‘The world may well be divided, then, between a North whose political tone is set by elderly women, and a South driven by what Thomas Friedman labels super-empowered angry young men.’ - Fukuyama
The super-Abundant Global Retirement Village
As we continue to be shocked by world events—Brexit, Trump’s 2016 victory, the global quarantine measures initiated in 2020 and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia— all of these events seem shocking to those clung onto an increasingly implausible view of human nature on one level, and refuse to look honestly at their own influence on the world(by that I primarily speaking of the West) for some time now, on the other.
Referring to Fukuyama’s quote at the top of this essay. This was taken from his work from 2002, Our Post Human Future, of which he addressed many of the issues raised by advances in bio-technologies. This quote was taken from the section on the prolongation of life. He argued that demographic changes of progressive, economically abundant nations—which had already seen massive demographic shortages of younger generations due to women preferring work over having children—was going to intensify as the prolongation of life through medical technologies advance, and makes an aging population an even more prevalent issue.
On the other hand, this can be contrasted to the global south. The global South has been gaining huge population growths in the past fifty years. Large amounts of young men in particular have , due to lack of regular warfare, but without the same re-productive dis-incentivizing schemas of the north, expanded dramatically. The instability of these regions then leads to large influxes of young men from the South into the North. This is not a right wing talking point. It is a fact which inevitably stems from an unstable region which is biologically productive living in the same planet as a biologically but richer, unproductive one. The second begins needing active and young physical labour by way of younger men from less developed nations; because the richer part of that world failed to produce(or value) your own. Our reactions to demographic tensions between North and South has being in spasm since 9/11.
Yet, this is more than a labour issue, but one of psycho-political changes which these demographic tensions bring out. Of course, 9/11 was the first ‘post historical’ reminder of angry young men with high ideals performing for the global media culture; to what is to this day the most viewed event in media history. But we will concentrate on the other half of this schism for now; the northern, aging and feminised world of the developed/democratic hemisphere.
The economically prosperous world of an aging, feminized and non biologically productive North versus an overly-biologically productive, poor and increasingly radicalized (Radical Islam in particular) South, means we could see the growing ideological divides as one determined by tension between elite grannies and rageful under (or un)employed young men, whom have found meaning in some militant belief system which sees itself as in tension with liberal, humanitarian, economistic values.
For this reason, I would argue that the emphasis on simple gender which both feminists and the right focus on (assuming a gender antagonism between men as a whole and women as a whole), is inaccurate. So is the racial politics of—again—both left and right, which see a simple nation versus nation or race vs race of European/North American vs black/Asian divide. These have, in a globalized system proven absurdly false frameworks to view the world from, although they are still repeated ad nauseum.
Rather than race, I would argue both class and generational antagonisms between an older population of largely boomers versus millennials/ Gen Z, and a general state and civilizational schema of holding onto and prolonging both wealth and biological life for the sake of prolonging, without any higher aim or long term end, (for example legacy, or progeny) has infused itself into a gendered and generational antagonism of which the south/north divide was only a temporary element, and not an eternal one. The schema of North vs South is not rigidly ethnic, nationalistic or geographic. It could easily assume itself as a domestic issue for Western states.
Taking the Covid lockdowns as example, we could interpret it as the entire world suddenly going into retirement. All assets and values of wealthy retirement age peoples became entirely over-valued; suburban property prices, being the most obvious example. While on the other hand, many young people were suddenly told every component of their values and life opportunities must be put on hold..for two weeks…then two years. In fact, they were even told their values—like that of wanting to celebrate an 18th birthday with friends—were dangerous and destructive. I will point to the masking and E-learning of young children for the benefit of school administrations who clearly hate any sign of youth or life, as the most extreme example. We could conclude that an ideological value to placid retreat from life—and not the becoming or growth of life, took over quite despotically.
Moving back into Fukuyama’s theme of angry young men and what occurred to them both ethically and demographically, we could say ambitious young men with a tendency towards what made history, history (glory, world-making, martial spirit and a need for higher ends of God, glory, or absolute truth) all got replaced by an overly medicated, highly luxurious and super prosperous global retirement village, of which fused together mediocrity, psychiatry and medical technology, to form what was paradise to some and a hellscape to others.
