Voluntary servitude
The entire world these days seems to have entered into a new period of dangerous decline, in one way or another affecting every country and every culture. It is a period characterized by the worldwide domination of several different combinations of neoliberalism and neofascism, in every region of every continent. Notwithstanding the recent publication of hundreds of thousands of official disclaimers, from almost every public and private institution in the world, pretending to be opposed to both of those recently-imposed forms of regression, that is still what is going on right now. Both those reactionary ideologies continue to dominate almost the entire world, not only in the majority of countries adhering quite openly to some form or another of autocratic rule (absolute monarchy, bureaucratic theocracy, elected dictatorship, one-man “socialism”, etc.), but also in the minority of countries still pretending (for the moment) to practice some form or another of top-down, “representative” democracy.
An increasingly frightening situation, to say the least, that makes it more and more difficult to see how the tiny minority of rich and powerful people deliberately mismanaging all those countries, as well as the billions of ordinary citizens trying desperately to survive under their increasingly erratic tutelage, can possibly hope to deal with any of the large-scale, multiple, intersecting crises currently afflicting everyone on this planet. The constantly accelerating crisis most often mentioned in today’s media is climate change, at the origin of an unending series of particularly destructive meteorological disasters, accompanied by a rapid and ominous decline in biodiversity, all over the world.
Excessively poisonous forms of every kind of pollution are causing all that havoc, particularly but by no means limited to enormous recent increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels. None of the other currently available sources of energy seem to be sufficiently viable or sustainable as substitutes, nor even preferable as methods of truly reducing the overall levels of pollution caused by human beings. Switching to the electrification of everything not previously electrified (such as electric vehicles replacing fossil-fuel vehicles) is not a real solution if the electrification processes involved create even more pollution than we had to deal with before.
It is absurd to believe that any such process can be truly beneficial, when corporations and governments all over the world refuse to include in their planning the new sources of pollution being created by those operations, before, during and after they come into effect. Those operations include the opening up of thousands of new mines, as well as the burning of even more fossil fuels in order to create all that new electricity. Most of the electric vehicles currently being built are also even more massive and resource-consuming than those that they are supposed to be replacing.
Even more dangerous than that kind of climate change, however, is the ongoing proliferation in the number of nuclear-armed nations, accompanied by the multiplication and intensification of hundreds of geopolitical confrontations (Yemen, Mali, Ethiopia, Palestine, Haiti, etc.) in every part of the world. The most disturbing one of which is the ever-escalating Russian invasion of the Ukraine, as well as the much more successful counter-strategy of the US-dominated NATO alliance, designed to permanently eliminate the longstanding Russian threat to its military ambitions. Which means that we are currently closer to a total nuclear war right now than we ever were in the past. Such a worldwide conflagration would inevitably create immensely greater levels of pollution, and much more devastating kinds of climate change, than anything that has so far been seen or projected.
As if those enormous problems were not sufficient by themselves, we have also entered into an endless series of overlapping pandemics, largely caused, directly or indirectly, by the recent expansion of human habitations into areas that used to be reserved mostly for wild creatures. Besides killing off tens of millions of people, those pandemics have also had a hugely negative effect on the world economy, as well as on worldwide social relations. At the same time, truly unprecedented degrees of social division are also getting worse in every country, which are particularly devastating in the world’s very numerous areas of highly concentrated poverty and degradation. Billions of particularly unfortunate people all over the world are obliged to suffer much more, and much more often, than the very few, ultra-privileged members of society, simply because they belong to social categories arbitrarily considered to be inferior to any of the self-appointed, superior categories of people.
The variety of division that affects the largest number of human beings is that of social class. The numerous classes of people artificially designated as inferior have been divided up into dozens of sub-categories, which include the majority of the world’s workers and peasants, as well as many other sub-sets of people, deemed to be significantly less “successful”, and less “efficient”, because they have somehow failed to become as rich, or as powerful, as their self-appointed “betters”.
The second largest category of human beings considered to be socially inferior is the majority of women in the world, most of whom also belong to the social classes located at or near the bottom of the heap. However, women are also targeted as such because their entire gender has been designated, in the vast majority of countries, to be socially inferior. This is true in spite of the fact that many countries deny any such wrongdoing, based on the wording of constitutional promises favouring equality of the sexes. Nevertheless, most of the women on this planet are still being treated worse than most men, no matter to which social class they may belong. Even female homosexuals (lesbians) and gender-changers are considered to be inferior to male homosexuals (gays) and gender-changers, including within the LGBT community, which has the same overall limitations as the general community.
A third category of prejudice, placing millions more people into predetermined groups artificially considered as inferior by the tiny number of people who like to dominate everyone else, is that of the world’s dominated “races”. This particular category does not even exist from a scientific point of view. Most of the people in that ideologically-created category of domination also belong to one of the inferior social classes, as well as quite often being female, and therefore already presumed, for both reasons, to deserve odious treatment.
The “races” that the world’s self-elected dominators decided to place into the superior slots of society are not always the same all over the world, the one at the top of the heap in the USA, for example, being different from the one on top in China. This means that the so-called races considered by dominant people as being inferior to the ones on top also vary from country to country, or from region to region, this category of social division being just as geographically widespread as any of the other ones.
A fourth category has also been invented by the same gang of professional dominators, many of the world’s religions also being considered inferior to some of the others, resulting in even further degrees of division and oppression. This variety of prejudice targets any individual belonging to any religious affiliation that does not control that person’s country of residence, whether or not people belonging to the religion designated as inferior have lived in that same country (or region) for centuries. Every victimized practitioner of every religion targeted as inferior is automatically considered to be an “impure” person, by those representing the dominant religion holding state power in each particular country.
There are also a variety of other ways in which human beings mistreat each other collectively, besides those already mentioned. For example, people in many different cultures quite often mistreat young children, or adolescents, much more than they mistreat adults. In other places, those being hugely mistreated are much more likely to be over 60 years of age, a form of prejudice known as age-ism. Collective mistreatment according to age, however, does not seem to function in the same way in every culture, or in every period of history, as do the previous categories. Yet another kind of mistreatment targets handicapped people, especially those belonging to any of the other populations also deemed to be inferior.
