One question explains almost everything
If you want to understand a human being or the human condition, what is the single most important question you should ask? In attempting to understand human beings, especially large groups of humans
— i.e., their society — the most important question to ask is "What in life gives you the most meaning?"
The answer does not explain everything, of course, but it explains the human condition better than any other question.
The reason is this: After food, the greatest human need and human desire is meaning. Even more so than the ability to reason or even to speak, this is the great divide between human and animal. We share all other needs with the higher animal species and share many needs with some of the lower animal species. Like them, we need food, shelter and companionship. But, while human beings seek and need meaning more than anything except food (and companionship — but for human beings, companionship usually provides some meaning, and sometimes enough), no animal needs or seeks meaning. There is no evolutionary explanation for the need for meaning. Meaning is not a biological need.
The problem, however, is that just as the need for food has no inherent moral quality, the need for meaning has no inherent moral quality. Meaning can be found in evil just as it can be found in good. Nazism provided millions of Germans with as much meaning as helping the dying in Calcutta provided Mother Teresa. For most Americans until the last generation, the need for meaning was filled by family, religion, community and patriotism. All, or nearly all, of those sources of meaning are being lost. In fact, the present generation of Americans has few or none of those meaning providers.
As regards family, Americans are marrying later in life and many not at all, and fewer are having children. With regard to religion, more than a third of millennials do not identify with any religion. As for community, a vast number of Americans have lost ties to any community. This is a major reason for the epidemic of loneliness that afflicts so many Americans. And regarding America, what is there to believe in? For more than a generation, young Americans have been taught contempt for this country: Its past is essentially racist, genocidal and imperialist. So much for patriotism.
So, then, what is to give meaning to Americans who have lost all or most of the above? Something has to, because the need for meaning is as built in and as universal as the need for food.
The answer is self-evident: Whatever it is, it must provide meaning without being dependent on family, community, religion or patriotism.
And what is that? Leftism.
All of leftism (not liberalism, which affirms all the traditional meaning providers) consists of meaning providers that replace community, religion, America and even family. For leftists, feminism, environmentalism, socialism and trans rights provide meaning. The life-filling meaning of leftism is most evident in the constant leftist use of the term "existential threat."
President Donald Trump "is posing an existential threat to America," wrote leftist Frank Rich in the latest issue of New York Magazine. "Bloomberg, in Campaign Event, Calls Trump an 'Existential Threat,'" ABC News headlined two months ago. The Sioux City Journal headlined last week, "Biden: Trump Represents 'an Existential Threat to the Future of Our Country.'"
Fighting President Trump means fighting for the very existence of the world's order and for democracy in America. What could possibly give those devoid of meaning more meaning than that?
Well, there is one other thing: fighting for the very existence of the world itself. That is the animating impulse of the left's obsession with global warming. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a recent CNN town hall that the "climate crisis" is an "existential threat to the planet." There are as many assertions of fossil fuels posing an existential threat to Earth's survival as there are leftists (and the many liberals who fear the left).
The proof that this alleged saving of democracy and the world from extinction are nothing more than left-wing meaning givers is this: The only communities who don't believe this continue to possess all the traditional meaning givers. We don't need the left's substitutes.