Beyond Liberalism: The emergence of new identity politics
Shahzada Rahim
Liberalism emerged as the most enduring philosophy of the enlightenment era but since the dawn of the 21st century, it seems dying in a vault.
‘Philosophy will not be able to effect immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavours. Only God can save us’.
These are the famous words of Martin Heidegger during his famous interview with Der Spiegel, in which he openly expressed his views about the crisis of liberal modernity and his contempt towards liberal dystopia.
The moral and capitalist adventure of liberalism has destroyed the very philosophical foundation of enlightenment. Basically, it is not the gangster-style authoritarianism that is threatening liberalism rather the co-opt resistance from the liberal elites, which betrayed the passion and shattered the hope of ordinary masses.
According to famous American writer Adam Gopnik’s definition, liberalism can be defined in two broad contexts: one is called ‘Fallibilism”, which refers to uncertainty in the domain of empirical knowledge and the other is called ‘Imperfectability’ that mainly emerged from the consumer hampered liberal capitalism. Indeed, these two ills severely damaged the philosophical foundation of liberal altruism and morality.
Is liberalism dead? The answer is yes, because as a philosophy and as an ideology, liberalism died a long time ago. It was the illiberal mantra of Capitalism that maintained liberal dystopia on the political surface while crushing its principles at the base.
Today, people are living in a hyper-delusional world, where people are confused with ideological underpinnings, civilizational cleavage, cultural disruption, anthropological idleness, sociological collapse and political chaos.
What is the way out, the people don’t know. Ordinary masses are suffering from the schizophrenia of their identity and communal miscarriage that gave birth to the perpetual crisis of essence and existence.
This is what we call a neo-identity crisis that supersedes communal politics over liberal national politics. The very ‘being’ of communities feel threatened by the fallible liberal mantra of openness and unpretentious individualism. It was the lack of dialectical thinking of liberal elites that brought liberalism at the cross-road of identitarian politics.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin during his recent exclusive interview with Financial Times said; “the liberal idea has become obsolete”. Basically, he was referring to the rising anti-liberal hysteria across the west, where identitarians are staunchly opposing immigration, assaulting multiculturalism and rejecting neo-liberal capitalism.
President Putin’s response has been widely misinterpreted by the western media because what he said is the living reality of our time.
Consequently, it was the liberal west which betrayed the ideals of liberal philosophy and the foundation of European enlightenment. Perhaps, the west is no more liberal and has never been liberal because the liberal slogans were disguised with the broader interest of the capitalist elites, which turned liberal enlightenment into capitalist corporatism.
Likewise, this liberal corporatism has given birth to political orthodoxy widely practiced by the western liberal elites, who prioritized market morality over personal and social morality.
Today, the ordinary masses are searching for a new direction in order to secure the realm of their personal morality. Thus, identity politics based on the philosophy of collective identities seems a new genuine way for securing the realm. Though, the liberal west calls it as the birth of ‘New Right’ but a large portion of the world population is supporting this new geopolitical trend.
Even famous American political commentator Francis Fukuyama admitted this new trend in his recently published book Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment.
What he said:
…the liberal world order did not benefit everyone and inequality increased dramatically worldwide, particularly in liberal democracies, and many of the benefits of growth flowed primarily to an elite defined primarily by education… supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together”.
With these words, Fukuyama openly admits the decaying liberal order, which once he deemed as the last government of human civilization.
Thus, the rise of Fourth political theory has put an end the feeble mantra of liberal world order by appealing to the anthropological sociology of collective identities. What Dugin writes in the “The Fourth Political theory”:
‘The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any ‘membership’. While the ideological struggle had formal opponents, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice — that of class, racism or statism, or individualism.
The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind. This is when the phenomenon of globalization entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society makes itself known, and the postmodern era begins. From now on, the individual subject is no longer the result of choice, but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity.’
In contrast, if people want to think beyond liberalism then the only opportunity which is knocking the doors of their mind is the philosophy of fourth political theory that appeals anthropological chronology and identitarian personal morality.
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(“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”) – Maggie T.
