Category: society

1984 and photo of George Orwell. Public domain.

Every Order Needs a Story

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George Orwell worked at the British Ministry of Information during World War II. From 1941 to 1943, Orwell worked for the BBC, broadcasting propaganda talks to India. His wife worked in the ministry’s censorship division. It became the model for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s world-famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.1 The Ministry of Truth’s motto was, ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ We learned that the BBC told us the truth, but that was part of the propaganda. The alternatives were Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union. They had their own propaganda that nazis and communists believed. No social order is objectively the best. We cooperate by believing stories, such as religions and ideologies. We can’t do without them. If we stop believing them, our societies fall apart. Every order needs a story.

The Cold War was a decades-long standoff between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Two opposing myths and corresponding political-economic systems competed for global dominance: businesses aiming for profit, with their funny advertisements selling harmful products like cigarettes, versus the humourless communist cadres who wouldn’t murder us for profit but for their socialist ideals. It included a propaganda war. Western propaganda touted our freedom to choose a cigarette brand and flavour as a way to express our unique personality. Smoking a brand made us feel special. The communist propaganda claimed that cigarette manufacturers murder us for profit. People in communist countries had no brands or flavours to choose from, so they didn’t feel special or unique. Yet they held spectacular military parades every year, flaunting their tanks and missiles.

In those days, Great Britain executed secret black propaganda operations that included forged documents, controlled news agencies, and enlisted journalists to disrupt its enemies and protect its interests. These operations aimed to encourage a reaction, incite violence, or foment racial tensions.2 The BBC cooperated with the UK secret services to prevent people with communist sympathies from entering the staff. In the Netherlands, secret services planted news stories3 or employed experts on the radio and television.4 You can never be sure whether the news you read or hear is fully factual. That is why people increasingly came to distrust the mainstream media.

The mainstream media usually doesn’t spread fake news. They may omit relevant facts and perspectives, which you might call lying by omission. And that can be as bad. The Dutch public broadcaster NOS reportedly passed every fact check for five years.4 Most notably, people on the right have criticised the selection of news stories and how the NOS presented them as having a leftist bias. Fascist media like Ongehoord Nederland have spread fake news. Yet, they also report on stories and perspectives other broadcasters don’t. That makes it harder to get to the facts. In 2026, Ongehoord Nederland caused uproar for claiming that Adolf Hitler had said some good things about the globalist elites, leading to renewed calls for disbanding the broadcaster.

Revolutions don’t require freedom of opinion or social media. They have happened in the past. Orders work as long as most of us think they work for us. Orders collapse once we stop believing the myths underpinning them, for instance, when the facts on the ground diverge from the propaganda, or when we have an unenlightened interest in denying the truth. Repression may uphold order, but it can fail. Every order comes with myths that are, to some degree, false. Nationalism and fascism led to World War I and World War II. The fascists try to replace the failing liberal and multicultural myths with ones that have already failed, so we may soon see World War III.

Western leaders have used false flags or invented stories about weapons of mass destruction and spread them via the media. The US started the Vietnam War after falsely claiming the North Vietnamese navy had attacked US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US invaded Iraq after falsely claiming the country had a stash of weapons of mass destruction. The former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, once said sanctions on Iraq were worth the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, which was the estimated death toll of the sanctions the West had imposed on Iraq. In the West, people were allowed to criticise their leaders’ actions. Freedom of opinion exposed the myth of the liberal order being the best. That was impossible in the Soviet Union and China. It brought the West closer to the truth that no order is objectively the best.

Had the West not enjoyed military and economic superiority, the liberal order might have collapsed earlier. Life under Soviet, Muslim or Nazi rule would have been quite different. The myths we believe in arise from an interplay of historical forces, in which religions, ideologies, and other myths, such as those of national greatness, compete to organise people. You can call these myths ‘mind bugs’. Their evolutionary purpose is to help our genes survive and spread. The myths we now believe in have survived the competition. They are also models of reality, so they are often correct to some extent. The freedom of opinion in the West stems from a belief in objective truth, established through the investigation of facts and the examination of possible explanations. That has been a foundational pillar of the West’s success, as it brought us science.

The weak point of the whole endeavour is that we imagine our realities, which opens a can of worms, as you can connect the dots in infinite ways if you ignore facts that contradict your views, which we are wired to do, since we are creatures who cooperate based on myths. The measure of success is survival, not truth. And with the rise of connectivity, imaginations can cross-pollinate, leading to an explosive rise in freak thinking. These mind bugs are infectious, so we will go down fighting over our fantasies. And so, in the end, only The Truth can save us. Those who deny it are suicidal morons who will drag us down with them. You can’t win debates with morons who live in their own fantasy worlds, so The Truth can only come by force.

Myths like freedom of the press have power. Believing them can make them work. The euro has value because we believe it has. The value of the euro is something we imagine. There is more freedom of opinion in the West than in other places. Still, those who pose a threat to the order know that there are limits to freedom of opinion. Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, which published documents obtained by hackers, thereby exposing human rights violations by the US secret services. The United States considered these revelations a national security threat. On 1 November 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, wrote, ‘While the US Government prosecutes Mr Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.’6 Yet we wouldn’t have known about Assange had it not been for freedom of the press.

Every social-political order comes with a story explaining why it is the best. Without an inspiring myth, we can’t have order. The foundations of our orders are stories like a prophet receiving a revelation from God, the founding fathers drawing up a constitution with great wisdom, or a she-wolf raising the founders of the empire. Most of the time, revolutions and civil wars are worse than dealing with the omissions and falsehoods in the stories that hold the order together. But not always. It is why revolutions do happen, but are rare. As long as we don’t believe the same stories, we will fight each other. The orders we have today are the outcome of a competition, not some objective measure of quality. The success of orders depends on, sometimes, arbitrary circumstances. Had the first Chinese emperor not standardised the script and chosen pictograms rather than phonetic characters, there would be no China today.

In today’s globalised world, there are several competing stories. There is a Christian story, an Islamic story, a socialist story, numerous nationalist stories, a story about slavery and the civil rights movement, a conspiracy theorist’s tale, the story of indigenous peoples, a Hindu story, a Chinese story spanning 2,000 years of greatness, and several others. These stories figure into identity politics, so the Chinese like tales about China’s greatness. Finally, there is a liberal story of individual freedom centred on the Magna Carta, the European Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the American and French Revolutions, universal suffrage, and the overcoming of fascism in World War II, in which D-Day, rather than Stalingrad, serves as the hallmark event. Children in the West learned it at school. It is a skewed version of history to explain why the liberal order is the best.

