Overcoming delusion

For the past twenty years or so, I have been trying to understand the nature of ideological delusion in human thought and behavior. My quest was initially inspired by the realization that I had myself been deluded over and over again, during the last four decades of the twentieth century, while participating in various political movements and related intellectual debates. To the extent that such a thing is possible, I then set out to free myself from those delusions, by making sure that I had just as rigorous an attitude toward proof when dealing with ideas that I liked as when dealing with ideas that I did not like.

It soon became obvious to me, that although my own experiences had to do with such modern ideologies as atheism, socialism, economic nationalism and utopian theories of education, the problem of delusion certainly applies at least as much to such atavistic ideologies as conservative populism, fundamentalist religion and ethnic imperialism. Not to mention the major varieties of modern capitalism, differentiated by their greater or lesser emphasis on the private sector or the public sector: economic liberalism, or laissez-faire, now called neoliberalism; social-democratic (“Keynesian”) capitalism; fascism, or “national-socialism”; and state capitalism, often mistakenly referred to as “communism”.

In fact, it seems clear to me now that every kind of human ideology ever invented, whether of a religious or of a secular nature, inevitably suffers, to a greater or a lesser degree, from self-inflicted ego-projections, or delusions. These deliberately-adopted cognitive distortions constantly undermine and deflate every attempt to use any of those systems of belief as a useful guide to action in the real world. I read Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, before I embarked on my own ideological odyssey, and I might have saved myself a lot of grief it I had taken his message more seriously. At the time, however, I thought that his analysis had to be faulty because it was being used by establishment politicians to justify their own derisive attitude toward anything they considered too radical.

Being in favor of the status quo, however, does not in any way absolve people from acting in the same “true believer” fashion as the ultra-left-wing and ultra-right-wing radicals that Hoffer denounced. Truly believing that slogans like “free enterprise” and “representative democracy” justify the domination of society by privileged liberal or conservative investors, is every bit as radically deluded as truly believing that slogans like “living space (lebensraum)” or “dictatorship of the proletariat” justify the domination of society by privileged fascist or “communist” (state-capitalist) investors.

Changing the slogans and the mechanisms of capitalist domination (more emphasis on private property or more emphasis on public property) do not change the underlying reality behind those systems, all of which are premised on letting a very small number or rich and/or powerful people lord it over a very large number of much less privileged people. Social-democratic, or “Keynesian” capitalism, like that practiced in some of the Scandinavian countries, alleviates the pain somewhat for most people, but it does not really solve the problem.

Also, it makes no difference to the reality of ruling-class domination if the ideologies and the slogans being used to uphold sadomasochist social behavior are of a secular or a religious nature. Recently, I added atheist Richard Dawkins’ best-seller, The God delusion (2006), to my collection of readings on ideological alienation. He did an excellent job denouncing various religious distortions of reality, most of which are premised on the invention of imaginary, other-worldly beings and places that are supposed to make it possible to right all the wrongs committed in this world, somewhere over the rainbow. Although Dawkins carefully avoids making this point, the main advantage to rich and powerful people of positing the existence of immaterial gods and paranormal worlds is that it takes the onus off today’s rulers to at least appear to govern society in everyone’s interest rather than in just their own interests. “Revolutionary” totalitarian politicians accomplish exactly the same public-relations task by also inventing “brave new worlds”, superhuman heroes and “golden dawns”.

I stopped believing in God myself over 50 years ago, but I have always felt that the most important shortcoming of the well-known atheists whose works I have read so far, is that most of them seem very reluctant to apply their devastating, rationalist critiques of religious fairy tales to any of the world’s equally deluded secular ideologies. Ergo, the most important contributions to the fight against delusion come from devastating critiques of both religious and secular forms of deception, as in the impressive 2014 essay written by Sophie Bessis, La double impasse: l’universel à l’épreuve des fondamentalismes religieux et marchand. Her message is that both religious and neoliberal forms of fundamentalism are making it increasingly difficult to build any kind of international humanism.

Since the end of the Cold War, most of the naive, revolutionary or democratic socialist delusions of the past, which were quite popular back then, were largely replaced by ultra-capitalist neoliberalism, that rapidly became the dominant ideology of our time. Even nominally communist, socialist and social-democratic parties have adopted neoliberalism, as has become absurdly obvious in France, for example, not only during the Socialist Party presidency of François Mitterrand (1981-1995), but also since François Hollande became president (2012). Nowadays, neoliberalism is still immensely popular among the ruling elites all over the world, but a chaotic cacophony of competing brands of neoconservative populism has also emerged alongside it.

The Donald Trump takeover of the US Republican Party is only the latest, but perhaps the most dangerous, example of a world-wide trend toward increasingly reactionary, atavistic, neofascist ideas and movements. Ultra-right-wing political forces are on the move all over the place, not only in the USA, but also in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the Islamic world, India, China, Japan and just about everywhere else. Unfortunately, an epidemic of conflicting, but also curiously converging, delusions is currently infecting every part of the world. These infectious ideological diseases are making it increasingly unlikely that any kind of rational solution will ever be successfully applied to any of humanity’s currently most perilous problems: environmental destruction, extreme social polarization, economic paralysis and multipolar geopolitical confrontation.

All the world’s numerous ultra-conservative, populist movements initially sprang up as national or regional reactions to speculative, neoliberal globalization, which started gradually taking over world politics and an increasingly battered world economy during the 1980s. In the neoliberal version of pre-psychotic thinking, that has been adopted by almost all the important decision-makers (VIPs) on the planet since then, people can do everything that really needs to be done, control all useful development in society and in the economy, on a totally business-oriented, private-enterprise basis.

Neo-liberals seem to truly believe that all that is required to make their system work “successfully” is to convince every institutional investment board, every politician and every government, into doing precisely what they are told to do every day by the gnomes in Zurich, the City (financial district) of London and associated centers of professional tax evasion and non-productive investment, spread out all over the globe. Since Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees was first published back in 1714, the economic-liberal capitalists of days gone by and the more recent wave of neoliberal capitalists, have always believed that what they euphemistically call the “market” (a pseudonym for the world’s richest investors) has to control “society” (a pseudonym for everyone else), not the other way around.

But all that the hopelessly “inferior”, “ordinary” (non-VIP) people in every country ever got out of believing in any of that laissez-faire gobbledegook was the kind of horrendous financial crises like the one that struck again in 2007-2009, and the total paralysis in productive investment that inevitably follows such a calamitous event. This time around, financial stagnation has persisted right up to the present day, in spite of the herculean efforts of the world’s most important central banks, spending astronomic sums of public money on too-big-to-fail bailouts. Nine years after it began, world-wide financial impotence still shows no signs of ever going away.

Once the ideological blinders are swept aside, the obvious reason why that is so, is that neoliberalism has brought us back full circle to the gilded society (as depicted in “Downton Abbey”), of the decades preceding the First World War. As a result, a very small number of super-rich people are once again living alongside a very large number of much less prosperous people, even in countries like the USA, where all the wealth created since 1979 has gone to a very small percentage of the total population. As a result, large parts of the USA, and dozens of other neoliberal nations, are once again starting to resemble pauper nations like Haiti, which were never allowed to abandon the “masters and servants” model of the nineteenth century. Several decades of neoliberalism have almost completely eliminated the very large, well-paid, industrial working class that was initially fostered by Henry Ford (in Detroit!), and then gradually expanded in all those countries that also installed their own versions of the modern (more or less social-democratic) welfare state.

Unfortunately, the financial speculators and their political puppets have conspired to reimpose the “upstairs-downstairs” model of society instead, by gradually impoverishing the middle (salaried) class that had dominated economic and social development from the 1940s to the 1970s. Neoliberalism’s long-term goal is to completely eradicate the income gap between the “first world” (industrially developed countries) and the “third world” (ultra-poor, neocolonial countries), by making sure that wage levels, as a percentage of total income, are never again allowed to rise to North American, 1970s-middle-class standards, anywhere in the world. The proof of the neoliberal conspiracy’s “success” in keeping for themselves the lion’s share of all the wealth created since the 1980s, is the current stagnation of the world market. Once again, too many people are too poor to continue buying all the very numerous goods and services offered for sale, while too few people can still afford to pay for all that stuff.

