There's a lot of chatter about the meaning crisis, which goes by many names. People say things like "we need a new vision for society" or "we need a substantive account of the good". I think this is entirely the wrong paradigm to actually "solve" it.

The logical fallacy in "new vision" discourse is in implicitly trying to derive premises from the problems caused by their lack. You've got the whole thing back to front!

What are your premises? That is the question. No amount of study of your failures will answer it.

What are your premises?

To actually answer this question, to the extent its even necessary to do so, is an introspective exercise, not a logical one. You already have some motivating orientation in your heart. You must cultivate it and double down on it.

It is not necessary to have explicit moral premises. They are already there in your heart, motivating you. What you really need is answers to specific practical and philosophical problems that are vexing your external and internal life. That at least can be done.

The problem of meaning is basically material. It is in the organization of your means towards your plans, and the smashing of internal psychological barriers to that.

Socially, it is about the organization of comrades to generate POWER.

The lack of psycho-moral order in our own hearts is definitely a problem, but I now think (maybe?) that problem is not the limiting step. Given your perfect premises, it will all ring hollow unless you organize an actual coalition that renews the structure of society.

We slide into this "we need a new vision" mode because it's cuddly. It doesn't start fights. It implies that we can just cook up some ideas and suddenly everything will be meaningful again.

The actual nature of the meaning crisis is political. Our malaise is despair at lack of possibility. The way out is to directly build a new machine of power and possibility. The motivation problem is solved by articulating all the glorious things we will do with this new machine.

There are visionary and philosophical problems in building a new machine. How will it work? How do we reorient past problems with the current machine? What brainwashing do we have to undo? What's our new paradigm?

But these are very normal, practical problems.

There is also the rhetorical and "design for the customer" problem.

The customer of the new machine currently thinks such things are evil. There is a camel that needs to fit through the eye of a needle there.