Push people to live in the glaring light of truth and they will end up blinded, prone to lunging for relief toward the opposite extreme of complete darkness. Martin Heidegger developed this insight further during the 1920s and '30s, writing about how the founders of civilizations and peoples wrest collective meaning from the nothingness that underlies human existence in all of its forms and that threatens to overwhelm and engulf all such meaning in the modern, enlightened world.

¶ 6:55 AM