The Prince Rupert's Drop Effect

We Are Slowly Shattering

[The following post is a snapshot of an observation I made recently, and admittedly is not well put together, but I decided to put it out after starting over several times because I want you guys to agree and disagree with me and help me think this trough, and because I don’t want there to be big lapses between posts. Enjoy!]

A Prince Rupert’s Drop is a sperm-shaped glass droplet with one fascinatingly paradoxical property: the bulbous head is exceptionally strong, while the tail is pitifully weak. What’s more, when the tail is compromised, the entire object violently explodes. Take a look.

[Clip from 1:20 - 1:55 is the important bit]

Pretty cool, right? You can watch the entire video for an explanation of this phenomenon, or you can read what ChatGPT says about it.

When the molten glass hits the cold water, the outer layer of the glass cools and solidifies almost instantly, while the inside remains hot and fluid for a little while longer. As the inside cools and contracts, it pulls on the already solidified outer layer, creating a state of high compressive stress on the surface and high tensile stress in the interior. This tension gives the head of the drop its strength, but also means that any damage to the tail, which compromises the structure, can lead to a catastrophic shattering of the entire drop.

If you’re like me, you can see how this physical phenomenon lends itself quite easily to metaphor: an object, held together by competing pressures and forces, is nearly unbreakable at one end, but susceptible to the slightest disturbance at the other end, resulting in complete and total destruction.

I believe that we - western culture specifically - are in the midst of what we might call The Prince Rupert’s Drop Effect. Something fundamental to our society has broken, and we are in the midst of the fallout. I want to be careful not to take the analogy further than is acceptable, which is always tempting. I want to focus specifically on what happens to a society when a linchpin is removed, when a keystone comes loose, when the tail of a Prince Rupert’s Drop cracks.

In this analogy, it seems to me that the crack in the tail is what Nietzsche referred to as the “death of god,” and the billions of tiny fragments that exploded are represented by our collective narcissism.

God remains dead! And we have killed him!

- Friedrich Nietzsche

A culture without a cohesive, shared vision of the future is reduced to a collection of individuals with their own competing visions. In some real sense, what used to be our shared vision - god - has been meaningfully neutered from society, and has not been replaced by anything that we could call cohesive, or shared. This second part, the replacement, is directly addressed by Nietzsche in the sentences immediately following his quote above.

How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?

It’s clear that his intention was not for the death of god to be triumphant. Indeed, he refers to it as murder, and even presents us with a conundrum - what are we supposed to do now?

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about what I believe is meant by the death of god. Obviously, to the extent that the god he was referring to - the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible - is real, he cannot be killed in the normal meaning of the word. No, instead what he meant by “God remains dead,” is a symbolic end of the traditional concept of God in the modern era. This weapon that was used in this murder was the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific rationalism that had the effect of debunking or eroding the idea of a creator who governed the world, and of portraying the whole enterprise of religion, spirituality and the divine as a sort of hoax. (Don’t get me wrong, religions are susceptible to human greed and corruption, and are not beyond reproach, but so are schools, businesses, hospitals, etc., and we would not dispense of those institutions outright whenever we find that one or another is corrupt.)

This, in his eyes, and in the eyes of many others, is a tragedy. Sadly, it seems, the tragedy has been lost on most of the western world, and too often we revel in the so-called death of god. I certainly fell victim to this, and I expressed it in my hostility and condescension toward believers.

But how does the death of god, or the rise of atheism, create a culture of narcissism? I’m tempted to answer my own question, with another one of my own questions. How could it not?

What is the purpose of god in the first place? Far be it from me to speak for the world, but generally speaking, god represents the means by which we orient ourselves toward goodness and love, and is the super-ordinating structure inside which we live, struggle and thrive, something permanently greater than us to which we can make offerings. Without such a presence, what is there above us? Some people say, “the universe,” “humanity,” “the earth,” etcetera, and to some extent those are honorable notions, and are not the worst thing to orient yourself toward, but they are not the best either. Other people, though, come right out and say one of two things, “there is no god,” or, “I am god.”

Those who say “there is no god,” are the atheists who would probably also ascribe something akin to divinity to the cosmos and the planet, and less and less, it seems, to people. There does appear to be an anti-human attitude towards godless people.

To those who say, “I am god,” I say that this is the trojan horse of narcissism. I think I know what they mean when they say it, and it’s certainly not that they are my god, or your god, or literally anyone else’s god at all (unless you’re talking to Kanye West). They mean they are their own god, their own boss, their own master, so to speak. In a way it’s a manifestation of free will. It says, I have the power to do anything I put my mind to, and to be honest, there is a lot of truth to the positive effect that willpower, discipline and belief in oneself can have. It doesn’t require being god, though, and closing yourself off to a god who is above you is a way of creating an island with a population of one. Examined more closely, it is a form of narcissism. The systematic denial of god without an equal or superior replacement (assuming there could even be one) leads to a population of people with a wildly inflated sense of importance.

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When a real Prince Rupert’s Drop explodes, it does so almost instantaneously to our eyes. What we are experiencing is far more gradual, and as a result, not as easy to observe. In my opinion, though, the division we see in our country, and in the west in general, can be traced back to this erosion of a shared vision of the future - of god. The race wars, the pronoun pandemonium, the rampant dissemination of dis-/mis-/mal-information, the widening political gaps, the widening wage gaps, the censorship industrial complex, the rise of social media and “reality tv,” all of it feeds directly into the archetype of narcissism. That is, it benefits a narcissistic personality, and rewards narcissistic behavior. It focuses the attention inward, and values individuality over community, ego over sacrifice, originality over community, personal truth over truth, me over we, and so on.

We are slowly shattering.

Fortunately, this is just an analogy, and there is something we can do about it. We can reverse the cleavage and become whole again, but only if there is a cohesive vision of the future that we can all believe in. In my personal life, god has a unifying, integrating, stabilizing effect, but I struggle to imagine a world where the presence of god returns into the hearts, minds and souls of people the way that it was in the past. In that sense, maybe Nietzsche was right. The concept of god that reigned supreme for nearly two thousand years is no longer sufficient enough for our modern society, one that values the scientific method, reason, rationality, skepticism, materialism, etc. The problem to me isn’t that these methods of coming to knowledge render the need for god unnecessary. These tools and methods are clearly valuable, and have produced some of the greatest achievements in technology, medicine, and discovery in human history. But they don’t answer - they don’t even ask! - questions such as “why are we here,” and “how do we live a good life?” Those lines of inquiry remain the domain of the divine. As such, we should encourage our own concept of god to evolve into something, or someone, who isn’t just responsible for the tools and methods of science and reason, but who is the source of a guiding spirit that orients us toward goodness, love, beauty and truth. In this way we can still express our individuality while recognizing the a common spirit. We can freely operate in the world while making offerings to the same power. We can continue to probe and investigate the world as revealed by the mind of god. Without this shared vision, without a common orientation toward good, our science becomes ideology, our tools become weapons, our technology becomes a noose, and we become sand.

Onward and Upward