History is Imperfect

I have either been making history (a few times, as shown in the autobiography that opens this blog), writing history (master’s and doctoral theses, published articles), teaching history (35 years, college and university levels) or learning about history for most of my life. The most important thing that the study of history has taught me from day one is how incredibly imperfect everything that happens truly is. There is just nothing in this world that ever works out the way that people think that it ought to have worked out.

To start with, history is imperfect because everyone who communicates historical information necessarily follows some particular interpretation of events, whether in oral form, written form or any other form (such as film or photos). No human being is capable of transmitting any kind of narrative whatsoever without introducing some kind of personal bias. And it really does not matter what the subject is: universal history, cultural history, national, regional or local history, the history of many people, a few people or just one person.

This applies even to those few professional historians who try very hard to avoid any sort of prejudice and who voluntarily submit their work to the judgment of their (extremely critical) peers. It applies even more ardently to those other egotistical professionals who are convinced that theirs is the only possible interpretation that makes any sense. Not to mention the millions of journalists and other amateur historians of all kinds whose output varies in its degree of honesty from one individual to another.

But the more important point is the fact that the imperfection of history completely demolishes and discredits every attempt that proselytizers are always making to convert everyone to the one true belief, whether religious or otherwise. These people, innocently unaware of their own hypocrisy, think that everyone who does not support their obviously correct point of view is being biased and ideological, but not them. This peculiar attitude shows up not only in the often incoherent ramblings of fundamentalist sects, whether religious or political, but also in the official discourse of powerful politicians and investors representing currently dominant ideologies.

Today’s leading ideology is based on faith in democracy, as if the popular majority was truly in power, instead of the infinitesimally small plutocracy that really runs the only theoretically democratic part of the world. These false democrats pretend to be ruling an international community of several dozen supposedly enlightened nation states, practicing free enterprise, free trade and all the other attributes of officially sanctioned neoliberalism and libertarianism. But they are just as supremely unaware of any possible contradiction between reality and their own peculiar ideological amalgam as any extremist professing the absolute and literal truth of whatever absurd, totalitarian concoctions that they may have themselves invented.

Since everyone necessarily possesses a particular ideology, whether marginal or hegemonic, no honest historian can ever completely support any particular side in any particular debate, over anything at all. Moreover, since history is the study of everything that took place in the past and the past is everything that is not happening right now, or in the unforeseeable future, then no honest person can ever accept at face value any particular point of view about any possible phenomenon that has ever existed. It makes no difference whatever whether or not the historical discourse being analyzed is very recent or really ancient; all human discourse is necessarily biased. The truly intelligent and aware people among us are those who admit that no matter when or where they occur, “the facts” are always ideological constructions and no perfect description of reality is ever possible.

The domain in which this shows up in the most obvious way is in the study of geopolitics. For example, probably the geopolitical topic most often referenced since the Second World War is the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is also one of the  most emotional issues that has ever been debated. Every single entity involved in that conflict, such as the state of Israel itself, the different political factions within Israel, all the Palestinian factions and movements that have sprung up over the years, the other Arab countries, the other Muslim countries, the USA, the Christian Zionists, and every other country, political and religious organization in the world, has its own particular take on that conflict. Unfortunately, all of those “takes” are necessarily erroneous, although some of them may certainly be closer to reality than others. As a result, there is no way that any honest observer could thoroughly support one side or the other in that conflict, or any other conflict, without committing some kind of egregious error. Any either/or approach (“you are either for us or against us”) is necessarily ridiculous.

Most observers invariably get all caught up in the specific predicates of any such conflict. No one ever likes to admit that every possible point of view on anything is necessarily erroneous, in one way or another. There are dozens of reasons why some people support Israel and dozens of reasons why other people support Palestine, but none of them take into account the true interests of all the real people directly involved. In an ideal world, both peoples would be able to live together and prosper peacefully in a harmonious, honest, binational state, but no sane person could possibly believe that such a perfect solution could ever really come into being. None of the sides really wants that to happen, ever.

Human societies never work in any utopian way, and every side in every conflict is always corrupted by circumstances and never proceeds in an ideal fashion. During the Cold War, for example, the officially democratic countries fought against the totalitarian communist menace by allying themselves with over a hundred ultra right-wing military dictatorships spread out all over the world. Which meant that though the self-proclaimed democracies did often function in a somewhat more democratic way inside their own countries than the authoritarian countries did, they were not really promoting democracy as a principle. Since every single ideological conflict in the world is now and always has been corrupted by such dubious alliances, one wonders whether or not any of the leaders of human institutions ever truly believe in their own propaganda. Most of the time, ideological principles are used in the same cynical way as commercial advertising, to sell products and ideas, and after the sale is accomplished are not considered to have any intrinsic value whatsoever.

It makes no difference either whichever geopolitical conflict is being analyzed. In today’s Middle East (North Africa and Western Asia), besides Israel and Palestine, there are dozens of similar conflicts and all the other regions in the world have or have had hundreds of other examples to offer. Wherever and whenever political, economic, social or cultural groupings of people gather themselves into any sort of collective entity, each definable group will always try to degrade or to defeat the aspirations and the activities of any rival group. The separating process that succeeds in splitting human beings into rival groups leads each gang of insiders to invent its own particular systems of identification that deliberately make it impossible to find common ground with any of the outsider groups.

Throughout the centuries, in every different region, all sorts of human groupings have competed with each other for the right to exist and once they achieved that right they inevitably sought domination over all the others. Using only recent examples, whether this process takes place at a global level for world domination (the USA, Russia, China, etc.), regional domination (Germany in Europe, Brazil in Latin America, India in South Asia, etc.) or local domination (the UK versus Scotland, Canada versus Quebec, the Hutus versus the Tutsis in Rwanda or Burundi), makes no difference. Every geopolitical or cultural entity is only interested in its own advancement, whenever it becomes stronger, or its own survival, whenever it becomes weaker. In every case, might makes right: the winning side gets to write the official history of every conflict, unless or until the losing side somehow manages to make a comeback and become the new winning side.

Changing the parameters of the conflict makes no difference either. It does not matter in which particular period of history any conflict has taken place, nor in which domain of human intercourse. Tribal rivalries, religious divisions, conflict between the social classes, are all just as complicated and corrupted by opportunism as any of the geopolitical clashes. Today’s regional wars, like those in the past, are always characterized by all sorts of shifting alliances, making it impossible for anyone, including fundamentalist sects, to legitimately claim any kind of purity whatsoever. History makes every conflict dirty and disgusting, with the result that some of the world’s most fanatic purifiers, such as today’s Islamic State movement, often turn out to be nothing but counter-gangs, or agents provocateurs, under the occult control of external forces. For that reason, no one involved in any conflict can ever be truly certain about what he or she is truly fighting for, or against.

This is why it is so ridiculous for true believers to proclaim that their particular ideology is somehow more sacred than all the rival beliefs. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucianist or any other kind of religious fundamentalists always treat their own founding texts as literal truth of universal significance, descending onto the earth from some ethereal source. But historical analysis of all those texts always determines that none of them were ever revealed all at once by any (non-existent) higher entity and were in fact always the product of centuries of change and dispute between competing religious and geopolitical forces within their respective regions.

Every supposedly sacred text has in reality been altered hundreds of times to reflect the historical evolution of each host society. In exactly the same complicated way that any theoretically non religious, merely political ideologies, have also evolved over time. Anyone who has ever read anything about the evolution of conservative, liberal, nationalist or socialist ideas knows something about the extremely convoluted process by which ideological orthodoxies come into being. The development of the Marxist ideology is an excellent example of such a process, with its constant divisions between competing varieties of democratic and totalitarian socialists. In the end, the currently accepted versions of the Bible or the Koran are in fact no more sacred than the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, or even the compiled quotations from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”.