I remember being both surprised and appalled when I heard those words spoken aloud so many decades ago. I’ve now lived long enough to see such blatant oligarchic idiocy enshrined as the new – “common sense” – the new societal myth organizing our now “color-blind” version of our neoliberal, neocolonial project of complete and total planetary destruction.
Geeze – who could have seen this coming? Would you prefer your next illegal immoral “regime-change war” (WITH) or (WITHOUT) gender specific bathrooms here at home?
The intense focus on identity politics (all over the west, but especially in America) seems like an obvious attempt by the capitalist bankers to move the attention away from them and to get the plebs fighting among themselves (with deep emotional investment) over issues that pose no threat to the bankers.
And they seem to be very successful in that..
Standard diversion tactic.
What do we want?
Toilets for trannies!
When do we want them?
Now!
You hit the nail on the head in one short comment Daniel. Identity Politics has smothered and thoroughly defanged any genuine opposition to the elites aka The masters of the universe. The Zapatista’s and the Gilets Jaunes seem about the only exceptions to my knowledge.
Let’s just cut to the chase shall we… Dugin proposes two thinkers as his foundation: Evolva and Guenon, the first an apologist for Mussolini and the use of rape in political conflict and the second a mystic/satanist/freemason member of Action Direct (cogoullards).
enough said….
Identity politics is simply the ‘scientific’ weaponisation of the ancient identity conflict.
The mind in reaction to a misidentification sets its ‘self’ in image and form and is in that sense possessed of its own thinking rather than identified truly or transparently to relational being.
The dissonance of a self-conflict with Life is then framed as the need to adjust or change the image and form to fit the ‘imaged’ self judgement.
The aristocracy is a residual of the god-king right to rule from a time when ‘Gods’ enacted a loss of a a prior ‘paradise’ that their purpose was to restore as the order OVER chaos of its loss or fall. the nature of this chaos included to subjugation of the old by the younger and various combinations of rivalry in which other gods took ascendency or were considered as extensions and messengers of an earlier Power.
Nothing in our current cosmology allows any sense of what this common experience was – and is structured largely as a denial and escape FROM its triggers and associations – and yet the archetypes of such a ‘mythic’ age sets the structure of a developing ‘consciousness’ in imaged model that we call subjective consciousness because it is an object model or projection.
The Liberal movement was born in reaction in large part against an extremely callous and cruel aristocratic inheritance of presumption to rule without responsibility to the whole and the inherited power to enforce it with indifference to the consequence of an ignorant arrogance.
One of the means of displacing the framework of support for such distortion of psuedo-religious social organisation was the emergence of science and the middle classes that rose from the application of technologies that became a source of wealth, influence and power. And the weaponisation of science to unseat the tyranny and raise the idea of sovereignty from the ground up rather than top down.
However, look and see that the same themes operate through the new clothes but in perhaps more insidious ways.
The weaponisation and marketisation of science is effectively one part of a broad spectrum dominance of using the mind against itself – as the politics of the Big Lie that frames a mind capture in a polarised identity reaction.
Tolerance for difference does not means becoming a doormat or scapegoat for those with grievance to exact vengeance or fantasy vindication. And the weaponisation of grievance is the vector through which our sympathies are used to undermine an integrity of being.
What liberalism has become is a result of what it has been and is being used FOR.
Derogatory labels frame identity polarities and will always throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Redeeming our word is perhaps the beginning of the release of a false identity – that thinks it can only live on the subjugation or invalidation of another.
Aleksandr Dugin says facism has disappeared – I am not sure I agree with this.
Perhaps the most potent, and certainly most destructive influence on world events nowadays are corporate and banking entities?
They have bought off so-called democracies, and are especially adept at exploiting taxpayers money to fight a multitude of resource wars.
In this respect the military is little more than a tool hiding it’s real purpose behind phony rhetoric, such as delivering humanatarian aid, spreading democracy, or protecting ‘our way of life’ but at heart is an instrument at the disposal of exploitative powers used to intimidate weaker states (so as to acquire things that don’t belong to them such as oil, territory, opium, labour, etc.
At the same time banks are skilled at leveraging long-standing national debts such as those generated by Greece or across many of the African and Latin American countries to control certain forms social and political discourse, ‘austerity’ being just one example.
