When ideas that guide nations are no longer valid or have been corrupted, then new ideas must (and will) replace them. Without them, institutions, government, and societies begin to crumble. That’s what we’re seeing now. Few have respect for big government or big business today. Most everyone assumes both lie to us, that government spies on us continually and too many businesses are sleazy and dishonest. A lot of this is because the social contract is breaking down, a belief in working towards a common good is vanishing as the ideas that once guided us no longer seem valid.
The current vacuum will be filled. Maybe by new ideas. or maybe by violence.
Here’s a tiny question. Are we idearupt? As in: bankrupt of great ideas?
Go ahead. Name me an “ism” that still works.
I’ll wait.
Conservatism? #LOL. Liberalism? #lol. Capitalism, or what’s left of it? Sure, maybe for billionaires.
You can add socialism and communism to that, as both generally end up with authoritarian buttheads at the top looting the system too. None of our systems are working effectively.
We’re living through a kind of implosion. Not just of institutions—that much is obvious. But a collapse of institutions that was detonated by an implosion.
Of ideas.
Yesterday’s ideas about how to organize societies and economies simply don’t work anymore
And so we’re left in a vacuum.
Without guiding ideas, institutions implode, the citizenry gets pissed off and cynical, and it all spirals downward.
And already from that witches cauldron is rising the smoke. Of violence, animosity, extremism, hatred. Which will eventually, if the fire is left untended, kindle into a wildfire of war.
These wars could be really nasty populist uprisings, wars against other nationalities and cultures, extreme xenophobia, wars for resources due to the planet being plundered.
Or we could find some new ideas.