But none of this leveling off of competing religions and ideologies into so many separate  forms of human discourse means that people are obliged to give in to moral indifference, or ambiguity. Just because no single interpretation of history has any kind of monopoly on the truth, just because every set of ideas is always corrupted and compromised by being mixed up with all the other sets of ideas, does not mean that people should just reject all possible interpretations of reality in a relativist way. Principles guiding thought and action should still be put forward and argued even though no one can honestly expect any of them to necessarily prevail in the real world.

As anyone reading my blog already knows, I also have my own set of such principles, that I share in some cases with millions of other people. For example, I favor complete social equality between men and women, rather than any forms of male chauvinism, whether blatantly proclaimed or hypocritically disguised. Unfortunately, though some parts of the world managed to go quite a distance toward feminist emancipation in relatively recent times, we now live in a period of almost universal regression. More and more men are moving back to an antediluvian attitude toward women, if they ever abandoned it in the first place.

This has become obvious not only in extreme examples like most parts of India but also among native peoples in Canada as well as within the National Football League in the USA. In most such instances, cultural relativism is being used to camouflage such atavism, including the many cases in which women themselves identify with their aggressors (the Stockholm syndrome), such as in deliberately wearing either far too much or far too little clothing in public. In every case where women are being mistreated, it does not do any good to denounce sexism only on the part of dominant countries, or cultural majorities, or social classes, or even, in the case of the Stockholm syndrome, only among men. Equal opportunity denunciation also requires that sexist attitudes be attacked wherever they appear, in every country, every cultural community and every social class. Religious fundamentalism, cultural isolationism and social degradation are not acceptable excuses for rotten behavior of the sexist variety, any more than psychotic levels of egoism in all the world’s toxic personalities are acceptable excuses either.

Another principle that I particularly favor is secularism, based on the complete separation of church and state. In today’s complicated societies, allowing any one religion to get closer to state power than any of the others is thoroughly disgusting. This principle is also quite useful for women’s liberation, since women are invariably the main targets of the kind of religious exaggeration now known as social conservatism. But freedom of religion is almost useless if it is not accompanied by freedom from religion, for everyone who so chooses. Unfortunately, once again it seemed for a time that many more enlightened countries were gradually replacing belief in mythical mystifications with a more scientific approach, but recently the trend has turned in the opposite direction. People are now combining religion with individualism by cherry-picking whatever mystical concepts they choose to adopt, making a total mockery of every established corpus of belief. Even many scientific communities, originally founded on a firm rejection of belief in any concept that cannot be verified by observation or experience, are now letting religious concepts in through the back door, thereby severely undermining their own credibility.

Another one of my chosen principles is the refusal to accept enormous differences in social equality. Once again, there was a tendency not so long ago among many enlightened countries to gradually reduce the gap between the social classes, whereas nowadays this has been replaced by the neoliberal tendency to greatly increase that gap. This is another extremely dangerous trend that has even been denounced by some establishment thinkers as threatening any future expansion of the world economy. To be sure, promoting social equality too much, to the extent, for example, of giving the same mark to every student during a semester is ridiculous, but the 30 million to one gap between daily incomes in today’s world borders on the insane. Nothing good can ever come from the adoption of the so-called Haitian model, in which billions of ultra-poor people are forced to sacrifice their lives to please a small handful of ultra-rich people. Extremely high levels of corruption are the inevitable result, as in India where it seems that an incredible 97% of the total population (1.4 billion people) is forced to scrounge for a living outside the formal economy!

A related principle that I have tackled in my master’s and doctoral theses, as well as in my published articles and my political activity, was distilled from a long-term study of the troubled relations between economic nationalism and economic liberalism. Those studies led me to firmly reject the ideological premise of libertarianism, to the effect that individual control of everything, most particularly the economy, is somehow necessarily superior to collective control. This premise is based on the egotistical mania of toxic personalities, who use an appeal for individual freedom as a cover for their own elitist domination of the supposedly inferior underlings who, according to them, were born only to serve their superior interests. They claim that the enormous corruption of all public bodies over the centuries has been caused by their collective nature, deliberately obscuring the fact that all public corruption has a private origin, whether in the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China or any other place. In reality, corruption is not at all confined to either individual or collective causes, and is much more universal than any of the world’s religions or political ideologies.

A further, very basic, principle is the need to uphold the integrity of the natural environment. People all over the world are now tolerating extremely high levels of pollution much too willingly, particularly in newly industrialized countries like China but also in richer countries like Canada, in which the conservative government has steadfastly refused for the past eight years to observe any environmental standards whatsoever. According to the Canadian government, the 47 people who died last year in the village of Lac Mégantic when a petroleum train blew up were killed only by the negligence of individual workers and not at all by the total absence of federal regulation of the devil-may-care railway and petroleum industries. The world’s largest polluters systematically refuse to accept any blame whatever for climate change or any of the other consequences of their consistently reactionary behavior. Like the tobacco companies, they throw all the blame back on individual choices and refuse to acknowledge any collective responsibility for anything at all.

As I pointed out earlier, however, upholding progressive principles like these ones does not imply leaving behind a sense of reality. Just because people like me feel that these ideas are far superior to their opposite numbers does not mean that we ought to think that they will eventually triumph. In the absence of any plausible reason to believe in the inevitability of progress, it is entirely possible, and is even becoming probable, that superior ideas could eventually die out altogether. Millions of people all over the world may agree that these principles are the best ones known to mankind, but hundreds of millions of other people do not agree at all. Religious fundamentalists, political extremists and ultra-individualists all have their own principles that are in total contradiction with the ones that people like me support. Where we see good, they see evil and where we see evil, they see good.

Deliberate ignorance on a mass scale, as in the Nigerian Islamist “Boko Haram” movement (“Western education is sinful”), combined with enormous sums of money, being channeled through such entities as the political action committees in the USA or the petroleum dollars of the Gulf states, may soon succeed in wiping out the world’s most progressive ideas completely. If current trends continue, the future of humanity could very well be an atavistic reversal of past development (the scientific revolution, the age of enlightenment) and a universal return to truly primitive ways of thinking. Unfortunately, all the social and material wealth of human societies is exclusively based on more modern modes of thought, with the result that a return to primitivism would undoubtedly eliminate most of the world’s population in the process.

History is imperfect. The final proof of that is the absence of any teleological imperative leading toward human progress. Everything is entirely dependent on ideological choices taken by imperfect people, individually and collectively, whose unfortunate decisions are  often determined by egotistical fantasies of omnipotence and immortality.

The ego epidemic

In the conclusion to my previous post (“Regression trumps Progress”), I referred to the epidemic of hubris that is currently dominating human behavior. Although hubris, the kind of overweening pride denounced by the ancient Greek philosophers, has been around for as long as human beings have existed, it certainly seems to have reached the status of a true epidemic nowadays. Following the collapse of the collectivist ideologies that were popular during the “thirty glorious years” of human development (1945-1975), the neoliberal counter-revolution has installed libertarianism as the governing ideology of our era. Unfortunately, the victory of ultra-individualism could not have happened at a worse time, with today’s enormous population of over seven billion people straining to find the resources necessary to deal with all the social, economic, geopolitical and environmental crises that are currently combining together to threaten our collective existence.

