Today, the phrase “the world is shifting to the right” is heard more and more often. While it`s not entirely certain that this observation can be stated as a fact, one cannot ignore the evident “right-wing” trends prevailing in most countries of the so called free world. Freedom is very important, because this shift can be seen as a natural response to the numerous totalitarian manifestations of neoliberal society, which many perceive as a threat to their personal freedom and identity.
At the same time, people are not always able to clearly define or articulate these threats for themselves, which is quite understandable within context of semantic disorientation characteristic of the postmodern era. However, the absence of clear definitions does not negate the ability of a person to feel threatened at other levels of perception and respond accordingly. Therefore, a person who is quite loyal to the external surrogate values that are offered to him or her or inculcated by propaganda unconsciously rejects them as soon as they come into conflict with his or her natural values. And it doesn’t matter how long this “loyalty regime” lasted. What comes from nature cannot be replaced by a surrogate. The immanent always wins.
Modern man is a homo mediaticus, a product shaped largely by the consumption of narratives dominating the media space. Their worldview is a syncretic plateau, littered with the secondary. Many of these narratives are in sharp conflict with human nature. The most famous are anti-natalism, perversion, censorship of political correctness, cultivation of intersectionality, secularization, and relativism. Rejection or insufficiently inspired approval of most of them involves repression-condemnation, bullying, “undoing,” etc. These practices are increasingly perceived as totalitarian and raise a fair question: “Why do I have to obey these laws if they are not?” The moment this question arises is also the moment when a person falls out of the narrative frame, followed by a period of conscious observation, critical analysis, then selective acceptance, and finally sabotage or open protest. Hundreds of millions of such pointed “epiphanies” form the ground on which worldview and, consequently, political changes, including the ones in question, grow. In parallel, there is a realization that liberal concentration camps are no different from illiberal ones. All concentration camps look alike and serve the same practical function: to hold and exterminate those who do not please their owners. It also becomes obvious that escaping from conditional loneliness into all-encompassing nothingness is not a good solution.
The world’s most sensitive organism, the market, has already realized this, and in addition to right-wing political outbursts, we are witnessing a gradual reformatting of the mainstream, from the blogosphere to Netflix, which no longer seems to see the evil in normativity and is not so picky about intersectional quotas. And this is also evidence of the victory of the natural over the surrogate.
So, strange as it may seem, killing the human in a human has proven to be much more difficult, despite the enormous global impact on it. And it is clear why: a person is not a demographic unit, but the result of continuity. Continuity is ensured by processes that are not subject to revision, and revision with obvious lethal consequences is even more so. The attack on the immanent has failed. There is not a lot of good news these days, but this is it.
Sergey Ivanov
Publicist and interviewer.