To be sure, some of the people belonging to either a poorly-treated social class, or sex, or “race”, or religion, or age group, or handicap, can still be bad people. They also engage, albeit on a lesser scale most of the time, in the same kind of rotten behaviour toward their fellow human beings as do the people at the top of society, who consider themselves to belong to one or several of the dominant categories. If this were not the case, it would be a great deal less difficult for people to see how we might collectively go about eventually getting rid of most kinds of disgusting human behaviour.
The fact that many people considered by the rich and the powerful to belong to one or all of those “inferior” categories can still be odious individuals makes it much more difficult to solve the general, all-encompassing, social problem. It would be much easier to fight against the division of the world into all the kinds of prejudiced categories of people, as an overall system of intersecting social control, if we did not have to deal with the fact that millions of ordinary schmucks have also decided to adopt rotten behaviour, for their own individual reasons.
The generalized result of all the different kinds of social division being imposed from the top, even inside the world’s richest countries, is that the people considered to belong to an inferior category, for any one of those predetermined reasons, always suffer from much higher rates of every sort of pollution, and much more frequent, often work-related accidents, than the pollution and accidents that also affect, to a much more limited extent, those enjoying a higher spot on any one of those intersecting ladders of social-hierarchy. This is even more obviously the case when some particularly unfortunate people find themselves suffering from all the forms of prejudice at once, a situation often referred to as intersectionality. The same under-privileged people also tend to be much less well-educated, get sick much more often and are much less well-treated in hospitals, retirement homes, and so on, in every part of the world and in every period of history.
Yet another complication, that has recently become more important than it ever was before, stems from the over-ambitious definitions of what some people, either erroneously or deliberately, choose to call the “middle class”. The much more limited number of people in any particular country who truly belong to the always poorly-defined middle class, do not stand out as much in reality as any of the official statistics currently being published would seem to indicate. This is true not only because every variety of official statistics, in every country, is always way off-base, either for reasons of political opportunism or because of rank incompetency. In this case, those statistics are also skewed because millions of ordinary, working-class people falsely claim to belong to the middle class, even though they do not really qualify for that somewhat more privileged position in society.
Inclusion in the middle-class ought to be reserved only for people who make a significantly larger amount of money, and enjoy a significantly higher social status, than do most genuinely working-class people. To be sure, mere middle-class status is much further down the social ladder than the much higher status of the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people who run the entire world. But the number of people occupying a more or less mid-way position on that ladder, inside each country, is often artificially inflated, becoming just another method of officially denying the very existence of demeaning social status. Some particularly disgusting sycophants have even decided to add together every country’s official statistics concerning the middle class, in order to suggest some kind of bogus, middle-class majority functioning in the entire world. As the saying goes “never underestimate the power of denial”.
All the developing disasters mentioned earlier are also being still further compounded by a massive recent increase in political and economic corruption, involving every corporation and every level of government. The criminal gangs running both private capitalism and state capitalism on every continent have merged into one gigantic, insatiable beast, constantly attempting to consume all the world’s available wealth. The people on top are all behaving as if they would rather get rid of the entire human race altogether than to make any of the extremely drastic changes necessary to preserve our collective future. The ruling elites do not want to change anything at all that they are currently doing, continuing to deliberately mistreat “inferior” people, as well as refusing to take any real steps to prevent any of the world’s crisis situations from degenerating out of control, all the while claiming to be doing just the opposite.
They are also not the least bit impressed by the fact that the subordinate systems, in both the public and the private sectors, that are supposed to be taking care of people’s health, are also being ruined completely, even in the world’s most “advanced” countries. A situation that is even further undermined by ever-expanding epidemics of substance abuse, involving all the different kinds of mind-destroying addiction. A growing number of countries have decided to “tolerate” (i. e., let people die from) such crippling forms of behaviour, going so far as to get rid of the victims of “self-inflicted” diseases by using medically-assisted methods of execution, much more often than they ever did in the past.
The other public and private systems that are supposed to be upholding the already grossly inadequate levels of formal education, and cultural development, attained by each particular age group, in every part of the world, are being torn apart just as quickly. The same can also be said of every kind of poorly funded social welfare system currently fighting for its continued existence in dozens of countries. The only exceptions to that rule are the large number of ultra-poor countries, or similarly deprived regions within every other country (including the richest ones), that have never been allowed to possess such systems in the first place.
Deliberately ignoring everything bad that is currently going on seems to be consistent with the ever-accelerating control over everyone’s thinking, carried out by the anti-social media. This is an entirely new source of enhanced propaganda, run by a very small number of ultra-inflated egos controlling every giant corporation. Even the numerous new discoveries in artificial intelligence are being rapidly co-opted into helping the world’s most reactionary, thoroughly unethical, ideologies further strengthen their stranglehold on the world’s population, thereby making it almost impossible to maintain or develop genuinely progressive ideas instead. Ultra-egotistical managers all over the world interpret every social situation and every ongoing crisis in the most reductionist ways possible. They have chosen to deny the very existence of everything that does not fit into any of their predetermined agendas.
The world’s dominant people seem to have decided to “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil”. They talk as if everyone should just ignore anything going wrong anywhere, not only all the constantly accelerating crises but also all the different forms of official prejudice. They feel that if everyone avoids getting upset all the time, those bad things will just disappear by themselves. In imitation of the rich and powerful people who run the world, the fake leftists in the fake-woke movement have adopted exactly the same attitude. They refuse to acknowledge as real many of the things that I have been mentioning since the beginning of this blogpost, refusing even to pronounce the words involved and substituting the first letter of any objectionable practice. Anyone seen to be getting upset about any of those unmentionables is automatically considered to be “an enemy of the people”, especially if that person condemns the belief in magic that such extreme denial always entails.
The most telling proof of the enormous decline in everything positive that still exists in this world are the recent revelations about how several hundred “management consulting” firms, the most important of which being McKinsey & Company, have been taking over just about everything going on in both private and state capitalism since the 1950s. These giant corporations branched out from providing consultation into planning and controlling the ever-increasing gap between the salaries paid to upper-crust executives, as opposed to those paid to ordinary workers. They then began to also manage the huge increase in the number of people being laid off or delocalized worldwide, including the spectacular transfer of hundreds of millions of working-class jobs from countries like the USA to countries like China.
