Put an entire society into the same sort of conflict between ideology and experience, and new belief systems that promise a radical resolution of the conflict spring up.

It never fails to bewilder me how many people these days think that "transcend" and "give up on" mean the same thing.

revitalization movements, which is what sociologists call the mass movements that sometimes gather around these new belief systems in times of drastic social stress

A society founded on the unquestioned belief that economic expansion and technological development will continue forever may have a very, very hard time dealing with a future in which economic contraction and the abandonment of technologies too complex to be sustainable will likely be dominant trends.

I have argued here and elsewhere that those crises define a predicament rather than a problem – a situation that cannot be solved, only lived with – but that definition flies in the face of some of the most deeply rooted assumptions of our culture.