The media belongs to the same network playing a vital role in reality management thus depriving most of us of a better understanding of what these power structures are really up to.
Sometimes we see the casualities of this system such as they way Julian Assange or Jeremy Corbyn have been treated, i.e. those who have tried to challenge or at least expose its machinations.
Since such entities are unelected, total and remote I think it is possible to conceptualise them as a form of fascism, albeit one that is hidden: crypto-fascism.
At any rate whatever labels we apply they are largely responsible for generating the kind of social and economic chaos that makes it much easier for them to flourish while large swathes of the population remain unaware of how and why they are being played.
Rahim is getting there – there’s a mix of philospphy and critique that is difficult to accomplish in a short article. Most commentators who attempt this core critique of liberalism have difficulty making it plain and simple, because we have lived within the liberal political world system as people, East and West, for so long – 300 years. A key claim is that:
However, it goes much deeper than the elites. The people will never be “told” that liberalism died with modernism, and devolved (or slouched) into global corporatism. We have to make up our own minds that the king is dead. Prof. A Dugin is quoted here, who has perhaps proposed the most credible alternative so far – yet one that terrifies the elites to consider. Of course his Fourth Political Theory is called “fascist” as a poison pill, so that people will avoid reading or speaking of Dugin, as today liberals avoid truths such as those contained in Hillary’s emails on Wikileaks, as if merely considering another point of view might make one mentally ill. The Fourth Theory basically states the unit of political claim cannot be the individual or the world will be destroyed by endless growth, inherent in the monotonic capital accumulation of liberal globalism. Dugin claims Dasein is the next unit of formative power. The (anarchic) Greens could support this, if they dropped the liberal demand for global identity solidarity, which is really just a type of consumerism.
Rahim could say much more about his thoughts on Dugin, rather than just tossing off the quote. Because these theories are “new” it will be easy to argue, and I am not arguing for truth, only betterment. But let’s consider argument, the dialectic approach, to be an evolutionary process that leads to better knowledge.
As Marx already recognized, nothing does more to stunt the free unfoldment of individuality that capitalism, wage slavery and neo-liberal austerity. To identify capitalist (neo-)liberalism with ‘individualism’ – rather than egotism – is a fundamental error. So also is the false opposition of ‘individualism’ to some form of collective identity. Instead, like Martin Buber, we should understand that any collective is made up of units of relationship between individuals.
The true locus of social change is therefore neither the individual nor community – but the immediate relation of individuals to one another within any community. What is needed is what I call Relational Revolution – a transformation of the way individuals relate to each other within larger social groups – from egotism and the objectification of others to a capacity for new form of aware, embodied and resonant inter-subjectivity – an authentic capacity for Inter-Being (‘Mitsein’ in Heidegger). Individuals flower through deep and authentic relations with each other – not through buying into a marketplace of branded personal, ideological or collective identities. NB the author could at least have quoted Heidegger correctly. Heidegger said “Only a god can save us now” and not “Only God can save us”.
Indeed, very well said.
So the next obvious question/inquiry is – where will this very necessary “Relational Revolution” stem from? What would bring it about? How will it come into being?
What CAN bring it about? What can bring about such a deep (and very very necessary) transformation in the way we relate to each other and the world?
And perhaps some clues to that might be found in inquiring – what has prevented that from happening up to now? Both socially/culturally and economically and psychologically.
What is fascism? Is it not a collective identity fixated on the Higher; the Superior; the Ideal? That is it is a fixated ontological personality cathexed on the Idealism of the Transcendent. A Transcendent that is fixed in identity, both mind- and time-independent …as Becker might put it: an ersatz immortal and absolutised identitarianism?
We choose our cults because of our lack, inferiority, and fear of mortality. Our deficiencies that are primordially caused by our imaginative ontological constructivism of the Higher; the Superior; and the Ideal.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution; the Fourth Globalisation (Globalisation 4.0); the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) …looks like four is the magic number?
It must be coincidence, right? No, not at all. It was the principle theme of Davos/Klosters WEF 2019:
“Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
Welcome to ‘globalisation 4.0’: the green neoliberal Zeitgeist. Neoliberalism 1.0-3.0 (Classical Liberalisms) are dead: long live neoliberalism 4.0 – the Fourth Political Theory or ‘pre-Liberalism’.
