This episode – “Dark Gods of Modernity: Why We Still Need Monsters” – argues that our age is full of monsters, even if we pretend we’ve outgrown them—and that we actually need them. The episode starts with the old role of monsters: they used to patrol the edges of maps and myths, marking what was dangerous or sacred. Dragons, demons, trickster gods gave shape to fears and taboos; they were ways of saying, “There is something here we don’t understand, but it matters.”
Modernity claimed to banish them with science and rationalism, yet they’ve only changed costume. Today’s monsters show up as serial killers in prestige TV, pandemics and plagues, rogue AIs, shadowy elites, conspiracy cabals, zombies and apocalypses in endless variations. Even in a secular culture, we keep inventing figures that condense dread, guilt, and awe.
The episode’s core claim is that monsters are how a society metabolizes what it cannot face directly. Climate change, systemic racism, algorithmic exploitation, ecological collapse—these are slow, sprawling, and hard to narrate. So we displace them into sharper figures: evil billionaires, satanic rings, killer robots, viral hordes. Sometimes those stories illuminate real power dynamics; often they simplify and mislead. Either way, they signal where the pressure is.
We also carry personal “dark gods”: intrusive thoughts, addictions, forbidden desires, depressive spirals. Treating them only as malfunctions misses something. Like mythic monsters, they guard thresholds—unresolved grief, disowned anger, unlived capacities. The episode suggests that outright demonization backfires; what we refuse to acknowledge returns in cruder, more destructive form.
Rather than trying to erase monsters, we need better ones: images and narratives that help us see genuine dangers (like fossil capital, surveillance, supremacist ideologies) without collapsing into paranoia or purity crusades. Monsters, in this view, are tools: creative, symbolic containers for terror and shadow that can either trap us in fear or guide us toward more honest contact with what’s wrong—and what still might be transformed.
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