Communitarian fetishism

The well-known Quebec theatre director Robert Lepage, along with Ariane Mnouchkine from the Théâtre du Soleil in France, have recently become embroiled in a huge cultural controversy with militants from both the black and the indigenous communities over the past several weeks. First of all, a musical called “Slav”, about slavery in the southern USA, in which most of the roles were played by white people, was cancelled by the Montreal International Jazz Festival after only three performances, when several black artists got upset about what they called “cultural appropriation”. Then, another upcoming collaboration between Lepage and Mnouchkine called “Kanata”, focusing on the clashes between indigenous peoples and those of various European origins throughout Canadian history, also ran into similar charges of cultural appropriation from indigenous militants, especially since none of the roles to be played had been assigned to artists of indigenous origins. It, too, has now been cancelled, although in the meantime it seems that the Slav production may soon be revived by another theatre company.

As usually happens in this kind of controversy, most of the people involved, on both sides, resolutely put forward their own particular points of view about what was happening, over and over again, without ever seeming to directly address any of the arguments or the claims of the opposing point of view. So far as most of the commentators favouring the Lepage/Mnouchkine side were concerned, for example, the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, since artists all over the world should always be allowed to present their own artistic interpretations of real historical events without having to run their ideas by “censors” coming from current (self-appointed) representatives of the cultural communities being depicted. The people on the Lepage/Mnouchkine side also asserted that important cultural realities such as the history of slavery, and the history of conflict between indigenous and “settler” communities, all over the world, are universal themes that can be treated by everyone, from every country or culture, just as long as their representations of those stories from the past treat all the cultural communities involved without bias.

However, so far as most of the commentators supporting the black and indigenous militants were concerned, those prominent white (European-origin) cultural figures from Quebec and France should never have felt that they could get away with presenting such themes without extensive prior, and ongoing, consultation with both black and indigenous community activists. They also stressed that most of the roles to be played, concerning people from both communities, should necessarily always be assigned to actors and singers coming directly from those communities. From their point of view, the white people involved were practising “cultural appropriation”, which is to say stealing control over their own history from black and indigenous communities, both of which are still very much oppressed by white people nowadays.

Some commentators from the militants’ side also alleged that their “multicultural” point of view was supported a lot more by the anglophone community (English-speaking people from all sorts of ethnic origins) than by the francophone community (French-speaking people from a similar variety of ethnic origins), in both Canada and Quebec. This latter claim seems to have been undermined somewhat, however, when several English-language periodicals in Quebec published dozens of letters to the editor upholding the Lepage/Mnouchkine point of view, especially concerning the right of artists to combat censorship of their work.

My own take on this whole controversy is that people on both sides seem to be extremely alienated from one another. One of the anthropologists participating in this debate made the important point that we should not be mixing up “racial” discrimination (such as under-employment) with the alleged stealing of other people’s cultures. The way to fight against majority discrimination in all societies, involving minorities of various different origins, in every part of the world, ought to be by ensuring that all the minority populations in every country have equal access to information (in the largest sense of the word), equal access to the media (to express divergent points of view) and equal access to gainful employment. Which is, without a doubt, much easier to proclaim than it is to put into practice, given the inherent tendency on the part of all dominant, or majority populations (not only dominant ethnic and cultural origins, but also dominant religions, genders, and social classes), to “democratically” impose their selfish will on everyone not belonging to their particular category.

People in the theatre business should also take care not to willingly upset militants coming from minority populations that are not well represented among those theatre companies’ usual customers. Even if many of the minority people in any society may not feel that they are properly represented by the usually self-appointed militants, they are still much more likely to side with the militants than with the theatre companies in any dispute of this kind. Some of the people in those companies do not seem to be very good at doing business with minorities, and therefore cannot very well look forward to expanding their customer base in that direction.

However, people representing, or claiming to represent, dominated or minority populations,  should not be forgetting that not everyone theoretically belonging to the dominant, or majority, populations, are all guilty of discrimination uniquely by accident of birth. Most “white” people, for example, not only in countries where they seem to constitute the majority of the population, but also many of those belonging to “white” minorities in many other parts of the world, are not responsible for the sad state of affairs currently affecting human societies. Whether it be about the over-exploitation of the natural environment, the increasing likelihood of new economic crises, the ever-increasing gap in every country between the rich and the poor, the continuing existence of the nuclear arms race, or any of the other world problems about which everyone nowadays is (quite legitimately) complaining.

Most of the people who are indeed responsible for all those things, as well as for poor relations between majority groups and minorities of all kinds, belong instead to the very small set of ultra-rich and ultra-powerful decision-makers, in every country, who do not represent (and never have represented) more than one percent of one percent (one ten-thousandth) of the entire world population. Not to mention the fact that in every population, including white people, there are many individuals who have spent their entire lives fighting alongside non-white people, against all the different kinds of discrimination that exist in this world. Those just-minded individuals ought not to be treated in the same way as those who have always adopted a complacent, or a downright reactionary, approach instead.

All the world’s more or less “white” people do not in fact belong to any kind of generalized conspiracy against non-white people than do all the world’s more or less “black” people, or all the world’s more or less indigenous populations, belong to the category of the eternally oppressed. As has already been pointed out by several other observers participating in this debate, making the mistake of treating all white people as oppressors, and all non-white people as victims, is quite similar to the rhetoric adopted by the Muslim terrorists who felt that they had every right to assassinate any “crusader” (Western) cartoonist choosing to depict the prophet Mohamed in a negative way, or indeed to depict him in any way at all.

For the obvious reason that all the world’s Muslims, often considered to include even people born Muslim who choose not to practise their religion in adult life, or not to believe any more in any kind of divine intervention, should not be treated as belonging to any cohesive community. Any more than all the world’s whites, or all the world’s blacks, or all the world’s indigenous people, constitute any kind of cohesive community. All of those “communities” are not really communities at all, at least not in the sense of presuming that all the members of such a “community” in fact participate in some kind of generalized “zeitgeist” of necessarily shared political and social opinion.

For the same reason as the “whites”, all the world’s “blacks” are not part of any legitimate “nation” either, because of the enormous diversity of the designated population, coming from hundreds of different countries and social situations, as well as possessing an endless variety of physical characteristics. As everyone ought to know nowadays, human “races” are not scientific categories and cannot be defined in any coherent, biological way. Most certainly not, for example, according to the USA’s “official” designation of a “black” person as being anyone “containing” one percent or more of “African blood”.

Similarly, all the world’s Muslims, just like all the world’s Christians, or all the world’s believers in any of the other religions, are not separate “nations” either, for exactly the same reasons as those already cited, to wit the enormous diversity of ethnic and cultural origins, and similar diversity of physical characteristics. False communitarianism is a kind of sectarian disease affecting all sorts of groups, all over the world, which is particularly prevalent among those nations that have chosen to adopt a kind of ultra-right-wing populist, authoritarian, often neofascist stance based on any one of several different kinds of designated systems of belief. 