Humanity’s main problem in solving previous crises of this magnitude, such as the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War, from the 1914-1945 period, has always been the huge gap between reality and perception that prevents most people from realizing what is really happening to them. In today’s world, millions of ordinary people have been brainwashed by the egotistical maniacs of vulture capitalism into believing that it is organized society, cooperation and solidarity that are threatening our survival and not the toxic personalities who are constantly promoting unbridled individualism.

Unfortunately for everyone, a large minority of the world’s population is made up of individuals infected by several different kinds of personality disorders, whose toxic behavior poisons the lives of all those around them. These disgusting people tend to concentrate in larger institutions like private corporations or governments, but they also thrive in smaller social institutions like the neighborhood or the family. As a result, millions of people who now fall prey to libertarian ideologies are doing so because they have themselves encountered increasing numbers of such egotistical maniacs in their own lives, and mistakenly conclude that total submission to such domineering individuals cannot be avoided.

Several years ago, I was so fascinated by the negative impact of the world’s leading bullies on their numerous victims that I decided to read a couple of dozen books specifically related to this social disease. The one that impressed me the most was a work published in 2000 by Marie-France Hirigoyen called Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity. The author pointed out that even though she was particularly concerned about abuse in the workplace, bullies are to be found everywhere. Wherever they congregate, however, even though some of them became aggressive monsters because they were themselves bullied at one point in their own lives, this does not at all justify their attempts to destroy those around them. Many other people who have been bullied just as much refused to become bullies themselves later on.

Hirigoyen is also impressive when attacking the myth according to which the victims are considered to be masochists, or accident prone people, who merely bring out the aggressive side that is supposed to exist in just about everyone. In fact, this is nothing but pro-bully propaganda, invented by toxic personalities and their sycophant courtesans in an attempt to let them get away with bullying their victims to their heart’s content. But the victims do not at all enjoy being victimized and are in fact immensely relieved whenever they succeed, after a tremendous amount of effort, in escaping from the clutches of their gleeful tormentors.

Unfortunately, toxic personalities seem to thoroughly enjoy causing as much harm to others as they possibly can. Some people try to soften the blow by claiming that bullies only act in this way to escape from a lack of success in their own social relations. In reality, however, bullies, who often have more money and more power than most other people, keep on torturing as many innocent victims as they capable of reaching because they can never get too much pleasure out of choosing to mistreat their designated victims.

This kind of antisocial behavior is behind practically all the problems that I have been identifying on my blog, as well as in my published writings since 2001. The long-term existence of this anti-socialism, and its recent acceleration in the neoliberal counter-revolution, is a sort of “answer to everything” as to why so many different aspects of human life have become even more negative than they were before. It is something like a “unified field theory” of recent social activity, outlining how aggression, both active and passive, has overcome cooperation as the current standard of human behavior.

This is the same ultra-individualist trend that was identified as long ago as 1979 by Christopher Lasch in his book (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations), published in the same year that neoliberalism’s Margaret Thatcher first came to power in the United Kingdom. Many more aspects of the same trend were also identified in Tom Wolfe’s well-researched novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Wolfe’s description of “the masters of the universe” (the bankers and the traders) who deliberately set out to ruin the world economy to prove their own superiority over others, turned out to be quite prescient, since he seems to have predicted the 2008 world financial crisis, whose effects are still very much present nowadays.

But it is not just the world’s most important bullies who belong to this current trend in human behavior. The same general approach to life also characterizes the activities of millions of quite ordinary individuals, whose massive egos also prevent them from identifying with any of their unfortunate victims. Today’s overwhelming rejection of civility, or any kind of public spiritedness, also stems from the same root of deliberate irresponsibility. All of today’s egotistical maniacs are governed by similar kinds of cognitive distortion, variations on the theme that although they used to be “mister nice guys” in the past (usually untrue), now it’s “pay-back time” and everyone one around them is just going to have to do what they say or else.

Unfortunately, we are now living in an age of total self-indulgence, in which liberation from the stifling social constraints of the 1950s (“father knows best”) gradually morphed into total dependence on subconscious spontaneity. In other words, a complete rejection of society altogether, in which each individual concentrates all his, or her, attention on immediate gratification of every possible inner desire. Publicist Timothy Leary’s admonition that everyone simultaneously “turn on, tune in and drop out” soon became abject consumerism, driven by the uncontrollable need of investors to convince every single individual in the world to mindlessly purchase “sex, drugs, rock and roll” and every other item that they could possibly cram into a deregulated and often illegal market economy.

As a result, people’s walls were constantly defaced by graffiti, autographs were replaced with selfies, face to face conversations were replaced with cellphone messages, bridges were loaded down with love lockets, and illegal drugs starting being decriminalized, along with many forms of prostitution, artificial insemination, womb renting, vote buying and so on. Even religion was individualized, with each believer choosing among a million different denominations and ceremonies the ones that were most suited to satisfying every particular need for spiritual stimulation.

Deadbeat dads also became part and parcel of the same individualist trend. Although this category of human behavior has always existed, the number of people afflicted with this particular antisocial disease also seems to have significantly increased recently. All over the world, more and more deadbeat dads simply run away from home at the birth of their first child, while the others satisfy their domineering desires by always letting the women in their lives do all the work that has anything to do with the home or the children.

Even in relatively advanced societies, that allow women to have decent jobs, it is still the missis who has to do all the housework, make the children’s lunches, take them to school and bring them home again, go to all the doctor’s and the dentist’s appointments, meet with their teachers in the evening, and so on and so forth. Even when madame makes more money than monsieur, even when monsieur is officially a house husband, the woman still has to do everything domestic, so as not to disturb her man-child’s oddly fragile identity.

A similar category of burgeoning antisocial behavior is the spoiled brat. Again, this juvenile version of social irresponsibility has also existed since the beginning of time, but until recently it was largely confined to children from rich or powerful families of aristocratic or upper bourgeois origin. Nowadays, however, the spoiled brat syndrome has also gone from several thousand cases per country to millions of examples everywhere. The spoiled brat is no longer just the screaming five-year old in the daycare center, nor just the teenage monster refusing to do any household chores, no matter how trivial.

This social type has now morphed into twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, living with their parents forever, flunking out of course after course, and refusing to do any paid work whatsoever. Some of them go so far as to blame their ignorant behavior on the post-recession economy, or even (in some countries) the capitalist system, conveniently forgetting that many of their peers manage to behave normally in spite of living under exactly the same conditions. The spoiled brats irresponsible behavior is really pro-capitalist, however, since it is the unearned income of the speculative investor that has always been recognized as the very essence of vulture capitalism.

In today’s world, those odd individuals who are still antediluvian enough to remain socially responsible can only survive if they try to avoid such egotistical monsters whenever possible. People with normal egos should do whatever they can to keep their different social groups (families, unions, associations, administrative boards, academic departments, and so on) from falling under the control of toxic personalities, as they so often do. Normal egos should also try very hard to avoid sharing property with ultra-egos, such as in condos, inheritances, or joint investments, because the toxic ones will always do their damnedest to ensure that nobody except them gets to enjoy any of the benefits of the theoretically shared enterprise.

Normal people should also avoid also getting into any arguments with excessive egos about any subject whatsoever, because such bullies always claim to know absolutely everything about anything, in every field of endeavor, no matter how distant it is from their own area of expertise. Like the eighteenth century composer Johann Schobert, every last one of these dominant bullies is quite capable of wiping himself out, along with his entire family, whenever he (or sometimes she) pretends to know as much about wild mushrooms as he does about music.

