Apocalyptic Party: Prophet and Algorithms

What do Taylor Swift, Jordan Peterson, Kayne West, Donald Trump, Beyoncé, and Andrew Tate have in common?

At first glance: nothing. One sells stadiums, the other sells 12 Rules for Life. One tells you to clean your room, another tells you to drink raw eggs and reject feminism. But in another sense, they're all prophets.

A prophet is not just a holy man. They’re not a priest in fancy robes. A priest manages the sacred. A prophet disrupts it. They don't preserve tradition; they announces its failure. They show up when the old story no longer makes sense and claim to offer a new one. They don’t just say “here is a song,” “here is a lecture,” “here is a campaign.” They say here is a way of interpreting the world and making sense of it.

The prophet doesn’t come offering complexity. They come offering clarity. They speak to a world that feels fragmented and say: "Here is the secret. Here is the truth behind the confusion. Here is the thing they don’t want you to know."

And people listen.

Because once you stop believing that society is benefiting you, belief itself begins to mutate. This is what Durkheim called anomie—a kind of normlessness. A rupture in the moral fabric. You’re no longer sure how to act, or why it matters. And in that confusion, prophets find fertile ground.

Now, this isn’t just about religion. It never was. The prophet today might not wear robes or speak of angels. They might wear designer sneakers and talk about masculinity. Or sit in front of a webcam ranting about the decline of the West. They might be a self-help guru, a Silicon Valley visionary, or a populist politician. But the structure is the same.

They claim access to a secret and promise renewal. They explain the chaos. And most crucially—they demand loyalty. Not to the facts, not even to the ideals, but to them. Because they are the vessel of the truth.

It’s important to understand how this works. A prophet doesn’t just offer a message. They become the message. That’s what makes them sacred. It’s not what they say—it’s the belief that they have been chosen to say it. That belief immunises them from criticism. If they seem mad, that’s proof they’re ahead of their time. If they’re attacked, that’s proof the elites are afraid. Their fallibility becomes evidence of authenticity. Their mistakes become signs of persecution.

This is why cults form around prophets. Not necessarily in the religious sense—but in the sociological sense. A cult is simply a group that defines itself by proximity to a sacred truth, with the prophet as its centre of gravity. Within the cult, everything makes sense. Outside it, nothing does. That’s what makes leaving so painful. You don’t just lose a belief—you lose the entire structure of meaning that held your world together.

This isn’t irrational. It’s human. We are meaning-making creatures. And meaning doesn’t come from spreadsheets. It comes from stories, rituals and repetition. Although the etymology of religion is unknown, according to scholars, in Latin, the word religio may come from ligare, to bind. Religion, in this sense, is what ties people to one another and to the moral order. Another possibility is re-legere—to reread, to go over again. In either case, the emphasis is on repetition. Religging, or religioning, isn’t just about the initial binding. It’s about doing it again and again—reciting, re-caring, re-affirming. Ritual is the origin here. Not belief as a one-off declaration, but as something acted out, returned to, tied to time itself through repetition. Prophets, by contrast, don’t repeat. They interrupt. They arrive when the old binding no longer holds, when the rituals have lost their grip, when repetition starts to feel like a lie.

This breaking isn’t necessarily bad. Some prophets are the conscience of their age. They expose hypocrisies. They tell the truth when no one else will. Think of the prophets of civil rights, of liberation, of revolution. But the structure—the fact that the prophet is both sacred and disruptive—makes it hard to tell the difference between the ones who seek justice and the ones who seek power.

Because false prophets speak in the same register. They say the world is broken and they say they know why. They say that if you follow them and only them, it can be fixed.

This is where Durkheim offers a warning. When organic solidarity weakens, when interdependence no longer feels like belonging, societies will revert. They will reach for older, more visceral forms of unity. The mechanical kind. The kind that needs a scapegoat. The kind that says, “we are pure, they are the problem.” And that’s when things get dangerous.

Because mechanical solidarity is intoxicating. It feels good to be part of something bigger. It feels good to know who you are by knowing who you’re against. Prophets—especially the false kind—are very good at delivering that feeling.

So what do we do?

We can’t go back. Not really. The village, the tribe, the single shared faith—those aren’t coming back. The complexity of modern life is here to stay. And pretending otherwise just opens the door to those who will sell fake simplicity to desperate people.

Instead, we need new rituals. New forms of moral imagination. We need prophets, yes—but not the kind who break without building. We need those who can tell stories that make difference liveable. Who can bind without erasing. Who can say: yes, the world is complicated, but that complexity is not a curse—it’s a fact. And a fact we can learn to live with.

Durkheim believed that societies needed sacred things. Not because the divine is real, but because sacredness is what gives life its weight. If we don’t create new sacredness, something else will fill the void. Celebrity. Nationalism. Nostalgia. Algorithms that feed us whatever will keep us angry and online.

But sacredness can be chosen. It can be constructed. It doesn’t have to be handed down from a mountain. It can emerge from the ordinary: the shared table, the public square, the act of listening to someone who sees the world differently. Those don’t feel sacred at the moment, but maybe that’s because we haven’t ritualised them yet.

So perhaps the real prophetic task today is not to reveal a hidden truth, but to help us see the truth that’s already there. That we are bound, whether we like it or not. That our fates are entangled. That solidarity is not just a theory. It’s the only thing standing between us and collapse.

And that’s not a secret. It’s just really hard work.