Dozens of countries, all over the world, have fallen one by one into such a trap over the years, including places as almost completely different as Russia, China, India, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea (DPRK), Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador, Colombia, the Congo (both of them), Libya, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and so on. The list just keeps on getting longer all the time. Which means that many people in minority populations nowadays may be feeling more and more like those European Jews prior to the Second World War who were so thoroughly integrated into one or another European culture that they had forgotten that they were Jews, until Hitler reminded them about that in the most violent way possible.

Unfortunately, the UK also definitely seems to be going in the same sectarian direction (Brexit), as does practically every other country in the world (France, Germany, Canada, etc.), all of which are threatening to fall over the same cliff just as soon as their very own ultra-right-wing populists take over full control of those countries as well. Meanwhile, the neoliberal ideology still being followed in the countries that have not yet become fully neofascist, is constantly pushing millions more people in the same ultra-reactionary direction.

As for the USA, ever since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, that country seems to be following its own distinct pattern of former-superpower disintegration, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the extremely humiliating, Boris Yeltsin meltdown of the former Soviet Union, during the 1990s. The USA as a whole seems to have lost its former collective psychology of resolute patriotism, the majority of the population having followed their billionaire leader by themselves trying to behave like egotistical maniacs, just like him. How could anyone possibly think to “make America great again” by getting closely involved in dozens of sex scandals, not to mention dozens of investment scandals based on using political domination of a country for personal profit, and also hero-worshipping such authoritarian champions as Boris Yeltsin’s immediate successor? How the mighty hath fallen, and so quickly! It’s no wonder that Quebec film-maker Denis Arcand has followed up his hit movie about the “decline” of the American empire with a new one about the “fall” of the same empire.

Given the kind of world that we seem to be living in nowadays, it is therefore wrong for commentators like Montreal newspaper Le Devoir columnist, Christian Rioux, to describe the ideology of the black and indigenous militants involved in the theatre controversy mentioned above, as being an example of “left-wing communitarianism”. There is really nothing genuinely “left-wing” about adopting a racist attitude that ascribes universal characteristics (good or bad) to every designated “race”, culture or religion on this planet. This kind of hyper-alienation is just another, slightly hidden, version of ultra-conservative ideology. It is completely inappropriate to assume, as many thousands of naive people (from every country) often do, that all opinions coming from “eternally oppressed”, non-white populations are necessarily “left-wing”, even when it is clear that hundreds of millions of non-white people really do support politically and socially conservative points of view instead. People who resolutely uphold fundamentalist religious beliefs, who condemn women’s liberation, homosexuality, government “intervention” into economic and social policy, and so on and so forth, cannot be presumed to be “left-wing”, no matter from which “race” or culture they may happen to originate.

I think there is a parallel to be made here with another kind of ideological fetishism that is also quite popular these days, the one that glorifies youth over older people. Samuel Vanasse, the president of the youth council of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Montreal, wrote an article in Le Devoir (July 23, 2018) about militant young people, in which he denounced the current tendency in some circles to consider young militants as being necessarily more progressive than older ones. While it may have been true fifty years ago, when the baby-boom generation came of age, that young people in many countries tended to be a lot more left-wing than older people, it is certainly not necessarily true nowadays. Treating young people as being necessarily left-wing seems to be the same kind of ridiculous fetish as treating non-white people in the same way. There is just not any necessary sort of coherence between political bias and the accident of birth, not in the dimension of time and not in the spatial dimensions either.

Fifty years ago, the leaders of all the world’s totalitarian “communist” countries were also considered to be genuine left-wingers themselves. If we define “left-wing”, however, as being the common political characteristic of all those people who militantly oppose unjust treatment of all oppressed populations in this world, be they oppressed workers, peasants, poor people in general, oppressed genders (especially women), or oppressed minorities of every possible kind, then the totalitarian “communist” leaders should not have been treated as “left-wing” people either. With a few, relatively minor exceptions, such as the medical sector in Cuba, none of those totalitarian countries ever really tried to put into practice anything remotely resembling a classless society.

Similarly, the left-wing terrorist movements of days gone by should also not be qualified as being genuinely “left-wing”, since terrorism has never succeeded anywhere in “jolting” any oppressed people into all of a sudden becoming much more militantly anti-establishment than they ever were before. Nowadays, any “left-wing” terrorist groups that still exist anywhere in the world, as well as authoritarian regimes pretending to practise “left-wing populism”, such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela or the Ortega regime in Nicaragua, should also be deprived of any “left-wing” credentials that they may still be claiming.

This entire controversy over the alleged “cultural appropriation” of the above-mentioned theatre companies is just another example, if another one was needed, of just how thoroughly today’s world is divided up almost completely into right-wing and ultra-right-wing tendencies, with very little space left over for any genuinely leftist viewpoints. On the “ordinary” right-wing side, we have the longstanding hegemony of the neoliberal movement, that has dominated a very large number of countries for the past four decades, following the neoliberal economists (“Chicago boys”) initial partnership with the military dictatorship in Chile (1973).

From that day to this, dozens of countries have been ravaged by neoliberal excesses, such as that of the Canadian Pacific Railway company, charged along with the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway company and the Irving Oil company, for shared responsibility in the 2013 petroleum-car “accident” in Lac-Mégantic (47 deaths). As well as dozens of other train wrecks like the one just outside Montreal (Saint-Polycarpe) a short time ago, that luckily did not kill anyone (this time around). CEOs like the late Hunter Harrison have been pushing thousands of such companies all over the world to perform better for their all-important shareholders, by speeding up whatever they could get away with speeding up, without any thought for the consequences for mere “stakeholders” (such as company employees and the residents of towns dependent on those companies).

Nationalist reaction to neoliberalism, as well as to classical liberalism, becomes a form of communitarian fetishism whenever the definition of the nation is confined to only one religion or one ethnic group. Just like what happened in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), as well as what is now happening in today’s Israel, following the adoption of the recent Jewish nation-state law. Nationalism is sometimes capable of becoming a good thing, especially when it is combined with genuine social-democracy, but only if the nation involved is not too narrowly defined. For example, Quebec’s Charter of the French language (“Bill l0l”), adopted back in 1977, passed that test, at least theoretically, because it included people coming from all religions and ethnic origins living there, all of whom could participate in a pluralist society simply by adopting the French language as the official language of public communications.

