A Fragmented World at War
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
A few days ago, in a brief article titled ‘A Globalized and Fragmented World’, the brilliant French sociologist Alain Touraine stated that the world has changed a lot in the last 20 years and has become a new habitat for the human species in which ethnic, geographical, mythological and linguistic barriers no longer limit knowledge of new cultures, languages and traditions. At present, communication with countries far from ours is much simpler than before.
Touraine says that there is also a very noticeable change in the economic sphere. He talks about the economic decline of the sixties, the obsolete political and economic models of Latin American countries and says that there is a major split with the rest of the world because in these countries there is no solid analytical basis for rejecting the economic integration formula that governs most countries in the world today.
Touraine believes that one factor that has destroyed human development has been the low level of education throughout the West. Reading is very important but the number of functional illiterates has grown dramatically because young people are managing to earn good incomes from an early age so they do not need to go to college and they begin to have an independent life from a very young age which distances them from reading and higher learning.
So the current globalization has been evolving using technology that is more advanced than that which is coming from universities and it is present everywhere. In addition, the basic conditions for a country to be competitive have expanded. According to Touraine, in the new digital era barriers are being eliminated to create a greater diversification of cultures enabling exchange of ideas between different countries. He says that we are in a process of historical fragmentation owing to the dominance of the mass media and the way they manage information, reaching the stage where they completely distort it.
We live, according to Touraine, in a world that is globalized but very fragmented by cultural, social, technological, financial and political factors, which leads to the belief that at the moment the powers that be are a very serious threat to the development of any country.
Using these ideas from Touraine, I propose to look at the period that the human species is going through in the world today. While the president of China, Xi Jinping, maintained at the last Davos Forum that humanity must be a cohesive community seeking a future and a common development where everyone comes out winning, the politics of Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is that his country should be the only world leader no matter what happens. This situation is leading to an unprecedented worldwide fragmentation in which all partnership agreements between nations are being unravelled and new disputes are appearing in relation to economic income, ethnic groups and political and legal models.
With the United Kingdom preparing for its exit from the European Union with the so-called ‘Brexit’, Germany trying to gain total control of the financial system of Europe plus a basic subsistence income paid by the State, France seeking to establish an obsolete political model and most of the European countries facing problems with migration, unemployment, health and subsistence, the whole world is becoming completely fragmented.
Added to this, two great allied powers have emerged – China and Russia – that are trying to reconfigure the world order using concepts that are totally different from those used by the West over the last two hundred years. Instead of being grounded in a mythology that combined elements of the Enlightenment in the time of Louis XV and the ideas of the French Revolution modified by Freemasonry, they have begun to use the most recent principle of ‘social ethics.’ Instead of benefiting a small minority of people with the income of millionaires, the aim is to extend the benefits of their political and economic model to the large majority of people in their countries and throughout the world, and to gradually get rid of the influence of military powers and old notions of Western law in the development of the new global world society. This is partly because of their huge material costs, the increase in human cruelty, the ecological crisis created by the use of nuclear weapons and other new energy sources and the possibility of producing a global conflagration that could destroy Planet Earth in just a few days.
Addendum: In the brief history of humankind since ‘homo sapiens’ the world has always had good and bad leaders of global dimensions whose influence has lasted for only a few decades. So the current presence of Trump, of Xi Jinping, of Putin and of the top leaders of the great powers of the world will hardly last a few more years in the worst of cases.
But what will definitely last for the rest of the current human civilization will be the fear of wars, of religions and of the lust for material power that have now left their negative mark for more than two hundred years.