They are now also managing the enormous increase in the number of people employed worldwide in part-time jobs rather than in full-time work. Not to mention contributing in a very significant way toward greatly increasing the capacity of particularly autocratic countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to track down and eliminate hundreds of thousands of political dissidents. (See Jean-François Lisée, “Le cabinet du capitalisme toxique”, in “Le Devoir”, January 25, 2023.) Ultra-right-wing “influencers” have also largely succeeded in destroying whatever was left of “representative” democracy’s already hugely inadequate interpretation of the needs of everyone not belonging to those same ruling circles.
People all over the world are currently trying to figure out how in hell we got into this entire disgusting mess. During the at least two hundred thousand year-old history of our species, how did a relatively small number of rotten people, during a relatively short period of time, manage to impose their sadistic will on everyone else? According to most accounts, the aristocratic domination over millions of “ordinary” people started out only about five to ten thousand years ago in the eastern Mediterranean region, then gradually spread to the other parts of the “Old World” (all of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Pacific islands), as well as to very large portions of the “New World” (culminating in such well-known examples as the Aztec and the Inca empires). That whole process was then greatly accelerated when European-imposed, globalized imperialism finally succeeded in taking over the entire planet, between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries.
How did such a tiny minority of people altogether—at first only a few thousand egotistical maniacs passing themselves off as god-kings, then rapidly growing into only a few million ultra-elitist successors nowadays—succeed in taking over control of almost the entire world population? During that same period of time, the overall human population grew from only about seven million people altogether at the dawn of the aristocratic age, before increasing exponentially to over eight billion human beings nowadays. The answers to those fundamental, existential questions are not currently known for sure, but some of the world’s most dedicated researchers have come up with a number of intriguing suggestions as to what might have caused that relatively rapid seizure of wealth and power.
I recently finished reading a 692-page book by two British academics, David Graeber and David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity” (McClelland and Stewart, Penguin and Random House Canada, 2021), as well as reading several long, equally academic reviews of that work available to everyone on the Internet. Although the authors do not pretend to have been capable of really answering any of those intriguing questions, they, as well as some of their more discerning critics, did manage to come up with several fascinating insights. Most of their book consists of a detailed review of several hundred other researchers recently-published anthropological and archaeological field-work, focusing on indigenous peoples from way back when, in various parts of the world.
Many of the conclusions that those two authors came up with, about what might be pertinent within all that scientific research toward understanding the origins of the inter-connected disasters that plague humanity in the twenty-first century, seem to me to be at least plausible. However, some of their other conclusions seem to be either hopelessly naive, or at best clumsily misinterpreted representations of the available evidence.
One of the most intriguing concepts that they used quite frequently in their book was that of schismogenesis, a concept introduced by Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, defined as the tendency among human societies, all over the world and in every period of history, to differentiate themselves from other neighbouring groups, on purpose, just to be different. One example that Graeber and Wengrow offered was that of ancient Greece, in which the ruling elites in Athens and Sparta, situated only a short distance away from each other, deliberately developed opposing versions of the same overall Greek society. Sparta put the emphasis on war-like, aristocratic behaviour, while Athens favoured a somewhat more democratic form of government. Both those city-states were in fact governed by competing groups of aristocrats, that went to war with each other time and again, but one of them at least pretended to be much more peace-loving and consensus-loving than the other one.
Graeber and Wengrow also referred to dozens of other examples of the same type of deliberately divergent behaviour between neighbouring groups of people. Another example that they cited was that of the Inuit living a long time ago in the far northern part of the world, including in what is now called northern Canada and Alaska, in contrast with some of the Algonquian peoples who also occupied some of the same territory at the same time. According to those authors, while living in the same kind of relatively barren, frozen territory as their neighbours, the Inuit invented the igloo, quite an appropriate discovery for that part of the world, while the Algonquians invented the snowshoe, which was just as appropriate.
Neither group, however, decided to adopt the new technology that the other group had come up with, even though both technologies would have been quite useful to both of them, presumably because of a similar sort of schismogenesis. The authors also underlined analogous differences between indigenous peoples living centuries ago on the Pacific coast, notably between several peoples living in what is now called British Columbia, with other groups living in what has now become northern California.
Those two authors roamed over the face of the entire world, mostly focusing on “prehistoric” periods of history, just prior to the discovery of writing, or to the widespread development of large cities, and came up with hundreds of other examples of similar dissonance, that they felt could not be explained by anything but schismogenesis. This seems to me to be quite an interesting concept, that I am tempted to apply to many apparently similar forms of dissonance between neighbouring societies nowadays. Could the overlapping but disjointed evolution of English Canada and French Canada (concentrated in Québec), since the arrival of the competing French and British empires in this part of the world, also have been influenced by this kind of dissonance? Dozens of other potential examples also come to mind.
I do not, however, agree entirely with one of the main themes of their work, about the contributions that were presumably made by the Iroquoian peoples of the “Eastern Woodlands” of North America, to the European Enlightenment. In their opinion, some of those peoples, particularly the Wendat (Huron), made a significant contribution to intellectual development in Europe by severely criticizing French attitudes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries toward “inferior” people within their own community.
This critique was directly conveyed to French leaders by indigenous captives often transported against their will to France for several years, that Graeber and Wengrow seem to think may even have included a particularly intelligent Wendat representative known as Kondiaronk. According to them, Kondiaronk’s comments had a major influence on one of the French intellectuals at that time, the Baron de Lahontan, who lived for awhile with the Wendat before returning to France. In 1703, Lahontan wrote a well-received book (“Curious Dialogues with a savage of good sense who has travelled”) about his conversations with Kondiaronk. Lahontan claimed in that book that Kondiaronk had a genuine influence on Enlightenment thinkers in France and Germany, including such luminaries as Rousseau and Leibniz. Several years after Kondiaronk’s supposed return to Wendat territory, Lahontan died in 1715 at the court of Hanover, where Leibniz apparently supported and befriended him (page 50).
Those two authors devoted quite a few pages in their book to the enormous controversy that the publication of Lahontan’s book caused, not only in the early eighteenth century, but also more recently, with dozens of authors heaping scorn on Lahontan’s claims about Kondiaronk’s supposed contributions to the Enlightenment. In their book, Graeber and Wengrow denounced all of that furious Western opposition to their theory as being of racist origin. They firmly believed that the Wendat society itself was ultimately better than the French society of that period because of the Wendat’s internal unity, since they were a people who refused to declare class war on the members of their own society. Instead, they chose to make war only on their enemies, such as some of the nearby Algonquian peoples, as well as against the Haudenosaunee, the rival, five-nation-Iroquois confederation.