Avoiding toxic personalities on the personal level is definitely difficult, but not impossible. Avoiding their noxious influence on society as a whole, however, is another thing altogether. With every passing day, our world is becoming increasingly ungovernable, as the ego epidemic undermines our collective capacity to resist its evil onslaught. No one knows what the future holds, whether or not human society will succeed in escaping from the totalitarian control of conspicuous consumption. All we can do, as the saying goes, is to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

Regression trumps Progress

The signs of regression are all around us nowadays. In North Africa and Western Asia, recent attempts at imitating liberal democracy, not to mention the nationalist and communist movements of previous decades, are all moribund. In their place is the current epidemic of hyper-reactionary Islamic fascism, rapidly overtaking all those countries not provident enough to have organized a return to a somewhat less disgusting military dictatorship. To be sure, this medieval Islamic atavism is not confined to the Middle East, nor even to the Muslim world in general, but has also followed migrant populations into the more accommodating sections of Europe, North America and several other regions. The ultra-Islamic contagion is helping to turn back the clock several centuries not only for moderate Muslims but also for all the other inhabitants of the infected regions. Promoted for decades by Western empires and their ultra-conservative Middle Eastern allies, as a useful weapon against nationalism and communism, primal Islam has now become those empires well-deserved nemesis.

Unfortunately, this particular disease is only the most virulent strain of world-wide religious regression, that has also broken out inside the Hindu-nationalist movement, in India and in the Hindu diaspora, to say nothing of militant Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist revivals affecting various parts of Eastern Asia and other emigrant communities elsewhere. Not to be outdone, the world’s most popular religion has also exported its own antediluvian versions of Christian fundamentalism and Bible-thumping literalism, infecting dozens of other countries. Based especially in the USA, this particular form of regression also spawned the increasingly popular Christian-Zionist movement, in alliance with the militant leaders of today’s Israel, in which liberal democracy and social-democracy have been recently replaced with a Talmudic fixation on the ultra-orthodox colonization movement.

As has become common with all these religious resurrections, microbial elements of neolithic belief in tribalism, sorcery and magic have also been mixed into the overall pandemic, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in the imperfectly modernized Western world. Nomadic mythologies, both Aryan and non-Aryan, are being combined once again with neofascist miscegenations of the Christian narrative, just like they were back in the 1920s and the 1930s. Native peoples in Canada, the USA, Australia and several other countries have also had to cope with a similar outbreak of borderline identity disorder, also focused on pre-urban traditionalism.

Another major source of modern regression is the enormous income gap between the social classes, that has been increasing at an alarming rate ever since the libertarian infection also broke out some thirty-five years ago. As a result, the top one percent of one percent, about one ten-thousandth of the world’s total population, has been taking an exponentially larger share of world income than it held during the somewhat healthier thirty-four years that followed the Second World War.

In spite of relatively modest gains in income that accompanied the recent industrialization of several previously peasant economies, the overall social bill of health  of today’s world has been severely infected by an unprecedented dichotomy between billions of underpaid industrial and service workers (more numerous than they ever were before) and a handful of ultra-rich financiers. The middle class that is supposed to preserve social well-being by separating the two extremes is gradually being killed off altogether, as every country in the world competes against every other country to reduce taxes further than ever before on parasitical nodules of potential investors. But only a very few of those hyper-concentrated pools of capital are still interested in any kind of job-creating productive investment, in which the rate of return is so very much smaller than in the pestiferous, exclusively financial transactions that dominate the current world economy.

The world’s richest people, not only those hailing from private-sector financial conglomerates but also those other billionaires who have taken over direct control of nationalized economies, are also trying to eliminate whatever remains of the much maligned twentieth-century welfare state. All over the world, every social program originally designed to help underprivileged people stay afloat at least minimally is being re-engineered so as to transfer less and less real income to such unworthy “useless eaters”. Today’s libertarian survivalists are trying once again to spin survival of the fittest into the epitome of a primitively democratic way of life, each individual guaranteeing each other individual’s personal freedom to compete in a fight to the finish for each and every place in the sun.

Still another affection undermining physical and mental health in today’s world is the incredibly short-sighted but quite popular tendency among decision makers to completely ignore ecological disorders. In spite of overwhelming evidence and daily reminders in all the media, both private and public investors all over the world are constantly pressing ahead with full-scale development of every kind of material pollution. They do this all the time in the most deliberately profitable ways possible, constantly inventing new excuses for doing nothing real to prevent environmental degradation. On the contrary, they consciously pretend that their ways of doing things are in fact ecologically preferable to any of the alternative methods available.

Canada’s Conservative government, controlled by people from the extractive industries, has become a world leader in pollution denial since it came to power back in 2006. They pay the inevitable lip-service to environmental protection, while carefully avoiding any decision that might in fact negatively affect investors sacrosanct bottom lines. Even the explosion of non-regulated petroleum tank cars, that killed dozens of people in Quebec last year, has not done anything to temper their enthusiasm for immediate profit. They have deliberately refused to take any blame whatsoever for what happened, just like they did during the poisoned food scandal in Ontario in 2008. All libertarians all over the world, in both the private and the public sectors, always blame every “isolated incident” of criminal negligence on the workers who carried out their orders and never on the bosses who made those decisions.

Every one of those seemingly separate outbreaks of reactionary behavior is in fact interacting with each other kind of atavism to create a world-wide pandemic of regression. Religious fanaticism, tribalism, social Darwinism and ecological blindness are like four separate strains of infectious disease combining together to bring down progress, rather like the famines in the early part of the fourteenth century that made it possible for the Eurasian plagues to kill millions more people than such epidemics managed to do prior to that time. As a result, all the material and intellectual progress of the succeeding six centuries risks being turned into its exact opposite in the foreseeable future.

During the European renaissance of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a small group of intellectuals started believing in progress, the idea that human beings and their societies were not trapped in any kind of apocalyptic or cyclical prison, but could in fact gradually improve themselves, both individually and collectively. This belief in human progress, originally rooted in the religious concept of the divine spark, led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which Christian anthropomorphism was abandoned by leading thinkers in favor of natural explanations of the universe. Human intellectual development as a concept took on a decidedly secular connotation during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when many thinkers came up with considerably more radical interpretations of what progress should entail. French philosopher Denis Diderot, for example, famously avowed that the world could only progress once the world’s last king was strangled in the entrails of the world’s last priest.

The industrial revolution in the West, between 1780 and 1880, considerably strengthened this idea of progress by giving it a much more solid grounding in productive economic growth, greatly increasing the potentiality for a much richer kind of commonwealth. The scientific progress preceding and accompanying that economic and social revolution then continued to expand and deepen its effect during what have sometimes been called the second (1880-1930) and third (1940-1980) industrial revolutions, which were in reality conceptual and technological extensions of the first one.

The idea of progress both caused, and benefited greatly from, all the amazing discoveries and innovations that constituted the truly positive aspects of rapid economic growth. Political and social reformists and revolutionaries all over the world then started to tackle the more negative aspects of industrial development by trying to extend the benefits of massively increased material wealth to all the different human populations that were initially ignored or horribly exploited by the pioneering entrepreneurs who managed to turn scientific and technological progress to their own exclusive advantage.

Although the train of human thought has never followed a strictly linear path, it nevertheless soon became obvious to people possessing a progressive frame of mind that leaving behind a belief in magic or in equally mythical religious constructions eventually led to several other logical conclusions. The first such conclusion had to do with the extension of the word “revolution” from its initial appearance in the science of astronomy to its eventual use as a political construct. To put it as simply as possible, using the most well-known example, the revolution of the planets around the sun was found to follow an elliptic curve rather than a pure circle, an idea (among many others) that was rejected by the scholastic leaders of the Catholic Church. For them, individual human behavior on earth could certainly be imperfect but not the actions of their universal God, who would necessarily have made heavenly objects follow a perfect pattern (a circle).

