Megalomania, Xenophobia and Narcissism in the 21st Century
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
In the late eighteenth century (1786), the aristocrats of the French imperial nation-state formulated a new political model aimed at improving the social condition of the poor classes, creating a larger middle class and doing away with. To this end, the most educated class of that period known as The Enlightenment, most notably Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu coined the famous phrase ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ to denote the basic elements of the new imperial model whose purpose was to take human society to higher levels of social, economic and ethical life. This would come about without any detriment to the lavish lifestyle of the monarchs and the power elite comprising owners of real estate and material goods, the military, the clergy and bureaucrats of the monarchy.
Although there was a prolonged period of prosperity in the French kingdom, in Great Britain and in the US, everything suggests that after two hundred years this great empire has collapsed due to some converging factors, such as the destruction of the myth of democracy, the growth of inequality, the rapid disappearance of the independent mass media, the political empowerment of the elite owners of great fortunes, the birth of an economic system in which industrial production was the basis of the development of the autonomy of nations. This is in addition to financial systems that were not based on savings, commercial systems underpinned by military control of other nations and the emergence of new transportation and communication technologies which built a new unipolar world order. This involved a military, commercial and financial system controlled by international diplomatic, monetary and military agencies at a great cost that was applied to the external and internal debt of the big nations. In the process they created a money bubble that had no real backing either in real estate or in money or material goods, to such an extent that at this point the liabilities of the West are almost 10 times greater than its wealth with solid foundations and the debt can no longer be controlled by issuing currency through a global bank that is recognized by all the nations of the world.
Now that China, patiently, meticulously and at a very low cost, has built a large territory containing everything necessary for the peaceful development of a new human society based on social ethics, the main symbols of the new society of the West are no longer liberty, equality and fraternity, but megalomania, xenophobia and narcissism. To this could be added the notions of ‘fake truth’, ‘bullying’ of and the disappearance all the individual freedoms that were the basis of the prolonged success of Western democracies.
This new stage in human civilization that began with the 21st century will be very different from the one that was created at the end of the 19th century because the human being will have new paradigms which, in many cases, will be totally different from those of the Age of Enlightenment, especially in terms of their rationality, given that emotional and metaphysical features will continue to be part of the human condition. Both love and art in all its forms of expression and human beings’ concern for their fellow human beings will remain, albeit embedded in images, concepts and ideologies that are very different from those of the immediate past.
There is no doubt that rational, caring human beings with emotions will continue to live on the planet for many more years, but their worldview has completely changed. Their individualism will increase, their love of peace and beauty will have other dimensions and their acceptance of other ethnic groups, other cultures and other religions and mythologies will keep expanding, which, in the end, will lead to the creation of a new kind of human coexistence, without hatred, without ill-will and without selfishness.
Everything that is now happening in the new digital world will take humanity to a higher stage and human beings to an ethical and cultural level that will allow them to eliminate the negative aspects that have hindered their development, their love for others and the development of metaphysics, science, beauty and art.
Addendum: This new stage of human society will make the human being a much better individual and will succeed in eliminating all the negative elements that have been the main cause of the great ethical and existential crisis now dominating the entire Western world and certain regions of the new Eurasian continent.