Wider context of Ukraine's local fireworks celebrating a changing world order

The present Ukrainian episode of our shifting global order is omnipresent throughout the media all over the world. But its daily news is completely detached from the broader context of the last fifty years that planted the roots for its emergence today.

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(The following is a quotation from the volume 2 of my series "From Modernity to After-Modernity" titled Modernity that will become available sometimes during this coming June).

 

Western societies have been practicing postmodernism and Neo-liberalism for something as half a century. And we are presently discovering what are the consequences for the working of Western societies. Western citizens are visibly having enough of this elitist plot and they have started to rebel : yellow vests in France, Brexit in Britain, Trump in the USA, and more generally the growth of anti-establishment parties everywhere.

In other words the West has landed itself in deep trouble and the establishment reacts to these troubles in the most convenient way by blurring the lines of factual realities under a thick propaganda fog :

“We are surrounded by propaganda at all times. Our entire civilization is saturated with it. When you say you support internet censorship to stop “Russian propaganda”, what you are really saying is that you only want your own rulers propagandizing you.”   from "This War Is a Propaganda Campaign Wrapped in a Psyop", Strategic Culture Foundation, by Caitlin Johnstone. 2022-04-18.

The more intense the disagreements are growing, between the governed and their governance systems, the bigger the temptation grows in the minds of those who are in charge, of the decision-making process, to point fingers at scapegoats. That’s how Russia and China were made the center of attention in order to deflect the responsibilities of Western big capital holders and their servants the intellectuals, economists, state bureaucrats, and other.

But by deflecting their responsibilities the Western powers that be are adding further risks, to their existing national problems, in the form of an intractable destabilization of the Geo-political order...

Postmodernist thinkers supplied the narrative used by big capital holders and their servants to castrate all oppositions by boxing their societal worldviews in a coffin. Big capital holders thought to do the same by globalizing the reach of their investment while terminating their societal material productions in the West. And so societal Worldviews and material productions finally ended up sharing the same Western coffin.

All this was done in the name of opening all countries on earth to the reach of Western capital which was sold to Western populations, in the nineteen seventies and eighties, as the path to a better tomorrow. But the fact is that this adventure came at an extremely heavy price for Western populations. 

 

Their societies suddenly lost their cultural field, which is their compass to navigate a systemically complex reality that basically is inaccessible to the human mind, and in the process they lost their way forced to navigate blindly until exhausting all their available energy. They are now in a transitory phase solely powered by their force of inertia which they accumulated along high-Modernity when their cohesion was at its zenith. But that inertia comes soon to a standstill.

At the image of a train, whose engine has stopped running for lack of energy, but that is still moving powered by the sole force of its physical inertia, a society, that gets atomized while losing the existential power conferred to her by the initiative of its citizens, is still moving forward for some time powered by the sole force of its societal inertia.

But both the train and the society inexorably come to a stop after having consumed the entirety of their force of inertia. For a train that means physical immobility but a society is a living organism and so coming to a stop means institutional collapse and the ending of all activities. In other words an atomized society ends leaving its citizens on their own to fend for survival in nomad-land, city-tents, or earth-bags.

This should serve as an existential lesson to the rest of the world. Postmodernism and Neo-liberalism are traps set by Western big capital holders to take the control of national state institutions in order to expand the field, of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”, to all citizens on this earth. In light of the outcome of “the reason” for Western societies it is in the interest of the rest of the world to re-assert its control over its own societal path forward.

And so the community, of nations on this earth, is now in the most urgent need of alternative cultural field narratives. This is something that starts to be vaguely perceived in the north as well as in the south. Such alternative cultural field narratives will unmistakably put substance on the bones of the architecture that President Xi Jinping some time ago titled “a community of nations with a shared future”.

China finds the resources to sense the necessary attributes of societal continuity, amidst the present societal chaos, in the continuity of its millennial governance system. And the title, “a community of nations with a shared future”, given by President Xi Jinping, to the future architecture of our world’s governance, intuits that the future shall be shared or shall not be at all. 

 

This intuition certainly matches the necessity that we see arising in “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” (physical side effects of Modernity and governance side-effects). But a title does not make the narrative of an alternative cultural field. Each nation will have the responsibility to devise its own local and adapted version rooted in its traditions and adapted to the new realities of “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”.

The economic success of China over the last 40 years has surprised the whole world and all eyes are now watching Beijing for answers to the Late-Modern predicament of humanity. But in its spite, at losing its hegemony, the USA is now shaking the China shop in the hope of breaking the world’s dream. So before even starting to think about rebuilding their cultural field the nations of this earth will first have to tame the West ! 

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In the present moment we have reached this historical junction when 87% of the world population refuse to follow the diktat of the West to punish Russia for its military operation in Ukraine. The 87% understand that NATO had pushed Russia with its back on the wall thus threatening its existence as a nation.

 

The West is visibly furious all the more so now that its internal order is beginning to crumble : 

• extreme social inequality is generating anger that explodes in violence
  
• extreme poverty is generating the feeling of having nothing to lose any longer
• societal fragmentation is pitting different interests against each other 
• societal atomization is separating people and plunging them into loneliness in front of their screens where the web procures them the illusion that they have free will and know better than anyone else about anything
• Neo-liberal financialization has trivialized the reality of the factors of production like : —  labor — raw materials — energy. But recently the real-world factors of production have started to reassert their reality over the illusion of paper finance.
• Western printing of mountains of fiat money is now ending in hyper-inflation and printing more will not resurrect the lie of their dying world order.

In conclusion the west has reached the end of its game of Modernity while the rest of the world wants to definitively tame it. In this historical moment lurks the danger of Western spite... which could engage a mushroom cloud.

 

I am convinced that at this point, more than anything else, the world needs the animist wisdom of the grandmother of all civilizations to deflect western grudges...