Potemkin wrote:I see it as an inevitable development. There has been a general move in the West away from authoritarianism and tradition towards (classical) liberalism in economics and (modern) liberalism in matters of culture, religion and government. This process began in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, and went into overdrive in the aftermath of the Second World War, in part as a reaction against Nazism. The West doubled down on the Enlightenment Project after 1945. Factor in the selfish rebellious nature of the Baby Boomer generation in the 1960s and 70s, plus the ideological victory of neo-liberal and monetarist economics, and the collapse of the authoritarian, collectivist alternative model of the Soviet Union in 1991, and we are where we are....
Whether one sees it as a positive or a negative development rather depends on one's background. It's largely a generational thing. To anyone born after approximately the mid-1990s, they take it for granted and would be horrified by anything else. Just as the older generations are and were horrified by anything other than the cultural traditions they grew up with.
Inevitable perhaps, but I don't like it.
I was born well after 1945 and I simply dislike the trajectory of post-modernity.
You will not have a Marxist society or any sort of society. Socialists don't seem to realise that you can't have left wing economics and socialism of the type they imagine without some level of social solidarity and collectivism. Rabid individualism and socialism do not mix. They forget that there is also an idealistic component to socialism that requires a person to be willing to put the building socialism before their own needs. Cultural leftism is destroying the foundations for any such socialism.
Part of the socialism of the Warsaw Pact countries was the notion that you did not need lots of consumer items, you had a few, but your sense of happiness and meaning in life came from building socialism, or through romanticism, love of nature etc. Well, I am not sure this was officially in writing but it seems to have been conveyed unofficially.
This has little to do with causes or left wing and right wing political thought but more just the general cultural state of a society. We are regressing into I don't know what.
It will just be vapid emptiness. No more art, no more culture, no more beauty. Where will we be in such a world? Somehow I fear there will never be another Gustav Mahler. That is not any sort of world. It's as though in post-modernity we are losing any sense of what makes life truly worth living. We are living in some type of anesthetised simulacra of reality.