Humans are eternally tempted by The Big Idea. It is the notion of the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” satirized in Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
There is, of course, one little problem with a Big Idea. You can usually tell how big it is by the size of the mountain of skulls that it leaves behind.
Obviously the biggest Big Idea of our time has been Communism.
Its first trial in the backward state of Russia ended in 1989 and has been replaced with a quasi-communist state run by the chaps from the Communist secret police. It is telling that only secret policemen were the ones to inherit the corpse of Communism in Russia.
The second trial in the decayed state of China ended in 1979 when the leader of the Chinese Communist Party Deng Xiaoping decided to moderate Communism with state-directed capitalism.
Of course the whole idea of Communism was that it was going to take over the world, and that’s what the current leader of Communist China thinks China is going to do.
Shaomin Li at The American Spectator is trying to warn us about China and its leader President Xi.
The essence of the Communist Party is to firmly grasp absolute control of the whole country... And it does not stop within China; the CCP’s model must be taken to the world to “build a community with a shared future for mankind.”
How different is that from Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset model for the World Economic Forum?
Let us just say that prominent people have always been tempted by the idea of setting the world to rights using political power. And starting not later than the 18th century, middle-class intellectuals have not been shy about gussying up comprehensive political plans to set the world to rights.
I would say that the particular enthusiasm for political plans of fundamental transformation represent a combination of two notions. The first is the Schmittian notion of politics as war against the enemy. Everyone in politics has internalized that. The secon thing is the triumph of Newtonian mechanics. Just put the parts together in the right way and you can change the world.
But I say that the age of politics is over. The whole point of politics, to mobilize the men to defend the border and our food-growing land against the enemy, has been neutralized by the global market economy.
And I say that the age of mechanics is over. We don’t think about Newtonian “matter” any more, nor yet “machines.” We know that the universe is way, way more complicated than that, and that the more we know the more we know we don’t know.
One approach to understanding this new way of looking at the world is J.J. Clarke’s The Self-creating Universe. Time and time again we see things combining to form an entity that is not explainable in the nature and the behavior of the constituents.
And that applies both at the level of combining elements into a compound and combining humans into an organization.
How does that work? We don’t know. Clarke believes we should only try to describe the world and not try to understand it.
So I say that President Xi’s CCP model ain’t gonna work. And I say that Schwab’s Great Reset ain’t gonna work. And Biden’s model of the war against ultra-MAGA enemies ain’t gonna work.
The only question is how big of a mountain of skulls they get to build before they fail.