New Year’s Eve used to be nice.
As long as I can remember though, here where I am it’s always been pretty grim. And it seems only to get grimmer, with increasing vandalism and violence.
Worse than this, all this antisocial tumult is clearly feeding a disturbing vein of intolerance and far-right sentiment.
Viewed from one angle, the 2010s look like a lost decade. After the financial meltdown of 2008 it was clear we were at a social and economic watershed. In the 2010s, however, all we did was muddle through with a band-aid or two applied to this leaky dinghy whilst the seas only became rougher. We doubled down on our obsolete system of financial capitalism knowing full well it was long past its sell-by date. We capitulated in the face of orchestrated hate campaigns ably designed to promote our most atavistic sentiments and those prepared most grossly to incarnate them. Meanwhile the urgency of action to limit and mitigate climate change became increasingly apparent, but it seems the gulf between those who cared and those too frightened to think for themselves only widened.
The right has played a classic game of divide and conquer, but the left has cruelly disappointed. Obsessed with political correctness and the most obscure of progressive causes, it has alienated its own base and delivered them into the hands of the most cynical of its opponents. It has been largely unable to go beyond its Marxist paradigm and rethink social policy for an age in which capital formation has become redundant and the relations between capital and labor have radically shifted. Both the right and the left are committed to keeping the masses in a state of waged or unwaged serfdom.
It seems that only a fool would look forward to the 2020s, and rightly I think morosity predominates. But it does not serve us and it is full of dangers. In the end we will have the world we dream of, and if we allow ourselves to dream the dark dreams prescribed us by others, we choose the side of darkness with them.
Not so long ago, many of us were quite upbeat about social changes. We felt that, on a deeper level, consciousness was evolving. We knew that the new ideas we were striving for and so desperately needed were so alien to every concept developed in the last 10 000 years of human history that no one could ever have expected them to be articulated and adopted in the space of a few years. Yet it really seemed that we were making a start. What went wrong?
I think the alarming manifestations of human savagery we see all around us today are a consequence of the fact that these dark forces feel no longer safe in their subliminal rabbit holes. We have drawn bigotry and cynicism out into the open. With a face and a name we should be able to fight them much more easily. But we are terrified by accumulated trauma and resort, ourselves, to the tools of hate they have taught us are the only way.
The 2020s will only put humankind on a path to a better future if we stop employing the tools of our enemy. The patriarchy feeds on violence. Even when it loses, it wins.
We need to stop seeing the other as an enemy out there and start seeing it as a manifestation of our own unresolved conflicts. Something we need to understand, empathize with, learn from and heal, not try to eradicate in a paroxysm of allopathic folly. We need to be angry that things are the way they are, but not that people are the way they are. We need to reclaim civil space, but not ghettoize those who are condemned to reject us by our inability to understand and care for them.
The purveyors of violence are not a tiny minority but merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of persons given no stake in society as a result of our collective inability to imagine and navigate the transition to a post-industrial, more caring future. They haven’t failed; we have failed them. It’s time to acknowledge this.