The Death Throes of Globalization

Ding, dong, the witch is dying

Image art @Jeronimovosking

Tales of woe about coming Globalization are quickly becoming a literary form of their own. It is understandable: when one is stuck in the middle of something, it is easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. From down here, surrounded by the coffee fields of Carmo de Minas, though, the view is completely different. Globalization is indeed at least an annoyance, and for people in Western Europe and Anglo-land it can become a serious nuisance in the near future. It is a doomed project, though, and I think it could help some to offer an explanation of where it comes from and where it is headed to.

Globalization is nothing but the final political form of Modernity. The death throes of a dying era.

Modernity is said to have started with the Lutheran Revolution, which substituted individual scriptural interpretation for the vast common understanding of religion that formed the Christian Civilization. After demolishing the common view that held society together, Modern solipsism’s next big step happened one hundred years later, when Descartes turned mankind’s relationship with the world upside-down by stating that what is inside man’s head is somehow truer that his perception of reality itself. Yet another century passed, and Kant doubled down on Descartes’ original mental revolution, stating that while we cannot be sure whether we have two arms, or that it is cold or hot, dark or sunny outside our mind, Reason is universal, that is, if people think hard enough on anything they will arrive at the same conclusions. Ideas became truer than real life, and the Age of Ideologies could and did start.

Ideologies are, by definition, universalizing enterprises. Either all men are the same, and must be placed (as in Marxism-Leninism) or place themselves (guided by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, in Capitalism) where their efforts will be useful for the whole of society, or there are tiers (or even subspecies) of Man, and the best shall rule over the masses (as in Nazi-Fascism or Technocracy). All men, thus, have their place and have to get there so that things work as the always-truer ideological reality prescribes. Even if some people’s “proper place” end up to be the Gulag, Auschwitz, or Rikers Island

It could seem that the individualist revolution was undone by the arrival of universalizing ideological thought; the common worldview that oriented our civilization was shattered by the individualism of first Modernity, only to be replaced by a new ideological universalism. It is not the case at all, as Modern universalizing is the opposite of a common reality-based worldview. For St. Thomas Aquinas, goodness is truth, and truth means that what is inside our heads (ideas, notions, perceptions) matches what is outside (reality itself). For any ideologue, it’s the opposite: “goodness” is having reality itself matching what is inside his head, the ideology he subscribes to. Instead of testing their perception against the touchstone of reality, ideologues judge reality against their truer-than-life ideology. When dealing with any social phenomenon, they start from the premise that Real Truth® – that is, ideology – must be the yardstick. Usually without being asked, they’ll state that this or that bad thing would be “solved” if only the Principle of Non-Aggression, the Common Property of Means of Production, or whatever ideological rule they worship, was implemented.

The main problem of ideological thinking is that it is literally the worship of a fantasy. Fantasies are stuff that does not exist in the real world, only inside our minds, and believing what is inside one’s head instead of one’s lying senses is the starting point of ideological thinking. Its second problem is that ideologies do not allow for the most essential element in human society, human nature. If we read a story written hundreds or thousands of years ago, we will see men acting just like today’s men, suffering for the same causes, seeking the same pleasures, falling into the same temptations, and so on. Man does not change, and although each man is different from all others, on a certain level all men are the same.

Having blinded themselves to human nature, ideologues always fall into the same universalizing trap. They may be one-size-fits-all ideologists, such as Capitalists and Communists (in fact just God-less ideological versions of Protestantism and Catholicism, but that’s for another day), or they may believe Blacks, Slavs, or Jews to be their inferior; in the end, they all treat either all or at least huge swaths of Mankind as if all men were the clones of what they see in the mirror. They are always optimistic about how people will behave, they always assume everybody wants and values exactly the same things they do, and so on.

Up to a certain point, if one is not afraid to get one’s hands quite bloody, uniformity can indeed be enforced. Prior to the French Revolution, what we now call French was just the Parisian dialect, one among hundreds (a dialect is a language that lacks an army…) spoken throughout the French territory. With absolute ideological power installed in Paris, all other dialects were fundamentally eliminated, and nowadays the exact same language is spoken in Marseilles and Strasbourg, albeit with different accents. The much-bloodier American experiment is another quite interesting example: the mass-murder of the native peoples allowed a Modern society to be built from scratch, on a tabula rasa, a vast empty (or rather emptied) territory, from a mostly Northern European population. People with the same basic ethnic and cultural origin, thus avoiding most predictable cultural conflicts. And work it did: Americans (and Canadians, the people of the single Disunited State) have so few internal differences they perceive Utah, Texas, California, and Virginia to be vastly different, whereas for anyone looking from the outside the differences are insignificant, certainly not greater than those between neighborhoods in a big city.

