The popularity of denial

Not a month goes by that the difference between what we should be doing about everything that is going wrong with the world, and what most people actually end up doing instead, becomes greater and greater. Most world leaders, as well as most of their followers, have turned denial of reality into one of this planet’s most popular pastimes. As a result, deliberate, ideologically-based, ignorance of what is really going on has become at least as important as either of the two other sources of ignorance that also unfortunately exist. (Leaving aside any strictly biological considerations.)

In the first place, deliberate ignorance has become as popular as the increasingly absurd situation of billions of poverty-stricken people, all over the world, who even in those countries that are now much richer than they ever used to be, still do not have the time to find out about most things, because they are forced to spend every hour of every day simply trying to stay alive. And in the second place, it has also become as popular as the ridiculous situation of the hundreds of millions of other people who have become so doped into the endless consumption of electronic and/or psychotropic forms of “entertainment”, that they could not care less about anything else that may be happening beyond their immediate line of sight.

The most obvious example of the deliberate, ideological form of denial, is the totally perverse reaction of most leaders and followers to the always-more-dangerous-than-the-last-time-we-looked poisoning of the air we breath, the water we drink and the soil we depend on for most of our food. During the 1970s, just in the transportation sector, millions of people already rich enough back then to own cars reacted to the first energy crisis by opting for smaller, more compact, less gas-guzzling, vehicles. With the onslaught of ultra-individualistic neoliberalism in the 1980s, however, those same people began switching over en masse to much larger SUVs, and even bigger pick-up trucks, more often than not to accomplish the same job of driving one person at a time, mostly to work and back, every day.

With the result that even though the fuel efficiency of most motor vehicles has increased considerably in recent decades, that has not come anywhere close to offsetting the overall polluting effect of the addition of tens of millions of much bigger individual transportation machines, not only in the richer countries that were already consuming the smaller machines way back when, but also in every one of the newly-emerging economies. Similar upside-down reactions occurred with equal perversity vis-à-vis all the other forms of pollution, like the billions of tons of plastic garbage being deliberately dumped into the oceans (for “economic” reasons), especially in Asia. Or the fact that every time some government decides to apply some sort of carbon tax on fossil fuels, it is inevitably replaced (during the next elections or the next coup d’état) by a new government that rescinds that order.

Not to mention the equally incredible spectacle of what could be called personal or voluntary pollution, such as in the ever-increasing consumption of cannabis, whether legalized in some places (such as in Canada), or remaining illegal in other places. A product that is mostly smoked in cigarettes, in spite of the enormous, and only partly successful, barrage of publicity in dozens of countries aimed at eliminating the very dangerous consumption of nicotine smoking. Cannabis being just as dangerous, not only because of the smoke inhalation, but also because it contributes to the potential onset of schizophrenia, especially among young people, and significantly increases incidents of driving-while-stoned. Just what we needed, another “fun”product, like alcohol, becoming more and more popular even though it makes driving motor vehicles even more potentially deadly than it already was.

It turns out that 70% of all the different kinds of pollution in the world can be attributed to the negative product “contributions” of only 100 major (private-capitalist and state-capitalist) corporations. In spite of the enormous quantity of information about pollution being disseminated these days, all over the world, most people’s reaction to the ecology crisis nowadays remains that of trying really hard to avoid noticing that it still exists, while also pretending not to notice that it is, nevertheless, getting worse all the time.

Solving this problem in the usual way suggested by most politically-correct pundits, in the case of mass transportation, by convincing everyone to use public transit instead of privately-owned vehicles, does not meet with a great deal of enthusiasm in most circles. Even getting all the appropriate infrastructure in place in all the world’s poorest countries, medium-income countries and richest countries, at the same time, so that everyone needing to get from one place to another could do so in the most ecologically efficient way possible, using today’s technologies and existing political-economic systems, would require an enormous, unprecedented, industrial effort that would inevitably create (at least for a time) a huge amount of new pollution.

Whereas sufficiently changing all the world’s existing technologies, as well as its political and economic systems, almost overnight, so that ecological efficiency of this kind could be attained before it is too late, not just in passenger transportation but in every other necessary part of modern life, is definitely not getting much support either. Denial has become almost universally popular because most people much prefer just to sit back and to feel good for no particular reason, rather than having to take on such a gigantic task. Especially since the ecology crisis is not the only life-threatening situation facing humanity these days.

