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by UncleOxidant
1425 days ago
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" Maybe being happy with the current state of things is just hard. Maybe actually maintaining a good, stable society is hard too; harder than expecting what worked yesterday to work for us now. I don’t want to minimize or ignore that there are very real problems with the current state of things, and trying to improve them is a good idea, but current political appetites feel decidedly destructive." Agreed. Things aren't actually all that bad right now. When compared to most of history things are really pretty damn good. Sure there's the pandemic, but as pandemics go... well, there have been much worse. And yet a lot of people want to see it all burn. I really don't understand this sentiment. What makes them think that something better will arise out of the ashes? |
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This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia". As per usual no real political analysis is provided, just the cleverly worded implication that people who disagree with the preferred direction don't really have political views, just atavistic destructive tendencies. That they want to "watch it all burn". It's flattering to the ego to believe that other people are just vastly intellectually inferior, of course, but not very intellectually interesting for observers.
To wit, the core of the author's thesis is that with the threat of nuclear war receding, "Capitalism and liberal democracy had won, and nothing would ever really challenge this staus quo again. That thesis has now unraveled so obviously that nobody claims we are at the “end of history” anymore, and this book is remarkable only for the hubris it embodied. Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden."
This sounds clever but is devoid of any meaning or detail. It's a New York Times cliché, not actual analysis of the world you could learn anything from. And because it's so thin we can easily spin it around.
Consider Trump. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is about a world post-nuclear apocalypse. Trump is cast as somehow equivalent or similar to this. But let us recall the alternative voters were given! I remember the original presidential debates, and it was Trump's opponent who wanted to create a no-fly zone over Syria i.e. start a hot war with the nuclear armed Russians! And it was Trump who stood against that and said no way, we're not doing that, we're not starting a hot war with Russia over Syria. So you could argue that the voters stood up for Eden in that moment by saying: no, getting the first woman president is not enough to offset the risk of nuclear war. A serious analysis that linked A Canticle with modern political events should really consider that sort of thing, but this article isn't such an analysis. It's instead the usual cry of pain of those committed to unaccountable managerial technocratism, wondering why the savages inexplicably reject their benevolent rule.