You cannot go much further than that, though, and this is the glass ceiling Modernity hit its head on. It is impossible to make Germans, French, Greeks, and Spanish become the same, and this spelled the doom of the European Union from the beginning. At the same time, even the national Modern projects are starting to come apart at the seams. Even the US can now be said to be internally divided into two different peoples; it is an ideological divide, showing that not even the greater success story of Modernity could last more than a couple of centuries.

But as any wounded beast, Modernity will fight (reality) to the end. Its final goal is global uniformity, and that is the hill it is dying on. That is what all that WEF Great Reset is about. It’s pathetic, in a sad way, just like when a mortally wounded rat keeps biting and scratching the air, fighting to the end when the end has already come. Globalists do have a very small chance of local and temporary success, but when the goal is to rule the whole world forever, a temporary local success is a failure.

The success of the Globalist project would depend on many elements that are just not there; the most important would be:

- Acceptance of the project by a critical mass of society, that is, having enough people willing to become storm troops while the vast majority just shrugs, allowing the small minority that actively refuses to accept the new order to be “disappeared”;

- The ability of local (national, provincial, whatever works) governments to impose on their populations the orders that come from above. The Armed Forces, police, and so on, would have to be on the Globalist side everywhere, as well as all political and administrative institutions, literally everywhere on Earth. In a sense, their role and situation could be compared to the sheriffs in the Old West: they were elected law-enforcement officers because they shared the local cultural mores and unwritten laws. A non-assimilated Native, a Spanish hidalgo, or a Chinaman would never get the job, and even if they tried they would not be able to impose their concepts of right and wrong.

Well, while there is indeed a vast number of people around the world that would gladly become part of such a project (the American left, most old-stock Western Europeans, and most Aussies and Kiwis), they not only do not constitute a critical mass but are concentrated in a few increasingly-unimportant places. The Eurasian integration project, for instance, which very importantly does not care a bit about how people live and are locally ruled in each country as long as they trade with the others, is gaining terrain everywhere. The mishandling of the Ukrainian situation by the US boosted the Eurasian project to such an extent that the inroads it had been getting in South America and Africa are now turning into an actually-global anti-Globalist new world order. One in which, if the Chinese want to turn Uighurs into Han or the Russians want to make Russians out of Ukrainians, it is their own business. In which the Persian theocracy is a good friend of the atheist and Communist Chinese, and both have great relations with polytheistic Hindu-fascist India. There is no one-size-fits-all ideology there, only pragmatic interest in trade. The best of globalization, without the ideological downside of Globalism.

Besides, precisely due to the very strong nationalistic component of late Modernity, the macho men – that is, the military and cops –, even in thoroughly Modern countries, tend to distrust anyone who is not their compatriot. It would be tough to get their wholehearted support for a truly Globalist project. And that is the fly in the ointment in Modern-land: Western Europe and the Anglo countries. Outside that increasingly isolated territory, there is simply not enough Modernity to go or to even start thinking about implementing that project. When we realize there is no word or commonplace expression for “law enforcement” in either Spanish or Portuguese, it becomes a tad clearer that South American states, even if they fell in the hands of Globalists (as Brazil suffered Lula for a while, for instance), just do not have what it gets to impose something so alien to the culture of the people as the Globalist project. And that’s in what has first been the backyard of European powers, and later that of the USA. In Africa, of course, things are stratospherically worse for the Globalist project, as there is not even a semblance of Modern forms of government to be found anywhere.

It does not mean the idiotic attempt will stop. Nobody could ever accuse Moderns of common sense. The Globalist project will be enforced, even if only in that small area (The five Anglos + NATO) that is presently cutting itself out from the rest of the world with a new Iron Curtain. It may even seem to work for a while. But even up there are too many indigestible elements: at least 50% of Americans, a great number of Third-World immigrants in Europe, and the small but noisy European right (which includes most members of the military and police) will not easily agree to the game change. If we take a longer view, say 50 or 100 years into the future, it will probably seem like a small blip, the last squeak from the cornered and wounded rat of Modernity. Until then, though, things can get pretty unsavory in the secluded Modern areas; I am quite glad I live in a country where nothing like that could even start trying to work.

On the other hand, whenever I read about the Globalist promise that one will own nothing and be happy, I am reminded of how happy I was when I lived in a monastery and owned nothing. It’s much better than the world out here, where we own plenty of stuff but are not as happy.

At least for me.