It is easy to become trapped by words. They may as well be etched in stone, given that they betray their origins in time and the meanings of the time they were created, even though they evolve in usage.
We are now in the jaws of this trap.
The political terms of “left” and “right,” having served for just two centuries (since 1789, in France), are now misleading and, to a substantial extent, dangerous. They lead us to false assumptions about the current socio-political divide. The current schism in Western democracies is not between “left” and “right,” but between more fundamental philosophies.
We are at the end of the two centuries of transformation from what American writer Thomas Paine called “the Age of Reason”—at the same time that French revolutionary thinking threw up the political “left” and “right”—which grew from the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, the world has abandoned reason and enlightenment and the intellectual choice that it seemed individuals could take of their own free will.
And while “free will” may describe a situation arrived at intellectually, “willfulness” seems to describe a social situation in which, today, directions are chosen emotionally, even subliminally. Recently, I wrote about “the Collapse of Wisdom and the Rise of Chaos” and suggested that the world’s populations seem to be behaving with the same herd mentality exhibited by societies of hunter-gatherer times. The ages of Enlightenment and Reason had ended.
Twenty-first-century society seemed to have crystallized, particularly with the global phenomenon of the COVID-19 crisis, into more fundamental camps, which we had seen reemerging in recent decades (and which have always been present beneath the sophistry of societies).
This is the division between the element of society that wishes to be told what to do and how to behave, absolving itself of responsibility, and the element of society that wishes to make its own choices and accept personal responsibility. The COVID-19 crisis saw the emergence of individuals who relished the task of dominating those who had chosen the path of subordination.
To be fair, this is not a new situation. In my 2012 book, “UnCivilization: Urban Geopolitics in a Time of Chaos,” I estimated that the overwhelming majority of people—could it be as much as 80 percent of them?—“preferred the certainty of oppression to the uncertainty of freedom.” Of course, those who submit fully and willingly to subordination, and those who reject it, absolutely each represent the ends of the spectrum: the “new left” and “new right,” if you wish, with varying shades of gray between them.
It is as though the roles of sado-masochism—bondage-discipline or dominance-submission—have become writ large into societies, now on an overt and authorized scale. At its core, societies now demand rigid “virtue signaling” at a visible level to differentiate between those who cherish obedience and those who cherish freedom. Still, even that is an oversimplification of the phenomenon. It does not mean that those who demand freedom cannot also embrace discipline, or that those who welcome subordination cannot also desire choice.
All this has significant political import, especially in societies that seek a continuation or evolution of “democracy.” Democracy includes the right to vote for one’s own oppression. Where it creates debate is when, or whether, it includes the right to vote for the oppression of others.
In immediate political terms, this evolution of social composition away from the “old left” and “old right” has been evident in the “rebellions” that saw “regional” peoples—not fully benefitting from the ultra-urbanism that emerged during the 20th century—voting in the United Kingdom for “Brexit”: the end of the subordination of Britain to the European Union. Or in the United States, voting against the urban-dominated political establishment that had built up, putting Donald Trump in the presidency.
These “rebellions” of the countryside jolted the ultra-urban communities to defend themselves. And breaking the two centuries or so of modern lifestyle creation—in fact, by shattering the economic and social security of those years of increasing urbanization—we saw, beneath it all, the reality that ancient geopolitical and social identities were revived.
This may seem abstract, but it is at the heart of what will decide political reaction—democratic or visceral—over the coming transitional years. And is a new “Western authoritarianism” the natural answer to “Eastern authoritarianism”? Will ochlocracy (mob rule) rise as a precursor to a new pre-democratic authoritarianism?
Economic challenges to urbanism will be part of the equation because when we become poor, we are prepared to fight each other.
