Filosoof Francis Fukuyama: ‘Mensen leven meer en meer in een fantasiewereld’
www.volkskrant.nl
In zijn bestseller Het einde van de geschiedenis uit 1992 waarschuwde de Amerikaanse politicoloog en filosoof Francis Fukuyama er al voor: als vrede en welvaart bereikt zijn, zullen mensen daar uit verveling tegen gaan strijden. Hij zag het gebeuren met de Capitoolbestorming. Nu maakt hij zich zowel zorgen om rechts complotdenken als om linkse politieke correctheid.

Loosely translated by me: (In the first paragraph he is still talking about both the extreme-right and the “woke-left” by the way)

"Experience tells us that when people cant fight for good causes, because those good causes already triumphed in a previous generation, they will instead fight against those good causes. They will fight just because of the fight. In other words, they will fight out of a certain sense of boredom, because they cant imagine living in a world without struggle. And when the greater part of the world they live in is characterised by a peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they will fight against that peace and prospering, and against democracy."

"The people who attacked the Capitol had materially no reason to be discontent. (…) They weren’t your average factory workers who lost their jobs to overseas competition. Most were fairly well-off middle-class people with a job.

But more and more people live in a kind of fantasyworld, borrowed from videogames and movies. any far-right extremists see movies like The Matrix as symbolic of what has happened to society."

"Take the blue pill, and the world looks normal - you go to the office and everything is pais en vree. Take the red pill and you realise that everything is one big façade, created by elites, and that nothing is what it seems.

I have the idea that many people have started believing this story about the red pill. Something like that can only happen in a wealthy society. Where people have enough time on their hands to live in virtual worlds, divorced from reality. Technology has allowed them to fantasise themselves as characters who are greater than life, and who are fighting in a worldwide struggle against evil. Thirty years ago i would have never tought that videogames and actionmovies could lead to such delusions."

He also called the attack on the capitol the “largest attack on American democracy since the civil war”

I once heard someone say on here that the debate between Liberalism and Marxism was decisively won by Marxism over a hundred years ago and this piece makes me fully agree with that sentiment. Marxist writers published far more accurate and insightfull analyses of Fascism and the role of the upper middle-class in Fascism back in the 1920s!