsche in his final book Ecce Homo, but also by many other philosophers and social ruminators in the years, since) that as religion fades from prominence and fewer people belong to organized, faith-oriented communities, other things will fill that role in our lives.

This is premised on the idea that we need to have a source of “truth,” and if a religion or spiritual belief of some kind isn’t there to tell us what’s what, we’ll turn to other communities, other leaders, so they can do so instead.

Thinkers have posited all sorts of potential stand-ins for religion, but Nietzsche suspected politics would fill this role for most people, and this would in turn evolve our political parties into something like rival armies waging spiritual warfare against each other, each pitching and prioritizing their own ideologies and dogma, rather than policies predicated on a shared sense of reality, fairness, and justice.