These stories are falling apart in this globalised world. None of them can unite us. The Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution mean nothing to Chinese, Indians or Africans who look back at a colonial past of oppression and exploitation. If you aren’t a Christian or a Muslim, Christianity and Islam strike you as odd. Others show little interest in China’s rich history or the stories of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And the Hindu caste system makes only sense to Hindus. We are imaginative creatures and invent new myths, adding to the confusion. The belief in different stories will ruin us, so freedom of opinion is overrated. Only The Truth can save us now. And then, we all have to believe it and accept the consequences. Otherwise, we are doomed. And so, we need a Ministry of Truth telling us what to believe.

Latest revision: 27 June 2026

Featured image: 1984 and a photo of George Orwell. Public domain.

1. Orwell, 1984 and the Ministry of Information. Dr Marc Patrick Wiggam. School of Advanced Study, University of London (2017). [link]
2. Britain’s secret ‘black propaganda’ operations. John McEvoy (2026). Declassified UK.
3. Nederlandse media drukten artikelen af die waren geschreven door veiligheidsdienst BVD. Bart Funnekotter, Joep Dohmen (2023). NRC.
4. Geheime diensten gebruiken ‘onafhankelijke experts’ om publiek debat te sturen. Sebastiaan Brommersma (2024). Ftm.nl.
5. Mediabiasfactcheck.com. Netherlands Radio and Television Association (NOS) – Bias and Credibility. (2023).
6. UN expert on torture sounds alarm again that Julian Assange’s life may be at risk. United Nations (2019). [link]

The Great Reset

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During the coronavirus pandemic, the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched a plan, The Great Reset. It aims to rebuild the world economy more intelligently, fairer and sustainably while adhering to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). These SDGs include ending poverty, improving health and well-being, better education, equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, jobs and economic growth. That sounds great, but is it a reset? It would be up to so-called responsible corporations and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to implement the agenda before 2030. Not everyone thinks that is a great idea.

The change is supposed to be powered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a fusion of technologies in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing. I get an uneasy feeling when I read that. It looks like an excuse for technology addicts to play with our future. Is it because I am against progress, or is it because of a rational fear that something is about to go seriously wrong even though I don’t know exactly what?

Under the umbrella of the Great Reset, so-called young global leaders of the WEF came up with new ideas. For instance, new technologies can make products like cars and houses cheaply available as a service, ending the need to own these items. A young global leader wrote an article titled, ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.’1 She hoped to start a discussion, and the article produced a slogan that also became an Internet meme, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ There certainly is an economic rationale for sharing items like cars, most notably if they become more expensive to keep because of technological innovation.

Property, for instance, a home, can give you economic freedom. If you own a home, you don’t have to pay rent. And you own some capital when you retire. Some people think the WEF is a sinister elite club scheming to achieve a secret agenda where the elites own everything, and the rest of us ends up with nothing. And that might happen anyway if current trends continue because that is how capitalism works. Capital accumulates and ends up in the hands of a few because of interest. It is not a secret since Karl Marx figured that out. And it leads to a crisis when the impoverished masses can’t buy the things that capital produces. With negative interest rates, there is no need for that.

Property rights have become a semi-religious value in Western culture. That prevents us from taking the property of the elites and ending their stranglehold on our political economy. Marx advised that workers or the state would take over corporations. That might not be a good idea because workers and governments often do poorly at running corporations. Markets and private enterprises can efficiently provide goods and services, but it comes with wealth inequality and happens at the expense of future generations. Our societies must find the right balance. At some point, the disadvantages of the current political economy start to outweigh the advantages.

We use far more resources than the planet can provide, and wealth inequality is now so extreme that we might need a genuine Great Reset. Taking the wealth from the elites and discontinuing enterprises that don’t provide for our essentials is not communism, as long as there are markets and private property. People should prosper if their work benefits society and enterprises often do better at providing for our needs. But we don’t benefit from the corrupting influence of oligarchs. Their wealth comes from inheritance, criminal and shady activities, and, most notably, accumulated interest on their capital. That arrangement may have suited us in the past, but not now.

Economists believe property rights are essential for economic growth, and that business owners should be able to do as they please. For instance, Elon Musk has the right to ruin Twitter because he owns the company. Should employees and others suffer from the irrational behaviour of their owners? In the Netherlands, a series of interesting trials took place, where corporations tried to escape the influence of their majority shareholder Gerard Sanderink, who allegedly didn’t act rationally in the interest of these companies.2 Limited property rights and a collectivist attitude have not prevented China from becoming a large and advanced economy surpassing the United States and may have contributed to China’s success.

The degree of individualism currently existing in the West may do more harm than good. They promote political fights and litigation and prevent us from doing what we should do. And perhaps, less privacy can go a long way in reducing crime. Property rights and individualism were crucial to start capitalism and made the West dominate the world for centuries. And so, we have learned to see them as necessary, inevitable or even desirable. But once the European imperialist capitalist engine ran, these features became less important than economic stability. If you start a business, you must be able to estimate your returns, but you can lease everything and own nothing.

Individualism and property rights also play a positive role in society. The cultural heritage of the West is extensive compared to other cultures, for instance, if you express it in the number of books written or discoveries made. Self-interest and personal responsibility can inspire us to work harder and do a better job. The Soviet Union failed to produce enough food for its citizens while there was enough arable land. In the Soviet Union, farmers had to work on collective enterprises where they could not do as they saw fit and didn’t share in the profits. The tragedy of the commons is that we don’t care for public spaces as much as our possessions. Homeowners usually take better care of their houses than tenants. The same is true for car owners.

As they are now, property rights protect the elites. And the WEF plan is just a fart in the wind, not a Great Reset. We face unprecedented worldwide challenges while wealth inequality is at extreme levels, so individualism and property rights need limits. And we need a proper Great Reset, or a switch from economic to political control of the world’s resources if we intend to live in a humane world society that respects our planet. It is what a corporation named Patagonia did in 2022.3 We can do that on a global scale.

