Something very significant happened at the end of history. Now, Fukuyama’s end of history was not the actual end of history but the end of the Cold War and the universilazation of liberal principles in the late 20th century were about as big of a historical shift as one could get. Fukuyama’s end of history belongs with the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution in its significance. The liberal system of the late 20th century was not the final form of human government and society. It was a massive event, however. One major element of that shift, and arguably one of the fatal flaws of late 20th century liberalism was the pretense of the end of history. The world’s problems become much more abstract and esoteric after that.
The alienation of the individual in a globalized, liberal, society was one of the major etiologies of nationalism and threats to the liberal system but unlike the oppression of racial minorities or women, it is difficult to organize a political movement around that which is, in part, why liberalism may be doomed. What the psychological science says will reduce people joining the far-right and what the left thinks they should do are wildly different. They think, generally, like Childish Gambino’s “This is America” which is a stupid polemic because it is not America. It says that America is racist but fails to comprehend the etiology of the racism. This is a poem I wrote:
The Alienation of a Nazi (Globalization and the Individual) (March 5th, 2020)
Alone
In a Rome
With no home
And nowhere to go
The world is one
The polis is gone
The Aristotelian town
Is now dilute and a ghost
The little mouse
Was a mighty household
In a town
That is now a suburb
The mouse has lost to Moksha
He is one in a blob
And wants to get out
To be wanted and stout
He has gone mad with lust
The devil tempts his tongue
He is weak and doth succumb
For the promise of love
In a world where the social justice movements don’t understand the nebulous enemy they face. The average nationalist is like a rust belt worker who got laid off and feels empty on the inside but dealing with the alienation and depression of an ex-factory worker is way more sophisticated than how protests and political movements usually work. It is because the left doesn’t know how to fight such a nebulous enemy that they do things like fight British imperialism sixty years after the empire basically ended.
Queen Elizabeth II, as said in an earlier article on this blog, was born 341 years after the British empire started, got her job by accident of birth, and even if she had power which she did not, she over saw the abolition of the British Empire. They want to fight racism today but that enemy is too nebulous so they go back in time to when it was not nebulous. They’re fighting battles from the 1950s over again because modern racism is too subtle and its etiologies too esoteric to easily see or organize about.
The British have massive problems, right now. The worst is probably the Russian oligarch money and the energy cost crisis and the fact Liz Truss has decided to oppose a windfall tax and if anyone is going rise in indignation over British government policy, right now, they need to occupy Trafalgar Square and demand that windfall tax to bring down energy costs and also regulating oligarch money. That money is largely laundered in real estate so they could bring down London housing prices while confiscating the oligarchs’ property and the left should be screaming about that, too. But why protest something real when you can protest something symbolic?
My fellows on the left, I know y’all aren’t the brightest bunch, but please stop screaming about a monarchy without power while largely ignoring a prime minister and her cabinet with real power. Yet, the oligarch money and the housing prices are too wonky. Those particular ones are somewhat less abstract and esoteric than the alienation borne of globalization but somewhat is not enough. Of course, the windfall tax stuff and the housing intersects with race, too. Yet, unless the racism is as overt as Jim Crow or Marine le Pen, the left is too stupid to recognize it. Ergo, they’ll keep fighting dead causes like the British Empire.
We’ll keep fighting those old battles as long as the current ones are too wonky or too sophisticated. At a certainly level of complexity, the human brain makes society kill itself because the problems are too abstract.
The Autistic Resistance 