This led the followers of science and secular reality to the conclusion that since inanimate, celestial bodies could behave in such an “imperfect” way, there was no reason at all to continue believing in any of the human social constructs that had been invented over the centuries to justify enormous differences in power and income. In the absence of extra-terrestrial control, if the physical universe was not at all perfect, eternal or unchanging, then human societies did not have to follow any preconceived notions like the totalitarian domination of universal religions, the divine right of kings, or any other such malarkey. Subsequent observers have extended the same train of thought into the rejection of dozens of more recent ideological constructs, such as the free market.

As a result, the concept of progress soon came to include the extension of civil rights to everyone, not just the white male owners of property who originally invented free assembly, freedom of speech and the right to vote as weapons in their fight against the absolute monarchy. This meant liberating women, the other half of humanity, from 6000 years of religious and civic oppression within all the world’s urban-based empires. It also meant freeing hundreds of oppressed peoples in the colonies and economic satrapies of those empires, not to mention minority populations living inside the imperialist “mother countries”.

Recently, however, progress as a concept has been deliberately maligned and manipulated by sycophantic reductionists to mean the opposite of what it was originally supposed to mean. Radical ecologists, for example, have been denouncing “progress” as a synonym for environmental destruction. Multiculturalists have been just as busy rewriting the definition of the right to practice some particular religion as an excuse for doing away with such inconvenient, competing rights as women’s liberation, or taking away children’s rights to a decent education by allowing religious maniacs to confine education to purely religious fantasies.

But ecology is in reality an integral part of progress, since it means making sure that economic expansion really does provide increased prosperity for everyone. Unsustainable development can never guarantee progress for the rather obvious reason that short-sighted, linear expansion will simply collapse as soon as massive dollops of pollution eliminate the human populations totally dependent on breathing, eating and drinking non-poisonous elements in order to survive. Anyone who accuses progress of being anti-environment has obviously not thought much about what the word “progress” is supposed to mean. Ecological fascists should go back and read their dictionaries one more time.

Human rights are also an integral part of progress, as long as exclusively religious rights are not allowed to drown out all the other rights. The right to practice a religion, after all, is a personal choice, not a social one. Modern societies mixing together hundreds of different peoples, believing in thousands of different combinations and permutations of magic and sorcery, competing religious constructs, and primitive forms of ethnic identity, all jumbled up together, cannot possibly be expected to survive if every little group of believers is allowed to reduce everyone else’s rights to fit their own mythical projections. In a world of over seven billion globalized people, universal rights have to take precedence over letting each individual ego make up its own little package of personal behavioral quirks that everyone else has to accommodate because they are supposed to be so much more “authentic” than any other people’s beliefs.

There is also nothing racist about rejecting any of these reconstructed religious fantasies. In the first place, none of these modern egotistical projections of ancient religious practices are historically or theologically accurate reconstitutions: they all combine certain poorly understood ideas that their founders initially had, while rejecting others just as important, and adding all sorts of newer ideas in which none of the founders ever believed. In the second place, these reconstructions are not confined to any particular religious or cultural tradition.

Most importantly of all, it is completely ridiculous for politically correct sycophants to try to compel everyone to accommodate each and every one of these modern religious reconfigurations out of a misconceived fear of committing racism. Racism, after all, does not just mean negative discrimination against some particular cultural entity, it also includes positive discrimination for any particular group. Any form of discrimination on racial, cultural or ethnic grounds is racism; ordinary racism also includes reverse racism.

Evil things that people from dominated, minority groups do are just as evil as equivalent things that people from dominant, majority groups do. Evil people are not better if they come from Palestine rather than from Israel, or from China rather than from the USA, or from native people rather from non-native people. Equal doses of evil are equal, no matter from which human population they stem.

And finally, ego projection, otherwise known as hubris or overweening pride, is the root element of each one of those different forms of reactionary regression. People who believe in magic or similar religious myths are, after all, only projecting their own egotistical refusal to acknowledge that human beings are just another part of the natural universe. Humans in fact do not have any special right to be protected from the consequences of their own childish behavior by any genie, metaphysical father figure or harmonic principle possessing absolute control over everything that exists. Without an adult sense of responsibility for their actions, humans cannot expect “something else” to step in to save them from their own misdeeds. Unfortunately for more modern minds, the indifference of the rest of the universe to human problems and inadequacies is not something that over-inflated religious egos have the courage to accept.

Hubris is also the psychological principle underlying the individualist or antisocial form of egotistical behavior. Those who favor massive increases in the income gap between the social classes are into that sort of thing not so much for material benefit as such, since there are only so many particular items that any one individual can possibly use in a single lifetime. What they really seek is the kind of power over others that accumulating massive gobs of capital and outdoing everyone else on the planet appears to give them over every one of the supposedly inferior peons who surround them.

This is the same master and servant feeling of pure domination that also motivated, and still motivates, all the world’s totalitarian dictators, regardless of the imperialist, fascist, communist, populist or neoconservative ideology that they are nominally supposed to be representing. It is also not at all anomalous to note that many of the world’s most reactionary religious movements have made a very convenient pact with the devil by also upholding material accumulation, according to their favorite dictum, “God helps those who help themselves”.

This selfsame ego projection also explains deliberately ignorant attitudes toward environmental destruction. People who are constantly denying that any real ecological problems currently exist, or who profess to being able to find some kind of readily available technological fix for pollution and climate change, are simply letting their colossal egos get in the way of any real solution. While it is true that human beings are theoretically capable of solving those problems by simply discovering new kinds of natural resources that do not possess the same negative physical characteristics as those now being used, as in the controlled development of nuclear fusion, this can only happen if human societies possess the time, the audacity and the organizational will-power to effect such massive changes.

Unfortunately, there is nothing at all in the way human societies are currently being run that would suggest to any intelligent observer that progress is going to trump regression any time soon. Quite the contrary. Religious fanaticism, libertarianism and ecological blindness, all of them upheld by the kind of overweening pride that currently seems to have a death grip on the human race, make any kind of genuine progress highly improbable. It remains to be seen how this will all turn out, but at the moment the epidemic of unredeemable hubris looks unstoppable.

Corrupt Politicians and their Austerity Budgets

The recently elected Liberal government in Quebec came out with a new austerity budget that closely resembles many other such budgets adopted over the past several years in dozens of other places. This time around, it seems that the provincial government is serious about drastically reducing spending across the board, following the usual rhetoric about the need to eliminate annual deficits right away and therefore make it possible for Quebec to eventually pay off its accumulated debt. To reinforce their message, they have promised to pass new legislation this autumn so that they can roll back salaries and freeze hiring for all civil servants, not just for ordinary ministerial employees but also for everyone working indirectly for the government in the health and education para-public sectors, over half a million people all told.

These drastic, unprecedented cuts, as announced, go much further than any of the previous austerity budgets adopted in the past, since Quebec first hopped on the neoliberal bandwagon during the induced recession of the early 1980s. This latest version of fiscal rigor is being vigorously supported by the usual crowd of libertarian economists and media editorialists, all of whom emphasize how dangerous it is to continue borrowing money to  help pay for such “over-generous” social programs as public transit and daycare.

Spending middle-class taxpayers money on programs popular among middle-class taxpayers would seem like the right thing to do, given the fact that they pay a much larger percentage of tax than the rich do. But the antisocial fanatics always blame popular programs for causing every budget deficit and every debt burden ever created. They always treat every financial crisis caused in reality by the world’s richest investors as a given, as if it was completely impossible to control any of the incredible excesses of the world’s leading egomaniacs. Only social programs benefiting lesser folk, the non VIPs who do not make enough money to deserve deferential treatment, are singled out as the unique cause of every budget crisis the world has ever known.

