One thing that future historians may marvel at is the interlocking pattern of cheeky inversion which characterises modern discourse e.g. Jihadists moaning about colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, tech bros and populists griping about the demise of accountability, democracy and free speech, and so on.
A new form of post-truthful leadership (or mouthpiece-ship) has come to the forefront, one which habitually makes use of near blatant, pseudo-factual subterfuge fabricated to polarise people around tribal identities which many mistake for rational worldviews.
I see this as very much part of the phenomenon highlighted by Moisés Naim in The Revenge of Power, whereby “the centrifugal forces that weaken power called forth a new set of centripetal forces that tend to concentrate it.”
The political malignancy of today is firmly based on mimicry: “What we’re seeing today,” Naim argues, “is a revanchist variant that mimics democracy while undermining it, scorning all limits. It is as if political power had taken stock of every method free societies have devised over the centuries to domesticate it and plotted to strike back...
“Contending sides no longer seek to accommodate each other in a quest for minimum viable governing arrangements. Instead, they deny the basic legitimacy of the other side’s right even to contend for power...“Lacking an alternative explanation that they can use to bolster their legitimacy, they go to considerable trouble to dissemble, trying to pass themselves off as exemplars of a system they’re determined to dismantle.“
No comments:
Post a Comment