Social media is beset by hysterical women and soy boys having collective hissy-fits and meltdowns that their country has “betrayed” them by electing Donald Trump. A certain Schadenfreude has led to re-postings of breakdowns, and to normal people asking whether they’re real. Alas, they are real.

They’re real and they prove two basic principles of the Catholic understanding of the human person: We need a god and people always choose what they think is good. That these principles get distorted doesn’t mean they are not real. And the collective freakout on social media corroborates it.

First, people need a god. Contemporary Polish philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski makes the point (in his Clash of Civilizations) that there is no such thing as an atheist. Everybody — including self-proclaimed “atheists” — has a god, i.e., one principle in his life taken on faith to which everything else is subordinate and around which all else is arranged. That deity may be the true “God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” or it may be a false god aping godhood; power, sex, and money usually constitute the unholy trinity. But everyman has an Absolute, even if that Absolute is, paradoxically, relativism. Man is inescapably religious. He may just adhere to a false religion.

Given the weakening of religion in Western societies, including America, that “god-need” in people’s lives has to be filled. In many societies, including America, and among many demographic cohorts, especially young people known as “Nones,” that vacuum is filled by “spirituality,” i.e., some gauzy collection of inchoate ideas their adherents do not understand that make them feel they are not simply empty vessels.

For many, the vacuum is filled by politics. But those politics are not normal politics, i.e., reasonable debates over policy issues where give-and-take can produce mutually acceptable compromise. No, those politics have become idolatries because they have been sacralized. They are politics undergirded by existential commitments about the nature of man, god, morality, and society that ground quasi-metaphysical and axiological commitments about which one cannot compromise. (You can’t say, “well, I think exterminating people is a bad thing but you don’t, so let’s only eliminate a third of our target population, okay?”)

And that is why we are seeing otherwise seemingly normal young people crying on TikTok (yeah, I get the paradox of considering people who feel the need to cry publicly to the whole world “normal”) that they literally don’t know how they can get through the day now that Donald Trump was elected. Their spiritual vacuums have been filled with this ersatz “spirituality” of radical feminism, critical race theory, make-believe genders, and abortion-on-demand (as a backup to sex disconnected from responsibility), and now they feel their gods have been toppled.

Nobody is telling them that the problem is you have chosen to worship strange gods.

Second, people choose what they understand to be the good. That’s elementary. When you ask somebody “why did you pick A over B,” their response is likely to be “because A is better.” If they said “because A is worse,” their response would be unintelligible. You’d ask if they were kidding you, misspoke, or were crazy. So, yes, people choose what they perceive as good. But that doesn’t mean that choice actually is good. The perversity of the argument for abortion-as-choice lies in trying to elide perception with reality: I chose; therefore, it is good. Thieves choose to steal because they see a “good” in theft: what I want is now mine. That it happened to be yours and I acquired it unjustly are merely factors bracketed out and stripped of their moral significance. But morality has a nasty way of asserting itself even if we try to be blind to it.

Those engaging in exaggerated meltdowns over a political outcome do so because they have invested not just political choice but moral commitment in that outcome. A mere political choice has become an existential choice between good and evil. The problem, however, is that what is denominated “good” and “evil” really are not good and evil but, in fact, their opposites. The dictatorship of relativism wants us to pretend that those truths are simply opinions and we can have “my good” and “your good” without “the good.” But the voraciousness of the reaction shows that argument to be a lie: What people invest in as “good” and “evil” are not just rolls of the electoral dice that we can live with, win or lose. Morality demands commitment. The problem is: like false gods, false moralities commit us to monstrosities.

What we’re seeing online is real and is both unfortunate and scary. But it is also a call, in charity, to engage in the hard, upstream work of not just changing political decisions but of rebuilding our culture, a work that will exceed one or even several electoral cycles, but one without which our political decisions will be built on shifting sand.