Which means that social progress in the future is deader than a doornail if everyone decides to cling to exclusively right-wing (neoliberalism) or ultra-right-wing (neofascism) modes of thought. People cannot just go on forever writing articles for the media about how everyone ought to be doing the right thing, such as treating seniors properly, or providing proper day-care, or educating young people correctly, or solving problems caused by greed, masculine toxicity, financial concentration or geopolitical sabre-rattling, once and for all, without indicating how society is supposed to accomplish all these wonderful goals. Before signing off on such an article, authors and journalists ought to be suggesting some credible instrument, or strategy, capable of achieving those ends. Spontaneous uprisings occur all the time on a local level, or occasionally on a national scale, but never all over the place at the same time. These things have to be organized, using a coherent message that is not going to be swept off its feet by the determined resistance of the anti-democratic establishment.

Several decades ago, when there was still an international communist movement, as well as an international (democratic) socialist movement, millions of ordinary people thought that they could look forward to a period when such things could have become feasible. Because back then, if such movements had ever truly wanted to do all those things, they could have been accomplished, at least technically speaking. Even nowadays, all of those goals are still technically doable. None of them, however, are ever likely to be achieved for real these days because the social forces strong enough to push aside the tremendous resistance of the world’s ultra-rich and ultra-powerful reactionaries, do not currently exist.

On paper, the world communist movement and/or the world democratic-socialist movement, could have presumably pulled it off. That it was not done was not so much because those movements were too weak, although that very real problem certainly contributed to their failure. But more to the point because most of the world’s “communist” leaders, and most of the world’s “social-democratic” leaders, did not really want to implement communism, or democratic socialism, as such, but merely wanted to use those very large movements for their own self-aggrandizement.

Today, the illusion that those movements were really aimed at doing what they said that they wanted to do, is gone, along with the movements themselves. Nowadays, there are no social forces on earth even remotely capable of getting within a billion light-years of such a goal. Peter Sellers’ first big movie, “I’m all right, Jack” (1958), said it all. The world’s greatest and most pressing problems are not receiving anywhere near adequate treatment because none of the world’s leading lights ever remain faithful to their childish dreams of real progress, and never want to participate in anything more than just the usual wheeling and dealing, to become big-shots and to remain big-shots until the day they die.

Regress report

This is the opposite of a progress report on the human condition, in other words it’s a regress report. Which fits in quite nicely with the overall zeitgeist of many of my other blogposts. I was originally going to call this particular posting, “Billions of big babies”, the same title that I used for the last book that I published back in 2006. Because a large part of the cause for regression nowadays comes from the extreme childishness of a great deal of recent human behaviour. But that title can be misleading, since it seems to imply that most of the overall population has an equal share in the genesis of the current disastrous situation, which is not true at all. The richest and the most powerful people among us are certainly much more responsible than are most of those at the bottom of the pecking order. Their capacity to do harm to others is much greater than most people’s capacity, in the same way that richer and more powerful countries also have much more capacity to do harm than do other countries. Unfortunately, the capacity to do harm generally results in real harm being done every time, since few people seem to be capable of resisting their aggressive urges.

If we look at all the different ways by which human society has been evolving backwards (devolving) since the 1970s, neoliberalism is still the number one cause. Which can be summed up as the tendency among dominant people, no matter what their official ideology or religion, to work together (in spite of everything that divides them), in order to ensure that the enormous gap between the social classes keeps on getting bigger and bigger all over the world. Not only so far as income is concerned but also vis-à-vis all the different ways of accessing knowledge and basic intelligence. With the result that even basic IQs, in the countries that measure such things, seem to be going down these days for hundreds of millions of abandoned “ordinary people”, the austerity process of the past several decades having considerably downgraded basic education. A process that is constantly being reinforced by the increased (often socially malignant) intelligence of the tiny elite from big business and big government that controls all the world’s big data.

The anti-humanist attitude of the ultra elitists in every country also lies behind the current, neofascist reaction to neoliberal austerity. It turns out that the ultra-right-wing populist movement began gathering steam right alongside the earliest forms of neoliberalism, when the “Chicago boys” first established their symbiotic relationship with the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile (back in 1973), and has never stopped gathering momentum. This world-wide revival of ultra-conservatism is directly related to the equally symbiotic revival of dozens of different varieties of old-time, fundamentalist religion, in every one of the world’s most important cultural centres. Atavistic religion having become a potent and necessary component of each neofascist movement currently dominating large parts of today’s world.

Although extremist tendencies are common to all the world’s established religions these days, it is still important to emphasize the particularly virulent, salafist trend that exists within the Islamic community. All over the Muslim world, radical islam has become a genuine scourge, increasingly replacing the prior cohabitation between moderate islam and modernism with simple, literal, fundamentalist (but fake) answers to everything. As such, it is another excellent example of childish regression, covering every kind of reactionary behaviour, including terrorist aggression against rival ideologies, most of their victims being only “moderate” Muslim believers. Salafist women are also playing an important propaganda role, among other things by showing off their hijab, and other more extreme varieties of cover-up clothing, as if they were wearing signs around their necks proclaiming their sincere belief in male domination of women.

The deliberate dumbing-down of the political discourse of the true-believer, brought on by the ostensible (fake) refusal of elitism, only succeeds in even more fully reinforcing that same elitism. As several ultra-conservative observers have pointed out, most denunciations of ultra-right-wing populism are probably not that dangerous, at least from their point of view, since most adversaries of those movements use a lot of big words, and unpopular concepts, in their writings. Which means that any criticism of their message is probably lost on the most important audiences targeted by neofascist organizers. Dumbing down also includes another recent decline in the already abysmal intellectual levels of popular television programs (“Say yes to the dress”), the pre-programmed hype of social media, the political manipulation of whole countries through controlled algorithms, and an ever-increasing dependence on pets, and inanimate objects (hoarding), as a substitute for human contact.

Not to forget the very important observation according to which all news are fake news, since all facts are necessarily social (ideological) constructions. The human brain is quite simply incapable of describing things the way that they really are, although modern science, with its primary emphasis on verification of each contributing observation and experiment, comes the closest. Every time someone thinks about some phenomenon globally, the brain is constantly “filling in the blanks” in our inevitably limited knowledge of the world, based on some particular interpretation imposed on reality. So even though constant fact-checking has become increasingly necessary in today’s world, no one can really pretend to have established any specific fact whatsoever, once and for all. This is, however, in no way an excuse for particularly reactionary people to make up deliberately stupid stories about everything, based on no real information at all, as they are always doing nowadays. Thereby giving such intense delight to the infantile-regressive people in the ultraconservative movements, who always prefer “spiritual excitation” to any of the more rational ways of thinking.

One of the more interesting observations that I read about recently was the ongoing convergence that some thinkers have postulated between the current tendency among many scientists to acknowledge that many different species of animals are a lot smarter than was previously believed, and the current tendency among many groups of people to follow the existing trend toward reduced human intelligence! Recent human regression seems to have gotten to the point that it has encouraged those same observers to believe that something akin to blind instinct among human beings (“thinking animals”) is almost as potent a force as the ordinary instinct that is still considered by most scientists to be a major influence on the behaviour of what used to be called “dumb animals”.