If you are not steeped in Katehon: you will have no idea what I am talking about. Let’s call it ‘Duginism’. Let me note that Dugin is the ‘Russian Heidegger’. The Fourth Political Theory (4PT) is a reactionary stance to Classical Liberalism that proposes a return to pre-Enlightenment traditional values. Not to the Greek Realism of Platonic and Aristotelian political theory: but to the traditional (neo-Volkisch) political theory of late Heidegger.
Here I can make two bold statements: this is the most crucial and timely philosophical essay OffG has published …and the most dangerous. If you do not follow philosophers: you probably cannot understand why.
First: let me note that Stephen Hicks and Dugin use exactly the same model. Not a similar model: exactly the same. I am merely noting the correlation, not suggesting any collusion or even contact. I even adopted the model myself as the ‘slippery slope’ model: with Classical Liberalism (CL) in the centre, occupying the higher ground (the 1st Political Theory (1PT)). Any movement to the left or right and you are on the slippery slope to the left and right collectivisation of identity. Communism to the left (the 2nd PT (2PT)) and fascism to the right (3PT.)
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/fourth-political-theory-shortest-presentation
Whereas Hicks uses the model to defend CL: you may recognise the model in Jordan Peterson’s thinking (slippery slopes to totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the gas chamber) …Dugin uses the model to propose the Heideggerian solution proposed above.
This is perhaps the most dangerous political theory ever proposed. To understand why: you have to understand philosophers. To do that: you have to understand the transcendent conception of Being.
You might have noticed me saying that you cannot understand politics unless you understand the philosophy of Being (ontology). This essay hints at why. Dugin’s philosophy is an existentialism that closely follows Husserlian ‘phenomenology’ and Heidegger’s Being in the world – Dasein. A notoriously difficult conception I am not going to wrestle with here – except to point out that the relationship between Dasein – Being in the world – and sein – being in the world (that’s me writing or you reading – activated being) …is a conceptual fascism. Which if manifest widely in the world will become literal fascism.
As a political theory: Dasein can take on regional variations to become something like the Zeitgeist ‘spirit of the nation’. If think that is cool; think of Sacred Germany and the Volkisch tradition. Oh yeah, I see what you mean now, BB.
Authentic Being confirmed onto ‘Blood and Soil’ environmentalism; Heimat (homeland); and the Volkisch mystique = the ‘green wing’ of Nazism. Which is all overlooked as a Western demonisation of Heidegger by Dugin and his cabal of sycophants.
But it is not. Humanities obsession with conceptual Being is destroying us. We are being tyrannised by an invisibilised identitarian fascism. It’s in the language; it’s in the political theory; it’s in epochal thought …it’s fucking everywhere. The conceptual monolithic ontology of Being – as an absolutised, superiorised, permanent fixation in thought – inferiorises and infantalises being (that’s us) …imperfect subjective identity (that’s me) – and is the source of our neuroses and lack-based desire. But that is a whole other philosophical pantheon.
Suffice to say: this might seem like a rather benign article. Proposing a successor state to Classical Liberalism. But it is not. Not if you understand the Idealism behind it. It’s fucking dangerous. And it is informing the Fourth wave of eco-fascism emanating from the WEF/UN. It’s everywhere when you recognise it. Liberalism is not dead. It is coming right at you as ecological liberalism: a neo-Volkisch neoliberalism 4.0.
The historiography of philosophy is now a political matter. It is a “philosophy-becoming-the-world” revitalisation of libertarian fascistic Being …when we actually need to move from identitarian Being to processual Becoming to embodied Seeing. Which is a shift from ontological to epistemological phenomenology …post-Being. And that really is a whole other ecosophy.
Once you understand the idea, how it manifests in the world, and how imperfect philosophical idealisms become actualised as political realities …you will see how dangerous this is. De nada.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/02/24/aristotle-on-immigration-diversity-and-democracy/
BigB, either we can sit around & re-invent the wheel, or discuss the wheels of progress to the point where we have already played ‘god’ & determine societal ‘FORTUNES’ and distribution of same, deploying Plasma Physics & the Physics of ‘Societal Swarming’ that most fail to even consider, when wishing to discuss Thermodynamics & Entropy … that’s reality.
