Week 24
NB. This is an uncharacteristically bleak blog post, but try to bear with it. As always, it is an exercise.
It might be a “wrap” for the world…
Date: 13 Jun 2022
Motion: THS the ‘infamous’ hypothesis about the End of History
Role: Deputy (gov.)
When scholar Francis Fukuyama wrote, 33 years ago, a fifteen-page essay at the tail end of the roaring 1980s in The National Interest, predicting that world history would not progress farther from his vantage point in a liberal USA, amid the turmoil of the Tiananmen Square, many people took note. My history teacher broached it in class and related to us the basic content of that essay. He was in his mid-forties and had a Freudian type of a facial haircut. He was a leftwinger. Maybe it was in retrospect the last great eye-opener to an academic who had graduated as a M.A. in history and who was interested in such linear thinking. For what it’s worth, I think that the essay has bared our foreseeable future to a great extent.
It is unfashionable to paint with such broad, unrelenting brushstrokes today. People try to be nice, so that they would not upset other people. Attention is the new black. Fitness & orthorexia have become the new religion. Tourism to far corners of the world is a given. Underground ideas have ceased to remain underground. A notable exception to the prevalent world order is Greta Thunberg in Sweden, who prophecies about the end of the world, of whom the world is taking note. In the next, I tell why Greta’s pessimism is not ungrounded.
Class Escalators Are History: End of History 1.0
What has become harder to attain is upward class mobility. As the middle class is being eroded in the middle of demographics, people are faced with a choice: they have to rise to the upper class, based on their good fortune: genes, industy and/or talent. If this is not possible, one’s fate is to join in the ranks of the under- or working class. Excelling in art, gambling or a sport are shortcuts to fame and money, as always. Class mobility does not occur that much anymore. People are bound to become either masters or servants: the master class or the servant class.
Nationalism as a Force Is Gone: End of History 2.0
When the 20th century was still upon us, it was not uncommon that new nations were born out of the old ones. A slew of ex-colonies became independent. India “gave” us Pakistan and Bangladesh. Nations changed their names. Some nations preyed on the others, usually neighbouring ones. Borders were movable and negotiable. But, not anymore. What borders we have in the 21st century seem destined to be permanent.
The present war in Ukraine is a case in point. Even if Russia has wanted just a “just readjustment” of their borders with Ukraine, it has been met with tremendous international resistance. It is as if the world was saying, “do not mess with maps“. What’s more, nationalism is linked up with its ideological distant relatives chauvinism and Nazism, the latter of which has through (the tuition of) history become such a piñata that it is being hit at from both sides in the conflict. The Nazi Card is certainly being waved. In any event, nationalism is a consumed force. It might also mean, by way of extension, that Cataluña (in Spain) and Scotland (in the UK) will hardly see independence from their respective superordinate governments.
The Liberties We Enjoy Do Not Increase: End of History 3.0
What’s more, it seems that we already live amid the most amount of permissiveness we may in the first place. Drugs, p**n and s*x are not hard to come by — at large, if one knows where to look. Money can buy most corruptions that we have. Our mobility is not restricted, apart from space travel. If we had more liberties, they would encroach on the liberties of others, and would need to be settled in court or the parking lot. We have already reached “terminal velocity” when it comes to freedom and liberty. The only way is toward more restrictions, which was niftly demonstrated by the covid pandemic.
As the Leader of the Opp. countered: What about the evolving technology? Isn’t that a continuation of history? Don’t we have now what we had not in the 70’s? It’s true that tech is evolving, but it is very lopsided. It benefits only the “5 Ts”. Those 5 Ts are: telecommunications, tourism, trade, traffic and travel. Even the hyped (green) innovation, the Electric Car, can be seen to belong merely as an innovation in the larger scheme of traffic. In other words, technology only makes our communication, economics and logistics spin faster, without improvements beyond. Very few real technological advancements can be seen in unrelated fields.
The worst thing is that we do not know when our “credit” is “maxxed out”. Laws of nature govern our actions. There is no centralised administration, even if we like to pretend that the UN is such a body. Two things are on an upward curve, one short-term and the other long-term: inflation (price overgrowth) and natality (population overgrowth). When those two things are going up, and reach a boiling point, the world may be going down.
Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Tässä puheessa luetaan madonluvut maapallolle. Käytän pontimena esseetä, joka on sopivasti juuri täyttänyt 30 tai 33 vuotta laskemistavasta riippuen (kirja–essee). Sijoitun I tiimin 2. puhujaksi, koska kiistän tai torjun toiseksi viimeisessä kappaleessa jotain, mitä vastapuolen aloittaja sanoo melko varmasti.
Polar Ice Standpoints Society 