Another ultra-important issue that gets ignored just as much by most people, most of the time, is the world’s increasingly dangerous geopolitical situation. For one thing, the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons is getting bigger all the time, with most of the nuclear powers hating each other as much as, or more than, they ever did in the past. Not only the USA, Britain and France against Russia, China and North Korea, but also ever more Hindu-nationalist India versus ever more ultra-Islamic Pakistan.

The USA’s big bad Donald Trump runs around crowing about his “upcoming” nuclear deal with North Korea (the DPRK), while in reality he is being played for a sucker by “the little rocket man” himself, Kim Jong-Un. Meanwhile, Trump’s country remains by far the world’s most important spender on weapons of all kinds, as well as on hundreds of military bases and personnel, scattered all over every continent and ocean. Not to mention spending huge sums of money trying to interfere non-militarily in whatever is going on in every other country in the world, while getting justifiably upset whenever some other country (such as Russia) tries to interfere in whatever is going on in the USA. Moreover, Russia’s decision to continue producing as many intermediate nuclear weapons as before, in spite of a treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987, has also given the USA a convenient excuse to repudiate that same treaty, thereby setting off a new, all-nuclear, arms race. What a wonderful world we live in.

At the same time, the Trump-skull, both intellectually and ideologically ignorant, has also decided to do away with the international agreement that was supposed to prevent Iran from going nuclear as well. While simultaneously supporting most of Saudi Arabia’s apparent attempts to turn Syria’s very uncivil war into a regional conflagration. It turns out that even godfathering the Saudi regime’s barbaric sponsorship of the uber-reactionary Islamic State movement, as all the US presidents and their Western allies have done for the past several years, was not enough.

Now the USA also seems to be encouraging both Iran (backed by Russia) and Saudi Arabia (backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) to exacerbate the regional division between Sunni and Shiite Islam, so as to ignite the entire Middle Eastern theatre. The ghoulish Saudi murder of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, is probably not sufficient either to change any world leader’s mind about “more important issues”, such as the sale of billions of dollars of conventional weapons to the Saudis, in spite of some half-hearted bleating about that particularly disgusting murder. Not to mention the “perceived need” to save too-big-to-fail Saudi Arabia from collapse by creating even greater mayhem in the entire region.

In addition, the USA and its Western allies appear to be trying to make sure that such a horrible thing really does take place after all, by brainlessly continuing to back nuclear-power Israel’s equally dangerous attempts to “protect” itself from destruction by also fanning the flames of an even wider war. To top it all off, the Sunnis themselves have long been a house divided, the Saudis and their allies being totally opposed to the attempted revival of the Ottoman (pan-Turkish) Empire and its new-found allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Erdogan, having recently abandoned Ataturk’s longstanding policy of separation between the state and religion, has put that country in a good position to take a few, “moderately radical” Muslim allies away from its long-time Saudi foe.

In other words, every country in that  region, and well as every one of its international backers, wants to triumph over every other country, thereby maintaining the traditional role of the Middle East as the world’s standard-bearer of violent, multilateral confrontation. Each one of those belligerent nations, Iran, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are being propelled toward total war not only for expansionist reasons, nor just because of pressure from their mentor empires, but also by the incredibly motivating power of their already fundamentalist, or increasingly fundamentalist, religious ideologies.

All the people involved in this multinational escalation sequence simultaneously pretend to ignore the fact that a regional war could very easily become a world-wide, nuclear conflagration. Whose only “beneficial” effect would be to free us all, forever, from having to worry about the ecology crisis any more, by turning relatively “slow-moving” climate change into a much more rapid, much more “efficient”, destruction of the entire human race. Along with millions of other multi-cellular species, and most of the rest of the natural environment. A distinct possibility that makes the recent invention of the new geological epoch, the “anthropocene”, seem like a really bad joke on the part of today’s scientists.

Which puts the emphasis on another outstanding example of most people’s deliberate ignorance of how things really work in this world, when they refuse to understand as well that each separate crisis situation, such as the ecological crisis and the geopolitical crisis, are not separate “files” to be dealt with independently of each other, but tend to intersect at every possible juncture. If human beings are going to survive at all, for more than just the next few years, we are going to have to free ourselves not only from each different kind of voluntary blindness, but also from the combined effect of all these multiple varieties of deliberate ignorance, coming together all the time as they inevitably must.

