Because moderns are cut off

from both the spiritual faculty of apprehending the sacred and the ascetic techniques that enabled union or identification with it, they take pleasure instead in blasphemy. What is in vogue today, in lieu of worship, is the inversion of worship: vapid rebellion, deconstruction, demystification, demythification, critique. At best, this yields a momentary frisson, joy in destruction being a tacit admission of impotence. But for that reason, the activity of destruction must never cease because if it does, the impotence reveals itself. Modernity is in flight from a numinous that if allowed to visit would traumatically demolish progressive self-regard. Unbeknownst to themselves, the blasphemers are the last remnant of the faithful.

The derealization of the world

becomes particularly evident from the '60s onward.

Drug use is not the cause. Drug use is a symptom of a receding world and of a facile (chemical) attempt to reestablish connection with something beyond fugitive appearance.

The paradox: loss of metaphysical orientation does not increase contact with reality (as science promises) but the opposite. When physics supplants metaphysics, the world is emptied of meaning, becomes insubstantial. Science zombifies world.

Consumerism transforms the world into a garbage dump of disposable things and images. Disposability contributes to the sense that "nothing is real."

Like science, photography promises greater intimacy with reality but transforms reality into images. It virtualizes the world.

The demythification/demystification of the world undertaken by modern sociology turns the world into an ideological mirage. The demythified world shatters into fragments experienced in bewildering isolation from each other. (Christopher Nolan's Memento.)

This may account for why "identity" becomes a postmodern fetish. 

Unable to participate in a shared, consecrated reality, the postmodern subject compensates by sacralizing the self. However, flimsy postmodern identities resting on nothing more than narcissistic conceits do not yield sufficient existential assurance. Instead, they tend to induce "imposter syndrome." 

The derealization of the world and the self go hand in hand. They are aspects of modern mass psychosis.