EXCERPT // Notes from the Zombie Apocalypse

by Walter Foley

Why is there suffering? Why is love so complex? Why is there ultimately no satisfaction in chasing pleasure?

John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and psychologist at the University of Toronto, believes we’ve lost the ability to confront these perennial problems. We are beset by a “meaning crisis,” unable to cultivate wisdom and cast into a metaphorical zombie horde: homeless, directionless, without a deep understanding of our lives.

In their 2017 work, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis, Vervaeke and co-authors Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic describe how this monster—an insatiably hungry, laconic being that shuffles aimlessly between the worlds of the living and the dead—came to symbolize the effects of our loss of meaning. Beyond the metaphor, we see tangible consequences in rising rates of suicide, addiction, and reported loneliness, as well as in a loss of trust in institutions that are tacitly replacing spiritual traditions.

The book, freely available as a PDF through Open Book Publishers, delves through historical, philosophical, and sociological literature to pinpoint how the authors believe we ended up here. Vervaeke’s summation, in brief: We threw away cognitive tools that had been honed over millennia specifically to deal with these perennial problems.

“I don’t expect that the gods of our time, the market and the state—and now they’re becoming indistinguishable—are going to want to hear this, because they have built themselves around adversarial processing,” Vervaeke tells me over a video call in November. “They’ve built themselves around bloodthirsty competition.”

How does one cultivate wisdom? It isn’t by memorizing as many facts as possible, nor is it done by joining a club in which everyone holds the “correct” worldview. Through his research and online lectures, Vervaeke has been arguing that much of a person’s ability to navigate complex systems—whether it be familial drama, romantic relationships, or deep existential questions—is garnered through implicit learning, below our conscious awareness and in the domain of intuition.

What follows are an edited interview with authors Vervaeke and Mastropietro, as well as excerpts from their book.

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