From a truly universal point of view, however, and not just stemming from a reductionist Western misinterpretation of universalism, it seems to me that going to war against their indigenous rivals, instead of mistreating “inferior” groups of people belonging to the sub-aristocratic members of their own community, does not necessarily make the Wendat superior to the French. I think that all-out war between rival peoples is every bit as objectionable as class war within any particular society, even back then, but certainly in our own time.
Graeber and Wengrow also believed that the Wendat treated the women in their society much better than the French did, which seems to be, from the evidence presented in their book, a much more plausible conclusion. Unfortunately, the Wendat were also divided among themselves, and their Haudenosaunee rivals almost succeeded in wiping them out completely. Their survivors (on the Québec side) were later recuperated, ironically enough, by the French. Several centuries later, some of those people are still living near Québec City, while others (called the “Wyandotte”) ended up scattered around various parts of the USA, including many regions that were entirely new to them back then.
I would like to point out in this context that I fully agree with some of those authors critics, such as those who pointed out that Graeber and Wengrow largely ignored the much longer and much earlier period of history when human beings were confined to Africa, before crossing over into Eurasia. Most of the examples that they provided in their book about pre-history focus instead on the Eurasian expansion, particularly those coming from the Iron Age (about 8000 to 5000 BC), which was the object of much of their early research.
I would also like to add that I do not think that any of the world’s “indigenous” peoples currently live in the same regions that they inhabited from the very beginning. Practically every group of people that we now call “indigenous” to some particular region, do not really constitute what Canadians call “First Nations”. This is the case in spite of the fact that many such peoples, all over the world, have claimed to be occupying the very same territory since the beginning of time. Even the Inuit, however, did not live in far northern Canada from the beginning, originally coming from parts of northeastern Europe (such as Greenland). Before the Inuit came, far northern Canada was previously inhabited by the Dorset culture, that apparently disappeared a short time after the arrival of the Inuit. This sort of thing has happened all over the world, over and over again.
I was recently reminded of that fact when I read the 2021 English translation of a German book published originally in 2019 by Johannes Kraus and Thomas Trappe, “A short history of humanity: A new history of old Europe”. The authors of that book concentrated on how recent DNA sampling of extremely old findings of human remains, notably from far northern Russia, confirmed that human beings have criss-crossed this entire planet, over and over again, for eons. According to them, their research also showed that people from the Old World crossed into the New World more than once, notably around 35,000 years ago as well as around 13,000 years ago. They concluded that all the peoples everywhere moved around quite often after their initial arrival in any particular region of any continent, migration being the number one characteristic of human habitation from the very beginning. Which, it seems to me, also means that none of the peoples inhabiting the world now should be considered purer, or superior to, any of the others.
In their book, Graeber and Wengrow also came up with a general theory of human expansion, caused by three different bases of social power: violence, information and the charisma of “extreme individuals” (pages 364-366). They roamed back and forth over the ages and into many different parts of the world in order to prove their theory, describing hundreds of different examples of how those three principles of social organization were constantly being used together to impose control over people who did not have any access to one or another of them, or of all three kinds of power at once.
They also cited Chairman Mao for his not so delicate definition of violence (“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”), as well as emphasizing the importance of bureaucratic control over knowledge, such as that practised by the Chinese civilization during several succeeding dynasties, that Leibniz recommended be copied by European society. According to them, individual charisma has also been a well-practised basis of social control for quite a long time, even though it seems to be particularly influential nowadays.
On several occasions, they also suggested that even people opposed to official control over “inferior” people could use such concepts to some day do away with top-down social control altogether. However, instead of that kind of revolutionary change, what has happened recently is quite the opposite. Ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism), while theoretically opposed to elitist social control, has been successfully manipulated into significantly reinforcing top-down control instead. Exactly the way in which classical fascism hoped that it would.
I would like to embark now on a rather different, but just as valid, method of contributing to our understanding of how we came to be bogged down so completely in any of the more recent forms of regression. This is by focusing on a number of contemporary examples of voluntary slavery, or servitude, mostly based on information gleaned from articles recently published in the more reliable sections of today’s media. The examples that I have chosen seem to me to be typical of how millions of people living in today’s world manage to make their own lives even worse than they otherwise could have been if they had not decided to proceed in such a self-destructive manner. They made those reactionary ideological choices by practicing many different forms of voluntary servitude, thereby reinforcing the already-existing domination of the human race by the gangs of antediluvian rulers that control the most important public and private institutions currently operating in every part of the world.
Contemporary rulers have greatly intensified the levels of oppression that were originally established several thousands years ago, in only a few countries, by the first ruling classes, as they gradually began to dominate ever-increasing proportions of humanity. The first contemporary example of inducing popular acceptance of voluntary servitude that I would like to mention here is the very real (not at all invented) worldwide conspiracy launched after the Second World War by some of humanity’s most reactionary thinkers, based largely in the artificially-designated, Western part of the world.
They started out by trying to do away with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the USA, the 1935 version of which led to a greater degree of positive, state-sponsored, economic and social interventionism than had ever before been tried out in that very important capitalist country. Starting in 1945, ultra-conservative academics like Walter Lippmann, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek set into motion an international “open conspiracy” designed to eliminate not only the “excessively democratic” form of “progressive capitalism” that FDR had “unfortunately” founded in the USA, but also to gradually eliminate similar programs set up throughout the Western world, particularly in Western Europe.
Their more long-term goal was to at some point extend their brilliantly-conceived counter-revolution to every other part of the world as well, including the long-term subversion of the USSR and its third-world allies. The people in power who supported their ideology particularly concentrated on helping to subvert the leaders of the officially-named Communist Party of China (CPC), that in 1949 had succeeded in seizing power in the mainland part of that country, setting up the “People’s” Republic of China (PRC) and pushing the remnants of the US-dominated, officially-named Nationalist Party of China into taking refuge on the nearby island of Taiwan.
It should be noted that most of the theoretically communist leaders of both the USSR and the PRC were not really all that interested in the world communist utopia as such, as they were in using the Marxist-Leninist ideology in order to impose imperial domination in their respective spheres of influence. That is to say, not only on their own long-suffering populations, but also on the surrounding nations that had already been dominated, at some point in the past, by the previously existing Russian or Chinese empires. I will have more to say about the official communist movement, as well as about official social-democracy, as contributing forms of voluntary servitude, later in this blogpost.
