Reinforcing elitism

Many of my blogposts have dealt with the similarities as well as the differences between the two most important ideologies in today’s world, neoliberalism and neofascism. Both of these systems of belief firmly belong to the right-wing part of the political spectrum, and have dominated world politics since the 1980s collapse of such previously important left-wing modes of thought as totalitarian communism and democratic socialism. The communist dictatorships, which at one point seemed to control almost one-third of the world’s population, certainly did the most damage to left-wing pretensions about providing the world with a viable alternative to private capitalism. But their complete reliance on increasingly unpopular and incompetent police-state methods, and their incapacity to provide a better life for the lower-class people that they were theoretically supposed to have been helping, put an end to all that.

For its part, democratic socialism did a much better job of introducing such welfare-state policies as unemployment insurance, public health care and the placing of trade-union representatives onto the boards of many of the world’s largest industrial firms. But the dozens of different varieties of economic nationalism and of state capitalism brought into being by both the falsely communist and the only more or less social-democratic countries never managed to create the degree of social-economic dynamism that could have succeeded in keeping individual greed, corruption and opportunism at bay. With the result that both the communist and the social-democratic movements (which hated each other intensely) just caved in under the overwhelming pressure of the neoliberal onslaught, abandoning the ideological battlefield altogether and leaving the entire world under the hegemonic control of vulture capitalism.

From 1979 to 1989, neoliberalism started out by wielding its monetarist weapon (the temporary quadrupling of interest rates by the world’s most important central bankers) in order to consolidate its hold on its original, multinational, anti-communist and anti-socialist base. Then it moved on to rapidly incorporate all the formerly anti-capitalist genres of power into a new, highly-integrated world-system. As the prime ideology of vulture capitalism, neoliberalism defined itself as a relatively moderate political stance, advocating a return to nineteenth-century individualism and to an updated version of classical liberalism’s fascination with the “free market”, that is to say the total abandonment of any collectivist, governmental or trade-union “intervention” into economic and social affairs.

However, the founders of neoliberalism, such as Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, “forgot” to tell the majority of the population that they were not at all included in the neoliberal definition of individualism. This fact is an early example of what has now come to be called “fake news”, since only rich and powerful individuals, the vast majority of whom are men, are considered to be “real individuals” in the neoliberal scheme of things. In dominant countries like the USA, many ordinary working-class men, particularly white men, thought that they could also participate equally in the neoliberal system because they still believed in “the American dream” and similar, mythical interpretations of social reality that also existed in many other countries. However, as in classical liberalism, so in neoliberalism, the “individual” is a social (class-based) construct, imposed on lesser beings by those genuinely free individuals who have become rich and powerful enough to qualify for membership in the upper-class fraternity. A very small group of women may also become frat members if, like Margaret Thatcher, they agree to abide by the rules, according to which “society” does not exist outside the fraternal conspiracy of the anti-democratic Star Chamber.

Neoliberalism’s enormous success at reintroducing narcissistic, ultra-egotistical elitism as the world’s dominant emotion, seemed to leave its extremely numerous, insufficiently rich and powerful victims with no apparent alternative to its rule but to revive ultra-right-wing totalitarianism instead. Hence the recent rise of the neofascist movement, based not only in the Western-imperialist, Christian-fundamentalist countries, but also in the East as well, taking on almost as many different forms as there were traditional religions to build upon: Salafist Islam and jihadism, Hindu nationalism, Buddhist authoritarianism, Confucian imperialism, etc. To be sure, the leaders of all those neofascist movements, East and West, come from the same upper classes of rich and powerful people who also run neoliberalism, but they managed to get a lot of support from millions of ordinary people by pretending to disagree with neoliberalism’s total put-down of the world’s “inferior” classes.

