This is a lightly edited repost of the obituary of the “Liberal” System, what I wrote around two years ago.
Since then I have been repeatedly harmed online for predicting this moment by people who dared to call me an “optimist” - one of my trigger words.
In response to my plight, this the week the house magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations finally announced the international liberal system is dying, and that it has been killed by liberalism. Lol, as the intellectual says.
This is akin to Pravda telling you the USSR has been ended by Communism.
If you read this post you will have some idea of what the liberal system was, and why it is a very Good Thing it is over.
LIBERAL LEGACY - A SENSELESS WORLD
Why does the world not make sense? Why does nothing work anymore? What is the meaning of this chaos, and why does it come as such a surprise?
This is a piece which explains the reason for the tremendous natural shocks which our modern flesh is heir to.
I will treat the following
La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
The Third Religion of Man - Liberalism
Coming in from the Cold - The COVID State
Victims of Modernism
Reality Does Not Exist - The Empire of the Self
Things Can Only Get Better - Progress as Ruin
Permanent Alarm - Crisis = Management
Endnote: All’s Well that Ends
La Grande Illusion
La Grande Illusion is Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece in which a downed French fighter pilot has a genial exchange with his German captor. These two noblemen agree they are relics of bygone age which is vanishing before their eyes, to be replaced by a future which will have no use for them.
Capt. de Boëldieu:
“I think we can do nothing to stop the march of time.”
Capt. von Rauffenstein:
“Believe me, I don't know who is going to win this war the end, whatever it is will be the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boëldieus.”
Later, Capt. von Rauffenstein dutifully shoots Boëldieu as he attempts escape. As Boëldieu he lays dying he consoles his friend
“Of we two, I am not most to be pitied”, Boëldieu says. "For me it will all be over. Soon. But for you it isn’t finished.”
Capt. von Rauffenstein:
“Not finished dragging out a futile existence.”
Eric von Stroheim, who plays Capt. von Rauffenstein was himself a product of a vanished empire, born in the Austro-Hungarian dynastic capital of Vienna. He considers his final line as a man with a future outside of the times. The war has removed the world in which he made sense. He is stranded in himself, an anomalous presence in a future with no use for him. That future was Liberalism.
This latest war has made redundant a whole system of ideas which was commonly accepted to have been universally and finally victorious. It is not the same thing to win as to watch your competitors lose. Nevertheless, this was the conquering myth of Liberalism, which has unravelled faster even than the Soviet Union, because aside from the institutions, money, military force and spectacular marketing was mainly a story - a phenomenon of the mind. It has fallen at the first challenge from hard reality, as if St Thomas had poked his finger into a ghost. It is an advertisement that corresponds to no product.
In the end, what did for this empire was that it had already ceased to exist.
The Third Religion of Man
Many of the fantasies of the west have been shot down in flames recently. Freedom, progress, universal values, the idea that Liberalism, the last remaining -ism of the twentieth century troika – had won and won forever. This was the grand illusion of the West, which, bewitched by its own propaganda, believed that the future would be Liberal, democratic and vouchsafed by the stabilising mechanics of globalised trade.
Each of the -isms is a God that failed. Nazism, Communism, Liberalism. Each has its own model of Godmanship and a raft of beliefs on which to float him. Each sinks.
The foundation of Liberalism is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. This manifesto of the religion of enlightenment Reason laid out the basic guarantees of individual freedom and property rights.
The last two years have discredited the idea that these principles are eternal. They are not even inevitable, but their enshrinement as the product of history being resolved in their perfection is itself an illusion derived from the fantasies of people who believe history has a spirit of its own, working through the conflict of events towards utopia.
Governments in the west have frozen bank accounts, seized property, prohibited the free use of your own home, restricted personal movement, coerced the population to receive injections of dubious benefit at best, imposed the kabuki of masks and plastic face screens, derided evidence based explanations before pivoting to acceptance without explanation, and manufactured an enormous parallel bureaucracy to the state that is hand-in-glove with those well known champions of probity, the pharmaceutical industry.
What was it all for?
Coming in from The Cold
The printing of billions upon billions of banknotes led to inflation. An enormous wealth transfer took place, ruining many smaller businesses and pipelining the cash to corporations and smaller scale fraudsters alike.
It is the middle class, not the aristocrats, which are hereby being abolished. The tide of mass immigration continued apace, feeding the terror-pool of wageless indenture into which any of us may now fall. This underclass functions to discipline anyone who must work for a living by the vertiginous example of the illegal immigrant gig economy, a giddying nightmare offering easy entry and no escape.
The founding principles of the republics, the unwritten constitutions and the customs in law and in policing have been destroyed in a manufactured fever over a cold. Still we believe that liberalism has won, even whilst we are killing it ourselves.
Victims of Modernism
The Modernist sees everything from the point of view of the self. With its roots in the Romanticism of Gericault and the Positivism of Comte, this romanticised narcissism hoped initially to free itself from the chains of Rousseau through a belief in the innate goodness, later innate Reason, of Mankind.
