The Cult of Personality (Part I of IV)
The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Adventures in Error, 1936
Note to the Reader
This is the first in a four-part series on the collapse of meaning in modern life. From the rise of personality cults, to our cultish devotion to stuff and status, to the breakdown of language, to a final mutation: the all-consuming, totalizing fog of the cult of everything.
When we lose what’s real, we reach for whatever remains: charisma, consumption, noise, and eventually, anything at all.
As you read this series, you may get the sense I'm pointing fingers at them, at those. I'm not. I'm pointing at you. At me. At us.
What I find so bewildering is how routine it all feels. How we just shrug off these devilishly cultish dangers — despite the warnings. Repeated. Urgent. Desperate. Delivered to us in every possible way. And still, we carry on, like nothing’s wrong.
The danger isn't over there anymore. It's right here — on your screen, in your purse, in your home, right inside your child's bedroom.
And I just can't stop wondering why.
The Cult of Personality
Our hunger for meaning may be our strongest and most dangerous instinct.
It's so powerful, we’ll trade almost anything — our morals, our money, our Mondays, even our mental health — just to feel a little less alone.
We’ll walk into the arms of people who don’t mean us well.
We’ll surrender ourselves to dangerous beliefs just to feel seen.
We’ll even help tear down the world just to feel like we’re part of something.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do human hearts. As traditional sources of meaning — community, religion, shared stories — erode, they leave behind a void where something ravenous waits to reawaken.
We are living in such a moment now.
The modern world floods us with more choices than any one of us can reasonably navigate. Who to be? How to live? What to do? What to want? With no shared vision to guide us, we’re left drowning in options and starving for direction. This isn’t a liberating freedom. It’s a freedom that feels overwhelming, exhausting, and quietly soul-crushing.
For many, it's easier to surrender this burden to a single idea, group, or person who says, "Don't worry. I've got you," than it is to face a world where everything is possible and nothing is certain.
Into this vertigo fever dream step charismatic figures who manipulate our fear, doubt, and overwhelm by promising us certainty, belonging, identity. A place to put the ache.
But what we must know is that most of these people are not what they seem. Too many of us either dismiss or refuse to confront the deeper, darker psychological forces at play. Beneath the surface, often buried in their distant past, lies a dangerous, unhealed wound rooted in feeling unloved, unvalued, and forgotten. It is from this quiet torment that the most terrifying cults of personality emerge — not from place of strength, but from the heart-sized hole in their soul that comes from having been left behind or never truly seen.
Before the fame.
Before the myth.
Before the wealth.
Before the parades.
Before the flags and statues.
Before the flattery and sycophantry.
There is just a person. And every person begins with a wound.
The future firebrand — part ringleader, part circus act — was once a child, like the rest of us: vulnerable, overlooked, afraid. Then something happens. Something early. Maybe it's obvious, maybe it's not. But whatever it is, it leaves a mark. And something inside hardens. A silent adaptation. Not a vow, exactly, but a deal of some kind. A whisper that sticks: this will never happen again. From then on, their every encounter and interaction becomes a performance of self-defense. They study people. Learn to read them. Charm them. Manipulate them. Persuade them. Attention becomes their armor; admiration, their oxygen. This craving isn't vanity. It's survival.
These kinds of people are always among us. But they only flourish when something meaningful falls away. When shared meaning collapses, when coherent narratives break down, and when we’re too disoriented, too numb, or too angry to see the danger for what it is.
Our media and institutions, once the foundational scaffolding of our cultural immune system, have decayed. Significantly. Not just outcompeted, but self-sabotaged through incompetence, corruption, pay-for-play reporting, partisan capture, and a failure to adapt to the digital age. Their authority drained, their attention splintered, their trust traded for clicks — leaving us with a fragmented, algorithmic marketplace of performance, where outrage wins, balance breaks, and none of us can say for sure what’s real anymore.
Truth is now a headline.
Nuance, a quiet casualty.
We are awash in spectacle.
We don’t discuss. We declare.
We don’t share. We broadcast.
We don’t think, plan, or process. We perform.
In a world this loud and murky, the one who shouts loudest wins. In a culture where drama drowns out deliberation and reaction eclipses reflection, the line between influence and idolatry gets very blurry, very quickly. Cults of personality don’t just take root in dictatorships. They thrive in every corner of a society that’s forgotten how to think for itself.
Enter...
The CEO-savior.
The self-help guru.
The influencer-star.
The podcaster who's "just asking questions."
The non-expert thought-leader speaking with suspicious clarity.
They don't ask for power. Not outright, at least. We hand it to them, often gratefully, because even cheap certainty beats sitting alone with our confusion. It's easier. It goes down smoother than ambiguity. It hits faster too. In a world where truth becomes just another popularity contest and swagger is mistaken for wisdom, charisma doesn't just resemble credibility — it erases it.
Also, if we're brutally honest with ourselves, it's not just certainty we're after. We give ourselves over to these people because we're bone-deep tired from watching the meaning drain from everything around us. We're disconnected in ways we can feel but barely explain. Atomized in ways we can hardly see. Starved for answers. For something that feels real. And underneath it all, we're haunted by a creeping suspicion that no one's steering the ship anymore. Maybe no one even knows how.