As a completely bogus alternative to neoliberalism, neofascism usually presents itself as a much more “virile”, militarist political stance, associated with ultra-right-wing populism and the return of a “national-socialist” (deliberately racist and sexist) approach to economic and social policy. In today’s world, all the dominant centres of power, the stronger governments as well as the most powerful corporations, have adopted policies that reflect different combinations of both neoliberal and neofascist influences. To be sure, however, most of their public declarations, which are usually written by professional manipulators of public opinion, do not often speak the truth openly. Instead, they are routinely loaded down with politically-correct fake news, pretending not to be fake news, especially (and not except) when they pretend to denounce political correctness itself, as a concept.

In reality, both neoliberalism and neofascism are on the same political spectrum, the milder and the more bombastic versions being just more or less volubile presentations of the same essential message. Both of them share the common goal of completely eliminating any non-elitist input into political decision-making in the world today. Neofascism likes to pretend that it genuinely represents “ordinary folks”, but curiously enough the people it puts into power (such as Donald Trump and Narendra Modi) belong to exactly the same anti-social establishment that spawned neoliberalism. They just represent an ultra-conservative version of that same general outlook, such as when they reduce taxes for rich people even more than neoliberalism always does. These ideologies have even had a negative effect on the English language, “the bottom line”, for example, having become a new synonym for the absolute truth, when its original meaning was as a synonym for profit maximisation!

The neoliberal-neofascist spectrum of ideas always endeavours to remove any possible political weight being granted to any of the real needs of the world’s less wealthy and less powerful citizens, through the constant reinforcement of the already enormous income gap between the social classes. Either directly by replacing what is left of “old-fashioned” social programs originally set up to help less fortunate people, with “modern reforms” promoting “greater economic efficiency”. Or indirectly through such artifices as the revival of traditional forms of anti-feminism, the never-ending division and re-division of the world’s ethnically-based cultures into biologically unfounded “races”, and the artificial division of those same competing cultures into so many “racialized” religions.

Back when left-wing organizations still had some kind of significant impact in the world, most notably during the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975, millions of people had developed a healthy distaste for vulture capitalism, refusing to let Big Business run the world all by itself. Nowadays, however, after several decades of unimpeded neoliberal and neofascist propaganda, practically every government on this planet has been so thoroughly corrupted by the world’s most powerful millionaires and billionaires that they no longer even try to represent anyone too poor to afford to buy a decent modicum of influence.

In Canada for example, some naive persons were expecting the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau to at least pretend to defend the middle class against the ravages of the upper elites. As had been promised during the Liberal election campaign against the totally supine attitude toward private capital that had characterized the previous, Conservative, regime of Stephen Harper (2006-2015). Instead, the Trudeau government has totally ignored all attempts by Canada’s smaller, anti-establishment parties, such as the Bloc Québécois, at getting the federal government to block access to such preferred, upper-class, tax-evasion paradises as the island of Barbados.

In its place, they came up with a much more comfortable strategy (for them) of trying to cut off some of the ways by which many of the more enterprising, smaller business and professional people regularly use incorporation as a way to get tax advantages over their slightly less enterprising colleagues. The only result of which, at least so far, has been to expose the Liberals to constant attacks from such almost-but-not-quite rich people, who claim that they desperately need those tax loopholes in order to finally become permanently rich themselves.

Even more recently, Mélanie Joly, the minister of culture in the Trudeau government, decided not to tax foreign (i. e., American) cultural corporations like Netflix in the same way that competing Canadian corporations are taxed. Instead, she “preferred to accept” offers of ongoing, voluntary investment in Canadian cultural content, in English, with no guarantees adhering to any minority francophone component. Which indicated to most observers that the Canadian government does not consider itself strong enough to take on a giant like Netflix, even if most of the other governments in the Western world, as well as many non-Western countries, have already imposed such a tax.

