Towards The Post-Liberal West

A couple of seemingly disparate issues caught my attention recently which, on the surface, seemed to have nothing in common whatsoever, but upon closer inspection have a great deal in common. Both have something to say about where we find ourselves and where we’re headed.

The first subject is the Biden administration’s proclamations on the ‘‘Liberal World Order’’ which excited various stripes of populists and conspiracy theorists.

The second subject is the truly execrable new Jurassic Park/World movie.

Let us begin by focusing on the term ‘‘Liberal World Order’’ which inspired so many overly dramatic Bitchute videos and populists proclaiming something to the effect of:

‘‘This is it, right out in the open now folks!’’

The full context of the statement in question was an interview on CNN with Brian Deese, director of America’s National Economic Council, in which he stated:

Deese, June 30: Well, what’s heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes. This is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm. But at the same time what I’d say to that family and to Americans across the country is you have a present administration that is going to do everything in its power to blunt those price increases and bring those prices down.

A large swathe of internet punditry took the term ‘‘liberal world order’’ to mean a ‘‘New World Order’’ which the elites have long been conspiring to bring into being.

In actual fact what Deese was referring to was the consensus formed after World War 2. A consensus containing the values held dear by the populists, centre right and conspiracy theorists alike, namely, freedom of speech, democracy, liberalism in general and laissez faire capitalism.

If you live in the West you’ve been living in the Liberal World Order all your life.

The Council of Foreign Relations describes the post-war liberal consensus thus:

“World leaders created a series of international organizations and agreements to promote global cooperation on issues including security, trade, health, and monetary policy,” CFR writes. “The United States has championed this system — known as the liberal world order — for the past seventy-five years. During this time, the world has enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity.”

The post-war liberal consensus grounded itself in being opposed to the horrors and outrages of World War 2 by enshrining the human individual with rights and freedoms. From this rather comfortable and smug position the American-led liberal world order could claim to be on the side of ‘‘humanity’’.

Carl Schmitt wasn’t impressed:

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”

Simply put, if you’re a liberal you’re on the side of humanity, if you’re not a liberal then you’re not on the side of humanity. Nazis and racists are therefore not on the side of humanity and thus an ‘‘exception’’ which can be treated accordingly.

Regardless of the hypocrisy and inconsistencies, this vague concept of humanity as a mass of individuals all deserving rights was the fulcrum upon which Western Liberalism situated itself.

The very people complaining about the ‘‘New Liberal World Order’’ are actually in agreement with the core tenets of the post-war order.

The tediously awful Jurassic World Dominion also touches on issues which elicit excitement in certain quarters. To be fair I can see why: the film features food shortages, genetically modified crops, giant killer bugs and shady corporations manipulating and scheming from behind the scenes. It even has an all-powerful and controlling technocrat who seems to be modelled on Steve Jobs or some other Big Tech oligarch with a God complex.

However, we don’t even need to sift through the subplots for a revealing commentary on the zeitgeist. It’s explicit in the central premise and even the title of the movie itself.

‘‘Jurassic World: Dominion’’ is a world in which humans share the planet with dinosaurs who now roam free, feeding upon the blubbery mass-man of late modernity. This, we are informed, is ‘‘just the way things are now’’ and Jeff Goldblum is wheeled out to explain explicitly that:

‘‘We not only lack dominion over nature, we’re subordinate to it!’’

Humanity has now been de-centred, or de-throned as the form around which all life, politics and ethics revolve. We no longer hold ‘‘Dominion’’ over the earth, we’re merely one species upon it. This message runs throughout the Jurassic Park movies but is most obvious in the latest (and worst) instalment of the franchise.

The dinosaurs themselves are simply the symbolic representation of nature reasserting itself over man. This, then, begs the question of where humanity’s place shall be within the new paradigm. Having been kicked off its privileged fulcrum, humanity will now be expected to find its place within the earth as a system of integration and stability.

It doesn’t take long for us to to notice the Malthusian calculator poking out from behind the ‘‘we are one’’ Gaianism of Lovelock’s theory. Mother Earth may well be a self-regulatory biological entity but surely there’s nothing wrong with giving the old girl a helping hand — especially when there’s so much filthy lucre to be had in carbon credit scores, renewable energies and, yes, synthetic meat and bug-food.

You don’t like it? Well that’s just too bad for you, bucko - we’re trying to save the planet!

Why yes, you do (for now) have the right to own your land but you do not have the right to burn fossil fuels on it or graze carbon-gas releasing cattle. And by the way, your chickens look sickly - we wouldn’t that spreading….

If the post-war liberalism of the West was predicated on there being ‘‘One Humanity’’, the post-liberal West will be predicated on there being ‘‘One Planet’’. One Humanity allowed for the West itself to be demographically transformed and critics silenced as heretical to its own values set and moral codes.

The new direction of travel seems obvious: the rights of the individual superseded by Human Rights which are then in turn superseded by the Rights of the planet itself.

This then raises an obvious question. Who or what get to defend what is or what is not in the interests of the planet? Why, scientists and experts of course! All of whom have been generously funded and careered into what amounts to nothing less than a neo-priestly caste interpreting the pain of the planet like a shaman reading the entrails of a dead crow.

