Great Reaction
in brief
The old world, before capitalism, was feudal, a system of domination and subordination, from the king and his direct vassals down to the meanest serf on a lord's estate.
Then came the 19th century with ordinary people running all over the world without permission, inventing new things and selling them. All over the world. And it worked! Trade and cooperation could work on the basis of trust between nobodies, with the legal system as a backstop to take care of cheaters.
It was in the middle of the 19th century that rich kids invented socialism proposing to reestablish the old regime of top-down control. Rich kids would save the workers from a fate worse than death by beating up on the employers and capitalists. After World War I another generation of rich kids extended the notion to include other marginalized groups as approved victims.
I call this movement the Great Reaction, a nostalgic lurch to the imagined Garden of Eden of a vanished past, a reassertion, if you like, of primitive archetypes that dwell in the human collective unconscious.
I say that:
Socialism is a return to slavery
The welfare state is a return to feudalism
Identity politics is neo-tribalism
Reparations is neo-vengeance
Activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents
Helpless victims are a return to sacrifice
Social justice is good old loot and plunder
And I say that there is no greater task for humans than meeting and answering the challenge of the Great Reaction, the deeply instinctive turn away from the disruptive change of the modern era and its Great Enrichment and back to the primitive.