It is also completely ridiculous for politicians in power to complain that they need more time to figure out how to adjust to this “brave new world” in which we all live nowadays, because government “intervention” into private control over the Internet is so controversial. As if private control over the same Internet (invented by the US Army, after all) is not even more disturbing! In any case, all the governments in the world’s somewhat more democratic countries always claim that they need more time to adjust to everything “new”. The several decades such governments have been taking to react to the invention of the Internet mirrors the several decades the same governments refused to do anything about massively increasing pension plan inputs, or health-care spending, even though they knew during all those same decades that the overpopulated baby-boom generation was considerably larger than the succeeding “X” generation. Oddly enough, those same governments were totally capable of adjusting much more rapidly to any equally complex problems (such as the 2008 financial crisis, for example) because it had an enormous negative impact on a very small number of really important people, namely the world’s richest private investors.

This kind of hypocrisy is even more desperate in the province of Quebec, whose even more supine also-Liberal government recently appointed a new board of governors for the main anglophone (McGill University) hospital in Montreal that includes more than a few business representatives, while simultaneously refusing to appoint any union representatives. To make matters worse, none of the usual political commentators even seemed to notice the obvious conflict of interest in the fact (according to media reports) that the new board members from the business community all represent firms very much involved in selling hospital supplies and services! This kind of straightforward business/government collusion, at the expense of the taxpayers, might have been expected from the Trump regime in the USA, or from an emerging economy (and limited democracy) like the one in South Korea. But it was not supposed to have happened, at least not so quickly, in a semi-autonomous province that used to pride itself on maintaining some kind of social equilibrium among publicly appointed board members.

Conservative pundits in the Canadian news media have also accused the Trudeau government of having caused a recent decline in tax revenue generated after they dared to slightly increase the very low, top rate of income tax. Those pundits refused to blame the rich people in Canada for reacting to the new rate by shifting even more of their investments to offshore tax havens, and instead blamed the government for having dared to increase the rate in the first place! So far as such commentators are concerned, rich people seem to be somehow genetically immune from media criticism, which can only ever be applied to non-business institutions.

However, it is entirely plausible that the government knew in advance what was going to happen anyway, and only increased the rate in order to appear to want to “soak the rich” a little bit more than before, without ever intending to actually do so in reality. The same government’s most recent attempt to raise revenue, by taxing “freebies” granted to the working poor by their ever so grateful employers, only serves to underline once again the enormous contrast between their mollycoddling attitude toward the ultra-rich and their gouging attitude toward the lower classes.

The steadily increasing, thirty-million-to-one income gap between the world’s (very few) richest people and the world’s (very numerous) poorest people makes it entirely impossible to support the totally unrealistic claim that today’s world is becoming more democratic all the time. Real political power is wielded instead by the world’s most important private investors, especially (but not exclusively) in those “advanced” economies where the larger corporations are hundreds of times more powerful than most governments. And by the world’s most important government bureaucrats, especially (but not exclusively) in those “emerging” economies where the state still controls a relatively large part of everything that moves.

Fiscal policy is obviously one of the main conduits by which rich people exercise their power over government. All the world’s most important banks and multinational corporations, obviously including the enormous “cyber-states” from Silicon Valley (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and so on), use tax evasion as one of their main methods of avoiding government control and thereby indirectly influencing public policy. With the result that in the neoliberal (and neofascist) era of history (since the 1970s), governments do not have nearly the kind of spending power they used to possess in order to exercise public influence on society, for the common good. (From the neoliberal as well as from the neofascist point of view, the word “common”, after all, has the same root as the word “communist”.)

Not only that, but since 2008 in particular, semi-public entities such as the world’s most important central banks have also been forced to spend astronomically large sums of money in order to save the world economy from the very real danger of total collapse brought on by the private debt crisis known as the Great Recession. Which has had an additional, hugely negative effect on government’s capacity to bring into effect any other public policies. Not to mention huge sums constantly being spent on such totally unproductive endeavours as all the different varieties of speculative “investment”, the very expensive, private corruption of public institutions, and the waging of even more ridiculously expensive wars, which are most often based on a never-ending struggle over the control of natural resources overseas.