This same argument applies, too, with a vengeance to yet another leading (and also very closely related) example of deliberate ignorance, namely the deleterious effect of the world-wide, communitarian-identity epidemic. In dozens of different countries, ultra-right-wing populist movements, and their falsely-democratic, state-capitalist governments, are reacting against the kind of international cooperation sponsored since the 1970s by ultra-individualist, private-capitalist neoliberalism, forming a de facto, alternative, anti-liberal coalition instead. Their goal being to promote several different kinds of ultra-conservatism at the same time, while still being divided into opposing clans separated by religion and “pure” ethnicity. People like Marine LePen, the leader of France’s “National Rally” movement, have succeeded in turning the concept of the old-fashioned nation-state, originally intended to embody the now-moribund ideal of “the common good” (or the commonwealth), into a neofascist weapon against the official, European Union variety of neoliberalism.

In the USA, the giant trash-can dumpster, or “Trump-ster”, is also moving more and more into neofascist territory, with the eternally loyal support of the Christian evangelical movement, that always brushes off every one of his evil, corrupt, increasingly mortal sins. His contribution to the neoconservative movement has been to turn old-fashioned commercial protectionism, originally designed to save burgeoning, “infant-industry” economies from the free-trade imperialism of Great Britain, into a weapon to “make America great again” by freeing it instead from the unfair competition of low-wage economies like China and Mexico.

His brand of “economic nationalism”, however, is completely useless in this context, since he has simultaneously decided to drastically cut taxes for already ultra-rich people even more than the previous, neoliberal governments of the USA have been doing since the days of that other false-nationalist from the entertainment industry, Ronald Reagan. US allies, like Japan, the European Union, Canada and Mexico, have lost as much, or even more, of their former sovereignty under Donald Trump than they had already lost under previous American regimes.

Trump’s enormous tax-cuts seem to be designed as a vain attempt to get the other American billionaires on board with his national-imperial ambitions, even though those same billionaires’ gargantuan greed was responsible for the deliberate export of so many American industrial jobs in the first place. But sending the US debt from the stratosphere, where it is now, into the even-further-out ionosphere, will only succeed in preventing the American government, including the Federal Reserve, from being able to do anything at all about the next major, world-wide financial crisis, like the one that almost bankrupted every variety of world capitalism ten years ago.

For the past forty years, neoliberalism has dominated the economic strategies of the imperial Western countries, as well as that of Japan, which have all been trying to build up a world-wide, “post-industrial”, service economy. Based on finance capitalism, freer trade than ever before and the reduction of government to a role exclusively dedicated to helping Big Business eliminate all its previously-important enemies, such as communist and social-democratic parties, trade unions,  publicly-owned industries and utilities, and liberation movements in their former colonies.

Not only were the USSR and its former allies politically defeated and removed from contention, the formerly-communist People’s Republic of China was also conscripted into taking over Britain’s old position as the “world’s workshop”, supplying the neoliberal empires and their satrapies (Canada, Australia, etc.) with cheap manufactured products. To top it all off the vast majority of the former, anti-colonial, liberation movements were successfully turned into ultra-authoritarian, caretaker, neocolonial regimes supplying raw materials and an ultra-poor, reserve labour force for every other part of the world, the same roles that they used to play when they were still formal colonies.

More than anything else, it was this neoliberal onslaught that provoked the coming-into-being of neofascism, all over the world. The neoliberal empires not only mistreated all the other countries in the world, but also helped ultra-conservative forces in all those places put every left-wing political organization out of order, as well as any genuinely progressive-nationalist movements that still existed. They also mistreated their own populations, as well as ordinary people everywhere else, by holding down wages and worsening working conditions wherever they could. Not to mention convincing governments to compete among themselves in order to lower taxes on ultra-rich people, using tax havens like Lichtenstein and the Caiman Islands to hide hundreds of billions more dollars, and forcing almost every government into enormous budget cuts in every possible program beneficial to mere “ordinary people”.