Be that as it may, the relatively small group of elitist liberals that I am focusing on here contributed most of the ideological content adopted wholesale by such direct-action “consulting” firms as McKinsey & Company, that everyone is talking about nowadays. Four French leftists (Pierre Dardot, Haud Guégen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre) published an extremely well-documented book in 2021 about the founders of neoliberalism, proving point by point and backed up by thousands of direct quotes from all the leading plotters, about why they felt that they had to act in that way, and how they intended to implement their conspiracy. I wrote an earlier blogpost about that book several months ago.
Neoliberalism was originally conceived as a return to the kind of elitist, economic and social liberalism that had begun during the first Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (1760-1830), a period during which the government of that country had come under the complete control of private investors, as well as under the ideological influence of classical-liberal thinkers like Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith. Their goal was the same as that chosen later on by their neoliberal imitators, namely to make absolutely sure that the role of the state in their system would be to guarantee that elitist liberalism would always put the interests of the most important private investors in first place.
In their view, world domination by huge private investors was the only way to guarantee “the onward march of civilization”, rather than kow-towing to the interests of the vast majority of the “relatively stupid” general population. In every country where that strategy of control was implemented, however, the only way to succeed was to somehow pretend, in spite of everything, to be officially democratic anyway.
Unfortunately for those British investors and the Liberal Party politicians who supported them, as well as of allied investors and politicians in dozens of other countries, their system did not succeed very well in taking over complete control of world capitalism back then, not even in the USA or Western Europe. The British form of elitist liberalism, while still quite influential, gradually fell out of fashion towards the end of the nineteenth century, during the geopolitical confrontations that led to the First and the Second World Wars, as well as during the first part of the Cold War.
As those four French leftists described it in their book, Lippmann, Hayek and all the other ultra-conservative thinkers of the 1945-1979 period, were desperately searching for a way to finally ensure popular support for their ultra-capitalist regime, in order to completely eliminate the “excessive democracy” that some countries had adopted instead during the intervening period. The solution that they came up with was to deliberately promote every kind of reactionary impulse that had already existed for centuries within the overall population.
In my view, those backward tendencies definitely included the kind of toxic masculinity that had come to typify a small minority of working-class people during the second Industrial Revolution (1780-1880), involving many more countries than just Great Britain. A good example of which was described quite well later on in the song “Sixteen Tons”, about an exceptionally strong, thoroughly individualist, nineteenth-century coal miner in the USA. That song, released by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1947, was chock full of lines like this one: “If you see me coming, better step aside; a lot of men didn’t and a lot of men died”.
Aside from rank individualism, particularly of the “he-man” variety, jingoist support for imperialism, “old-time religion” and all the other components of what was later called ultra-right-wing populism, or neofascism, were just as important. Especially significant is the fact that those tendencies were quite similar to the main ingredients that also characterized classical fascism, that had taken hold for awhile not only in Italy, Germany and much of the rest of Europe, but also in parts of the Middle East, India, China, Japan, North America, South America and Australia. This is quite similar to what has also happened, after a brief historical hiatus, with today’s neofascism, a slightly updated version of classical fascism.
Just as significant is the fact that Lippmann’s and Hayek’s ideas also intersected with the strategies developed after the Second World War, especially by the British, French and American armies, centring on the containment of pro-communist countries and movements all around the world. Not to mention the simultaneous development of counter-insurgency techniques, specifically directed against left-wing nationalist movements on every continent, but often also applied in the home countries, as well as in the formal colonies and in the informal (neocolonial) satrapies.
After having gone a long way toward implementing their strategy in many of the most important Western countries, the founders of neoliberalism achieved a major breakthrough in their drive toward world ideological domination when Mao Ze dung himself invited Richard Nixon into the PRC in 1972, and began the process of cozying up to the USA in order to do away with “revisionist” (Soviet Russian) control over the world communist movement. Mao and his supporters adopted the curious premise that the Russian-dominated USSR had become a greater threat to the very existence of the PRC than was the USA. After Mao’s death in 1976, the same year in which his sometime rival Zhou En lai also died, the “capitalist roaders” inside the PRC, led by Deng Xiao ping, took over the CPC completely and brought it resolutely into the “new world order” in 1979.
Not coincidentally, this was exactly the same year in which Margaret Thatcher in the UK, joined by the USA’s Ronald Reagan a short time later, became the Western world’s most enthusiastic supporters of both neoliberalism and neofascism, combining tightened private-sector control over the state with new military adventures in the third world. The most well-known of those adventures were Thatcher’s war with Argentina over the “Falkland Islands” (Islas Malvinas) and Reagan’s backing of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein against the newly-installed Iranian theocracy, which had just taken over one of the USA’s most important Middle Eastern satrapies. Reagan’s adventurism also led to the so-called Iran-Contras scandal, involving not only Iran but also the Central-American country of Nicaragua, that had been taken over in the meantime by the Sandinistas, a group of left-wing nationalists.
These strategies set off an exponential increase in ultra-reactionary developments all over the world, involving the arrival on the scene of thousands of even more antediluvian leaders, like George W. Bush, and millions of new followers, all of them actively promoting every kind of reactionary attitude that had long been popular among millions of wayward ordinary people in the past. A whole new generation of phoney anti-establishment politicians grew up, such as Donald Trump in the USA, Boris (“Brexit”) Johnson in the UK, the current prime minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni and her two slightly less zealous collaborators (Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi), not to mention leading “wannabes” like Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France. The current, worldwide, two-pronged support for neoliberalism and neofascism is very much the increasingly dangerous coming-into-being of everything that the original pioneers of those same ideologies had always worked for with such passion, succeeding far beyond their wildest dreams.
The second example of voluntary servitude that I would like to talk about in this blogpost is closely related to my first example. This is the current rise, for the umpteenth time in world history, of religious fanaticism. It seems to me that the majority of the entire world’s population is currently involved in a curiously coordinated return to ultra-simplistic, ultra-religious ways of “understanding” the universe that make no scientific sense whatever, except as a method of fleeing psychologically from all the other crises previously mentioned.