It begins with seizing the wealth of oligarchs and criminals and all hidden wealth in offshore tax havens, including their so-called charities, placing them in sovereign wealth funds, and setting a limit on what individuals can own or earn. And perhaps, we need to build our future on values rather than balance sheets. And everyone should contribute. Capital accumulates by interest, and people who live off interest don’t work for a living. That might be as bad as being on the dole while you can work. And peddling unnecessary products that harm life on Earth could be as bad as being a criminal.

Laws should prevent people and corporations from doing wrong, but they often fail to do that. Corporations pollute the environment or exploit employees to make a profit. But consumers desire excellence for rock-bottom prices. It is profitable to break the law if you can get away with it or when the gain is higher than the fine. And if there are loopholes, they become exploited. The anonymity provided by money, large corporations and markets turn us into uncaring calculating creatures. That is why big pharma, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, and the Internet giants threaten us. If corporations do right out of their own, many laws and regulations become redundant. If moral values can replace the law, it could be better.

Less efficiency, poorer service and a smaller choice of products can be preferable if that doesn’t lead to deprivation and starvation. For instance, why must you get your meal from a takeaway restaurant instead of preparing it yourself? Or why do you need to dress up in the latest fashion if you have ample wearable clothing? And you must work to pay for these things, so if you don’t buy them, you have time to prepare your meal or mend your clothes. We don’t want to give up these things, so in a democracy, we can’t fix this problem. Perhaps we might accept the change if God sends a Messiah who tells us this is for the best.

That might be wishful thinking, but what else can make it happen if it is not religion? Do you believe we will come to our senses, become one humanity, and do right on our own? That is wishful thinking. God is our only hope. As we are heading for the Great Collapse in one way or another, the End Times could be now. We might live inside a simulation run by an advanced humanoid civilisation.4 Hence, God might own this world, and you might soon discover that you own nothing and be happy. God’s kingdom might be a utopian society as early Christians lived like communists (Acts 4:32-35).

So what can we achieve by taking political control of the world’s resources and means of production by seizing the elite’s wealth and placing it in sovereign wealth funds? You can think of the following:

  • We can direct our means to the goals of a humane society, be respectful of this planet, and plan long-term.
  • We can dismantle harmful corporations or give them a new purpose without starting an economic crisis with mass unemployment.
  • We can make corporations employ people in developing countries and give them an education and decent salaries.
  • We can fund essential government services in developing countries and eliminate corruption insofar as it is due to insufficient pay of government employees.
  • We can make corporations produce sustainably and pass on the cost to consumers.
  • We can determine the pay of executives.
  • We can halt developments like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nuclear energy if we believe they are undesirable.
  • We can end the incentive to produce and consume more and stop the advertising industry from tracking us.
  • We can end stress in the workplace if we axe bullshit jobs and redirect workers to the needs of society. A twenty-hour working week might be enough.

Interest stands in the way of a better future. The economy ‘must’ grow to pay for the interest. We ‘must’ work harder in bullshit jobs to pay for the interest. Corporations ‘must’ sell harmful products to pay for the interest. Corporations ‘must’ pay low wages or move production to low-wage countries to pay for the interest. And because of interest, money disappears from where it is needed most and piles up where it is needed least. Interest is our tribute to the wealthy. If we hope to live in a humane world society that respects creation, ending interest might be imperative. That is where Natural Money comes in.

Latest revision: 28 April 2023

Featured image: You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. WEF.

1. Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better. Ida Auken. World Economic Forum (2016).
2. Zakenman Gerard Sanderink tierend in rechtszaal: ‘Deze rechtbank deugt voor geen meter!’ AD.nl (2023).
3. Patagonia’s Next Chapter: Earth is Now Our Only Shareholder. Patagonia (2022).
4. Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.

What Is the Point of Politics?

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‘Politics is not worth a lightning bolt to me. Throw it to the sharks,’ sang the Dutch band Normaal in the 1980s. Many people feel disillusioned with the government and politicians. Is there something wrong with politics? Is it the system? Are our expectations too high? Do politicians interfere with matters that should require expert knowledge? Do we not elect the right people? Is the political system not democratic enough? There are no simple answers, but some countries do better than others. Francis Fukuyama wrote two books about political order. Good government is an uphill struggle that never stops.

And democracy often has frustrated the establishment of good government. So, there is reason to think, ‘What is the point of politics?’ Over the centuries, there might have been some progress in political institutions, which are customs, laws, government organisations, and other arrangements. Human nature does not change, so politicians have not evolved to a higher standard. People in the past devised institutions to provide stability and make governments work better. In recent decades, globalisation has made several institutions dysfunctional, most notably, the nation-state.

The basics

So, what is the point of politics? We organise ourselves economically and politically with the use of ideas. Among those ideas are money, states, and religions or ideologies. That made us successful as a species. We have languages to describe situations and the things we can do. And we discuss other people and what they are doing and thinking. That gives us information about other people, for instance, who can do a particular job best and who are reliable and who are not. We use that information to cooperate.1

Politics deals with questions like: what should we do as a group, what must our rules be, and who shall lead us? What we are going to do, is decided by ideas like sowing crops in the spring, doing a rain dance in the summer to please the rain fairy, and harvesting in the autumn. And we may have a priest who leads the rain dance. We do the rain dance we believe in the rain fairy. If rain does not come, we might try to please the fairy by electing another priest. But beliefs can be wrong.

This short tale already tells a lot about politics. There is a belief system. There are rules. And there is authority. Villagers believe the performance of the priest influences the rainfall. Political leaders influence what happens, but in many cases, they must deal with circumstances over which they have little control. Leaders might revert to public display, like ordering more elaborate rain dances to show us they are working on the problem. Things can go wrong because of our beliefs.

The big man

We are social animals, and politics is in our nature. We discuss plans, who should do what, which rules we must follow, and who should lead. Traditional societies also have politicians. For example, the big man leads a family group in Papua New Guinea. He earns his status by gaining the community’s trust, usually by solving conflicts and distributing resources to the members of his tribe. The big man can lose his position, and someone else can take his place.2

The big man is a politician, like the alpha male of a chimpanzee band. Much of politics comes down to solving conflicts in the group and distributing resources and favours. To become the leader, the big man forges a coalition of followers. His followers benefit from his leadership. He can also take actions that benefit the entire community and gain widespread respect. Not much has changed since then. Politicians look after the interests of their followers and can work in the public interest.