Personally, I’m expecting to hear much about Aristotle revived, by your new P.M. 😉
sadly . . .
In a Gramscian vein: we’re all philosophers now.
Hicks and Dugin – each in their own way – propose the ending of humanities inquiry into itself. Hicks by negating all post-Enlightenment philosophy – except Anglo-American analytical philosophy …Logical Atomism; Posivitism and Empiricism. Dugin wants to graft Heideggerian existentialism onto Hellenism. Do you want to be socially engineered into the neo-Volkisch Republic hybrid? Me neither.
The recursion into the Eternal Return of Being is not a mere philosophical arcane diversion: it is the future of humanity. If nothing else: it reveals the Ruling Class mentality …philosophy becoming psychology. It’s all strictly Cartesian. Split reality = split humanity.
Unbeknownst to just about everyone who does not follow these things: cognitive neuroscience negates all previous philosophy/psychologies …right up to cognitivism. All previous thought is ‘disembodied’. Consciousness is ’embodied’. Science is moving on and is on the verge of eclipsing all Cartesian ontological thought …realigning our disembodied a priori transcendent imaginations with our empirical embodiment.
It has been on the cusp for a hundred years: but if science moves slowly …political theory is positively immune to progress. So it chooses regress and recursion of Idealisms that have already turned fascistic …like Classical Liberalism. How do you suppose the philosophical reset of ‘neo-Volkisch’ ‘sustainable’ Liberalism will turn out? Not least with the very same ‘global governance’ architectures of institutionalised power, truth, and dominion over.
It is the whole thing of narrative construction, perception management, and narrative control. Whoever controls the narrative shapes the ontological identity of the Dasein. Then a priori runs the polity of conforming to the ontological image of Dasein …using behavioural change applied psychological means. For a ‘theory of change’ campaign you have to have an a priori transcendent model of where you want the communities of consent to go. That’s Dasein. Or Being.
That is where technocracy, philanthrocapitalism, and surveillance capitalism want us to go. Especially if you add in a big dollop of Nietzschian ‘Ubermensch’. Ironically, Heidegger was a technophobe. Do you think the ruling class are purists when they play mix-n-match fascisms! 😀
Laughing too much for words, this moment >>> but this leads to a journey where the ruling classes have less of a road map than they ever imagined and we have all the advantages, intuitively & numerically … do you think the ruling classes are capable of writing the algorithmic code for mix n’ match fascists with ‘Parallel Platforms’, without back doors into the mindset of IBM’s Watson & MIT elementary conclusions in programming ? 🙂
Michel Kosinki’s OCEAN or CANOE profiling programme, of all historic 2008 events, which enabled the Mercers & Cambridge Analytica subsequently to assist Trump & probably Johnson next, will in reality be more valuable to humanity than any financial bailout or ‘Socialism for the Rich’ in futures bright & binary: profile the ruling class purists of neo-liberal mix n’ match fascist doctrines of anything PC, First …
Just a thought 🙂 Dasein _ be there or be square, on Epstein’s Island ?
e.g. what does “consumer hampered” in the phrase “consumer hampered liberal capitalism” mean?
Even in the first sentence what is “dying in vault”?
Reading this I was struck by how you cannot be quite shure of the meaning of any of the sentences. Is this post-modernism?
There is, of course, a computer programme to generate postmodernist essays, which sound like academic discourse but are just meaningless nonsense. However, I suspect if this essay had been generated by such a computer programme, it would be less obviously nonsensical and meaningless.
Alan Sokal demonstrated beyond doubt back in 1996 that the postmodernists are a bunch of intellectual charlatans.
“… the postmodernists are a bunch of intellectual charlatans.”
wonderful @self-celebratoryparties, when yer’ in the mood to let rip,
or should I spell that R.i.P. as one exits through the ashes of ole’ bridges burning . . . 🙂
There is, of course, a computer programme to generate postmodernist essays, which sound like academic discourse but are just meaningless nonsense.