Liberalism concerned itself with the removal of these chains, seeking to free us from every moral, customary, social, legal and cultural restraint. The very foundations of all these systems, being Christianity, has been derided as a fantasy by those who thought that Man had no more need of the God he now believed he had himself invented.
The worship of Reason is the worship of Man. Which brings us to the dressing table of Modernism, a system of applying makeup to this new incarnation of the divine.
By this commodius vicus of self centred recirculation the world is shrunk to a favourited meme in the mind of the Modernist. Everything is simplified by the mad cult of the self to flatter or to outrage a personal opinion which is nothing more than a bricolage of false images. The Modernist has a scrapbook mentality, a picture book of pasted in trash which it likes to consult for opinions. These opinions are the costume of emotion. This modern, Godless, rational man is a plaything of popularised delusion fuelled by mania.
The destruction of norms which is also called progress is result of late stage Liberalism. This anomie – normlessness – leads to a rudderless and deracinated individual in a sea of similar strangers. Anxiety and tension result from the absence of any fixed point against which to refer moral or even practical reasoning. Much of the public discourse is informed by people so weak and afraid that they will parrot anything that will avoid disagreement. We are educated to conform, and also to condemn.
Reality Does Not Exist
The world you believed in is not real. It does not exist in the way you pictured it.
Just as Wordsworth lost his faith in nature, staring at the mountain, we suddenly realise this world we cherished is a fantasy. It is animated by our feelings, by sentimental ideas of the world and of our significance to it. In fact it is as indifferent to you as the moonlit mountain was to Wordsworth, a fatal realisation from which his Romanticism would never recover.
Buchner’s Lenz went up a mountain to go mad. The mountain is important. It signifies the vastness of all things not the self, and how terrifying it is to witness one’s fragile and tangential existence.
The mountain is real. Our ideas about it, the world, and even ourselves are not. This is because we refer in times of need to institutions which we consider to be durable bastions of integrity and function. These institutions no longer exist outside your mind.
There are buildings and employees and dignitaries and offices. There are websites and telephone queues and advertisements and uniforms. Approach the bureaucracies – any of them – and see how they function to exclude the foreign body that is you. Organisations at scale like the law, the police, the public administration, the education system, the universities, the corporate leisure and supermarket providers, these organisations have all developed an immune response to human scale interference. An accidental emergent property of managerialism, the machine has become aware that to itself you are a threat.
This is what happens when you try to engage with them.
To be processed by the machine is to realise you are to it a kind of disease vector to be isolated and neutralised. The institutions of which we made these bureaucratic machines are no longer under anyone’s control and serve mainly to perpetuate themselves. They are well branded, virtualised concepts of what we once imagined them to be. To confront the reality is to be estranged from any reasonable expectation of health care, civic duty, legal probity, military efficiency, government competence.
We believe in principles that are not practised. The belief we have in our institutions is the belief in a ghost that no longer haunts the buildings that they occupy. Our institutions are not merely incompetent, nor rotten. They have ceased to exist in the way we once knew them. The show goes on, preserved on the screen of the popular mind, despite long being over. Imagine you are watching a repeat of a cherished television broadcast.
This is our noli me tangere state. Born of a god that failed, it promises not salvation but ruin. Its gift is the anti-life of consumerism and it offers nothing more. It is falling apart and no one notices, because we a silent gallery of spectators, all watching ourselves.
There is no “liberal” any more in our Potemkin democracy, because Liberalism has ended in chains of its own manufacture. We are like the children of this Laocoön, stranded on a beach beside a pitiless tide.
Things Can Only Get Better
Progress, the Grand Illusion of the fanatics of the Enlightenment, Progress – the infernal spirit of the Islam of the West, Protestantism – Progress is both real and not real at once.
Progress in the sense of ‘things getting better’ is a child’s idea of history, which posits an upward hypotenuse in time described by man’s inexorable moral improvement. It is to laugh.
Progress in the sense of ‘vengeance on the past’ is all too real. Look at the work of your ancestors and sit it beside the architecture of progress.
Drama, literature, film and art, comedy and news – these products of our consumerised culture are trash. They popularise tropes which themselves seem designed to model a promising new world on make belief, a blackwashed afterworld of rainbow harmony. Everything is entertainment and none of it entertains anything but its own greetings-card philosophy of the future. Our monuments, buildings, our treasures of art and of the written word are hated by Progress and its broken acolytes.
Progress is a religion of the victims of Modernism. It is the false salvation of the desperate, broken by despair of humanity and of the world. A kind of fusion of self destruction and desire, it fetishises the decay produced by its thanaterotic frenzy. It leaves us feeling alone, filthy, and desolate as it teaches us to despise the fine.
Despair arises from a tremendous disenchantment with the promises of Modernism itself, which has liberated the worst in Man at the expense of everything fine. It has reduced the world to a fantasy based on a mistake, which is to have any faith in humanity at all. This is the religion of Man. It is Modernism. It cannot make good on its promises. It is like a humiliated gambler, who reaches for his pistol having lost a game he was not compelled to play. The table overturns and the bullets begin to fly.