The role of institutions

Politicians are like big men in Papua New Guinea or priests of the rain fairy. And they can disappoint us by giving us fewer favours than we expected or not bringing rain. In democracies, we elect our leaders, so why do we not select better ones? Perhaps the problem is not politicians but how we conduct politics and organise societies. The programmatic political parties of Western Europe may have been an apex in the development of politics. They promoted general policies in the interest of their constituency or the public interest. But these parties have lost their lustre.

Today’s world differs from the world where they emerged and flourished. If you were born in a socialist or Roman Catholic family in the Netherlands in 1900, you remained a socialist or a Roman Catholic for the rest of your life. Dutch society was stable, and politicians did not need to compete for attention. The ideologies and religions of these parties have not passed the test of time. They have no answers to the questions of today. Many voters think traditional parties do not represent interests. In the absence of new ideas, politics becomes about identities and personalities.

Institutions can raise politics beyond the level of individuals and their interests, emotions and weaknesses. Traditional societies already have them. The rule of electing a new priest when rain fails to come is an institution. It tells us what we should do when rain doesn’t come. Otherwise, villagers might disagree and start a bloody conflict. The harvest is of the utmost importance. If you do not have faith in the measures taken, you feel obliged to protect yourself and your family from the stupidity of others. Institutions like rain dances can keep the peace but do not guarantee good outcomes.

Political development

The first humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. They had no property. In times of conflict, they often relocated. Later on, bands coalesced into tribes. Tribes could arrange more men for warfare. A reason to do so was the Agricultural Revolution, causing a switch to crop planting and cattle herding. Crops and livestock that needed defence from thievery and pillaging.

People living in tribes could have a lot of freedom. Tribes were loosely connected, and tribal leaders had limited authority. They might settle disputes, but only if parties agreed on them being the referee. Tribal leaders usually did not give orders. Another political development was the lord with his armed vassals. In Europe, this was called feudalism. Similar arrangements existed elsewhere in the form of warlords and gangs.

The requirements of warfare promoted the development of states. There was intense competition between states in China during the warring states era. Chinese states had armies of up to 500,000 men. They rationalised their organisation and tax systems. As a result, the first modern states appeared in China, and China remained the most advanced state for nearly 2,000 years.

States have the authority to order people. After humans switched to crop planting and cattle herding, there was more food, and more people could live in the same area. And more people could create more sizeable production surpluses to maintain states. States provided more security than tribes as they had police and standing armies, so the inhabitants could benefit from the defence and political stability that states could provide.

The modern state

Modern states have a rationally organised administration with merit-based recruitment and promotion. That happened in China first. Chinese emperors did not have to pass an exam. They inherited the title or came out on top during a power struggle. Emperors had unchecked powers, and there was no guarantee that only good emperors made it to the throne.2 Institutions can protect the country from poor rulers. This problem does not go away if we elect our leaders. That is why democratic states also have institutions, most notably, the separation of powers.

The separation of powers aims to split the state into three independent branches, which are the administration (the executive), the parliaments (the legislative) and the courts (the judiciary). Each has its responsibilities, and the branches should not interfere with each other’s tasks. Parliaments make the laws, the administration executes them, and the courts verify whether they are applied correctly. Ideally, the administration has no power over the parliaments and the courts. For instance, the administration should not nominate or appoint candidates for the parliaments and the courts, and the courts should stay out of political affairs, which is the domain of parliaments.

As political leaders change and can raise controversy, many nations have a ceremonial head of state to provide a sense of stability and continuity in the form of a person. Some countries hold on to their royal families, while others have presidents to perform that role. Usually, ceremonial presidents are highly respected individuals who do not interfere with political affairs. Royals can also provide a stable sense of nationhood, but kingship is a birthright. Kings do not need to have particular qualities, so they may lose the respect of their nation, while a ceremonial president has earned the nation’s respect and, therefore, is less likely to lose it.

Our predicament

Improvements in democratic political systems are possible, but our current predicament is not so much the result of a lack of democracy. Our belief systems are at stake, for instance, nationalism, socialism and liberalism, but also cultures, religions and traditions. And we have made money the prime mover of our decisions. Wealth inequality has increased in recent decades, creating a self-reinforcing trend in which an oligarchy has all the wealth and power. Identity conflicts and pride also block progress.

You can analyse the economy from a socialist or a capitalist perspective. The results are very different, and neither is the analysis entirely wrong or right. The proponents of ideologies and religions tend to have an explanation for everything. Within the confines of their models, their arguments make sense. If you believe in the rain fairy, it makes sense to think she is angry when rainfall does not come. Many of our belief systems are models of reality with merits and drawbacks, and we should treat them like so.

Our political institutions are the result of ideas from the past. They still have merits but grow increasingly problematic. Clinging to obsolete thoughts is like doing rain dances to prevent harvest failures when the cause is climate change. If existing ideas stop working, people become frustrated and lose faith. If crops continue to fail, some villagers may realise that electing a new priest does not solve the problem. They may worship the weather spirit instead and start a violent conflict with followers of the rain fairy.

The issues we now face come primarily from failing ideas and institutions rather than politicians. Existing religions and ideologies have no answers to the issues of today as many are global collective action problems, while centralised complex systems are ineffective in dealing with them. If the collapse is at hand, we may need to find common ground about what we should do and delegate practical decision-making about how to do it to the local level when possible.

Featured image: House Of Commons in the United Kingdom. Parliament.uk. [link]

1. Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
2. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama (2011).

Rational debates and progress

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Knowledge or wisdom?

Ancient cultures had religious traditions and wisdom. Chief Seattle’s speech reflects the beliefs of traditional peoples who live in nature as hunter-gatherers. It is an idealised version as traditional peoples like the Native Americans also drove species into extinction. They didn’t have the means to destroy nature as much as we do. Modern people may think these so-called primitives and their ways of knowing are irrational. Knowledge and rationality aren’t wisdom. It is the theme of the biblical story of The Fall. Instead of listening to God, who knew better, Eve and Adam wanted to learn the truth themselves. We would not have been in this mess today if they followed God’s command.

