All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.

Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration .

Pieces of information do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that our happiness consists of the possession of a non-negotiable truth. Today, we no longer have such non-negotiable truths.

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust.

Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise, pulling us into a permanent frenzy of fleeting moments.

The inwardly turned, narcissistic ego with purely subjective access to the world is not the cause of social disintegration but the result of a fateful process at the objective level. Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people.

The narrative vacuum in an information society makes people feel discontent, especially in times of crisis, such as the pandemic.