• rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    It’s not majority of the world, it’s majority of the people in power.

    We’ve had sort of a revolution (or a reaction, however you want it) in the last 30 years, where a certain kind of people felt threatened by all the wisdom of the kind you get from reading Hannah Arendt or frankly anything intelligent and morals-related I can think of, and I think USSR finally dissolving galvanized them - both in their fears coming true when a totalitarian state fell, and in their hopes getting up when people just like them took power in ex-Soviet states.

    It’s a very strong principle - making human rights really a value, making genocide really a crime, making it clear that you owe nothing you haven’t borrowed, and so on, are in direct conflict with a certain understanding of the world order. But antisemitism as a specific case is connected to the experience of WWII, which is an important foundational myth (not meaning it didn’t happen) of the modern world. So one has to maneuver.

    Now, that certain understanding and that kind of people are not marked by anything notable - that’s actually their main quality. That’s people who are sufficiently social to bunch together, but insufficiently creative, intelligent and romantic to care about good, evil and duty. Their main achievements in our world are all about gaslighting and stealing.

    Such people are the most likely to have power today. Their power exists because of organizations and faceless groups being above the human, because when it’s not so, they are irrelevant.

    It’s a temporary situation just like anything else, of course, because the described culture cannot maintain structures control over which gives them power. It’s enshittification of nations, one can say.