In other words, the ruling classes of the twentieth century learned nothing at all, long-term, from the world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), the Great Depression (1929-1939) and the simultaneous rise of totalitarian fascism and communism. At the first available opportunity (1979), they reversed every “concession” that people like Franklin Roosevelt and John Keynes had made toward the “lower classes” in the West during the Great Depression, even though they knew full well that doing so would inevitably bring on another Great Recession (2007-2009). Their point man in the USA, Bill Clinton, “the most Republican of all the Democrats”, in 1999 enthusiastically endorsed a congressional campaign to rescind the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which, among other things, had separated commercial banking from investment banking.

Reactionary decisions like that one, not only in the West but also in most of the other parts of the world, freed neoliberalism from practically all existing government restraints. With the result that the housing debacle in the USA, and similar negative-investment binges in several other countries, were deliberately grafted onto the entire world economy, via the forced mixing of good investment paper with toxic paper. Having finally been liberated from the legislative consequences of the Great Depression and the “thirty glorious” (1945-1975) post-war years, the financial speculators threw caution to the winds, ignored the lessons of history, and made sure that the world would suffer through another Great Recession, by once again loaning enormous sums of money to millions of people with no investment income whatsoever.

After the 2007-2009 crisis showed everyone that neoliberalism had become just as dangerous to the world economy as the classical laissez-faire of the 1920s, one would have expected some kind of credible opposition to that obvious ideological delusion to have emerged. At least among the world’s leading millionaires and billionaires trying desperately to save their endangered fortunes from total destruction. Unfortunately, none of the populist movements that they set up, even when run directly by billionaire moguls like Donald Trump, have managed to come up with any credible global alternative to neoliberalism. All they can do is to clumsily advocate the re-erection of a protective wall around their respective home markets, while simultaneously trying to maintain free admission of their own goods and services into every other country on this planet. Good luck with that.

It ought to come as no surprise to anyone that all the people who run those reactionary movements are part of the same clique of highly corrupt investors and politicians that also includes the leading champions of neoliberalism. Whether neoliberal, or neoconservative, or both at the same time, all the world’s rich and powerful people only amount to about one percent of one percent, or one ten-thousandth, of the world’s total population. Using methods similar to those that brought on the 2007-2009 panic, the egomaniacs who run the world economy nowadays have salted away trillions of dollars of ordinary taxpayers’ money into private accounts like the ones described in the Panama Papers, just the latest in an ongoing series of “illegal” revelations of world-wide corruption on an enormous scale. All the over-privileged people in the world, inside every level of every government, every important bank (Goldman Sachs, HSBC, BNP Parisbas, etc.), and every multinational corporation (Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Valeant, etc.), have joined forces in a colossal orgy of fleecing and defrauding all those people too poor, too powerless, or too alienated, to fight back in any meaningful way.

Unfortunately, the vaguely socialist movements that have also sprung up recently here and there, such as the Sanders campaign inside the US Democratic Party, are much too weak and utopian to themselves put up any kind of credible resistance to the neoliberal, neoconservative and neofascist aspects of global capitalism. Instead, hundreds of millions of ordinary working-class and middle-class people all over the world are supporting, or at least tolerating, authoritarian father-figures like Xi Jin-ping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, or the reconstructed business tycoon Donald Trump in the USA. The latter strongman, not yet in power as of this writing, somehow seems a whole lot more credible to millions of dumb-ass Republican voters than choosing a wimpy old socialist left over from the 1960s.

If only they had thought about it a little more, however, those ordinary salaried people should have realized that powerful father-figures nowadays are no more on their side than were the authoritarian and totalitarian dictators of the 1930s. In today’s USA, knee-jerk Republicans should have known that an over-stuffed straw man like Trump is in fact the worst possible champion they could have found for their cause. It should be obvious even to dummies that a leading investor in luxury hotels, casinos, immigrant labor, illegally low wages and organized crime was not the world’s best choice to represent a return to an industrially-based economy, featuring well-paid jobs and high business taxes. It would have been much more appropriate for American workers to have enthusiastically supported their trade unions instead, like they used to do before neoliberalism. Or, even better, they could have developed an appropriately up-to-date kind of socialist party, rather than to have voted for someone so obviously opposed to their cause as a populist, but still essentially neoliberal, Republican.

Not to mention the fact that a slogan like “Make America great again” is not terribly well-suited for a Mussolini-imitating champion like Trump, whose brain does not work very well, whose language is as vulgar as his demeanor, and whose only claim to greatness is in the overwhelming size of his ego. But unfortunately for the rest of us, right-wing populist movements like his are here to stay and will not simply go away even if “the Donald” does not become the president of the USA in January, 2017. Other standard-bearers of ultra-conservatism, such as Ted Cruz and Mario Rubio, with their fire-and-brimstone attacks on “social liberalism”, are at least as nutty as Donald Trump. Similar ultra-right wing movements are also close to taking power in many other countries where they are not yet totally dominant, as in France where the National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, seems to have toned down her father’s ultra-racist, ultra-fascist rhetoric just enough to make it possible to get herself elected to the French presidency, also in 2017.

Neofascist movements like these always come up with punchy, simplistic and bombastic slogans without any particular content. The Trump slogan about “America” interprets its host country, the USA, in a highly symbolic way, just like in such competing examples as “Mother Russia”, the “Middle Kingdom” (China) or the totally hypocritical “citizens republic” in France. Patriots “born in the USA” always like to throw their weight around by referring to themselves as “Americans”, deliberately overlooking the fact that hundreds of millions of other people also live in the Americas, such as Latin Americans, Canadians and so on. That particular habit of symbolically ignoring everyone else in the Americas is so ingrained in the US conscience that it may continue on anyway even if immigrants from Latin America, legal and illegal, become the new majority in “white America”, and even if someone like Cruz or Rubio eventually becomes the president.

More importantly, getting “America” to become great again might be harder than expected, especially if a large number of people ever get around to realizing that “America” has never been all that great. Re-reading my course notes on (United States of) American history that I gave to hundreds of young adults here in Quebec before I retired, I could not find any particular period that I would personally qualify as great. Items such as persistent gang violence, religious wars and the massacres of such “unAmerican” opponents of “liberty” as rebellious natives, runaway slaves, striking workers and uppity feminists, kept getting in the way. As for the return to world domination implied in the Trump campaign’s main slogan, it is difficult to imagine how “America”, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, India, Japan, and a couple of dozen other countries can all simultaneously become “great again”, without dragging humanity into yet another great war to end all great wars.

It is just as important to keep in mind that none of those countries, not just the USA, have ever truly been great, for all the usual racist, male-chauvinist, imperialist and genocidal reasons. None of the world’s geopolitical or religious empires, or civilizations, could be properly assessed as having had an overall positive effect on human development, each one of them having promoted, or condoned, too many barbarian cultural practices to qualify for genuine greatness. Even the fine artistic objects that ordinary people have finally been allowed to see in all the world’s most important museums are just so many reminders of how each and every civilization has always become rich and powerful by horribly mistreating millions of its own lower-class “subjects” in hundreds of different, but equally disgusting ways.

The USA, and most of the other Western countries, have also shown their complete contempt for any of the so-called “Western values”, like liberal democracy, separation of Church and State, equality between men and women, and official opposition to all forms of racism, by doing exactly the opposite, not only in domestic policy but also in foreign policy. During the Cold War with the Soviet Union (1945-1991), the USA in particular had no qualms at all allying itself with dozens of military and political dictatorships, theocracies and absolute monarchies. Which is not to say that the USSR, or any other competing empire, managed to do any better.

The most incredible example of “American” duplicity has been its post-1945 alliance with that most absolute of all extant monarchies, Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world in which the entire nation is constitutionally considered to be the private property of the ruling family. The people running US foreign policy have never had any problem with Saudi funding and sponsorship of ultra-conservative Islamic salafism and salafi jihadism all over the Muslim world, nor with promoting similar Islamic adventures such as Pakistan’s sponsorship of foreign-born terrorists like Osama ben Laden, both during and after the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation (1979-1989).

Not even the 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA, with 3000 victims slain by mostly Saudi nationals, managed to change US rulers’ minds about allying with what is arguably the world’s most reactionary regime. Rather than denouncing Saudi treachery, they decided instead to attack the secular Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq, blithely inventing a totally ridiculous story about Saddam’s own “alliance” with Al-Qaeda.

