Capitalism vs the Bourgeoisie¶
John Gray makes some telling observations about the debilitating practical paradoxes of the late-20th century right.
Summing up Thatcher’s outlook, [Charles]Moore writes of her “unusual mindset, which was both
conservative and revolutionary.” It is a shrewd observation, but
Thatcher’s reactionary nostalgia and revolutionary dynamism had
something in common: the sturdy individualism to which she
looked back was as much a fantasy as the renewed bourgeois life
she projected into the future.
Once ‘sturdy individualism’ is dismissed as a fantasy, a horror
story of some kind is the only imaginable outcome. If people are
really too pathetic to take responsibility for their lives, what
else could we possibly expect?
It has surely to be granted that anybody useless enough to be inadequate to the basics of their own survival, is scarcely going to exhibit the altruistic surplus value required to effectively take care of anybody else. Maybe God will make good the deficit, or — to plunge fully into feel-good superstition — ‘society’? The ultimate implication of Gray’s argument is that humans aren’t fit to live. (Which isn’t to say that he’s wrong.)
The future belongs to frontier people. If no significant fraction of the human species is any longer capable of being that, then it’s time for an evolutionary search for something that is. Don’t expect it to be pretty.