As Fukuyama pointed out in the End of History, the mediocritizing forces of global capitalism will be one the greatest question marks over the future of liberalism. Rather than medical technologies being seen in the more simplistic utility of treating disease, Fukuyama foresees the potential of it being used to deal with pathologizing away any justifiable tension being brought to life by overbearing mediocrity, boredom and perhaps nihilism. The use of drugs like Ritalin to medicate young boys who won’t sit still in classrooms all day is one of his preferred examples.
We could say that the world dominated by the counter opposite to excessive young male energy is embodied in elderly or middle-aged women, of whom largely make up the political and institutional structures that oversee an increasingly suspicious medical-state bureaucracies and conjure up extremely dubious pathology-labels of natural behaviour. The term ‘toxic masculinity’ is probably the best example here. The paradoxical element is that this medicalization of excessive male energy has also come along with the hyper-medicalization (or even self medication) of middle aged women being the largest users of drugs like Prozac. The likes of Nancy Pelosi of Christine Lagard could be seen as the embodiments of this ‘post war’ medical realism; by realism I mean the assumption that modern civilization could only ever be acceptable as part of a techno-medical dulling down and androgynizing of the world for the sake of ‘security’, for the sake of economic efficiency and for sake of living without the need of any clear reason to live (and die) for. This belief system preferred by our elite grandmother figures could seen encapsulated in the term ‘Homo economicus’.
We shouldn’t shy away from the reality that these women are likely (due to their age but perhaps because of more complex psychological factors) held together only by copious amounts of pharmaceutical drugs. (Something very noticeable in Joe Biden, also).
In this new antagonism between the excessive energy of young men and the cmd/cntrl disposition of medically zealous and security obsessed aging bureaucrats, we see the possibility of using bio-technology for another purpose. Some curious mechanics of the human brain have recently argued that we could save space and resources by using medical technology to induce prisoners into a state where they experience their sentence as say, one hundred years, while they may only be in prison for a day. This again goes well beyond simple medical treatment of disease—and even goes beyond simple vulgar use of technology for policing purposes or social control—it also shows a genuine tension in how we value time. The prolongation of life could be seen in this case , quite glaringly, as an ideological preference of extending time, even if that time is totally controlled and humiliating, as opposed to living a shorter, more glorious existence.
Medical Science in the Global Retirement Village
One of Fukuyama’s quotes is again prescient. 'Would Caesar or Napoleon have felt the need to conquer most of Europe if he had been able to pop a Prozac tablet every now and then? If so, what would have become of history?’
The message here is more than the simple technical question of ‘would these technologies work at such a function?’ but rather would we be willing to accept that level of mediocrity (not even having a history), just to avoid confrontation, pain and general disruption to our new absurdly engrained obsession with our personal consumption and identities?
One can’t sperate the hyper-liberalization of pharmaceutical drugs from the position we are now in; one where we think we can prescribe away every issue without confronting it. When the primary disposition is such, the boundaries of medical treatment and political interest or social control become highly blurred. Aggression and treatment, we could say, infuse together. This could be seen in light of the how much states spend on healthcare, the amount of profit pharmaceutical companies bring in, yearly; a profit margin so large it makes the future of state-backed healthcare uncertain—not to mention the recent fusing of security and healthcare which Covid brought forth. The UK, for example has been referred to as a hospital with nukes. In this world it wouldn’t be absurd to say politics has itself become a form of medication.
Anyway, regardless of the dangers of post-humanism and gynocentric, well-armed retirement centres we starting calling ‘Superpowers’…along came Covid and suddenly that life-prolongation ideal was cut rapidly short. In fact, taking the UK as an example, it has seen dramatic drops in life expectancy for both genders beginning in 2019. It seemed Fukuyama over-estimated the progress in medical science. It should also be noted that the use of medical technology to be used as a compensation mechanism for both psychologically unliveable states of being, and massive political and economic disintegration, is highly suspicious.