The neoconservative goofballs running US foreign policy in 2003 apparently figured that they could not afford to alienate Sunni extremists in the same way that they had treated the ultra-reactionary Khomeini regime in Iran. Back in 1980-1988, they had used the very same Saddam Hussein to wage war on the Iranian theocracy, which had just carried out a successful uprising, with communist help, against the USA’s own (comprador) absolute monarch, the Shah (1953-1979). In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even “liberal” media in the USA, and throughout the West, agreed that some Arab country or another had to be punished to save American honor, and that that country could not be the one harboring the most important Islamic shrines in the world.

In other words, even though the rulers of the USA, and most of the other Western countries, have occasionally adopted a slightly progressive social policy at home, as in Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” (1965), their foreign policy has always been distinctly reactionary. Nowadays, however, after having imposed neoliberalism and anti-working class austerity for the past several decades, they have completely alienated the popular support that their more progressive programs had managed to procure for them, prior to the Margaret Thatcher (GB)-Ronald Reagan (USA)-Helmut Kohl (Germany) counter-revolution that began in the 1980s. Slight improvements along the way, such as Barak Obama’s health-care initiative, have been too weak and too vulnerable to have made much difference to the overall picture. A very large number of ordinary “Americans”, like similar ordinary people in Europe and all the other continents, are now in a decidedly reactionary frame of mind.

One of the most interesting characteristics of all the atavistic, ultra-right wing movements in the world’s leading countries is the religious element. Every time a really strong percentage of ordinary (non-VIP) people support some ultra-racist, neofascist strongman (or woman) against their own best interests, old-time religion is always part of the picture. Ultra-conservatives in the USA are not just upset about how the modern world is “mistreating” the formerly powerful American empire, they are also horrified at the rise of what they call “devil worship”.

Their deeply-rooted social conservatism makes them go crazy every time they see a rise in the number of women in power (Hillary Clinton), legal abortions, gay marriages, or any other social practice not part of their traditional, Christian-fundamentalist world-view. They also go ballistic whenever anyone dares to make “blasphemous” suggestions like granting justice for Palestine against Israeli colonization. In their Biblically jaundiced view, the second coming of Jesus, and the advent of the “new Jerusalem”, cannot happen until after the Israeli army takes direct control over the entire Middle East.

Millions of Canadians, particularly those still supporting the Conservative party of the former Harper government, are equally as afflicted with the same ultra-right wing points of view as their neighbors to the south. During its decade in power, that government actively supported every backward policy identified with the ultra-conservative Republicans in the USA. The recently-elected Liberal regime of Justin Trudeau, the son of the autocratic Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, tries to project a more progressive image, but has not yet done anything substantially different. Probably the best proof of that has been its decision to uphold a multi-billion-dollar military contract to provide Saudi Arabia with up-to-date Canadian armored troop carriers.

Trudeau’s pronouncements against international tax evasion were also shown to be entirely hypocritical, since Trudeau himself actively participates in tax evasion. So far at least, his government has done nothing at all to prevent Canadian capitalists from “investing” tens of billions of dollars in tax havens like Barbados, whose real national economy is no bigger than that of any rather small Canadian city.

As for the formerly socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada, its centrist leadership has prevented it from taking advantage of middle-class resentment against the same concentration of wealth, corruption and tax dodging that fed the Sanders campaign in the USA. Canada’s provincial politicians are just as small-c conservative as their federal counterparts, including the new NDP government in oil-rich Alberta, the highly-corrupt Liberal government in French-speaking Quebec and Quebec’s official opposition parties. Even the tiny Québec solidaire party, that supports many of the same social policies as the Sanders faction inside the USA’s Democratic Party, steadfastly refuses to criticize religious fanaticism inside Quebec.

Canada’s main claim to fame in recent years has, in fact, been the rise of an entirely new form of political liberalism, called multiculturalism, that has now been copied by politically-correct people all over the world. Unfortunately, as practiced in Canada at least, multiculturalism is not just a “goody-goody-two-shoes” attempt to get people coming from all sorts of different cultures to live together harmoniously. It got its start as part of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau’s federalist strategy against the Quebec independence movement. During the 1970s, the current prime minister’s father tried to impose the idea that Canada was not born in 1867 as a marriage between two founding nations (English Canada and French Canada), but was the historical fusion of dozens of different “cultural communities”, the native “Siberian-Americans”, the French, the British, the Métis (“half-breeds”), the Ukrainians and all the more recent cultural immigrants composing the country’s current population.

What distinguishes Canadian multiculturalism from just jamming a bunch of different cultures into the same “mosaic”, however, has been the deliberate imposition of an essentialist definition of every one of those different cultures. To keep people, in either English Canada or Quebec, from copying the USA’s melting-pot ideology of assimilation, all the different cultures cohabiting in Canada are constantly presented as unchanging cultural constructs. All of them are considered incapable of blending with any of the others, or evolving in any way, and are supposed to possess exactly the same immobile characteristics nowadays, and in the future, as when they were initially founded several centuries ago.

Curiously enough, these are the same kind of essentialist definitions as those currently being used by religious fundamentalists. Native peoples, for example, are constantly being urged to remain faithful to their original animist cultures, European immigrants are supposed to remain eternally faithful to their “original” Christian cultures, Muslim immigrants faithful to their “original” Muslim cultures, and so on. According to multiculturalism’s leading propagandists, such as philosopher Charles Taylor, the Canadian mosaic itself has to be maintained intact, forever. Every culture (or piece of glass) within that mosaic must eternally preserve its original colors, and no intermingling of cultural characteristics can be allowed to develop over time. A more inherently racist definition of multiculturalism would be hard to find.

At the same time, nothing currently taking place in Western Europe is any more edifying than what is going on in North America. The United Kingdom, or at least the English and the Ulster sections of it, is holding a referendum today on membership in the European Union for all the wrong reasons. The big banks in the City of London have always been pushing the British government to oppose every feeble attempt the EU has ever made toward controlling speculative finance, and every equally feeble attempt at developing existing social policy into a European-wide welfare state. In spite of the division among bankers concerning official support for British membership in the EU, the City as a whole would much prefer to belong to the original goal of a mere “common market” with the other European countries, that does not infringe in any way on their ability to make an enormous amount of money at everyone else’s expense. Unfortunately for them, British exit from the EU may make doing that a lot more difficult, if the already tottering world economy decides to take a nosedive now, rather than later on.

In other words, neoliberalism, the political brainchild of Margaret Thatcher, still dominates British politics almost completely, even if the new Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and some of his supporters, have officially abandoned Tony Blair’s twin capitulations to neoliberalism and the geopolitical adventures of US neoconservatism. At the same time, the current Conservative PM David Cameron’s hypocritical “assault” on tax evasion was also more than a little undermined by his own proven participation in it. Not to mention the fact that the City is by itself the world’s most important center of shadow investment.

The European Union as a whole, despite upsetting the ultra-conservative British rulers by paying lip-service toward controlling wayward financiers and pretending to support the working-class, is almost as much dedicated to neoliberalism as the British government. For the past several decades, it has applied a horribly strangulating choke-hold on continental Europe, almost but not quite doing everything in its power to ensure that every national government follows the standard austerity-driven policy of transferring all the world’s wealth to the top one percent of one-percent (one ten-thousandth) of the population. Wayward EU members like Greece have been forced into total compliance. Wolfgang Streeck did an excellent job describing how neoliberalism controls just about everything that moves in Europe in his book, Du temps acheté: La crise sans cesse ajournée du capitalisme démocratique, published in German in 2012 (the updated French version, that I read, was published in 2014).

Former communist, socialist and social-democratic parties in such countries as France, Italy and Germany have all helped the EU achieve its goals by abandoning every reason why they were originally known as socialist or communist. European workers and other salaried people have reacted to that collective sell-out by supporting neofascist governments and political parties all over the continent, not just in countries officially belonging to the EU but also in the “other Europe” outside the EU. As of this writing, most of the 50 or so European countries west of Russia are either under authoritarian, neofascist governments (as in Hungary and Poland), or seem to be on the verge of doing so. Even the nominally social-democratic governments of Scandinavia have allowed ultra-right-wing parties into their ruling coalitions.