With the highly predictable result that most of the world’s governments have opted to enforce stringent austerity programs on all their pre-existing health, education and public welfare expenses, initially directed toward helping those extremely numerous people who cannot afford to pay for those things out of their own pockets (like rich people so often do). Such indirect ways of influencing public policy by choking off public spending and forcing governments to increase taxes on everyone else instead, are very seldom considered in most of the world’s highly conservative media chatter about “excessive government spending”. None of the conservative pundits ever get upset about the increasing “efficiency” of private corporations to generate wealth for rich people only, but they never miss a beat when accusing “inefficient” governments of spending far too much money on ordinary people’s welfare.

This is negatively similar to the US military pretending to minimize “collateral damage” to civilian populations during warfare, only in this case it is Big Business attempting to minimize any “collateral benefits” going to the general population as a result of their increasingly self-centred investments. It could also be seen as the business equivalent of what is called “systemic racism”, that is mistreating entire religions as if they were “inferior races”; in this case mistreating the entire un-rich population for not being smart enough to become rich themselves. The ruling fraternity’s ultimate goal seems to be creating a world in which an ever-decreasing minority of the population uses up more and more of all available resources, leaving an ever-increasing majority to divide the tiny modicum of left-over resources among themselves. If this keeps going on for another couple of decades, they will have succeeded in turning the entire world into a universal concentration camp, just like the completely dysfunctional, science-fiction dystopias depicted in dozens of recent Hollywood movies.

The return of “in your face” varieties of racism and anti-feminism, reintroduced by the neofascist movements, are once again becoming useful extensions for the reinforcement of both private and public forms of elitism. Women in general are considerably more victimized than men in almost every governmental austerity program, to the same degree world-wide that visible minorities are also victimized (women from such minorities being doubly victimized). Institutional, or “systemic” racism, sexism and class-based elitism are not at all new phenomena, after all, having always existed in practically every culture all over the world, not just among white, European-origin and Christian-origin people.

Every majority religious community in the world has always been guilty of systemic racism towards religious minorities in its midst, although the degree of intolerance practised by every such community has often varied from one period of history to the next. Since the revival of modern neofascist tendencies, “racializing” rival religions has once again become a popular practice on every continent, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious majorities regularly treating each other’s religious minorities as inferior “races”. Which is a convenient, racist way of generalizing on the well-known historical tendency of different ethnic groups to choose opposing religions, or opposing sections of religions (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christianity, or Sunni and Shiite Islam), in order to prop up their ethnic identities. As could be expected, even when the leaders of such movements are fully aware of the error of their ways, they nevertheless deliberately ignore such realities for political reasons.

Unfortunately, the world-wide tendency among religious majorities to mistreat religious minorities in a falsely racist fashion does not mean that the victimized minorities themselves do not often react in a similarly harmful fashion. In Sri Lanka, for example, majority Buddhist exploitation of the Tamoul (Hindu) minority for several decades led to the formation of the Tamoul Tigers organization, some elements of which indulged in terrorist activities on a large scale before being militarily defeated.

In another example from the same region, the theoretically neutral, but in reality Hindu-majority, government of India under Congress leader Indira Gandhi also tried to eliminate the Sikh independence movement in the Punjab (Khalistan) region by invading the main Sikh temple in Amritsar in 1985. Some of the Sikhs fought back by creating their own terrorist movement which, among other attacks, blew up an Air India plane on a flight between Canada and the UK, killing several hundred innocent Canadian citizens, mostly of Hindu origin, during that same year. An event which still has ongoing repercussions, several successful Sikh politicians in Canada (among them its current defence minister as well as the newly elected leader of its third largest political party) still getting into trouble because they seem reluctant to condemn the terrorist wing of the Khalistan movement even nowadays.

