The Last Crisis?

 
We are living through the Last Crisis of Late (European) Modernity (EM).
 
A system constructed on Two self-subverting scaffolds, Asocial Individualism (AI) and Avaricious Adversarialism(AA) is simply bound to implode.
 
A human society simply cannot be sustained on that basis.
 
This was the egregious error of the European Enlightentment.
 
It had a grossly flawed understanding of human nature.
 
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All our latter-day crises stem from those false, initial premises.
 
These cannot be mended by deploying any item in the (E)Modernist tool-kit, be it liberal, conservative, or, socialist.
 
As Einstein pointed out, issues can never be resolved using the same means as those that created the problem(s).
 
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But, who dares to think outside the box?
 
No happy emoluments await one in that perilous enterprise.
EM teaches us to question everything – except EM.
 
So we continue , within the system, to chase our own tails, all but merrily.
 
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Against the fallacies of EM, I have suggested the following postulates, for serious reflection.
 
1. We are NOT Asocial Individualists, nor are we Avaricious Adversarials , except when forced onto that Procrustean bed by force and fraud.
 
2. We flourish best in Gemeinschaft formations, rather than in Modernist<emGessellschaft corrals.
 
Human integrity loses its pith and meaning when we depart from face-to-face relations.
 
3. We are affective, communal, cooperative, convivial beings rather than competitive, covetous, rationalist calculators of personal worth and well-being, as EM decrees us to be (A Buddhist qua Buddhist cannot pass a Micro-Econ Exam without having to concede that ‘more is better‘).
 
4. Nation and State are imposed entities ( The Treaty of Westphalia institutionalised that dual for all of us), by ruling elites, corresponding to their need for tribute, taxation, and territory.
 
5. Human societies are built from below on the basis of family, kinship, and community: only (some ) native peoples still live within that healing matrix. Most of us live in the engineered alienation of the modern nation state, which is amongst the endemic causes of all modern conflicts.
 
6. Human societies evolve spontaneously requiring no plan, no agenda, no manifests. We build societies much like ants and bees, instinctually.
 
7.Instincts are the fabled dog that does not bark in EM discourse, advisedly: to accept that is to admit we are organic beings with organic needs: so we may not be ‘engineered’ to conform to this or that political fantasy
 
8. The meretricious EM idylls of liberty, democracy, equality, et al are all modes of decoys and detours , diverting us from the brute facts of EM oppression (tying most of us to the Wheel of Permanent Drudgery) , so we safely expend our lives in a fine frenzy, seeking chimera that are ever denied and/or delayed.
 
9. Like Sysiphus we still carry those burdens, up the hill, in vain hopes of an imminent good (EM utopias, like heaven – which they replaced, historically – always lie, safely, beyond the present). That , alas, never arrives.
 
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Stepping off the EM treadmill is equivalent to breathing, again, for the first time: understanding ourselves, our needs, and the grim nature of the spin of the system.
 
Life can then be redirected, within a clear vision of who we are, to providing for our real, communal, needs , unfiltered by the endless, ever more extortionist demands of the system for our labor, our time, our minds, our fealties, and our resources.
 
As I have said before, EM ideas of who we are are no less than a dire libel upon the human race.
 
They turned, over time, a Band of Convivials into an unhappy Company of Strangers.
 
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You can see much of this for yourself: look around you, the people you work with, the people you work for, the people you know, the people you live close to – what are the ties that bind you to them , and vice versa?
 
Excise the forces of necessity – commerce and power– from those equations, above, and what is the residual?
 
What happened to the life-endowing desiderata of your Affective Life</em>?
 
It’s nothing less than a grisly travesty.
 
The Good Life cannot be built upon anomie, alienation, and angst.
 
Those are precisely the states of being that the system generates, on an ever ascending scale.
 
The Amoral Society is built by shredding any and all sources of societal empathy, a situation near-perfected today in the US .
 
Its grim data of daily mass-murder and mayhem , not to mention the frozen tundra of its social relations, stand as tragic, irrefutable, testimony to that.
 
It goes beyond even the ghoulish to realise that all this stands as the very Template of Progress within the EM world.
 
Dystopia, intended or not, is its necessary, ultimate , consequence.

 
[© R.Kanth 2023]

 
Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).