On the other side of the political spectrum, “extreme” left-wing parties, like Podemos in Spain, whose programs strongly resemble those of the Sanders campaign in the USA, do not seem to be putting up much of a fight. Most of them seem to be following in the footsteps of the Syriza government in Greece, that completely capitulated to EU austerity in 2015, in spite of being elected to do exactly the opposite. Instead of being an alternative to the EU’s control of Greece, they soon became its accomplice.

The other major crisis undermining European unity these days is without a doubt the immigration crisis. Several European countries, having participated with the USA in overthrowing several North African and western Asian dictatorships, are now suffering the consequences, as millions of refugees from dozens of failed states stream into Europe. Accompanying the much more peaceful “silent majority” among those displaced migrants are thousands of petty criminals and religious fanatics, which has had the political effect of dividing the host populations in Europe into jovial accommodationists on the one hand and neofascist racists on the other. In other words, Canadian-style multiculturalism versus ethnic imperialism, with nothing in-between. Whatever side the British decide to vote for in their referendum, will certainly not alleviate that division.

Similar delusions are also very much in play not only in North America and Europe, but also in even more neoliberal Australia and New Zealand, both of which often seem to enjoy imitating the more reactionary sections of Europe and the USA with their overtly racist attitudes toward illegal immigrants. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, however, manages to outdo most of the Western countries in reactionary domestic politics, doing less damage in foreign affairs only because some of the Western countries, especially the USA, possess much more extensive international empires. Russia, the country possessing the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, has been under that strongman’s exclusive control since the beginning of the current century. His victories over the Chechens, the Ukrainians and other outlying peoples of the Russian empire, not to mention his largely successful foray into the Syrian civil war, have emboldened him to the point of playing brinkmanship with the US empire still militarily dominating most of Europe through the rapidly expanding NATO alliance.

The Putin regime is an extremely authoritarian “democracy” whose opponents are regularly eliminated in all sorts of “creative” ways, the secret police even being accused of blowing up its own people in order to provide the kind of terrorist climate necessary for repression on a grand scale. Besides being thoroughly corrupt, the Putin government is nevertheless hugely popular among the truly patriotic citizens of the Russian (imperial) Federation, partly because of its attempts to return “Mother Russia” to Soviet levels of world influence.

Putin’s current popularity also stems from his regime’s ideological alliance with the ultra-conservative Russian Orthodox Church and its own Christian-fundamentalist condemnation of feminist and homosexual “crimes against nature”. Not to mention the fact that Putin took power after the extremely chaotic Yeltsin regime had given away two-thirds of the former Soviet Union’s industrial strength to a gang of oligarchs known as the Russian Mafia. Prior to dissolution in 1991, the USSR itself had become increasingly corrupted toward the end, never managing to fully resolve its eternal oscillation, or zig-zag, between ultra-totalitarian periods of state-capitalist rule (such as during the so-called “third period” between 1928 and 1934) and the much more “liberal-communist” periods.

For their part, the current leaders of the still totalitarian People’s Republic of China (PRC), under the exclusive control of the “Communist” (state-capitalist) Party, and its own strongman, Xi Jin-ping, have a lot in common with the people running the USA, Europe and Russia. The PRC itself, however, has become much more important in the world, at least from an economic standpoint, than Russia, or even the European Union, having provided the de-industrialized, neoliberal Western group of countries (and Japan) with its main center of low-wage industrial labor over the past three and a half decades.

Although China very recently began developing its own internal consumer economy, it is still an extremely important exporter of industrial goods to the West and will probably remain far behind Western levels of consumption for quite a long time to come. (Unless, of course, current Western levels continue to slide all the way down to China’s current level.) To be sure, the post-Mao government in China owes most of its current popular support to its 1979 decision to abandon the extreme poverty of peasant agriculture. 

Even though there are still as many poor peasants in China as there were when Mao was alive, hundreds of millions of China’s much larger recent population have managed to considerably increase their annual incomes. Because of major disasters imposed on China several decades ago by the Mao faction, particularly during the 1958-1962 “Great Leap Forward”, and the 1966-1976 “Cultural Revolution”, tens of millions of people were wiped out, and income levels for those who survived declined drastically. When the Zhou Enlai  faction finally came to power in 1979, under Zhou’s dauphin, Deng Xiaoping, income levels had nowhere to go but up.

Most of those very numerous Chinese now earning larger incomes than before have become drudge workers in factories, a lot like equally exploited wage slaves in the West back in the nineteenth century. The one-party system, however, has also replicated Western development by creating an entirely new class of “communist” billionaires, many of whom are the offspring of the founding fathers of the “People’s Republic”. Those people have a vested interest in making sure that average wages never become so high that they would threaten the privileged class’s overall domination, as the neoliberal investors in the West imagined had become the case in their countries during the inflation crisis of the 1970s.

Like the West, the PRC has adopted a largely neoliberal attitude toward economic and social development, but also paradoxically maintains an economic nationalist posture, defending the home state and the national currency from full-scale free-trade in goods and services. More or less in the same way that Donald Trump’s protectionist (and anti-Chinese) prescriptions for a USA under his projected control by no means cancel out his own neoliberal stance on most other social and economic issues.

China is also copying Russia, and challenging the US empire in Eastern Asia and the Pacific by severely repressing its own “internal colonies” (such as Tibet and Xinjiang), permanently threatening its “departed province” (Taiwan) with imminent takeover, and expanding its maritime empire (thereby infringing on the sovereignty of such neighbors as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia). On another front, it often cooperates with Russia against Western imperial interests in Asia, and controls its own economic colonies in the north, such as Mongolia and North Korea, trying very hard to prevent the extremely unstable Kim Jong un regime from imploding.

The PRC also seems to have developed a quasi religious aspect to its curious blend of neoliberalism and ethnic imperialism with its recent emphasis on cultivating respect for ultra-conservative, Confucianist traditions in Chinese society. In so doing, however, it is thereby implicitly undermining its own official propaganda stance against the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan-Buddhist feudalism.

Japan is not doing much better. It abandoned its own economic development plan, run by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), during the 1980s. A decade of uninhibited speculation was then followed by several decades of economic stagnation, that in spite of all government stimulus still persists to this day. This, however, has not prevented Japanese leaders from attempting to move out from under the US nuclear umbrella, and the constitutionally imposed pacifism of the immediate post-war period, gradually embarking on a return to a more traditional, militarist, attitude. These leaders are repudiating their previously apologetic attitude toward the Japanese expansionism of the 1931-1945 period, and trying instead to justify all the horrors that were inflicted by Japan on Eastern Asia and the Pacific regions back then. Like China, they are also combining their rediscovered ethnic imperialism with a renewed emphasis on ultra-conservative, Shinto-religious obscurantism.

Japan and China are the two most important countries in the tiny group of formerly “third-world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America) states that never became formal colonies of a Western empire during the colonial period of history. That incredible period lasted in fact for over five centuries, all the way from 1415 (Portugal’s takeover of the Moroccan community of Ceuta) to 1945 (the end of the Second World War). Japan suffered under Western economic domination from 1854 (the US bombardment of Yokohama) to 1899, when it managed to repudiate the “unequal treaties” signed earlier with the USA and several European empires. China’s period of neocolonialism lasted from 1842 (the end of the first Opium War) to 1943 (Western abandonment of the division of China into three economic zones of foreign domination). In addition, the 1949-1960 period could be seen as a second period of foreign, in this case Soviet, domination of the PRC.

Three other countries that “only” became economic satrapies (or “neocolonies”), of Western empires, at least for a time, were Turkey, Iran and Thailand. Among those countries, since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has become the most independent, but at a terrible price. Not only has it had to suffer economic strangulation from the recent Western boycott aimed at eliminating its nuclear program, but it also suffers politically and socially from the ultra-conservative control of theocratic religious leaders. Turkey and especially Thailand are still heavily influenced by the Western empires. Like several other third world countries, Thailand also suffers from an irrational fixation on the “godliness” of its hereditary monarch, and often puts people in jail for “insulting” him with any kind of criticism whatsoever. Recently, Turkey’s elected president, Recip Erdogan, also began acting the same way, presumably because he sees himself as just as much an “Ozymandias” as any hereditary chieftain.

