The derealization of the world becomes acute from the ’60s onward.
Not because of drug use. Drug use is a symptom of a receding world and of a facile (chemical) attempt to reestablish connection with something beyond trite appearance.
The paradox is that scientific “evidence-based” knowledge diminishes rather than increases contact with reality. When physics supplants metaphysics, the world is emptied of meaning, becomes insubstantial. Science zombifies world, turns it into dead minutiae.
Consumerism turns the world into an array of disposable things and images. Disposability contributes to the sense that “nothing is real.”
Photography and photographic media promise a forensic intimacy with reality but transform reality into fleeting images.
The social sciences demythify the world. This demythified world shatters into fragments experienced in bewildering isolation from each other. (Christopher Nolan’s Memento.)
In this shattered world, “identity” becomes a fetish.
Unable to participate in a shared, consecrated reality, the postmodern subject becomes a consumer of selfhood, buying into one identification after another and declaring the assortment at every possible opportunity in a frenzy of self-reification. But instead of feeling grounded, this overdefined subject suffers from imposter syndrome.
The derealization of the world and the self are complementary. They are the two sides of the current mass psychosis.