It is as if the central banks monetarist interventions of the 1980s never existed, as if the world’s leading vulture capitalists never embarked on their speculative binge of strictly financial investment, as if the IT millennial crisis never took place, as if the 2007-2009 world financial collapse of the “too big to fail” never brought us all to the brink of disaster, as if none of the incredibly stupid decisions still being taken even more recently by the world’s most important financiers, had any impact whatsoever on government debt. According to all the mainstream economists and all the establishment editorialists, every single budget problem that ever surfaced anywhere is always and forever the fault of excessively demanding ordinary people, who insist on maintaining public health care and public education in spite of the “obvious need” that the experts feel for getting rid of that populist rubbish once and for all.

The Quebec government has already implemented the first phase of its legislative onslaught, by requiring current pensioners at the municipal level to contribute once again to previously negotiated pension funds, notably through de-indexing. Municipal unions are being targeted as the major obstacle toward eliminating the huge pension deficit, often on the grounds that younger workers are being made to pay for more numerous older workers. The other major argument for canceling collective agreements is that otherwise millions of people in the private sector who have no company pensions at all, or very inferior ones, would have to pay vastly increased municipal property taxes.     

Only a few analysts choose to remember, however, that it was the provincial governments, all across Canada, that decided twenty years ago to collectively transfer a large part of their responsibilities onto municipalities, suggesting that they pay for those greatly increased localized services by “temporarily” ignoring their pension liabilities. However, the provincial governments were themselves merely transferring part of the effect of the federal government’s own previous decision to download many of its responsibilities onto the provinces. And the federal government made that move during the 1990s because of the enormously increased federal debt caused by the monetarism of the 1980s, when the world’s central banks decided to solve the inflationary crisis of the 1970s by quadrupling interest rates. The Canadian government’s accumulated debt, from Confederation in 1867 right through to 1979, about 79 billion $ all told, was then astronomically increased in only fifteen years to over 500 billion $.

The 1970s inflation itself was caused by several different factors, such as the Vietnam War against communism and OPEC’s decision to greatly increase prices of petroleum exports. But a more important contribution to that crisis was the problem caused by the continued use of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, even after the USA had fallen way behind its post-war domination of world industrial production. An equally important cause of double-digit inflation during the 1970s was the refusal of many leading financiers, especially in the US, to sufficiently depreciate the monetary value of their by then technologically obsolete industrial investments.

In Canada, today’s federal debt is still almost as large as it was in the 1990s, in spite of all the transfers of responsibility to inferior levels of government, and all the accumulated debt-service charges paid since 1979. This is because of all the other financial boondoggles imposed by the world’s leading financiers since that time, especially the 2007-2009 financial meltdown. In fact, the Quebec government’s escalating assault on its own public sector is just a relatively small part of the entire world-wide transfer of responsibility for debt from the “too big to fail” private financiers who initially caused all those problems, to the ordinary people who always end up paying for financial hyper-profits, one way or the other.

Unfortunately, not much can probably be done to prevent libertarian governments from using ordinary taxpayers money to pay for rich people’s excesses. In the USA, the relatively small Tea Party rump seems to be controlling US politics altogether, to the astonished delight of its billionaire sponsors. Canada’s Conservative government is also hanging in there for privately sponsored neoliberalism in spite of its hundreds of political gaffes and its ongoing control of only about one-third of the total electorate.

The province of Quebec is another interesting case because voters here recently returned to power the anti-separatist Liberal Party. Curiously enough, the Liberals were  handily re-elected in spite of being singled out by the ongoing Charbonneau Commission into provincial and municipal corruption, as the major source of all that collusion. Quebec’s new premier, Philippe Couillard, is particularly poorly placed to lead a vigorous assault on public expenditure because of his past role as a non-performing business partner of Canada’s king of corruption himself, Dr. Arthur Porter. Porter at least symbolically brings the whole game together for not only having corrupted the McGill University Health Center and the Quebec government, but also for having “duped” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper into briefly appointing him to oversee the Canadian network of spy agencies.

Even though nothing has as yet been officially proved about the criminal guilt of any big-time political leader, the very idea that Couillard should become the guy running the most recent attack on the public sector is almost comically disturbing. The Quebec Liberals have zero credibility for this job since they were the ones most involved in encouraging construction companies to artificially inflate spending on public infrastructure in dozens of underhand ways. The private-sector friends of the provincial Liberal Party may not have had as much negative impact on Quebec government debt as did the much larger boondoggles of the world’s leading financiers over the past forty years. But it boggles the imagination to think that anyone could possibly rely on them to do anything to stop that kind of corruption. Like their Tea-Party cousins, the only thing that they are any good at is convincing middle-class people to pay for the bail-outs of the billionaire class.

Nationalist oligarchies

The recent coming-out of Pierre-Karl Péladeau as a Parti Québécois candidate in the current election campaign has made a lot of people in Quebec very happy, and a lot more people very upset. Péladeau is a media mogul based in Quebec, but with significant holdings in English Canada as well, who has become the only near billionaire to have so far declared his undying support for Quebec independence. As a result, the election campaign has focused on the constitutional issue once again, meaning that the current PQ attempt to form a majority government may have been sabotaged by the notoriously weak support for sovereignty even among the francophone Québécois.

In fact, people have known that Péladeau and his deceased father, the founder of the Québecor media dynasty, were Quebec separatists for quite a long time. But this is the first time that any ultra-rich oligarch has ever come out openly for sovereignty, which raises a lot of questions about the limitations that could be put upon such a person if ever he became a minister in the Quebec government or even, one day, the provincial premier. Those same questions may also become a lot more important even later on if Péladeau’s option ever wins a future referendum and he becomes a minister, or even the president, of an independent republic.

All the turmoil caused by Péladeau’s recent announcement, however, should be tempered by the fact that the Quebec independence movement has never really been about complete separation from Canada. Because of the large anglophone minority in Quebec, and the now equally large allophone community, it would take about 65% support for Quebec sovereignty among the francophone population just to achieve 50% plus one vote in a general referendum. Since that type of support has never been achieved, the PQ has always had to scale back its objective to sovereignty-association, or hyphenated sovereignty, meaning that an economic association with English Canada has always been part of their message. No one really knows if English Canadians would ever envisage a merely economic association with Quebec, however, since the PQ did not win the two referendum campaigns already held, even though it came a lot closer in 1995 than it did in 1980.

Nationalist movements all over the world have always been based on the premise of national liberation from foreign control. By removing politically or economically oppressive foreign control over the nation’s vital forces, the argument is that independence will lead to a much better life for the majority of the population. All the social components of the nation are supposed to put aside their differences and pull together toward a common goal of national development, that becoming possible for the first time because the people are no longer oppressed or exploited by a foreign empire.  

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, English Canada also went through a national liberation phase of sorts, many people feeling that Canada as a whole had become nothing but a US satellite country, both politically and economically. Paradoxically, the Liberal governments back then that tried so hard to silence the Quebec separatists, were also the same governments that adopted economic nationalism to free the Canadian economy from US control, as well as taking decidedly anti-American stances in foreign policy. National liberation for Canada was supposed to have been focused in particular on ending the old reliance on exporting natural resources, in order to develop a more industrialized and therefore more independent nation.

