There is a rather large pachyderm in the room: the communist ideology which provided non-religious meaning and purpose for a great number of people.
And if you want to talk about how rejection of this particular meaning and purpose pushed people into looking for alternatives at the small-community level, well, there are more interesting examples than student operas.
The science on meaning and purpose, which I cited in the article, talks about how people get meaning and purpose from three things overall: self-reflection on a sense of meaning and purpose, community bonds, and serving others.
Now, it doesn’t mean that other things don’t contribute to meaning and purpose, such as ideology, it’s that the science has not yet confirmed or denied them.
So I made sure to keep my claims narrow and based on the science, otherwise it wouldn’t be published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal. Psychology journal peer reviewers don’t accept speculation based on things that are not based on the science: this is not a literature criticism journal, after all :-)
There is a rather large pachyderm in the room: the communist ideology which provided non-religious meaning and purpose for a great number of people.
And if you want to talk about how rejection of this particular meaning and purpose pushed people into looking for alternatives at the small-community level, well, there are more interesting examples than student operas.
The science on meaning and purpose, which I cited in the article, talks about how people get meaning and purpose from three things overall: self-reflection on a sense of meaning and purpose, community bonds, and serving others.
Now, it doesn’t mean that other things don’t contribute to meaning and purpose, such as ideology, it’s that the science has not yet confirmed or denied them.
So I made sure to keep my claims narrow and based on the science, otherwise it wouldn’t be published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal. Psychology journal peer reviewers don’t accept speculation based on things that are not based on the science: this is not a literature criticism journal, after all :-)
Oh, dear. It’s much worse than I thought.