In other words, the disasters caused by the supremacy of technocratic mega states far out paces the technical innovation needed to fix over those problems. Covid wasn’t just a contingent intrusion of a virus which took life from the elderly (many of those far poorer elderly) but rather that technical task of medically fixing over, through pharmaceuticals, financial stabilizations (money printing and/or sanctions), and media propaganda, as responses to pre-existing problems. All the go-to responses to crisis mentioned, have shown themselves to be rather short-termed and relatively impotent solutions to the very problems it has helped caused. The system’s role as a causer has paced out its role of fixer.
Covid was a disruption to a zealous techno-optimism in medical technologies, not because the vaccines didn’t help many people of vulnerable categories (elder, obese people ect.). But rather, because the general lockdown measures caused two problems for every one problem it fixed over. For a disease which primarily effected obese people, locking people at home all day and making them wear a mask just to go for a cycle in the park, likely exaggerated one of the key conditions which made Covid dangerous to begin with.
Printing copious amounts of money seems like a good idea if you also bring with it forms of mass de-commodification, universal basic income and a sweeping subversion of neo-liberal policies. As a temporary fix to get out of tight spot, it simply causes far more issues than it fixes; i.e hyper-inflation and an engrained corporate class who ultimately uses the public tax purse to create a bottomless safety net, at the cost of tax payers. For a democracy this is both economic and political suicide.
Was this just incompetence, a lack of resources, basic human fallibility? I argue no. I would say the other danger of medical-technologies which Covid exposed was the deeply ideological fixation with insisting that medical technology was the only answer to every problem. Those who could rely on their own natural immunity were coerced through propaganda campaigns, scapegoated and excluded through mandates, into taking a medicine which they did not need. Covid revealed that the boomer-era faith in medical science and technocratic management is so strong that the very existence of those who could rely on what nature had provided for them through youth or an active lifestyle, was to be seen as backward, dirty and dangerous.
One particular example which highlighted the uncertainty of this global luxurious retirement home as a prototype for civilization, was when those wealthy elderly couples got stuck on cruise ships for weeks at a time; not being allowed to dock due to containment measures when Covid broke out. From floating luxury for those with a lot of expendable cash to directionless floating vessels of illness, was a prescient analogy for the non-productive, hyper-commodified, hyper medicalized direction many Western states have taken.
As for the insistence that young people with healthy natural immunity must indulge in the consumer-hospital logic which became exaggerated at the time. I do not believe any conspiracy of trying to deliberately hurt young people through mandating vaccines. Rather, that it was an expression of ideological hubris which couldn’t come to terms with the fact that many of pillars of post-war era technocracy are rapidly crashing down around them; and hopes in the revelation of true utility and potential of medical sciences, was simply one of those pillars. After all, major diseases like cancer and diabetes are still incurable, life expectancy has taken a sudden turn downwards and many techno-optimism projects—like the Elon Musk’s plan to wire our brains—is directed at both media consumption of titillating new cyber-realities which often stir up thoughts of addicts rather than innovators, or perhaps new military projects for neurologically driven bio-warfare. The hopes of a disease free health state is a bubble which has burst explosively.
Media in the Global Retirement Village
A massive shift in the realm of media has been occurring over the past decade. The old mechanism of ‘manufacturing consent’ as Chomsky once put it, has proven to be rather impotent. It was Trump who first took advantage of this weakness in the system in his victory over Hillary Clinton. The establishment media was absolutely on the side of Clinton and with only a few right wing outlets like Fox even taking Trump more seriously than a tool for embarrassing the Democrats. Yet, he won. This could only have been possible with a contesting media landscape of the web, of which is filled with—demographically speaking—many young men who’ve witnessed nothing but idiocy and lies from the legacy media since childhood. Weapons of mass destruction, paranoiac claims about Russian election hacking, opportunistic slander against some of the political figures whom they held some hope for on the left and Right (Trump, Corbyn, Sanders).
There was also a large gender/generational divide there. Trumps internet savvy antics made him a meme-worthy anti-hero in the largely young male orientated landscape of certain parts of the web, and helped him secure victory. While Clinton was a perfect embodiment of the democratic boomers whose propaganda was largely focussed on college-educated, middle aged women or people over the age sixty. Viewership of TV news in the UK, for example, is 90% in the 65 plus age group.
