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“The Void of a Symbol”
CGI
2025
To all that suffer
By Ricardo Morin
July 2025
Abstract
This essay examines the ethical decline at the heart of contemporary civic life and its consequences for culture. It argues that culture is not merely the preservation of artistic or intellectual forms, but the public expression of moral purpose. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958)—in particular, her critique of the “worldlessness” of mass society—the essay traces how symbolic and institutional forms have become detached from ethical responsibility. In place of a culture grounded in shared moral commitments, it identifies the rise of anticulture: a spectacle-driven imitation of cultural life, stripped of civic responsibility and moral depth. Rejecting nostalgia, the essay calls for a cultural renewal based on solidarity, public compassion, and ethical engagement.
The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility
Culture’s crisis is a moral one before it is a political one.
A society’s cultural life is not sustained by museums, literature, or festivals alone. These may serve as symbols of identity or refinement, but culture, in its fullest sense, demands a deeper moral orientation. If goodness—understood as a commitment to the dignity of others—does not animate civic life, culture loses its grounding and becomes a decorative shell. It may preserve the language, symbols, and rituals of a healthy society, but without ethical vitality, these forms risk becoming performative—or even deceptive. What withers first in such decline is not expression but conscience—the inner faculty that gives culture its ethical weight.
The current state of American public life illustrates this decline. Public discourse has grown coarse. It is now common for political actors to brand their opponents not merely as mistaken, but as dangerous or depraved. During his first presidency—and again since returning to office—Donald Trump has labeled critics as “traitors,” “scum,” and “evil.” At rallies and across social media, he has referred to political adversaries as “vermin,” language historically used by authoritarian regimes to delegitimize opposition. The press has been repeatedly cast as “the enemy of the people,” a phrase long employed to undermine public accountability.
This style of politics has become normalized. In school board meetings, legislative chambers, and campaign platforms, elected officials accuse their counterparts of being “groomers,” “communists,” or “un-American”—language that transforms disagreement into moral condemnation. In 2023, when Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox publicly supported protections for LGBTQ youth and called for civil dialogue, far-right commentators denounced him as a ‘Republican in name only’—a supposed traitor to conservative values. His appeal to empathy was interpreted not as strength of character but as political surrender. In such an environment, even measured gestures of respect are read as weakness—or worse, betrayal.
Conspiracy theories once relegated to fringe pamphlets now echo in congressional hearings. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused political opponents of orchestrating “Satanic rituals”, while Senator J.D. Vance suggested that cultural and academic elites pose an existential threat to the nation. In such an environment, political opposition is recast as moral deviance. The result is not merely polarization, but a systematic dismantling of the civic imagination.
What is promoted in this environment is not only a political ideology, but a form of power centered on the humiliation of others—a self-glorifying posture sustained by the denigration it requires. This type of leadership rests not on principle or public vision but on the glorification of one’s own image. It is a form of narcissistic power—not in clinical terms, but as the conversion of symbolic authority into a vehicle for grievance, personality cult, and systematic contempt for difference.
The consequences of this climate are not confined to rhetoric. In 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home by an intruder radicalized by online conspiracies. In 2025, Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a man reportedly enraged by progressive legislative agendas. Around the same time, a lone assailant attacked attendees at a local Pride event, citing ideological grievances as justification. More recently, on September 10, 2025, the high profile influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a young radical inflamed by the very rhetoric he opposed. These acts are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a civic landscape in which anger is not only normalized but weaponized. Dehumanizing discourse is not idle speech; it becomes license for violence.
Online platforms amplify these dynamics. What began as tools for connection have become engines of outrage. Algorithms on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) promote content that inflames rather than informs. Verbal take-downs, personal attacks, and tribal affirmations generate more engagement than thoughtfulness or restraint. The loudest voices—not the wisest—are the most amplified. As a result, cruelty is often rewarded as candor, and ridicule is mistaken for insight.
The effects are tangible. A mayor receives death threats for enforcing public health policies. A schoolteacher is harassed online for adopting inclusive language. A librarian resigns after refusing to censor materials that affirm pluralism. Columbia University pays over $200 million in penalties to the federal government under political pressure from the Trump administration—forced to signal partisan compliance in order to continue its cancer research. These are not anecdotal exceptions. They reveal a broader decline of democratic sensibility: a failure to recognize fellow citizens as worthy of care, dialogue, or even basic dignity.