The Chinese have their own tradition and wisdom. Confucius was their best-known philosopher. He lived 2,500 years ago and is still influential today. His teachings comprise moral rules, correct social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity. Chinese tradition and beliefs like loyalty to the family, ancestor veneration, and respect for elders were the basis of Confucius’ teachings. Confucius argued that family should also be central to government policies. The Chinese Tao is the natural order of the universe. You can only grasp it intuitively. You can’t understand it with reason, let alone quantify it. The Tao path to wisdom is understanding the whole by experiencing it. One of the greatest poems ever written is the Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Laozi. It begins like this,

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

When you try to express the natural order in words or give it a name, you are astray already, or so says the Tao. It disconnects you from the whole of Creation. The Buddha is another source of ancient wisdom. Our desires trap us in this world of suffering, he taught. Once you have what you desire, you desire something else, so you will never be happy. You can escape that and achieve enlightenment with the help of meditation, physical labour and good behaviour. The end of craving is the end of suffering. The capitalist consumerist system aims at the opposite, which is creating new desires, and if needed for that, making us unhappy.

The Western tradition is one of expressing things in words and quantifying them. Wisdom in Greek refers to knowledge and insight and its practical application in life. In Greek philosophy, wisdom was the highest good a human could aspire to. We can develop this virtue through study, reflection and experience. The Greeks believed wisdom comes from knowledge. In hindsight, that was a mistake.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived around 400 BC. He is a founder of the practice of rational debate. Socratic debates are discussions between people with different viewpoints who wish to establish the truth using reasoned arguments. In his dialogues, Socrates acted as if he was ignorant. Admitting your ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge. The Greek philosophers began a quest for knowledge. European philosophers and scientists continued it nearly 2,000 later.

Is there progress, or can there be?

When we think of progress, we think of things getting better. But are they getting better? One invention can cure a disease, but another can kill us. Undoubtedly, our knowledge has increased. But is that progress? And can there be progress if we are less happy than our grandparents were? So, is there such a thing as progress? And if so, can we achieve progress through rational debates and persuasion? Or does it come by force because of the competition between groups of people?

We see progress as moving towards a goal, for instance, well-being. According to science, we do not have a purpose. Some religions, like Christianity, see history moving towards God’s aim. We enter Paradise one day, and all that occurs is necessary to get there. That is a peculiar view, but it implies progress and a type of progress that eludes the understanding of mere mortals like us. Did Jesus have to die? Was the Holocaust necessary? Was there no other way?

If we have a purpose, and you can get your hands on a time machine, there is a fellow you might want to meet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He believed that spirit drives history through ideas and that history progresses towards a goal. Hegel lived before Charles Darwin published On The Origin Of Species, and it shows. The evolution theory completely upset our thinking about the purpose of humanity. Most intellectuals eventually considered it silly to think we exist for a reason.

Around 1800 AD, when Hegel was alive, scientific discoveries began to affect the lives of ordinary people, and the Industrial Revolution took off. At the same time, enlightenment ideas started to affect societies. The American Revolution followed the Glorious Revolution in England. Then came the French Revolution, which ended the old aristocratic regime and mobilised the masses for the first time. A few years later, the armies of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideas over Europe.

Hegel was there to witness it, and he was impressed. He learned to see history as a struggle towards progress where more powerful ideas replace weaker ones. He made a daring attempt to explain history, and as a result, his thinking greatly affected history. Marxism and the Soviet Union would not have existed without him. The conflict between capitalism and socialism dominated global politics for most of the twentieth century. His thinking inspired others, for instance, the Neoconservatives.

Hegel’s dialectic


Hegel was a philosopher of progress. He believed things would get better and we would, one day, live in a utopia. We increase our knowledge over time. By reflecting on our thoughts, we can challenge them. Or something might happen that changes your mind. You might believe all swans are white until a black one comes along. From then on, you think most swans are white while some are black. Hegel came up with a three-stage scheme for progress in thought:

  1. You believe all swans are white. That is your thesis.
  2. There comes a shocker. You see a black swan, the antithesis.
  3. Then you think most swans are white, and some are black. It is the synthesis.

And that is progress. Hegelian dialectic is this elegant three-stage scheme with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. You can see why people liked it so much. It is wonderfully simplistic, and it explains so much, or so it appears. The synthesis is incorrect if there are red swans, but it is better than the thesis. The prediction that the next swan I see will be black or white is more often correct than that the next swan will be white. And even though the synthesis may still be incorrect, it better predicts future events. You can also apply it to Socratic dialogues, where people with different viewpoints wish to establish the truth using reasoned arguments. Our viewpoints are imperfect, and exchanging ideas can bring progress, which we can discover using Hegel’s dialectic.

Suppose we have a time machine and fetch Adam Smith from 1770 and Karl Marx from 1870 and bring them to the present so they can meet. They first study each other’s books, and then we let them start an argument. Smith sets out the thesis. He says capitalism and free markets work best at raising the general living standard because self-interest makes people do a good job, and increases in scale improve efficiency. Then, Marx comes up with the antithesis. He argues that the living conditions for workers are miserable, and capitalism distributes its benefits unfairly as factory owners and traders are wealthy. They agree on minimum wages, as they have good intentions.


Ideas may look great in theory but usually work out differently in practice. Experiments can help to find out. There was a capitalist experiment in the United States and a communist one in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Marx would be disappointed when the time machine brought him to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The workers in Western capitalist societies were better off. And maybe Smith will be disappointed when he sees the United States today. And both may say, ‘This is not how it is supposed to be.’ They may not blame the plan but the execution. It is always someone else’s fault. That is the standard excuse of planners who have seen their plans fail.

We play a small part in a greater whole of humanity. Hegel says our consciousnesses are part of a general consciousness called spirit. Spirit reflects the ideas in society and how they change. Our ideas about slavery are an example. Today, most people believe slavery is wrong, but in the past, most people didn’t think so. The spirit requires individual freedom of thought and the ability to be part of society with a spirit containing these ideas. In dialectic terms, the individual is the thesis, our society the antithesis, and to take part in that society is the synthesis. We have our individual thoughts and desires. But we live in a society. By engaging ourselves, we become part of that spirit.