Figures who appeal to young men like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson out sell and out perform pretty much all other avenues of media and book sales. While these trends don’t translate into change in embedded institutional power and remains on the level of cultural influence, it is still a glaring divide; and considering many of the architects of modern propaganda like Bernays and Lipmann understood how important this sort of influence was for democracies to function, it shouldn’t be dismissed as not deterministic. A largely polarizing culture which reflects Fukuyama’ angry young men vs wealthy old women, seems valid here. To quote what radio host Adam Carolla stated recently, ‘Today we are either running to the panic room or the Octagon’.
As a personal anecdote, I remember returning home during the first Covid lockdown to where I grew up in relatively small coastal town in Ireland. I had returned from central London, and when I wasn’t around older boomer aged relatives, I got all my media from relatively alternative news site, online. Once again being exposed to the mainstream media, I realized just how patronizing, infantile and comfort-driven the media had become. While many aspects of social media are targeted at creating the same trivial, emotionally comforting desire for familiarity and approval, TV news presents itself as an expression of civic duty. However, it largely treats an very elderly demographic of viewers , not with a spirit of journalistic informing or civic engagement, but with the task of emotional management.
It should be noted that the cultural divides that the contesting interpretations of what was actually going on with Covid(alternative vs establishment media) also played out as divides between a ‘pyjama class’ of professional office workers who often quite enjoyed many elements of the lockdown; no commute, more comfort and convenience, saving money on transport, not to mention the property owning older generations saw their house values soar due to restrictions on building. This is contrasted to another class which was less than happy with the attempt at creating a new way of life through zoom conferences and ideologically aggrandized hypochondria. The trucker protests in Canada are of particular note. It should also be known that transportation is the biggest sector for non college educated men. While there is less of an age tension here, a gendered and class element is obvious. These Truckers were literally treated by their office-professional, work-from-home rival classes, as terrorists —and many even had bank accounts frozen.
War in the Global retirement village
There is another phenomena which modern states must contend with, regardless of how much they medicalize away domestic social problems. That is of the potential for global conflict. There have been a few main mechanisms of ‘post war’ imperialism and domestic conflict management which emerged once superpowers realized total war—with the advancement of nuclear weapons —meant mutual destruction. One of those were financial mechanisms of a new globalized financial system which eventually morphed into what we would refer to as neo-liberalism. One example of the effectiveness of these new techniques of power was after the 08’ crash when Greece voted to not pay off national banking debts by means of imposing austerity measures on the public purse. No tanks, ground troops or air force were needed to whip the small rebellious nation back into good behaviour. The systems of finance are so interconnected that threats of leaving a government leadership dealing with an angry public who could no longer access their savings accounts, would do.
Taking another small nation as an example, that of Ireland. It should be noted the suspiciously high amount of NGOs—or what in Marxist jargon would call ‘ideological state apparatus’—operate there, relative to the small population; it likely stems from it being a tax haven for silicon valley in Europe. Sillicon valley is, after all, the new centre of cultural and ideological power taking the place of the old mainstream media. Mechanisms of soft power or financial servitude have largely replaced the physical enforcement of guns and tanks, at least for Europeans.
The era of ‘cancel culture’, which did emerge after populist revolts against technocracy emerged as responses to the 08 crash, are interesting because they do largely replace means of physical police enforcement with forms of ostracization. We saw this logic being utilized, not just by ‘radical’ leftists policing their own groups, but also as mandates which use the exclusionary logic of ‘this person is disobedient so they are dirty and shouldn’t be allowed inside’. Trump was the initial sign this new replacement for traditional or more transparent physical power, was not sustainable, as he was subject to its power and it failed to translate into the ballot box. Right after the lockdown finally ended another event occurred which posed another massive question mark for the future of post war financial and ‘soft’ power.
Like Covid’s pinprick bursting the bubble of techno-medical optimism of indefinitely prolonging life, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did the same thing for the ‘hopes’ that we could replace physical military power with financial and soft (humanitarian) forms of power.
