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We swim in the medium of liberalism. Throughout our school and working lives, indiscriminative principles, known euphemistically as ‘political correctness’, are drilled into us. In a Hollywood-Disneyland world of media stereotypes, the ‘good’ guys always win, where the good is equated with the liberal and ‘progressive’; and the cops get the villains, leaving the world a safer place for homo economicus to pursue his nihilistic dreams.
Little wonder that our western way of life appears rational, even natural and the culmination of a long chain of Darwinistic evolutionary progress. The hard fact to swallow is that it is none of these. Liberalism, the dominant western, verging on global, belief system is built on a chimera, a lie.
Liberalism’s mantra of equality has arisen in such a manner that no other difference is acknowledged to be more right and more true than that which is ‘achieved’ through one’s efforts and ‘merit’, according to the terms of the nihilistic economic measure of wealth.
From a higher point of view (from a point of view that knows that the progressive decay of the organism will eventually push one into nothingness), meritocracy and the chasing after wealth or self-fulfilment or peer-recognition or celebrity all lead, quite literally, to dead ends.
Yet liberalism remains unchallenged from any point of view. The political left and right in the West are both sides of the same coin. Where one promotes multi-culturalism, the other offers globalisation. The same applies to nationalisation and corporatisation, equality and commoditisation, liberty and the free market, materialism and the amoraleconomic space, education and media indoctrination. Even Karl Marx was pro-capitalism to the extent that it was necessary to sweep away tradition. Where religion exists in the West, it is these days founded upon vague liberal ‘ethics’. It is not a coincidence either that vaguely left causes are often supported by the global elite.
In short, the same coin is liberalism and there is no opposition to it. The right in the West was long ago hijacked by economic liberalism. And what does liberalism serve? Money. It arose out of financial liberalism, the freedom to make money out of money. Whatever the personal belief held by the individual, whatever the motive driving the individual, the way society is constituted under liberalism means that his or her efforts will serve money in the end.
‘Thank God for the possibility of my holding certain beliefs’ some might say. But is too simplistic to suggest that all are at liberty to think how they will. You only have to look at the world to see that people are thinking, behaving and consuming in ways that are increasingly similar. Liberty seems to be mistaken for the ‘principles’ of the corporate human resources department, where all are equal in a 1=1 prison. In this sense, an individual right becomes a right to nothing.
In this scenario, we might be free to hold beliefs, but these will eventually be an irrelevance. It is much easier and safer to be like all the others, to become a repetition, a number along with the crowd, all serving the great global enterprise in the most efficient manner. Belief will become a folk memory.
Being two sides of the same coin, today’s political left and right offer a false dichotomy. The right has been hijacked by economic liberalism, whereas once it was resistance to the amoral economic space opened up by money that once motivated the radical right.
A renewed political dichotomy would have the liberal economic motive on one side and the ethically-driven onthe other, the latter founded on beliefs that have a transcendental origin, separate to man. Without a renewed political dichotomy, there will be no opposition to liberalism in the west. But how will one emerge? All contact with previous eras of faith have been lost; the distance between the traditional and today’s egoistic mind being vast.
The answer is that faith and tradition will have to be rediscovered and relearnt, something that will have to happen outside of academia, which is now a functionary of liberalism, engaged in the business of preparing workers for the wage economy.
Once a process of rediscovery has been undertaken, then a more meaningful and historically relevant political dichotomy will arise in the form of liberalism versus traditionalism, the latter being the radical challenger to the status quo. Traditionalism is the only radicalism.
John Dunn.
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