We aren’t free and subject to outside forces, but we can cut ourselves off from the outside world, turn inward, and experience freedom of thought. That makes us unhappy because we desire unity with the eternal absolute truth, God or the universe, Hegel claims. We express this desire in religion. We feel insignificant towards that absolute and want to be part of it. Our reason is the alternative absolute. We can imagine a relationship between the particular, which are objects like cows and the universal ideas. So, a cow participates in the universal concept of cowness that all cows share. We exist in unity with the universal, and with reason, we can conquer the world. Thus, knowledge is power.

Hegel claims reason conquers the world. And now we get back at Napoleon. Hegel saw Napoleon as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideas conquering the world. Napoleon did so by military force. He was impressed by the French successes. He learned to see history as a struggle towards progress where more powerful ideas replace weaker ones. It is good to know that Hegel believed there is an absolute truth, so reasonable people might, or should, not compromise with unreasonable people and overcome them by force. And that belief has had a significant impact on history. It became the model for ideological conflict. Leaders may fight for power, but ideological conflicts are about ideas.

Hegel and history

The most well-known is the conflict between communism and capitalism. Hegel’s dialectic affected Marx’s thinking and that of the communist revolutionaries. Hegel believed the direction of human history is progress towards greater rationality. Hegel was an idealist, which means his philosophy was concerned with ideas. Marx, on the other hand, was a materialist who believed historical changes have material causes. Change doesn’t come from ideas but from circumstances in the world around us. Often, these are economic. So, Hegel might argue that slavery would end because people consider it wrong, while Marx might say slavery will stop when other forms of labour are economically more efficient.

Marx claimed we work in relations like master-slave or employer-employee, not because we want to, but because it is the most appropriate way of production in a given stage of our economic development. These relations form the structure of a society, the foundation on which a legal and political system arises, and that shapes our social consciousness. So, in a capitalist society, the legal system might centre around property rights, and labour rights might be non-existent. And it was like so in the 19th century. Not our consciousness directs our social existence, but our social existence determines our consciousness. So, serfdom in Europe didn’t end because serfs wanted to be free; it was because new forms of labour organisation had become more efficient.

Change comes from contradictions between the underlying material reality and the social superstructure. You can see that in Hegelian terms. There was serfdom in Western Europe because it suited economic conditions (thesis). It ended because serfs flocked to cities to earn more as craftspeople. It undermined the social superstructure of serfdom (antithesis). Lords of manors had to provide an attractive alternative to keep their peasants. Serfs became free (synthesis), which best suited the new conditions. Marx believed humans were free at first and lived as communists (thesis). As the economic reality changed (antithesis), societies became slave states (synthesis). In the following sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, slave states developed into feudal societies. Those societies became capitalist states because of economies of scale and capital requirements. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis may seem contrived, but the status quo changes due to forces that undermine it, creating a new status quo.

Marx prophesied that in the next round of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the working class would overthrow the capitalist states and start socialism. Marx believed it was a historical necessity. After all, the Hegelian dialectic works behind it, so communists were more advanced, reasonable people who sought to overthrow the backward capitalist order. Marx was a prophet as he prophesied what would happen and had a vision of paradise. Humans first lived in a state of nature, the simple communism of the group, Marx’s Eden and we will return to communism, Marx’s paradise. Marx called religion opium for the masses, but Marxism resembles a religion. Like Christianity, Marxists think history has a purpose and an end times in which we enter the worker’s paradise. Ideologies come with prophets and holy books. The Capital of Karl Marx was the sacred book of Marxism.

Ideas require power to change the world. Marx claimed the exploited masses, the employees, should rise against their employers because their profits come from paying workers less than they are worth. All the workers across the world had to unite in a revolution. Capitalists disagreed. They argued that wages are the market price of labour, and the capitalist sells his products at the market price. The profits and the losses are for him. An entrepreneur seeks to employ the means of production, including labour, in the most efficient way, so the market value of an employee might increase due to the capitalist production organisation. Workers in socialist countries often had lower wages than workers in Western market economies. The communists and the capitalists believed they were reasonable, that their ideas were better, and that you shouldn’t compromise with unreasonable people, causing a stand-off between two ideological blocks, the Cold War.

In a Hegelian sense, capitalism seems better because it won out. However, capitalist societies introduced reforms like minimum wages and welfare. Agreeable societies have mixed economies, a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements, thus a market economy and an active government that intervenes in markets with regulations or money transfers like welfare. That could be the synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Capitalism is now the thesis of a new Hegelian question. The antithesis is that our production and consumption are about to cause an ecological or technological catastrophe. We need a different political economy. Hegelian thinking has limitations. It stylises questions as choices between two opposites. So, it is either capitalism or socialism or a mixture of both. Experts often use models to deal with complex problems. The use of models requires expertise or even wisdom. We have to learn how the parts interact and contribute to the whole.

Featured image: Portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Jakob Schlesinger (1831). Public Domain.

one ring to rule them all

Multiculturalism

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An astounding success

For those who think that multiculturalism is a failure because large numbers of immigrants arrive in their country, of whom a significant number have trouble adapting and end up on welfare, not to mention those who cause trouble and commit crimes, the truth may be a surprise. Multiculturalism has been one of the most epic successes in human history. Yet, it is all about the time horizon. You don’t observe that trend over decades. Centuries may not even suffice. Yet if you think in millennia, then the trend becomes obvious. It didn’t happen all peacefully. There have been quite a few casualties along the road. They were the roadkill on the way to unity. That is only because humans are such a violent species, which makes unity an absolute necessity, no matter the fatalities. Otherwise, we will fight until we are all dead. And so, there is no alternative. It is unity or death.

As far as the supposed failure of multiculturalism goes, I wouldn’t have known about it had I not had access to the news and social media. Where I live, people from different ethnic groups mingle and live together peacefully, a bit like a multicultural fairy tale. I suspect a setup by the Great Planner to show me that it can be that way, as our belief in fairy tales can make them come true. There may be more of these places, but they hardly attract attention. Social media is filled with stories about crimes, violence and sexual abuse. It seems that every incident involving minorities that comes in the news gets copied on multiple feeds and sometimes multiple times. Still, the place I live in looks like how the world could be, and should be.

In Europe, you are far more likely to die in a car accident than from violent crime. The fear of the fascists concerns not today, but the future. There are reasons to worry. It can go wrong, as it has many times before. And we live today. The greater trend in history is not our concern. Worse yet, we might end up as roadkill on the road to unity, or our children could. Our genes wish to survive and multiply, and if necessary, at the expense of world peace. Still, overall, multiculturalism has been a tremendous success. Successful empires allowed people from various cultures to coexist peacefully under a single government. These were multicultural states. As long as the state is stronger than the identities of the people living in it, those people will gradually develop a common identity.