It should be noted that many psychologists have agreed that ostracization is generally a more female form of social aggression, while physical confrontation is typically male. Much of the ideological responses to what Russia has done by means of a military crossing of sovereign borders into Ukraine, should be seen in light of a growing distinction, no longer just North and South, but of East and West, of the return of more masculine, traditional and transparent forms of power; which could be contrasted to the financialized and soft power of ostracization—economic exclusion or psychological shaming—(feminine forms of aggression), of the West.
I do believe that Russia’s invasion of /Ukraine offended us in the West—not because we actually care about smaller Sovereign nations. I could use a handful of examples off the top of my head to prove this: Yemen, Northern Ireland, Syria, Libya, but especially Iraq and Afghanistan, have all suffered from far more brutality which exceeds the soft power mechanisms mentioned. But then, what is it that offends us? It could be a reaction by the royal members of this super-abundant retirement home, that their mechanisms of power are not simply being contested by other powers, but on a more general level being subverted.
The conflict in Ukraine proves there are large Swaths of young men whom are both white and in some loose sense, European, which have subverted the insistence of all aggression being played out through one of these three methods. (Ostracization through media/ control through finance or subduing through medication). What is happening in Ukraine could be significant not just for the region but the entire trajectory of trends and assumptions which has for long escaped the competency of most Western thinkers to admit that they are no longer in control of the cultural and ideological vehicle they so triumphantly have claimed to be driving—quite destructively all through the world— for some time.
The Rusisan military ethos is proving starkly different to the NATO forms of power we’ve all grown to know in the ‘post war’ period. Russians seem to be willing to take on losses of their own soldiers and restrain form using total technological power of big bombs or a larger airforce, in the place of achieving a political objective (removal of the centre of power in the Ukrainian state and their nationalist militias). Whereas the West have since the end of WW2 (or even with Hiroshima), taken the tune of willing to use any technological means necessary to minimize losses on their own side through such means as carpet bombing or drone strikes, or in Hiroshima, a nuclear weapon.
The leaks which got Assange in trouble showed—not just the brutality of war—but the total cowardice of the operators of these hyper-destructive military technologies. The US’ authority as world police was largely destroyed, not just because of strategic errors, or rival competitors, but because their sense of moral authority became laughable when such images freely floated around the globe.
Russia’s actions are more than simply the movement of other supers again (other than the US). This move from uni-polar to multi-polar world order also brings with it a need to rethink military ethos and methods; like that of limited war instead of a total war of technological dick-measuring. This brings nations with undisciplined and untrained populations, but with higher value currencies and more bombs, a sudden feeling of encroaching powerlessness.
The reaction of the West to Russia by trying to ‘cancel’ the entire country or anything associated with them through sanctions; and even going so far as to refuse to play Tchaikovsky in theatres as what happened in the UK recently—shows a funny way of dealing with an enemy; from immunizing them from the very consumer culture and media consumption that has degraded their own nations so much. Russia do produce the own food and oil, after all. The sanctioning is largely cultural as opposed to directly material.
By removing them from the world of MC Donald’s, Only Fans, Porn hub, Uber eats – while they are a nation large enough to domestically produce things like fuel and food – only does what any revolutionary movement has never been able to do with their own people in any sustained long term project. That is, remove them from the conditions of what Frankfurt school intellectuals called ‘de-sublimation’. They may accidently create a nation free from all the forms of techno-consumption which will lay the ground for a community of sublimating ubermensches.
This isn’t to say Russia will become a radical hub of ascetic warrior philosophers. Putin himself often finds himself in conflict with many aspects of this increasingly deterministic demographic of angry young men. Islamists in the middle east and Syria or Ukrainian ultra nationalists are two examples. He also presents his foreign policy measures in the all too familiar tone of ‘national security’. This isn’t to say that national security isn’t a genuine issue for any sate. Rather, that the understanding of just aggression, does seem to be stuck in the post historical role of ‘securing’. Securing against what I ask? This a ideological baggage anybody claiming national security justifications must contend with.