All of which touched off yet another sort of crisis, with the forced migration of millions of people, particularly from “failed states” in many parts of Africa, and also in many parts of Asia (especially the Middle East), as well as Latin America (especially Central America). Most of the people leaving those extremely devastated and extremely violent countries have been trying for the past several years, by any means possible, to move in large numbers to Western Europe, as well as to the USA and Canada, as mostly illegal immigrants. In other words, millions of people from countries destroyed largely by Western intervention, decided to immigrate into the very nations that destroyed their own countries. The deliberate ignorance in this particular case being the disastrous comments of leading politicians in the West, like Trump and LePen, about what “horrible people” these immigrants supposedly are, spreading fake news about how most of those immigrants are “really” criminals and terrorists. In other words, some of the worst kind of hypocrisy ever encountered.

During all those years, the only large populations in the world that succeeded in making any significant gains in overall income share of the world’s newly-created wealth were the hundreds of millions of former peasants in places like China and India, just by becoming industrial workers instead of remaining ultra-poor farmers. However, hundreds of millions of other people, in those two countries and dozens of others, nevertheless remain ultra-poor peasants even nowadays, with an average income of less than two dollars a day. Quite a bit less than the tens of millions of dollars a day that some of the world’s leading billionaires currently “earn” for their “labour”.

At the same time, the neoliberal empires have severely mismanaged the majority section of the world economy that they still largely control. Their particularly stupid strategy of making hundreds of billions of dollars off of selling millions of homes, in the USA and dozens of other countries, to poor people who never had the capacity to pay off their loans, and then reselling those bad debts to everyone else, touched off the Great Recession of 2008, that almost bankrupted world capitalism. Nothing having been done since then to keep private capitalism from doing that sort of thing all over again nowadays, the chances are really good that the next major financial crisis will throw the entire world into a much more catastrophic Great Depression instead. The potential regression that could be caused by such an entirely plausible event is equal to the deleterious effects of either the ecology crisis or the geopolitical crisis, or both of them together, because the chaos and ungovernability caused by a real, world-wide, depression could easily aggravate both environmental destruction and/or military confrontation beyond the point of no return.

By keeping the world’s new-found wealth almost exclusively for themselves, except for some of the people in those countries “fortunate enough” to fall under the (partial) control of ultra-right-wing state-capitalism instead, and by eliminating all left-wing and even centrist political activity in most countries, the neoliberal empires left no one any choice. If they wanted to leave the neoliberal spectrum, then they had to join the neofascist movement instead. Not to forget that both neoliberalism and neofascism were born together in Chile back in 1973, when the Pinochet dictatorship overthrew Allende’s social-democratic government and invited neoliberal economists from the USA, the “Chicago Boys”, to run their economy.

In every part of the world, all the neofascist regimes and movements-on-the-brink-of-becoming-governments, that have been established since the 1970s, are run by people every bit as deplorable as Trump and LePen. Their definitions of good citizens in each country always being confined, as in the more honestly-evil example of Nazi Germany, to “blood-and-soil” descendants of the founding tribes inside each national unit. In other words, an openly racist, blatantly sexist, anti-recent-immigrant, one-true-religion definition of the limited, extensive-family-based community.

This sort of thing is playing itself out these days in various European nations, especially strongly in the former totalitarian-communist Eastern bloc of countries like Hungary and Poland (as well as in the eastern part of Germany), but also in such former stalwarts of merely-electoral democracy as Italy (currently run by a populist coalition, more ultra-right than centrist), France (where the National Rally has not yet succeeded in taking power), and Britain (opposition to the EU largely based on imperial nostalgia). To say nothing of several formerly social-democratic countries in the north of Europe, where ultra-right-wing parties have recently begun to form part of governing coalitions or de facto parliamentary alliances.

Countries in every other part of the world are also fully participating in the same dominant, ultra-right-wing populist trend. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, dominated by European Russia but including parts of northern and central Asia, has also become a world leader that has found its place on the same neoconservative/neofascist spectrum, greatly contributing to geopolitical anti-pacifism with its recently-replenished stockpile of nuclear weapons and its vigorous participation in the Syrian-based war. The Christian Orthodox Church is also very much involved in this imperialist revival, not to mention participating in Putin’s equally vigorous repression of every kind of opposition movement within the federation, whether in the “colonial” section of the de facto empire, or in the strictly Russian section. At the same time, neighbouring countries that used to be part of the USSR, in Eastern Europe as well as in central Asia, are finding it difficult to maintain any sovereign presence of their own.

