The Great Turning (01)

This is an introduction to a series of 10 articles in which I describe the contemporary moment through the lens of my just published book “Modernity”. Starting today I’ll publish a new article every Friday until attaining the end of the series.

Everyone somehow feels that humanity has entered a historical transition and that the relations between nations, and the lives of their citizens, are going to change drastically. But no one knows with any degree of certainty what this entails for peoples’ daily lives along the transition nor after its completion. And the media are not helping as they are stuck in one or another echo chamber. To keep one’s sanity we have certainly to stay informed but the wisest keep their distance from the daily news for a good reason. 

Constant immersion in propaganda weakens the synaptic processing of neuronal data which turns thinking idiotic !

In our present times of propaganda war, and mass cancellations of independent voices by the powers that be, only the study of what is called ‘long haul history’ can unveil what kind of background processes are at work in the societal cultural field that synchronize the perception of the citizens, about their contextual settings, and so kickoff their daily societal culture, taken in the largest sense of the word, which means all the individuals’ shared perceptions, beliefs, behaviors and actions.

The comprehension of the formation of our societal daily culture immunizes us from the ignorance, in which the powers that be want us to stay, and from their manipulation through propaganda that intents to mislead those very rare souls among us who earnestly search to understand the world we live in.

What is for sure is that we are all witnessing a rare historical moment of Western societal madness. And anyone who kept a sane mind will tell you that what we are witnessing more precisely is the sudden panic of Western elites at the sight of 85% of the world population that is starting to jump from the ship of Western Modernity which is signaling that we approach the end of a historical era.

Western elites are panicking at the sight of their loss of control, over the economy-world and the governance-world, in this Late-Modernity. This loss implies indeed a world-changing process that would free all societies on earth from centuries of Western hegemony. 

Lets never forget that Western countries, have been overturning non-Western peoples’ daily lives, for some 500 years already !  They first committed a worldwide genocide and then they relentlessly destroyed their traditions, their daily culture, and mercilessly looted their resources.

And while non-Western people were suffering their Western counterparts were supplied a constant flow of cheap goods that exploded the returns on investments of Western big capital holders while Western public institutions, and the International Institutions set up by them, were keeping non-Western countries in a state of constant subjugation !

What is at stake, for the West during this transition, is the ending of its 500 years of privileges and for non-Western countries it is the prospect of discovering their true potential in a multilateral context of partnership between sovereign nations sharing equal rights. 

 

The paradox of Modernity gets resolved with the fall of Modernity

Two trends dominate the history of Modernity :

1. its extreme success at churning out material goods to satisfy a societal life based on consumerism is rooted in the paradigm of Modernity which emerged in the 12th century in the land of the Franks as "the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital". That "reason" expanded into philosophic rationalism and the scientific method and both participated in the expansion of Modernity to the whole world..


2. in their extreme distraction, by Modernity, from "the First Principles of Life" humans have externalized many costs like : — the pollution of air, water, and land — the expansion of agriculture to the remotest places which is putting humanity in contact with wild animals carrying transmissible viruses which results in the constant threat of epidemics — industrial agriculture is occasioning the running of top soils and its productivity is falling — climate change is making life more and more difficult in ever larger swathes of the world — the peaking of energy and material resources is rendering the Western modern way of life impossible — and so on and on....
   

The paradox of Modernity is the simultaneous presence of these 2 contradictory trends that, by this Late-Modernity, are annihilating each other and bringing about the fall of Modernity. 

 

With "the Great Convergence" Modernity is ending.

After centuries the convergence, of all the side-effects of Modernity, is also converging with the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world, from the West to the East, that is destabilizing the governance-world at a time when humanity urgently needs to act as one entity to circumvent a mass extinction that could possibly wipe out our own species.

This great convergence, that is ravaging the habitat of life and its species, is rendering life as usual impossible for the human species. And the paradigm of Modernity that is rooted in "the reason" , and its extensions rationalism and the scientific method, is coming under question.

In the nineteen-seventieths Western big capital holders had already shifted "the reason" to "the gamble that is at work in the transformation of debt into capital" in order to finance the vast investments required by the expansion of their reach to the whole world.

The shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia, with China at the core, is vigorously resisted by the West and more particularly by the USA who do not want to lose their hegemony over the world. But their internal situation is rapidly degrading socially, politically and also economically. And after the great recession of 2008 their biggest capital holders, and the corporations they own, came to the conclusion that the total levels of debt would require new income streams to avoid a terminal collapse of their financial and economic systems.

Some 10 years ago already US and European big capital holders proposed a new shift in the paradigm of capital formation. Their solution is the implementation of “the totalitarianism that is at work in the transformation of nature into capital”. Like for their nineteen-seventieths revolution this one will also be implemented in stealth mode and in the greatest secrecy. The fact is that its implementation is already underway but nearly nobody has any inkling about it.

The plan of big capital holders is to monetize the free “usage value” of the services that nature procures by grabbing their ownership and transforming that “usage value” in “exchange value” that generates an income stream… And what is most enlightening is that the promoters of this scheme estimate the value of the total ownership of such natural services at some $4,000 trillion dollars ! In 2019, the wealth of the world was estimated at a total of some $360.6 trillion. The transformation of nature into capital, that is starting to be implemented by Western big capital holders, is thus 11 times the size of the world's wealth today ! Russia, India, China and the Global South better awake asap to this new revolution in capital formation that is starting to be implemented by Western big capital holders and their corporations...

The financialization of nature would occasion the same kind of social devolution that occurred after globalization set in and the middle-class melted away. But the social devolution coming with the financialization of nature is at another level. It's implementation will be at an incomparable scale and depth that Western big capital holders think would allow them to prolong their hegemony over the whole world... 

 

Is a new lease on life for the unipolar world in the cards ?

Humanity's future is preordained by "the great convergence of Late-Modernity". And the fact is that the impact of the factors at work in that convergence dwarf the impact of the present destabilization of the governance-world.

The paradigm of Modernity is bound to finally die with “the totalitarianism that is at work in the transformation of nature into capital”, which “the First Principles of Life” have already started to sanction with — an abrupt climate heating — the eruption of plagues — the overwhelming chemical pollution of air, water, and land and the collapse of most human systems sometime after 2030.

What happens then will not only question Western Modernity, but also the Chinese model of development which is rooted in it. This should be a wake-up call for the Global South to plan, while there is still some time, for local self-sufficiency, slow life, and low technology. 

 

Having said that the real world is still rooted in Modernity and hegemony. Countries have thus to navigate at sight trying to create the conditions that protect them from the hegemon while simultaneously preparing their populations for the devastating context that they will soon face in After-Modernity.

 

Here follow the titles of my next 10 posts.

1. The fall of the West by its own doing
2. Is a new lease on life for the unipolar world in the cards ? 
3. Modernity falls under under the impact of "the great convergence of Late-Modernity"
   
4. The continuum of the societal cultural field
5. How did Modernity arise ?
6. The paradigm of Modernity and its expansion into philosophic rationalism and science
7. The difference between 'rationality – scientific knowings" and "logic – coherence – traditional knowledge"
8. The Western resistance to the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world
9. The Russian operation in Ukraine is a rallying cry against unipolarity
10. A new worldview for a multi-polar world