The Death of Humanism and the Birth of The Fool
A vulgar image for a vulgar essay
by Andrew Sweeny
ased on a conversation between Andrew and Tom on The Parallax View.
We are living through a time of exhaustion. Not only ecological, political, and psychological exhaustion, but metaphysical fatigue — a sense that every narrative has already played itself out. Integral theory, metamodernism, the meaning crisis, systems thinking — each grand theory of everything promised renewal, and each now feels strangely hollow.
This is not a failure of intelligence or human effort, but a symptom of completion. The old humanist story has reached its end. What we’re witnessing is not collapse, but a threshold — a pause before something new, unnamed, makes itself known.
The Wisdom of Fatigue
Justice (or Karma) is clearly telling us that nothing seems to work anymore. When every model collapses into irony or boredom, we find what could be called positive nihilism, or weariness with samsara.
But do not despair — Justice’s gaze of nothingness is not a mere void, but a sacred clearing.
It’s the same weariness the Buddha (perhaps the Pope here) felt before awakening — the total exhaustion of samsara and its circularity. Fatigue becomes the doorway to silence; silence, the ground of renewal.
To be tired of all the bullshit — our own and others’ — is not defeat; life, freed from pretense, can finally begin.
Secular Humanism as Anxiety
Of course, in the age of artificial intelligence, people will laugh at something so quaint as Tarot cards. But the Renaissance artists who birthed the Tarot stood in dialogue with the divine; their humanism was a bridge between man and cosmos.
Ours became a closed loop of anxiety — man reflecting endlessly on himself, cut off from mystery, from eros, lost in a noisy culture war.
What we now call “crisis” is the moment when this loop collapses.
The archetype of the Pope in the Tarot symbolizes this bridge — the passage between the human and the transpersonal, between immanence and transcendence.
The Fool in the Tarot walks beyond all systems, unburdened by knowledge, naked before the unknown, the savior himself, in drag. He is not naïve; he is empty of pretense and therefore free.
After the failure of models and ideologies, what remains is the Fool’s openness — the courage to amble around without guarantees, to live symbolically and with eros and serendipity. He trusts himself because eros and justice are one in him.
The Failure That Heals
Our culture worships the fantasy that the world can be managed, fixed, and engineered into harmony. But the deeper movement of life is the opposite: the acknowledgment of death and failure is sacred. Gurdjieff called this holy denial, which is then followed by holy affirmation and holy reconciliation.
Wisdom begins when we stop trying to fix or save the world and instead attend to, hold, listen to, and inhabit it. Only our embodied living will save the world in the end; big ideas are merely impotent and autistic in the face of the real.
Every civilization must fail. Every mere philosophy must crumble. Saturn eats his children — and this too is divine. To quote Gurdjieff again: “I wish to destroy, mercilessly, without any compromise whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.” That possibility is still there. Gurdjieff’s great gift to us! Let us allow this total destruction of the known to emerge!
The Beginning After the End
The death of secular humanism is not the end of the human story, but its purification.
From the fatigue of meaning and attention capture, a new meaning and attention can arise.
From the apocalyptic clearing, new fantastic visions.
We never actually left the Garden of Eden — it is right here still, in a little drop of water!
Let’s not forget the wonder of our world, beyond the drizzle of the newsfeed.
The task ahead is not to invent another system but to be ethical thieves in the temple, guided by Real Ethics (Justice), Real Holiness (The Pope), and real experiment and play (The Fool).