Nevertheless, it was relatively easier for those five Asian countries to at least partially escape from total Western control of their economies than it was for any of the much more numerous formal colonies. And it should not be forgotten that both Japan and China also controlled, or still control, both formal and informal colonies since they attained their “independence” from the West. But the more complete colonial domination of the majority of the countries in the Third World, initially defined as the so-called non-aligned states during the Cold War, by the various Western empires, still persists in today’s neocolonial attitude toward most of those same countries.

Unfortunately for those dozens of former colonies, whether they became theoretically independent during the nineteenth century or the twentieth century, the post-independence regimes have not at all succeeded in genuinely liberating their countries from foreign control. No matter what sort of constitutions they adopted, dictatorship, democracy or whatever, the vast majority of those regimes have simply replicated colonial conditions, theoretically substituting a local ruling class for an international one, but not substantially benefitting any of the common people.

Much of the blame for that situation comes from the fact that most of the post-independence regimes have become neocolonial compradors, that is local merchants and politicians serving the pecuniary interests of the same colonial masters as before. Some of the profits made from exploiting both natural and human resources within each country have been transferred to the local bourgeoisie, but most of those profits still make their way to a much more important neo-imperial bourgeoisie. In many of those former colonies, their neocolonial masters are the descendants of their old colonial masters, while in several other places, some new imperial center of power has taken over. Quite a few third world countries are also being controlled by several imperial masters at once, more or less the way that China was controlled from abroad when it was divided into foreign economic zones.

South Africa is one of those former colonies in which the abject failure of the new ruling elite to genuinely liberate its people, has become particularly obvious. From Nelson Mandela to Jacob Zuma, each succeeding African National Congress (ANC) president following the fall of apartheid in 1994 has become more and more corrupt, less and less democratic, and less and less capable of doing anything for ordinary people. The white minority of the former Boer regime, as well as its allies, the multinational corporations still operating within that country, remain the dominant forces in the national economy. Which means that aside from a very small ANC elite, none of the people who so far continue to support that party in every election are getting anything back in exchange for their support.

Corruption is also endemic among dozens of other former colonies, particularly those in which warfare between criminal gangs, or cartels, for the control of illegal trafficking in slaves, drugs, arms, ivory, historical artifacts, etc., terrorizes the entire population through mass murder, forced migration (internal or external), and a host of related calamities. In most of those countries, such as Colombia and Mexico, the market for all those “commodities” is much more foreign than domestic.

Unfortunately, the alternative to such obvious corruption, and collaboration with the enemy, is sometimes worse than the disease. In Zimbabwe, for example, the Mugabe regime, which has always been great friends with the ANC leaders, went on a concerted campaign a few years ago to replace all the rich white farmers in that country with its own militants. Very few of those people had the knowledge or the capacity to become farmers, however, with the result that Zimbabwe as a whole has been greatly impoverished. Venezuela is another obvious example of failure in running a country successfully, by people interested in doing away with the compradore economy and indirect rule through foreign multinationals. Things seemed to be going well in that country when the instigator of the “Bolivarian revolution”, Hugo Chavez, was in power, and when oil prices were high, but that regime has fallen completely apart over the past three years.

Two of the five Asian countries that were never formal colonies, Turkey and Iran, as well as a very large number of the more recent neocolonial states, also belong to the Muslim world. The people living in those countries are also suffering from the fact that the Muslim umma has become another very important center of ultra-conservative intrigue, very much involved in trying to revive its own regional empires. This is a complex situation if there ever was one, the Muslim-majority countries stretching out in a huge line from northwestern Africa to southeastern Asia, but also intermingled with other non-Muslim empires along the same line, such as the Jewish state (Israel), Hindu-nationalist India and Buddhist-revivalist nations further south and east. Inside the Muslim portion of this enormous “region” are several competing centers vying for imperial hegemony, such as Turkey (the center of the former Ottoman empire), Iran (the center of the former Persian empire), Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia. The zone of Muslim influence in the world includes huge, traditional Muslim minorities inside countries like India, but also more recent Muslim minorities in Israel, and migrant minorities inside several European countries, the USA and Canada.

Unfortunately for the world’s second-largest religion, Islam is currently experiencing an ultra-fundamentalist revival period similar to that of the Catholic crusades during the Middle Ages, or the anti-liberal, anti-socialist interventions of nineteenth-century popes like Pius IX. In spite of the fact that millions of Muslims have not yet become extreme fanatics, support for salafism and jihadism has been increasing all over the Muslim world ever since the Western empires began promoting Muslim fundamentalism as an imperial weapon against nationalism and communism.

Hundreds of billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other Gulf states, have also helped convert some of the more “moderate” Muslims into supporting ultra-conservative attitudes toward women, social and religious minorities, apostates and other assorted unbelievers. Literal interpretations of extremely violent passages found in the Koran, like the literal interpretations of similar passages found in the Bible and many other holy books, are also being used to “justify” terrorist attacks all over the world, most of them targeting fellow Muslims. Recent Western military assaults on many regional dictatorships, resulting in millions of Muslim deaths, make it easy for Islamic fanatics to show that they too can blow up large numbers of people, including their rivals in competing terrorist organizations, as brutally and as fearlessly as their opponents do. Some of those true believers, particularly in the Islamic State movement, truly enjoy being as barbarian as humanly possible, especially against religious minorities.

But the revival of fundamentalist Islam is only the most spectacular example of a similar disease infecting most extant religions. Fundamentalist Christianity has become very important inside the USA and Canada, as well as in dozens of other countries, mostly in Latin America (such as Brazil), in Africa (such as Uganda) and in Europe. Generally of Protestant origin, it also has considerable influence within the Catholic Church and the various Orthodox churches. Like other fundamentalist movements inside most of the other religions, Christian fundamentalism almost always allies itself with reactionary (authoritarian, ultra-conservative, neofascist) political forces, wherever it goes. All the world’s fundamentalists, from whatever religion, also have a very strong tendency to favor neoliberalism, presumably because they prefer to let business people take care of the civilian economy so that they can concentrate their own efforts on promoting social conservatism.

Fundamentalism is also extremely important inside India, with the rise of the BJP’s Hindu nationalism, which has become particularly strong since party leader Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. Unfortunately, India possesses, at least in absolute terms, the world’s strongest concentration of extreme poverty and of barbarian cultural practices. Both those huge problems reflect the overwhelming influence over the centuries of that country’s traditional, ultra-reactionary elites, not only the majority Hindu portion but also the minority Muslim and Sikh portions of which have continually supported previous fundamentalist revivals during both the pre-colonial and colonial periods of history.

All those related problems continue to plague that country nowadays, since like in South Africa, the parties in power since independence have also failed to fulfill the promises of national liberation. The Congress Party, that has been in power more often than any other party since 1947, was supposed to have turned all of India into an ultra-modern country instead, but has been so corrupted that it has not managed to give more than lip service to most of that social and economic modernization. It seems that as much as 97% of India’s enormous population gets by every day, barely, on whatever can be scraped together inside the informal economy, none of those people having succeeded in joining the modern world completely. Moreover, half of that country’s enormous population of 1.4 billion people, apparently defecate outside every day, with an obvious impact on local hygiene. Recent advances in industrialization account for some of India’s high levels of recent economic growth, but the country is coming from so far behind that modernization is still being held back by enormous social and infrastructural difficulties.

Just like Hindu nationalism, Islamic and Sikh forms of fundamentalism are also on the rise inside India as well. All the different kinds of religious fundamentalism affecting large populations within India have also followed the Indian diaspora into various other parts of the world, thereby exporting their disputes, and their terrorist actions, to places like Canada. Several majority-Buddhist countries in southern Asia, such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar (Burma), have also recently been afflicted by the adoption of fundamentalist attitudes among their rulers, resulting in state-terrorist attacks on Hindu and Muslim minorities within their own borders.

The fact that all these different kinds of fundamentalism support reactionary political and social behavior is not at all a coincidence. The most important characteristic of fundamentalism, after all, is the strongly-held conviction that everything that is wrong with the world could be instantly solved if only all “moderate” believers became true believers, adopting exclusively literal interpretations of all the holy books and rigidly abiding by every rule set out by the founders of each religion. Like mainstream believers, however, fundamentalists hypocritically ignore many of the founders’ most obvious tenets, such as the admonition that good Christians should automatically give all their worldly possessions to the poor and concentrate exclusively on preaching the word of God. Curiously enough, corruption quite often afflicts true believers even more than it does their more moderate brethren.

