When Rage Replaces Reason: The Rise Of America’s Violent Creed
(ANALYSIS) Street protests spill into riots. Universities host intimidation campaigns. Digital mobs savage anyone who dares step outside the script. Across America, political anger is spilling into the open, and on the left it increasingly takes a violent shape. What begins as dissent can tip quickly into destruction. A protest sign becomes a weapon. A cause becomes a crusade with no restraint.
The unrest is not only about policies or parties. It reflects a deeper fracture in the American spirit. At its root lies nihilism, the belief that life is without a higher purpose. That no truth exists beyond power, and that morality is nothing more than personal preference. When that philosophy takes hold, rage is no longer restrained by conscience. Brutality becomes not only acceptable but seductive, a performance of meaning in an age that has lost meaning.
The rise of nihilism has a history. Friedrich Nietzsche, often caricatured as its patron, actually feared its insidious influence. He saw clearly that when belief in God fades, the moral foundation of society begins to crumble. His famous pronouncement that “God is dead” was not a boast but a warning: Europe was marching into an age without transcendence, and no political structure, no science, no art could easily replace what faith once anchored. He foresaw the slide into relativism, where truth becomes subjective and morality is absent.
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Ivan Turgenev gave the idea shape in “Fathers and Sons,” sketching young men who wore their rejection of tradition like a badge, scorning any call to morality or meaning. Fyodor Dostoevsky, more prophetic still, carried the thought to its dark end in “Demons,” showing how the denial of God brings not freedom but ruin, where men drunk on nothingness lash out at the world around them.
His warning was powerful. Without the sacred, nothing is safe; when nothing is holy, everything is defiled. T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” saw a world thirsty for transcendence but choking on fumes. Philip Larkin wrote of lives pared down to habit, where awe and belief had all but disappeared. David Foster Wallace showed a culture lost in endless distraction, chasing comfort yet finding little joy. Bret Easton Ellis, in “American Psycho”, exposed the cold emptiness behind wealth and fashion. Cormac McCarthy, in “The Road”, imagined a future where faith has evaporated and barbarism reigns supreme.
The 20th century provided proof. Entire regimes rose on the promise of liberation from old truths, and they baptized themselves in blood. The Russian Revolution promised equality and a radiant future, but quickly descended into purges and gulags, its leaders convinced that higher law was an obstacle to their vision. In Mao’s China, the Cultural Revolution taught children to denounce their parents and destroy their heritage, turning violence into a civic duty. Faith was mocked as superstition, tradition dismantled as oppression, and cruelty raised to the level of ritual.
For much of its history, America drew from a different source. Belief in God — whether voiced in church, synagogue, or in the civic language of natural rights — provided a shared moral grammar. Even those who doubted still moved within that framework. To break a promise, to strike a neighbor, to torch a business, these were not only crimes against man but sins before God. That grammar has eroded. Many of us speak the same language, but theologically we are back at Babel. Our tongues colliding, our meanings scattered. Morality is recast as preference, truth as perspective, faith as oppression. The result is a public square without a compass.
Politics rushes in to fill the vacuum. Protest becomes a perverse performance. Rage becomes redemption. To shout down a speaker or smash a window is reframed as virtue. Groups that claim to fight for justice often leave communities in ruins. Movements that preach justice resort to intimidation and exclusion. Power alone decides what is permitted, and the stronger voice, or the angrier crowd, carries the day.
Secular thinkers warned of this danger. Albert Camus, though no believer, saw that nihilism breeds rebellion without end. Unless a society can affirm something sacred, violence escalates without limit. He described a world where the void itself becomes an idol, worshiped through destruction. His words echo now with unsettling clarity.
The United States risks drifting into that same abyss. The answer is not forced faith. Religion cannot be revived by decree. But humility can be. Recognition can be. A society must accept that it cannot endure without some reference point higher than rage, higher than partisan politics, higher than the self.
To recover even the idea that life is sacred, that truth matters, that morality is more than opinion, is to recover a line between mercy and mayhem, between Heaven and Hell.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.