In the wake of WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again threaten humanity. But this resolution soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.
Influential thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince the post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism was the “closed society” — marked by strong gods: strong beliefs and truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past. Ultimately, all the “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” These are hyper-distilled symbols in political dress — the cross, the flag, the national myth — compressed across generations until they bypass thought and operate directly on the body, which is precisely why they can bind a civilization together and precisely why the post-war project found them terrifying.
The unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous — an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now suspect, alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism.
Simple Picture
ELI5: after a house fire caused by a furnace, the neighborhood collectively decided that all fire is dangerous. They removed every furnace, every stove, every candle. The houses became fire-safe — and uninhabitably cold. Now the residents are freezing, and some of them are starting to build fires again, and nobody remembers how to do it safely.
The Managerial Replacement
The dissolution felt like liberation partly because the post-war order also built an architecture for routing psychic entropy outward — military bases, economic structures, a global periphery absorbing the cost of the center’s openness. Spice names this mechanism directly: the open society’s vitality was not free, it was funded by externalizing the weight the strong gods used to carry internally.
The post-war establishment dreamed of governance via scientific management — transforming politics into “a social technology whose results can be tested by social engineering” (Popper). This could be limited to a cadre of carefully selected “institutional technologists.”
Pareto’s elite circulation names the mechanism: nations founded by lions (direct, comfortable with force) are taken over by foxes (indirect, managing through narrative and process) — who find themselves defenseless when wolves arrive. The result: vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The creation of a “rules-based liberal international order” — where all contention would be managed by supranational structures and war between states would become a relic — was the pinnacle of these ambitions.
This is Bourdieu’s insight at the civilizational level: taste launders economic capital into the appearance of innate superiority. The managerial class launders political power into the appearance of neutral expertise. The technocrat does not rule — he “manages.” The distinction allows power to be exercised while denying that power is being exercised. Yarvin names the finished structure — the Cathedral: a decentralized consensus machine spread across academia, prestige media, the permanent bureaucracy, and the NGO complex, each of which inherits the moral authority the strong gods used to carry and spends it as sovereignty. The carpenter who sees through the consultant’s pretension still cannot get a loan, and the citizen who sees through the technocrat’s neutrality still cannot challenge the policy. The Babel Limit names the scale ceiling on the entire project — the managerial consensus is a mandate masquerading as a Schelling point, and mandates cannot survive the communication physics that apply past a certain N.
The Dissolution
Instead of producing utopian peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. The South Korean case shows a parallel path: Confucian community bonds were dissolved not by ideological conviction but by economic pressure, producing the same atomization through a different mechanism. Strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions debunked, communal bonds weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down management. The same dissolution operates at the global level as pseudo-diversity — peripheral cultures get metabolized into the cosmopolitan substrate, and what circulates as “diversity” is the phenotypic residue of distinctness that has already been digested.
Hirschman’s framework explains the mechanism: the open society maximized exit while atrophying voice. The people with the strongest convictions — those who would have fought to improve the commons — exited to private alternatives, depleting the public sphere of its principal agents of change. This led to nation-states that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. The campaign of radical self-negation functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies.
Despite its obsession with “openness,” the world of the post-war open society has always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. Human nature is viewed with suspicion — something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed, and contained, or remolded into a reliable cog for a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism, and passivity has always been one “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe.”
The Connection to Loneliness
Arendt warned that totalitarian solutions would survive the fall of totalitarian regimes “in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” The open society project was a response to totalitarianism that inadvertently created the conditions for its return: by dissolving the strong gods, it produced precisely the rootless, lonely, conviction-less population that Arendt identified as susceptible to ideology.
The need for adults describes the personal version: adults with no convictions cannot hand anything down, children grow up with nothing to admire and nobody to become, and the only rebellion left is to give up on everything. The strong gods were banished at the civilizational level, and the result is the same void — filled by therapists, algorithms, and the perpetual adolescence of a culture that optimized for safety over character. Orphaned independence names the mechanism at the individual scale: when nothing transpersonal is installed as a counterparty, autonomy compounds on itself until every assertion becomes load-bearing and every challenge becomes existential. The civilizational void and the personal stubbornness are the same structure at two resolutions.
The Necessary Tension
Strauss understood that the strong gods of the closed society “are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded.” And that a society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.
The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos impossible to discuss seriously. Finding the proper balance between closed and open values is necessary to maintain a healthy society — a fact carefully ignored for decades.
This is the infinite tension made political. A purely finite society — rigid, boundary-obsessed, preparing against surprise — becomes totalitarian. A purely infinite society — boundary-dissolving, meaning-resistant, preparing for nothing — becomes too weak to survive. The strong gods are dangerous because they are strong; which is precisely why they have the strength to protect and defend. Freedom is being disliked — but a civilization that fears being disliked by anyone dissolves into a civilization that stands for nothing.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “bring back nationalism and religion — the old ways were better.”
The midwit take is “the open society project was correct and any return of strong conviction is fascism in disguise.”
The better take is that the strong gods are not good or evil — they are strong, which means they can be fearsome and dangerous, or they can protect and defend. The question is not whether to have strong convictions but whether a civilization can hold strong convictions while retaining the capacity to question them. History suggests this balance is extraordinarily difficult to maintain — and that the pendulum between too-open and too-closed is the permanent condition of political life, not a problem to be solved once and for all.
Main Payoff
It remains an open question whether the necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously, or whether the world will again be plunged into greater strife. Taleb’s forest-fire principle applies: systematically preventing small fires to be “safe” makes the catastrophic fire inevitable. The post-war project suppressed the small volatility of strong conviction and got the large volatility of civilizational dissolution. The thing about strong gods is that they demand something from you. The pain-avoidance orientation of the open society — risk-avoidance, depoliticization, technocratic management — was a locally-optimal strategy for preventing the specific catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it prevented them by dissolving the structures that also held civilization together, and the bill for that dissolution is now coming due.
References:
- R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West
- N.S. Lyons, American Strong Gods, The Upheaval