After the pandemic came a hot war, a new state of emergency. There are slogans from all sides about the need to inoculate democratic culture with the virtues of war, hatred of the enemy, conscription, intransigence. Whoever applies the principle of thinking people "whenever I accuse someone of wronging me, I find myself wronged" is considered a collaborator with evil, the difference between disinformation and opposition websites is dangerously narrowing in the eyes of the censors. As Abraham Lincoln said in 1848, "The public eye is fascinated by the attractive rainbow arching over the bloody splinter of battlefields, which will stupefy and bring destruction".
Remember the tragedy of Gorbachev's perestroika. It was supposed to be a return to normality after decades of a state of emergency, justified by the need to rapidly build up the industrial infrastructure to catch up and overtake the Western industrial powers. But it turned out that the decades-long state of emergency had intoxicated the entire society to the point that it could no longer function normally. Instead of helping Russia, the West has exploited Yeltsin's unconceptual presidency and contributed its share to the country's devastating transformation. The result has been a rapacious oligarchisation of economic and political power that has also significantly intoxicated the Western economic system.
The state of emergency is always a negation of the complexity of the world and therefore the first step towards tyranny. Complexity is traumatizing, so the greater the complexity of society, the greater the demand for its negation - for strong men who will not be fooled and see Prague Pride as the degeneration of the West. The bloody splinter falling on Ukraine has mercifully swept away all past NATO failures in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the entire Middle East. It overlays not only disputes in the EU over, say, illiberal Polish laws or the causes of rising inequality, but also the traumatic crisis of liberal democracy as a whole.
I regret that the new state of emergency is likely to last for the rest of my lifetime.
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