- cross-posted to:
- geopolitics
- geopolitics@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- geopolitics
- geopolitics@lemmy.ml
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Excellent article.
On the subject of the social constructive west, Europe’s rhetorical trap, and the hyperfixation on trying to use language to bend reality rather than vice versa, I often wonder whether it’s less of a philosophical stance of our leaders and more of a materialist result of their makeup.
Here in the UK, and through much of Europe, the primary career backgrounds of politicians (especially high ranking ones) are that they’re either from advertising, law, or news media. The thing that all of those professions share is that they a predicated on the belief that language actually creates reality (persuasion to need in advertising, arguement to objective judgement in law, narrative to political result in news) and not the other way around.
It would also help to explain why governments in the global south (+ China and formerly the Soviet Union) tend to have political classes (at least outside the right) that are more realistic and materialist as the career backgrounds of it’s makeup tend to be more varied and include people from the labour class more frequently. Admittedly, this bit is a pretty broad generalisation on my part, but I think it’s interesting.
I think so as well, these people are largely insulated from the underlying material reality, they have no direct experience in things like manufacturing or managing supply chains. They’re used to simply being able to talk their way out of problems, and they’re applying their lived experience to a situation where the problem is rooted in material conditions they’re not equipped to understand.
I completely agree, although I think that unreality goes deeper than that even. The main point of the article - and a trend I’ve noticed since the advent of the war on terror that has only intensified in the last ten years or so - is that Western states have essentially entirely given up on even the concept of diplomacy. They’ve drank the KOOL aid of their own propaganda so thoroughly that they cannot see others as actors with actual material interests.
Years ago I posted here referencing an old but interesting interview with a top diplomat about how the combination of propaganda think-tank culture was completely killing diplomatic services, which has since been made worse by cut budgets and awful job satisfaction with most of the actually capable diplomats fleeing the profession.
So now you have a situation where there are basically no (or at least few) actual diplomats but instead the ‘diplomatic’ advisers to these politicians are just as dogmatically self-propagandised as the leaders themselves, if not worse.
Yup, that’s very much spot on. The unipolar moment killed the ability to do diplomacy in the west because there was no need for it anymore when you could just dictate to others from a barrel of a gun. All of a sudden, the west now finds that they’re not able to do this with Russia and they have no idea how to approach this because there are no actual diplomats to be found in any western government, and the leadership still can’t accept the fact that they will have to do genuine diplomacy and compromises to end the conflict.
I wonder if you’re right, or if this rejection of reality is just a function of the EU countries being mostly service-economies, who are by and large deindustrialized. These people at the top of the leadership have risen to the top by being good at speaking things into existence, because they have until now just been able to import whatever they needed, and if things got tough, they could usually just move to the US and start a consultancy.
Them being from (now) largely deindustrialised economies is an interesting idea too, although it’s a bit muddier. Germany for example might be rapidly being deindustrialised now, but that wasn’t the case over the last forty years or so, and to a lesser extent it’s also true of other European countries while these leaders were coming up or earlier in their careers.
I genuinely think it might also just be that since the economies were deindustrializing in general, the people who could best “pivot” to either financial fuckery, real estate or paper shuffling ended up on top. And since the EU for a while consisted of at most 2 countries actually making and exporting stuff, and the rest of the countries seemingly only existed to absorb said exports, things were fine for a while. The problem comes when these people have to acknowledge that they aren’t in the same world that they grew up / came up in, and a lot of them seem to struggle with taking this step.
That’s a reasonable point I agree.