In the Western world, liberal (multicultural) Christians attempting to atone for imperial colonialism and neocolonialism also sometimes adopt a form of religious masochism, deliberately tolerating obvious intolerance, most often from “anti-crusader” jihadists, in the unfounded belief that turning the other cheek will somehow make Muslim fundamentalism, in particular, go away all by itself. They think that they are being “inclusive” by refusing to get upset at even the most outrageous provocations, without realizing that all the different kinds of religious fundamentalism in the world have become essential ingredients in the promotion of each one of the different varieties of neofascist elitism.

Mistreating women, and mistreating poor people, are also just as essential as mistreating religious minorities, in every branch of neofascism. In some Western countries in particular, an over-extended interpretation of what individual human rights are all about has even convinced many overzealous liberals into inviting representatives from newfangled, UFO cults such as scientology and Raëlism, to ecumenical discussions on tolerance, in the totally absurd belief that anything calling itself a religion must necessarily be treated with the utmost respect.

This kind of problem with over-cautious attitudes to minority religions has repeatedly plagued Great Britain more than any other country, which has mistakenly allowed its own Muslim minorities to introduce extremely conservative sharia laws dealing with social relations within that community, in which women in particular are constantly being unfairly treated in total contradiction with British law. The same kind of undeserved tolerance has also been practised from time to time in many other Western countries such as Canada, although it was condemned recently in the province of Quebec as well as having been rejected in Ontario, but only after considerable protests against its impending adoption.

As if all this was not bad enough, some of the world’s most innovative intellectuals have come up with several even more dangerous methods of reinforcing elitism, inventing such barbarian neologisms as “libertarian trans-humanism” and the even more astonishing “sado-liberalism”. For its part, libertarian trans-humanism seems to be an attempt to use artificial intelligence (advanced robotics) to discover ways of developing a superhuman race of beings, that science fiction writers used to call “cyborgs”. Apparently, some of those intellectuals wanted to use such as yet undiscovered trans-human methods to help ordinary people as well, but it seems that the libertarian group promoting advanced elitism is much more popular in such circles.

Libertarian trans-humanism was influenced by nineteenth-century social Darwinism (the survival of the fittest “races”) and by the ideas of such elitist thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche (the superman concept) and JBS Haldane (eugenics). Believers in this theory often denounce their ideological opponents as “bio-luddites”, meaning that anyone not agreeing with the creation of a post-biological super-race are like the British artisans who went around breaking newly-invented machines during the early years of the industrial revolution. Apparently, some of the early founders of artificial intelligence, such as Joseph Weizenbaum, have themselves denounced libertarian trans-humanists for trying to “naturalize” social hierarchy and thereby fostering enhanced-minority, totalitarian, control over society.

This certainly seems to make a lot of sense, since it is hard to believe that any discoveries being made nowadays in the field of enhanced intelligence would not immediately be coopted into the joint neoliberal/neofascist attempt to eliminate social consciousness forever by dividing human beings into two permanently separate entities. Those being a tiny over-class of high-energy achievers living in a marvellous world of universal prosperity and light, separated by an enormous wall, or force field, from a massively overpopulated under-class living in an inter-connected, world-wide mega-slum.

As for “sado-liberalism”, I learned about this new concept by reading an article written by philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour in the Montreal daily, Le Devoir (September 26, 2017). It was based on a court case in France that was eventually decided upon by the European human rights tribunal, to the effect that the two perpetrators (a doctor and a judge) who wounded a female victim of sadomasochism could not be punished because the victim herself had agreed to participate in the first place! The “human rights” judges apparently decided that the woman’s “personal autonomy” in joining the sadomasochist seance had to be protected by the court against the larger society’s belief that they were punishing a crime. In other words, under neoliberalism (and neofascism), society exists not to control individual passions and urges (especially those belonging to dominant individuals), but to liberate those passions from their prior, socially-imposed confinement.

It certainly seems as if both libertarian trans-humanism and sado-liberalism have simply become two “really neat” new ways by which neoliberalism and neofascism can go beyond “mere” upper-class elitism, systemic misogyny and systemic racism, in order to reinforce and eternalize their common objective of dividing human beings into two entirely separate entities.