Fundamentalist leaders nevertheless expect each convert to return to the “golden age” of the founders and uphold the original goals of each religion, at least as defined by the currently existing religious hierarchy. They are all trying to reconstruct today’s world along the lines of an ideal projection initially invented several centuries ago. In the case of religions with universal pretensions, such as Christianity and Islam, that would seem to mean forcing all unbelievers to convert to the “one true religion”, if only to save them from burning in hell for all eternity. Or at least obliging their victims to obey the rules set out by whichever sect wins the inevitable conflict between rival organizations. In today’s globalized world, that means that if all the competing varieties of true believers get their way, the entire planet will necessarily be engulfed in a gargantuan, multicultural, holy war, or jihad.

Naive, liberal-minded relativists, of an ecumenist bent, generally argue that people from different cultures can overcome their negative attitudes toward each other, if they only find out more about each other’s religion or culture. The politically correct gurus assume that discovering how others think about their beliefs will necessarily eliminate any negative attitudes toward those beliefs, which according to them are based entirely on prejudice, rather than on real antagonisms. It is difficult to figure out, however, how this “goody-goody-two-shoes” attitude toward human conflict can possibly work as opposing religions all over the world become increasingly hell-bent on reasserting each one’s fundamental beliefs.

But even when people with a decidedly neutral attitude toward opposing religions set out to find out more about how believers think, the results are not often all that ecumenical. My own recent reading of the Koran, for example, did not at all convince me about how genuinely democratic and pacifist the world’s first Muslims were during the founding years of their religion. Quite the contrary. Nor was I at all impressed by the liberal, open-minded characteristics of historical Hinduism after I read Wendy Doniger’s extremely well-researched 2009 book, The Hindus, an Alternative History. Having also read the Bible several decades ago, as well as a few other religious works since that time, I can only conclude that finding out more about other people’s beliefs has not done much to overcome my initial skepticism. To say the least.

The other major problem with religious belief, whether “moderate” or fundamentalist, is that in spite of all their pretensions to the contrary, none of those religions seem to have had an overall positive effect on their respective believers’ morality. I spent several decades reading thousands of books and other documents, so that I could get a BA, an MA and a PhD in order to join the privileged group of people teaching mostly 17-to-22 year-old students about the history of Western civilization, the Third World, and the twentieth century, as well as specific courses on the history of the USA, China, Canada and Quebec.

During all that time, however, I never got the impression that any of the world’s religions had any particular success in convincing their respective believers to behave in a more morally-fit way than that encountered among rival religions, or among those who refused to believe in any religion at all. So far as I can tell, in the aggregate, no particular group of religious believers, or of non-religious people influenced by secular ideologies, stood out as behaving particularly well, or particularly poorly. Individual exceptions aside, the choice of belief, whether religious or secular, did not seem to have much effect on each group’s overall behavior toward other people. All the usual evils, such as racism, sexism, imperialism, totalitarianism, and the promotion of enormous divisions between the social classes, or castes, seemed equally present in every group of believers.

In addition, barbarian cultural practices, that were formerly supposed to have been gradually disappearing in all the myriad countries afflicted with the recent revival of fundamentalism, are also on the rise. These practices include such abominations as forced marriages (usually of young girls with older men), female excision, “ordinary” rape and gang rape, forced prostitution and sexual slavery (mostly involving women, or girls, but also including male prostitution, mostly targeting young boys), honor killings, and so on (the list is endless). Some of that disgusting behavior exists, and has always existed, in every culture, and is often said to have tribal origins, related to what are often called “animist” or “prehistoric” religions. In many communities nowadays, barbarian practices combine together in what are sometimes called hybrid, or syncretic, religions, in which relatively “recent” religions like Christianity and Islam tolerate tribal traditions handed down from more ancient periods.

These comments about the non-conformity between religious belief on the one hand, and morality on the other, also apply just as much to native communities, sometimes called “First Nations”, all over the world. Such groups can be found not only in places like Canada, the USA, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific islands and Siberia, but also in China, India, southeast Asia, northern Europe and just about everywhere else. In Africa, the so-called “natives” that first the Arabs and then the Europeans encountered during succeeding waves of imperial expansion, came from several different ethnic origins. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the current Bantu majority originating in the eastern part of the continent spread out all over the southern and central regions, dominating even more ancient “native” peoples along the way, such as the Pygmy and the Khoi-San. Similar migrations of dominant peoples also affected all the other pre-modern regions in the world, including inside Europe itself.

As a result, wherever they are to be found, the world’s “native” peoples have not always been as native as all that, and have often developed conflictual relationships among rival groups centuries before the modern colonial period began. The rival “animist” religions, such as opposing varieties of shamanism, totemism and so forth, also fought for regional hegemony long before the Europeans initiated the advancing waves of globalization that began back in the fifteenth century. Once again, there does not seem to be be any kind of particularly positive, or particularly negative, relationship between native religions and morality, any more than there is between morality and “colonial” religions.

This makes it incomprehensible why certain liberal-minded judges in countries like Canada and the USA sometimes decide to give more lenient sentences to native criminals than to non-native ones, on the spurious grounds that “native peoples have already suffered enough”, or that “he was driven to do that because that’s the way those people live”. Even though official oppression and extremely poor living conditions often have evil effects on personal behavior, the majority of people living under those conditions do not succumb to committing crimes any more than do privileged people. Native peoples, and native religions, are no more and no less inclined toward good behavior, or bad behavior, than are non-native peoples and their religions. The “justice” system is certainly one of the worst victims of ideological influence in every country, millions of people having been unjustly condemned during every period of history, and millions more, truly and entirely guilty people, getting off completely, particularly among VIP populations.

Secular ideologies, whether ancient or modern, can easily become just as reactionary as religious ideologies. So far as the return to fictitious “golden ages” is concerned, the extremely numerous examples used to illustrate David Lowenthal’s 1996 book, Possessed by the Past: the Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, include not only some of the more important religious myths but also a huge number of nationalist origin myths, covering the entire left-center-right spectrum of political ideologies. The propagandists of every single nation or ethnic group in the whole world, every branch of every religion, and every other kind of ideological construction, have been guilty of creating thousands of heteronomous heritage doctrines over the years. Since time began, they have been spinning together specious interpretations of real events and entirely fictional non-events into fake histories that have very little to do with whatever really happened. The classic example was the Biblical incorporation of the Sumerian deluge myth into Jewish “history”, but there are thousands of other such examples from which to choose.

This process is similar to the point that I made earlier about how finding out more about some particular culture does not necessarily result in adopting a more positive attitude toward it. Having some particular group of people in power make a pitch for getting “everyone to learn more about our history” does not mean that they are indeed promoting the popular acquisition of genuine historical knowledge. Unfortunately, the version of history being promoted is inevitably biased toward whatever interpretation of events, real or imaginary, that best suits the promoters. Every year in Western nations, for example, the November 11 armistice ceremonies are trotted out, all about how “our” brave and patriotic soldiers were shot dead during the First and Second World Wars, by equally brave and patriotic enemy soldiers.

In addition to the original, founding myths, religious and/or ideological propagandists all over the world are constantly rewriting history, even for relatively recent events. Here in Quebec, for example, many of the current partisans of the independence movement tend to adulate former Parti Québécois leader, and premier of Quebec (1994-1996), Jacques Parizeau, as the one who almost succeeded in making Quebec an independent country by winning 49.4% of the popular vote during the second referendum campaign in 1995. They seem to forget, however, that the referendum question posed in 1995, like the one posed during the first referendum campaign of 1980 (in which the PQ won only 40.4% of the vote), did not explicitly refer to independence as such, any more than the first one did.

Much more importantly, however, politically active people in Quebec nowadays, whether federalist or pro-independence, seldom recall that the same Jacques Parizeau, who used to be René Lévesque’s finance minister before and after the 1980 referendum, was unable to defend the two main principles in the PQ platform, sovereignty and social-democracy, during the world-wide monetarist onslaught of the early 1980s. Losing the 1980 referendum against Canadian federalism made the provincial government much weaker than it might have been during the subsequent fight against international monetarism, but it is not obvious that even real independence would have changed the final outcome.

