The Perils of Audience Capture

I (also getting older) would have ended the sentence right there. I live in NYC, and so I guess in general I don't come across the 'right-wing strains of US Christianity' that frequently.

> we do need something like religion, at least enough of it to convince people and society (a) that cultural integrity is important and worth fighting for, and (b) that playing a decent role within one's culture, rather than trying to dominate or "influence" it as much as possible, is enough.

I think the fundamental problem your trying to address here is that after decades of telling people there isn't any transcendant meaning to life, they've begun to believe it and are ordering their lives thusly.

What makes our current war different from others is that our enemy controls nearly every aspect the society we live in. They decide whether we have an income. They can destroy our reputations. The end of the world has started (i.e., we are in a state of active war, it is a violent one even if most people don't know it yet, and it will likely escalate to totality although it may take 100 more years) but everyone still has to go to work. That's the problem. If you're facing a foreign invasion, either you kill them or they kill you and either way it ceases to be your problem. If you're at war with an enemy that has the power (by law) to withhold resources and coerce you to work for them, it's completely different, and in general it is more trying on courage, because there are now three possibilities instead of two: (1) you win, (2) you die, or (3) they keep you alive in a degraded state in which, even if you think you're working in opposition, you actually serve a strategic purpose from their perspective (i.e., they can make an example out of you). The indignities and tactical failures associated with the third possibility are what makes humanity's final war, the war against capitalism, so different and so much harder to prosecute.

Insofar as capitalism tends to squash such experiments, because it feels threatened, yes, that is evil. But the good news is that few people would do that for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that they (we?) believe that capitalism is pretty damn good at organizing society, all things being equal, and it's hard to feel threatened by such an experiment. However, given the revolution in technology, particularly with smartphones, all kinds of possibilities open up which have not been explored. Such experiments tend to need champions, capitalists with a magnanimous (or curious) bent that can carve out a space to run, fund, and protect these experiments from predators. Such experiments would be like startups, but with a different success criteria (not just "eventual profitability") and a more comprehensive set of behaviors for the participants (not just "find product/market fit").

It may be time for another round of utopian experiments, but this time supercharged with knowledge of those failures, and adding ~50 years of new knowledge about psychology, society and science. What sorts of minds could arise in these unusual places? Optimistically, in the worst case you'd raise a generation of unique minds that, with any luck, would be highly sought after in the wider society, such that even in the event of failure the participants would be okay. And if they succeed, they can spread and grow, and gradually replace components of capitalist society. (Success is when the real danger starts, of course, because it goes from curiosity to threat.)

I just hope you don't give up on your dreams. If undermining capitalism is what you want, you have to play the cards you're dealt. Capitalism is ascendant, although it is showing tremendous weakness WRT wealth concentration. The world is the way it is, so pick a path that uses what you have. Good luck!