>>9181471It's only wrong to deal with the question on a national level when the national unity has already been dissolved. We might hope that extended families or local communities would replace the nation in this regard, but in practice people who at one point end up in a state of total alienation like OP and myself were not taken through any genuine enculturation process at all, whether on the national or sub-national level.
I can provide an example which may be instructive: one of my grandfathers was a Lutheran, the other an Anglican, while one of my grandmothers was a catholic, and the other had no real religion at all. I was not raised with any religion except for a vague nondenominational "religious sense." This is a very common state of affairs in the US, and most people have no cultural traditions to fall back on in the case of their immediate family's failure.
on another note, some level of romanticism is necessary to be initially interested in the spiritual. It is the central point I wish to make that individuation is fundamentally a process which occurs on a supra-material level, namely concerning the spiritual. I think it's very obvious that the purely material lives of many different individual humans are essentially the same, and even when their experiences are different the differences do not usually produce effects which speak of a free and well-defined individuality. Rather, the different circumstances people experience materially seem to bind them against their will to certain modes of living, which is certainly not what we would understand as an integrated personhood or will which might be described as truly eternal in any sense whatsoever.
This seems to me enough reason to suspect that the pure personality is essentially spiritual; thus to take the first step in its cultivation one must take some romantic interest in what is not mere material.