Cultures don’t change overnight, so for an empire to achieve political stability, it allowed subjugated peoples to retain their customs and religions as long as they didn’t threaten the political and social order. Multiculturalism was a tool of the ruler, so figuratively, the One Ring to Rule Them All, as in The Lord of the Rings. One of the first successful multicultural emperors was Cyrus the Great, who ruled around 550 BC and respected various faiths and traditions in his empire. He helped the Jews return to their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Today, the Jews are still thankful that God sent them that leader.

The Romans were also tolerant people. Conquered peoples could keep their gods, languages, and customs as long as they respected Roman authorities and paid tribute to Roman gods and godlike emperors, which only troublemakers like the Jews and Christians refused to do because of their uncompromising belief systems that allowed worship of only one Creator. Paying Roman taxes was not a problem for them, but venerating Roman emperors and gods was. The Jews fought to the death in two major uprisings, hoping that God would come to their rescue, but the Christians eventually succeeded in taking over the Roman Empire. It shows that uncompromising belief systems are the primary obstacle to unity, and that we can have permanent peace only under a single belief system.

Lasting achievement of empires

If the empire lasted long enough, the nations in it integrated into a common culture. The Roman Empire is an example. Conquered peoples could keep their gods, languages and customs as long as they respected the Roman authorities. Greek culture spread in the east, and Roman culture in the west. Several later Roman emperors came from the provinces such as France, Africa or Arabia. After the empire collapsed, the conquered peoples, like the Gauls, didn’t reappear as independent nations,1 despite the brave resistance of that one village where Asterix and Obelix lived.

The Chinese standardised their writing with pictures, allowing people who spoke different languages to read one another’s writing. The Chinese could read each other’s books while not understanding one another in conversation. China was a vast empire, and there were no mass media, so developing a common spoken language was unthinkable. The writing helped China form a national identity that has lasted for over 2,000 years. In Europe, Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, remained the written language, but the phonetic script proved to have a fatal design flaw. Hardly anyone spoke Latin, so the language couldn’t unify Europe. The Russian, Turkish and Austrian empires failed to form a lasting common identity, so they collapsed after World War I.

Sharing a language is not enough, as the Bosnian civil war exemplifies. For over 500 years, Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians lived relatively peacefully together in three successive multicultural states: the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburg Empire, and Yugoslavia. That was until the 1990s, when identity politics turned them into Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, and they began murdering each other in a frenzy. Religion became the divisive factor, as they shared an ethnicity, history, culture and language. The Soviet Union was another multicultural empire. Still, it didn’t last, and it failed to wipe out the national identities. After it collapsed, there have been several nationalist wars in the former Soviet Union.

Multicultural empires, such as the Roman Empire, allowed for gradual assimilation. It led towards greater unity. The Chinese standardised pictographic script played a similar role. In these cases, multiculturalism was a transitional phase towards unity. Over time, the number of cultures in the world declined as smaller groups merged into larger ones. There have been temporary reversions as empires collapsed. Still, the long-term trend is clear. The world gradually became more integrated. Today, the world is closely interconnected so that a global culture may emerge and existing cultures may become folklore.

Identity politics

Today, identity politics and individualism have changed multiculturalism. Every individual, including minorities, needs recognition and their feelings acknowledged. And so, rather than peaceful coexistence and acceptance of the social order, modern multiculturalism is about respecting and accommodating other cultures. That promotes conflict rather than unity, as identity politics involves flags, marches, pride and hatred. And uncompromising belief systems stand in the way. Jews have long lived in Christian and Islamic countries as a minority group. It led to multicultural tensions as they strictly kept to their religion and culture, and eventually to the Holocaust, giving us a 2,000-year body of evidence that non-assimilation and clinging to separate fairy tales cause never-ending trouble.

Jews and Christians kept fighting over their myths, like whether or not Yahweh had a son named Jesus. In the Roman Empire, and also in China, such uncompromising beliefs didn’t stand in the way of unity. In uncompromising belief systems, even small differences can be problematic. Protestants and Catholics have fought several bloody religious wars despite largely agreeing on the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. So, if people in Europe think that it is better not to have Muslims around, despite Muslims, like Christians, believing that Jesus will return, they have good reasons, because Muslims, like Jews, don’t believe that God has a son. That seemingly insignificant disagreement has produced millions of fatalities in the past and may do so once again.

Borders are arbitrary. They will crumble under the pressure of competition, or civilisation will break down. The extreme nationalists are right. They have already lost, unless they are willing to wage a race war. That is going to be shitty, and it is not going to solve anything, for two white Christian Slavic nations are fighting a bloody nationalist war. Both are desperately looking for foreigners to fight that war for them, not to mention the lazy Americans and Western Europeans who do not wish to bring in their harvests. Nation-states and businesses need immigrants to remain ahead of the competition. It has to end, and the world needs to become a more agreeable place for everyone. Yet, humans are religious creatures, so that requires a wonderful fairy tale that unites us all.

Us and them

Us and them
And after all, we’re only ordinary men
Me and you

Pink Floyd, Us and Them

We divide humanity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. We are good people with superb beliefs and a superior civilisation. In contrast, the others are the inferior ones with dodgy habits who act oddly, look different, have funny accents, wear peculiar outfits, and believe in strange fairy tales you can’t take seriously, like the one about Jesus dying for our sins, and that by believing that, we will be saved and play the harp in heaven forever instead of being fried eternally in Satan’s ovens. We differ in skin colour, religion, sexual preferences, political views, and other qualities. Even when you think you are open-minded, you may hate those inferior, narrow-minded bigots and racists who are not like you.

Welcome to human nature. We are xenophobic creatures. Evolution did that to us. Fear of the unknown protects us from harm, such as poisonous foods or the cannibalistic tribe next door. It can be a powerful emotion. Human violence has long been one of the top causes of death among humans until states grew tyrannical and began to repress our violent human nature, thereby reducing murders by over 99%. Trusting strangers was dangerous indeed, and it is still risky, so it is something adventurous people would do. Living in peace with others and trusting them also brings tremendous benefits, enabling us to overcome these feelings and roll the dice of fortune.

