Sorry, but it's not a meaning crisis

What if we're in a crisis of belief, rather than meaning?

The idea of a “meaning crisis” has gained prominence lately, but what would it really mean for us to be in a meaning crisis? People don’t actually believe that nothing is capable of meaning anymore — words have not stopped signifying, body language has not stopped signaling, and texts have not become incoherent.

Lest we forget, mean-ing is a verb, a function of signs, not a substance or entity transmitted from mind to mind or flowing through the sluice of our words. [1] Rather, more like the turning of a gear, the deployment of signs generates meaning with mechanical regularity. Meaning is the clamor of signs jangling together.

We can go even further than this though — humans cannot have a meaning crisis in the sense of a lack of meaning, because meaning-making is literally what we are constantly doing. Nietzsche’s nihilism did not stop at ‘there is no meaning’ [2] but took the next step to unmask this claim as itself an act of evaluation which gives meaning, and thus calling us to make our own meaning. We are condemned to meaning, regardless of what we think or feel about it.

Assume that an advocate of “meaning crisis” would grant this — that we’re always-already “doing” meaning — then what, we might ask, is the nature of this meaning crisis? If we’re always-already mean-ing (sometimes even against our conscious will, as psychoanalysis tirelessly points out), then in what consists the crisis part of the meaning crisis? What is broken or not working?

The options which turn up for responding to this question begin to reveal the dangers of this ‘meaning crisis ‘ framing — not only does the idea of a ‘meaning crisis’ elide meaning as a verb by instead subtly shaping our sense of our need as a lack of something called Meaning, it consequently serves to shift our search for meaning away from the realm of the symbolic (signs) towards the realm of the imaginary (fantasy, images).

Meaning crisis discourse worries that we lack in our modern context a felt-sense or experience of meaningful-ness. This is how it grasps “the Problem.”

By shifting from the terrain of meaning as verb (function of signifiers) to our imagined sense of self, world, and others, the meaning crisis discourse corrals us back into the marketplace of ideologies. The person who recognizes their predicament in the meaning crisis discourse realizes that no ideology currently on offer satisfies their personal demand for meaningfulness. All the old meaning-making structures of family, religion, society, culture, ritual, myth, and on and on, have fallen away, leaving nothing but the naked individual. The supplicant of Meaning now finds themselves encountering new communities, systems, and philosophies as they search for a solution to this problem of the missing experience of meaningfulness in their lives.

While the best practitioners within the meta-modern strains of the internet are vigilant about the difference between a community and a cult (many of them having experienced religious fundamentalism at some point in their lives), I believe that the theory of meaning as ‘the experience of meaningfulness’ has already sent them hunting down the wrong path, one which will continually loop back on itself and leave them dissatisfied. We can keep re-treading the ground of the loss of these social meaning-making structures, and we can begin to devise ersatz ones which can grow up in their place, but I wonder if this is solving the actual problem.

Slavoj Žižek has offered a better interpretation of our situation than that of a meaning crisis [3] — he proclaims that we’re in a crisis of belief. It’s not that we lack meaning — in fact, we have too much meaning! We are awash in possible meanings with no way to adjudicate between them! — Rather, it’s that we are no longer able to believe anything. We now struggle more than ever to believe.

I wonder if the person who feels a lack of meaning actually realizes that they don’t truly believe anything. We have become too clever for our own good. Every idea or conviction we have is assailed by a sneaking suspicion of doubt, every thought can generate its own counterpoint, every example has a competing case study, and even the sense that “getting it right is important” has lost any urgency it might once have had. In a global, interconnected, and educated world, how does one believe rather than constantly cynically hedge their own views?

Here’s a question — do you have any beliefs you would die for?

Do you wish that you did? How does that make you feel?

Of course I’m aware that doubt is intimately tied up with faith. We shouldn’t miss how the two are inseparable. A blind and zealous confidence in one’s beliefs often evidences foolishness or immaturity more than it does a depth of spirit and wisdom. However, we don’t keep re-posting horseshoe memes for nothing — sometimes the fool and the wise man really can outwardly appear identical. The ending of the Ox Herding pictures depicts the jolly old man returning to the market. We want to believe again, from an enlightened naivety.

But, the attempts to replace the old structures of family and culture with newly devised and self-elected replacements carries this subtle problem that you can’t really dupe yourself into believing in something that you know you created.

“Friends are the family you choose for yourself” — yes, but your family is your family regardless of how you feel about them or choose to associate with them. The point is that you didn’t choose them, and you can’t change that. You can walk away from any friend group or internet community at any time. It’s easy to feel a sense of connection to someone you just met at a popup city — but how would it feel to live next to them in the same town for 30 years?

Dan and Michelle Garner at

O.G. Rose

have been working on this problem from the angle of “belonging again,” which I think is a wonderful angle, but I want us to keep tarrying with Žižek’s comments about a belief crisis. What does it really mean to believe something? Are we able to believe something today? I find this problem much more interesting than whether our world is “enchanted” or not.

Why? Because beliefs engender convictions, and convictions become actions.

While beliefs become actions which change us and our world, what does meaning do? It’s profoundly unclear, because the very nature of meaning is to be multivalent, to remain open to the play of infinite deferral. This is its great power, but also its crippling weakness when not handled skillfully. I’m afraid then that the framing of a “meaning crisis” stops short of where we need to go — from meaning to belief — leaving us with a conception of the problem (and its attendant solution) that ultimately keeps us stuck.

To mangle the words of a famous theorist: “Influencers have hitherto only made the world meaningful in various ways; the point is to change it.”

[1] For more on this, see my piece “Signs mean. People think.”

[2] I feel somewhat ashamed for presenting Nietzsche as so one-dimensional as the slogan “there is no meaning,” (hence this note of clarification) for he’s really decrying precisely what the meaning crisis discourse folks are now saying, although he saw it over a century in advance — those master signifiers, like God, which guaranteed the validity of the meaning-making structures had fallen away and could now no longer be relied upon to deliver social or existential meaning. Instead, we had to take up the task (and risk!) of making our own.

[3] See this (hilarious) interview between Žižek and

Cadell Last

of PhilosophyPortal. I believe Žižek talks about it around when he starts discussing an example from a movie involving an Islamic terrorist and his female hostage.