The Weight of Moral Fatigue
Who is ultimately responsible for the moral framework of society, and are all active participants allowed to have a voice in creating it?
Recently, I have found myself feeling the weight of moral fatigue. The alarm bells have been ringing and the chosen few have heard the call. They are here to help solve the human conundrum: Which system maintains social cohesion, and how can it be implemented quietly?
In Paul McAdory’s October 13, 2026 article, “Grimes’s Secret Psy Opera Pop-Up” in The Paris Review, Grimes discusses her planned manifesto, tentatively titled Gesserit, examining Gen Z’s moral education. She describes them as:
“The first humans ever in all of history to be raised by atheists.”
There was no further elaboration on such a totalist claim.
With the sound of existential dread ringing in my ears, I began to dig deeper. While staring into the void, I discovered a June 2024 Guardian article by Judith Levine, who describes herself as the “daughter of militantly atheist socialists”. Levine, who was 10 years old in 1962, goes on to discuss growing up in an era when God was being inserted into American public schools, often without regard for those who practiced other spiritual beliefs, or none at all.
Who determines which lens of spirituality is the “correct” one? The state or an entertainer? I wonder if either of them can be truly right without including more people in this civilization-changing conversation. We are, after all, trying to stop the decay of our shared social traditions.
And even in more recent years, the evidence hardly supports the picture of an entire generation raised by atheists. In a Pew Research Center study conducted in 2019 and published on September 10, 2020, researchers surveyed American teenagers ages 13–17 and their parents.
| Religious identity | Teenagers | Parents |
|---|---|---|
| Christian | 63% | 72% |
| Religiously unaffiliated | 32% | 24% |
The unaffiliated category includes atheists, agnostics, and people who identify with no particular religion.
These results do not establish that most American Gen Z teenagers were raised by atheists. In fact, 72% of the surveyed parents identified as Christian. The study only covers American families, but the distinction is worth making. Meanwhile, 61% of surveyed teenagers said belief in God was not necessary to be moral or have good values. Believing that morality can exist without God does not make someone an atheist.
This leads us to a question that has been bothering me for some time. Who is ultimately responsible for the moral framework of society, and are all active participants allowed to have a voice in creating it?
I have found that there is a growing amount of rhetoric surfacing in regard to religion and our self-inflicted cultural necrosis.
As technology accelerates, the old world is being rewritten once again. There are voices from all aisles screaming that they have the solution, but does anyone actually have a stable enough ethical structure to replace what we already have? What does it even mean to call Gen Z a generation raised by atheists, and how do characters from the novel Dune fit into this mystery?
Over time, I will explore the mythologies being built in the information age, alongside many other topics I have stumbled into while chasing digital rabbits.
We are constantly navigating a labyrinth of technology and power. Hopefully that manifesto will have something to say about a few of these glaring potholes.