We used to be taught from childhood that public interests are higher than personal ones. All levels of social formation of a full member of society are saturated with this idea, starting from children’s fairy tales and cartoons, ending with history and religion. At each level of education of a spiritually healthy and highly moral person, we see a lot of examples of both mutual assistance to one’s neighbor and self-sacrifice for the good of the fatherland and brothers.
But today, to a new man, a modern member of “not society”, these teachings are no longer needed. And not only they not needed, but also harmful, from the point of view of the legislators of the new antisocial ideology, which is liberalism.
Yes, it is ideologies, though adherents of this movement, that position the liberal idea as freedom from all sorts of classical ideological forms, that is, as cultural and political pluralism, they say, everyone is free to believe in anything, think, speak and do whatever. But this is all for the “visitors”, that is, for those who need to learn and instill an unshakable faith in the correctness and lack of alternativeness of this system of coordinates.
Oddly enough, the practical part of the idea of autonomous individualism, like the Absolute, began to forcefully be implemented in the United States in the mid-1970s, and under certain, quite understandable, rational tasks.
Now, probably, many sympathizers of liberalism reading this material may have an objection. After all, what about the ideas of building a purely “commercial civilization” that have been in the British Empire since the time of Adam Smith, Ricardo, philosophers of the advocates of individualism – Locke, Hobbes, Mandeville?
In the 1970s, in the United States, at the same time as the end of the period of economic strengthening, due to the cleared markets of part of the European continent and the existence of the anti-capitalism zone (described in more detail in my work “Post-capitalism, or what modern society is transforming into”), a qualitative and quantitative strengthening of the working class took place, who constantly demanded better working conditions.
But since the period of super-profits was only enough for 30 years (until 1975), the process of economic globalization was accelerated – the transfer of the main capacities of industry beyond the core.
In parallel, a decision was made to adjust the cultural and ideological situation to the challenges of new globalization processes. An indicative confirmation of this, there is a report by Huntington, Croisier and Watanuki to the Club of Rome, entitled “The Crisis of Democracy”.
The report talked about the fact that those values that were at the head of the “American dream” are outdated, and they need to be qualitatively reformed, because in the regime of industrial transfer, the working class, as a social phenomenon and an strengthened engine of the economy, should be quantitatively and qualitatively reduced, which with the ideological situation unchanged, it will cause a social explosion and mass protests.
Therefore, the concept of translating public guidelines in a new way was adopted. There were theses that democracy as a value is outdated, and new guides should come in its place. And they, as time later became clear, became “liberal values.” This concept was supposed to weaken the collective unity of the labor society, but at the same time, not destroying, but even strengthening consumer consciousness. Therefore, the liberal idea fit right.
In fact, liberalism can be considered a degenerate form of democracy, which, by its basic laws of functioning, tends more to anti-democracy. After all, democracy in its classical form is the power of the majority, that is, the foundation of democracy lies more in the common collective good than the individual good.
But liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism, implies preferences for the minority to the detriment of the majority. That is, the emphasis is on the promotion of personal desires, regardless of social needs.
But the corpus delicti lies much deeper than in the plane of substituting the foundations of the democratic system and fooling the minds of American workers, the corpus delicti and the cunning intent is that liberalism as a universal idea is designed to completely destroy the concept of society as a collective phenomenon as a whole.
Religion
Liberalism starts the process of encouraging personality vices and the destruction of the collective community of entire nations. This was notably manifested in the United States, with a consistent continuation in other countries of the Protestant sense.
The thesis that faith is not a collective, but a private matter of everyone and everyone is free to choose where to pray and what to believe, is so entrenched in the minds that religion as an institution, in many ways, has lost the role of a unifying collective institution, and this is a primary blow to traditional and collective values, not only in Protestant society, but also in all the others that American globalization has not spared, this is especially evident in the “Internet generation”.
After all, the main goal of any religion and church, first of all, is not worship of higher powers, but rallying of peoples and masses into a circle of common values and higher spiritual goals. And this, in turn, determines the identity of the people and strengthens its protective mechanism against external attacks.
The liberal idea, however, was created to destroy this necessary defense mechanism.