Nowhere is this inversion of moral language more visible than in two of the most enduring national failures: the absence of universal healthcare and the unchecked circulation of firearms. In both, the language of freedom conceals the logic of profit. Insurance and weapons industries, fortified by investors and political patrons, convert dependency and fear into revenue while legislators invoke “choice” and “rights” as moral cover for their complicity. The result is a civic inversion: health and safety—once understood as the moral responsibilities of a just society—are administered as markets. When interest acquires the vocabulary of conscience, democracy begins to speak its own undoing.
Yet this crisis is frequently mischaracterized. To name it is not to indulge in nostalgia. The diagnosis does not propose a return to an idealized past, but instead demands a reckoning with the ethical foundations of culture itself. A society may build monuments, publish literature, and preserve archives—but if it no longer cultivates compassion, humility, and the habit of care, its culture has already begun to wither.
When Aaron Copland composed Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, the phrase “the common man” carried a sense of moral optimism—the embodiment of democratic dignity, sacrifice, and inclusion. Today, detached from that wartime faith in shared purpose, the same title sounds almost ironic, as if questioning whether the “common man” still exists amid inequality, manipulated populism, and performative patriotism. What was once an anthem of unity now lingers as an echo of the ideal—equality, justice, and shared responsibility—and that echo reveals, beneath its noble resonance, a critique of how those virtues have been hollowed out and repurposed by demagogic politics and consumer spectacle. The fanfare no longer celebrates; it laments. It stands as an elegy for the loss of democratic sincerity masquerading as triumph, capturing with quiet precision the tension between moral aspiration and civic disillusionment.
This moral decay gives rise to what may be called anticulture: not the absence of cultural forms, but their inversion—their use as instruments of division, branding, or control. Anticulture offers performance without substance, heritage without responsibility, and visibility without ethical vision. It mimics meaning but does not generate it. Its language flatters rather than guides. Its stories entertain but do not bind.
When conviction forgets to breathe, it mistakes endurance for moral strength. In time, it becomes a ritual of loyalty to its own image. Aspiration, however, is the current that keeps conviction alive—the movement that returns it to conscience. Without conviction, aspiration drifts without form; without aspiration, conviction calcifies into creed. The moral imagination depends on their continual exchange: hope that remembers, and memory that still dares to imagine.
To rebuild culture is to recover its moral essence. It is not enough to preserve institutions, sponsor festivals, or fund the arts if the ethical spirit is neglected. Culture without goodness becomes hollow—easily co-opted by spectacle, tribalism, or power. Acts of public courage, the rehumanization of discourse, and the refusal to normalize contempt are not ornamental gestures; they are essential conditions for renewal. Like democracy, culture must be tended—not merely inherited or displayed. When culture mistakes approval for virtue, morality becomes a mirror for power. At its core, culture and goodness are not separate. Nurturing one gives life to the other. Where goodness falters, culture loses its vitality; where it is cultivated, culture may yet be renewed. The work of rehumanization is therefore never complete; it must remain a continual labor of conscience.
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Annotated Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt explores the distinction between labor, work, and action, offering a foundational critique of how modern life has eroded meaningful public engagement).
Bellah, Robert N., et al: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (This sociological study examines the tensions between individualism and civic responsibility in American culture).
Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. (Berman traces the psychological and cultural disorientation caused by modernity, especially in urban life).
Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence clarifies how cultural forms can devolve into mechanisms of exclusion or aggression).
Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. (Lasch critiques the rise of therapeutic individualism and the erosion of civic virtue).
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (MacIntyre’s argument that modern moral discourse is fragmented and incoherent lays the philosophical groundwork for the essay).
Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that cultivating emotional capacities—such as compassion and solidarity—is essential for a just society).
Putnam, Robert D.: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Putnam presents a comprehensive study of declining civic engagement in the United States).
Sandel, Michael J.: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. (Sandel critiques the intrusion of market logic into spheres of life traditionally governed by ethical norms).
Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. (Taylor examines the moral and cultural consequences of secular modernity, particularly the fragmentation of shared meaning).
Observations On Perception 