Sunday, April 8, 2012

No competition to capitalism and the rotting west

Hegel made a correct observation that dialectics between two opposites (thesis and anti-thesis) creates new matter (synthesis) and promotes the advance of history.
Currently, when the leftist ideas championed by the USSR and socialist movements were demolished, there is no counter thesis to create dialectics versus the capitalism, which in its turn causes the rotting and decay of capitalism.

This way, the basis of the western renaissance, the logic questioning of subject, competition between ideas and cycling improvement is in danger.

While Capitalism and Socialism were contending against each other, new and advanced forms of matter appeared in the friction lines - social-democracy, welfare state, social security and more.

Nowadays, it seems that regardless whether you are a western capitalist, a middle eastern Islamist, a nationalist Russian or a competitive Chinese - money is a tool and a goal at the same time. Thus, they do not challenge capitalism and capitalism isn't really challenging their core values. This way, western liberalism (what we used to wrongly call, leftism) is left without a defender and is vanished from the ideological arena.

I agree that these ideologies currently competing on world dominance do have dialectics between them, but not sure these dialectic currents are positive.

The left has left and we are left alone. It's our own responsibility to bring up a new notion of liberalism.

We had a dream - and now we have none

Martin Luther King had a dream. That dream marched hundreds of thousands of people all over the USA and inspired others around the globe.
The strength of King didn't lay merely on is personality and his ideas.
It laid, first and foremost, on the fact that he had an idea. He combined the existing wishes and passions of people in the USA, centuries of belief in human equality and human rights into a clear an articulated utopia - an achievable new world which managed to wash away cynicism and mobilize masses.
The existence of a clear alternative world is a strong force - the one which explains the force of religions over people. The one which explains why Marxism had the same force over people.
This explains also the amazing strength of the capitalist idea - which is a clear but also one of the simplest of all utopias. Let the market play, don't intervene and the world will be paradise.

There is no leftist utopia nowadays. There is no liberal utopia. Liberalism has succumbed to a pile of post modernist bullshit. It retreated in the face of a mass of relativist ideas which justify why all the ideas of humanism and liberalism should be sacrificed to appease religious, extremist ideologies and oppressing regimes.
Enlightenment as moved aside and in the name of liberalism cleared the way to anti liberal ideas.

The west's liberalism submerged itself in a bath of guilt over the calamities that Europe has brought on the world over the 20th century has disappeared.
Instead of reformulating its aspirations into a new sociopolitical movement is was washed away by relativism, effectively accepting non-liberal ideas as acceptable just in order not to impose "European" ideas and castigating those who still believe in it as "imperialists", i.e. the USA.
For the sake of humanity and the world, the western liberalism has the same right to exist and profess its convictions like any other ideology. Regretting for western deeds should learn to a revision of ideas, improvement of liberalism and cleanup of racist ideas, but not to a full retreat.