All over the world, a lot of people these days tend to forget that the neoliberal ideology took over most of the world after 1979, not just because laissez-faire politicians like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl were elected back then, but mostly because the world’s leading central banks “solved” the 1970s inflation crisis by using monetarism as a sort of “cow-catcher” against economic nationalism. Between 1979 and 1983, primary interest rates in the world’s most economically powerful countries were deliberately raised from about 5% to about 20%, and held relatively high until the end of the decade, thereby crushing inflation by creating an enormous, but artificial, recession. Succeeding in doing that allowed the neoliberal movement to simultaneously launch its entire program of vastly reducing government control over the world economy and replacing it with much-increased private-investor control of just about everything that moved, governments included.

Opposing political forces in the world, favoring different kinds of economic nationalism, were simply swept away. China helped out enormously by inaugurating its own pro-capitalist move at precisely the same time. “Independent” governments in countries like France, then under a Socialist Party president, initially tried to resist by nationalizing the economy even more than it was before, but then totally capitulated to laissez-faire in 1983 after an enormous political and financial campaign was directed against that country. The much more isolated, “communist” (state-capitalist) government in the USSR held out until the end of the decade, but then imploded altogether, eliminating two-thirds of its industrial economy in the process.

Given that all those events were taking place at exactly the same time as the first PQ government in the province of Quebec (1976-1985) was trying to move in the opposite direction (toward more government intervention in both economic and social policy), it is tragic, but not surprising, that the PQ was unable to do either of those things. Finance Minister Parizeau, in his 1981 budget speech, started out quite well in resisting monetarism, by using a literary metaphor to denounce the “docteurs Diafoirus de la politique monétaire” for their deliberate attempt to ruin the entire world economy. He was trying to say that the central bankers were acting in a completely harmful way by raising interest rates so much. He felt that using monetarism against inflation was a lot like the purging and the bloodletting prescribed by quack doctors in France during the seventeenth century, who had been thoroughly ridiculed back then as characters in one of Molière’s plays.

In 1982-1983, however, after a concerted attack was launched on Quebec finances by its creditors in New York, Parizeau caved in completely. To save the government’s financial position during the recession, he decided to unilaterally cut employee salaries in the public sector by 20%, and to freeze pension-fund indexation for 17 years, thereby repudiating most of the gains previously won by the union movement since the PQ initially came to power in 1976. In those days, I was a union militant as well as a PQ candidate in the 1981 elections, and I used my campaign to denounce the Bank of Canada in a series of articles that were published in several mainstream newspapers.

I tried to point out how hypocritically the federal government of Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, himself a former economic nationalist, was behaving when it supported the Bank of Canada’s total collaboration with international monetarism. Up until then, Trudeau himself had also been an economic nationalist, among other things adopting the National Energy Program, to keep cheap petroleum from Western Canada lower than the world price after OPEC’s enormous increase in imported oil prices during the 1970s. But he caved in like everyone else on the monetarism issue.

By the end of the 1980s, the new Conservative government of Canada, under Brian Mulroney, went on to sign the free trade deal with the USA, which became NAFTA when Mexico joined in 1993. That particular decision thereby reversed the National Policy of protectionism and government-sponsored economic development that had been in place in Canada since it was adopted in 1879 by John A. MacDonald, the first Prime Minister after Confederation, who was also from the Conservative Party.

Unfortunately, PQ leaders like Jacques Parizeau and Bernard Landry (also a premier of Quebec later on), strongly supported North American free trade back then, presumably because they wanted to get the USA’s support for, or at least lack of opposition to, Quebec independence from Canada. Before he died recently (2015), Parizeau reportedly came to regret that decision.

Back then, I was forced to quit the PQ in 1983 to protest against Parizeau’s attack on government employees, a blow against sovereignty as well as against social-democracy, by walking out the door all by myself during a regional convention. It was one of the few times when events in my little life intersected with what was happening in world history. My point here, however, is that although Jacques Parizeau may indeed have been somewhat more resolute in his support for economic nationalism and social-democracy than most other Quebec politicians, he was not really the giant of independent decision-making that many of today’s pro-independence militants claim that he was. But I cannot get too upset at him nowadays because I cannot think of anyone else, anywhere else, who survived the monetarist juggernaut of the 1980s.

So far as I can tell, no world leaders at any level of government, no leading politicians outside government, no business leaders, no VIPs in the cultural sector (university presidents, symphony directors, etc.), and very few union leaders, have managed to do anything at all over the past 37 years (since 1979) to save the world from the intersecting scourges of neoliberalism, neoconservatism and neofascism. To make matters worse, millions of ordinary people, all over the world, continue to vote for those ideologies all the time. In Peru this year, the people who bothered to vote divided their support almost 50-50 between a neoliberal candidate and a neofascist candidate for president.

Most of the politically active people in that country seem to have ignored the fact that the multinational mining companies dominating the Peruvian economy have been recently tearing the national landscape apart, in their frantic search for maximum profit. Ruining the environment, and killing off large numbers of local people in assorted “accidents” and other “isolated incidents”, is especially prevalent in neocolonial countries, as in the infamous 1984 Bhopal chemical explosion in India. But it is by no means confined to the poorer countries, as witness the 2013 petroleum-tanker explosion in Lac-Mégantic (Québec). Adding insult to injury is the fact that almost nothing is ever done after events like that, to make sure that they do not happen again, in the same places as well as everywhere else. The private companies and the governments involved almost always decide that the cost of fixing the problem is a good deal more expensive than the immediate cost of ignoring the natural environment and the local populations.

Without getting excessively maudlin about it, the future of humanity itself seems more and more doubtful. On the one hand, we could succeed in muddling through all those converging crises like we always have, every new generation always divided into tiny minorities of rich and powerful humans, continuing to treat huge majorities like so much excrement under their feet. On the other hand, we may slip up instead, almost by accident, and do away with ourselves altogether, as the rival groups of neofascist populists try to wipe each other out.

In that case, it’s game over for all us humans, the rich and the powerful along with the poor and the powerless, with the only “silver lining” turning out to be that at least the majority of ordinary people yet unborn will not have to suffer as horribly as billions of such people do now, and have been so doing since human societies first started out. Of course, a lot of people might interpret that as small consolation indeed for no longer existing at all! Getting back to the present day, the only outcome that seems increasingly unlikely is the possibility that we could start to think and act rationally as an entire species, most of the existing centers of power, such as they are, acting together world-wide to solve the host of unprecedented problems that currently assail us.

Things are getting so bad these days that it might become useful at some point to give every new adult, on his or her eighteenth birthday, a sign with the same message written on it that appeared at the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. It is, after all, the tyranny of hope that keeps ordinary people from rising up against their oppressors, since they are always, religiously or ideologically, hoping for the best. But simultaneously also blaming the wrong people for the ills visited upon them by their own chosen rulers. To be sure, those who do rise up are often met with ridicule, if their opponents think they have no chance of getting anywhere. When their opponents think that they do have a chance, those who rise up risk getting their asses shot off instead.

In any case, all the world’s religions and ideologies constantly produce true believers who slavishly follow all the different kinds of leaders, more or less in the same way that all sorts of people fall under the influence of some particular kind of addiction. Quite often, true believers are capable of inventing the most incredibly arcane reasons to “justify” their total devotion to the cause, a lot like smokers, drinkers and drug addicts often go to great lengths to “explain” to their friends and their families why they cannot shake off their addiction. Usually along the lines that it is not they, but everyone else, who is in fact addicted to social conformism. Just like the old joke about the fellow driving his car the wrong way on the highway and complaining about how he is in fact the only person on the road who really knows how to drive.

Back in 1979, before neoliberalism inaugurated the current atavist trend in history, many people still thought that some kind of forward movement might take place instead. The “revolution of rising expectations” led to projections of a new kind of world, in which all religions were to be relegated exclusively to the private sphere so that they could then gradually die out altogether. People all over the world were expected to develop new forms of rituals and ceremonies, celebrating rational and humanist approaches to “the good life”, rather than replicating the hideous religious practices of days gone by. Middle-class people were supposed to take over the entire world, eliminating poverty altogether and controlling the exaggerated appetites of highly-unpopular rich people. The physical and the social sciences were supposed to have become more and more popular every year, the formerly elitist arts totally freed from the stultifying influence of consumerist pop-culture, and so on and so forth.