The worship of extreme narcissism, fulfilling the hippy agenda of the 1960s and the 1970s, certainly seems to be the main underlying cause of recent human regression, since it is by far the most common behavioural tendency favoured by both of the world’s leading ideologies (neoliberalism and neofascism). Hundreds of millions of people wallow around nowadays in more or less extreme personal indulgence, combining such devastating diseases as the various different kinds of drug addiction (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opioids, etc.), taken separately or all together. That are often also combined with addiction to pornography (heterosexual and homosexual) and to unprotected sexual activity. Not to mention increasingly popular forms of legal and illegal gambling, including government-sponsored lotteries and sports-related wagers. “Must have fun” (anything goes) is all the rage these days.

Even the widespread opposition to toxic masculinity, such as in the “me-too” movement, does not seem to have brought about any kind of decline in alpha male aggression toward women, which still seems to be predicated on doing as much harm as possible to anyone perceived to be physically weaker than oneself. Just for the sheer pleasure of acting badly, particularly but by no means exclusively among men in high places. Curiously, millions of women also participate in this same syndrome, usually through atavistic identification with the aggressors (“stand by your man”). To which can also be added millions of victims of professional sport (the concussion epidemic) and various other kinds of disguised suicide, the most important of which seems to be “workaholism”, among those hundreds of millions of people who are constantly refusing to take vacations (“voluntarily” or not so voluntarily after all).

At the same time, hundreds of millions of other people also continue to indulge, apparently more than ever before, in the kind of barbarian cultural practices that were at one time supposed to have been declining all over the place. The incredibly long list of those kinds of practices includes such thoroughly disgusting abominations as honour killings, female excision, forced marriages (especially targeting underage girls), the death penalty for apostasy, religious terrorism and so on and so forth. Practices that not only affect the original host populations in various different parts of the “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America), but also minority immigrant populations in Europe and North America. Slavery is yet another cultural tradition from the past that is also being revived all over the world, particularly but by no means exclusively, for sexual reasons.

The former third world is also much more poverty-stricken in reality than it is officially considered to be by United Nations bureaucrats. For them, only about a billion people, less than 15% of the world population, are still living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than two dollars a day per person. By Western middle-class standards (which are constantly attracting millions of actual and potential migrants), it would be more accurate to say that 90% of the world’s people are poor, with about 75% living in extreme poverty. In dozens of countries, of which India is one of the worst examples, 97% of the total population is living outside what is called “the formal economy”. Living and working conditions in all those places are so abysmally bad that it seems difficult to know where to start in order to describe them properly. This truly horrible, world-wide income distribution being caused by the combination of neocolonial foreign investment (from several Eastern as well as from most Western countries), with ultra-egotistical attitudes toward their poorer compatriots on the part of most of the local elites.

For their part, the countries hosting most of the Western world’s “Caucasian” populations are still actively indulging in their own barbarian cultural practices, notably through military repression (aerial bombardment) of dissent in the third world and mistreatment of immigrants coming from those same dissenting countries. Not that any of the “Eastern” governments and peoples treat ethnic and religious minorities any better than do the Western ones, whether they are classed as “traditional” minorities, or as more recent arrivals. Every country in the world has also fallen victim to an unprecedented increase in every possible kind of corruption, as well as a major increase in the power, including the military power, of organized crime. Not to mention increasingly violent, religiously inspired, attacks on such nonconformist social practices as abortion, female adultery and homosexuality.

At the same time, the traditional, extractive industries (fuels, metals and other raw materials) continue to be as popular now as they ever were among leading investors, which contributes enormously to ever higher levels of industrial pollution in general, and induced climate change (the Anthropocene hypothesis). Apparently, even the 1987 Montreal Protocol on eliminating the CFCs causing the massive hole in the ozone layer, once touted as the one truly successful, international treaty on the environment, has been thoroughly undermined by illegal production of the offending chemicals, notably in China. The lip-service being given all over the world to doing something about the environmental crisis just makes everything worse by providing people with false hope. The influence of uncontrolled, harmful chemicals on the environment has also apparently had a disastrous effect on levels of human intelligence, not to mention having greatly contributed to a debilitating decline in male fertility. Fake, neofascist solutions to neoliberalism in every part of the world, such as that being provided by the Trump regime in the USA, also contribute massively to regression, considerably amplifying the false-hope syndrome.

Neoliberal counter-attacks on neofascism, such as that provided by leaders like Emmanuel Macron (France) and Justin Trudeau (Canada), are just as counter-productive. Just because theoretically progressive, collectivist solutions to neoliberalism (and neofascism), such as totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, failed to give results several decades ago is no reason to conclude that either neoliberalism, or neofascism, is somehow a good system by comparison. Those ideologically progressive, collectivist solutions failed not only because of their own internal demons (either extreme conformism or extreme opportunism), but also because of the massive opposition organized against them by the combined forces of private (neoliberal) and state (neofascist) capitalism. Exceptions to the rule, that is state capitalist countries that also practice genuine political democracy, social democracy and successful absorption of immigrant populations, are almost non-existent.

Instead, neoliberalism has exhibited a distinct tendency to encourage the rise of neofascism, rather than to discourage it for real. Another recent example was provided in some of the poorer districts of Montreal recently, when primary school teachers noticed that they were receiving more and more recent immigrants every year, from some of the world’s most devastated countries, such as Syria. Apparently, new pupils in those districts, with no appropriate language skills at all (some of them never having held a pencil in their lives), just show up on any particular morning, with no advance notice being given to the teachers. Who are then expected to integrate those children into their regular classes, with no additional training or resources (professional help), no planning, no preparation, no coordination between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government, not to mention with the independent school-board level of bureaucracy. Which would seem to be the best possible way to foster negative attitudes toward officially illegal immigrants. The insanely arrogant people at the top do not seem to give a damn about any of this, they just make decisions for legal or electoral reasons, and expect all the people below them to do whatever is being demanded of them, regardless of the situation in which they find themselves. “Doing more for less”, over and over again, in the usual laissez-faire fashion.

If we put all those negative situations together as part of a coherent analysis, this means that humanity is collectively going downhill at an increasingly rapid rate, and there does not seem to be any limit as to how incredibly monstrous some people can become. Every kind of leadership in society is pointing in the same downward direction, daring everyone to go even farther than they have ever gone before. It is a race to the bottom of the ocean, even if everyone knows that the bottom is a very long way down indeed. Things are bad enough right now, but they seem to be constantly getting worse, at a pace that could easily speed up quite rapidly. Particularly in the wake of the next worldwide financial crisis, which promises to be a lot more devastating than the one that took place back in 2008. Add on a major geopolitical crisis, in a world chock full of nuclear weapons, and we could end up accelerating already dangerous climate change in a truly major way. Given the kind of people who are running the world nowadays, who is ready to bet that no one will ever be stupid enough to go too far? Or have we already gone too far for anyone to realistically expect us to be able to adopt a more sustainable human condition?