This extraordinary revival of “old-time religion” certainly applies to the Abrahamic triumvirate of “revealed” (totalitarian) religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I am including here all the subordinate configurations inside each one of those religions, such as the ultra-orthodox version of Judaism, which is currently dominant, but also the currently less popular versions (orthodox, reformist, etc.). Also included is the evangelical version of Christianity, as well as similar tendencies inside the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox versions, and the radicalization of original Islamic divisions between the Sunni and the Shiite, also affecting minority groups like the Ismailis. It also applies just as much, unfortunately, to a whole panoply of other religions, and religious philosophies, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism and so on, as well as to their own subordinate configurations. Last but not least, it also includes so-called “pagan” or “tribal” religions becoming increasingly popular again among many of today’s indigenous peoples.
Each one of the religious revivals that I am targeting here is, as I pointed out earlier, very closely linked to the emergence of ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism), affecting not only the world’s richest countries like the USA, Japan, Israel, Canada, Australia and most of the European nations, but also significantly less-rich countries like the PRC, the Russian Federation, India, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Egypt and South Africa. Religious revivals are also linked with the rise of neofascism in all the even poorer parts of the world, in such diverse countries as Haiti (“voodooism”), Peru, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Myanmar, and so on.
I see no reason whatever to limit my observations to just the Western part of the world, nor just to the non-Western part of the world, like so many other observers of both those artificial geographical entities always seem to be doing. In today’s world, why not take a global approach to understanding ideology, particularly the ultra-right-wing kind? Not just concerning such things as the merger of private and state capitalism all over the world, but also by underlining similar patterns of worldwide ideological convergence between all the different kinds of religious fanaticism. Globalization as a concept should not just be reserved for international commerce.
Although most of the world’s countries are not yet under the complete control of such totally backward religious ideologies, nothing going on in today’s world seems to be pointing to anything but further regression in the immediate future. Not even in countries like Iran, where opposition movements to the current regime, also set up in 1979, seem to be successfully contained, at least for the moment, by extremely severe government repression, combined with a few insignificant concessions.
Even more important is the fact that almost all those atavistic religious revivals are being considerably reinforced by increasingly aggressive imitations of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, each imperialist country involved (including the PRC, the Russian Federation, India, Iran, Turkey, Bolsonaro’s half of Brazil and so on) trying to impose some kind of past greatness (either real or imaginary). All over the world, in every country so far mentioned in this blogpost, as well as in many others not yet mentioned, religious revivalism is feeding into the related revival of worldwide imperialism, as well as regional domination, completely replacing the old-fashioned East-West, North-South divisions of the past.
A third example of voluntary servitude on which I would like to focus, that I also mentioned earlier, is that of the contemporary world’s left-wing movements, all of which have been horribly out-maneuvered and out-performed by both the traditional right-wing and by the recent revival of ultra-right-wing populism (neofascism). This observation applies not only to the kind of left-wing movements that were popular in many countries fifty years ago, but also to the fake-woke forms of left-wing activity that dominate the scene nowadays, particularly in some of the world’s richest countries.
Back in the 1970s, the world’s left-wing movements seemed to be much stronger than they have become in more recent times. Back then, the left was divided more or less evenly between those organizations belonging to the world communist movement, theoretically favouring the violent overthrow of capitalism everywhere, and the equally worldwide democratic-socialist movement, instead favouring the election of pro-labour governments, which were supposed to come into power long enough, or often enough, to sustain long-term social change. A much smaller conglomeration of left-wing anarchist collectives also existed back then, some of them connected to hippie “communes”, a few of which also spawned “direct-action” off-shoots involved in occasional acts of anti-big-shot terrorism.
Some of the communist parties set up in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia had succeeded in taking state power, not only in the USSR and the PRC, but also in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (temporarily) and Cuba. All those regimes suffered from the same kinds of ambivalence that I mentioned earlier, namely that of confusing world communism with degenerate forms of “bourgeois” nationalism, often bordering on regional imperialism. Those same regimes were also quite influential worldwide, notably in dozens of “third world” countries, throughout Asia, Africa and “Latin” America, that often set up left-wing nationalist (anti-imperialist) governments to fight against “patrician” Western domination.
The PRC’s anti-Soviet alliance with the USA, and the subsequent collapse of the already-imploding USSR, however, led to an almost complete dismantling of that worldwide anti-Western coalition. This was accompanied by the historical “revelations” concerning the forced collectivization of agriculture and the equally forced industrialization of the USSR during the Stalinist period, followed by quite similar developments in the PRC during the Maoist period. In each case, millions of peasants firmly opposed to collectivization were starved into submission, those refusing to budge being physically eliminated, leaving behind several million dead peasants in the Ukraine and in the southern part of Russia, as well as a much larger number of dead peasants inside the PRC. Both of those “revelations” were already common knowledge in all the world’s officially anti-communist countries, but were either ignored of not at all believed until the mid-1980s in many left-wing nationalist countries, not to mention inside most of the world’s communist parties, some of which had become quite popular in places like France and Italy.
While all this was going on, the pro-labour social-democratic parties had also become equally popular in many other countries, not only in Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, etc.) but also in the Americas (Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, etc.), as well as in some parts of Asia (India) and Australia. Many left-wing nationalist movements also teamed up quite often with social-democratic parties throughout the third world. None of the parties favouring democratic socialism, however, ever succeeded in remaining in power long enough to become successful in promoting pro-labour legislation anywhere near the levels that they had initially set out to achieve.
During the period when the influence of world communism was rapidly waning, from the 1980s to the present day, the influence of social-democracy also fell apart in a similar way. Ultra-opportunist politicians like Tony Blair in Great Britain came up with greatly watered-down versions of previously-adopted electoral programs like “New Labour”, designed specifically to accommodate their organizations to the worldwide domination of neoliberalism and of neofascism. Almost everyone on the left decided at almost the same time to abandon any kind of genuine anti-capitalism altogether.
This massive desertion left many people high and dry, even in some of the world’s richest countries. In Québec, for example, the poor treatment meted out to that nation by the rival, and distinctly more prosperous, nationalism of the English-Canadian establishment, led by such turn-coats as Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, greatly contributed to a popular reliance in Québec on “people in high places”. This tendency favoured popular politicians like Parti Québécois founder René Lévesque and his financial lieutenant Jacques Parizeau, in order to fight against English-Canadian domination. Leaders like Lévesque and Parizeau certainly out-classed any of the other politicians of their day by trying to set up an independent Québec. After the failure of the lukewarm, 1980 “sovereignty-association” referendum and the death of Lévesque in 1987, Parizeau rallied the troops to try again in 1995, coming within a few thousand votes of winning the second referendum.