It wasn’t exactly unknown for a shaman or witch-doctor to stumble across a crab-shell which conveniently revealed to them that they deserve the most succulent meat at the evening’s feast, or that the clouds had revealed that the warlord who endorsed them had divinely ordained dibs on a particularly pretty young girl.

Similarly, when today’s scientists and experts interpret the needs of our planet, our planet inevitably needs exactly whatever policies and investments the billionaire class have been endorsing or drafting in recent years. It’s downright spooky.

However, it is when we draw out where this logic can potentially lead that the true horror begins to reveal itself.

Are there, for example, too many people living on earth today? If carbon emissions are not reduced to almost zero, will the world burn up and set in motion the collapse of life on earth?

Our experts and scientists (and most certainly those who fund them) would answer to both questions in the affirmative. The question which then presents itself is the following: Can these existential problems be solved within the paradigm of post-war liberalism based on human rights? No, they cannot.

The freedom to breed or consume as the individual sees fit stands in direct opposition to the received wisdom on planetary health. Thus, humanity ceases to be a large group of individuals with rights and instead becomes a biomass to be managed from the macro level — along with fish stocks and forests, manure and bluebottles.

We are not, however, actually subordinate to ‘‘nature’’ but to the whims of top-down technocrat planning and data sets. Here we come to yet another core liberal principle being jettisoned to make way for the post-liberal age: popular sovereignty (or at least the pretence of it) is also being dumped overboard as unwanted ballast.

Nobody was asked if they wanted Agenda 2030 and nor could they be. If the name of the game is saving the planet then it is palpably absurd to allow people to vote against saving it. Once again, what we understand to be ‘‘Liberalism’’ is in the process of being phased out in favour of something else. For the moment though, we do not have an exact name for what ‘‘it’’ is, so Western elites carry on the pretence.

In some respects Covid-19 was a trial run, the prawn cocktail before the main dish. Policy dictated that the public had to acquiesce to bizarre and nonsensical diktats in the name of the greater good, which of course was the struggle against a supposedly deadly virus. However, the new narratives offer a canny switch: now humanity itself is the virus and it is the planet which needs to be protected, from us!

Needless to say, this touches upon some of the darkest theories of vaccine skeptics, namely, what if we always were the virus? But I shall not dwell upon that here or indeed anywhere until further evidence is available.

Nevertheless the question which people should be asking, and currently aren’t, is what, if anything, is out of bounds in the name of saving planet earth? what policy or piece of legislation, or ‘‘freedoms’’ can trump preventing the world from turning into a scorched rock devoid of life?

There’s something anachronistic and ironic about Brian Deese at America’s National Economic Council fretting about the future of the liberal West. He probably knows it has no future (well, not until they change the definition like they do so frequently these days). Deese was referring to what he thought was a commonly held set of values across the West which the public would want to defend. The populists, on the other hand, heard code-words for a sinister agenda of control which is currently being birthed.

In Deese’s world-view the greatest threat to Western liberal values comes externally. Russia publicly, and in private and more cautiously, China. Yet it isn’t Russia who is traumatizing Western children with images of submerged cities and the world as a burning inferno. It isn’t Putin or the Chinese politburo who’s clearing Dutch farmers off their land, wilfully endangering food supplies. The same can be said for the situation in Canada or the madness of net-zero policy across the West in general.

Likewise, the ESG ratings which will kneecap small businesses across the West are proudly endorsed by every major Western institution and corporation and government. This same network proudly proclaim the need for ‘‘Global Governance’’ without so much as a nod and a wink toward democratic norms.

In short, nothing threatens the post-war liberal consensus more than the very people who laud those same ideals. This is by no way an endorsement of those ideals, rather an appeal for honesty and clarity.

Why the obfuscation and sleight of hand? Why the pretence of upholding one set of values while simultaneously pulling them out by the roots?

The answer, I fear, is that they know at some level that what they’ve created, which is yet to be fully unmasked, is an abomination.

I’ll indulge myself with a reference to a second Jeff Goldblum movie, The Fly. Our elites are like the mutated Brundlefly, using all the power of his persuasion to convince Geena Davis to step into the transhuman teleportation device in order to be reborn perfect. Something seems a little ‘‘off’’ and behind the salesman patter and PR smiles there’s something in the tone of his voice which is saying:

‘‘You’re going in, one way or another!’’

Everyone’s fave Aussie yummy mummy, Nicole Kidman, is eating crickets now so just jump in and enjoy them. Meanwhile as Nicole smiles through the crunchy goodness what we don’t see are the Blackrock executives wondering what the hold-up in farmland confiscation is.

Dear old Mother Earth has no more ardent defender than the billionaire who has just sunk $500 million in investments to protect her virtue, after all.

In stark contrast the virtue and modesty of Mother Earth is the West’s much vaunted ‘‘Liberal Values’’. Indeed, when we take the technocrat agendas in their entirety from forced vaccinations to censorship, property confiscation to surveillance — liberal values appear to us more like a maiden who’s about to be gang-raped than a higher philosophical principle to be defended.

Populist and conspiracy theorists online can in some ways rest assured. Whatever world order is being birthed before our eyes, it certainly isn’t liberal. Or as the popular internet meme would say….

‘‘If only they knew how bad things really are’’