Discrimination doesn’t always come from xenophobia. We are social animals who cooperate in groups. It requires a shared understanding of our rules and methods for handling various situations. A shared culture can make the group achieve optimal efficiency in this competitive world. Otherwise, there can be confusion, discomfort and conflict. You want to bow your head to Mecca when going gets tough? In critical situations, we depend on each other, so we must understand and trust each other. It is why sports teams in competitions train and work on team spirit. The atmosphere in teams can differ, depending on who is in them. That is culture.

Culture has wider implications. Imagine you like to barbecue in a neighbourhood where militant animal rights activists live. In that case, you should be careful not to end up on the barbecue yourself. And so, we prefer the company of like-minded individuals. Those who do not fit in can tell personal stories about bullying, physical violence and exclusion. It is a wider phenomenon than racism. Many societies have anti-discrimination laws saying things like that discrimination on the grounds of religion, political opinion, race, sex, disability, sexual orientation or on other grounds is not permitted. So, you can’t barbecue a person for loving meat. That would be discrimination.

The world is interconnected

In September 2023, a flood killed over 10,000 people in Libya. Climate change may have contributed to this disaster. And so did the overthrow of the Libyan regime with the help of NATO in 2011. During the ensuing civil war, critical infrastructure, such as dams, became neglected. No one in the NATO countries voted for the military intervention, nor did most people in Europe support immigration from non-Western countries. Is someone to blame? In the case of Libya, the ultimate cause could be you and me driving cars, thereby generating oil demand. Oil played a major role in the wars in the Middle East, as oil revenues gave the dictator Moammar al-Khadaffi the funds to sponsor terrorism, making the West eager to take him out. It also motivated the United States to invade Iraq, even though the country had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Everything in the world is interconnected.

What we do has consequences for other people far away. Had it not been that might makes right, and had there been true justice instead, and had we all had the right to self-defence, those who see their harvests fail due to climate change would have the right to kill those who drive their fossil-fuel-powered vehicles towards their bullshit jobs in marketing and information technology, wasting energy and resources in the suicidal rat race that is going to terminate humanity. So, if these suicide terrorists are going to die anyhow, then why not pre-emptively kill them to let the rest of us survive? Sadly, the one with the biggest gun is always right, and that is usually the one who wastes the most energy and resources and murders the most people. Yet, if we are to have a future, this arrangement can’t continue. We need a new social contract for humanity.

Cultural progress

Cultural exchange goes in multiple directions. Westerners use Arabic numerals, pray to a Jewish deity, eat potatoes, a dish of Native Americans, and listen to Jazz inspired by African rhythms. Maybe we think that rap music sucks, but the Chinese, the Muslims, the Native Americans and Africans were also not particularly thrilled by the cultural enrichment that the West has brought them. Cultural exchange is an ongoing process, and cultures change as they respond to their environment, including other cultures. Usually, there is an improvement, such as Arabic numerals being superior to Roman numerals, that makes us adopt a new idea or practice. Culture is not tied to ethnicity, but to life experiences. And new cultures can emerge. In the United States, a cultural divide has emerged between urban and rural populations. They have gradually grown into incompatible cultures.

Adaptation takes time and sacrifice, and from both sides. The small town where I grew up had a sizeable Ambonese community. The Ambonese were soldiers who fought for the Dutch in Indonesia, and when Indonesia became independent, they had to leave their homes and settle with their families in a country on the other side of the world, where they were initially treated poorly. Yet, the Dutch also had to put up with them and their troubles. The Ambonese couldn’t return, so the Dutch and the Ambonese were stuck together. The people of Nijverdal have never chosen for their presence, but have accepted the burden for decades. Most people didn’t suffer, only those who happened to be the subject of the violent incidents. Over time, the troubles gradually diminished.

If your culture is dominant, you enjoy advantages you may not realise that you have. Societies in Western Europe and the United States may be multicultural, but Western culture is dominant. Having that dominant culture is a privilege. If you aren’t from that culture, you are at a disadvantage. The damage your cultural group inflicts on the dominant culture can lead to the repression of your group, while the damage the dominant culture does to your group may go unpunished. It is how history has always worked. Yet, discrimination is not the decisive factor in an ethnic group’s success when everyone is equal before the law. Culture is more important, and the strength of their community. In the United States, blacks do relatively poorly, while Jews do well. That has to do with the cultural values and attitudes within the black and Jewish communities.

If you are not from the dominant culture, you may be equal before the law but not equal in reality. You may not get a fair chance, or your attitude could be the cause, or it may be both. When I was forced to leave the dormitory, I had never had a fair chance, but I wouldn’t have fit in anyway. I came from a different culture than the prevailing culture in the dormitory, and being autistic, I was unable to adapt and unaware of the harm my conduct caused. Cultural differences divide us and blind us to the harm we do to others.

Replacing the dominant culture in the West with another existing culture is problematic, as Western culture includes a quest for knowledge, so it spawned science and ideologies. And Western culture socially progressed the furthest with the help of Hegelian dialectic. So, discrimination is wrong, and other cultures may have that same value, but in the Western context, it became an absolute moral rule. That is the work of social justice activists, who in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, pursued absolute morality. That doesn’t stop discrimination, and people may have reasons to discriminate because of culture-related expectations, but having such a rule as a goal sets the right standard.

Many countries have anti-discrimination laws, but laws in themselves don’t create an agreeable society. South Africa has progressive laws, but it is one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Something is missing there. These progressive values originated in Europe, in liberal, bourgeois societies. These societies have built on earlier traditions. Transplanting them into an African country will not result in immediate success. That is behind the fear many Westerners have of immigration from Islamic or African countries. In South Africa, there has never been a black bourgeois society.

Yet if we are to survive, we must progress further, because Western culture alone doesn’t suffice. We must work out what the future requires of us and make that the foundation of the future world society. If we are to succeed, it will require a lot from all of us. It will be nothing less than a total shock that will leave its traces like my forced departure from the dormitory. Make no mistake, diversity can only work if we identify as one humanity, share a belief in a common destiny, and share essential norms and values.

Latest revision: 26 August 2026

Featured image: One Ring to Rule Them All. Xander (2007). Public Domain.

1. A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.