This statement seems to exclude the possibility that much actual academic discourse is itself meaningless nonsense. However, it is far from clear that there are criteria which could reliably distinguish between “real” postmodernism, and the output of the Postmodernism Generator.
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Putin was saying that a life without spirit is self consuming and incapable of regeneration.
The author is just another false prophet.
A most timely article to help readers consider the true essence of Freedom and how science must rule over any liberal notions of fantasy philosophy …
You have a right to freedom of thought and a finite number of quantifiable actions and choices …
What you don’t have, for example, is the universal right to spray Stratospheric Aerosols and formulate Solar Radiation Mirrors or A.I.M.s, Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors (as I call them) and geo-engineer the weather over my garden (as if playing ‘GOD’ with HAARP) and determine weather & whether I have something to eat & drink, after my gardening efforts and expenditure of energy & natural resources on the H2O quintessential elements of life …
With any form of rights you construct some form of accountability, Responsibility & REACTION, in others, to the finite Data of Scientific Consequences, from your actions : And if we have to personally come and destroy your equipment, that determines weather, we will do that: people better start discussing what NATO does to engineer others FORTUNES, before they even begin to discuss climate >>> WTFU, wake the fuck up, because that feeling of Liberty and the USS Liberty, will never die . . . and reactions follow !
.
Review of “Identity” 23.7.2019
A masterpiece of indoctrination and pro corporate-feudal innuendo by a shill and an apologist for the little admired U$A Dark State (the empire puppet masters). That aside, FF’s eager and parrot-like repetitiveness more suited to a first year A level entrant out of his depth, desperate to impress his parents in Langley, Virginia.
Would this book impress humankind within e.g. Palestinian, Chinese and Iranian societies? No.
Will the book appeal to the 1% who profit from divisiveness and ‘othering’? Yes.
Is this book a waste of public funds (bought by public libraries)? Yes
.
Chuckle, ta for that: maybe I’ll give it a miss then, as we have matters far more pressing to discuss, like, who actually pays for the Stratospheric Aerosols to reduce Solar Radiation and determine every-body-every-body’s biosphere, climate, water, health & food supplies, oh & weather; & with what ‘Free Roaming’ additives in societal futures and with a collective responsibility to quantify same to others, who cares ? free4all … spray your wares squirt & shoot, do what the fuck you want, science will determine outcomes, brutally if necessary …
#Right2determineE.E.? Everything-everything …
praise be to God, Jesus is finally reborn in the form
of corporate fascist controlled computing competence … PC4 short, lol
What could possibly go wrong now . . . ?
With Liberal notions of the extreme …
There you go and I didn’t even ask for the decades long History of Data for electricity consumption, spikes & troughs of HAARP Electronics …
(whoops, damn it, that was cheap ) 😉
Yes – that review is good enough for me. I’m not even sure what “liberalism” is supposed to mean – unless it is based on that notion, prevalent throughout my own lifetime, that the bold West had managed to achieve the perfect society: a middle-of-the-road wonderland avoiding those nasty extremes of Right and Left, thus a kind of restrained capitalism. If the last three or so decades prove anything it is that capitalism can never be restrained, that it must constantly change, constantly destroy and create – only to further destroy etc. all the while facilitating the most brutal shift of wealth from the have-nots to the haves. And while all this is going on, the old bleating about “Be all you can be!”, “Realise your potential”, “Rising tide raises all boats” etc. becomes increasingly fraudulent. We are seeing the end of “capitalism with a friendly face”.
Thank you, George. According to Britannica online.. “Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognise that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.”
No mention of bombing the have-nots. No mention of facilitating the murder shooting and imprisonment of other people’s children. No mention of puppets acting for the so-called elite. No mention of deceiving 99% of humankind. As far as I can see!!