All of which seems to be nothing more than an ordinary consequence of all of us just turning out to be insufficiently evolved animals, sinking into an enormous quagmire of our own fabrication. So, make humanity great again? Good luck with that. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any genuinely hopeful signs around anywhere.

Bad policy drives out good: updating Gresham’s Law

The G-7 conference of world leaders that took place here in Quebec last week inspired me to apply Gresham’s Law in economics (“bad money drives out good”) to the way that most countries are being run these days. However, my idea that bad policy drives out good policy is not at all a reference to the abundant tears that various people in the Canadian media have been shedding, to the effect that six of those G-7 countries (Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Japan) were so badly bullied by the barbarian president of the great American empire to the south. In the first place, it is not obvious that every one of those six unfortunate countries are as opposed to Donald Trump’s protectionist and anti-immigrant ideas as Canada purports to be. For example, Italy’s delegate, representing that country’s newly-elected coalition of populist parties (one of which is decidedly neofascist), had to be talked out of agreeing with Trump that several mistreated countries in the West, especially his own, have recently been accepting way too many non-European immigrants. The latest information coming out of that country being Italy’s intention to also refuse to ratify the new Canada/European Union free trade deal.

More to the point, however, is the observation that each one of the professional politicians present at that meeting are constantly having to deal with their own, homegrown billionaires, many of whom are every bit as reactionary and disgusting as Donald Trump. For the moment, the USA is the only country in that group to have elected a billionaire as president, thereby “cutting out the middleman”, by letting one of the private investors who dominate the anything-but-free market economy also run the political side of the elitist equation. So it is quite amusing, as well as genuinely frightening, to see several well-known leaders of the political class trying their damnedest to convince one of their worst nightmares to support the official set of policies that was designed to hide the completely unequal nature of power, even among some of the world’s most important, officially democratic countries. Having guys like Trump running international politics as well as the world economy, at the same time, makes it increasingly difficult to convince some of the more intelligent “ordinary people” that there really is a place for popular influence anywhere near the centres of power.

Not to mention the fact that the Charlevoix region of Quebec, where the conference was held, was turned into an armed camp, with thousands of police officers, soldiers, armoured vehicles and helicopters vastly outnumbering the only medium-size horde of journalists and the very small number of protesters who were eventually allowed within a few kilometres of the official site. A situation that also neatly underlines how obvious it has now become that the entire world is entirely run by private money (private capitalism) and/or state power (state capitalism). The Canadian organizers of that (at least) 600 million dollar conference tried their best to make everyone believe that all that security was absolutely necessary to ward off the potential threat (that never materialized) of hundreds of anarchist, “Black block” revolutionaries wanting to disrupt the conference with their own ultra-violent, neofascist methods of protesting against everything in the world not specifically organized by them. Given the way that they do things, it looks as if at least some of those anarchist organizations may have actually been set up as what British general Frank Kitson used to call “counter gangs”, which is to say police-controlled protest movements. Just like some of the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) cells were apparently controlled fifty years ago.

All this brings to mind Bertrand Russell’s comment to the effect that in a democracy, people only have their rights until they really need them. Every time officially democratic countries go through some type of crisis, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, or even the much smaller October (1970) crisis in Quebec, all the rights that everyone previously thought were guaranteed suddenly disappear. In this day and age, for example, people have the right to say almost whatever they want to say on the Internet, unless of course someone rich and powerful decides to feel hurt by whatever it was that was said about them. As everyone now knows, however, the Internet is also being used to promote totalitarianism by algorithm, such as during the 2016 presidential election in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK. With the result that nowadays no ordinary person ever has the faintest idea what may or may not happen in the future to his or her own life and/or personal interests.

Recent scandals all over the world, such as the thousands of hurricane victims that were deliberately kept out of the official statistics in Puerto Rico, show exactly what has happened to the democratic pretensions that some countries tried to project in the decades following the Second World War. The fact that the treasonous Donald Trump prefers “strong, authoritarian” leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un to “weak, ineffectual” leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, is not so much a cause of the recent trend toward ultra-right-wing domination as it is a symptom of the increasingly popular regression of most countries toward more openly barbarian methods of rule.

Neoliberalism and neofascism, which are jointly practised to some degree in practically every country in the world nowadays, have joined hands to promote the race to the bottom, each country trying to be more “competitive” than the other one by lowering taxes on rich people much more than on the poor, or on whatever is left of the middle class. In that context, the protectionism adopted in countries like the USA has nothing whatever to do with the “infant-industry” argument of times past. It is also completely incapable of reversing history in order to bring back the “good old days” of US industrial domination over the whole world during the 1950s. Any more than anything that the oligarch-ridden Russian Federation does nowadays will ever be capable of bringing back the levels of industrial development achieved by the former Soviet Union. For the obvious reason that in both cases it is entirely useless to close the barn door after the horse has already fled. Tax “reform” of this kind only makes the overall situation in the whole world a thousand times worse than it was before.

As for Gresham’s Law as such, it was initially proposed back in 1858 by British economist Henry Dinning Macleod and attributed to Elizabethan court financier Thomas Gresham. In economics, this idea simply means that any currency that is not backed up by any real value, but is still allowed to circulate anyway, always drive out any other currency that does represent real value. As an economic concept, that same kind of observation also seems to apply quite well to what took place when good and bad receivables were fraudulently mixed together during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, in the USA as well as in many other countries.

According to Wikipedia, former US vice-president Spiro Agnew reworded Gresham’s Law, which became “bad news drives out good news”, to describe (from his jaundiced point of view) the somewhat similar race to the bottom among American news media during the Nixon era. And British anthropologist Gregory Bateson also used that same general concept to describe cultural evolution, saying that “the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful.” Both of those observations concerning the race to the bottom certainly seem to apply again today, both to news media and to cultural evolution, in most parts of today’s world. So my idea of using the basic concept underlining Gresham’s Law, to describe the decline and fall of modern democracy as an ideology, certainly seems appropriate as well.

But we still have to figure out what is it that makes the positive evolution of human societies, toward greater cooperation between different countries and cultures, so difficult to achieve, as opposed to negative evolution (or devolution) toward greater division (commercial and geopolitical warfare). The answer would seem to lie in the tendency possessed by the vast majority of human beings, even among some of the world’s most progressive people, to let their own personal demons (excessive narcissism, or egotistical mania) bring them down. To the extent that, over time, they let bad policy drive out good policy, even when they themselves were largely responsible for the adoption of good policy in the first place.