However, Putin is going about this conflict itself in a manner which is noticeably different from the preferred methods of the West in the post war era; one that may make himself more popular both among younger Russian generations who don’t want to be de-valued and replaced by destructive machines and would like a meaningful role in society as a brave soldier or a father of a family, and not a ‘brave’ drone operator, or hyper alienated polyamorous media consumer; and also the more conservative older generations who want some protection against hoards of militants who are fighting in the name under the banner of foreign gods or flags, with the help of CIA money. I suppose the question is less about Putin’s particular ideological slant and more about the necessity of limited forms of warfare which are contrasted with the modus operandi of the ‘post war’ NATO methods thus far,.
Return of the Thymotic
There is a connection between power by mediation of money and power through psychological shaming seen in ostracization. Both are attempts to reduce the manner in which we understand challenges to embodiments or conceptions of justice. How do we distinguish one person who should be believed, respected or recognized from another who shouldn’t? The Homo-economicus or Homo-traumaticus dispositions of cancel culture and compensation culture (grievances mediated by way of suing or status by way of marketable ownership). While cancel culture could be seen as conforming to an algorithmic or bureaucratic knack by paying dues to the latest fashionable talking points and censoring any challenge as ‘toxic’ ‘dangerous’ ect. The crossover lies in the idea that recognition and respect can be cheaply bought.
Aristotle wrote in the Art of Rhetoric that ‘ Noble too are the things which win rewards and status, especially those that bring honour rather than money’. In other words, there exists something which cannot be simply paid for (or sycophantically paid tribute to); a sort of innately deserved recognition—which conforming to fashionable morality or reducing to the numbers in bank account—will never be quite able to reach. This is very much an issue for ‘post historical’ figures who believe these are the only acceptable manners of ‘earning’ high praise and position. This understanding of innately honourable recognition, as opposed to the cheap simulations of it, is understood through our thymotic minds; what we will finish this essay on.
I would point to Peter Sloterdijks work Rage and Time to reference a great work which predicted and observed the resurgence and unavoidability of Rage and Pride as psycho-political forces which are increasingly subverting the primacy of both the calculated rational economistic and the erotic—which have been in cultural control of the West in one form another over the past 70 years. I will say that a total breakdown in young people’s ability to form long term relationships or even any intimate connection at all, the worryingly high rates of mental illness, the meaningless or half way employed (gig economy et.) work prevalent today—and of course the state’s love of money printing and drug production, all shows that the formation of liberal rational adults who structure their life on a decent career and marriage, are already all things of the past. We just haven’t noticed it yet. In this void the thymotic will rear its deeply repressed head. So what does war in Russia have to do with any of this?
As the world looks at Russia contesting the West’s hegemony over a liberal technophile world order, we will all be looking to see if the Russian bear will be once again tamed by exclusion from a global consumer market and emotionally extortive articles in increasingly discredited Western media outlets. Or—which is more likely— this will only create a greater sense of militancy and nationalism among Russians who are already tired of being prodded in the chest by ways of economic exclusion and scape goating.
In a sense then the invasion of Ukraine, despite being a tactical move by a superpower with its own political and security interests, is also becoming increasingly similar to a proper historical event or hotspot in which larger questions of the certainty and longevity of liberal, humanitarian, progressive, bureaucratic and technophilic cultures really have; or at least how acceptable and tolerable they are to increasingly influential parts of world populations. In this way it is an event like 9/11 which showed that there were people still willing to die for zealous religious devotion; and that the last man wasn’t by necessity a cultural safeguard against disruptive violence; and like Northern Ireland a few decades ago, in which a less spectacular but equally prescient undermining of liberal pieties formed through violent struggles of Catholics and Protestants; something which is still barely understood.
Conflicts in far away parts of Europe are proving that the sanction-orientated and techno-warfare common to the Obama era are not universal advancements in how we express aggression. The use of medicine to deal with every social ‘problem’, not only comes with dangers as Fukuyama has pointed out—relating to danger of social control through bio-technics—but also just seems to no longer correspond to any genuinely positive findings which make the entire system of commodified medicine anything more than deeply suspicious to much of the public. Cancer was never cured, robotic limbs still haven’t arrived and even the task of keeping people alive for longer and longer has fallen part. The redemptive and beneficial breakthroughs which made the social ills caused by these technologies acceptable, has stagnated, while the potential detrimental side effects of medical science and digital technology seem to be overwhelming.