Molloy
These tendencies toward an increasingly atomised social order are,in a qualitative sense nothing new but they are more widespread and fashionable. Emile Durkheim for one recognised the disruptive, centrifugal forces within a liberal capitalist order in his two principle works – ‘Suicide’ and ‘The Division of Labour in Society’ the second of which was an explicit polemic directed against against Adam Smith who extolled the virtues of liberal capitalism. We have reached the stage of what Durkheim referred to as ‘Anomie’ or ‘Normlessness’. A weakening of the integrative ties which hold society together. The bonds of social cohesion (shared collective culture) is a function of and gives rise to society. Society and rampant, nihilistic individualism (best epitomised by the likes of Ayn Rand) are ultimately incompatible. ED writes:
”If, in activities which almost completely fill our days, we have no rule save that of our own self-interest, as we understand it, how then can we acquire a taste for altruism, for forgetfulness of self and sacrifice? Thus the lack of any economic discipline cannot fail to produce effects that spill over beyond the economic sphere, bring with it a decline in public morality …Thus moral or legal rules essentially express social needs, which society alone can identify. (The Division of Labour in Society – .xxxiv-xxxv)
There is therefore an eternal tension between the pull of culture and society, and the pull of individualistic egoism. In Freudian terms between the Id and the Super-ego. In our own age the Id (chaos) has become rampant and culture (society and its demands) has retreated. But this situation is not necessarily terminal – very serious but not terminal. At the present time notions of self-sacrifice, duty, morality, are under attack from the liberal nihilists who seem to have the wind behind their backs. However, there message is beginning to weaken in the gradual emergence of a counter-culture. Turning to Orwell (once again) he uncovers the shifting polarity between these tendencies.
”Society (i.e. culture, rules, duties, sacrifice) has always to demand a little bit more from human beings than what it will get. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, be faithful to their wives and must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing . The whole of what we might call official literature is founded on such assumptions … without seeming to hear a chorus of raspberries from the millions of common men and women to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless these high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat (Churchill) always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety first and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face child-bed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in torture chambers, battleships go down with decks awash and still firing. It is only that the other element (ego) in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer, who is inside all of us, can never be completely suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.”
(George Orwell – The Art of Donald McGill – in Decline of the English Murder – 1941)
For me, reality.
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt
For example. “Hello, Good Evening and Welcome to the BBC.”
All of us are surrounded by bullsxxt and sociopaths. “We’re now going over to Number Ten (to hear more lies and bollix).”
“… the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
― Harold Pinter
I’ve thought for some time now that the emergence of contemporary identity politics was a reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. At that time, a rather disparate group of economic ideologies came together to recognise that the debt fuelled neoliberal corporatism was deeply damaging.
Conservatives and libertarians didn’t like the debt. Socialists and, to a lesser extent liberals, didn’t like the spiralling wealth divide. Everyone was beginning to recognise the hand in glove fit of financial corruption and state corruption.
Normal people of all stripes were becoming aware of things like fractional reserve banking. This conglomerate had to be broken.
Step in Identity Politics 21st century style. The perfect tool to make sure those groups with different outlooks on life will stop talking to each other and eventually develop a deeper divide than any point in recent history.
Not only has neutered critique of the economy and monetary systems, the anti-war movement has been all but abolished.
Of course, I’ll admit I might be wrong, and it was all just a naturally emerging phenomena. Was it just a coincidence that benefits the establishment?
The central idea of Coincidence Theory, is that the sort of coincidences which are most likely to occur, are those which benefit the establishment.
In fact, establishment-benefitting coincidences hardly ever fail to occur, at exactly the most opportune time. Which is quite fortunate, because otherwise somebody would have had to make the effort to engineer a similar outcome.
I wonder sometimes about what and when new articles are introduced here… i hope i am wrong.
Anyway – i believe Putin gave a wide ranging interview to the FT very recently that covered the liberalism (more correctly neo-liberlism).
Full text is available fot free from the official kremlin site.
Is ‘liberalism’ really dying or has the name ‘leberal’ had its meaning stolen and been re-assigned as the name of a thing which is dying?
My take would be that atomisation has exhausted or is exhausting itself. The author correctly identifies that liberalism focuses, in part, on the individual, that atom of society. It is a neat fit with materialism’s focus on the apparently indivisible. And yet no matter how deep or small we go, the ‘parts’ we find can be further divided. This infinite regress into nothingness, captured by the likes of Heidegger and Nietzsche, confronts us with a self, as if seen in a dark mirror, whom we cannot quite perceive. We want to find a clear objective Truth, but instead find ‘nothing’ there but ourselves, denuded of ‘identity’ via endless fracturing, gazing back confused and impotent: quite ironic really.