A fascinating example of this sort of thing was quite nicely described in a seven-part series, “Montreal’s longest-running real estate fiasco”, that journalist Linda Gyulai wrote for the Montreal Gazette earlier this month, about completely disastrous municipal attempts since the 1960s to develop the originally pristine Rivière-des-Prairies suburb on the eastern tip of the island of Montreal. Each successive city administration, from the Drapeau era (1960-1986) right up to the present day, was (believe it or not) initially elected as a reformist movement in order to clean up the disgusting corruption left behind by each and every previous administration, not only in that particular suburb but also in most of the other parts of the city. Each one of those several succeeding “reform movements”, however, after having quite correctly denounced while in opposition all the horrible machinations of their corrupt opponents in power, turned into corrupt politicians themselves a short time after they managed to come to power. Thereby once again upholding British historian Lord Acton’s famous nineteenth-century maxim according to which, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So far as I can tell, the same kind of thing seems to have happened over and over again, all over the world, in thousands of other similar cases, from the beginnings of urban-based government 6000 years ago right up to our own time. Well-intended, progressive-minded reform movements have constantly turned into their opposites whenever they were eventually confronted for more than a few months with the reality of political power. In most of the more recent cases, those governing movements were corrupted by the much more realistic folks from what is euphemistically known as “free enterprise”. In other words, guys (as well as more than a few gals) like Donald Trump for whom no particular ideals are ever allowed to get in the way of recognizing, in the immortal words of W. C. Fields, that one should “never give a sucker an even break”. This observation also applies with even greater effect to revolutionary leaders, every more or less bourgeois (England, France, the USA), proletarian (the USSR, China) or anti-colonial revolution (Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa) in the world, over the past several centuries, having always been betrayed almost at the outset.

This is why it soon becomes obvious to anyone who wants to really think about it at all, that gun lobbyists in the USA who pretend that the only decent way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to send in a good guy with a gun, are so completely off the mark. The way that violent interventions function most of the time in the real world, is that the good guy with a gun soon becomes thoroughly corrupted by the superior power of his own weapon, and we are left at the end with two bad guys carrying guns. Who will then be tempted to shoot it out in order to figure out which one has the bigger weapon (or nuclear button).

Once the “superior” people at the top of every society become thoroughly corrupt, the somewhat “less superior” people at every level of the pecking order will then transmit that same characteristic all the way down to those at the very bottom of every class-based society. Leading shareholders will pass on what they have learned about the real world to upper management, who will pass it on to middle management, then lower management (“outhouse bosses”), then workers (also divided between “superior” and “inferior” races, religions and genders), then stay-at-home spouses (or the occasional male housekeeper), then the children, and on down to the family dog. Each level of society successively mistreating the next lowest level. Except that these days, the worst-off people, those in extremely poor countries with no sewage or garbage disposal systems, will also imitate their “superiors” by treating the natural environment as being even lower than the family dog, sending every discarded object into the river and on downstream into the world’s increasingly polluted oceans.

While all this is going on, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “deplorable people” from every social class and every culture will seize every available opportunity to differentiate between themselves and other even “less worthy” groups of people. In the same way that the “poor white trash” in the southern USA have always insisted on the “obvious inferiority” of black people so that they would not end up being considered “the lowest of the low” in their own particular region. This kind of projected discrimination also, unfortunately, has often been adopted by all sorts of groups previously mistreated by everyone else, whose attempts at climbing out of their designated roles often induce them to adopt what is now being called “reverse racism” (or even “reverse sexism” or “reverse elitism”).

One such example that I came across recently was in the Spring 2018 issue of the left-wing Canadian Dimension magazine, published in Winnipeg. Several of the photos published by that magazine show people in Canada protesting in favour of indigenous rights, carrying signs that sometimes read “White people scare me”. The racism of that message is obvious, even though it is directed against the dominant “race” in Canadian society, rather than against any of the dominated “races”. Assuming that all white people are necessarily reactionary is every bit as racist as assuming that all indigenous people, or “visible minorities” in general, are necessarily inferior. Fortunately, the same issue of the magazine also published an article (“Does ‘anti-racism’ contribute to racism?”) by Samir Gandesha, that clearly establishes that the misuse of certain slogans, and messages, can indeed contribute to racism even when the presumed intent of the message was mistakenly believed to be anti-racist.

This leads to the kind of systematic error that often crops up these days in the messages being propagated by all sorts of theoretically liberal and progressive-minded governments and organizations. Anyone who sets out to defend only women (or transgender people) from alpha male domination, without any attempt to also discover how most (non-alpha) men might also be victims of the same domination, is making that kind of error. As are those who defend only the rights of “obviously” handicapped people, without showing that people not displaying any obvious, mental or physical handicap might also be suffering in some way from that same type of discrimination. As are those who refuse to have anything whatever to do with the problems of white working-class people, or white immigrants, because of their “obvious whiteness”.

In reality, “racial” and cultural discrimination, as well as gender discrimination, are only “special” cases of elitist discrimination. All forms of discrimination among human beings, as well as inhuman treatment of animals, are basically elitist, “elitism” being a general category that subsumes class-based oppression as well as gender-based oppression, species-based oppression and cultural-based oppression (which is often transcribed as “race”-based, even though races are not scientifically-founded categories).

Which means that anyone supporting self-determination for indigenous peoples should also be supporting self-determination for Québec, as well as for Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and so on. Anyone supporting Israel’s right to exist as a functioning society also has to support Palestine’s right to exist as a functioning society. Or Tibet’s right to exist as a self-determined, functioning society, as well as any of the other minority peoples within China, or Russia, or any other imperial nation. (Most nations in the world are imperial nations, in the sense that almost every country possesses at least a few oppressed peoples within its self-imposed borders.)

No one should have to choose between national entities like Israel and Palestine, all such nations should all have equal rights, just like all the genders and all the social classes. Why do the vast majority of countries give way more advantages to employer associations than they do to trade unions? Why do we put up with today’s enormous, thirty-million-dollars-a-day versus one-dollar-a-day, income gap between the world’s richest people and the world’s poorest people? Why does practically every country in the world condone the kinds of legal and illegal tax evasion that support that ultra-discriminatory system of income distribution?

The same sort of rational humanist logic should also apply to the resolution of any other kind of human problem, even those not seemingly related to a known form of elitism. For example, what should we be doing about problems like excessive drug use or gaming addictions? In the case of drug abuse, why do we have to exclusively choose between “the war on drugs”, which does not seem to have resulted in any decline in the abuse of illegal drugs but only in sending millions of people to jail, and total legalization of every obviously harmful substance known to humanity? Why do so many different companies and governments end up profiting from some people’s addictions to drugs (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, opioids), or profiting from some other people’s addictions to gambling? Why not try to find a solution that includes neither of those extremes?

