Charles Taylor has just been describing various, deleterious, stances that secular people take in the so-called immanent frame; you’ll see those referred to in the quote I am going to provide from him below. What I want to focus on is the third way that people in the secular frame, according to Taylor, engage with the world. It is resonant with a way that I have observed and reflected with on my own; based on my own experiences in the world, and an attempt to exegete them thusly. Indeed, what Taylor will be describing for us is the way of the Corporatist; the way that is “nihilating,” seemingly, the whole world right now (I am feeling that nihilation myself currently, as I may well lose my job because of this sort of secular stance in the world). The corporatist stance, ultimately, in my view, and in Taylor’s, respectively, is the Übermenschen way; the way associated with Nietzsche’s nihilism. Taylor writes: 

Moving along a spectrum from the Bolshevik, we can come to a stance which has abandoned universal benevolence and the moral order of mutual benefit. This is a Nietzschean stance, which rejects equality and benevolence because it sees them as levelling, and catering to the lowest in us, to comfort and security. It seeks heroism. A form of this can connect to the titanic, as in Jünger’s Der Arbeiter phase. Or it can take a milder form of élite rule by Übermenschen, where everything subserves their heroism and dedication to excellence. 

Here the first positive part of the answer is no longer benevolence, but the idea that the human type demands realization of its excellence, and only the few can do this; so they must go ahead. The rest can perhaps get some satisfaction in knowing that they subserve this, but if not, they have to be sacrificed. The enemy here is not suffering, but a sinking into sloth, mediocrity, meaninglessness. The second process, marking one’s distance, comes from the élitism of this outlook. Only the excellent truly count. 

The animus here against liberalism/socialism is the Nietzschean one, that they make their major end succouring the weak, ending suffering, bringing about equality. They stifle the need of the highest spirits for excellence, self-overcoming, risk, heroism. You are ready to put your life on the line: Hegel’s “Daransetzen”; you are ever ready to “have at them”: Jünger’s “Draufgängertum”. These superior beings are eager to affront suffering in their drive to a higher life; and they are ready to face death. They reverse the field of fear. They hold to a warrior ethic. Precisely for this reason, they have to fight off the temptation of pity. They have to steel themselves against engulfment, and take the cold distance of disengagement. So their answer to the power of evil, at least for part of it, the drive to violence, is to internalize it, and baptise it, as it were, consecrate it to the striving for excellence; marrying the Übermensch, the primitive, and the highest. This is a modern variant of that internalization/concentration of the numinous in violence that I spoke of in the previous section. Again Jünger of the ‘20s seems to be tempted onto this path. This is the dark side of his Nietzscheanism, which was vulgarized in Nazi racism.1 

Corporatist oligarchs seem to fit this bill most these days. Operating as the saviors of the world through their fiscal overachieving, at all costs. As if the only thing that matters is the Almighty Dollar, as a witness to their achievements as conquerors of the world. Indeed, currently we are seeing these ‘masters of the universe’ place themselves into a position wherein they believe that their reality, as the Supermen/women of the world is more important than the lives and livelihoods of the people they use to elevate their star into the heavens. Nothing else matters, but their commitment to overcome all odds; and their badge of honor is how much money, and thus power, their respective companies produce. They are Nietzche’s nihilators. They only live in the face of the absurd by living from it. The people they trample on to achieve their statuses are simply the fodder they require to overcome; the dead and wrangled bodies of their serf-class, are simply the ladders to their self-possessed development as the Übermensch that they seek out as the very esse of their existence.  

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 682-83.