In hindsight, I would argue now that Lévesque, Parizeau and many of the other PQ leaders of that period were too closely tied to international free trade and to many of the other ideological components of neoliberalism, to become successful in setting up a truly independent Québec. It seems to me that their effort would have benefited from a much stronger left-wing movement back then, based in the labour movement and ready to defend their nation against Canadian sabotage. In 1983, when worldwide neoliberalism was in the process of completely eliminating all prior opposition to its rule, Lévesque and Parizeau both caved in to that pernicious ideology by severely cutting back on the modest demands being made by labour leaders at the time. To be sure, even in France, the much stronger Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand also caved in during the same year, after a brief period (1981-1983) of stubborn resistance.
Even in the third world, insufficiently left-wing anti-imperialist movements, such as the African National Congress in South Africa, focused on achieving their immediate goal of doing away with direct European control and/or settler apartheid (like that of the Dutch-speaking Boer minority). They all refused to take the next step and to liberate the majority of their populations from poorly-paid, bottom-feeding wage labour. As a result, even though there were a large number of black and/or indigenous faces in the leadership of many third-world countries back then, not only in South Africa, the vast majority of ordinary people in that nation, and in most other such nations, ended up being downtrodden and mistreated by the new ruling classes, as well as by the old ones.
As a result of all that back-pedalling, the left-wing movements still active in most countries have become a lot weaker than they were in those days, not only in the former “Soviet bloc”, or in the former third-world, but also in the Western countries. In many parts of the world, a reductionist version of leftism has now emerged in the fake-woke movement, misinterpreting the premises of the genuine “woke” movement in the USA that had existed prior to the Second World War. Back then, black communists like Leadbelly had insisted that black people opposed to white-dominated capitalism should remain eternally vigilant not only against class-based prejudices, but also against the majority-white, general population’s tendency to support racist prejudices as well, most of the time against their own class interests.
Fake-woke militants nowadays, many of them being more privileged people than most left-wing militants used to be in the old days, often spout ridiculous tirades based on what is sometimes called “reverse” racism, deliberately accusing all white people in the entire world as being, always and forever, necessarily prejudiced against every other “race”. Which has led some earnest, masochistic white militants into blaming their own “race” for every crime imaginable, particularly accusing all white “baby-boomers” of being collectively responsible (regardless of their class or their sex) for every kind of crisis affecting the world nowadays.
Some of those people seem to think, all evidence to the contrary, that every white person alive on this planet, at least since the onset of modern imperialism, or the first industrial revolution, has always been a privileged person. In reality, most white people on this planet have instead belonged to the category of “poor white trash”, both within the home countries of European imperialism and within the lower classes in many of the colonies belonging to those empires. Millions of such people were kicked out of their home countries in order to found “settler” colonies in the Americas, as well as in places like South Africa (the Boer population) and Israel, not to mention the Russian settlers sent into such internal colonies as Siberia or the Ukraine.
Fake-woke people deliberately ignore all the evidence collected by such eminent historians as Nancy Isenberg, whose 2016 book, “White Trash”, described the entire history of how the ruling-class elites in Great Britain and the USA used such severely downtrodden people in order to simultaneously “improve” their home countries, and to expand their empires, by shipping millions of white indentured servants off to the colonies. Once they arrived, they could then become either fixed-address, working-class proletarians, or constantly wandering, “lumpen-proletarian” adventurers, doing most of the dirty work necessary for the daily functioning of every Western empire on the planet.
In countries like Québec, French-speaking populations left over after the British empire kicked the French empire out of most of North America, were treated even worse than the English-speaking settlers. Similar fates also befell similar people in many other colonies who also belonged to a previously-dominant empire, and imperial language, after many other such take-overs. Nevertheless, some fake-woke people nowadays continue to deny any such “intermediate” social realities, using reverse racism to presume that every white person who ever lived is now and always has been as exceptionally privileged as every other white person.
Most of those same people have also decided that no one living nowadays should ever be allowed to use demeaning words, such as what they call the “n” word. They apply this particularly ridiculous injunction even to historical essays published in the past, such as the book written back in 1969 by ex-FLQ sympathizer Pierre Vallières, “Les nègres blancs d’Amérique”. They continue to do so nowadays, even after militant journalists in Québec like Pierre Dubuc reminded everyone recently that the New York City leaders of the Black Panther Party enthusiastically endorsed the title of that book, as well as its message, before and after it was published. The book itself was largely written on the premises of the BPP.
Fake leftists nowadays also deliberately “forget” that the very word “slavery” had its origins in the Slav populations of Eastern Europe (including European Russia), who are every bit as white as are the mostly-white ruling classes of the USA, the Western European empires, and the Russian empire. In every period, however, most white people are much, much more likely to be downtrodden than they are to belong to the ruling elites. This is true in spite of the equally important fact that even the downtrodden whites are not quite as downtrodden as those even more poorly treated people who suffer from more than one, or from all the categories of ruling-class prejudice combined together, which is the real meaning of intersectionality.
Unfortunately, even the word “intersectionality” is being frequently mis-used by some fake-left demagogues. In Québec, for example, such people are currently opposing the recently-adopted law in that country, banning the wearing of religious symbols by civil servants in positions of authority, on the grounds of “intersectionality”. In fact, that law does not in any way make it more difficult to protect super-oppressed people being constantly degraded by all the different kinds of intersecting prejudice. In reality, that law reinforces rather than undermines the protection that those very people, among others, are receiving from the state, even though that protection is severely limited, for reasons that have nothing to do with that law as such. Left-wing demagogues all over the world, however, like to deliberately misinterpret progressive concepts like intersectionality for their own reasons, often upholding rank individualism and electoral opportunism instead.
The fourth, and last, example of voluntary servitude that I would like to mention in this blogpost is that of the many different ways in which millions of people all over the world also suffer from masochistic obedience to cultural symbolism. Thousands of collective mythologies have been invented by the world’s ruling elites over the years, all of them promoting ideas that are even more utopian than those that the communist and the social-democratic movements supported in the past. The most deceiving ruling-class utopia ever invented has probably been “the American dream”, which to date has only been realized by a very small minority of the USA’s total population, as Nancy Isenberg demonstrated recently in her book.
