Politics & Power Quote by David Foster Wallace

The line lands like a spit-take because it turns “American exceptionalism” into a psychological tic: we don’t just like things, we consecrate them. Wallace is diagnosing a national habit of spiritual outsourcing. In a culture that distrusts traditional authority but still craves transcendence, we convert whatever’s handy into a stand-in religion: success, self-optimization, romance, the market, the body, the brand. “God and cosmos” is deliberately grandiose, the kind of totalizing language you’d expect from theology or myth; his point is that consumer culture learns that rhetoric and deploys it with a straight face.

Then comes the snap of the knife: “or else kill it.” The cynicism isn’t nihilism so much as a warning about how devotion curdles. Once something has been inflated into a cosmic solution, it can’t remain merely fallible or human. The inevitable disappointment doesn’t just demote the idol; it triggers a backlash, a purity purge. America’s love affair with the new becomes America’s appetite for takedowns: celebrities built into saints, then fed to scandal; movements romanticized, then written off as fraud; tech hailed as salvation, then treated as civilizational poison. Worship sets the object up for annihilation.

Wallace’s intent, in context with his broader work, is moral and diagnostic. He’s tracing how a freedom-obsessed society still ends up enslaved: not by kings or priests, but by whatever we’ve chosen to load with ultimate meaning. The “man” keeps it conversational, but it’s a trapdoor into something bleak: our extremes aren’t passion, they’re coping mechanisms.