On a world scale, however, the national liberation promise has been vehemently criticized over the last several decades because of the obvious failure of many liberated countries to achieve most of their goals. As a result, the majority of the people in most of those countries do not seem to be much better off now than they were before independence. National pride may have grown tremendously, but economic or social development has often lagged far behind. The national liberation of places like India, Algeria, or South Africa, for example, only seems to have replaced one group of foreign oppressors with a new group of national oppressors, the national bourgeoisie taking the place of the imperial bourgeoisie but refusing to pass on any of the liberating effects of independence to any of the socially inferior classes.

In many cases, colonialism has been replaced by neocolonialism, with the former empires abandoning outright political control but substituting arms-length economic control instead. The same multinational corporations from the same countries as before simply operate through the compradore bourgeoisie, which is to say local politicians and investors who take a small cut of the profits for themselves before transferring most of the loot to the real bosses in the former “mother country”, or some other foreign empire that has taken its place.

Putting those two situations together means that ordinary people all over the world are now being exploited by a combination of local and foreign big shots, the percentage of national or imperial control varying greatly from one place to another. The only element of the equation that has not changed at all is the way that the majority of the people are being treated. No national liberation at all for most of them, including in Canada, where a recent succession of mostly Conservative prime ministers have brought the country back into its old pattern of resource extraction for the benefit of foreign empires.

In the Quebec case, the sovereignty movement used to characterize the Canadian federation as nothing more than a political extension of the former British empire. One of the more radical members of that movement, Pierre Vallières, accused the Canadian sub-empire of treating the francophone Québécois like “white niggers of America”, exploiting them in the same way as the Black minority in the USA were being exploited by the White majority. Former Quebec premier René Lévesque also referred to rich English Canadian minority leaders within Quebec as “white Rhodesians”, who treated the French-speaking population in Quebec the same way that Ian Smith’s government (1965-1980) treated the Black majority in Zimbabwe.

All of this was initially based on the fact that Quebec used to be what Chicago sociologist Everett Hughes called a folk society, in which most of the employers were anglophones, while most of the industrial workers were francophones. That meant that for quite a long time the Québécois were indeed both politically and economically subordinate to the English-Canadian majority in the rest of Canada.

This neocolonial situation began to change, however, during the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, when the provincial government began actively subsidizing the development of a much larger Québécois bourgeoisie than the one that used to exist for a century and a half before that. Francophone investors like Pierre Péladeau and his son, Pierre-Karl, started becoming a lot richer and a lot more powerful than their predecessors ever were in days gone by. Although anglophone investment in Quebec (from the USA, the UK, English Canada and the anglophone minority within Quebec) undoubtedly remained dominant, for the first time francophone Québécois investors became a significant minority in the overall community of big-time capitalists operating within that province. The folk society was kaput.

Back in 1987, I remember talking briefly to Pierre-Karl Péladeau when I was attending a conference on nationalism organized by a conservative magazine called L’Analyste. Much of the debate going on during that meeting concerned the influence of neoliberalism, that had just recently become a popular ideology after the election and re-election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I had published an article in that magazine claiming that the debate between which institution should control economic development, the state or private enterprise, was a false debate since no large modern economy seemed able to function properly without involving both of them. Right after that, I also published a two-part series in the same magazine about the history of economic nationalism in Quebec.

The Québecor empire went on to become a perfect example of a private enterprise profiting from state intervention, especially in 2000 when the Quebec government prevailed upon the Caisse de dépôt pension fund, to join with Péladeau to keep the Vidéotron cable network from falling into the hands of a rival, English-Canadian, media empire. More recently, Québecor has also profited from the Conservative federal government’s desire to help it become a major player on the much larger pan-Canadian media scene, in order to break up the current price-fixing oligopoly of three English-Canadian conglomerates.

Unfortunately, on a number of other fronts, Pierre-Karl Péladeau has adopted a much more neoliberal style than his father had developed initially. For one thing, Péladeau fils  became a case study in bad industrial relations, using lock-outs on 14 different occasions, not in order to reach any kind of compromise with the rambunctious unions within his sprawling empire, but to eliminate them altogether. He also managed to circumvent the Parti Québécois government’s anti-scab law during those conflicts and, more recently, seems to have prevailed upon the party to cancel a resolution that was to have become part of its electoral program, aimed at updating that law so as to include electronic media. The journalists association in Quebec is also upset at what they call Péladeau’s micro-management of his newspapers, according to them constantly intervening in editorial decisions in spite of the fact that he has always claimed to be against that sort of thing.

This has led a large number of critics to fear that if Péladeau gets elected, and becomes an important minister in the PQ government, he will use the same style of neoliberal management in whatever presumably economic portfolio he inherits. Critics are concerned that recruiting him right now fits in very well with the PQ’s drift to the right over the past few years. Instead of sticking with the interventionist, social-democratic, pro-union profile that used to characterize that party, the PQ seems intent nowadays on cozying up to the business class instead. Their drift to the right has notably included much lower taxes on mining companies than they used to advocate, as well as ignoring any environmental disasters that those companies leave behind. The PQ has also decided to play along with the federal government’s endorsement of importing petroleum into Quebec from the Alberta tar sands, another policy area in which they are now advocating what they used to oppose.

Those fears about Péladeau may turn out to be entirely justified. Someone who made a lot of money with the help of the government may one day turn against using state intervention for social programs. Most people with a neoliberal frame of mind think that Quebec spends far too much money on such things as health care, education, welfare and daycare, especially given the fact that the Quebec debt is already quite a bit higher than that of any of the other Canadian provinces. What happens when the provincial government, or  a future sovereign state, has to choose between helping Quebec businesses succeed against ferocious competition from outside Quebec, or continue developing social democracy for the rest of the population?

Even more importantly, what happens to the whole national liberation movement within Quebec if its leaders adopt exactly the same pro-business, libertarian stance that every other government in the world has already endorsed? If the only people who get liberated are the billionaires, why should the rest of the population go along with the gag? If the Quebec population cannot afford social democracy any more, how can they afford to help their oligarchs compete against much richer countries, or against poorer countries using low production costs as a bargaining chip? The same question also applies to the Canadian government as well.

In today’s world, the various national governments have to compete not so much with each other, but more importantly with the world’s most powerful banking corporations. Those people now spend most of the world’s available capital on several different kinds of speculation, but particularly on monetary speculation, which has increased 500 times over since 1970. Most of the government debt in today’s world comes from speculation rather than from social programs, as we all found out following the 2008 debacle. What kind of sovereignty, or independence, can countries have from each other, if all of them are totally dependent on geographically disembodied pools of capital for their survival? Even the USA is totally dependent on foreign bondholders who control most of its increasingly colossal debt. What does national liberation mean in a world like this?

Religious conspiracy theories

Those who follow any of the world’s media regularly are constantly being bombarded these days with dozens of comments about how stupid it is that so many people continue to believe in conspiracy theories. Without a doubt, most of those theories, like the one about how the Americans never really landed on the Moon after all, are completely bogus and were indeed invented by weak minded people to help them deal with the unbearable anxiety caused by not always having all the answers to every question. Other conspiracy theories, however, like the one about how President Aristide of Haiti was overthrown back in 2004 by a military conspiracy involving the USA, France and Canada, are most likely true, even if they have not so far been proved.

As I pointed out several years ago in one of my published books, real conspiracies have been happening throughout recorded history, not only in the political sphere of human discourse, but also in the economic, social and cultural spheres as well. Since the rise of capitalism, the most frequent conspiracies are the ones constantly being concocted by the world’s most important companies of investors, who are always trying to make more money than everyone else by keeping their various investment strategies a secret until it is too late for the competition to do anything to thwart them. Modern political ideologies like liberalism, nationalism and socialism have also created hundreds of their own conspiracy theories over the years, the libertarian conspiracies for running the world by doing away with the state altogether becoming a mirror image of totalitarian conspiracies aimed at abolishing the private sector instead.