When the smoke and fury settles into ruin the game is still lost.
Progress is fuelled by hatred and it will not stop with piecemeal revisions to the canon. The aim of cancel culture is to cancel culture. It is doing well as it moves to the state-actor level.
Permanent Alarm
Crisis has become a principle of management in the chaos we take for order. In this world the sirens are always wailing. A new crisis supervenes whilst all the others smoulder on. Nuclear war, ozone, BSE, GMO, Millenium Bug, The War On Terror, The Axis of Evil, WMD, Ten Years or Ten Months to Save the Planet, North Korea, Gadaffi, Assad, Transphobia, BLM, COVID-19, Nuclear War again.
How fondly we should reflect on those innocent decades of relative and exceptional peace, punctuated only by our few adventures in the sand.
Like a broken smoke detector there is a shrill note forever sounding across the horizons of the empire of Progress. It promotes a permanent state of emergency which can be pivoted towards a new focus at a moments notice. Perhaps the panic cannot be stopped. The howling mob can be be directed around the auditorium. They do not appear to notice that there is no exit - until the curtain falls and the scenery collapses. As it is doing now.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS
The Grand Illusion is over. Your culture will recover, jokes will return to comedy, and reality to politics. As it does, expect more chaos in the cultural warfare dimension of digital media.
Now is the time to learn informational hygeine, so you do not melt down along with the century of lies and all of its foundational myths. It is goodbye to all that now, as we detransition from the counterfeit culture of the liberal system, whose aim was to replace our civilisation with itself.
If you would like to horrify your soon-to-be-former friends with this shocking glimpse of a reality-based future, you could do this.
If you have now realised your money rightfully belongs in my wife’s current account, you can do this too:
God bless you all and enjoy the end of the show.
... "The mountain is real. Our ideas about it, the world, and even ourselves are not. This is because we refer in times of need to institutions which we consider to be durable bastions of integrity and function. These institutions no longer exist outside your mind."
Beautifully stated. The choices of art, superb. I concur. A wonderful essay, that caused me to pour a coffee, and move to a comfortable armchair to read and savour, unlike most reading today. Thanks Frank.
4 years ago, I moved from my "oh so award winning - material evidence" of status and affluent progress, overlooking the twinkling city and convenience of 5 minute drives to everything in a packet - to an old run down farm 3 hours from everything in a packet - but 5 minute from the mountain, the ancient Jarrah trees, the birds, the snakes, the hard back breaking work, the abundant pomegranates, the peaches, the storms, the floods, the fires, the suddenly dead sheep, the busy task of burying the occasional heavy corpse for fear of stench and organs cast adrift by foxes.
I was motivated like many during 'the Covid times' upon seeing the state govt in West Australia take one step too far, when it announced at the daily podium, that it was arranging 'door to door' visits (in random suburbs which they would not reveal) on the weekends, of a pack of helpful 'nurses with little baggies', with police escorts, to arrange for you to be jabbed on your porch, as a kind of gracious public service. No need for your previous medical history but they would take your name down, and if you refused it.
This caused me to understand that there was no option but to move further away from the 'helpful' madness of organisation. The pack psychosis was real, and to find somewhere to 'shelter in place', somehow.
I always saw the game even as a child, as nuclear war was broadcast daily from the radio in an endless terrrorising of little children like myself. I grew up with nightmare dreams of the morning after Armagedon, where all humans were cindered but me as I staggered around picking up blackened cindered bones. Thank you gracious leaders. 'The Russians - the Russians are coming'. I stood on the roof and asked at 8 "Why are they doing this? Why are there no grown ups in charge?" Once I went to 'church' in desperation to see what went on there, (when I was about 9) to see if I could find some answers. I was ushered into the box for children, and given a bookmark with the ten commandments on it. The answer never came, only the box we were herded into as 'the processes were processed' and everyone went home.
It was not until much later - in fact when I was 63, that I realised, it was not about getting the answer to satisfy the query. The real quest was to ask the right question.
PS, I always saw that painting "The Incredulity of St Thomas" (Caravaggio, 1602) as a young woman, as evidence that the dry wound of Jesus in that painting, meant that the miracle of Jesus was that while he was wounded deeply, mortally, there came a time where our wounds stopped pouring blood. They stopped hurting. They remained as 'dry scars' of honour, to remind us that we can survive all this, but the only hope was for us is to retain the scars, for if we forget them we return to the same 'cycle' of hatred, war, maliciousness, and victimhood.
Liberalism was the last of the great twentieth‑century faiths, and like its cousins fascism and communism it promised salvation but delivered ruin. It claimed to be eternal, the end of history, yet collapsed at the first poke of reality, a ghost revealed as an advert for a product that never existed. Its institutions are Potemkin shells, its promise of progress a child’s fantasy, its only genius - the management of perpetual crisis. What we are witnessing is not tragedy but exposure, the grand illusion is over, and with it the pretence that this hollow creed was ever a civilisation….