Other examples of misleading cultural symbolism include such sick jokes as the “thousand-year-old tradition of aristocratic excellence personified by the British royal family”, including such exemplary practitioners of excellence as Henry VIII. Skipping ahead to the twentieth century, that same family also included Hitler-admirer Edward VIII and his divorced American wife, Wallis Simpson, who also supported fascism, not only when she was still living in the USA, but also after she married Edward VIII. Both of them continued to support that ideology for several decades afterwards, in their new roles as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
A more recent example of “aristocratic excellence” is the well-known pedophile, Prince Andrew, who teamed up with such delightful companions as Jeffry Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, in the degradation of vulnerable women and girls under their control. Even relatively more palatable British royals, such as Elizabeth II, only succeeded in founding institutions like the British Commonwealth of Nations, which in reality is a neocolonial entity as far away from sharing any kind of “common wealth” with ordinary people in the UK, as it is from sharing the wealth with any of the former colonies of the British Empire.
Still more examples of thoroughly misleading cultural symbols include the glorious imperial history of “Mother Russia” (including the betrayed revolution of the Soviet period), the French Republic’s repeatedly broken promise of upholding “liberty, equality and fraternity”, “the Chinese path to socialism” (which resulted in anything but that), the half-assed “national liberation of the South African people” (or any other neo-colonial country nowadays), and last but not least the deceptive multiculturalism of the Kingdom of Canada, currently pretending to attack rotten islamophobia while championing equally rotten francophobia. All these myths have been trotted out in order to reinforce and intersect with all the other reactionary tendencies mentioned above. The common goal of all those cultural symbols, and dozens more like them, is to render those atavistic ideologies even more devastating than they were in the past for all the world’s dominated people, targeting not only their individual self-assurance, but also their collective self-determination.
Rich and powerful rulers, as well as the voluntary slaves who fall victim to their propaganda, always present these cultural myths in a positive light, proclaiming that they help to “light the way forward” for everyone in that particular society, “providing hope” for the ordinary masses, and are not just there to serve the limited interests of those on top. In reality, however, each one of those deliberately concocted mythologies is constantly being used to help convince ordinary people that they too can look forward to “a good life” after all, if only they “keep the faith” for a little while longer. The real purpose of those cultural myths becomes obvious, however, as soon as the vast majority of ordinary people realize that their day of reckoning always keeps being put off a little further into the future, and that they never end up genuinely realizing any of their dreams. The better future is always being reserved for a tiny minority of big-shots, and for the only slightly larger group of sycophants who cheer them on.
Each such collective mythology turns out to be just another example of cultural fraud on a massive scale, that reinforces the impact of official propaganda being diffused by various levels of government, as well as the demoralizing impact of billions of commercial messages emanating from the giant corporations that inundate today’s media. This kind of fraud has also become deeply embedded into popular culture itself. “Soft power” organizations, such as the “Disney Channel” in the USA, have become particularly successful all over the world, even further amplifying the efficacy of private and state-capitalist propaganda by using all the newer kinds of mass media currently available to them.
This is precisely the kind of enhanced propaganda that was recently highlighted in an article by Benoît Heilbrunn, “La force des habitudes”, that appeared in one of the “grands dossiers”, called “Rethinking consumerism”, put out last autumn by the French magazine, “Sciences humaines”. Heilbrunn made reference in his article to the overwhelming power of acrasy, a particularly violent form of intemperance propelling super-manipulated people into wanting something so much that they make decisions that are completely contrary to their own best interests, almost as if they were governed by two conflicting personalities at the same time.
Apparently, Heilbrunn took this concept straight out of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (seventh book), so it is not as if it has only been recently discovered. This is precisely the sort of information that none of the world’s dominant people want any successfully dominated people to find out about. This advanced kind of knowledge is also exactly what the opponents of upper-class domination require in order to be able to survive into the near future and to prevent humanity itself from disappearing forever. The current situation goes way beyond any historical equivalent, given our recent entry into the Anthropocene, in which human pollution (including the military kind) has come to threaten our continued existence on this planet in a very real way. All the other problems inherited from the past have therefore been rendered a thousand times more dangerous than they ever were before.
Those of us who think that “nature” (in the form of non-human plants and animals) differs somehow from “human nature”, are also in for a rude awakening. Human beings, after all, are only direct descendants of animals such as chimpanzees, who eat meat with even more gusto than they eat plant food, and who see no reason why they should not continue to do so forever. Everything scurrilous that we humans have done to each other over the past two hundred thousand years, and everything equally damaging that we have done to non-human forms of life, particularly in more recent times, are in reality all part of nature, and should not be seen as fundamentally different from the “rest of nature”. Of course, the same logic also applies to everything good that people do, but good things right now do not seem to be having the upper hand, not by a long shot.
If in fact we do not survive for very much longer, because of the coming-together of all the highly threatening crises and social divisions mentioned earlier, that enormous tragedy for all of us will still be quite natural. If human beings disappear altogether from the universe, the rest of that same universe will go on without us as if nothing in particular had just taken place. And even if some new life-form, with the same approximate level of intelligence that we possessed, evolves in the same way that we did from similar animals to the ones from which we evolved, nothing guarantees that that new life-form will necessarily do better than we did. There is nothing about nature that would guarantee any kind of more positive result.
So we should not just sit around waiting for our world to end, and do nothing to stop that from happening. To be sure, we should have started planning for the future, and changing our ways drastically, back in 1972, when the Meadows report about “the limits of growth” first came out. As I have tried to show in this blogpost, the real limits to growth are not just the physical limits that Meadows was talking about, but also the social and historical limitations to human development. Doing away with these limitations would entail the elimination of all the different kinds of prejudice that continue to hold us back, and coming up with real solutions to all the political, economic, social and cultural threats to our ongoing survival, not just the more technical ones.
The fact that almost fifty years ago, we foolishly decided to make all those problems a great deal worse by adopting neoliberalism and neofascism instead, means that we are going to have to work a lot harder this time. Trying to cram all the enormous changes required that I have been talking about since the beginning of this blogpost, all together, all at once, in today’s circumstances, makes our chances of succeeding much more difficult than it would have been if we had acted properly back then. Starting to get serious this late in the game means that it may already be too late. However, doing more of the same as we did before, like the ruling elites and the fake-woke movement would have us do, is not a very realistic option.
