Could we couch this dyad also as the contest between the Individual and the Collective ? Hypermodernity turned out to be pathologically individualist, and the novelty engines that flame the fires of desire and distraction are largely responsible for the disengagement of the individual from the group, embedding him as it were in an electronic thicket of self-gratification and baroque monism. Ironic then that the “network” of connectedness has not in actuality created an electronic tribalism, but only the illusion of one. Modernity has been about the expression of the desires of the self more than any other social movement, Adam Curtis commented on this brilliantly in his BBC documentary “The Century of the Self”. The schizophrenic disassociation of modern man has left him stranded and alone, shivering on the platform of the Ego, crucified by his own desires.

In ancient religion, the sublimation of the self into a larger collective was a necessary condition, and it was this hive mind that drove forth the great feats of engineering and construction such as the Pyramids at Gizah and the giant Moai of Rapa Nui. Philosophically these projects are essentially “un-democratic” and “anti-modern”, and yet they still stand to confound our feelings of premature self-congratulation. Our egalitarian democracies and our “freedom” have come at a price, and the alienation of the modern soul from itself and the ground of being might only be ameliorated by violent mass movements and reversions to groupthink articulated by Eric Hoffer and others. Right now there is too much chaos to see any gestalt, but I would guess that continued economic duress would result quite logically in the dialing back of the clock and the re-emergence of the death cults that you are describing.