The People’s Republic of China is also run by a tiny ruling elite, very tightly-controlled by Xi Jinping, one of the few countries in today’s world still officially practising totalitarian “communism” inside the dominant Han nation, as well as inside its own internal colonies (minority regions). Officially billed as a strictly Chinese path toward “socialism”, it nevertheless depends to a large extent on promoting a revival of Confucianism instead. Countries bordering on China, or located nearby, are also feeling the heat of the imperial dragon’s breath. Moreover, China’s commercial domination of a significant portion of the world economy, that is second to none in many different categories, is based on a curious combination of economic nationalism and neoliberalism, the ultimate goal of both policies being to simultaneously maintain and expand China’s ever-increasing political and economic empire.

Meanwhile, the largest and most influential country in Latin America, Brazil, is currently in the process of electing a simultaneously neoliberal and neofascist, Christian-fundamentalist government, run by a former army officer (Jair Bolsonaro) openly nostalgic for the military dictatorship (in which he personally participated) that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. His promise to eliminate political corruption in that exceptionally corrupt nation rings as hollow as Trump’s promise to “clean up the swamp” in the USA. No ultra-right wing government in any country has ever succeeded in controlling, let alone eliminating, corruption, which has always grown much stronger throughout the duration of every such regime. Several other countries currently governed by the right-wing in Latin America, such as Colombia and Honduras, form a significant part of the world-wide proof for this observation. Even theoretically left-wing, authoritarian governments in the same region, such as Venezuela and Nicaragua, are hotbeds of corruption as well, clumsily following in the footsteps of the totalitarian-communist dictatorships of days gone by.

Yet another major participant in this ultra-right-wing populist trend, affecting most of northern Africa as well as many different parts of Asia, not to mention many recent-immigrant communities in Europe and North America, is the often terrorist, Islamic fundamentalist movement. This particular ideological force, based as it is on trying to completely take over a huge religion with universalist pretensions, at first glance looks somewhat different from the more ethnic-based, neofascist movements in other parts of the world. However, the widespread tendency in every human population to turn religious divisions into “racial” divisions applies to every religion in the world as much as it does to Islam.

In Muslim-majority countries, people belonging to minority religions (Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.) are officially turned into tightly-controlled, minority “races” every bit as much as Muslim minorities living within Christian (or post-Christian) countries are also considered to be minority “races” by millions of non-Muslims. This tendency to confound religion with ethnicity becomes particularly virulent whenever any particular religion, such as Islam, falls under the influence of a strong fundamentalist, political movement emphasizing a largely imagined “return” to the “golden age” of the founders of each religion, based on a strictly literal interpretation of sacred texts.

The same observation also applies to every other possible combination of religious majority/minority relations everywhere else, such as Hindu-majority/every-other-kind-of-minority relations in India, Confucius-majority/Muslim-minority relations in China, Buddhist majority/Hindu minority relations in SriLanka and Buddhist-majority/Muslim-minority relations in Burma (Myanmar). Sub-Saharan Africa, especially the more authoritarian countries, some of which also started out as left-wing states, like the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Eritrea,  Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe, as well as not-so-far-mentioned parts of Asia (such as Japan, where homegrown Shintoism vies for power with imported Buddhism), are all affected as much as any of the afore-mentioned regions of the world by the same propensity for ultra-right-wing populist movements to combine ethnic fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism. Not only in the larger religions, but also in most of the “tribal” or “animist” religions that still exist among many of the world’s very numerous indigenous peoples, which are also vying for power locally with proselytizing or “evangelical” religions imported from abroad.

All over the world, confounding ethnicity with religion is often based on some kind of underlying reality, as in the historical Persian (Iranian) decision to switch to the Shiite form of Islam, rather than the Sunni form, for national-imperial reasons, or the Irish decision to remain Catholic rather than switch over to official British Protestantism during the European Reformation. But turning religious minorities into fake-racial minorities all over the world only complicates, without fundamentally changing, the main problem with this kind of cultural confrontation. Which is that every possible variety of such ethnic-religious, motivational amalgams are the common, underlying, necessary ingredient behind the enormous power of each one of these ultra-right-wing forms of populism. Without fundamentalist religion, and without ethnic parochialism, none of these movements could exist for five minutes, let along try to take over the whole world.