Otherwise, the continued application of Gresham’s Law to official policy all over the world will guarantee that our only choices for the future will be even more of the same corruption as before, or the total eradication of multicellular life on this planet altogether. Is it too late, or is a much more positive “third way” still possible?

Inside-out, upside-down and backwards

When I was recently visiting the British Museum, chock full of millions of artistic objects gleaned, or pillaged, from most of the world’s existing cultural traditions, I was once again struck, more strongly than at any other time in the past, by the frightening convergence of practically every one of those competing cultures. Whether the objects came from some part of Western civilization, or from one of the thousands of urban-based empires to be found in various different parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, or from one of the world’s myriad indigenous cultures spread out all over the inhabited regions of the globe, did not seem to make any difference in one fundamental respect. Nor did it often make any difference whether those objects came from societies or civilizations that disappeared thousands of years ago, or from any of the more recently established cultures that are still well represented on this planet nowadays.

In almost every case, and in spite of enormous cultural differences between each competing system, just about all the various different social structures had one fundamental characteristic in common. That was the outstanding anomaly of having each group of human beings, comprising tens of thousands, or hundreds of millions, of ordinary people, to be found under the tight-fisted control of tiny bands of privileged alpha males lording it over the “toiling masses” in a typically inside-out, upside-down and backwards parody of the modern democratic ideal. It is extremely difficult to find, anywhere inside those societies, including the few and far-between examples of (pseudo) democracy occasionally encountered within ancient Greece, as well as the somewhat more numerous democratic pretenders from the modern world, many cases in which the majority of the population genuinely enjoyed any significant degree of control over their own political, economic, social and cultural standards of life.

This situation leaves me with the impression that some kind of degenerate biological evolution seems to have been very often completed by an equally degenerate form of cultural evolution, placing almost every group of people in a stranglehold of wealth, power and privilege. With the result that every human society seems to be almost as anti-democratic as every other society, forever ruled by slaveholding social classes, practising relatively interchangeable degrees of elitism, sexism (misogyny) and us-versus-them racism. All of which are constantly being bounced back and forth between every conceivable, competing culture, religion, ideology and/or philosophical tradition. From the beginning of neolithic times to the present, the perceived needs of the world’s leading elites have practically always been placed first on every society’s agenda, far ahead of the welfare of the general population, rather than the other way around.

If any particular society had actually been organized in anything like a democratic way, the needs of the worst off and the most vulnerable elements in the total population would have been taken care of first, followed by the needs of “in-between” (middle-class) people. Once those two operations had been carried out, any surplus left over in that society would then have been distributed among those few people already prosperous enough to have been free from any immanent, material threats to their overall welfare. Instead of proceeding in a truly democratic manner, however, as if the majority of any given population were as important as any of its privileged minorities, almost all the neolithic and post-neolithic societies known to exist have just about always proceeded in an elitist way, letting any tiny surplus left over, after the ruling elites seized their lion’s share, “trickle down” (if at all) to the toiling multitudes.

In other words, the system seems to have always worked “properly”, but only for those un-democratic people who set it up in the first place. Nevertheless, in any popular cultural rendering nowadays intended to reflect the way things really work, such as the recent Spielberg film about the “Pentagon Papers”, people in high places are seen to be feigning incredulity upon hearing leading executives’ bald-faced lies about their deliberate ignorance of (theoretically projected) democratic norms. This is, however, ridiculous pretension, “artistically” invented in order to uphold the modern democratic illusion, since no such incredulity ever seems to have truly existed among the ruling elites, whose realistic pronouncements in our own time still read very much like the hyper-inflated boasting (à la Donald Trump) of any one of a hundred thousand ancient Middle Eastern imperial braggarts.

In recent times, “her majesty’s loyal opposition” has occasionally been allowed to severely criticize official governing policy, so long as none of that opposition ever ends up reversing the prevailing social order altogether. Every now and then, in various different parts of the world, popular rebellions have sometimes prevailed for a short time, that attempted to put ordinary people first, over previously established, elitist minorities. Especially when the rebels dared to literally interpret official propaganda according to which all believers were equal in the sight of some (unfortunately non-existent) religious divinity. After which, the prevailing order was restored, those rebels not having seen the error of their ways on time perishing in a frenzy of military slaughter. Even when official communist parties managed to take over temporary control of entire countries, or entire empires, the same official communists who made the revolution in the first place simply took the former rulers’ places in the throne rooms and ran those countries pretty much the same way that they were being formerly run. “Bourgeois” revolutions have also been just as thoroughly, and violently, betrayed as were “proletarian” revolutions, not just in the Western world but also in practically every single country or region belonging to what used to be called the “third world”.

None of the ignorant illusions that various different groupings of ordinary people have adopted over the centuries ever seem to have helped them avoid their fate as domesticated servants obliged to kowtow to their officially superior masters. Religious communities of theoretically equal believers, patriotic communities of common-wealth or shared empire, imagined communities of democratic electors (one person, one vote), as well as those said to be based upon celestial harmony and virtuous order, whatever absurd kind of high-flying ideals that people have invented over the centuries, have all been shown to be totally bogus in practice, at least in the vast majority of cases. Even those few countries pretending to practice cradle-to-grave democratic socialism have never attempted to complete that transition, always letting their own wealthy elites control quite a large proportion of national resources, far beyond their tiny percentage of the overall population.

In the real world, most human lives resemble the portrait assembled by South African philosopher David Benatar and his collaborators, in the books he published with Oxford University Press in 2006, 2015 and 2017. So far, I have only read a couple of pages of presentation of his ideas in the French magazine, Sciences humaines (Thomas Peltier, “De l’inconvénient d’être en vie”, April 2018), as well as several articles about his work published on the Internet (most of them fiercely critical). But I definitely have to agree with his reported assessment according to which most people’s lives are fundamentally compromised by all sorts of physical and psychological suffering, bullying, horrible living and working conditions, not to mention having to deal with the fact that certain, eternal death is always the only possible, guaranteed outcome of everyone’s life. Even when most people are supposed to be enjoying themselves, various negative incidents always take place to remind them that they can never have any fun without simultaneously having to put up with the darker side of reality.

It is also true that the desire for self-preservation convinces most people to nevertheless believe in some kind of avatar or another, voluntarily plunging themselves into an ocean of self-deceit, refusing to admit most of the time that their lives have no particular meaning after all is said and done, and that their minuscule existence is just a really tiny section of totally brainless, natural evolution, from the big bang to the present day. My take on all of this, however, is that I do not agree with Benatar at all about how his portrait of reality in fact applies to everyone equally, regardless of their respective place on the social ladder. In my right-honourable opinion (as anyone living within the British parliamentary system might want to put it), having a great deal of wealth and power makes it considerably easier to put up with all this crap than does (for billions of people) having to slave away during a very short overall lifetime, deep inside a dark and dismal pit of mud, blood and excrement, all “artistically” blended into a filthy, putrid mess, down at the bottom of someone else’s private gold mine.