But the conspiracy theory that I like the best is a lot older than those ones. This was the “Donation of Constantine”, a document written by the first Christian emperor of Rome that granted hegemony over all Christianity to the bishop of Rome, presumably starting with Saint Peter as the first pope and continuing right up until the Apocalypse. It was not until John Paul II’s reign that the Church officially admitted that the whole thing was based on a fake document written by Catholic monks during the Middle Ages, several centuries after Constantine’s death. It turns out that the first time that anyone really believed that the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head of the universal (catholic) church was when Gregory the First became pope towards the end of the sixth century, AD. In reality, the Christian emperors, from Theodosius I to the fall of Rome, adopted a form of imperial control over the Church (Caesaropapism), a practice continued later both within the Orthodox churches of the Byzantine and Russian empires, as well as the Anglican church of the British empire, but not at all by the theocratically inclined popes of the Catholic Church.

But anyone who thinks about such things from a social science point of view soon realizes that all religions are, in and of themselves, conspiracy theories on a gigantic scale. Fearful and anxious people have always tried to reassure themselves about the world that they live in by inventing all sorts of metaphysical or supernatural myths about creation, procreation, death and the end of the universe. This has been going on since our first Paleolithic ancestors tried to control their fear of the dark by creating belief in magic and the spirit world, as exemplified in the various kinds of prehistoric animism, shamanism and totemism. The somewhat newer, state-sponsored, official religions created since the rise of urban civilization 6000 years ago are simply more recent variations on a long-standing theme.

In all the official religions, the aristocratic founders of the state invented either polytheist pantheons of divinities, or a monotheist God with a human face, whose one common characteristic was to recognize the ruling aristocrats as the sons and daughters of the creator(s) of the universe. That way, any social upheaval among the inferior classes could be condemned as sacrilegious. Anthropomorphic surrogate parents dwelling in the sky (heavens) also helped reassure their earthly children that all was well and that the menacing manifestations of the natural world were nothing more than divine toys being manipulated in mysterious ways by their benevolent, immortal ancestors.

Later on, more enlightened human beings in various cultures began developing the rational view of the universe instead, attributing natural phenomena to natural causes and doing away with metaphysical explanations of reality altogether. Rational explanations, however, always seemed too cold and insufficiently nurturing to the fearful among us, who much preferred more comforting explanations of events. In recent times, even the compromises between science and religion adopted by more moderate believers were judged woefully inadequate by literal believers, who desperately needed a more fundamentalist version of the written word to deal with the nightmares caused by modern, urban living.

In today’s world, the rise of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish ultra orthodoxies, combined with a syncretic rise in belief in magic, threaten to forever eliminate science, the Enlightenment, critical thinking and, ultimately, technology itself. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are finding it exceedingly difficult to come to grips with all of their problems, because they are still reading (if at all) at a grade-school level in a world run by post-doctoral computer geeks and their high-financial employers. The fundamentalists absolute faith in heavenly intervention helps them deal with the fact that they do not stand a chance in today’s world, and leads them directly to their only alternative, which is to destroy today’s world completely and replace it with a return to antediluvian, old-time religion. Even if it means wiping out most of the world’s current population, which has become so pitifully dependent on more modern ways of thinking.

All the Muslim countries, as well as Muslim minorities in other parts of the world, have been particularly stricken by the fundamentalist disease, resulting in atavistic attacks on secular constitutions established during the twentieth century. As a result, the status of Muslim women is under worldwide attack, tribal customs and Islamic theology being combined to maintain or to reintroduce such abominations as excision, unpunished rape, forced marriages, cloister clothing and denial of access to basic education. But the fundamentalist epidemic has also broken out in Christian countries as well, exemplified by similar attacks on secular constitutions, women, gays and other minorities, not only in Africa and Latin America, but also in the USA and Europe. Hindu fundamentalists in India are set to take power again in that country, attacking women and gays as much as, or more than, any other fundamentalists, while pursuing their ongoing vendettas against any authors or publishers (such as Penguin India) who dare diffuse works that describe the mythological origins of Hindu divinities. Buddhist authorities in Burma (Myanmar) are also putting the lie once again to the myth of Buddhist pacifism in their ongoing treatment of Muslim minorities within that country. Israel is also under constant attack by its own ultra-Orthodox true-believers, even expelling one particular sect for its  outrageous treatment of women and children, the same sect going on to commit the same crimes in Quebec before doing it all over again in Ontario, and now moving on to Guatemala.

All over the world, fundamentalist organizations have succeeded in imbedding themselves within modern politics, taking power through theocratic revolution or through democratic election, whichever method works best in their own particular neighborhoods. In North America, they have taken over almost complete control of the Republican Party in the USA as well as the Conservative Party in Canada, but they also have strong constituencies within the other major parties. Their influence can be felt not only in domestic policy but also in foreign policy.

Israel, for example, practically owes its very existence not only to its own patriots but also to the ever-increasing numbers of Christian Zionists who back everything that the Israeli government does for their own peculiar reasons. They say that they like Israel because it is much more democratic than any of the other countries in the Middle East, forgetting what many Israeli scholars have already pointed out, that it is impossible for any state with an established religion to be genuinely democratic in any meaningful way. Israel’s ongoing successes in industry and its very large percentage of scientists within the overall population are also not the real reasons for their support of that country.

In reality, they like Israel because for literal interpreters of the Bible, the second coming of Jesus Christ cannot take place until Greater Israel has been firmly re-established within its entire Biblical territory. Nor does this mean that they particularly like the Jews themselves, since the Book of Revelations predicts that the Jews at Armageddon will be given one last chance to redeem themselves by converting to militant Christianity. Those who refuse to do so are slated to suffer torture for several hundred years during the Apocalypse, and eventually perish forever, along with every other kind of unbeliever in the world.

This may have been what was going on in the minds of Conservative true-believers in Canada recently, when leading ministers of their government compared Putin’s recent seizure of the Crimean peninsula with Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939. On the face of it, that comparison was not too outlandish since both the Germans and the Russians successfully conspired to occupy territory ostensibly to protect national minorities living inside Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine. Political opportunists in the USA may also have repeated the same comparison in order to help people there to forget recent American territorial conspiracies in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But for Christian Zionists that same comparison could be inspired by a subconscious desire on their part that the Russian occupation of the Crimea be soon followed by the outbreak of World War Three, just like the Sudetenland occupation was soon followed by the outbreak of the Second World War. That would certainly go a long way toward fulfilling one of the most important conspiracy theories originally written down in the Bible. If God and the Son of God do indeed exist, as good Christians so ardently believe, how could they ignore such a magnificent opportunity to establish the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven?

It would be nice to believe that even Christian fundamentalists could not possibly be thinking nowadays in such old-fashioned, apocalyptic terms, nor that they too could some day pull off such diabolical schemes as the one that their Islamic cousins committed in the USA back in 2001. But as long as conspiratorial religions keep on getting stronger and stronger, and rational methods of thinking keep on getting weaker and weaker, even crazier things than 9/11 may become increasingly possible. Those who still feel like reasonably accommodating the more exotic antics of the different kinds of true-believers these days would probably do well to re-read some of the most hair-raising sections of the world’s most sacred religious literature. There may very well be a few passages in those works that could lead to attempted wish fulfillment on the part of some of the more deranged conspiratorial minds among us.