Which brings us to the next phase of this exposition, namely the coming-together of the world-wide debate over laicity (sometimes confounded with mere secularism) and the equally important debate over individual human rights versus collective human rights. In addition to using a kind of transmogrified nation-state as a weapon of neofascism, politicians like France’s Marine LePen have also latched onto a deliberate misinterpretation of laicity as another useful tool. Instead of accepting laicity in its usually understood sense, to separate religion from the state in a totally neutral, democratic fashion, as was the initial intent of the famous French “secularism” law of 1905, LePen and her neofascist allies in the Christian world are using this century-old French tradition as a sneaky, indirect way of fighting against the influence of Islam in their countries.

Every citizen belonging to the Muslim minority, not just the fundamentalist extremists but also the more moderate Muslims, including some who actually support laicity as an integral part of modern democracy, are deemed to be “non-citizens”. In other words, turning the entire Muslim minority population into a fake “race”, which was already a false, totally unscientific concept all by itself. In the same way as the neofascist fundamentalists in many Muslim-majority countries (such as Iran and Saudi Arabia) are also defining their own non-Muslim religious minorities as dominated “races”. Including designated minorities hailing from the “wrong” branch of each major religion, such as Sunnis versus Shiites in Islam, the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity, and similar divisions within every other religion.

Many countries, mostly among the liberal-capitalist, Western group of nations, are also affected by the equally-blinkered, multiculturalist ideology, that goes way beyond theoretically letting many different cultures live together peaceably, but insists instead on the perceived “need” for each culture to preserve “essential”, ultra-conservative traditions forever, with no possibility of any joint, ongoing, cultural evolution. These countries are thrown off the track of any possible common cause ever occurring between any of their majority and minority elements by one of the main, non-economic, aspects of modern neoliberalism, namely the idea that all human rights are individual rights, and that collective rights must therefore be stamped out forever.

Which is why in those countries, people still favouring laicity for strictly democratic reasons are roundly denounced by the neoliberal ultra-individualists as “racist” and “fascist”, thereby giving credence to the ultra-right-wing populist movements’ cynical misuse of the laicity concept. Since for the neoliberal ideologues no one is supposed to be allowed any more to promote collective rights, it follows that anyone at all still arguing in favour of the nation-state as embodying the common good (which also no longer exists according to the neoliberal point of view), or any other form of collectivism (such as democratic socialism, communism, feminism or trade-unionism), is necessarily evil.

This attitude is increasingly present whenever people belonging to minority religions in neoliberal countries do something, as they are constantly doing, that is dangerous not just for others, but quite often even for the true-believers themselves. As in the well-known example of the Christian sect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, refusing blood transfusions even for their children. Or the considerably more dangerous, and much more widespread, practice among adepts of both majority and minority religions, all over the world, of refusing to vaccinate their children against infectious diseases, which puts the survival of the entire human population in danger because of the so-called “herd effect”.

When that sort of thing happens in neoliberal countries, a few of the more moderate liberals will nevertheless support a court intervention (representing collective society) to prevent that disease from developing further. In other cases, however, as whenever militant Sikhs insist on wearing their turbans even when riding motorcycles, as opposed to life-preserving helmets, the neoliberal prejudice in favour of a strictly individualistic definition of human rights, wins out every time. Another type of confrontation that is endlessly being discussed in neoliberal countries, is the issue of those ultra-conservative, Muslim-minority women who insist on wearing head-scarves, or other garments hiding most of their faces, or even their entire bodies, ostensibly for religious reasons. 

In this case, the danger to society is usually considered to be merely symbolic, because no one dies from wearing a head-scarf in public, although some women wearing burkas have been known to have fainted in extreme heat. The real problem in this case comes from the fact that cover-up clothing is clearly anti-feminist, though many victims of neoliberalism insist on denying that fact. This is because, once again, neoliberalism teaches that individual human rights are the only ones that count, whereas the argument that women have a collective right not to be assigned an inferior role in society, does not impress them at all. Even though the effect is “only” symbolic, the symbol being projected is nevertheless that of sexual inferiority.