A few examples of the end to rule by elite grandmother figures in more specific political embodiments are seen in the end of Angela Merkle’s reign, the loss of Hillary Clinton, the resignation of Theresa May and replacement of her by Boris Johnson and even the inevitable downfall of the likes of Justin Trudeau and Macron; who may not be elderly women but are ultimately the products of the libidinal energy of elderly women.
More or less, this indicates a general move away from the use of financial technologies to control and management unpredictable or hostile foreign powers—like the ones being used on Russia as response to the invasion of Ukraine, and also the general desublimation, to use Frankfurt school reference, of particularly male and Thymotic drives. The ignorance and repression of these drives by way of financial mediation, hysterical scapegoating and medicalization is reaching a breaking point and likely began spurring a growing awareness of the absurdity of going in this direction, indefinitely.
The reason for the initial repression and replacement of thymotic forces was likely that thymotic drives are far more inclined toward political conflict exactly because they deal with justification for leadership and power in much more radical sense than the technocratic commodified ‘meritocracies’ that global liberalism has tried to encourage. They exceed both that of either the educational/bureaucratic rationality of liberal professionalism, or of the eros centred drives of libidinal orientated impulses seen in celebrity culture and status driven by consumer culture.
Two world wars and common militancy, from the left and right, in the early 20th century caused a reaction of ‘post war’ period where in the name of international and domestic peace and prosperity, an extremely unthoughtful and flawed methods of conflict management were taken up by world leaders.
The situation was likely also exaggerated when so many men of fighting age died in one go within a thirty year period. This obviously meant huge pressures for a new age of mixed gender participation in many roles in society previously male dominated. Interestingly Aristotle criticized Sparta for something similar. He claimed too much time spent in war meant the domestic tasks of politics at home (to put it in more politically correct manner than Aristotle did) changed the domestic political scene in a way which left its longevity and legitimacy in question.
Thymos is an ongoing theme that Fukuyama himself has brought up in all three major works spanning over a twenty year period (End of History/Our Post Human Future/Identity)—they all deem Thymos as the primary ‘return of the repressed’—if we were to use a Freudian term—of which democratic liberalism could never quite grasp, deal with productively, or direct towards something recognisably great; or even acknowledge to exist.
Liberalism has always had this problem where aspects of human nature which cannot be reducible to rational self interest, or problems to be fixed over by technical/commercial (and now medical/bio-technic) advancement are too easily dismissed as backwards, atavistic, or something that be progressively evolved out of. A great work titled ‘The Passions and the Interests’ by Albert Hirschmann, highlighted how many of the proponents of economistic view of human nature were not scientific observations but rather moral responses to the conflict prone elements of pride and rage. In this sense, a form of moral faith was invested in the capability for commercial society to save us from our own unpredictability and peculiarity; we could say medical technology and commercial sophistication have now taken up that role.
This schism mentioned in the quote by Fukuyama at the beginning of this essay is no longer limited to a tension between a global North and South. To continue to pretend it is, is only part of the wish to carry on believing with enough drone strikes, the setting up of diversity driven NGO centres, bureaucratic democracies, pharmaceutical management and McDonalds, that the South will eventually be moulded into the fold. The recent reclaiming of Afghanistan by the Taliban proved this project comically wrong.
But don’t be fooled into believing the dividing line is simplistically geographic. No techno-economic advancement will be able to repress the resurgence of the thymotic, the innate value of a marital spirit or the mass of increasingly resentful younger generations whose lives are being subsumed into coping mechanisms for those who don’t want to admit they have failed; their visions have become nightmares and the worlds they leave behind, unliveable. Not to sound like Greta Thunberg, but even she expresses a rageful reaction against a confused and destructive incompetency of an older engrained power structure who won’t pass on power to anything they don’t have direct control over (they do over her, but you get the point).
The global superabundant retirement home is losing; it is falling apart. Both culturally and technologically. How will it try hold itself together?; assert itself? These are the questions we should be asking.