Liberalism did not start out this way, but it was fueled by science, which is analytical, divides systems into piece-parts to better understand them. This intellectual machinery has become a frenzy of materialistic, scientistic obsession that can no longer see the hand in front of its face.
Beautifully put, Toby,
science wouldn’t last a minute without the BEAUTY & WONDER
of Knowledge . . .
“Liberalism did not start out this way…”
In Locke’s head? Nor did Eden, in God’s head.
Precisely. Change is the only constant. But I guess I might have added: Don’t throw the babe out with the toiletries.
I was ‘freed’ from my membership in a community by continual bullying for years.
Communities are far from perfect and are characterised by anti intellectual thugs imposing through violence, emotional virulence, slave-like wages and covert surveillance.
If you think I and my kind will waste one second signing up to that rubbish, you need to see a head shrink.
Agreed. Symptomatic. Both Fukuyama and this article, seemingly, ignore deliberate divisiveness which benefits only the 0.1%. fwiw, please see my critique of the “Identity” (divisive) book in the main comments.
.
Unfortunately, all of that can exist without identity as well.
What we are seeing today is the rejection of the existing order, which serves the interests of a fraction of one per cent of the population.
I wouldn’t call it liberalism, which has connotations of moderation, generosity, open mindedness and progressive policies.
I would call it crony capitalism, crapitalism, parasitic financial rent seeking, a looting kleptocracy, neo feudalism, call it what you like. Wealth and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The great mass of the population are ground down into a generalised serfdom, where everything required for a civilised existence is steadily stripped away from them.
Privatisation, deregulation and financialisation of the economy, serving the interests of a tiny minority. 6,000 people in the US and 5,000 in the UK who own and control the vast bulk of the wealth, and whose interests are served by the political and media establishment, which they also own and control.
Most of the world’s population lives on less than $3 a day.
Even in western countries, people work hard all their lives with little to show for it. Declining living standards, endemic insecurity, struggling to scrape a living.
There is very little worth preserving or defending in our existing system.
A sham democracy provides a fig leaf of respectability for rapacious exploitation and criminality.
Concepts such as freedom of speech, civil liberties and the rule of law, are fictions which bear little resemblance to reality.
That is the system we have to move beyond.
All it has to offer is poverty, exploitation, suffering, gross degeneracy, hopelessness and despair, and an animal like degraded existence.
When is a concept a fiction?
when a fixation of the imagination, becomes science fiction reading anti-matter … 😉
“Capitalism has Failed !” Christine Lagarde 26/7th May 2014, Mansion House,
to the guests of LDR (Lynn d’Rothschild)
“but there remains the possibility for a future inclusive Capitalism”
and low & behold, Prince Charles, a few years later …
https://www.inc-cap.com/
Now we only need to know whether Ms. Lagarde finally paid any form of taxation on her wages from the IMF in Washington D.C. all these years of austere endurance and will she be paying any taxes anywhere, anytime, in future, as boss of the ECB: and a Lawyer by trade & training, one would think she’d lead by example, surely ? 😉
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/05/try-to-contain-your-laughter-prince-charles-and-lady-de-rothschild-team-up-to-talk-about-%E2%80%98inclusive-capitalism%E2%80%99/
Beyond capitalism, it might be wise to study the physics of societal ‘Swarming’, before any global warming & climate change in media & communications of vested interests:-
then followed by the chemistry & biology of our biosphere: because the only direct route to any form of peaceful co-existence is to eradicate poverty of mind, body & soul, first …
From the top down, of course, just like you clean your car or a fish …
Ikijime for longevity in preserving resources 🙂
http://www.ikijime.com/
I haven’t had a car since the early 1970z and I don’t have a fish. Fish have fish, in the same way as animals don’t have names, in the sense that if they do they don’t tell us what they are. Fish clean themselves in clean water. If you don’t find a good translation for “have dominion over” you are knee deep in the Zionist trap even before Cain first slew Abel already.