In this context, we should not forget that symbols are extremely important in human societies. National flags and constitutions are also symbols. As are swastikas showing up on Nazi arm-bands, and lapel buttons carrying the likeness of Chairman Mao. Although as symbols of oppression, head-scarves are not quite as obnoxious as those totalitarian symbols, they do nevertheless adequately convey the message of female inferiority, and are correctly associated with that idea in the popular mind. Not only in neoliberal countries (most of which are located in Christian, or post-Christian nations), but also in distinctly illiberal, Muslim-majority countries that have adopted religious fundamentalism, and the neofascist political points of view that inevitably accompany such extreme bigotry. As such, they make a real contribution to the excessive polarization that characterizes most parts of the world nowadays.

Neoliberal sympathizers with deliberately desexualized Muslim women always argue as well that those women have the right to hide themselves from other people, not for anti-feminist reasons but because of their “sincere”, “deeply-held”, individual religious beliefs. These neoliberal ideologues are forever pretending that there is something sacred about individual religious beliefs, which must always triumph over the “much less important” rights of women to dress comfortably (like men), even when most Muslim women in any particular country (or period of history) do not (or did not) share such beliefs.

It seems obvious in this context that those ideologues also have something to hide, namely their secret, hypocritical, conviction that religious belief is in reality much more important in their truncated vision of a “perfectly-functioning” (non-) society than they have the honesty to admit. As was pointed out recently by a group of Quebec citizens militating against another ultra-right-wing practice, namely the disgusting use of poverty-stricken surrogate mothers to provide babies for rich individuals unable to have children by themselves, desires do not automatically become rights.

Endlessly repeating words like “deep” and “sincere” to describe religious belief does not in any way explain why this particular kind of belief is somehow more important than any other kind of belief. Why is neoliberalism itself less sincere than religion? Or ultra-right-wing populism (also known as neofascism)? Or nationalism, whether in its political form or in its economic form? What about communism? Or democratic socialism, or feminism, or trade-unionism, or whatever other political, economic, social or cultural stance someone may wish to hold? How should anyone decide which one of these points of view, all of which have been expressed by millions of people, often over hundreds of years, ought to prevail?

A person, or persons, with a socialist, or communist, frame of mind, for example, could easily argue that their belief should prevail because it is a basic, individual, human right that everyone should be working for a universally accepted world government, representing the common good, rather than working for some money-grubbing private-capitalist, or even for some merely-national-based, state-capitalist employer. On the grounds that no one, and no group of people, should be obliged to waste their entire lives enriching some other person, or group of people, rather than keeping all the value added by their labour for themselves or for their not-yet-adult children, minus taxes to pay for previously-agreed-upon public services. The fact that such an imagined world government does not currently exist, and may never exist given the current state of human affairs, changes nothing about the “deep” or “sincere” nature of that belief, any more than belief in other non-existent entities (like God, for example) automatically disqualifies religious belief at the outset, without any additional argument.

Continuing on the same general idea, what makes individual religious belief in female inferiority a deeper, or more fundamental belief than the promotion of gender equality? On what grounds are national governments considered to be less important than religious caliphates? Why do many states in the USA recognize an individual’s “right to work”, without belonging to a union, as being much more democratic than a group of individuals, working for the same employer, voting to belong to a union to represent them in collective bargaining? On what grounds are “scabs” (strikebreakers) considered in many such political constituencies to be more democratic than union members who voted to go on strike because their employer refused to bargain in good faith?

Should class-action suits also be banned because they function more as “collective agreements” rather than as individual-to-individual agreements? Do individuals cease being individuals when they do something, or believe in something, that someone else is also doing or believing, in the same time and the same place? Does extreme belief in “pure” neoliberalism mean that all human “aggregates” (or societies) are just sadomasochistic relationships between dominant individuals and their dominated brethren? Where does all this ultra-individualistic nonsense end?

A much more inclusive approach would be to base our analysis of all these different, but converging, crisis situations on a philosophical framework grounded in a kind of extended, democratic humanism, combing political, economic, social and cultural aspects, successfully avoiding racism, sexism, fascism and all the different kinds of imperialism. In other words, promoting genuine, ecologically sustainable, evolution and real (not fake) progress toward diminishing, rather than constantly increasing, the enormous income and (Amartya Sen’s) “capability” gaps between the world’s social classes, genders and cultures. Change for change’s sake is ridiculous, if it means constant, neoliberal and/or neofascist regression toward total anomie, or totally inaccurate interpretations of whatever some parochial reactionaries from whichever non-existent “golden age” from the distant past might want to impose on everyone else, as well as on their own lives.

