Collapse of the West
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
There is no doubt that the birth of Western society towards the end of the18th century has been the most important political, social and cultural phenomenon of the modern age, and that it has given birth to the most well-educated, most developed multi-ethnic social group with the highest levels of employability and the greatest capacity for wealth creation in the history of human civilization. Although the original aims of this social phenomenon have been very different from the results obtained, it cannot be denied that the world of the last two hundred years has been led by the West in all areas – political, social, artistic and mythological.
Fortunately, all the things that exist in the world are not eternal, and right now we’re seeing the serious symptoms of a great crisis in the Western world, both in Europe and in America. The tremendous development in science, technology and the mass media has combined with the fall in industrial production, robotics and the decline of a middle class that had been the basis of its material success. There is also the empowerment of a small billionaire elite who believe all the advances in the world today have been the product of their clever and daring manipulations, so they have not the slightest doubt that they are the real owners of the entire world.
Perhaps the most serious effect of this disproportionate growth of the West has been the process of colonization initiated by the Spaniards followed by the English, which allowed the most powerful countries to seize large faraway territories as well as the basic raw material and commodities of the world’s poorest and weakest countries, leading to a process of accelerated impoverishment in the people of these nations, who are now like a burden that’s difficult to bear – a situation about which the great powers of the West do not feel guilty. On the contrary, from the outset they’ve been building an institutional world order to authorize such looting, territorial invasions planned with the support of their armies, the mercenaries at their service, and private state-funded agencies that provide all social services in the areas of health, housing, food and entertainment to the military occupying the nearly 800 bases that the United States has all over the world. All this has been organized through agreements endorsed by the other dominant countries with whom they have set up transnational councils that merely pressure them to give insignificant crumbs of their wealth to these poor nations to prevent all their inhabitants from dying of hunger.
Other unexpected factors have emerged to compound the crisis in the West. These include the growth of ultra-right ideologies in several nations worldwide moving in the direction of a new racial purification like the one that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century with Hitler and Mussolini. There is also the political, ethnic and social phenomenon of the far-right (alt-right) that brought about Trump’s election victory in the United States, and this involves a series of indecipherable enigmas such as xenophobia, gender diversity and attacks on the more radical religions such as Islam. In addition, we have the emergence of new major international powers such as China, India and Russia, new trade routes from China through Asia and Africa to Europe, the chaos in trade created by the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) in countries bordering the Pacific Ocean, the massive migration caused by the invasion of African agricultural territories by transnational companies growing genetically modified products to develop energy sources as alternatives to hydrocarbons, the relentless development of clean energy and the collapse of international agreements to control climate change – whether caused by changes in the orbit of the solar system around the galaxy or by the melting of the polar ice caps and the sharp shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates.
Add to all this the presence of a narcissistic psychopath who is the leading character in an American reality show and the maximum leader of the richest nation on planet Earth, and there is no doubt that the whole world is going to experience a growing crisis in the short term that could mean the last stage of world leadership by the West and a kind of new Renaissance in a multifaceted world order. This new world order will reduce the precariousness and population growth of the weakest nations, put a total ban on transnational war events, create a new global financial and monetary order aimed at lessening the precariousness and population growth of poor nations by implementing regulation of trade and of the world economy to allow human society in the new digital world to live in peace.
Addendum: It’s a case similar to that of Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, who managed to establish the feudal state in the West during the Middle Ages through a clever union of the feudal lords from the territories and the senior leaders of the Christian Church who co-opted to the working class. This model of the State worked successfully for several centuries until the arrival of the Renaissance. However, the new Western society is inspired by the creation of a new model of the State based on laws and civic rules that in a way were a substitute for the ineffective formulas of the decadent French monarchy of the eighteenth century.