The New Idolatry

‘Please turn back’ my passenger said after we had travelled six or seven miles, ’I’ve forgotten my mobile.’ There was panic in her voice. Even though there was no emergency in her life just then, and we would be back in a few hours, the thought of being phoneless was very distressing for her. Full-blown FOMO – the fear of missing out – is one of the most insidious social anxieties of our age. The word itself made it into the Oxford English Dictionary a few months ago.

The addictive state of mind it refers to is fuelled by our increasing engagement with modern technologies and social networking sites of all kinds. It is more than a deep desire to keep in touch. It carries a compulsive fear of being left out of the loop in terms of the latest fashions, of gossip and gadgets, of popularity among peers, or of keeping ahead of competition at work.

Extreme FOMO, in all its shapes and forms, and at any age, is an exhausting, competitive and obsessive mental and emotional condition that can consume people’s energy and seriously affect the quality of their lives. Neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield believes the condition will get worse. In her recent novel 2121, she writes, ‘I think the quality of our existence is threatened – and the kind of people we might be in the future’.

There is, currently, an increasing amount of reports and warnings about people’s deep fear of losing a sense of themselves, of right relations with others, of getting lost in a compulsive and unreal way of living. Social media is seen as a major contributor to this condition. Last November the term ‘internet-use disorder’ was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the international psychiatric manual.

Especially vulnerable are younger people. Addicted to pocket-computers such as smartphones and tablets, anxious teenagers are constantly monitoring their popularity among their peers, tormented by feelings of inadequacy and doubt. Easy access to pornography fosters this paranoia, offering a distorted image of human bodies and relationships. Unchecked, all of this transparent neurosis can lead to a disastrous loss of privacy, to the torture of being bullied, to self-harm and despair.

For young and old, the use of drugs only compounds the issue. Desperate, stressed-out executives are taking performance enhancers in their struggle to stay on top, not to miss out on their competitors’ progress. A growing number of businessmen and women, seeking an edge over colleagues and rivals are taking ‘smart’ drugs to keep them awake and alert, victims of phobias and unbalanced ambition.

Richard Kingdon, co-founder of City Beacon, an addiction clinic for workers in the Square Mile, whose clients are young City workers said that such abuse will eventually damage their minds and bodies, leading to depression and thoughts of suicide, and that his clients represent ‘barely the tip of the ice-berg’.

In his recent Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis acknowledges the ‘epochal change’ set in motion by the enormous qualitative and quantitative advances occurring in the sciences and in technology. ‘We are in an age of knowledge and information,’ he writes’ ‘which has led to new and often anonymous kinds of power.’ (52)

He refers to the ‘diagnostic overload’ in which people become desperate. Seduced and confused by ‘the new idolatry’ of a culture of consumption and competition, people lose their sense of direction, of self and ultimately, of reality. There is a destruction of the human spirit happening, a ‘process of dehumanisation’ inflicted by these silent assassins of the soul. Despite many useful suggestions why is the situation getting worse?

Essentially, we are here dealing with questions of a spiritual order – a sense of one’s identity, of one’s origin and destiny. ‘In the deepest part of me, who really am I?’ In a postmodern, post-religion world there are no easy answers. Yet no matter how neglected it may be, is there still not some inchoate intimation of a better life in everyone, waiting to be nudged awake, an unconscious, primal memory waiting to be unlocked?

However driven, drained or damaged people may be, is there not always some inner belief in a feeble flicker of a finer self, a moral, mystical seed still alive in the depths of their buried life? Their essence, their DNA, their very being – are they not all somehow quickened by the breath of a Mystery we call God? Deeper than their heart, their most intimate soul, they carry an original beauty and blessing, but their fearful compulsions and desperate drives keep blocking the hints and traces of that faint but graced awareness.

From that awareness emerges their true identity. It is the treasure hidden in the neglected fields of their souls. No longer trapped in a false persona, it is called ‘the true self’. This is very different from who they were told they were, and who they think they are.  Relentlessly they are persuaded they will radiate personality, presence and popularity with their peers, once they enhance their appearance, their fashion, their ambition, their success-rate.

Nobody tells them they are already chosen and cherished into existence by a primal and loving Being; that long before they were born their names were already written in heaven. Christians believe in each one’s individual worthiness, their inner dignity, with no over-powering ego-desires for popularity, prestige or profit, no more need for envying, pretending, accessorising and competing so as to get on. All of that belongs to the new idolatry, the old self and a lesser God.

The divine genes in everyone are what names and defines them. Treasured beyond measure, their identity is found in their kinship with God from the very beginning.  A key self-identifying moment is when God is no longer perceived as ‘out there’ but inextricably within. They do not look out at God as a separate identity; rather they look out from the God who is already utterly incarnate in them.

They will no longer have to build, protect or promote any idealised, unreal self-image – what others think of them, whether they are ‘good enough’, popular enough, successful enough. What matters is who they are before themselves and before God.