We were never meant to carry the crushing weight of all this choosing, all this pressure to matter, all this pretending to have it figured out — alone.
And deep down, we know it.
For most of history, we didn’t have to invent meaning from scratch. We didn’t have to make sense of life on our own. We didn’t have to know all the answers. We inherited them — values, direction, shared expectations, a sense of what matters — passed down by elders, kept alive through rituals, traditions, and stories. Narratives that reminded us who we were, where we belonged, how to live, and what to value.
Family.
Religion.
Tradition.
Community.
Shared nostalgia.
These held us.
They comforted us.
They shaped our lives.
They showed us we mattered.
Then, slowly, we broke them.
We critiqued.
We deconstructed.
We cast off the old gods.
We disregarded tradition.
We dismantled the family.
We hand-waved nostalgia.
And we told ourselves we were freer than ever.
But freedom, we must know, comes at a cost. And freedom untethered from belonging isn’t freedom. It’s drift, dislocation, dissolution.
Nietzsche understood this. His declaration "God is dead" wasn't a cry of despair or a note of triumph — it was a dire warning. He feared we’d either spiral into nihilism or replace the old gods with new idols.
Ever the overachievers, we chose both.
We killed the sources of our highest values. But the reckoning never came.
Now...
We like.
We scroll.
We swipe.
We binge.
We follow.
We brand us.
We worship them.
But, who are these people, really?
Why do we hand them our attention, our allegiance?
What lies are we hoping they’ll make true?
Maybe it's the person who promises to give us back what we've lost:
clarity,
identity,
certainty,
belonging.
Maybe it's the person who gives us an enemy to blame,
a script to follow,
a story to believe.
In the face of so much uncertainty, conviction starts to look irresistibly like truth.
We don’t follow these people because they’re cruel.
We follow them because they’re certain — and we’re not.
This is the dark gravity of the cult of personality. It satisfies our hunger for meaning by offering us relief from the burden of thought, but at the cost of becoming unthinking. It turns us from seekers into followers. It lowers us from individuality to fodder. From people into parts of the machine.
This loss of agency doesn’t happen all at once.
It happens gradually.
We align.
We adapt.
We repeat the phrases.
We defend the contradictions.
And somewhere along the way we forget we ever had a line we wouldn’t cross.
We don’t want in isolation.
We want what others want.
We want what others admire.
We want to be seen wanting the right things.
Perhaps because we want to belong more than anything else.
So...
our beliefs become costume,
our identities become performance,
our politics becomes mood — vibe — tribe.
We don’t reason our way into belief. We catch vibes from the crowd, we join the group, and eventually we learn to think as it thinks.
The architects of influence understand this.
First, win the individual.
Then let the group do the rest.
Once we feel seen, we want to join.
And once we’ve joined, we want to be right.
Because that’s what we do.
We imitate.
We conform.
We forget we made it all up.
What are we, really, but a fragile species trying to bear the awesome weight of consciousness.
We are fractured.
We are unmoored.
We are lonely and exploded.
We are tired in a way rest doesn’t fix.
Scattered across too many screens, too many selves.
Always connected, rarely held, performing more than living.
Slowly, quietly, forgetting what it feels like to be whole — to be human.
And into that void steps the Alpha.
The savior.
The brand.
The influencer.
The non-expert expert.
The man with the microphone and a story that cracks our hunger and makes sense of our fear.
And what do we do?
We listen.
Because it’s easier to be told what we are,
than to face the terrifying ambiguity of becoming.
If we’re going to survive the next century with our humanity intact, we need more than just new leaders or smarter politics. We need new foundations — social, emotional, spiritual — that can steady us when the ground shifts. Not just stronger institutions, though God knows we need those too. We need sturdier minds. Braver hearts. People who can hold their shape when the future doesn't.
We must become citizens of our own minds again —
Re-learn how to think clearly. Together. In real life.
How to reason with depth.
How to disagree with grace.
How to resist being told what to think at all.
How to endure boredom.
How to sit with uncertainty.
How to recognize manipulation.
How to resist the pull of spectacle.
How to speak, even when it’s hard.
How to listen, especially when it hurts.
How to act with humility, not just conviction.
We need elders who know how to listen, not just lead.
We need myths that reach us where we are now, not where we used to be.
We need rites of passage that teach us how to carry the burden of freedom without handing it off to the first charismatic figure who offers to hold it for us.
We need a culture that restores dignity to the individual.
Institutions that channel power, not hoard it.
Education that cultivates curiosity, not compliance.
Communities that make belonging possible without making dissent impossible.
And maybe most of all, we need to remember growing up isn’t just about growing older — it’s about initiation. And we’ve stopped initiating people into anything worth becoming.
We need courage.
Courage to sit with uncertainty.
Courage to resist the gravity of easy answers.
Courage to question what soothes but doesn’t serve.
We must understand that cults of personality aren't about the person at the center. They are about us. About the void inside us. About the vacuum we create when we abandon our responsibility to think clearly, to speak bravely, to do what's hard when it matters most.
This isn't about finding the right leaders.
It's about becoming the right people.
It begins with a choice: wake up or stay asleep.
To think — or follow.
To seek freedom — or settle for the illusion of safety.
To build what's next — or be swallowed by what's coming.
The future won’t wait for us to get it right because what comes next won’t look like a leader — it’ll look like life itself.