To me this song is more about the insanity of religion.
The light that no-one can see is your intangible god.
"What inspires in us this madness
That our existence should be defined
By a light that we can’t see? "
Is like "What made us believe that some intangible thing controls us?"

"By our blindness and stupidity
We kill everything. "
Crusades anyone?

To me this song is more about the insanity of religion.
The light that no-one can see is your intangible god.
"What inspires in us this madness
That our existence should be defined
By a light that we can’t see? "
Is like "What made us believe that some intangible thing controls us?"

"By our blindness and stupidity
We kill everything. "
Crusades anyone?

Wow. This song is the very definition of existentialism.

VNV NATION "SONG MEANINGS" INSIDE
15 page interview with Ronan Harris.

http://dancemusic.about.com/od/artistshomepages/a/VnVNationInt.htm

"we are a nation of communities... a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky"
-George H W Bush

If you really want to understand this song I suggest you look up carbon on wikipedia like I just did and see how much clearer it seems suddenly... Here's just a piece: "The name "carbon" comes from Latin language carbo, or coal. Carbon compounds form the basis of all life on Earth and the carbon-nitrogen cycle provides some of the energy produced by the Sun and other stars. Although it forms an extraordinary variety of compounds, most forms of carbon are comparatively unreactive under normal conditions."

Just to make a light is a double metaphor. In one sense it's referring to how important our lives seem to us yet when we die and decompose we eventually meet up with all the dinosaur bones and become petroleum or coal which is then mined (we cut the earth until it bleeds rain ashes from the sky just to make a light) to be burned for fuel or electricity so we can light up the darkness at night if we feel so inclined to not sleep. The other point here is that we as life are essentially pure energy. The light that no one sees is the light that comes from within us connecting us to the divine that is named in the song as the traditional religious deity that we recognize as ourselves yet we cover our eyes so with our blindess and stupidity we kill everything by denying responsibility and deflecting it to some authority outside. Then it also refers to the traditional pagan or scientific creator usually symbolized as the Sun (monuments in darkness standing watch until the sun will rise) once again both the artificial light used at night but it also speaks to how spiritually navigate through life by our own light or connection to God, our guardian angel if you will watches out for us until the time we rise to greet the day of true destiny (a million points of light ascending to the sky).

There's a line from a Skinny Puppy song that keeps popping up in my head to further explain this "I only kill to know I'm alive".. Humans learn by trial and error. We don't seem to know what's right until we figure out what's wrong. We learn from our mistakes. In order to create you must destroy. It is this dual nature that causes us to love despite how much it hurts. We kill everything to see if we can feel anything (what inspires in us this madness that out existence should be defined by a light that can't be seen by anyone) and we do feel it madly. We struggle everyday of our lives driven by something we will never be able to explain- love. Love for self that keeps us alive then that which contadicts it completely, a love for everything outside that we seek to attract and please like lovers & family or a love for God that we seek but never behold with our eyes. Our passion is what defines us, the will to shine (that without this light we are no more) keeps us alive.

To be honest with VNVs lyrics and all lyrics I dont think there is a solid meaning for them, yeah, Ronan had a meaning for it when he wrote it, he is singing about whatever he was thinking when he wrote the song. My belief is that everyones meaning to the lyrics is true, if it means something to someone and if the lyrics say something to someone then to that person that meaning is correct.

To me it all makes so much sense singing about how blindness and stupidity is killing everything because thats true, the world is being destroyed by blindness, stupidity and greed and the lyrics 'What inspires in us this madness that our existence should be defined by a light that we can't see?' I dont believe in a God, not just for the reason that he cant be proven to exist but this is what this lyric means to me.

VNV Nation has a habit of writing lyrics which make you stop and rethink everything.

This song I believe is about how we push instinct and nature aside to glorify ourselves and our deities. "The light that no one can see" represents a higher being, and "we cut the Earth until it bleeds, rain ashes from the sky, just to make [it]" can refer to crusades, suicide bombings, perhaps a nuclear holocaust inspired by religious difference.

The most meaningful lines to me in this song:
"I can�t see this all as progress
How did we come this far when we see ourselves as deities,
Claim nature for ourselves?
By our actions we betray the instincts in our race
By our blindness and stupidity
We kill everything, we kill everything. "