As a result of all this stagnant inequality, all over the world, progress as a concept has finally been abandoned by almost everyone and replaced by neoliberal and/or neofascist atavism, because it (progress) never had a chance to develop for real, given the inherently reactionary nature of almost all human “governance”. People are condemned to repeat history all the time, as in the case of the 1929 financial crisis being reproduced by the one in 2008, because they never succeed in becoming genuinely better people than they were before. The old saw about how “it’s just human nature” seems to have been borne out again within the past fifty years of my own adult life (1968 compared to 2018). As also exemplified in such other cute proverbs as “nice guys finish last” (baseball coach Leo Durocher) and “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (the Bible). All of which is mainly due to the jaundiced presence in our midst of a longstanding epidemic of egotistical monstrosity that recently went viral, brought on by those who we are now calling “narcissistic perverts”. Namely the very same privileged alpha males to which I was referring earlier in this article, just a lot more of them than ever existed before, in keeping with the world’s much larger present population.

Which means that whenever there is a problem anywhere in the world, whether it be sexual harassment, environmental degradation, religious terrorism, violent anti-immigrant sentiment, or whatever, the people in charge always end up blaming the victim. Problems caused by neoliberal or neofascist rulers always have to be solved by “everyone” (the lower classes), because preserving the prevailing system is considered much more important than anything else could ever be. For the world’s most important state-capitalist or private-capitalist rulers, guaranteeing a decent rate of profit for the people on top of the world is always a higher priority than keeping billions of ordinary people alive and kicking. Even though the world’s most horrendous refugee situations are predominantly caused by the deliberate geopolitical creation of “failed states” (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Haiti, Myanmar, etc.) all over the world, doing anything about any of these things is constantly being shuffled off onto the backs of the “little people”, that is to say those lacking the means (wealth and power) to successfully resist obedience to officially-sponsored evil.

For VIPs like British prime minister Theresa May, industrial pollution can only have been caused by regular joes (and jills), constantly throwing their one-time-only drinking straws into the ocean. For the “obvious” reason that no one like May has ever seen any “ever-responsible” industrial concern throwing anything at all away, or contaminating the soil, or anything like that. Similarly, for established newspaper columnists like Allison Hanes or Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed (of the Montreal Gazette), it seems that only ordinary European-origin Westerners ever adopt racist attitudes toward recent immigrants from non-European countries. For the obvious (fake) reason that no one at all among the “racialized” visible minorities living anywhere in the world, nor within any of its indigenous communities, has every been known to be racist, or anti-semitic, or anything like that. It is after all a well-known “fact” among such propaganda mongers that the only majority populations anywhere in the world to have adopted racist attitudes toward “outsiders”, are those coming from Christian-European origins. None of the world’s leading sycophants, or apologists for the prevailing system, will ever admit the truth, namely that every population of every possible cultural origin has always proved to be as racist as any other such population.

Unfortunately, human societies as a whole do not seem to be able to achieve moral rearmament anywhere in the real world, because none of the world’s societies or civilizations were ever morally armed in the first place. Still, it is not going to do anyone any good to just support reactionary regimes, because they are so popular these days, like a lot of my former colleagues have done. It is still better to take the high road (that I did not always do in the past) and to continue believing in some kind of turnaround, right up to the bitter end. Even though it often seems as if “everything that is possible is not worth doing, and everything that is worth doing is impossible”. There is in fact no excuse for ordinary people (those not making billion-dollar decisions every day) to behave like morons, just because almost all the VIPs in this world are doing it all the time.

One way of getting people to back away from the precipice, even when it seems a bit late to be still trying to do that these days, is to point out that the recent worsening of humanity’s long-established sorry state has, after all, been accomplished through conspiracy. As the dozens of very intelligent authors have pointed out, who were cited in Le Monde diplomatique (Manière de Voir)’s recent special on conspiracy theories (“Complots: théories…et pratiques”, April-May 2018), although a very large number of the conspiracy theories being bandied about all over the world nowadays are complete fakes, quite a few other conspiracies have turned out to quite genuine, with devastating results.

For example, it is certainly true that the USA did after all land several astronauts on the Moon several decades ago, and that the terrorist assault on the World Trade Centre in New York (and several other targets) did take place back on 9-11 (2001), pretty much as was reported at the time. But it is also equally true that several of the world’s most important states have been closely colluding with various multinational corporations, and the world’s most important criminal organizations, to jointly exploit the opportunities opened up by recent financial liberalization, in order to enormously increase the worldwide scope of both legal and illegal tax evasion. Worldwide government austerity, directed primarily at poor and middle-class people, has been the inevitable result. In other words, some conspiracies really took place as alleged, while others most definitely did not.

Unfortunately again, the counter-revolution against many different regimes’ democratic pretensions has been successful in dozens of places, fascism with a human face has been elected in some of the world’s most powerful countries, the book of neofascist faces is currently in power in many different regions, and voluntary slavery is therefore feeling real good about itself these days. After all, 63 million people in the USA did indeed elect a fake anti-establishment member of the establishment, with help from Russia, Wikileaks, private British algorithms and assorted minions of artificial intelligence. Neofascism has become as important as neoliberalism all over the world, because state capitalism is now collaborating openly with private capitalism. Many of the traditional allies of the USA (the European Union, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) as well as many of its traditional enemies (Russia, China, Iran, etc.) are all playing their designated roles in what amounts to a worldwide reinterpretation of the absurd 1960s musical, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. Or, to borrow a line from another such play, “My fair lady”, “It has been done!”

Francis Fukuyama was right after all, history is over, “the market” (i. e., the world’s most important investors) rules the world, state capitalism, private capitalism and organized crime have all merged (or converged) into one gigantic, elitist amalgam of vested interest. The future of humanity is upon us, we are now entering the final, mopping-up stage of the aforementioned counter-revolution. It appears that human beings have resolved to make this brave new world of neofascist trans-humanism work, or die trying. There is therefore nothing left to be done, because it already has been done. We are already inside the matrix. If we are all killed off in the next few years by our own nuclear insanity, or our own environmental implosion, or financial collapse, or unbridgeable social division, or sexual warfare, then we will pass the torch on to our robot successors and let them fight to the death among themselves over whether or not they ever had a biological origin. The only future that we seem to have chosen never to embrace will be the old-fashioned kind, that includes out-of-date concepts like progress and real, rather than fake, democracy.