This would also require dumping into the garbage can ideas like the ones promoted by what seems to be a majority of the ideologues involved in “postcolonial studies”, according to which every reference to universal values in human societies necessarily constitutes a form of Western imperialism. These people believe that even the Marxist concept of class struggle, or the very existence of social classes themselves, or universally-recognized genders, or any other form of collective existence, are simply notions invented by pro-Western ideologues to cover up their own (secret) adhesion to the corresponding empires’ conflicting strategies for world domination. But the postcolonial ideology merely substitutes visceral self-hatred of Western civilization on the part of those ideologues (most of whom are of Western origin), for neoliberal individualism’s refusal to recognize collective entities as being real phenomena.

Those so-called “postcolonial” theoreticians seem to have forgotten that all the countries or peoples conquered by the Western empires during the official, colonial period of history, also ruled their own, non-Western, empires for eons prior to modern, Western expansion, those non-Western empires continuing to exist in many cases alongside the Western empires for most of that period. Imperialism, after all, has existed in one form or another on this planet at least since the Akkadian empire’s absorption of the sedentary, Sumerian city-states about 5000 years ago. Not to forget the fact that even in pre-sedentary periods and regions, nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples have been warring on each other, dominating each other and enslaving each other for at least the past 200 000 years. Not only imperialism and slavery, but also racism, sexism and even fascism, were practised, or are in some cases still being practised, by non-Western societies just as much as by Western ones. The postcolonial conceit is just another example of deliberate ignorance.

At the same time, millions of people all over the world want to believe that the best way to do away with every one of these ideological deviations is by adopting science instead. Which is the only form of understanding that is deliberately based on trying to eliminate ideology forever, not only the ideology of one’s opponent but also one’s own ideological preference. Modern science has indeed come up with an immense body of real knowledge that people ignore at their peril, as in the example cited earlier about vaccination against infectious diseases. However, as an alternative to ideological prejudice, the use of science has been undermined by the extremely close relationship that many scientists have maintained over the years with rich and powerful people, not only in predominantly private-capitalist countries, but also in many of the state-capitalist ones as well.

This is definitely an opportunistic relationship, because the practice of science is often an extremely costly undertaking, particularly in the physical sciences. Even though neoliberalism is every bit as unscientific in its ideological underpinnings as neofascism, it is nevertheless especially among those attracted to ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism) that we find most of those other millions of people who have completely lost faith, so to speak, in science. This result has come about, however, mostly because of the lying propaganda of neoliberalism, which always equates development with the maximization of profits. Many people now think that progress, including scientific progress, has become a dirty word, associated with filthy lucre, rather than lighting up the future of humanity as it was originally supposed to do.

Voluntary stupidity, in all its different forms, seems to have become nothing less than another term for what is turning into a world-wide mental-health epidemic. Millions of people seem to be committing collective suicide, by refusing to do anything at all that could adequately deal with any of the extreme, life-threatening crises that have been briefly analyzed in the preceding paragraphs. Most certainly not at all with their cumulative effects either.

None of the different kinds of deliberate ignorance having been successfully repudiated by most of the world’s leaders, and most of their followers, it is entirely possible, in fact probable, that the onward march of human beings toward an ever more glorious future, will soon come to a completely inglorious finish. If current trends continue for very much longer, our world could quite easily be plunged into total chaos, resulting in the return of enormous famines and just as extensive loss of life due to the accompanying return of economic depression, “spasm or insensate warfare” and equally murderous epidemics. We could very well succeed in doing away with each other completely and forever.

In which case, sometime after our collective demise, the eventual arrival on our dead planet of extraterrestrial visitors from a much more advanced kind of civilization, may result in them mucking around in our ruins long enough to find out what really happened to us. In which case, we may end up on an extremely long list of semi-intelligent life-forms, more or less evenly distributed throughout the known universe, that were never capable of overcoming their unfortunate propensity toward different kinds of “primitive narcissism”.