Instead of an increasingly progressive world, however, all the aggressive competition between opposing forms of reactionary atavism have given us environmental degradation, extreme social polarization, terrorist violence, economic stagnation and geopolitical confrontation on a monstrous scale. Natural causes such as the giant volcano under Yellowstone Park, or another collision with a huge piece of space junk like the one that presumably eliminated the dinosaurs, may very well succeed one day in wiping out most of the superior forms of life on this planet. Long before that, however, we humans may indeed jump the gun with our own ignorance and do the dirty deed ourselves. Man-made catastrophes, including nuclear war, are even more likely to take place in today’s chaotic ideological smorgasbord, dominated by ultra-conservative ways of thinking, than they were during the more or less binary confrontation of the 1945-1991 period.

All it would take would be another huge financial crisis like the one that already shook the world in 2007-2009, with no government interventions this time around large enough or determined enough to temporarily contain it. Then we could find ourselves watching a few thousand totally crazy private armies, from every rival religious sect and populist movement on the planet, commandeer all the world’s conventional and nuclear weapons, and simultaneously try to physically eliminate their designated enemies. “Spasm or insensate warfare”, as the Rand Corporation predicted 60 years ago, during the Vietnam debacle.

Ever since I read Liu Shaoqi’s book, How to be a good communist, shortly after it was published (1965), I have been trying to figure out how both religious and secular ideologies function in the real world. In this text as well as in many of my previous writings, what I have proposed to add to the current literature on ideological delusion, is not so much a remedy, which is extremely difficult to imagine, as a kind of contextualization. It seems to me that if human civilization is to survive in any kind of recognizable state, people are going to have to move far beyond today’s deliberately ignorant epidemic of egotistical populism. They are going to have to embrace precisely the kind of enlightened, genuinely evidence-based approaches to world problems that manipulative politicians, their billionaire financial backers and their millions of deluded supporters, hate so very much.

While it is true that many of today’s scientists have allowed themselves to become thoroughly corrupted by establishment money and influence, the scientific method of thinking is still the only bulwark we humans possess against all the diseased modes of thought. As exemplified in the dozens of different kinds of metaphysical ego-projections that have transmogrified themselves over the years into totally irrational, self-contained, depositories of true believers representing all the competing varieties of religious fabrications, rank ideological reductionism and associated paranormal witchcraft.

As Yves Gingras put it in his recently published book, L’impossible dialogue: Sciences et religions (2016), it is totally impossible to envisage any kind of useful dialogue between religion and science, such as that proposed for the past several years by some of the leading lights inside the Catholic Church. Unfortunately for any such dialogue, those two modes of thinking, the scientific and the ideological, are based on two entirely contradictory approaches to knowledge. The scientific method is based on studying the real world, through rational observation, controlled experiments and so on, submitting all conceivable discoveries to the critical judgment of thousands of scientific colleagues. The mental world of true believers, on the other hand, is peopled with all sorts of imaginary superheroes and super-villains, concocting any manner of esoteric “explanations” of events that have no connection to material reality.

Recently, a large number of people in the West, and in the rest of the world, have begun to lose faith (so to speak) in scientific discourse. I think that a large part of today’s anti-scientific atavism can not only be attributed to the rise of religious fundamentalism, but also has a lot to do with the simultaneous, hybrid, triumph of individualism. In other words, the refusal to accept the reality of collective deliberation that is part and parcel of negative, anti-social neoliberalism. Just like Margaret Thatcher’s comment about how social classes do not exist, only millions of undifferentiated individuals, many people nowadays refuse to accept collective responsibility for anything, putting each person’s personal opinion, about religion, the economy, or whatever, on the same level as rational, scientific discovery and the ensuing debate over how to interpret natural reality.

Most people’s only encounters these days with deliberately garbled versions of scientific discourse come when the news media cite some austerity-prone financial expert or government minister using terms like “evidence-based” decision-making, and manipulating statistics in all kinds of creative ways, to create the impression that their budget-cutting and “paying down the debt” are in fact scientifically proven. All over the world, neoliberal decision makers trying to justify “spending money wisely”, creating “a level playing field” for investors, and cutting back on health, education and welfare for ordinary people, are using scientific jargon to convince their victims that each ruling-class decision is scientifically valid.

  

In reality, however, austerity and neoliberalism are not scientific, or evidence-based, at all, no more than are religious convictions. There is no way that letting all the wealth created in the world since 1979 go to a very small group of ultra-rich individuals, while everyone else has to cut back, can possibly be based on economic necessity. So far as economic activity is concerned, it is in fact the worst thing that anyone could possibly do, as we have seen with the recent epidemic of capital hoarding and the refusal to invest in anything productive. A lot of people are turning against science these days precisely because they have been falsely led to believe that all the world’s scientists are in bed together with the world’s leading financiers, feeding them “scientific justifications” for cutting everyone else off.

Many of those who reject science these days are also victims of the fundamentalist attitudes I have been denouncing since the beginning of this text, not only among “modern” religions and ideologies, but also among “native” ones. Gingras devotes an entire section of his book to the obscurantist attitudes of various “First Nations” groups attacking archaeological digs such as the one that resulted in the 1996 discovery of the Kennewick skeleton in the state of Washington.

A completely unconvincing “remedy” for this kind of adolescent rebellion against grown-up ways of thinking would be to naively propose that everyone just simply dump belief in magic, religion and heteronomous ideologies, into the garbage can and adopt instead an exclusively scientific mode of thinking. Hundreds of well-known philosophers favoring reason and science have been proposing just such a “solution” to metaphysical delusion for several centuries now.

But the least that can be said is that only a small fraction of the overall human population has ever embraced this alternative. Most people, not only the masses of ordinary believers but also the rich and the powerful VIPs who control those opiated millions, want nothing at all to do with scientific uncertainty and much prefer established cultural visions of imaginary grandeur instead. Figuring out how to get people to accept the scientific method as the only rational approach available has always been exceedingly difficult. Unfortunately, current backsliding on a massive scale makes it look as if time is running out, not just for the survival of popular rationalism, but for overall human survival itself.

A few months ago, François Therroux, a contributor to the Le Devoir newspaper (Montreal), wrote an article attempting to explain the current, atavist behavior of Islamic terrorism, by invoking a theory developed by nineteenth-century French sociologist Auguste Comte. Back then, Comte wrote about about how human societies had entered into a prolonged, but transitional, period of time between old-fashioned, theological modes of thinking, and modern “positive” (rational) modes of thinking. During that transitional period, Comte predicted that society would go through several phases, or oscillations, during which people in one part of the world or another would momentarily lapse back into outdated, religious modes of thought for awhile, before correcting themselves and returning to rationalism.

Personally, I do not find that particular argument very convincing. My reading of current events in the twenty-first century world of ideas leads me to believe instead that the populist, or neofascist, “oscillations” that we are experiencing nowadays, not just in the Islamic world, may become permanent, and, if so, may soon lead to humanity’s inevitable demise.

But whatever happens within the next few years, one thing at least is certain. Unfortunately for all those people currently afflicted with any kind of psychotic thought-disease about the anthropomorphic nature of reality, the rest of the universe does not give a damn about what may or may not transpire on this planet during the immediate future. As Dawkins underlined in his analysis of the God delusion, even if the existence of life on Earth seems to depend on the astonishing coming-together of a series of highly unlikely natural conditions, nevertheless the universe we live in is so incredibly vast that in addition to ourselves, there are also probably billions of other, more or less intelligent life forms out there somewhere. However, they are probably much too preoccupied with their own problems, or much too far away, to prevent us from doing ourselves in, during the near future. Particularly if our biological propensities are indeed more inclined toward constantly returning to the ignorant belief systems initially developed several centuries ago, like a dog returning to its breakfast, than they are toward collective, scientific endeavor and intellectual honesty.

So, as has always been the case in the past, we are most probably still on our own and likely to stay that way for a long time to come. If not forever.