A lot of people seem baffled about what the Successor Ideology offers its adherents. If it’s a secular religion, where’s its concept of redemption? Its form of deliverance? Its version of grace?

If it’s a cult, then where are its inspirational leaders? Its gurus? Its drug culture? Where is its sense of spiritual transcendence? Where is its promise of ecstasy and sexual abandon?

A lot of this confusion stems from not thinking enough about what it is that the Successor Ideology might be offering, rather than trying (and failing) to map it on to the contours of previous movements.

The intense period of Americanisation in Western Europe and the Anglosphere in the decades after WWII worked because America successfully equated its economic and cultural offerings with the latent desires of those beyond its borders.

Postwar America succeeded in commodifying the concept of freedom, associating it with consumerism, rock ‘n’ roll, the loosening (ultimately) of fashions and sexual mores, and the new commercialised identities of the teenager and the young adult.

The successor ideology isn’t offering those forms of freedom but it is offering something else—moral recognition for generations that have been taught to care deeply about what others think of them via everyday digital surveillance (“interveillance”).

It’s offering moral certainty for generations repelled and alienated by the epistemological, moral, and ideological free for all of the uncensored internet. Sexual restraint or disavowal makes sense for those bombarded and turned off by aggressive sexual internet content.

Coordinated hashtag and Twitter bio activism, as well as the distributed worldwide protest movements we’ve seen in 2020, promise to convert the previously atomised online world into a global congregation or collective, all speaking the same language.

There’s an immense power of recognition or belonging in this, one I recognise from my ‘90s adolescence when so many of my contemporaries discovered evangelical Christianity, getting absorbed into new circles that felt blessed, immediate, and alive.

There’s a material aspect to this, of course, in that true believers can seek to mobilise their beliefs via workplace activism and exploit new bureaucratic and administrative opportunities.

But the most universal aspect of the Successor Ideology lies at the horizon of belief, adherence, emotion, affect, and belonging, and those of us who seek to understand it should, perhaps, be focusing our attention there.