We live in a society that believes that nothing is worse than death, not even slavery. The sad thing is, this type of society is always doomed to death. After first being enslaved.
We have never ceased to say that in developed societies the conquest of political power goes through the conquest of cultural power; that no power can last, even if it is oppressive, unless it enjoys open consent, which can only be secured by a profound agreement between the values it embodies and those to which the majority of citizens adhere; that a parliamentary majority, which is not matched by an “ideological majority”, cannot legislate except temporarily; that a power of coercion in denies its nature for the sake of a “managerial” orientation or an ideological “neutrality” is doomed by definition; finally, that short-term action, cut off from its deeper dimension, that is, from its ideological and historical dimension, is doomed to failure.
According to the alternative right-wing conception, the politician is nothing more than a “transactor” or an “administrator”, the State will be considered, practically, as an instrument of economic activity. It will be a “state”, charged exclusively with police activities, control and the establishment of laws. The state is called upon to “supervise” the material property of citizens, to “arbitrate” in the event of conflict, to ensure that the laws are observed, to contribute to the general welfare, by managing public or collective goods, that is, those goods that cannot be consumed individually…
For the alt-right, nothing results from collective or state decision. Everything depends on economic conditions. The state, in other words, has no other reason for existence than economic… …The ecumenicalized economy goes hand in hand with the establishment of a world state. The neoliberal advocacy of a global economic market leads to a global political market, a crude perspective of an underlying Western centrism, since the economy has been “universalized” with the expansion of the liberal market model, while the “world state” is inspired exclusively by the democratic neoliberal Western model of governance…
…For neoliberalism, peoples and nations are nothing more than secondary realities. They are in no way objects of economic thought. “International” trade is, in reality, nothing more than inter-corporate trade. Improvement is provided, regardless of national or cultural borders, by a constantly expanding market, which ignores power relations and collective particularities. For each product, “global” improvement flows exclusively from the tendency towards parity in the price of products and services… …Neo-liberalism, which remains the dominant ideology in the field of international exchanges, does not simply result in the alienation of national independence.
It also brings about an international division of labor that makes national economies fragile in both third world countries and industrialized countries. Commercial society is a society for which no one wants to die, nor, more generally, to fulfill duties, for the wonderful reason that it does not cause rights to flow from duties and because it accustoms its members to think that nothing (and especially the dissolution of society) is worse than death.
This alone condemns this society to itself. A society that is incapable of thinking about its own death is already outside of life. Commercial society is destined to die because no one is willing to die in its place… …Society, by fostering “narcissism,” lives in a perpetual present. The individual cannot put himself in perspective, because this requires a clear consciousness of a heritage and a dependence that cannot be understood except collectively…