National identity
The national identity is also erased, as a relic of the past, which in the new globalized world is a burden, again, for the freedom of the individual in its implementation, identification and the possibility of being cosmopolitan. The idea of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism is the form of identity of a liberal person. This aspect, like the previous one, is intended to strike at the prevailing regional cultural and traditional values of a single people, in order to exclude collective cohesion. After all, why keep the fortress under siege, if you can give everyone faith in individualism and personal, independent of the collective, freedom and individualities themselves scatter on all 4 sides. Since without a sense of belonging – it makes no sense to protect concrete walls.
Traditional values
The world Anglo-Saxon elite did not stop there and went further. The next blow is inflicted on traditional values.
Advocacy and promotion of unconventional values is one of the strongest pillars of liberal expansion. So traditional values are again, one of the forms of collective identity, which carries an existential threat to the idea of promoting individual freedom to the detriment of society. Gender identity can also be added to traditional values, which liberalism also wants to overcome. Indeed, the affiliation of people to men and women occurs, not at all from the fact that they are individuals, but by their natural affiliation. This means that they share their collective identity with other men and women, and this prevents the creation of an antisocial person who, according to liberals, must determine his own gender, as well as nationality, and religion. Therefore, support for sexual minorities is one of the most advanced functions of liberal values in the cultural environment.
Class identity
So we come to one of the most important goals of liberal propaganda and the struggle against collective manifestations in the core of the capitalist system.
It is the destruction of class-collective identity.
After all, returning to the origins, it is worth remembering that there is only one struggle and this class struggle.
All world history is built on the struggle of the oppressed classes against the classes of the oppressors.
BUT, in order for the oppressed classes of society to fight the oppressors, they need collective rallying around one idea!
Therefore, the capitalist elite of the Western world, in the 1970s, realizing the threat of social cohesion and the possibility of the lower classes to challenge the upper classes, resorted to such liberal sophistication.
In order to prevent class uprisings, they needed to destroy the collective belonging of the masses and divide them into individuals with an exaggerated feeling and desire for personal freedom! It is precisely for this that the above-described functions of the liberal idea were needed. It was precisely for the separation of the working class and the creation of individual individuals subject to and fulfilled by nihilistic desires and aspirations, which, among other things, created an amazing consumer environment – at the head of which under the brand of individual freedom, freedom of consumption and the implementation of collective-condemnable prohibitions, previously related to vices and perversions.
The liberal model as an integral part of the new form of colonialism
After the collapse of the socialist camp, the liberal model acquired an additional, lack of an important function than the previous one – it became an integral part of Western neocolonialism. Upon the formation of a unipolar world led by the United States, liberal ideology was elevated to the absolute universal of the entire capitalist world.
This approach simultaneously solved two very important tasks.
The first, and already indicated, is the prevention of the unification of the oppressed masses into a social driving mechanism for combating the oppressors.
And the second, which later emerged, is control over the regions that have already been captured and planned to be taken over.
The control and enslavement mechanism was mainly carried out through the universal, as liberal propagandists provide, a model of values and examples of the high standard of living of individual Western countries, in which such a standard of living exists exclusively after three hundred centuries of robbing the colonies.
But as for the periphery of the capitalist world that did not have such historical experience, the West offers such a universal model, knowingly knowing that it cannot be implemented without money, puts forward the following proposals to the local elite, mind you, I say the proposals, because they do not require, I start to demand them after second act of submission …
And the proposal is as follows: if you want to live like us, and not want individuals, they can’t, because this model of antisocial behavior has been imposed for decades on every individual through its distribution in the media, in Western films, music, clothing, food and various youth movements. Ordinary people who have ordinary human weaknesses for perversity, which the new ideology encourages, sincerely desire the same lifestyle as in American or British cinema.
Here a small remark should be made so that the thesis of a social explosion does not dissonant with the thesis of the destruction of collectivism. The first task (to prevent social outbursts of the oppressed classes, relates mainly to those few countries that metered the demand for individualistic perversions by the availability of funds). But as regards colonization through the cultivation of ultra-consumer consciousness, this energy, if there is no money to satisfy demand, can be easily consolidated to achieve “liberal” goals.
Alexandr Lazarev
Alexandr Lazarev is a Ukrainian political scientist.
EAST AND WEST 